The Show

Back in August,  the day that we hired our neoprene suits to go swimming with the cuttlefish, we spent the afternoon at the Show.
            People describe the local show this way:  "It's just like the Adelaide Show, they say, and then they snort.  "Just like it - about 2% of it."
             Our show might be empirically smaller;  as measured in irrelevancies such as square footage and numbers of tents and rollercoasters and hucksters in the Home and Garden tent, our show might not look like very much.  But by any meaningful definition of the term - it's enormous. 
            It's Ours.

Take the cooking competition in the handicrafts hall, which is where we started.  The prep students at Miles Patterson had all entered the Decorated Biscuit competition in the cooking division, and a tenth-grade boy from my cooking class won a blue ribbon for his gingerbread castle.  And a co-worker of a friend enters an Orange Loaf cake every year (Baked in a Tin Division) - and she wins.

Decorated Biscuits, Grades 1 and 2

Our favorite Mr Potato Head

Kids Collections - Pet Rock Division

We stopped to say hello to the ladies running the stall for the Quilting Guild - and to the ladies running the stall for the Machine Embroidery Club - and even to the booth for the ladies who who Quilt And Also Machine Embroider (but very carefully - the schism over the use of the Quilting Guild Hall on Tuesdays by the Quilters who Also Machine Embroider has rocked the quilting guild to its foundations.)

 A professional florist won all of the flower-arranging classes.  Not very sporting.

The names on the cages of the prize-winning homing pigeons and chickens and flower arrangements are names we see on mailboxes and hear and in the office, and read in the community interest supplement of our local newspaper.  Three days before the show a taxi driver mourned to me - all the way across town - about how she'd been one day too late with her entry form to enter her prize duck in the poultry competition. 

Prize-winning Blondinette pigeons in the Poultry Shed.

Emo Chicken.

Noble Quackers.

No comment on this one. It tried to eat me.

We found Mr Tabubil's boss hammering pig iron in a living history display, red-faced with frustration and mired in a long, wrangling argument with his fellow renactors over an ahistorical but exponentially more efficient mechanical method for blowing the bellows:  "Well okay.  Deriving from a purely factual perspective, maybe they didn't, but if they'd known that they could, they would have, wouldn't they?!"
            We ate hot cinnamon donuts from the high school refreshment stand, watched Saul, our cooking instructor, show us how to turn lamb chops into sweet-and-sour summer heaven, then went out and found enough sideshow games and spinning teacup rides and ghastly plastic junk to blow the pocket money of every kid in town between the ages of nine and seventeen.

It was plenty big enough for us.

But can you find the pink plastic beer stein shaped like a cowboy boot?

Came over on the boats after the potato famine, presumably.