“I didn’t realize that the parking in the Middle Ages was this bad,” Michael whines as he nervously comprehends for the first time what exactly he is going to be expected to put up with.
I myself begin to get swept up in the spirit of the Middle Ages (or maybe I just begin to feel middle-aged) pretty much from the moment I purchase our tickets next to the life-size mural of the caped and armored knights of the realm, right beneath the giant sign welcoming all patrons to “Visit our museum of torture.” Apparently back in 1093 that was what they did with their evenings instead of watching sitcoms.
Moments later Michael comes bounding back from the room labeled LORDS to report, “I hear a toilet flushing and a dude wearing a tunic and tights comes out and washes his hands.”
“There was a woman in a long green gown with a veil and gloves in the next stall in the ladies’ room,” says Polly. So now we know for sure we’re not in Kansas anymore. Although, who knows—Medieval Times is a chain. There may be one just like this in Kansas.
Anyway, first thing on the agenda is to partake of the medieval tradition of being photographed with an old bearded guy in a cape and a crown. No one seems to know who he is. We all keep our fingers crossed that he is not armed and does in fact have a job here. A quote in my orientation brochure reads, “My noble guests, you honor me with your presence. I, Don Raimundo II, Count of Perelada, welcome you to my castle for an evening of sumptuous feasting and spectacular pageantry.” I have a feeling this may be Don. And how interesting to note that in the ensuing nine hundred years the phrase “you honor me with your presence” has been changed to mean “You must pay me thirty dollars if you want to come in.”
“Working here is just like being back in high school again,” the “ticket wench” tells me after I finish having my picture taken. “The knights are the jocks. The managers are the principals. The tech crew are the druggies.” I always suspected the Crusades were just a big pep rally. But before I even get to find out who the bartenders are, a couple of men in velveteen tunics carrying horns (the pep band?) step onto a little stage to call for our attention with a brief but alarming duet. “What do you call that kind of music?” I ask Michael, because he is a professional musician and I am an eager student of history. “I call that some sad shit,” he replies.
Now a guy with a manicured beard wearing a robe and a cape comes forward to make some kind of proclamation. He is speaking with the kind of generic Shakespearean accent that could get him work selling mutton at a Renaissance Faire. His message elicits such a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd that I cannot hear what he has said. “Sorry, I didn’t catch it either,” the cheering guy beside me explains, not letting that dampen his enthusiasm. But no matter, because now it is time to take our seats at tables that surround a large exhibition ring. We are all wearing colored paper crowns that correspond both to the tablecloth colors and to the teams of knights for whom we are expected to cheer. Those of us who are attending unaccompanied by children under the age of ten are hoping we look like very good sports and not complete idiots.
“Hi. I’m Rick, your slave and manservant,” says a guy in an apron and two different colors of pant legs. “M’lady, may I present your dinner?” Of course! Dinner presentation! Always a welcome part of the medieval dining-out experience. And so I have placed before me a small plate of middle-aged celery and a large silver cauldron of some kind of reddish canned soup. Simultaneously the air is filled with more staccato horn bursts (“Something from Fiddler on the Roof, I think,” says Michael) and out into the ring rides a gorgeous young man upon a valiant steed. (Or maybe it was the other way around.) “The cute one with the really long hair is my boyfriend,” whispers the “beverage wench” to me. I think she means the guy. “He works with L.A. Models. Care for another fruity wine cocktail this evening?” In the high school that is Medieval Times, she is a cheerleader. Manservant Rick is a shop teacher.
“Does the soup not please m’lady?” he nails me, paying what I am starting to feel is entirely too much attention to my eating habits. “No, no, it’s fine,” I lie. “I just have a little touch of the bubonic plague. But I think it’s just the twenty-four-hour kind.”
And now into the show ring a dark-hooded, hunchbacked monk appears in a cloud of smoke. There is a weird foreboding music and chanting that I can’t quite make out. “Who is that?” I ask my manservant Rick. “I’m sorry,” he replies, “I really can’t tell you. I’ve only been working here about three weeks.” “I used to know but I forgot,” says the beverage wench. “I can go in the back and check for you. Anyone care for another fruity wine cocktail?”
“Let’s move on to happier matters,” says the emcee as the spooky monk suddenly takes a powder. “My lords and ladies! A toast! To the knights of the realm!” Everyone cheers as Don Raimunda drinks an entire goblet of something. I’m not sure why this gets cheers. Perhaps just to celebrate the fact that a guy his age gets paid to wear a crown and drink a beverage for a living. Pretty good gig!
“M’lady is not hungry tonight?” says manservant Rick, on my case again. “Are you not feasting well tonight?” He is starting to give me the willies. “Yes, yes, I’m feasting perfectly well tonight,” I snap at him. Feeling guilty, I try to talk to him honestly. Turns out manservant Rick used to be a contractor who fell on hard times. “Ten ninety-three was a bad year for home improvement,” says Michael.
Now all around us the cheering has grown intense as the knights on horseback in the arena knock themselves and each other out jousting and running relays. “The one in the red cape is also a professional surfer,” the beverage wench tells me. “He just got engaged. Are you going to want to purchase any photos this evening?” Now she has the nerve to try to sell us mounted photos of a bunch of bleary-eyed jerks wearing paper crowns and drinking from goblets. Ha-ha-ha. They think they’re so damn funny. Whoops! Those are pictures of us.
“We welcome here tonight fifty-eight strong from the Kingdom of Shell Oil,” booms our emcee. “Also, Jeffrey and Kimberly announce their engagement.” I look over at my friend Michael. His crown is falling down across his nose as he slides into his “pastries of the castle.” He has fallen asleep. It is now the unanimous opinion of the lords and ladies at our table that it’s time to head back to the future, which looks a good deal more attractive than it did a few hours ago.
On the drive home we try to evaluate the lessons of history we have learned.
“It was just like the 1100s,” says Michael. “The 1100 block of Broadway.”
As for me, I am deeply relieved to be returning to a time when no one constantly monitors my food intake and calls me m’lady.
They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So I would like to think that I learned as much as I was meant to because I really don’t care to go through all of that again anytime soon.
If I Could Talk to the Animals
I have four dogs. This makes me a woman who lives in a herd. Naturally I talk to my dogs all day long. But although these conversations are frequent, they are admittedly kind of light on content. The most commonly spoken exchange is a version of “Okay, so now what?”
Like many pet lovers, I have often dreamed of one day being able to really talk with my dogs, despite the fact that I know I would not want to hear a lot of what they have to say. Topics such as sex, parasites, and butt itch would be better left uncommented upon.
But if I could talk to my dogs, I would dearly love to get some explanations. For instance, why, when I walk in the door, does my dog Bo run to get a stuffed animal and then disappear under the dining room table? For self-esteem reasons, I’ve chosen to interpret this behavior as “overwhelmed by delight,” rather than “overcome with terror.” Like so much of what my dogs do, it makes no literal sense. That is why I have come to think of my dogs as exchange students from another planet where there are few, if any, academic requirements.
I was harboring no illusions about a deeper kind of “interspeci
es communication” until recently, when I learned about a larger-than-you-might-imagine group of people all over this great land of ours who call themselves “interspecies communicators.” Members of this group claim that they are able to hold the kind of conversations with animals that many of us are not even able to hold with other people unless we are in a really, really good mood. Not only do these “interspecies communicators” say they can experience two-way verbal exchanges with the house pet of your choice, but they offer their services for sale in a counseling capacity.
These people live in a version of the world I have wanted to believe exists since I read my first fairy tale. It is that children’s-book world of magical powers, in which you get to warn a herd of deer that hunting season is about to begin and then have them turn up to thank you, the way they did for Dawn Heyman, a communicator who is booked up for weeks in advance.
Who would pay money for such a service? Well, I am their perfect client. So I decided to contact a number of interspecies communicators to see what I could learn.
Before we began, I decided to lay down a few ground rules for myself in order to evaluate the authenticity of the experience. Since my goal was to be convinced that an actual two-sided animal-to-human conversation had taken place I decided that the unanswered background questions I have about my dog Winky, whom I found loose on Pacific Coast Highway, would provide a way to measure the truth. If any of these animal communicators was actually talking to Winky, there would be some consistency in the details of their stories.
Communication Attempt Number 1
Available the same night I called her was “Marcia,” a retired teacher in her sixties who one day heard animals talking to her as though she “was channeling them.” Her ad for “psychic communication with your pets” was running in the “Counseling, Education and Spiritual Resources” section of one of those free Los Angeles New Age publications that sit in giant piles on the floors of coffeehouses and gyms.
“Cats will carry on a conversation with you like you won’t believe,” she tells me, when I call to make an appointment. She recalls that the talkiest animal she ever met was a six-month-old guinea pig who had a feeling that she was supposed to mate but wasn’t sure what was expected of her. Luckily, Marcia knew enough about the details of guinea pig dating to be able to offer helpful advice.
“Dogs do speak and understand English,” she tells me, as I look around the room at an immense amount of circumstantial evidence to the contrary. To converse with my dogs, Marcia will speak to them all on the phone. None of my dogs gets many phone calls, so this is shaping up as a special occasion.
That evening at the appointed time I called Marcia’s number. She suggested we begin by asking my dogs who wanted to go first. I did, but no one looked up from licking their body parts. Not wanting to hurt Marcia’s feelings, I assigned the task to my biggest dog, Lewis.
“Hold the phone up to his head,” said Marcia. This could only be accomplished by hanging on to his collar to keep him from running out of the room. While I restrained him, I could hear Marcia cooing soothingly through the receiver, seemingly unaware that the expression on Lewis’s usually friendly face indicated he thought the telephone was a torture device by which he was going to meet a painful death.
“You’re a big boy, aren’t you,” I heard her say to him, repeating the information I had given her. “How do you like being a big boy?” (“Do you know what he said to me?” she asked me later, chuckling. “He said, ‘It gets me around.’ He has a very laid-back sense of humor.”)
As soon as his part of the phone call was finished, Lewis put his tail between his legs and ran into the backyard. Marcia now picked up the conversation with my smallest dog, Winky. “He said he likes music, especially slow waltzes,” she reported, making me wonder where he had come into contact with waltzes of any speed. But since he seemed in the mood to talk, I asked her to find out why he was loose on the highway the day I found him.
“He told me that the maid on a big estate left the back door open,” she said. “Apparently he wandered off and couldn’t find his way back.”
Certainly a plausible enough story, were it not for the fact that he said something different to Dawn Heyman.
Communication Attempt Number 2
I had my phone appointment with thirty-four-year-old Dawn Heyman a couple of weeks later. A former social worker, Dawn was the founder of Spring Farm Cares, a farm-animal sanctuary in Clinton, New York. “It’s the world’s first center for the teaching of interspecies communication, serving fifty states, Canada, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Australia,” she tells me. She then mentions, offhandedly, that one of the buildings at Spring Farm was designed by one of her cats. Okay, yes, this sounds kind of absurd on the face of it, until you take into account that the cat in question was an architect in a past life. When I display a little skepticism, Dawn is completely unfazed. She is used to a bad attitude from laypeople. That is why she always explains to her workshop students that the early stages of communicating with animals can feel like “you are just making it all up. If you can imagine what your dog is saying, nine times out of ten that is what he is saying,” she goes on. The proof she offers is the way in which so many people at workshops end up having the same exact anecdotal exchange with a particular goat or sheep. This explains why they’re so seldom invited to dinner parties.
Which is not to say that animal content is not sometimes unpredictable. There was the time Dawn’s horse confided that she was “really upset about what was going on in the Mideast.” When Dawn inquired how the horse knew about the Mideast, she learned that the birds had been leaking the details. “Birds are the news gatherers of the animal world,” she tells me. (Although I heard from one of my dogs that a lot of birds are just getting their info from reading the papers at the bottom of their cages.)
Now it was time to talk to my dogs. But unlike Marcia, Dawn didn’t have me hold the phone up to anyone’s head. In fact, it was fine with Dawn that all four of her subjects were fast asleep on the floor. When I asked if I should wake them, she said I needn’t bother.
We began with Tex, my problem dog, who was rescued from a homeless guy. Tex was suffering from such bad separation anxiety that when I left the house, he ate through door frames and parts of the wall. “He feels a lot of fear because he lived in other homes where, as soon as he relaxed and felt happy, they got rid of him,” Dawn tells me. “He needs to know his role in your home. He wants to know what he can do to help you.” Toward this end, she gave him an exercise that she felt was going to help relax him. She told him that when I left the house, it was his job to make sure everything stayed exactly the same.
This sounded like a great plan, and it worked very well until Tex ate my bathroom windowsill later that week.
Which brought us to Winky, who was under the table, on his back, snoring loudly.
“He talks really fast,” she said. “He says he feels good. He’s really happy. He likes to eat and he likes his toys.”
“What does he tell you about his past?” I asked her.
“He says he lived in a very nice home with children and another dog. And he was very happy. Until one day he began following another dog around a supermarket parking lot. He got lost and couldn’t find his way back to the car.”
Certainly a plausible story. Just not the story the little psycho told Gerri Ryan less than twenty-four hours later.
Communication Attempt Number 3
Gerri Ryan has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and used to counsel couples until she “underwent a change in spiritual outlook” and began to have more profound relationships with her companion animals. Her credentials in interspecies discussion were many and varied. Not only had she counseled horses about postpartum depression, she once convinced the bacteria infecting a llama to vacate the premises so the llama could heal. But the bacteria had to survive and make babies, they told her. Which is when it occurred to her to tell those single-celled narcissists that there was a manure pile in the
back of the house. As it turned out, this was just the change of scenery the bacteria needed. Two days later, both llama and bacteria were healthy and happy and living apart.
Like Dawn Heyman, Gerri Ryan had more work than she could handle. Our appointment was delayed because she was talking to each of fourteen unsettled cats belonging to a couple who were moving to a new house. The cats were clearly unnerved by this, suddenly peeing everywhere. Gerri was trying to work things out with them, one cat at a time.
It seemed almost anticlimactic to ask her to chat with Winky. But she agreed, and her methodology was her own. After asking for a physical description, she disappeared for fifteen minutes while I hung around waiting on the phone. When she returned, she had already talked with Winky at length. He told her about a green chew toy that was his special favorite. Although Winky is a boy who has many toys, including a number of stuffed animals with whom he has sex every morning after breakfast, if there was a green chew toy in his life, I had yet to meet it.
Moving on to his past, Winky was very forthcoming for the third time. But this time he claimed he was driving at night with a well-built, jovial man wearing coveralls. Apparently this guy pulled the car into a park out in the country and left Winky behind. He drove off and abandoned him. Naturally, Winky had “lots of hurts from this for a very long time But now he had said his good-byes and made peace. He no longer misses them.”
What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned Page 10