It was two weeks ago, well, two weeks ago today now, that one of the greatest events of the year occurred. I mean, you've got your holidays and your birthdays and the like, but this is different. This was the Great Motherfucking Minnesota Fucking Get the Fuck Together! Its the State Fair slizuts, get it together. I should briefly contextualize why it is that I mention the fair in such high esteem. I don't mean to brag necessarily, but I think I have as good an understanding of State Fair dynamics of about anyone on the planet. There are things that need to be done, that can't be done, that are optional. My parents started taking me to the fair when I was very young. I was born about a month after the fair ended in 1979, so I didn't make it that year. But as a one year old I first experience the joys that occur for the two weeks leading up to labor day, in between Snelling and Cleveland, Como and Larpenteur.
I obviously don't remember the early years, but I attended every year of my life from 1980 until last fucking year, 2003, when my living out here made it impossible for me to get back. From the very beginning we would pretty much make a day out of the experience. We would go early and head straight to the world's greatest mini-donuts, the Tom Thumb booth next to the food building, right next to the Old Mill ride, a couple booths down from the original Sweet Martha's. You must understand, I remember going to the fair when it was still a much smaller operation. I've seen the booth explosion continue year by year. I mean, it was never a pristine Minnesota wilderness or anything, but you used to be able to DRIVE down these streets. Literally, you turned off of Snelling directly into the fair grounds, through the giant blue and green State Fair gates. You didn't just park on Judson Ave. or anything, but you could make your way to back behind the grandstand or up on machinery hill. If you take at some of those areas now you will notice that alot of important booths have sprung up direcly where the traffic used to operate. The deepfried candy bars would be run over by the first Yukon in the joint if the whole situation hadn't changed. There are still alot of wide open expanses, boulevards in the French sense of the term you could say, a promenade of sorts. But those are really just in the areas where excessive first and last weekend traffic would make it impassible otherwise. Anyway, I am not going to blabber on a whole lot further but to say that I have always loved the fair. Many of my fondest memories are of mini-donuts and cookies for breakfast, pronto pups and cheesecurds for lunch, random shitty all afternoon, and a show at the Grandstand before cotton candy and caramel apples for the ride home and for a top-of-the-fridge snack the day after.
Since about mid-end of high school the whole family up at the crack of dawn to the fair tradtion has sort of given way to my trips with mi amigos and the like. I have probably regailed ya'll with the tale of Wilking and the pot-butter, but if not I will save it for another time. This year I was pleased on a number of levels: I got to go with my new-wife (who has very few experiences of the fair whatsoever, certainly, not of my style of fair-going), one of my groomsfolk (whom had never accompanied me to the fair, though he is obviously a lover of the fine eaterizations and sublime beauty presided over by Princess Kay as well) , and his son (whom went to the fair last year, but not with me, not with such phat hair, and was the first younger folk to accompany me). Basically, I'm talkin' Katie, AJ, and Kaya.
We had to be home at some point before school started, but also had some fair lookin priority. As a result we decided to get up early Thursday, hit up St. Paul's finest, and then drive to Chicago and stay with Katie's Aunt and Uncle, since I fucking hate driving the whole mofucking drive in one sitting. We picked up the A, the J, and the K about 8:30 and despite my failure to get into the turning lane, were on machinery hill just moments after 9:00. The first weekend of the fair is a madhouse, but the weekdays leading up to it, especially in the morning, it is pretty calm. We took advantage of this fact and while we did glance at the tractors on our way down, we pretty much made a bee-line for donut city. I believe we started by going for the fair special, three bags for 8 bucks. I love these things, and who doesn't but I actually think that the Big K may have me beat here. I mean, he didn't eat more than me and if we were competing I would fucking hope I could roll even the world's finest 3 year old competitive eater, but if you go donuts per-pound of eater, I got smacked. We ended up having at least 4, maybe 5 bags total, and based on the sugar accumulation on his face, I would estimate he ate at least 2 of them. We decidded that we needn't go far to hit on the days finest culinary accomplishment. Its in the food building, no, I correct myself, it is the raison d'etre for the fucking food building. If you don't know what I am referring to yet: 1) I feel so bad for you, we will talk next summer 2) you will have to wait just a couple sentences.
I noticed, before we even walked in, that one of the big changes which occurred in the two years since I was last on the fairgrounds was the basic structure and composition of the joint. That includes the exterior, which got a nice paint job and some neon lights, the plaza outside, which got some new picnic tables and a general cleaning, and the interior, which is all but unrecognizable. I will explain. For the most part the food building was a wide open warehouse of a place. Back when the fair was little more than an livestock and 4H thing, the food building contained almost all the confectionary in the joint. As the occassion grew into something for the general populace, far and wide, the food building became a locus for some classic specialty foods. Now it is apparently one of the hardest tickets to get on the grounds, its expensive and there is a long wait-list. For the most part the places in there (the cinamon rolls, the cheap drinks and footlong booths along the side, the lefse, the thai food, etc.) have been there about as long as I can remember. Once you are established somewhere as a legit component of the state fair I think there is little risk that you aren't going to turn a significant process. The real reason that those businesses have been able to go so hardcore and the reason getting a spot in the food building is such the nuts, is due to the king of all the specialty food stands, which I mentioned a few moments ago. For a long time the middle 40% or so of the food bullding was devoted to this booth, and often more importantly, the lines for it. There were many times I can recall those lines being upward of 20 minutes long, this is for fair food notably, not a sit down sushi joint. Its also not like this was a small time operation, there were probably 15 people working there at busy times, a couple selling, a couple handing out, and the rest working the manufacture. Your average pronto pup stand has 2 tops, sometimes just a kid working the till and his/her mom/pop on the patented Pronto Pup turny-frier. My dad and I almost got in a physical altrication with a group of people who obstinantly refused to understand the basis of line formation in this situation once, and though I doubt I would have actually resorted to physical violence in light of snack food, if there was anything I was gonna smack someone about, this product would probably be it
The manufacture of what you ask, you ignorant prick, cheese baby, cheese. Cheese curds to be technical about it. They are the most delicious and unexplainable thing on the planet earth. Deep fried cheese curds, they have a mild cheddar cheese flavor with a beautifully stringy consistency and just a hint of twang. They are incredible. They are the foundation of the food building and I must admit that the geography of the place post remodel recognizes this fact. The cheese curd booth is no longer a free standing entity, but more like one wall of the building, where lines can form without completely shutting off the traffic around the area. The traditional cute little mouse guy standing atop his cheese has been accented by some neon Deep Fried Cheese Curd lettering high atop the wall in the classic sublimity of the state fair. The process of ordering and receiving the curds has been accented by an ordering procedure which takes obvious cues from the Corn on the Cob stand next to Bayou Bob's Gator Snax on the front-East side of the Grandstand. The dude/tte who you order from prints out a little ticket, qua the movie theater ticket spitter device, which you move down the line and exchange for a tub 'o' cheese. Two orders, two tickets, etc. There are still two or three different ordering and receiving stations, but there seems to be a much better flow.
I suppose I should return to the actual story of our Thursday, rather than just rambling on the general topic of the food building. I should admit, with my commentary on the food building, that we weren't gettin curds at prime curd-eatin time, it was only maybe 9:45 or 10:00 in the morning. Nonetheless, it was good. I bought two orders and grabbed a couple of Cokes from the soda and hot dog thing that lines the South wall of the joint (I should note, it is not exciting, but this booth does provide one of the best deals at the fair, considering your average 20 oz bottle runs at least 2 bucks, the 1.75 32oz-er is well worht the cash and since it is literally the entire length of the building there is never a line to speak of) before we found a spot to rest and munch outside. I think that this particular morning featured a particularly good batch of curds, they were as tasty as they have ever been. So tasty in fact, that though Kaya continued to chow the donuts he ad recently fallen in love with, AJ went back for another two tubs of goldeny yellow deliciosity.
We left the food building to do some walking and checked out the livestock. We didn't do much checking, but I remember that when I was a kid I liked to see cows and horses and stuff, at least a couple of them, so we took K over there. He seemed to enjoy the big moo and I always enjoy checking out the yearly installment of Boarzilla (this year he was 1200 pounds I believe, which is a good dose of bacon, but doesn't hold a hog-fat-candle to the original two-ton boheomoth (to be read "bo-ha-wee-moth" as per Stephen Wright qua Resevoir Dogs, tribeuce) from years back. We also made fun of the alpacas and beefalos, but just glanced around before heading towards the giant slide. We got pronto pups, padre and son made their debut voyage on the giant slide and we walked, people watched and just chilled for a while. We eventually got a bucket of Sweet Martha's and checked out the All-You-Can-Drink Milk booth (another remodeling highlight of this year, instead of the shabby white roughly octagonal structure with a tanker truck parked alongside there is now a classic red miniature dairy barn) which now features chocolate (a high quality addition, though I only tried one glass) and has undergone what I believe is the number three worst example of price inflation I have experienced in my lifetime (smokes and gas being the bastards ahead of the pack). Fucking thing was a quarter when I used to go with the rents, its a dollar now. Next thing you now you won't be able to enjoy a bucket of cookies and a couple cold tall-boys for less than a 20 spot. Regardless, we relaxed for a while, I drank 7 or so glasses of cold moo juice and hung out with Kaya as he explored the fish pond and general wildnerness of the DNR setup. By this point the K man was a little tired, Katie was a little exhausted from dealing with my mix of excitement and voracious unsatiable appetiteosity, so AJ and I directed the crowd over to the dairy bar for a tasty chocolate malt, a glimpse of the opening day's butter sculpture, and the long walk back up machinery hill. Kaya checked out some tractors, which may have been the only truly disappointing development of this year's fair experience. I mean, Kaya had fun, but he didn't know what AJ and I did, that back in the day they used to have big honkin things up there. I mean, I'm not exactly your agricultural equipment expert, but there are fucking lawn mowers with seats and then there are tractors, big fucking thresher things 20 feet high. When we were kids we didn't go on any rides, we just climbed on the gigantic tractors for an hour or two. We sat in the cockpits (are they called cockpits on a tractor?) pretended to drive them through major cities during rush hour (at least I did, maybe I was a little fucked up) and generally dicked around. Those are gone, not a trace. The biggest thing we could find would still fit in the average suburban garage (maybe not alongside a car, but it wasn't huge). Regardless, K enjoyed himself, though I think a majority of his pleasure was derived from directing his father onto a tractor at least a line or two beyond his own. We hit the pet building (cute chocolate colored mini-badger-dogs, which I had never seen and were hella cute) but no pug dogs or St. Bernard's to be seen. As a final tribeuce to my mom I grabbed a bag of cotton candy on the way out and it made a delicious snack for the drive home (loves it). Overall we were there for about 4 hours, and we were on 94 towards Chi-town by 1:30.
It was not one of my longer state fair experiences, but without question it was one of my favorite. Next year I hope to get there a couple times and try out some differnet snacks, though I think the only thing there I haven't had were some of the exotic animals, Safari Snacks, they were called, wild boar and the like. Anyway, we should make plans early and often. If there are those of you who have never experienced the fair ( I mean really experiecned it) we should get together. Maybe we can have a pre-fair planning session in the early summer, head out there some June afternoon for a dry run, map out a food route which will maximize an "appetizer-entree-dessert-dessert-snack-appetizer-entree-dessert-etc." rotation. That can wait. Right now, there is football. Fall rocks.
Peace,
MB-K
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