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Wait, who?
Heins: Guten Tag! I am, Heins Kosher the Fifty-and-Seventh, visiting from Prussia.
Steve: Actually, I’m Steve Anderson, a freelance actor and writer who’s worked for seven years
now (soon to be eight) at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, where I play the character of Heins Kosher
the 57th. (Notice the spelling, btw. There’s no Z.)
What is a pickleman?
Heins:
‘Tis like unto a bread man or a music man, but what I make and sell are pickles.
Steve: What he
said. As opposed to what PRF used to have, which was a pickle wench.
What’s the Pennsylvania
Renaissance Faire?
Heins: The what?
Steve: It’s a forty-acre festival running weekends from
August through October every year, based (loosely) on life in Renaissance England. Actors doing Shakespeare,
acrobats tumbling and juggling, people fighting with swords (or swallowing them), lots of shopping, and
lots and lots of fun. It’s what you’d get if you took a theme park and replaced all the electronics
with stuff that’s actually fun. (Learn more at PRF's own site.)
What’s the deal with
pickles on a stick?
Heins: Oh, I shall tell you. Fifteen hundred years ago....
Steve: Actually,
you can read the whole story, from Heins’ perspective and mine, on the Pickleman.
What
are Pickle People?
Heins: Ah, de pickles, dey do love to get in de spirit of tings.
Steve:
Don’t tell Heins, but his pickles don’t actually dress up for theme weekends on their own. I routinely
buy out the local Ben Franklin’s complete stock of artificial cucumbers in order to create little costumed
pickles to celebrate the theme of the week at the Faire. It makes people smile, and it gets them to
come every weekend to look. (Check out some of my pickle art.)
What’s a Pickle Slayer?
Heins: Ahhhh... a great hero of my people. In every batch of pickles, there shall always be one or
two that are not quite right, so you throw them away. And then, once a year vhen de veather turns, dey
come back. If not for de Pickle Slayer, they vould take o’er d whole shire.
Steve: Pssst....
Don’t tell anyone I told you, but the Pickle Slayer is actually mild-mannered pickleman Heins.
Is that real?
Heins: Vhat, you think you are hallucinating? Of course it is real!
Steve:
This actually is a frequently-asked question—sometimes about the pickle people, sometimes about the fout-foot
plastic pickle Heins occasionally carries around on his shoulder. As far as he’s concerned, they’re
all real; after all, things like plastic and foam don’t exist in his world. In actual fact, the giant
pickle is hollow plastic (it makes a nice drum, as Finale In Song fans may remember from ’03), and the
costumed ones are... well, they’re foam on the inside; I don’t know what Ben Franklin’s supplier uses
to make the outsides.
Where did you get that enormous plastic pickle?
Heins: I grew
it! I vatered it with Irish whiskey, and boom! Up it came!
Steve: The nice folks at www.ilovepickles.org
had something to do with it, too. My favorite part of getting it by mail-order? Its shipping materials
consisted entirely of... a simple white label slapped on the side. The UPS lady showed up one day carrying
a giant green pickle and said, "I’m not even going to ask." (I like to imagine an industrial conveyor
belt in a UPS sorting facility somewhere: box, box, box, pickle, box....)
What’s the weirdest
thing you’ve ever done with a pickle in public?
Heins: Weird? Pah! Ze gall of you English! Really!
Steve: Actually, the single weirdest thing I’ve done was a certain homework assignment. Take a
look—and don’t worry, yes, the link takes you to the right place.
So... I’m guessing
you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
Heins: Vhat mean you by that?
Steve: I know what
you mean, but no, I don’t have time on my hands. Supporting myself as a freelance actor and writer
in central Pennsylvania, especially when I’m not available to do weekends during the late summer and
early fall, I work three, four, even five different gigs every week in-season. Half the time, I end
up finishing the costumed pickle at two or three o’clock in the morning the night before the next theme
weekend. Any actors who’ve seen me drag in on a Saturday morning can attest to that. But once the gates
open and the newest of the pickle people starts getting smiles, I’m awake and alert and knowing it was
worth it.
What is wrong with you?!
Heins and Steve: No one knows.
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Pickles? They ate pickles way back then?
Heins: Of course ve eat pickles! But vhat mean
you by, "Vay back den?"
Steve: Actually, it's true. Pickles have been popular for a long, long,
long-long time. There are historical records of pickled cucumbers in the Tigris River Valley four thousand
years ago. Later, the Bible has the Israelites in the desert remembering "the cucumbers" which they
"did eat in Egypt freely."
They were a royal delicacy among the English by the thirteenth century
and the Dutch by the 16th, Columbus brought them with him to the New World, Amerigo Vespucci made his
living selling pickles to sailors (to prevent scurvy) before he became an explorer and had America named
for him, and there are records of colonists growing and pickling cucumbers in Canada by 1535, in Virginia
by 1609, and in modern-day Brooklyn by 1659. One source writes that pickles were a staple of life in
the colonies; they were, after all, "the only zesty, juicy, green, succulent food available for many
months of the year."
What do you mean, "No calories?"
Heins: Eh... I don’t know.
I, eh... I jhest say dese things sometimes.
Steve: Well... all right, it's almost true.
The pickles we used to sell at the Faire had zero calories; your body would burn exactly as much energy
digesting the pickle as it would get from it. (Pure nutrients without the guilt!) The pickles we’ve
been using since 2003 have five calories--but that's the grand total for an entire huge dill. For the
record, the average dill pickle has 15 calories—still pretty good, but we’re serving you the premium
stuff!
Garlic? Eww!
Heins: Did you not see de vampires valking around at Halloween
Veekend? Huh! Buy a pickle, you get a free vooden stake—and vhen you have eaten de pickle, de stick
shall be covered in left-over garlic. Thou shalt be vampire-proof!
Steve: Also... garlic’s been
the subject of some intense scientific study. It’s been shown to lower high blood pressure, cure sinus
headaches, help prevent stomach cancer, colon cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer,
and it also boosts your immune system and particularly helps your body fight allergies, arthritis, colds,
flu, sore throat, and fatigue. It’ll even lower your bad cholesterol while leaving your good cholesterol
untouched! And pickles are, obviously, an excellent source of garlic.
What was that about
potassium?
Heins: Vhat?
Steve: This is purely modern science here. Outdoors on a hot day
(like, oh, say, at Faire), you can lose three thousand milligrams of potassium in sweat alone—which can
lead to weakness, fatigue, confusion, irritability, heart disease, even nervous-system problems. Pickles
are a great source of potassium, and an even better source of the salt your body also loses through sweat.
Chemically speaking, pickles are an all-natural Gatorade... but of the two, pickles have fewer carbs.
Yeah, right. Like who eats pickles, anyway?
Heins: Everyone! Even de Queen! Vhat
are you vaiting for?
Steve: Actually, Heins isn’t far off here. According to a quick Internet
search, famous pickle fans include: Aristotle (who praised their healing effects), Cleopatra (who said
they made her beautiful), the Roman scholar Pliny, the Roman Emperor Tiberius, Julius Caesar (who served
them to his armies), Napoleon (who did the same), the historical Queen Elizabeth, George Washington,
John Adams, and Dolley Madison.
Even Thomas Jefferson liked pickles as comfort food: "On a hot
day in Virginia," he wrote, "I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like
from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar." And an 1884
book tells us, "To see cucumbers in a dream denotes that you will speedily fall in love. Or, if you
are in love, that you will marry the object of your affection."
And in our own time, pickles are
still incredibly popular. The average American eats nine pounds of pickles every year, and Bill Cosby,
Fran Drescher, Ed Koch, and Elvis Presley have all gone on record in praise of pickles—though Elvis did
like them fried. And Conan O’Brien, I’m told, has a giant plastic pool pickle like mine in his office
at NBC.
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