and we paid to do this.

This year, Miz Susan and I put plenty of thought into picking the best possible day to go to the State Fair.  I can't remember for sure what the exact thought processes were.  But I'm sure that they were rational, well-considered and took into account all of the various factors important to us to ensure an optimal State Fair Experience.

The one thing we didn't give adequate enough consideration to was who'd be going to the fair with us and just how goddam many of them there would be.  This turned out to be a fundamental miscalculation on our part.  The place was jam-packed, ass-to-elbow with crazy Minnesota Fairgoers and they did their darnedest to kill us.  It turns out that the second Saturday of the Fair, the one on the Labor Day weekend, attracted somewhere in excess of a quarter of a million people, us among them.  All of whom paid real money for the privilege of paying too much more real money for food and drink and entertainments.  And none of those were probably all that good for any of us.  This amounted to a new all-time single day attendance record.  And, I'm guessing, an all-time single day spending record   I don't know whether I should be proud of myself or disgusted with myself for being a part of it all.  Maybe a little of both.


Gee whiz...who'd'a thought?       August 30, 2014

It didn't start out too badly.  We managed to get out of the house by 10 in the morning.  This amounts to pretty quick-stepping for us on a weekend.  But we had our agenda and we were motivated.  Maybe we should have started to suspect that we were getting sucked into something close to an epic disaster movie scenario when we had to wait up on Snelling for 30+ minutes for a bus to come along.  But we had visions of corn dogs and the art work of hundreds of K-12 students in the Education Building dancing in our wee little heads.

It didn't seem that bad when we went in thru the main entrance opposite Midway Parkway.  Maybe my dad's benevolent spirit was looking down on us and was deflecting some of the horrors to come.  Doug was a huge fan of the Fair; back in the day when he was playing politics he'd go several times during each year's run.  Even further back in the day, he'd parked cars at the Fair as a Boy Scout and it seems like he never really got it out of his blood.  It hadn't occurred to me before I was writing this but maybe there was a certain justice in his having passed away at the Lyngblomsten Home just two and a half blocks east down Midway.  He was definitely on familiar ground.

O'Gara's newish building is right inside the Fair's entrance and I'd decided in advance that I needed to try their pretzel cheese curds.  These would definitely not have been good for me but they'd been touted in the media as one of the Fair's hot new foods to try.  Surprisingly, Miz Susan agreed that I should try them but, even at 10:30 in the morning, O'Gara's was a mob scene in miniature (clue #2 as to what we were in for).  So we deferred on that idea.  And headed south and west around the Agriculture Horticulture palace for the Dairy Building and breakfast malts.

Malts in the Dairy Building are one of our must-haves at the Fair.  The lines (more like anxious mobs frantic to board the last ship out of Dunkirk) have tended to feeding-frenzy long in previous years.  On our chosen Saturday, not too bad.  Chocolate for me and stawberry rhubarb for Miz Susan.  She proclaimed that hers was better.  Hers of almost anything is almost always better so I'm gonna give her that one.  We got separated as we spilled out the exit chutes from the milk shake franchise when Susan stopped to gawk at the glass-windowed butter carving cooler.  I'd have stopped, too, but the carver was just doing rough preliminary work without a suffering Princess Kay candidate shivering with goose-bumps and chattering teeth.  What fun would that have been?.

She came out of the butter carving spectator section looking around a little frantically.  This would be the first of many separations that day.  I never did get a chance to ask her what she was worried about.  We couldn't have possibly been more than 30' apart, we each had cell phones, I was wearing a bright red Twins cap (chosen for easy spotability) and we were at most like 3 miles away from home.  Maybe the excitement of the butter carving had gotten the best of her.  But it wouldn't be the last time I saw the look of fleeting panic in her eyes after we'd chosen different routes around an obstacle in our path (and God knows there were plenty of those) or when she squeezed thru a little opening in the crowd that I couldn't exploit.  She tends to forget that I'm about twice her size.  Which may have served me well on the broomball rink but isn't really an advantage I can parlay in polite society.

Leaving the Dairy Building, we joined the crowd pressing west down Judson.  The pedestrian traffic seemed to have grown considerably during the 20 minutes we were off the street.  This took us past the MPR Empire display (which Susan enjoys and which I don't give a hoot about) and up to the Minnesota lottery booth.  I've always said that the Lottery has scratch-offs at the fair with higher odds of winning than the ones that get sold out of the SAs and Holidays.  Makes sense to me; kinda like the dope pushers of urban myth handing out free joints thru the chain link fences of elementary school playgrounds as a business expense write-off against the big paydays with the hard stuff in high school parking lots.  My theory fell flat as not a single one of Miz Susan's three bucks worth of tickets paid off.  I'm not dissuaded; it was a pretty small sample.

We bounced back and forth across Judson to take in the sights at the KARE 11 and Miracle of Birth Barns.  All of the on-air talent had fled the KARE building and about the only excitement in the Miracle of Birth building was the anticipation that one of the visitors would pass out and maybe die.  Jam-packed, hot and humid, people moving around the place like marbles in the bottom of a shoebox.  It was pretty random.

We decided to cut across the swelling east-west traffic and head north toward the Grandstand.  Once we bumped into that dead end of a towering brick wall, we veered left for the newly rehabbed West End Market.  This spot is home to the Schell's Beer Bandstand and, more importantly, the Schell's Beer Garden.   Besides the Schell's Beer attractions, the former West End Market had been made up of a cluster of low-lying ramshackle wood-framed buildings which resembled nothing so much as stables on a low-rent horse farm.  The rehab transformed the Market into a cluster of low-lying steel-girdered and mesh buildings which did away with most of the dimly-lit, poorly-ventilated (think being inside a pizza oven) and claustrophobic stalls of Fairs past.  Balance the improved amenities with a loss of familiarity, though: we had to circle the individual buildings, all five or six of 'em, before we found what had drawn us there in the first place, the I Like You shop.  Miz Susan was greeted with adoring open arms by her former student whose mom runs the place.  I Like You is a regular stop for us during the holiday shopping season at its full-time location on the fringe of the usually-too-hip-for-us Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood.  It specializes in local artists' hand crafts.  It was nice to see a couple of friendly faces.

I don't think we bought anything at I Like You.  We'd seen all that stuff before.  I'd have certainly bought something at the Schell's Beer Garden if the lines hadn't been so damn long.  But we needed to push on; there were corndogs in our futures.  As we came out of the West End Market between the big-ass Sweet Martha's and Fresh French Fries concession stands, the picture above captures what greeted us.  The West End Market had been a relatively calm backwater compared to the Amazon of humanity which clogged Dan Patch in raging full flood.  Where had all these people come from?

From that point on, it's pretty hazy and my memories are dreamlike (or nightmarish).  There are some pictures in our cell phones which seem to suggest that we waited in line for 30-45 minutes to try Giggles's walleye mac and cheese and that we saw a chunk of the daily Fair parade (did they really have that many different gigantic cow sculptures collected in one place at one time?) and that we finally got corndogs at about 3:30.  When we got home, I found that I'd managed to buy a fistful of Fair-themed postcards.  Did I really think that we had that many friends who'd want to get one of those?  My most vivid recollection is of the insane driver of a motorized wheelchair.  She must have decided to test her chair's off-road capabilities by running the damn thing up the back of my left leg.  I don't think she got very far though she did manage to scuff up my ankle and hamstring. This memory is so far-fetched that I'd write it off as pure nightmare except for the picture Miz Susan took of the tread marks on my ankle.  It could have been worse.  When all was said and done, our bankroll was only $70 or so lighter than when we we'd left the house.

I started to come to as we stumbled off the MTC bus at Snelling and Laurel.  Our front porch had never looked so good.  Miz Susan managed to drag herself upstairs and collapsed onto the bed for a long nap.  I had other ideas.  Still smarting from the indignity of getting shut out at the Schell's Beer Garden, I hopped in the car and headed for Big Top Liquors in the Midway Shopping Center.  Yep, just as I suspected.  They'd gotten their first shipment of Schell's Oktoberfest into the store.  Of which I hauled two twelve-packs home.  Sometimes, good things do come to those who wait.

It was a pretty crazy day at the Fair.  I don't remember a crazier one.  Do we really have to wait a whole year to go back again?