Art is Life is Art: Susan Reep Photo Art

What is it about the Kern County Fair?  Or any fair, for that matter.  Basically, I dislike the fair – especially today, when the temperature hit triple digits, but the afternoon sun reflecting off the pavement added at least 10 degrees.  Yet – I went today anyhow because it was Senior Day and I got in free.

I went because I wanted a wooden sign.  Some things, you just get at the fair.  We needed a couple of signs for our cabin, Kamala, in addition to the sign Wendy and Gene gave us last year.  Which – Wendy got at the fair!

Now, I had several hours to fill up while waiting for the signs.  Several hot, blazing hours.  But there is something else I buy at the fair – folding scissors – so I headed off for the big tent full of booths.  Besides scissors, I acquired a bag of Christmas gifts and it wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t light either.

Gotta say, never been to senior day before.  But if this is any indication, not a lot of folks come out.  I’m sure the temp had lots to do with it.  The blazing white bench in the blazing midday sun did not look very inviting.

So here I was with time on my hands, bags over my arms, wanting to take photos but in the harshest lighting conditions of the day.  Mostly, I had to use one hand to hold the camera (Canon EOS 30D), also, since I’d already purchased those Christmas gifts.

The thing with photography is sometimes you have to make do.  And I had to make do.  I’m telling myself I’ll go back if some cooler temps push in, but I probably won’t.  Amazing how we can fool ourselves when we know already what we will or won’t do.  It’s the same thing with fair food.  Food, fabulous fair food.

Fair food.  Gosh, I love the idea of fair food.  Every year I think, This’ll be the year I eat a funnel cake!  This year I’m going for deep-fried anything (Twinkies, anyone?).  I get all excited, start with a corn dog, eat half, and find I really don’t like fried food anymore.

I mean, how pathetic!  Even for the Boy Scouts, I can’t eat fried food.  I think the problem is the smell of all that oil and fat in the fryers permeates the air.  Maybe if it were 70 degrees instead of 110, I’d be able to eat.  Every year, it’s the same story.  I live in Bakersfield, CA, in the San Joaquin valley, and it’s always hot during the fair.  The fair weather is not fair.

So, what to eat. Look at the gooey, melting cheese!  But I’m a melting senior – why do I want hot, melting cheese?

At the fair, you can get almost anything on a stick.  Anything American that is.  And believe me, egg rolls and orange chicken are American.  When we were in China, we could buy scorpion-on-a-stick, starfish-on-a-stick, snake-on-a-stick, testicles-on-a-stick – the list goes on and on.  Here – I’ll prove it.

So I won’t get anything on a stick. But – I love whipped cream.  To me, any food item is a whipped-cream-delivery vehicle.  And funnel cakes have whipped cream!

But I got to thinking about the nutrition information.  Now that it’s available in restaurants with over 15 locations, it’s hard to eat anything at all!  We eat crummy stuff when we go out to eat! (Of course, when you go to Valentiens, like we did last night, you say calories be damned because at Valentiens you don’t eat, you dine.)

But the whipped cream was calling me.

It didn’t call loud enough.  And with Big Bubba’s Bad Bbq next door, all of a sudden the idea of food was – well, take a look.

Too hot for Big Bubba.  Needed something totally cool.  And this did look good:

But what is freckled lemonade?  Strawberry freckled lemonade?  The freckles must be the seeds.  All of a sudden, I didn’t want that either.

The choices continued.

Cooling, but I never liked shaved ice.

I like polish sausage.  But it’s hot.

More food-on-a-stick.  But I already tried the DeMolay corn dog and ate less than half.

I like eating with my fingers – when we lived in Morocco from 1971-73, we ate without utensils and it worked just fine.  Often, we used bread to scoop up food from the common dish in the middle of the table.  But at the fair, juggling packages and my camera, finger steaks didn’t sound like the answer.

So once, again, although the fair food seemed like an udder d-lite, it was a no-go.  Time after time.  Time after time.  I can’t wait to get to the fair and eat, but I never learn and I never eat.  Yet hope springs eternal, so until next year…which is sure to be The Year of the Funnel Cake.  Or the Cinnamon Bun.  Or the Teen Challenge Apple Fritter.  Or the…hmmm, I can dream, but who am I fooling?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 10:20 PM and is filed under Art, General, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.