wshepperd, Thu, September 17th, 2009
“Do you want to be Mary,” I asked. Silly me.
“No,” she said matter of factly. “I want to be Jesus.”
I don’t remember conversation at that first Fair visit, only that her mother and I were tired from the experience and sat for awhile on our screened-in porch in the Westcott Nation. I do remember going with her every year after that, and looking forward to it. Mostly I remember the year—she was thirteen—when she didn’t want to go with me because the cool thing was to go with your friends.
Sideshow banners
On Nostalgia Sunday I asked her if she had ever sneaked into the Fair as a youth, a question most of the homegrown Fair Directors have ducked in my interviews over the past three decades. Although I didn’t grow up here, it seemed a logical adolescent challenge for natives, but she said she hadn’t. I didn’t remember the rides we went on, even when she got me to the midway. But she remembered the swings on chains, and remembered seeing the sideshow banners at the height of the ride.
I remembered the sideshow banners, mostly human oddities, and thought they had been eliminated at some point. But there they were on Nostalgia Sunday, within sight of the swing ride: Three-eyed Bill and the Elephant Nose Pig, the monkey with a human face and the giant nuclear radiated beetle, the two-headed baby and Frog Girl.
Lorca and husband Cabot took turns riding the swings on chains. I watched, and remembered profiling macho to disguise the discomfort some of the rides gave me back in the day. This time I got dizzy just watching. We went to the cow barn—my first visit—so she could pet the cows. She recalled that her mother had won a cow in the raffle at the barn one year, and was going to take it home with her to Central Square, but thought it would be lonely, so she took the cash instead.
And as is always the case at the Great New York State Fair, the visit was educational. I learned that cows need to be fed three times a day, with beet pulp and molasses apparently a rural delicacy. And they drink 40 gallons of water a day.
