Our revels now are ended. . .

I always try to wrap up the Renaissance Festival in some way. I have written blog posts, told it to my students, tried desperately to communicate it to my wife, who doesn't need words to understand me, so doesn't react the way I expect (as if I am opening a shining door into my very being) so it always feels less than adequate.

This final weekend of the festival was different though. I brought my daughter. In the past, I have banished my kids from the last weekend so I can be free of any obligation other than drinking in the joy and spending as much time with the audience as possible. Hannah is 11 now and has been a costumed participant in the show for 9 seasons. She acts 23 most days and so, I thought, sure she can spend one more weekend with her friends wandering the village like a pack of teenagers at the mall. She chose to spend the whole time with me. She followed me around the way her brothers do and she never has. After two long days of keeping up with me just fine and needing no real concern from the old man, we sat together and watched the closing gate show.

An old tradition largely fallen by the wayside, the closing gate show does now what it always should have. It gives a grand finale and a curtain call to this great piece of theatre and allows us all to feel okay with closing the trunk and taking down the signs for a year. I saw the quiet joy at being a part of it in my little girl's face and gave her the first rose I have ever caught from the hundreds I have seen thrown from atop the gate. We sang some songs, packed up our stuff, helped my mother do the same, and I hugged some friends goodbye.

On the drive home, just shy of 10-oclock at night, we stopped at McDonald's for some greasy burgers (a tradition) and I asked her if she'd had a good weekend. Looking at me, as only women can, with a look that asked me as if I was foolish enough to think there was doubt, she said simply yes. Then she smiled, and soon fell asleep in the backseat as if she had gone from grown woman to my little girl again in those few moments. I am always entertained by my fellow performers out there. I am awed and often struck dumb by one in particular who knows what I think so I hope he knows that. And I am endlessly grateful for the gifts the audience brings us in the form of laughter, happiness and sometimes wonder. But it is somehow surprising to me, after all these years, that it is in the eyes of my daughter that I see most clearly what I love about it all.