I had only the haziest idea of what to expect when we pulled into the parking lot of the Doubletree in Somerset, NJ, on Friday afternoon. My previous experience with conventions was that registration tended to be a chaotic cluster of folks in costumes and 'dane (mundane) garb alike, all arguing over "whaddya mean you don't have me listed, I registered six months ago!" and breaking into spontaneous squeals of delight upon seeing someone from last year's event.
Wicked Winter Renaissance Faire V: The Mad Tea Party
(Detailed Version)
(Detailed Version)
copyright 2009 Leona Wisoker
Leona may be contacted by email at the following address:
leona at leonawisoker dot com (no spaces, of course)
leona at leonawisoker dot com (no spaces, of course)
I saw chaos, certainly; a lobby overflowing with folk not sure which line they belonged in, some outrageous costumes, lots of people greeting each other. But it wasn't as bad as some registration scenes I've seen, and I was able to get through it all fairly quickly, thanks to the ever generous and utterly harried Jeff Mach, who set me and my husband up with two performer's badges and cut me loose to do as I wished throughout the event.
That threw me off balance; I'd expected to be presented with a list of "be here at this time for this event/panel/ceremony" -- but it turns out the Faire doesn't have panels, and none of the performances had room for or interest in a wandering writer. So I wandered, feeling as guilty as though I'd gotten in under false pretenses; thankfully, nobody appeared to be watching to see if I was "earning" the performer's badge.
Studying the schedule, I ran into a problem: the text was tiny, italicized, and arranged by time rather than room. Given that the times of most events overlapped, and multiple events were running at the same time, this made deciphering the weekend ahead tremendously difficult. Added to that, the room names didn't always match up to the names on the map (also way too small and impossible to read in spots), and the actual performances sometimes ran late or moved to different rooms.
Finally, while there was a "cheat sheet" attached (same reading problems as the rest), the explanation of what each performance offered was one line and didn't include every show or event listed. Now, the one line did offer a very well distilled explanation of the performance, but I would have liked to have seen a little more detail.
Before Faire fans pick up the rotten tomatoes, let me point out that the above criticisms are about it for my complaints. And I only point out those flaws because I gave up trying to decipher the list early on and just wandered, stopping in wherever I found something interesting going on. I can see now, from the photos that other people posted on Facebook, that I missed an awful lot doing it that way.