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a weekend in cowtown
Apr. 24th, 2006 01:15 pmVacaville (it doesn't really mean "cowtown" - it was named for an early settler named Vaca) is a tiny colorful circa-1900 historic downtown surrounded by a huge splotch of suburbia in the midst of the Central Valley, California's answer to the Great Plains. One of the shopowners in that downtown got the idea of attracting customers through one of those weekend street fairs, and - and this is where it got interesting for me - giving it a Tolkien theme.
I didn't hear about the first one, but this weekend was The Second Annual Middle Earth Festival, and having duly enquired I was invited as a speaker for the "Forums on Tolkien's Themes." They even gave me a hotel room for the night, which was really nice of them. (When I arrived at the hotel, the atrium was booming with a band playing cover versions of 80s pop songs for a wedding reception, but mercifully they packed up and departed before bedtime.)
I wasn't expecting much of the forums, just an opportunity to talk for a couple of hours with readers who knew enough about Tolkien to appreciate some more advanced discussion. I waved around a copy of the 484-page index to The History of Middle-earth to indicate how voluminous Tolkien's posthumous works are; in a discussion of the morality of the story I was able to outline the difference between Tolkien's characters named "Aragorn" and "Theoden" with Peter Jackson's very different characters of the same names without denigrating Jackson. (This magnanimity was achievable partly by entirely avoiding discussion of Jackson's character named "Faramir".)
For the most part we let the audience drive the discussion topics. The first of the two forums I attended was dominated by an audience member, a very tall and rather Ent-like woman who knew a very little about a very lot of things. The other forum was fairly skilfully led by a rather Calvinist Episcopal priest whose interest in teleology considerably outstripped Tolkien's. I think I managed to convey how Tolkien's own view differed, without stepping too far into a Christian theological dispute. Everybody knew their Tolkien well enough not to say anything dumb, and we had a good time.
As for the festival - well, the sales booths were the usual arts and crafts stuff, the food booths were exactly the same as the ones we get at festivals down here 80 miles away, there were a fair number of costumed folk mostly with badly-applied pointed ears, and the only people I saw whom I knew were the musicians of Avalon Rising, one of a few bands booked to play before small but appreciative audiences on the town square.
I also now know a little more of Vacaville than I did before, and can point you to a restaurant with very nice hamburgers. These are slightly overpriced, but not as much as the $2.50 they expected for a mug of Thomas Kemper root beer: I managed to ward that off. For the second day's lunch I went to Davis, home of a UC campus and a more notable culinary destination than Vacaville, where I found a really fine little Indian restaurant and chaat house.
I didn't hear about the first one, but this weekend was The Second Annual Middle Earth Festival, and having duly enquired I was invited as a speaker for the "Forums on Tolkien's Themes." They even gave me a hotel room for the night, which was really nice of them. (When I arrived at the hotel, the atrium was booming with a band playing cover versions of 80s pop songs for a wedding reception, but mercifully they packed up and departed before bedtime.)
I wasn't expecting much of the forums, just an opportunity to talk for a couple of hours with readers who knew enough about Tolkien to appreciate some more advanced discussion. I waved around a copy of the 484-page index to The History of Middle-earth to indicate how voluminous Tolkien's posthumous works are; in a discussion of the morality of the story I was able to outline the difference between Tolkien's characters named "Aragorn" and "Theoden" with Peter Jackson's very different characters of the same names without denigrating Jackson. (This magnanimity was achievable partly by entirely avoiding discussion of Jackson's character named "Faramir".)
For the most part we let the audience drive the discussion topics. The first of the two forums I attended was dominated by an audience member, a very tall and rather Ent-like woman who knew a very little about a very lot of things. The other forum was fairly skilfully led by a rather Calvinist Episcopal priest whose interest in teleology considerably outstripped Tolkien's. I think I managed to convey how Tolkien's own view differed, without stepping too far into a Christian theological dispute. Everybody knew their Tolkien well enough not to say anything dumb, and we had a good time.
As for the festival - well, the sales booths were the usual arts and crafts stuff, the food booths were exactly the same as the ones we get at festivals down here 80 miles away, there were a fair number of costumed folk mostly with badly-applied pointed ears, and the only people I saw whom I knew were the musicians of Avalon Rising, one of a few bands booked to play before small but appreciative audiences on the town square.
I also now know a little more of Vacaville than I did before, and can point you to a restaurant with very nice hamburgers. These are slightly overpriced, but not as much as the $2.50 they expected for a mug of Thomas Kemper root beer: I managed to ward that off. For the second day's lunch I went to Davis, home of a UC campus and a more notable culinary destination than Vacaville, where I found a really fine little Indian restaurant and chaat house.
