Cheese Curds & Brazen Beer Bellies

This weekend Atticus and I experienced our first Minnesota State Fair. Parking was an event unto itself -- I was thankful for my astonishingly patient husband and our equally agreeable new friends -- Cody and Melody Oaks. Endless lines of traffic inching in and around neighborhood streets and outrageous parking fees have never been so "enjoyable". The big goal of our little group was to consume fair food -- between us we were corn-dogged, french-fried, chocolate-covered nut-rolled, fried veggie-kabobbed, sno-coned, caramel-appled, and fried cheese-curded. Quite the gastronomic catastrophe. In between dinner courses we explored the exhibits. The favorite tent of the day was the fine-arts show though the main form of entertainment was people-watching -- as Cody noticed -- who knew there were still people bold enough to sport cut-off (midriff) shirts?

People are just so bizarre to me -- Brad reminded me of something he loves about L'Abri -- that they acknowledge and discuss high art as well as low art -- popular culture is out there and it is us -- we can't deny that every one of us has something there that "gets" us. I grew up with a mother who took me to the ballet in downtown Chicago and to weekly classical piano lessons at the local university and yet loves demolition derbies and doesn't mind a nice WWF moment now and then again -- not to mention her disparate range of movie and reading favorites -- oh my.

So State Fairs -- by the way, my parents living now in southwest Wisconsin have the honor of being near the only state fair that I know of that has COMBINE (giant grain harvesters) demolition derbies -- THAT is fantastic.