TRIED & TRUE : Faire Game : Renaissance Man Finds Pleasures in Olde-Tyme Garb

“Hast thou any pustulant sores, good sir?” the peasant woman waving the corked beakers asked sweetly. “I have healing potions.”

No slack, I thought. No warm-up. Go to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in costume, and you’re an Elizabethan now. No cue, no script, no briefing. You’re on. Only one minute through the gate and already I was being accosted by barkers, hawkers and oddball snake oil peddlers.

But my friends and I had asked for it. In fact, after the first visit to the Faire in mufti a few years ago, we’d actually gotten pretty rabid about it all. Walking around as ourselves, in jeans and Nikes, and speaking pure Lotus Land dialect, we decided, was unfulfilling. All the Faire’s a stage, the promoters like to say, and we were skulking around in the orchestra pit.

We noticed that costumes gave the wearers a certain license. Their gestures got larger and more pendulous; their voices became theatrical and round, and their bearing took on an appealing lustiness. Underneath it all, they were surely computer programmers and accountants and schoolteachers and middle corporate functionaries, but for this day at least they were good, rowdy subjects of Elizabeth I, gone a-Maying.

But you just couldn’t pull all that off in Banana Republic shorts and a Michael Jordan T-shirt. It would have been like trying to play Rambo in a pair of bunny slippers. So we began assembling a good representative pile of Elizabethan duds.

Or, more specifically, Mary Lodwick did. By far the most creative member of our group with needle and thread, Mary can sew an aircraft carrier out of a bolt of wool worsted. Over a period of months, aided by costumers’ reference books and pure imagination, Mary managed to whip together a small collection of period-perfect costumes.

Mine got a bit out of hand. Had I been smart, I probably would have taken the advice of Faire promoters and opted for a good, serviceable peasant outfit: simple knickers and a sleeved shirt, made mostly of lightweight muslin or other airy cotton. Perfect for the late May heat. But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I had had enough of being a peasant in real life. I wanted to find out what life was like among the haute bourgeoisie.

The result, after I went berserk in the yardage shop with Mary trying vainly to reel me in: blousy brown knickers surmounted by an ornate brown doublet with oversize sleeves and green satin slashes and gold cord trim, topped off by a green velvet flat cap with a white ostrich plume. Every stitch was true to the period, down to the tie-on sleeves. I was in the upper middle class at last.

But with such an outfit comes responsibility. The Faire staff who man the merchants’ booths, the food stands and the alehouses are dressed almost exclusively as members of the peasant class. This means that if you’re even one rung up on the social ladder, they’ll do a bit of fawning and kowtowing--in dialect and Shakespearean syntax--and you’re expected to respond in kind. The Faire is one huge period play and all the (costumed) men and women merely players.

This isn’t easy at first.

Jewelry seller: “Good morrow, gentle sir, if it please you do see my pretty trinkets, all wondrous fair.” Me: “Uh . . . (wan smile).”

Of course, a perfect riposte springs to mind the second I walk away: “How now, good woman! Thy wares are indeed of fine sort, but alas! The Queen’s taxes, God be with her, have left my own purse thin of late.”

It takes practice. Fortunately the Faire staff--many of them veterans of several years of spending their spring days listening to madrigals and speaking like members of the cast of “A Man for All Seasons”--are there to gently goad you. They never step out of character (even if you do) and they know their thees and thous. They also know some of the most lordly insults you’ll ever love to hear. Here are a couple from the “Basic Faire Language Guide”: “Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle.” “Whoreson cullionly barbermonger!”

After about an hour of wandering around places with names such as Felicity Cove, Drake’s Fen, Maybower Common, Potwobbler’s Way and watching Queen Liz herself being paraded loudly around in a sedan chair (the centerpiece of the day), an odd phenomenon occurs: The fair-goers in civvies start to disappear. They’re still there, but by the time you’ve become well and truly a part of the scenery you begin to develop tunnel vision. Your eyes bore in only on those who are also in costume.

Around 4 p.m. may be the best time of all. The civilians have mostly gone home, but you can’t blast the hard-core in costume out of the Faire. For the next two hours until closing, the air rings with the sound of little brass bells hanging from peasant maidens’ belts, the swish of elaborately doffed caps, the throaty roar of still another elaborate toast from the next alehouse down the lane, the thud of the feet of the Morris dancers striking the stage floor.

And, by that time, your costume has begun to feel entirely natural and your movements have ceased to be self-conscious. You have long since begun to call everyone “coz,” a perfectly fine and accurate term of Elizabethan endearment. It all feels not only out of time, but out of place, and it’s actually possible to make yourself believe for a few lovely seconds that you don’t really have to go home, or speak like a Californian, or wear a necktie or something as uninspired as Levi’s, ever again.

I looked for the potion woman on the way out. I was at last ready and able to discuss, lustily, a good cure for boils. After eight hours at the Faire, I was walking the walk, talking the talk and, in faith, I had the duds to back it up. But alack! She had gone.

No one spoke much on the ride home in the car. Back in the real world, there didn’t seem to be much that was interesting to say. And it’s difficult to describe the feeling of wearing an Elizabethan doublet in the back seat of an Acura.

But out on the world’s biggest stage, in truth it was merry.

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The 1993 Renaissance Pleasure Fair continues through June 6 at Glen Helen Regional Park, Devore. Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Memorial Day. $7.50 to $16.50 at the door ($2 discount in advance). (800) 523-2473.