A FAIR ASSESSMENT

Isn't it always the case that the best thing you do on your vacation is the thing you don't have a picture of? You get home and, in lieu of a photo, you have to come up with a thousand frickin' words. And even then, people aren't convinced that the thing was as fun as you've made out; their paltry imaginations need visuals.

I had to resort to said tactic this week. I had to come up with a thousand-word description of the deep-fat-fried cheese curds at the Kansas State Fair, because I walked away from that cultural mecca without a photo of said delicacy.

My description fell flat. It elicited stares, to be sure, but not like the stares that followed me at the fair as I walked down the midway with a heaping basket of hot, greasy, golden curds with a side of ranch and molten bubbles of stringy cheddar oozing out the pockets of fried batter. "What is that?!" people would exclaim, and "Where did you get that? It looks so good." I felt like Marco Polo parading through the canals of Venice with an exotic Oriental spice. "Over there," I said, "where they sell the Dutch Fatballs, but watch out for the six-legged monsters and the army of Kublai Khan."

Anyway, here's the abridged version of my curd description: Oh God, oh God.

And if that's not enough, I have witnesses. George and Erin were there and partook.

Here are some other things we ate: deep-fried alligator on a stick, monkey shines (blocks of hard ice cream rolled in chocolate and crushed nuts), ice cream cone, funnel cake with powdered sugar, peanut butter and chocolate fudge (Erin's mom got into a heated exchange with the fudge chef over whether his fudge was superior to Erin's grandma's fudge; the chef lost), deep-fried gator taters with extra salt, fresh-squeezed lemonade, a turkey leg and roasted corn with lime pepper and melted butter. I did not partake of the turkey leg because I'm a vegetarian. I did try the alligator on a stick because cold-blooded prehistoric carnivores I don't feel too bad about eating. It was supposed to taste like a chicken, but it was more like a chicken that had been marinating in a muddy bayou. And I skipped the butter on the corn because I'm watching my fat intake. The food item at the fair not to be missed — which, alas, we missed — was the famous Pronto Pup, which is a large, magically flavored corn dog. I missed it because I don't eat whatever animal it's made from, and George missed it for the same reason. Erin missed it because she had one last year and had bad memories of puking it up.

So the food was yummy.

The reason we went to the fair, though — and this was my first trip ever to our lovely state fair — was to see Ben sing with his new barbershop quartet, Wu. That's their name: Wu. As in big wu, or wu-hoo, depending on how you liked the show. In my opinion, Wu was the best thing about the fair, after the cheese curds. All the guys in Wu wore these really cute blue tops. In showbiz, you have to wear matching tops; otherwise, people won't know you're together. George and I wanted to get some barbershopper autographs after the show, but they all hurried off the stage. Later we would see random guys in bright polo shirts eating Pronto Pups and whatnot and looking lost without their threesome.

We saw a lot of animals. Remarkably, this sheep, when they sheared its wool off, had all these markings on it. It was born that way. Apparently some enterprising 4-H youth had put his seventh-grade biology class to use and genetically engineered a butcher-friendly line of sheep. He will probably get the blue ribbon for that. I say "he"; it could have been a girl 4-Her, I guess, but it just doesn't seem like something a girl would think up, don't you agree?



Every building had some particular kind of animal in it. Like there was a rabbit building and a pig building and a cow building, etc. In the poultry building, we saw this. (George said I should post this picture and write: "Look at this gorgeous cock.")



We also saw this Phyllis Diller-type bird. There's the hair similarity, of course, but doesn't it also look like she should be carrying an ivory cigarette holder and telling ribald jokes about how her husband doesn't find her sexy anymore? George called the birds with the fancy hair-dos the "socialites."





And when we came to the baby animal building, we saw this: (George said I should post this picture and write: "Look at this little ass.")



Good thing there wasn't a cat building. George might have been stumped for something clever to tell me to write.

That little donkey's name was Topper and his mom's name was Taffy. They are dwarf donkeys, and she was pregnant with him for like 13 months. He is about the size of my boy dog, but he has an extra huge penis. Huge. Although you can't see it in this picture. We thus speculated that the oft-heard phrase "donkey dick" is based on something more than charming alliteration.

Also in the baby building we saw some pregnant cows and newborn piglets. But I did not get pictures of these as I was too busy oohing and ahing. I did photograph some adult pigs in the swine building. This head and butt do not belong to the same pig, though.






And those are the highlights of my first visit to the Kansas State Fair.