While at university, I acted at a Renaissance fair near my Pennsylvania home. Situated on the sprawling grounds of a 19th century sandstone mansion and abutting a vineyard, the quasi-Elizabethan shire boasted Tudor-style shops and dirt streets, where muddy beggars and wenches grovelled at "Queen Elizabeth's" bejewelled train.
I played the sheriff's son. Dressed in a powder blue doublet and pink pants, I interacted with visitors and peppered my speech with "thees" and "thous". "Don't make any modern references," our director told us. "It's your job to act like it's 1589. People here want to time-travel back to Elizabethan England."
He was right. People loved the fair and the sensation of having passed through the space-time continuum. Some visitors, however, took time-travelling to a whole new level. No matter how hot or muggy those summer days got, people showed up dressed in costume: men donned full-body chainmail and ladies wore long-velour dresses that cascaded down to their ankles. It was the first time I had met historical re-enactors, people who like to escape the banality of modern life.
I moved to New York after university to pursue my acting career. Eight years later, I moved to Los Angeles. Disoriented by the city's prefab sprawl and turned off by the shallow quest for fame, I found myself longing for something more substantive. I felt compelled to turn back the clock, to live in what I imagined was a simpler time.
I wasn't sure how to begin, but a quick internet search pointed me in a most surprising direction, and soon I was en route to Colorado for my first adventure. A local re-enactor picked me up at Colorado Springs airport on a cloudless October day. By nightfall, after a 96km drive east, we had pulled into a makeshift car park on starlit ranchland.
Dressed only in a windbreaker and blue jeans, I shivered in the frigid thin air, trying desperately to warm myself before a couple of crackling bonfires. As sparks shot into the high desert sky, I saw just how strikingly out of place I looked. Ringing the two conflagrations were about 90 men with closely shorn hair, bundled up in second world war German greatcoats and tunics. Steam poured from their tin coffee cups and they chatted away about tomorrow's battle with the "Russians". I shook my head in disbelief. This wasn't chainmail at a Renaissance fair; this was hardcore re-enacting. I had landed smack in the middle of 1942 Stalingrad.