The Ohio State Fair by ColumbusGuy
Grimy, greasy, stinky, sweaty, tacky, commercial, garish and huge- the Ohio State Fair is a distillation of our middle and low-brow cuture in a thousand acre mish-mosh of activity.The backbone of the Fair is the livestock and farming events. There are thousands of rural Ohio residents, the 'Ag-People', who, with good justification, view themselves as the reason for this event's 140+ year existence. Livestock shows and competitions are a big deal here; and even in today's service economy, the champion steer still gets mention on the nightly news. The building blocks of the Columbus Economy may be banking and insurance, but agriculture is still king in the surrounding area.
In the early days of the fair, one can wander through acres and acres of livestock pens and watch 4-H families lovingly clip, trim shave, brush, and otherwise pamper their prize animals in hopes of impressing the judges enough to earn the blue ribbon. If fruits and vegetables are more to your liking check out the produce and gardening competitions. Each year, someone manages to grow a tomato the size of a bowling ball and a pumpkin that weighs more than a sumo wrestler. See where your dinner comes from!
Hitching a ride on all this agriculture is an impossibly varied explosion of activity- from concerts to cloggers, from rides to model trains, from greasy food vendors to slick cleaning product hucksters, the Fair is a sensory overload. There's a huge variety of midway rides, (which cost extra) carnival games (knock down this, pop that baloon, get that quarter on the plate, win a stuffed animal) The musical offerings are very odd. Generally the headliners are a sad series of has-beens or lesser known country singers. However, there are occasionally a few oddball surprises thrown in. A few years back, DEVO played the fair. The good news is that the concerts are usually free with Fair admission. Since I know that there are many of you out there who still like to listen to the likes of Travis Tritt, The Lovin' Spoonfull, Earth Wind and Fire, and Ted Nugent (I don't), here is a list of scheduled dates:
Fair Concerts and Events
The rest of the fair is a mixture of a strange Chamber-of-Commerce-like attempt at selling the virtues of Ohio's industries and resources, and a mad lowest common denominator form of commercialism. Throughout the southeast corner of the fair are lovingly prepared exhibits on such things as Ohio's coal industry or, conversely, the state parks The food at the Fair is, for the most part, sticky, greasy and liable to give you a stomach ache. I would advise careful consideration before indulging in one of the deep fried delicacies. Do you have any pepto-bismol nearby? The commercial expo is filled acres of the type of salesmanship one sees on late night infomercials: abdominal exercisiers, hot tubs, miracle mops, encyclopedias, fancy illustrated Bibles, and Oxy-Clean all being hawked by impossibly slick and cheerful, headset wearing self-help gurus. (It's amazing the enthusiasm which some of these people can put into selling a cheap set of steak knives. Are they human?) There's also the old festival standbys: 'put your face on a t-shirt/old time, old blinkng 'horsoscope' computers, analyze your personality tests- all sold with a naďve kind of gee-whiz faux scientific patina from the days before half of developed world had a home computer.
Even those 'sophisticates' who ordinarily turn their nose at weight guessers, haunted houses, fishing contests, side show freaks, tractor pulls, corn dogs, 'astronaut ice cream', personality analysis computers, 'miracle' cleaning products, pie bake-offs, all you can eat hot dog contests, blaring music from horrible sound systems, and the overpowering smell of countless animals mixed with rotting food dropped on pavement will find a kind ironic delight in all this. It's fun to see the earnestness with which so many dive headlong into the Ohio State Fair. Also, in this day in which everything is mass produced and consumed quickly, there's something comforting about the fact that there are people who still take the time, and still care enough, to meticulously stitch a prize-winning quilt or cultivate the most perfect varieties of apples or bodge together the meatiest tractor, or sculpt a life-size cow entirely from butter? or?
