Fair
We went back to the Minnesota State Fair on Labor day, the last day of its 2015 run. Here are a few highlighs.
Crowd
The crowds had not thinned out any on the final day of the fair, around 2:00 pm. In point of fact, Monday set an all-time record for Labor Day attendance: 179,865 other people wandered the fairgrounds with us that day.
Lunch
For lunch we shared the entire deep-fried menu of Ole & Lena’s Hotdish on a Stick truck. The crude drawing, affixed to the counter, explains how the proprietors accomplish their namesake dish. The banana split wasn’t deep-fried whole: only the banana was. Pity. The onion rings were among the best I have had, and they came with a scrumpitous lingonberry sauce.
The photo at right caught the back of the tee shirt of a worker at an adjacent deep-fried emporium.
In all there were said to be 62 X-on-a-stick foodstuffs for sale at the Fair, among 300 different food booths. These included key lime pie on a stick, stuffed Italian meatloaf on a stick, tikka on a stick, and — my favorite, as pictured below — Summit on a stick.
Stick
Summit is a local craft brewery. This may be a stick too far. It would be impossible to drink this Summit on a stick, unless three friendly people put their heads together while a fourth carefully tipped the contraption for them. And you can’t put it down except on a sufficiently empty flat surface, which were not in noticeable oversupply at the Fair.
Butter
This year’s Princess Kay of the Milky Way is Kyla Mauk from Howard Lake, in Wright County, Minnesota. She was sculpted in butter on the opening day of the Fair. The photo shows another of the finalists for the title, Morgan Uphoff, answering audience questions about bovine care, feeding, and raising while being sculpted from a 90-lb. block of Grade A butter inside a rotating chamber maintained at 40°F.
The sculptor, Linda Christiansen, has been creating these likenesses since 1971. Around the periphery of the rotating chamber are the images of other finalists for the Princess Kay title, sculpted one per day by Ms. Christiansen over the 12 days of the Fair.
Butter sculpture happens at other state fairs in the Midwest (as evidenced in this poem, by Andrea Cohen, from the Iowa fair), but only at the Minnesota event is it performed using a live model before an audience of fair-goers.
Sky
The Sky Ride operating at the Fair is 51 years old. It is one of 35 constructed on US soil by Von Roll of Berne, Switzerland, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and one of 10 still in operation here. This photo was taken mid-ride. See the first photo, above, for a look at the exterior of the mechanism and the cars.
We stopped at the booths of Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, and the Democrat Farm Labor Party. Neither Amy, Al, Bernie, nor Hillary was in attendance. We would have visited booths for Republican candidates but didn’t see any.
I’ve never had the beer on a stick… do the cups not come out? I guess a person could use a straw, but that’d be a little weird.
Glad you had fun at the Fair! My favorite part this year was seeing my 12-year-old completely enchanted at the birth of a lamb in the Miracle of Birth barn.
Yes, the cups come out; it’s just a wide stick with holes. With full cups, it’s heavy to hold by the handle alone; the cooperative fairgoer who agreed to be photographed looked pretty strong. You really need a small crowd with you to drink it properly.
You’re right, a straw would be… odd.
From this post and others, you seem to enjoy poetry, Keith. St. Paul’s annual sidewalk poetry contest begins in a few days in case your muse is inspired!
Oh excellent, Thanks Jim! More an appreciator than a practitioner, at least so far, but we’ll see what the muse has to say.
Well, gee. Where ya been? Is your LDL so high that you can’t think? All that fair food doncha know… or has life here become mundane a nd boring compared to life on the east coast?
Hi Linda, there has been a bit of a hiatus, hasn’t there? A bunch of life has intruded. I expect to be back to posting later this week.
Meanwhile, on the pizza front: we had out-of-town guests from back East last week (one of the intruding bits, see above) and took them to Luce. They were insistent on sampling the square cut. This time I was not so very taken by Luce’s pizza. On the upside, we had earlier tried the ur-Punch in Highland and found the simulation of the Neapolitan pizza experience quite compelling.
Well, that is good. I have 3 brothers, and one lives in Syracuse. He visited last week to spend time with Mom and Dad. We had fun discussing your blog and the nuances of life here and out east. I think my favorite is the tornado sirens… and of course “Well that’s kinda different.” We are so the epitome of passive/aggressive! Drives me nuts.