A Fair Remembered

Get your tickets here!

I was going to write about health care and misplaced outrage of these people at the TEA parties, but I won’t. I’m tired of thinking about it, and frankly, I have better pictures to show….of the fair.

I love the fair. You can make an argument that it’s silly, expensive, and generally boring once you get past eating a corn dog and riding on the ferris wheel. This was my argument for not going to them for most of my life, other than when my parents took me to the NY state fair as a kid. Carnivals don’t count. They may seem similar but they aren’t.

All the games you could ever want to play are here!

But now that it’s my job to meet people and relate my experience with them visually to the rest of you, I love the fair. There isn’t a better spot to meet a more disparate population of people--in a good mood, mind you—in the country. Young, old, country, urban, they are all at the fair.

Arm in arm at the fair. Incidentally, he had "LOVE" tatooed across both his right and left knuckles. On the right, he had her name; across the left (pictured) must have been a previous lover. Let that be a lesson: Tatoos are forever.

So for a personal project of my own—because generally the paper doesn’t provide the space, except for the internet—I worked on putting together my own set of images and sounds.

Eat all you can before summer is over!

The first is about the founders of the fair. I mentioned them in an earlier post. Here’s the audio slideshow of them. You may have to turn it up, b/c I am admittedly learning how best to do this , and when you listen to audio through headphones, it inevitably sounds much louder than it really is.

A couple founders sharing a laugh.

On a side note, the last 2 nights of the fair, stormed like nobody’s business, and the wrestling match I attended was almost canceled, because of the tornado watch.

Should Jimmy Cicero tag up?

Snapping a picture of "Big Sexy", Kevin Nash, who made an appearance at Prince William County Fair.

Kevin Nash slams Bazooka Joe to the mat, and is ready to "bring it home"...

Kevin Nash, wrapping it up in their "locker room".

Beyond the founders and the wrestlers, though, is a collection of fair goers that like to eat funnel cake, and win giant stuffed bears. They like to walk arm in arm, ride the ferris wheel and the carousel. It’s the last escape of summer for many people. After the fair, everyone gets back to being in a big hurry. The universities start back up, and then the public schools. Here is a slideshow of who I met at the fair, and what they looked like to me.



Self-anointed Miss ODS (Old Dominion Speedway, a local racetrack) tours the fair promoting the track


In addition, if you really like fair pictures and stuff like that, you should visit Kenneth Jarecke’s blog (which should be linked on the right side of my blog--unless you're reading this through facebook) where he posted pictures from his hometown in Montana. And of course, NatGeo did this story a couple months ago on county fairs.