This past weekend marked the opening of King Richard’s Faire in Carver, MA. Most Renaissance faires can only dream of what King Richard’s has achieved: a permanent venue at an 80-acre wooded park in which they’ve built an expansive medieval village that must be seen to be believed. I attended the faire several times in my middle and high school years, and I decided to drop everything on Labor Day for the chance to find out if the festival is still as fun as I remembered.

Before Bono made himself king -- or at least crowned himself rock and roll's official ambassador to the Universe -- the most internationally influential rock star, on a policy level at least, was Lou Reed. If there'd been a Secretary of State for 20th-century "alternative" rock, it woulda been Lou, since the Velvet Underground, as everyone knew, had helped topple Communism in the Czech Republic, where they seemed to have held a cultural sway that was vastly out of proportion to what they held such cultural backwaters as, say, the United States.

A heavily eye-shadowed young actress is standing haplessly by the door of a laundromat. Her elder cohort has been studiously letting her do most of the talking throughout the play, but is now searching for words to bring this girl out of her funk. Like a sphinx, her lips gather together to deliver the sage advice. And then a random guy — not an actor — walks in on the scene, squeezes past the actresses and the audience to the far washing machines to pick up his whites.