State Fair Strategies

A day or two before visiting the fair, I copied the text from a Star Tribune article ranking the food into a Word document, then edited it down from six pages to two by removing all entries relating to cookies, desserts, ice cream, and alcoholic beverages, and every item that ranked lower than three stars. I also removed the cutesy narrative verbiage that accompanies such articles:  “We all liked the xxx but the yyy was bland and strangely salty at the same time.”

We forgot this document at home, but it’s just as well. Once you’ve had a pronto pup, an “about a foot long” hotdog with fried onions, a chocolate malt, and a bag of hot, greasy mini-donuts, you don’t have room, or funds, for much more.

We left home at 7:45—twenty minutes earlier than usual—and didn’t meet up with the line of cars west of the North Lot on Larpenteur Avenue until after we’d passed the Bell Museum. Halleluiah! Twenty minutes later, after repeatedly cursing the stream of cars entering the line from side-streets to the north, we turned the corner into the lot. It was going to be a good day.

We entered the fairgrounds proper at 8:45. There were still hints of coolness in the air, and the North Plaza was half-deserted. But there were plenty of people around, and when we spotted Giggles Campfire Grill down the way Hilary said, “Why not have some walleye cakes right now?”

So we did.

Year after year, we habitually begin the day in the Eco-building, but we decided on a whim to tackle the art building—the day’s piece de resistance—first. But we made a stop at an ATM because we couldn’t remember if credit cards were widely accepted on the fairgrounds. (Duh! I must have been thinking back to those days in junior high when you went to the fair with a friend and fifteen dollars in your pocket, which you’d been saving up all summer.)

The art exhibit was a mixed bag, as usual. The two qualities that were in short supply were freshness and expressiveness. Some works were laborious constructions using bottle caps or hand-made tiles. Some were nature paintings done from photographs that got all the details right but failed to bring things to life. The sculptural pottery was uniformly uninteresting.

But there were also quite a few pieces that made you look again, and again. Everything came together, for one reason or another. A casual confidence, a lack of evident effort. Also, perhaps, a sense of mystery.

Here, for example, is a piece by Kimberly Wetzel called "Hidden in the Marsh."

It isn't easy to see the delicacy of the lines, but I would simply say that it's pretty cool.

Or if that's a little messy for your taste, how about this wonderful image of a green heron that has been created entirely out of pieces of fabric stitched together.

Or how about this landscape by R. Baller called "Sharp Landscape."

The title hits the nail on the head. The painting has a sharpness in the edges, and also an intensity in the tints, without becoming overly detained or undermining the almost statuesque beauty of the landscape itself. 

On a different plane of exactitude in Ronda Dick's elegant and slight stylized "Who Doesn't Love a Birch."

You may accuse me of highlighting nature-oriented works while ignoring the portraits, scenes of human drama and whimsy. Maybe so. But here is a piece of whimsy that I could not pass by or ignore.

And here's a remarkable pencil sketch by Robert Lundgren with the portentous title "Portent" that captures the spirit of the scene without in any way clarify what it was all about.

In one of the first aisles I came upon this print by Josh Bindewald called "Discourse." I don't particularly like the colors but for some reason the ensemble works.

 As Hilary and I made our way through the building I heard one volunteer say to another, "The line at the crop art exhibit is already two-and-a-half hours long."

Yikes! But that's the thing about the fair. There are plenty of things to do. If you want to wait in line, you wait in line. If you don't, fine. You go do something else.

When we emerged from the Art Building, I noticed there was no line at the "about a foot long" hotdog stand, so I bought one. Hilary usually geta a Pronto Pup at the stand down the street, but the line there extended all the way down past the Education Building. A forty-five minute wait!

In the distance, the line at the Pronto Pup food truck.

So she went to get a malt at the Kiwanis booth and we sat in the shade of the park across the street listening to a performer called Duke Otherwise sing a song about a dog. The fiddler was very good!

In the 4-H Building we watched a large group of young people do a choreographed line dance while singing a cheerful song the exact import of which I no longer remember. I noticed that the kids in the front were much better at it that the ones in the back, and I tried to imagine what the rehearsals had been like, off in far away Pelican Rapids or Waubun or Thief River Falls. (After all, the fair is billed as the "great Minnesota get-together." Shouldn't we be trying to get to know the farm kinds from outstate?)

We spent some time in the Handicraft Building admiring the knitting and the quilting and even the jewelry. 

The bagpiper had begun to play outside O'Gara's by the time we reemerged into the sunlight. The day was getting hot. (It had reached 91 by the time we left.) We headed for the Agriculture Building, where I chatted with a woman from the Minnesota Horticultural Society about old cottonwood trees and the best time to fertilize your garden. We crossed back to the Farmers Union, and along the way I stopped to tell a woman selling metal roofs about the rubber roof we recently had installed on our house. (These people are bored. They'll be happy to talk to anyone.) 

At the Framers' Union we bought a pork cutlet and some iced coffee, which we consumed on a shady park bench nearby. As we passed Ye Olde Mill I suddenly realized I had always wanting to take a flume ride through a dark tunnel where you're sure to get soaking wet. But not today.

We learned some things from the woman at the Voyageur National Park booth outside the DNR Building, wandered into the bat cave and wandered back out again, looked briefly at the fish pond--always refreshing--some beautiful chickens, a man sheering a sheep ...

Our final destination was the West End Market ... a terrible, treeless place to be. Five dancers were twirling in a performance circle, only one or two grades higher in skill level than the 4-H teens, I would say, though their costumes were better, and it appeared they were having fun. (Maybe they were getting paid?)

We bought a $12 strawberry lemonade on our way back to the lot on Larpenteur that was so sour we had a hard time finishing it. But we were in need of hydration, and the Culligan booth was three blocks away.