"Mask and Myth" - My Masks Website

 Since we're a month or so away from Halloween, I thought I should post about my Masks  Websites,  MASK AND MYTH and RAINWALKER STUDIO.   

I still delight in making all kinds of masks for holidays, Renaissance Faires, and Costuming, and commissions are especially  welcome!

American Nomads: In Praise of the Renaissance Faire Community

One more thing I found from my archives........

"I always felt like the show was a dirigible that somehow, when we opened, was up and God knows how the hell it got there.  Admit it, we all wish the village could somehow last forever.  When I leave the Bristol Renaissance Faire, I always remember a town full of people, and I'm glad that, even when it's buried beneath the snow, it exists, it will come back.  It's like Brigadoon.

It's all transitory really - it's only right now that we have anything, anything at all.  And that's what the Faires are.  They're a celebration that bubbles up literally out of the dust, sometimes in spite of the producers, the corporations, the personalities…….the magic is always there."

Bruce Bramson

I've been  in Renaissance Faires for 30 years.  I've stood in many a booth, eaten many a roasted turkey leg, danced beneath a full moon, shared gossip around campfires, and packed and unpacked many a camper.  I've been a mask maker, an amulet maker, a tarot reader, and a dancer, rolling across the country with winter always to my back.

I never meant to join the circus, so to speak. After graduate school I intended to become a professor of art.   But I guess, like most of us, I just fell in love with the Faire.  And, like all love affairs that begin with a lighthearted kiss, one never thinks, at the time, that the charm of this chance meeting might just change the course of your life.  That it might become a marriage, a career, a family, a way of life…...well, perhaps we are blessed that most of us lack the gift of prophecy.  Not that I have any regrets!  

The truth is, I write this as a love token, homage to a very special community.  And this year, 1999, is the first year in many I'll come off the road, to have what my friend Cora the Wheat Weaver calls an "out of bodice experience".  Peggy and others will manage the Rainwalker booths this year.  Well, I'll try, dear ones.  But I doubt this is my last Huzzah.

The festivals began in California in 1962, with the genius of Phyllis Patterson, a history teacher.  They began as a fund raiser for KPFK, public radio in Los Angeles, and offered participants an opportunity to join in the fun of reenactment.    Renaissance Festivals across the country are now a multi-million dollar businesses, a far cry from the counter-cultural encampments they once were.  And there are  three generations of "Rennies", many of whom have grown up on the road.  Some of us have noticed that we are growing old with the shows….strange in a world that, like the Fairy Isles, seems to be timeless.

My first encounter was in the early '70's, when I wandered into a circle of interesting people doing some interesting dancing at MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, one sunny afternoon.  They invited me to step into the magic circle, and before I knew it, I was dancing with them at the northern California Renaissance Festival, my velvet gown swirling behind me as I bowed to my partner, to the beat of drum and dulcimer music.  I do not think I will ever forget, late one night, as the flaps to our troupe's admittedly noisy tent parted.  Within the aperture, framed by the yellow light of a lantern, coated, cloaked, and formidable, stood the Sheriff of Nottingham.  "Thou dost disturb the peace!" he said.  Busted!

Many "Rennies" are nomads, which is a phenomenon in itself worth writing about.  Why do people become nomads?  What draws them into a lifestyle of constant movement?  I'm curious.  I've been asking myself that question for a long time.  Perhaps it appeals to a certain kind of restless soul who thrives "enroute" without, at least on the surface, the physical and emotional commitments that being "landed" engenders.  Maybe it's more primal than that: the Renfair community is rather tribal, and there are not many opportunities left to live a tribal lifestyle these days.  Like all tribes, it has its touchstones, rites of passage, weddings, births, deaths, rules, and ethics.  It's simply always on the move, coalescing and dissolving with each show.

There's a familiar rhythm.  It begins with an excitement that mounts as the show goes up.  For a month or more before the show opens, energy builds as, literally, it comes to life.  Booths go up, new paint and banners appear, trailers and tents sprout like mushrooms.  People drift in - craftspeople setting up their workshops, trying to get stocked for the show, performers rehearsing, carpenters with stages to build and roofs to shingle, kids with beat up vans, piercing and dreadlocks, looking for jobs.  The on-site schoolhouse opens,  potlucks are organized, birthday cakes are baked, drum circles might happen.  And then all too soon there is the amazingly fast breakdown.  A stream of vans, buses and trucks hauling trailers flow out of the gate, for points west or east….perhaps you pass them on route 40, and honk, wave.  "See you in New York!  See you in Maryland!"

It never fails to strike me that this is, well, Zen.  There is a living metaphor here, as I watch each show melt like a snowflake.  Here is a lifestyle that will not let me forget the fragile transience of our lives….we're all nomads, really.  We come together for a while, we make a family, a village, we dance together, we celebrate, we fight sometimes, we create, and then we pack up and we're gone, all in different directions, until next year, next cycle, next lifetime.

Until we meet again.  Same place, same season perhaps.  In the summer when bagpipes call from across the green or in the fall when the trees are crisp and brilliant, and multi-colored banners are flying from some fanciful turret.  

To all  who have celebrated with me for so many years, friends, colleagues and customers, I offer my deepest gratitude and praise.

Lauren Raine
(Berkeley, 1999)

"And we'll all go together,  to pull wild mountain thyme,

All among the purple heather, will ye go, laddie, go?"

With thanks to so many bodiced ladies, and the men in tights who wore them so very well:

Dellie Dorfman, Berkanna, Vicki, Taylor Marie, Barbara and Rick, Michael Stewart, Chris the dressmaker, Heidi the wanderer, Laurette, Pam DeLuna, Madame Ovary, Ceil, Peggy, Cora, Rosanna, Tracy the mask maker, Judy, Sandy and John Lockwood, Kathy and Thor, Judith, Mari, Jayvanti, the Mud Men, Robb Fletcher, Duncan Eagleson, Pat Murphy, Kerry McNeil, Dan, Jeff , Mitch, Cliff the Greenman, Bob, Seamus, Bruce Bramson, Kip, Michael Valentine, Herb and Rita, Bob Lepre, and so many more.

May we remain evergreen.

New Website: "Masks and Myth"

I recently created a new website for my saleable masks  which I'm proud of: 

"Mask and Myth"

 ( http://www.maskandmyth.com/)

 

For anyone seeking a handmade, one of a kind mask for any occasion I have quite an assortment.  I also enjoyed having a chance to remember very fondly my days at the Renaissance Faires, and pause to be grateful for those nomadic, mythic  days!  

50th Anniversary of Renaissance Faire

Farewell, and Thank You, to the Faire!

Me in 1997 as "Moth Woman" (non-oracular variety)

I know I've threatened to finally retire before, but honest, this time I really mean it!  But I had to stick around for the 50th Anniversary in 2012 of the first Renaissance Faire, here in Southern  California.

50 years!  As a true Rennie veteran, I have to say, go figure.  Who would have thought that Phillis and Ron Patterson's passion for history and participatory theatre, and the need to raise a little money for alternative radio station KPFA.........would have become hundreds of Renaissance Faires around the country, and a multi-million dollar international business? 

I did my first Faire in 1970, when I was living near MacArthur Park in L.A. and wandered into an interesting group of people doing some interesting dancing.  Somehow I entered the circle of dancers, and found myself part of a Renaissance Country Dancing troupe.  Before I knew it, I was headed for Northern California, and camping out each weekend in a historical tent with the troupe as we performed. In those days everyone stayed in character, and  I don't think I'll ever forget the night we were too rowdy and in the midst of our noisy merriment, the flaps to our tent parted.  There stood a black figure holding a candlelit lamp.  In awed silence we heard him say:  "Thou dost disturb the peace!"  Busted by the Sheriff of Nottingham!

Many years later, in the course of my strange career, I might add that I had an affair with the Sheriff of Nottingham, and married Robin Hood.  Not to mention the Pied Piper, bless his heart.

When I finished graduate school, I planned on becoming a professor of art, but somehow, I ended up joining the circus, so to speak, instead, when I re-joined the New York Renaissance Faire near Tuxedo Park...........a former botanical garden, ah, what magical summers we had there!  We would arrive the first week of July, to open the show in early August, camping, building our booths, nights spent around a campfire area we called "the Gypsy Camp" that always had music, drums, and conversation.   Such a magical place that was.......above the site there was a rather steep hill with a circle of stones, placed by unknowable ancients, a circle that marked a series of ley crossings. The stones were big boulders, and although some were out of alignment through the passage of time, the circle was clear to see, with a center stone that had veins of white quartz.    If you held a divining rod above the center stone, it "helicoptered".  We, of course, dubbed it "Spirit Mountain", and many would spend the night there on our improvised vision quests.  It was good to know that this place had once been sacred to native peoples.


Heck, we would have done it for free in the early years, and a great many of us did.  The sense of community, and creativity was so wonderful!  We made magic, and that was what the public came for.  Our booths were works of art we re-created each summer.  I remember, for example, Pam Tyrell's "De Luna Designs" booth, which she spent all of July creating, and usually most of her profit as well.  She would set up her dye pots under an amazing structure of woven sticks and painted velvet.    And Dellie Dorfman's "Pragmatic Enchantments" booths were woven works of forest art.

It was our custom to open the Faire with a blessing.  Many, but not all, were Pagans, and the "Psychic's Row" section (I was a reader for a while) had many spiritualists.  So we would gather around an old tree stump that marked a circle not too far from the entrance to the Faire, and with music (sometimes bagpipes), flowers, and chanting we would bless the day for all while patrons waiting at the gate waited to enter the Faire.  It says something about the corporate mind that a few years later we gathered once more, on the first morning of the opening weekend of another year's faire to see a group of actors, including several black cloaked "witches" complete with pointy hats and a fake cauldron, gathered around our stump, enacting a drama about witches and sheriffs.  Such irony, and of course, that put an end to our blessing.  Strange.

My friend Joyce Weiss at the Arizona Renfair

Here's a great story from those years in New York, and to the best of my knowledge, no one made it up, since I heard it from those involved.  Believe me, Magic is Afoot quite often, but you have to notice it.

Carol "the Fairy Lady" made "fairy environments", big bell jars that enclosed the beautiful fairy figures she made in environments of moss and flowers.  One morning one of the women who did face painting was in her booth, standing fascinated with a friend before a particular jar.  She told Carol that when she made some money at the end of the day, she wanted to purchase it.  At Faire's closing she was back.  "What happened?" she asked Carol.  "What do you mean", she replied, "I didn't sell that piece".  "But there were two fairies in it!" the face painter said, disappointed, and her friend, standing beside her,  echoed her statement.

"No", replied Carol, "there was only one".  

Me when I was younger and, alas, thinner, during the New York and Maryland Renfair years

One of the many mask makers I've taught is Elise "Peggy"  Linich and her Satori Masks.  To my credit, I can say that just about everyone who's ever worked for me or with me now has their own mask business, and my own designs have become, well, generic.  I guess my claim to fame is that I was one of the first mask makers on the circuit to create masks based on pagan mythology.  Certainly, I've populated the world with Green Men and Goddesses - it was a messy job, but somebody had to do it.

Rob Fletcher in Maryland

I've seen "faire brats" grow up and become parents themselves.  In Maryland there is a grove of trees planted for Rennies who have died over the years, and for sure I've seen quite a few weddings.  Time has come for me to say thank you,  many times thank you, to the places and people I've loved and met and danced with on the road. I've lived in "Brigadoon", and watched the villages rise and disappear through many seasons.  I really am retiring this year, honest........and I'm so glad to have been there.  Huzzah!

"And we'll all go together, to pull wild mountain thyme

all along the purple heather, will ye go, laddie, go?"

 

In remembrance and gratitude:

Amelia Sefton (Madame Ovary), Dellie Dorfman, Ro, Peggy and the "Blondettes", Chris Simone, Berkanna,  Kerry, Vicki, Taylor, Duncan Eagleson, Judith, Heidi, Green Crown, Shaman, Patrick,  Carol, Marty, Judith, Cora, Pam, Bob, Sandy...........oh, so very many.  I don't know where to begin or end.  The circle has no end.