Reading Tarot at the Pittsburg Renaissance Festival

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Tarot-To-Go We bravely traversed the wilds of Contra Costa County to set up the Tarot-To-Go booth at the Pittsburg Scottish Renaissance Festival last weekend (August 11 – 12). I’d worked the faire as a performer with my acting group many times, and my main memory of it was that it was *hot*. Really, really hot.

When we arrived to set up Friday afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, while it was warm, it wasn’t hot. It was, however, extremely windy. Windy as in “sit on the pavilion walls at the ground level in order to get them to hold still to hang them” windy. Fortunately, Rosered and Andrew were their usual sensible, reliable selves, and with the last-minute addition of two boxes of safety pins, we were set up and ready to go before nightfall.

Saturday was a beautiful day, and the crowd was pleasant. Some curious, some scared (one woman told us she couldn’t have a reading because she wasn’t sure it was okay in the Bible – you mean that book written by astrologers, augurers, and diviners of all types?), and some who had been looking for us. Wasn’t a huge day – certainly not in comparison to Valhalla Faire in June – but acceptable. Only one difficult client (she really wanted us to predict the future in exacting detail), which, at an event like this, isn’t a bad ratio at all.

Sunday was another matter entirely. It was *hot*. Really, truly, freaking *hot*. Out come the bowls of ice water to drench ourselves. So hot it’s almost impossible to breathe. The crowd was a usual Sunday late start (people sleeping in or coming after church services), and by the time they showed up, it was so hot that no one wanted to do anything. We did lots of one-card readings, but most people were too hot to contemplate anything more complex. The heat finally broke a bit before 4:00 pm, and we did a few regular readings before the faire closed at 5:00.

The upside of doing few readings was that it reduced the ratio of difficult clients, so all the clients were great to deal with, very interested and receptive. We introduced a lot of people to the idea of Tarot in general, and did a lot of debunking (I want all the media to just knock off the Tarot-as-devil’s-work stuff *now*), and overall it was a good weekend.

We’re looking forward to the Golden Gate Renaissance Faire this coming weekend, August 25 – 26, in San Francisco! If nothing else, we’re expecting a lot more people in the crowd to already know what Tarot is, so we’ll be able to engage them more on the actualities of it.

Come out to the faire and see us – look for the double-size blue-and-white-roofed pavilion!

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