In the Spring of every year, there is a Medieval Fair in Norman, OK. It's a three-day event that draws many thousands of people from all over the region. It provides entertainment, shopping and craft demonstrations typical of what is found at Renaissance Festivals and Medieval Faires across the country. At the Norman fair, sometimes we used to help out at the merchant booth owned by one of our long-time business associates whose health no longer permitted him to tolerate being exposed to clouds of blowing dust for three days. His booth primarily sold T-shirts with fairies, dragons, wizards, celtic knotwork designs and other such artwork, and sometimes he had a few other items as well. For the 2001 Fair, that included a rack of pendants on black cords. Among them were a few pentagrams.
Needless to say, all of the pentagrams on the rack were made to hang "upright"; the way that's pictured on the shirt we're making now. Lots of people stopped by and browsed the tables of T-shirts and other stuff, quite a few perused the pendants, and nary a discordant word had been uttered...all the way through Saturday afternoon.
That's when the MallGoths showed up. You know the type; teenagers, wearing ill-fitting black clothes with more zippers than a planeload of luggage and enough metal decorations to set off security detectors from across the street, with wierd hairdos, fake piercings...do we need to say more? No. So they walked through the tent looking at a few of the shirts (but obviously unimpressed since most of them weren't black that year) and stopped at the pendant rack. After a minute or so pawing through the selections, one of them pulled out one of the pentagrams and showed it to the other one, who promptly said "Cool, but why's it upside down?"
Grrr.
If they'd just left it there, the incident might have been forgotten. But they just had to ask. The one with the pentagram in his hand held it up, and called out to me "Hey, do you have any of these that are right side up?" Luckily for him, I have a lot of self control. As a result, I didn't do what I really wanted to do, which was grab him by the neck, lift him up about three feet and squeeze until I had his undivided attention, and then explain to him precisely why his question bothered me. In great detail. I'd have started with "These ARE right side up. The ones that are upside down are what you're describing, and while I realize that there are bands which use an inverted pentagram for the shock value, we're not here to sell crap that's intended to piss off your parents, and we're also not going to risk having the tent torched by somebody who considers an inverted pentagram to be a Satanic symbol. Got that? Right. Now go fascinate someone else." As it was, I just said "No, those are right side up. We don't carry inverted pentagrams, and we're not going to." The MallGoth proceeded to grouse again that ours were upside down, but fortunately he decided to leave before my patience was exhausted.
Had he not pressed the point, as I said above, the incident would probably have been forgotten. But he did, and it wasn't. A couple of years went by, and the tale of the MallGoths was told in a number of places...and then the idea finally hit me. I had wanted to come up with a design that explictly stated that the pentagram's orientation was correct when it was displayed as it's shown on our shirt. And what's simpler than "This way up"? Then it struck me that this also gave it a double meaning...and the rest was a matter of a little time spent with mouse and keyboard.
That's the tale of the shirt. The links below will take you back to the rest of the site. Oh, and there's a note all the way at the bottom about pentagrams, just in case that term is unfamiliar to you.
Back to the "This way up" shirt page
Jump to the List of Pagan-oriented Bumper Stickers