Bow Before the Barons: Ren fair hails thirty years as a self-supporting nonprofit.

• Author: Rhode, Scott

Venetian glass came to Alaska during the European Renaissance. Blue beads discovered in 2005 at archaeological sites in the Brooks Range were dated to the mid-1400s, having changed hands along the 10,000-mile trade route from Italy, through Eurasia, and across the Bering Strait. The artifacts are a tangible connection between where we live now and Venice from 500 years ago.

I tell this story to patrons who visit the Three Barons Renaissance Fair (3BRF). Or rather, the character I portray shares this tale with New Worlders partaking of the festival in Hillshire.

This summer is my third as a performer at the fair, which has existed in Anchorage for the last thirty summers. The organization has stood as a self-supporting nonprofit, offering two weekends of outdoor entertainment and an enthusiastic market for independent vendors.

Welcome to Hillshire

Before the Plague Year, the fair's record attendance was 13,336 during the first two weekends of June 2019. My castmates and I had begun rehearsals in 2020 when the fair was canceled for the first time in its history. The 2021 event was downsized to a two-day "Crown's Market" with free admission, to keep the hearth warm.

When the full fair (and full fare) returned in 2022, so did more than 15,000 patrons. "That really kind of blew our minds, that we blew past our high day. Almost 2,000 over it, and people were just excited to get out," recalls Kevin Hall, president of the 3BRF board of directors.

Entering the gate transports fair patrons to the fictional village of Hillshire, about 500 years ago. Attractions include the Crooked Toad Tavern for grown-up entertainment and the Twisted Tadpole for toddlers, games of skill at the Crimson Dove Inn or with the Tomato Wives, puppet shows by the Alchemist's Guild, roving improv by the Fools, living history demonstrations, a mind-bending maze, and plenty of vendors and food trucks.

And, of course, the eponymous barons from the Blue, Green, and Red Courts. "We're the person you want to meet. Want to get your picture taken with the baron and the baroness? Come and visit us in our pavilions," says Shane Mitchell, who has portrayed the Blue Baron at every fair since 1993. "We send them on quests, we grant them special favors and ribbons and tokens of esteem, we open and close the fair, we officiate at the Fight Show, and the baronesses officiate the costume contest. You know, the titular heads of the fair."

Mitchell's character within the fiction of Hillshire, Ali Akbar Mohammed elMutamin the Magnificent (supposedly the descendant of a real-life 11th century Andalusian emir), mediates the neutral ground between the cruel and greedy Green Baron from Elizabethan England and the kind and honorable Red Baron from the Serene Republic of Venice.

As production director within the 3BRF, Mitchell mediates for real among the courts, guilds, and other subgroups that rehearse their separate parts, to "produce a single unified desired effect," he says. "Basically, my job is to make sure that all of those...