By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2019

Dismayed by the folding of Virginia’s Renaissance festival in 1999, Cornelia Rutherford, a refugee “cast member,” decided to resurrect what had been made dead.

“I found out what a drug it is to make people smile,” says Rutherford, who turns 68 in September and is retired from careers in healthcare information systems and working at a pathology lab. “When you can make people laugh, it feeds your soul. And when they closed that fair after four years, they left a lot of us dressed up and nowhere to play. We went the whole year with nothing, and it was like withdrawal, and every time we got together, we’d fall into a pattern of bouncing bits off each other.

“They need this art form to make them whole, and part of the art form is sharing it with the people. That’s what compelled me to start this fair. It was killing me not to do this anymore because in my regular job I did a lot of sad things, and this was a happy thing.”

So Rutherford helped save it. On April 19, 2002, she and a handful of her fellow fair 1.0 veterans restarted the festival, dubbing it the Virginia Renaissance Faire. Seventeen years later, the VaRF is a self-sustaining nonprofit with hundreds of thousands of rainy day dollars in the bank.

Operating on about a $170,000 budget, the handmade and largely volunteer event draws, depending on how much it rains, 17,000 to 21,000 “patrons” every year for five weekends in May and June.

The VaRF has lately outgrown its leased home of 15 years—a sloped clearing with limited parking just outside Fredericksburg in the Lake Anna Winery’s backyard—and is thus trying to move to a nearby 500 or so acres. There, for a price of around $2 million, Rutherford can establish a permanent home for the VaRF and, ideally, build a year-round common-use space for Spotsylvania County, 60-some miles south of Washington, D.C.

She and the VaRF continue to raise funds, but Rutherford is the force that made it all happen. At 50 years old, she just had to cash out her, at the time, $52,000 retirement stash and blow the limits on several credit cards to debt herself up by around $90,000.

“If I had known what I know now, there would be no Virginia Renaissance Faire,” says Rutherford, who also has a bachelor’s degree in physical anthropology from Ohio State. “It would’ve scared the living daylights out of me—and I should’ve been scared but I didn’t know enough at the time to know how daunting a task it would be. All I knew was that I really missed it.”

Rutherford’s daughter, Emily Whittacre, got her into Renaissance fairing. Whittacre worked the VaRF’s predecessor, which ran from 1996 to 1999, and Rutherford, with her affinity for history and performing, got recruited. She made friends and found a real-world application for her affected English accent that, she claims, has passed for the real thing among our former Colonial potentates. Seems plausible. Rutherford is as entertaining as she is quotable, speaking in aphorism, discoursing in adage.

She detests snakes—“Locomotin’ without legs ain’t natural,” she says, the native Ohioan summoning a Southern accent—and she describes one man as looking “like an unmade bed.” Ideas to her can be “intellectually orgasmic” and she says that dressing like an English woman from 1568—the year the VaRF is set—is tantamount to “wearing a sofa for hours.”

At the fair, Rutherford does a little bit of everything. Stacey Hamilton, MFA ’19, who plays a 30-something Queen Elizabeth, called Rutherford their “Faire mom.” On the second to last day of this year’s fair, Rutherford even gives directions to lost and would-be patrons when they call the main VaRF number. It is also Rutherford’s number.

“I’m sorry,” she says, reaching for the non-Apple smartphone playing the Ohio State fight song inside her shirt. “My bosom’s ringing again.”

The early years of the resurrected fair weren’t as good as these. Before 2004, it was an itinerant happening. A small troupe roamed Virginia putting on makeshift shows wherever they could, entertaining themselves as much as their patrons—fields, parks and wineries among their bivouacked venues.

“One day,” longtime production director Chris Pantazis says, “we had five people.”

Pantazis, a biology professor at John Tyler Community College in suburban Richmond, says three of them ended up joining the VaRF. Typical crowds in those years were in the low hundreds, peaking in Northern Virginia where most of the cast and crew lived. The old fair also was near Fredericksburg and it left a vestigial cachet, boosted by the proximity of the Maryland Renaissance Festival in not-so-far-away Annapolis. It’s an area with a taste for the English Renaissance—the meat of which happened, roughly, between Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

“I’d think it was a big deal if we got more than 400 people to show up one day,” says Meredith Eriksen, the VaRF’s general manager and budget master for about 15 years. Eriksen is known as “She Who Says No,” the business degree-bearing realist to Rutherford’s fluttering dreamer. Just ask her about the Faire’s early days.

“I would’ve smothered it in its cradle,” she says, laughing. “I would’ve said, ‘There’s no way we will ever make it work. This is dumb. This is impossible from a financial perspective.’ … But Cornelia is just irreplaceable. Her strength of belief makes you want to believe. It’s like, ‘Well, I gotta help her make this happen. Look at her. She’s going to do it anyway.’”

Slowly, the staff and cast made it work by adopting some version of: We’ve got to save Cornie’s golden years since she mortgaged them for our fair. They established a five-person board of directors anchored by Eriksen, Pantazis and Rutherford, who kept the VaRF together in its first years with sheer hustle and mulish will.

When the Faire lost $32,000 worth of tents, props and costumes—someone cut the lock on their self-storage unit—during the Faire’s penurious travelin’ days, Rutherford made a handshake deal to secure new tents from a Northern Virginia vendor. Over the next several years, Rutherford bought and paid off the tents. They’re still used today. Rutherford also has recouped her retirement (and more). She says it took her 12 years.

“It’s only money,” Rutherford says. “After all that, I made something special. I did it with the help of a lot of people and I jumped off a cliff and they followed. For whatever reason, they followed—and look what we did. We did that. We did this thing from nothing. We did it. And if I hadn’t, I would go to my grave wondering if I could have.”

The Virginia Renaissance Faire, one of hundreds such fairs nationwide, operates with a complement of about 150, depending on the year. This includes the staff—first aid, groundskeepers, vendors—and the costumed performers who do 16th-century flavored improv and instruct at the various tents, giving the VaRF its educational emphasis.

There’s an armory, a scullery, pillories, and tents where you can learn about, among other period things, naval navigation and bookbinding. There’s also food of the English Renaissance—even the grownups giggle at the “fartes”—and stage acts: dancers, jousters, minstrels and magicians. A few are paid performers. They professionally ride the “fair circuit” to pry a living from a hobby.

Back on the second to last day of the 2019 edition, Rutherford is making her morning rounds. She’s not dressed as the historical Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley, an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, as she will be when she closes the day with a reverent peroration of that Tempest soliloquy you may remember from a high school English class. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on…”

That’s a tradition at Cornelia Rutherford’s show.

“People are not going to remember me as the world’s worst housekeeper—although maybe they should, because I am,” she says later. “They’re not going to remember me as an oboe player or someone who got a forensic science degree from GW or went to The Ohio State University or the crazy cat lady or the lady with the goofy fingernail polish I get when it’s not fair season. They’re going to remember that once upon a time there was a lady that made this thing happen.

“As long as my fair exists, I will live and people will be smiling because of something we did, that everyone said we couldn’t do—it wouldn’t work. They were wrong. I just think it’s an example to anybody that if you have an idea and you really believe in it and you’re willing to cast fear aside and just put your head down and go for it, you can do it. And you know what? If it hadn’t worked out, and at the end of the year everyone said, ‘Screw you lady, this sucked,’ it was just money and I’ll make it back, and I tried. What the hell.”

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