High Table Gives Best View of Feaste

“I have the best view in the show,” I always brag, when asked about serving as Lorde High Chamberlaine of Ye Olde Englishe Christmasse Feaste. But it’s not merely the best vantage for hearing the singers, watching the tumblers, admiring the fencers or laughing at the jesters. From the high table, I can also see the depth of commitment shared by hundreds of students, parents, faculty and community volunteers.

For 358 days of the year, our feasting hall resembles any high school cafeteria. But out come the elves, and the lush trappings of a Tudor court transport us back some four hundred years. T-shirt clad teens briefly stop texting one another to don flowing gowns and breeches and slippers and transform their interior selves into adults of the Renaissance. A tireless troupe of lifters and carriers volunteer to serve, clear and clean up a seven course meal.

While the cast evolves year after year, the production crew is constant. Volunteers all, whose kids are now tens ofyears out of school, they continue year after year from the purest love of the art and pageantry of the Feaste. Seamstresses work 12 months of the year, fashioning vintage costumes of amazing detail and authenticity. Sets are rebuilt, new props fabricated, all in the nights and weekends of otherwise very busy lives.

It is in the nature of this commitment that these indispensable toilers, with directors Polly Amborn and Brad Mann, transmit the lore of the Feaste through succeeding year. Conservation of tradition pervades the very DNA of the Feaste; the diction of the show, the very specific turns of certain phrases are set in amber, because that’s how we do it. In a show centered around historical reenactment, maybe resistance to change is good. One might argue that it is a virtue precisely because it gives our student a chance to partake of something profoundly traditional, a touchstone of continuity through the years.

In our Feaste, we see the very best in our students: creating art and music, as recorder players or brass or singers; creating pageantry as actors; creating from within themselves something that is outside themselves. And maybe that’s what makes me proudest of their work: that, in these days when the lure of self-absorption can also lead to self-annihilation, we meet this phenomenon of beauty and joy.

One can speculate whether we become part of the Feaste because we possess these qualities already, or whether taking part in the Feaste nourishes them in thirsty hearts. Sufficient that those touched by the show remember it always, and speak of it as a key formative experience.

Which is why my family has supported the Feaste through the years. My sweet wife, herself a jester once upon a time, and sister to another jester and a singer, could hardly imagine a Christmas without it. The Feaste caused our introduction and courtship, and is a highlight of our years together. While we don’t have a “horse in the race” yet, it’s only seven short years (!) before our eldest can audition. We want to be sure there’s a Feaste for him and for his sister.

If your family has been touched by Feaste magic as fans or performers, I urge you to honor its three-decade history and invest in its future by becoming a donor to the Feaste Guild, or become a volunteer. And forget about the Thanksgiving shopping rush. For me, the holiday season doesn’t begin until I get to walk down that center aisle carpet and shout out: “Trumpets! Sound your clarion call! And singers – HIE THEE TO THE HALL!”