Medieval Feast - The OppenheimerReport - 1/9/00

The OppenheimerReport - 1/9/00
I watched a commercial for one of those Medieval Feast places the other night, and by golly I want to go. For those of you who don’t live in a large metropolitan area, with a glut of entertainment options, you probably don’t even know what a medieval feast place IS. This is basically a fun-filled evening for which you pay an all-inclusive admission fee to sit in an auditorium, eat meat with your hands, and watch men on horseback try to spear each other in a mock jousting match. Occasionally, there is the odd hand-to-hand skirmish and maces and balls and chains are called for, but mostly, it’s just skewering. Picture yourself tearing apart an unmanageable slab of cheap, underdone cow meat (heaven knows from what part of the cow), as you watch chainmail-clad horsemen try to impale each other with giant pool cues. If that isn’t enough excitement, their galloping horses fling large gobs of mud and saliva up into your food as they race by. You have a front row seat for all the feudal carnage and savagery you can stomach. Relive the good old days for one, very reasonable, all-inclusive admission charge. Fun per dollar, I don’t know how you can do better than this.

Call me a testosterone-choked moron, but I love crap like this. It’s not that violence turns me on, it’s more that this is simply such a ludicrous concept. It makes about as much sense as watching the Foot Surgery Channel on TV as you sit down to your spaghetti dinner.

I am reminded of a funny experience I had a long time ago, when I spent a semester studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland. I and my classmates were taken on a field trip, as part of our cultural experience, and one of our stops was dinner at a place called Bunratty Castle. It was a genuine, ancient stone castle, dating back to Celtic times, which had been transformed into a rather bizarre restaurant. First, we were served mead wine by real wenches, and then, once sufficiently lubricated, we were led into a large banquet hall for a good old-fashioned throw-the-bones-over-your-shoulder medieval feast. They BRAGGED about this. The feastitorium seated about two or three hundred, but on the night we were there it was only about half full. The tables were long, seating between forty to fifty diners, and each place setting consisted of a serrated knife and a plate, but no other utensils. For the tour group of geriatric bible thumpers from Iowa, this must have seemed quite a primitive feast, but to my study group, made up in large part by scoundrels of questionable Irish decent, armed with their somewhat muddled interpretation of what was proper medieval decorum, this was a green light to party.

After several more tankards of mead wine, we realized that the folks at the next table were a rugby team visiting from England, and that they too were getting into the spirit of things. Once our slabs of animal flesh had been served, it wasn’t long before the mother of all food fights broke out. It was instant mayhem, the likes of which I doubt the managers of Bunratty Castle had ever anticipated or even imagined.

Entertainment during our feast was supposed to be a quartet of musicians playing music from the period, and they were all dressed in those balloon pants and those funny hats with big feathers. I’m sure they felt silly enough dressed like that, but no words can describe how silly they must have felt fending off projectiles of beef with their lutes and drums. Amidst the chaos - and let there be no mistake, this was CHAOS, there sat the Iowans, calmly eating their meals with as much dignity as they could muster, (remember they have only knives with which to eat), ducking occasionally to miss the odd incoming roll or slab of meat.

Needless to say, we, the School of Irish Studies and the rugby team, were summarily escorted out of Bunratty Castle before we could finish our medieval desserts, but not before leaving our indelible mark on the patience of these tourist trap imposters. Covered with food, we were bussed back to our hotel where we spent the next four hours drinking even more and embellishing what was already a slam dunk in the “memorable experience” department. By the way, I grudgingly admit that the rugby guys won the food fight. Now, whenever I see an ad for one of these Joust-O-Rama places, it triggers fond memories of that Bacchanalian orgy in which I was so blessed to have participated.

As I approach that stage in my life to which I loathingly refer as “approaching respectability” ... that point where I would never in a million years dream of behaving with such a careless lack of decorum, I look back on my Bunratty adventure as one of the high points in my Irish experience. Sometimes, while eating dinner with my wife at a fine restaurant, I’ll toss an olive at her, just for old time’s sake. In response, she will look at me as if to say “I married a single cell organism” ... or, worse yet, she’ll simply ignore my token nostalgic gesture. That hurts. In my mind there can’t be enough of these medieval feast places to satisfy the base needs of men all over the world. It’s in our nature to be this way, and all this rubbish about the rules of civilized behavior is totalitarian hogwash, foisted upon us by prudes like Emily Post and Miss Manners.
Oh, to be medieval again! Honey, do you know where I put my good feather? It’s time to feast!

-Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2000 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED