Meow House Theatre

Has anyone but me noticed that about 75% of the people involved in any Ren Faire activities weigh in the 300+ pound range?  I ran across a photo gallery today and just about everyone was fresh from shopping in the Husky Department.

What about Ren Faire draws a skewed percentage of large people?  Aside from royalty, which was a small percentage of the population in the Middle Ages, I’d wager that most people in the year 1565 were not fat.  They didn’t eat junk food and they had to work at manual labor 16 hours a day just to live.  So it’s not that people are being all historically accurate.  Ren Faire is not really accurate anyway.  People think they’re trying to be accurate by using only historical patterns and moldy old lace to make their costumes but then they pull out their Calvin Klein wallet to use their debit card to pay for their lunch of KFC Hot Wings and the whole imaginary transport back into time all goes to shit.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being fat and being into Ren Faire.  I’m just wondering why the bell curve has so many of the same body type in the center.  Basketball, for instance, is skewed toward having a large percentage of tall people involved in it.  The answer as to why is obvious in basketball’s case.  It is not obvious to me what about Ren Faire causes it to skew the way it does.

Or, it could be that the weight distribution at Ren Faire is actually quite even across the scale but the percentage of people who take pictures and post them online at those Ren Faire kind of activities skews toward the 300 lb. range.  Maybe it’s a fat people/camera thing rather than a fat people/Ren Faire thing.

I think the only way to prove or disprove one point or the other is to go to Ren Faire.  Which I did once and it was ridiculous.  And there were quite a lot of fat people there but I only went to the one so maybe that’s just the Ren-Faire-loving population in my area and not representative of Ren Faire attendeees as a whole.  Coincidentally this latest set of pictures–the one that got me to write this post–also took place somewhere within probably a few hours of me so it well could be a New England / Massachusetts thing and not a nationwide love of Ren Faire by the large.

Someone ought to do a study on this.