Brian is one of the most delightful newcomers to the festival.

Albeit, I'm a bit biased, since I met him in a different context and many of my friends hold him and his lovely wife in high esteem. But you can read for yourself and decide:

I’m one of those people who didn’t hold much love for the classics in high school. Shakespeare and Chaucer were anathema to my personal reading list, and a 11th grade English teacher whose love for reading them aloud, combined with a thick Queens honk in her voice, ended nearly all chances that I might be brought into the fold.

Somewhere back in the very end of the 1980s, a friend of mine, his wife and I ventured out to Crownsville to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It must have been one of the first years at the location -- I can recall only a handful of stages, and some areas, such as Mary's Dale Way and the Dragon Inn had yet to exist. The main attraction seemed to be the Mud Show, along with the chance to wander around with a few beers and laugh at some of the assorted goings-on around us. One of the mud show players used to come around and literally grovel for money, which caused us endless amounts of amusement by sending him off to embarrass some innocent.

Needless to say, we weren’t in it for the “period.”

A few years later, I believe it was 1991, I ventured off again to the RenFest, this time In the company of an ex-girlfriend and her roommate -- not the best group with which to assure oneself of a good time. The only high point of the day was spotting someone with whom I had gone to junior high school -- someone whom I had an incredible crush on then, and safe to say, still found just as attractive and personable that day. I hadn’t seen her since a water fight during that summer of 1976. She was a performer in one of the acts, and since 1991, I hadn’t missed a chance to go out to Crownsville at least once a year during the run and just catch a glance of her.

Now all this time, the RenFest had been sort of an amusing time in a place where a bunch of people acted out their fantasies of living in an era long ago, accompanied by bad dinner-theatre British accents and a lot of meat eaten from sticks. Later on, after I had a career epiphany and realized I wasn’t going to end up in New York as a correspondent for a network television news department, much less didn’t want to end up in New York as the correspondent for a network TV news department, I started to relax and have more fun in life. Me and my friends began to actually dress up on our annual one-day pilgrimage. Badly at first -- the pictures of me with a Robin Hood hat, tights and cowboy boots shall never see the light of day again, thank you (Must have been that English teacher’s revenge); it took me three more years to learn how to dress “period.”

The next stage was wackier still. Idiot that I am, I dared the guys in our group to wear, of all things, kilts (Thankfully, this was still several years before Braveheart). If you really want to make friends laugh hard, be a black man in a kilt in the 1500s. I think I made Krackin’ Kate of Whipflash, (Lauren Muney, whom I’ve known since waaay back) actually do a neck-wrenching double-take when she saw me that day.

Probably the best two moments during the “kilt years” were:

-- When another “Scot” would ask, “You’re a Scot? Where from?” My cryptic answer: “Black Forest.”

-- When I went to the White Hart Tavern one afternoon to purchase an ale. Dropping an extra dollar on the counter for the tavern help, I was walking away when one of the men behind the bar called out, “You know -- you’re not a real Scot.” I wheeled around. “What makes you say that?” He smirked and replied, “You left a tip.”

Somewhere along the line, my view of the RenFest changed. Some of it was seeing the quality of the performers: Whipflash, Johnny Fox, Gazzo, Mike Rose and Tom and Deirdre Crowl. And some of it was the old repressed high school actor in me, in love with the applause and the characters and the costumes and realizing the bonding that must go on over the course of eight weekends (and more, if you’re staff).

You may notice that all the performers I listed have something in common: they all perform magic at one point or another in their act. You see, I’ve been a magician since 1975 -- Lauren keeps telling people I was the first magician she’d ever seen, which makes me feel, well, really old -- but I didn’t start taking magic seriously until 1994, when my then-fiancee asked me about it. Over the time since then, I’ve been going to lectures, meeting with the real professionals and learning more about the theory and the art of magic, not just the craft.

Just before the 1998 season, things began to click. I had performed enough in front of enough friends and strangers to feel comfortable working in front of “crowds,” and in 1996, I became a non-resident member of The Magic Castle, the home of the Academy of Magical Arts and a mecca for magicians all over the country, if not the world. On the Internet, I saw that Mike Rose and Tom Crowl needed help for their magic shop on the boardwalk, so I called up Mike and volunteered. After two frantic weeks of culling up on the Internet everything I could about RenFests, I built up a costume and started as “outside talker” (carny language) "Desmond Devereaux" for the magic shop. My job: work the crowd outside and eventually shovel them inside to buy.

Well, in the end, I was probably doing my own stuff more than the shop’s, and so we parted ways, but I was allowed by the festival powers-that-be to perform with the magicians who gathered along the boardwalk: Conundrum, Woody and Hans, Darby Sterling, Chance Darewithal, and Nymblwyke from Whipflash. Eventually the “Magician’s Tag Team” started up at 5 pm each day, where we would do a trick or two, and then hand off to the next performer in line, and then either reset or act as the Greek Chorus for the performer, depending on the audience and the performer.

What’s next? I’m hoping to be a stage act come the 1999 season. Oh, and remember that person that I had the crush on? The one that I ran into that day in 1991? We’re married -- but to different people. My wonderful then-fiancee, now-wife Carla is the one who talked me into, and supported this crazy hobby of mine over the past half-decade (for which she probably deserves sainthood). She’s the one you’ll see floating around giving people hell in her more-than-authentic accent: she’s from New Zealand. Look for her as either a bawdy wench or black-clad pirate.

And that performer? She’s also married, and has a lovely daughter, for whom I’ve performed magic several times. What’s her name?

I’m not telling. She knows who she is.

Check out Brian's Web page, too.