State Fair

I went to the Utah State Fair on Saturday night. It was a surreal experience for me, since I didn’t even realize that they still had State Fairs. I felt like I was stepping back in time. There were all kinds of little amusement park rides, art exhibits that I didn’t bother to look at, a bunch of booths selling what you can only find at State Fairs and swap meets, and stages with people playing musical instruments, the kind you usually see people sit down to play, but that night were standing up and playing while kicking their legs out to the sides. There were games that you could play to win stuffed everythings, tetherball poles set up everywhere, and pony rides for the kids made out of real, living, breathing ponies. The roar of a tractor pull filled the air, but for some reason we could never find where the noise was coming from. It wasn’t loud enough to drown out the incessant jabbering of thousands of people though. Buildings upon buildings were filled with animals, all of which were tied up just right so that as you walked by all you really looked at was their rear ends. It stunk. I didn’t like the animal part of the fair, especially the pigs. They just laid there in their filth, covered in flies, and did nothing. And the line was slow, so I just stood there with my nose stuffed down the collar of my tee shirt. I couldn’t believe that when I came to the end of the line they were trying to charge me to see a pig that was supposedly the largest in the world. No thanks, a few small pigs were more than enough.

But my favorite part of the fair was the food. Everywhere you looked (accept in the pig tent) they were serving food. And the best part was that everything you could order was either served to you in a cup, a bag, or skewered on a stick. And almost everything that they served was covered in batter, plunged in a big tub of sizzling grease, and served to you within seconds of removing it from the pool without any time to let it drip dry. Kids everywhere were holding on to sticks with grease dripping down to their elbows, with mustard all down their faces, and cotton candy in their hair. And parents felt free to smoke near the carousel and double fist cups of beer while meandering down isles of neon plastic trinkets that in no way would still be working by the time their owners made it back to the car. Nope, there was definitely no “Over 18” or “Smoking” area at the fair. Personally, I had a large frozen lemonade, a fresh dipped corn dog, a pork-chop-on-a-stick, fresh cut fries (which came from a bag, rip off), and a deep fat fried Snickers bar. I didn’t even know that deep fat fried Snickers bars even existed. But it was so good, with its melted chocolate and nougat engulfed in a greasy hot pocket of freshly fried batter. At the same tent they had deep fried Oreo cookies, deep fried Ho Ho’s, and deep fried coca-cola, which I think was just coca-cola flavored batter. The guy doing the cooking was dipping the treats in the batter with his bare fingers, which almost made me look over my shoulder for the health inspector, but then I realized that this alternate reality from a time long past didn’t care about health inspectors, so I just decided to enjoy in the fun. As I walked away from this all-American good time, with a raging all-American stomach ache, thoughts of all-American stereotypes filled my mind.