As my friend’s light-blue dragon of a finely-tuned automobile turned into the sparse parking lot furthest away from the culinary settlement, I glanced past the trees and over the main road to the very-there parcel of land carved out by the few food-truck operators willing to brave the end of this plague year and its sullen entry into local Medieval Fair lore.
Like many Oklahoma City area bread and circuses over the past year, the good fairs have gone quiet and the decent fairgoers even quieter, but as responsible citizens have been receiving their vaccinations on a steady basis, slowly events have been returning to the forefront with one of Norman’s most flagrant—the Medieval Fair—leading the way. Sort of.
Walking out onto Reaves Park in its sunshiny glory, the bright yellow signage informed us it was a special event, featuring “food to go” now and the fair as a special online event later. As mainly hungry adults skittered around looking for something to desperately snack on, waving scarily at townsfolk off to the side was the only costumed creature I had seen there thus far, a skeletal warrior:
With twenty (or, probably, far less) trucks lined up on the gravel and green of the park, there was no sword-swinging fighters or tightly-bloused lasses to methodically heat up this winterfresh blood; instead there were the usual event-worthy eats featuring sausage-on-a-stick, fried-cheese-on-a-stick and, presumably, just sticks. It is a medieval fair, right?