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The fair


September 17, 2007 - 5:39 p.m.

Somebody has a much better job than I do.

We went to the Frederick Fair on Sunday, so Suzanne could see the wabbit judging, which started at 8am. There were no Flemish Giants, of course, but some of the English Lops were hilarious, with this big ole ears dragging around on the ground. She stuck around for the first part of the judging, then went off to church and left me to wander around.

I did all the things I usually do, which is to wander around before all the "carnival-goers" -- the people who just show up at the fair to ride the rides, eat, and go to whatever past-their-peak country music artist is playing at the grandstand that night -- showed up. The fair is a much different place before the midway fires up and the whining kids from the suburbs show up and try feeding straw to the cattle. It's quiet, dignified in a way. You go over and watch the enormous draft horses being put through their paces, and out in the middle of the infield the only sound is hooves on dirt, jingling harnesses and polite applause after the awards are announced. Goats get fed, chickens get robbed of eggs they produced overnight, and the dust hasn't started to rise from all the minivans rolling across the racetrack.

I make a note every year of new foods I hadn't seen at the fair before. One year it was emu burgers... they were there for a few years, and then vanished and haven't been back. Well, this year, the fad for deep-frying any damn thing you can get your hands on has apparently gotten to the Frederick Fair. In addition to the usual corn dogs, this year's additions were deep-fried Oreos (which we'd had previous at the Washington County Ag Expo), deep-fried corn-on-the-cob (which seems to me like it'd be like a corn fritter wrapped around a broomstick), and deep-fried strawberries.

Yeah.

I always thought the appeal of strawberries was that clean, cool crunch, which would pretty much be hosed if you battered them and dropped them in the same oil someone just pulled onion rings from, but to its credit, the same stand that offered these things also offered them just chocolate-covered, rather than fried. Maybe they just used the threat of frying to lure people in.

The fair has changed noticeably since I first went eleven or twelve years ago. Fewer entries this year, fewer vendors, even less stuff on the midway, fewer animals. Sure, some of that might be the heat and dryness we had this summer, but I think some of it is also the changing nature of the county. All the older rural people are dying off and retiring, their kids are selling the farms for development, and the people who move in don't know anything about farming, curing, canning, tanning, horses and livestock, woodworking, or any of the myriad other things. And probably their homeowners' associations wouldn't let them do those things even if they were familiar with them. A significant portion of the population increase in that area is people from cultures that don't have that "county fair" gene, people from south Asia or central America. They aren't fairgoers, and they aren't fair participants, so the fair shrinks.

I am fairly sure the Frederick Fair board knows exactly the day when it'll be more worthwhile for them to sell the whole fairgrounds for development. After all, it's now surrounded by development and when it started it was in the country, a good distance from the center of town. Not any more. As it is, one of the best offsite parking lots has been for sale for some time, and I am sure as soon as it sells someone will put 40 shitty townhouses on it and sell them to people who'll complain about their proximity to the 170-year-old fair.

Tell them to stay home, if you see them.

I wanna see what weird fried foods somebody thinks up in future years. Someone out there has a much better job than I.


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