Courting of King Arthur Pays Handsome Rewards

Joan Caton had been forewarned.

In the mid-1980s, Caton was teaching English literature and college writing at Reavis High School in south suburban Burbank, and staging medieval banquets as part of a learning project for her students. One year, when the Newberry Library in Chicago offered a King Arthur exhibit, Caton arranged for a class field trip and then drove downtown to preview the exhibit herself.

“When I checked it out I realized how much I didn’t know about King Arthur,” she said.

More importantly, Caton quickly became fond of the mystical and magical era and, shortly thereafter, earned a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in Arthurian Legend. For her mentor Caton befriended and chose Ruth Hamilton, a Newberry staffer whom Caton had met while arranging the field trip. Hamilton, coincidentally enough, received her doctorate in medieval studies and was a graduate of Reavis. It was while dining with Hamilton that Caton learned of what possibly might lie ahead.

“She said to me a strange thing that day,” Caton said. “She said, ‘You realize, Joan, that when you know King Arthur, things happen.’ So I looked at her and I said, ‘Ruth, please. You are this very well-known scholar, you don’t mess with that stuff.’ And she said, ‘I just need to tell you that things will happen, and your life will never be the same.’ ”

For Caton it hasn’t been. Too many fortuitous oddities have occurred over the years for her to consider them coincidences. Perhaps the most significant has been the career that Caton, a Sun City resident, has carved out for herself since resigning as a teacher in 1991. Through her company, Caton Enterprises, Caton stages educational programs at local schools and libraries with Marlowe Middle School as well as the Huntley, Hampshire and Dundee townships public libraries among her previous clients.

“We use 3-foot tall shields to tell the storyline of King Arthur, so the kids have a broad look at the storyline and they know the culture,” said Caton, who bases her programs on Bloom’s Taxonomy, a learning theory. “Then we move to pictures so that the kids can visualize what they just heard about the story, and after that we do a storytelling, which is (Sir) Gawain and the Green Knight.

“Then, the highest level of learning is, of course, to reincorporate and include (the students) in what has been learned. So I pull kids from the audience and put costumes on them. We’ll use two knights, two ladies, a trumpeter, and one of the teachers is a nobleman, and we’ll do a whole medieval tournament on (fake) horseback.”

Among the shows Caton has produced are Jester and His Castle, Camelot Connection and Arthur Alive, which was Caton’s first. Arthur Alive was also quite influential early on. When Caton performed it at a National Council of Teachers of English convention in Seattle in 1990, members of the Alaska Arts Council were in the audience and later offered her the Artist-in-Residence position in Ketchikan, Alaska.

“That’s what I mean when I say things happen and that’s what (Hamilton) meant,” Caton said.

Often performing with Caton are actors she met through the Bristol Renaissance Fair in Kenosha, Wis., where Caton owned and operated a bookstore for four years in the 1990s. It was at Bristol that Caton also experienced another Arthurian “things happen” moment, and it began after she decided her shows needed a falconer, of which she knew none and would have to locate. The next day a man entered her bookstore and inquired about books featuring falconer costumes.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Who sent you here?’ ” Caton said.

As fate would have it, the man, Mark Booth, was a trained falconer and had decided to stop at the fair while traveling to Minnesota from Indiana to visit his in-laws. Booth has worked for Caton for the past 15 years.

Based on the success of the King Arthur program, Caton has branched out and added similar interactive programs, including one about ancient Egypt that debuted last fall and a second focusing on Greek myths.

“We’ve had 14 bookings so far this year,” said Caton of her Greek Myths show. Helping fuel demand is Percy Jackson and the Olympians, characters from a bestselling children’s series that’s based on Greek mythology and written by Rick Riordan.

Demand also has prompted Caton to offer medieval banquets and Renaissance-themed weddings at which Caton and company greet guests and show them to their tables. They also introduce the wedding party and provide Renaissance music and entertainment.

“The people who hire our services are more concerned with their guests having a good time than with (the bride and groom) being the featured attraction,” said Caton, who has also performed at wedding showers and 50^th anniversaries and offers custom-made banners.

In her free time, Caton also makes and maintains many of the costumes her performers wear as well as the banners. While that might not seem like an area in which Arthurian “things happen,” it has been. Caton says that when she was 16 years old and working at a JC Penney’s store, she bought a piece of multicolored fabric that had caught her eye.

“I didn’t how I was going to use the fabric because it was so unlike me to wear,” she said.

Still, Caton hung onto the material for many years before realizing it could be fashioned in a costume.

The material “became the first tunic we used, and the start to the focus of my life,” she said.