Jake Otteson

I am so glad to meet you.

Please settle this argument for us.

And I'm riding that bus.

And I'm like, man, I gotta go back to the Renaissance Festival.

So that night, I call up the creative director and I say, hey, it's been a minute, but is there any chance that you have a job for me this summer?

And he said, sure, come on down.

And just like that, I was strapping on the old cod piece and heading back to the Elizabethan woods to make magic and find myself again, huzzah.

Now a couple weeks roll by and I get an email with the cast list.

These are all the people who are gonna be sharing the summer with me, my fellow actors, and I'm looking through the list and I'm thinking, oh great, I wonder who of my old friends are gonna be there.

I'm looking through, I'm looking through and I'm not recognizing any of the names really, and I'm thinking, okay, like, where's Matt?

who played this amazing architect character that would walk around and say zany things, or my friend Mary Lane who was an unforgettable pirate, or my friend Donna who played this incredible bawdy tavern wench character that would tell these Elizabethan jokes that had you like rolling in the dirt.

But none of those people were gonna be there.

And I started to feel kind of like nervous, like, hold up.

All of my memories of that place are with these people.

And is it going to give me what I want if my people aren't there?

So I go to the festival and my fears are more or less confirmed because, well, a lot of the new folks, they're right out of college.

And I don't know how this math works out, but somehow they're like 10 years younger than me.

And they're talking about memes I don't understand.

And there are some folks there who I had worked with before, but they've been doing this for decades, and they got their own thing going on.

And so I'm just really having trouble connecting.