Ok, to answer some of open mike's questions I've tried to write a short history of ren faires in California but it ran longer than I expected. Please forgive the lack of exact dates and any minor errors. I'm doing this off the top of my head.

The Renissance Pleasure Faire was started in the late 1960's by Phyllis Patterson and her then husband Ron. I beleive the first one took place in a Los Angeles city park, then moved to a location near Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills. At some point Phyllis formed a non-profit educational organisation call the Living History Center (LHC) to be the official owner of the faire. A couple/three years after the first Southern Faire they started a Northern California version. I beleive it was first held at China Camp State Park in San Rafael, then moved to some land that LHC had bought at Black Point, near Novato. (Both these locations are in Marin County, just North of San Francisco). Both faires continued under LHC through the 70's & 80's. RPFS (Southern) in the spring and RPFS (Northern) in the fall. In the meantime many people saw or heard about the faires and started up fiers of theire own in other states and also a number of small (usually one weekend) faires in California. At some point in the 80's Southern Faire lost its rented site in Agoura to development and moved out to Glen Helen State Park at Devore, near San Bernadino. However about 1990 LHC Filed for bankruptcy. (I have heard many stories about how this came to happen, but I wasn't there at the time so I'm not going to repeat any of them). So the first result of this was that the land at Black Point, being LHC's only tangible asset was sold to a developer, then a company called Renissance Entertainment Corpoartion (REC) bought the faires from LHC. They (REC) made a deal with the deveoper who now owned the Black Point site to lease it back until he was ready to start construction. This was expected to be about three years, in face it took eight years to clear all the financial and permit obstacles. In the meantime REC continued to operate both faires while looking for a new site for Northern Faire. After having several possible sites rejected (Usually by irate "citizens comittees" who didn't want those "scummy hippie ren faire people" in their backyard.) they were told that 1998 was the last year they could use the Black Point site. So in '99 they moved to the old Nut Tree site in Vacaville for three years and when the town wanted the site for someting else they moved last year to Casa de Fruta near Gilroy, South of San Jose, where it remained this year and now it's gone.

In yet another meantime. Kevin Patterson (son of Phyllis) and his wife Leslie (Both of whom had worked as RPF managers under both LHC and REC) formed a company called As You Like It Productions (AYLI) and in 2001 bought an existing small faire in the Santa Barbara area and renamed it Heart of the Forest Faire. It was quite well receive among many faire people. Last year ('02) they opened a Norterern edition at Stafford Lake Park in Novato.
They are smaller that the REC faires and shorter, though the Northern one expanded from three weeks to four this year and their web page says they're going to six weeks next year.

So in summary, the faire now owend by REC is the Renissance Pleasure Faire and has a resonable claim to be the continuation of the original ren faire started by the Pattersons 40 years ago. On the other hand the Heart of the Forest Faire also has a legitimate claim to descent from the original ren faire.

There are also several other small one or two weekend ren faires around Califorina. The largest of these used to be the Valhalla Faire which ran for two weekends in June at Camp Richardson near South Lake Tahoe. Last year they tried to move the faire so they could run three weekends but the new site got pulled from under them at the last minute at they had to cancel for the year. It remains to be see whether they will be back next year.

PS As I was writing this I received an announcment of the newest ren faire in the Bay Area. A one weekend event to be held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco on Aug. 28-9 2004.

-Bill