Columbia County Fair

 

How glad am I that THAT is over? My ego is too fragile to deal with the feeling of total rejection that comes with a performance as bad as the one my business put on this past weekend. So far this year, we have been lucky enough to have played to appreciative crowds at several of the events we’ve done. Some, not so much. But THIS one…this one in my own back yard, absolutely SUCKED. Granted, the weather was arguably the worst we have experienced in the three years we’ve been doing this (with the possible exception of one event in April of last year, where we had rain, wind, thunder, lightning, hail…I was expecting snow at any time…)

We had 100 degree plus temperatures smack dab in the meat of this fair. The two days—Friday and Saturday—that were supposed to generate the most revenue, were too hot for people to even leave their homes safely, much less sally forth to enjoy an afternoon at the County Fair. I was seriously wondering if they would cancel the rodeo, out of concern for the health of the livestock…(of course, they didn’t. Duh!)

One benefit of our horrible failure was, I got a chance liberate myself from the chains that hold me in my trailer, and wander out and about. I experienced our little County Fair in a way I had not been able to in previous years, when I had actually been working.

I’ve loved county fairs since I was a kid. Being a born and bred suburbanite, county fairs have offered me an insight into an agricultural lifestyle that has always existed right in my back yard but might just as well have been on another planet, for as much as I ever knew about or interacted with it. Baking and canning the fruits of your labors, growing grand prize vegetables, lovingly bottle-feeding a calf or a kid…all these things fascinated me, though they were as foreign to me as life in a ghetto in the inner city was.

I wandered through the "creative" exhibits. Photography, art, quilting, table settings, furniture making… They even have entries of "Lego" art from kids. And then there is the floral building. I can just picture the county’s most talented horticulturists lovingly snipping the finest blooms from their highly pampered plants to enter into competition at the fair. Does anyone else remember the "Andy Griffith Show" episode where Aunt Bea has the prize rose growing in her backyard, but Opie mashes it with a football before it can be entered in the fair?

I walk around the fairgrounds, soaking in all the sights, and I feel somehow connected with a simpler time, a simpler lifestyle. One that would probably drive me crazy if I tried to live it. But I can never resist an opportunity to immerse myself in that kind of nostalgia. I guess the "Bad Business" at the Columbia County Fair might not have been so bad after all.