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At the State Fair, funnel cakes never get old

There's nothing quite like the State Fair

Date published: 11/15/2009

THE VIRGINIA STATE Fair just completed its maiden voyage at The Meadow Event Park--sandwiching the cool corporate word "Event" between the pleasingly pastoral ones "Meadow" and "Park"-- in bucolic Caroline County. For longtime fairgoers, the change in venue was bittersweet. For so many years in late September, we'd found our collective thrills on Richmond's Strawberry Hill--since 1945, actually, when young Virginia families, seeking pleasant diversions after the tribulations of World War II, found that the State Fair provided the good, clean fun so emblematic of that simpler era.

Despite the change, all those things you remember from childhood fairs remain. The aroma of funnel cakes still mixes (not unpleasantly, oddly enough) with those bovine, porcine, and caprine odors emanating from the livestock pens. Mock-horror (and some very authentic) squeals from the midway punctuate the happy murmur created by thousands of people as they gawked at and ambled by all those food vendors, craft displays, and other amusements (including such sui generis entertainments as racing pigs and chain saw sculptors). And the midway continues to feature such rickety (the thrills are not all engineered; some are "value added" due to indifferent maintenance) rides like the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Zipper, and the Himalaya. There are plenty of kiddie rides, too, for the little sensation seekers.

And no midway is complete without the really strange stuff. How about Angel, the Snake Girl? Or the World's Smallest Woman? The World's Largest Horse? The World's Longest Snake? You get the picture: the biggest, the smallest, the most extreme. Sideshows have always been about deviations from the mean. (To say nothing about the mean deviants who sometimes prowl the midway. Just let it be said: Freak shows exist both inside and outside those darkened, ominous trailers.)

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Date published: 11/15/2009