A pirate's life for she

Kate Larsen is a professional pirate — minus the plundering part. Her living comes from her singing, acting, dancing, guitar playing, stage fighting, scarf juggling, business and event-planning skills, along with her knowledge of pirate lore.

Her character, Margot La Mechante, recently was named one of the top fictional pirates in the country, as voted by the readers of Pirates Magazine.

“They are calling me the first lady of pirating now,” said Larsen, who was known as Kathy Scott growing up in Lynchburg. Her character was the top vote getter overall and the only female character inducted, though some male-characters played by female actors made the cut.

The E.C. Glass High School graduate Larsen and her business partner Shuhe Hawkins are the co-founders of the Portland Pirate Festival, which they started about four years ago.

Hawkins said he and Larsen expected that a couple thousand people would show up to the first festival in 2006. Instead around 10,000 showed, many in costume.

“It almost killed us the first year,” he said, adding that last year close to 15,000 attended. The 2009 festival also broke the Guinness World Record for “The Most Pirates Gathered in one Place” with 1,670 people dressed as pirates.

At Glass, Larsen had a role in a production of the musical “South Pacific,” which starred classmate Faith Prince, now a Tony-award winning actress.

Larsen also pursued a career as a performer, but took a different route.

Larsen studied in France before graduating from Randolph-Macon Women’s College, then took singing jobs on cruise ships and in Hawaii before eventually moving to Portland, where she raised two children. Eight years ago she took a job portraying a pirate for a Portland street festival; that role led to many more.

Today she is part of a pirate crew, called the Brotherhood of Oceanic Mercenaries. The B.O.O.M. pirates offer a canon salute, music variety show, mock brawl, battle or execution among other bookable pirate presentations.

Her character Margot la Mechante is the widow of a French merchant, who lives aboard B.O.O.M’s fictional ship The Emerald Rose as navigator and lover to Hawkins’ character Luc the Lucky. Larsen’s two children Signe, 19, and Rafe, 16, also are members of the crew and play Margot’s children.

Hawkins calls Margot a “fiery French wench” but also says she is a character who claims respect from her fellow pirates.

“In the crew she is kind of a motherly influence,” Hawkins said. “… most of us (other) rogues are generally making as little sense as possible.”

Larsen and her children all take part in B.O.O.M.’s musical performances and in Larsen’s B.O.O.M. Bilge Rats band. She plays guitar and sings. Rafe is drummer and electric guitar player and Signe fiddles.

Interest in pirates has spiked in the U.S. and abroad following the release of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Larsen estimates that she works as a pirate a couple days a week between April and October, and some weeks everyday. During the winter, the business slows to a couple times a month, and Larsen fills in by acting in commercials and doing other performance work.

She advises others who might be interested in professional piracy to attend a pirate festival, where it is possible to pick up authentic pirate garb and get tips from the actors plying their trade. Lots of other people also have a good time pretending to be pirates, even without ever making any money at it.
“It’s just fun,” Larsen said. “Once you put on those clothes, you just take on that persona, but it’s not just actors — its everyone.”