Back to the Present : Collapsible Burlap Town to Vanish as Faire Workers Exeunt for Summer--and Less Elizabethan Pursuits

David Webb’s town has everything going for it: a pleasant setting, a healthy commercial base and community services that include its own police force, planning commission and tax collector.

Everything except permanence.

After Monday, the community of Chipping-Under-Oakwood will disappear from its oak-shaded mountain location 10 miles west of the San Fernando Valley and Webb and his 2,600 neighbors will fold their tents and move on.

They take such tent-folding literally at the 27-acre town that was set up two months ago for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

Six miles of burlap was used in the 225 booths and pavilions that will be taken down and stored when the festival ends Monday evening.

The 24-year-old Elizabethan-theme springtime festival is staged around a loose collection of crafts and food booths that are decorated to resemble the claptrap shops and stalls that might have stood 400 years ago in an English country village.

Often Lived in Shops

In those days, merchants and artisans often lived in their shops. In 1986, so do some of the Pleasure Faire workers and craftsmen.

“It’s convenient,” said Webb, 27, who works at a salad booth and sleeps in a small tent at the edge of the medieval-looking marketplace. “People are friendly here. We have hot and cold showers. It’s a good life.”

Webb is a former restaurant manager who worked for a national chain in Sepulveda and Sacramento. He said he joined the Pleasure Faire three years ago after burning out on the “pressure and responsibility” of corporate work.

“But I won’t be unhappy to see it end Monday. I’m faired out. I’ve had enough of a good thing,” Webb said.

A campground neighbor, 26-year-old Steve Goble, lives in a 1970 Cadillac ambulance he has outfitted with a toilet, sink and television set.

Goble manages a roast beef and crepe booth at the Agoura festival site. Next weekend, he will be selling food at a street fair in San Francisco. After that, he plans to work at several other Northern California festivals.

Relaxing Schedule

“This isn’t a bad life. You get winters off and plenty of time to relax,” Goble said. “I was working as a welder until I got tired of burning my lungs and eyes out.”

Katie Savacool will return to Tustin and unemployment when the Pleasure Faire and her job as a costumed water-carrier ends. She has been sleeping in a wooden shack near the rear of the festival grounds.

“It’s like a weeklong vacation, then you work your ass off for three days when the Faire’s open,” Savacool, 24, said. “I’m tired of the sleeping bag. But I’ll be extremely sorry to see it end.

“There’s a real communal feeling here. The flute maker lives on site. The crafts people live in their booths on weekends. I took four people’s clothes into Agoura to the Laundromat today.”

Poet Gene Brighton alternates between sleeping in his poem-on-a-stick crafts booth and in his 18-year-old van. The arrangement is one of necessity, according to the one-time graphic artist who spends nine months a year traveling to festivals.

Sells Poems Glued to Sticks

“I wouldn’t call it comfortable. People spend their time working on their crafts or doing maintenance,” Brighton said Friday as he sat in the Turkish coffee tent and glued printed poems on small sticks that sell for up to $5.

Coffee concessionaire Don Brown, 41, has operated his tent for 12 years. He lives in a burlap-enclosed balcony that sits atop the coffee-brewing booth next to the tent.

“There’s a family feeling here because it’s a town of 3,000,” Brown said as he relaxed on the front seat of his truck outside his booth, sipping a cold beer.

“But I don’t think I’ll be sad to leave. I’ll go home to Sonoma County to recharge and then maybe I’ll go to work up north.”

Stuart Denker, who for 15 years has run the steak-on-a-stick food booth as a fund-raiser for a church school, said he long ago gave up camping at the village. He now reserves a room at a Thousand Oaks motel for weekends during the Faire for himself and his wife, Stephanie.

“That way we can get a good shower and check in with the 11 o’clock news and see if the weather the next day is going to be nice,” said Denker, a South Pasadena interior designer whose helpers cook 1,500 pounds of steak on sunny weekends.

‘We Camped in Pup Tent’

“In the early days, we camped in a pup tent. But I got tired of being a camp warden and being in charge of bottled water,” he said.

Others live close enough to the site to commute, in effect traveling back and forth in time.

Retired Los Angeles County probation officer Bob Wright of Chatsworth works as an actor, portraying the elaborately costumed Lord Burghley, treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I.

“I was very self-conscious about doing it at first,” said Wright, 57. “Some of my probation clients saw me. They’d stare at me in utter disbelief.”

Wright got the last laugh, however. He spied several of those clients at Faire ale stands--in obvious violation of their court-ordered probation. “I had to take action later on that,” he said.

Sue Honor, 28, of Woodland Hills, said she tagged along to her first Pleasure Faire when she was 8 and her mother, Anita, was selling handmade rugs at the festival.

“It was such a great adventure. I came back every year and became an actor in 1975. When I grew up and went to work, I always made sure I had a Monday-through-Friday job with weekends free. And an understanding boss,” she said.

Breakdown of Staff

Pleasure Faire organizer Phyllis Patterson said about 1,000 costumed performers and a similar number of craftsmen work at the festival. Another 600 people work in behind-the-scenes security and maintenance jobs. She said most commute to the Faire each weekend--some from as far away as San Francisco.

About 230,000 people are expected to have attended the 1986 Faire by Monday’s closing, she said.

This year’s festival is operating on a $1.7-million budget, financed from ticket sales and booth fees that total 20% of gross sales for food and 15% for crafts, she said. The booths are regulated by a committee that has the job of preserving a medieval atmosphere.

Patterson, 54, said revenues are used to finance Renaissance education programs and to pay off a loan used to buy the 240-acre Marin County site for the annual Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire, to be held in August and September this year.

Patterson said she got the idea after staging a summer theater history program for school children in 1962 in North Hollywood.

After Monday, craftsmen will have seven days to remove their booths from the Agoura festival site, which is rented for $60,000 a year from landowner Arthur Whizin, Patterson said.

“It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” she said. “We’ll put it all together again next year.”