21 May 2017
A Letter from Mark
This past Saturday was the first of a 2-day pirate invasion of the Georgia Renaissance Festival, and I must admit that I had a great time wandering around the old place again. We started the day at the front door where some lady in purple yelled at everybody a long time before letting us all in. I think she did that as a distraction so we didn’t notice all them boobs everywhere, but man I noticed. After the lady finished yelling at us they opened the door so we could get in and once inside I ran as far as I could so that lady couldn’t yell at me no more.
I ended up at the tea house, which is really less “house” than it is “porch”. They really ought to call that place the “Fancy Tea Porch and Cookie Hut”, if you asked me. The people in there are pleasant and all, and the food is pretty decent, but the cook kept coming outside to tell us about all this stuff he was making. He apparently don’t know that we can READ the ding dang menu! I scored a good chair spindle from that place last year when our pal Larry farted a chair in half, and I showed it to the cook as an implied threat, which he didn’t seem to understand at all.
If you follow that place on Facebook you can find out about their secret drink specials, and everybody agreed that the one we got was spunkier than tea.
We paid up and headed down to the Tavern on the Hill where our lovely pal Ashley and her able crew were squirtin’ out pints for the assembled masses. On more than one occasion the solitary line stretched down across the patio and down to the stair leading to a grassy hillside – it occurs to me that they ought to figure out how to break that line in half.
Somebody mentioned that I was supposed to be leading my very own pubcrawl so I wandered off to see how I was doing. In similar fashion to the Pub on the Hill, the solitary line at the Drunk Monk Pub stretched all the way to the street and I knew that at the speed it was going I would best be served tromping on back around to the Brewer’s Pub where I found the line to be quite short.
After getting something to drink I went on over to the yellow and purple customer service tent to speak with the staff.
I asked if that loud and abusive lady in purple was anywhere to be found, as I wished to register “an complainte” (you have to talk like them people if you expect ’em to understand you). They said that lady was off dealing with other customers, so I decided to sit down and cool off for a few minutes.
Another staff member covered in black bows wandered in and that dude got all excited when he seen me sitting on the front row – I guess he don’t get many customers this time of the year?
He started asking me a whole bunch of fancy questions and scratching all my answers down on a piece of parchment. He seemed awful worked up about something when he handed me that parchment and announced that it was “a letter from Mark”.
Who the hell was Mark? Was he this guy?
Don’t get me wrong, getting a letter was nice and all, so I stuck it into my boot so as not to hurt his feeling because he’d gone to so much trouble writing all that stuff down and he’d made such a fuss about how important it was to him. I also paid attention because he also had a big sticker hanging from his belt and I’d left my cutlass back aboard ship as I hadn’t planned on no trouble.
If you’re reading this Mark, thank you for your very nice letter and interest in PiratePalooza Industries. I’ve asked my crew to provide you with an autographed picture of Yours Truly, I just need to know where to send it (along with $35 for shipping).
Publicity shot courtesy of Dirty Davy Crockett
After I got away from the funky bunch in that tent I wandered around for a bit and had some pretty close scrapes with some pretty crazy people but you don’t need to know about all of that – you just need to know that when I finally made it back up to the hill in time for the school photo of this year’s pirate hoarde it was a real cat-herding exercise! I was happily surprised to see even more old friends had struggled out into the day’s heat and joined us down to the pub which made me realize that there are other people who are just as foolhardy as me – perhaps even more so?
The rainclouds that had been threatening for hours finally burst forth, forcing Esteban of Landloch’d under an alcove where he played to a rapt crowd of tourists who had to decide whether to stay and clap or leave and get drowned.
They weren’t stupid, they all clapped.
After the rain let up I wandered back up to the customer service tent to attempt to file my complaint again and THIS time around that loud lady was there and she was JUST AS LOUD AND RUDE AND BOSSY as she’d been that morning. I frankly don’t know why they keep her on. She was ordering everybody around and it was clear that her co-workers were afraid of her but couldn’t do nothing about it so they just kept calling her “m’lady” and “Trajesty”. We yelled at each other for awhile and once I realized that the others weren’t going to stand up for themselves I left to watch the pub sing.
If we spoke at pirate invasion let me know, as I seem to have forgotten most of that day.
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