The Joys of Working a Renaissance Fair John Lehr | Bio

I am an actor from Kansas. Tough. People from Kansas don't generally see acting as a possible profession. Animal husbandry, yes. Acting, or "Drah-mer" as my father puts it, is seen as a fun after school activity especially if you are too wimpy to play JV football. Hell, you have enough trouble convincing people in my home state that evolution is a legitimate theory.

But money is another thing. Money talks and bullshit walks (even though it doesn't). So I knew as a 16-year-old budding thespian that making a little coin would go a long way to proving to myself and those around me that I could do this girlie thespian stuff for a living. There were two ways to become a professional actor in KC: dinner theater and...the KC Renaissance Festival! After destroying bags of oranges in my mother's kitchen learning how to juggle, my partner Rex and I scored the gig. Huzzah!

God I loved it there--the beer wenches with their lovely cleavages, the weird dungeons and dragons people who showed up to the fair in costume looking to start a sword fight, the turkey legs, the 'craftsmen' who sold their ceramic dragon bongs, and the MONEY. We made $500 a weekend...and we were sixteen. That's stripper money. I bought a candied-apple 1970 Mustang with white interior, a Hearst shifter and Jensen quadraxial speakers. As the Elizabethans would say: "God ye good den, me lord!"

And now, 25 years later, that golden Ren Fair egg is paying again. I produce and star in a show on TBS called 10 Items or Less and when my writing partners Nancy Hower and Robert Hickey agreed to a Ren Fair themed season ender, I nearly wet my tights. Unfortunately it was not to be as pleasant for me as I'd hoped.

The episode turned out great. My character owns a grocery store and chooses to decorate his store like a Ren fair as a promotion. We dressed all the actors up as knights, wenches, friars, and maidens. I was outfitted as a full-blown king complete with yellow tights. We have an awesome grocery cart joust - we put two actors in grocery carts and hurled them at each other.

The only problem--I was sick as a dog. I caught the flu and puked all night before the shoot. There is a scene early in the show where the owner of SuperValueMart (the evil store across the street) walks into the store and I challenge him to a joust. I was so sick during the filming that they put a bucket under the customer service. Take a look--you can see I'm pale as hell in that scene. You folks with your expensive HD monitors can see the ashen complexion of a man who has been hollering New York for 8 hours straight. Initially I was supposed to juggle a cantaloupe, egg and a butcher knife (a trick I use to do in my old KC Ren Fair shows) but I was so dizzy from the flu I kept dropping the stuff. At one point, I almost stabbed Richard the cashier with the knife. I do juggle later in the show, but that scene was shot a couple of days later when I was feeling like myself again.

I was able to tough it out. How you ask? Because the bottom line is my Kansan relatives are right: Drah-mer is not a real job. A real job is actually working in a grocery store. Or waiting tables. Or whatever. There are lots of real jobs I've done where I could not tough it out as sick as I was, but dressing up like a King on my own TV show...I can handle that. Even when I'm dry heaving. I love this job. Check out the show. I hope you like it.


The 10 Items or Less season final ("The Ren Fair") airs Tuesday, March 4, at 11p on TBS.