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!
- Jamie Oppenheimer
