McGinn: I’m OK with never going to another fair

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 6:58 AM Friday, July 30, 2010

I can’t say I’m a big fan of the fair — and not just the Clark County Fair, which ends Friday, July 30, but all fairs.

Then again, if it weren’t for the fact that I like ground chuck riddled with growth hormones and things made with high fructose corn syrup, I probably wouldn’t have much interest in agriculture, either.

In fact, if I never went to another fair, I’d be OK with that.

I’m not a farm person and, really, fairs are for farm people.

Even though I grew up in Iowa, the first time I visited a farm I got shocked by an electric fence in an attempt to pet a pig.

The second time, while helping a friend’s dad “spray beans,” I somehow managed to actually spray herbicide in my face.

And so the real fair happens on a side of the fairgrounds most people never get around to seeing, mainly because of a perceived lack of anything fun — too few places to buy a deep-fried Zagnut, fewer places at which to buy a Confederate flag and no places at all to blow $10 trying to win a plush Tweety Bird that smells of secondhand smoke, armpit and cooking oil.

There’s serious business happening at the real fair, with ribbons to be won, money to be made and tears to be shed by young 4-H’ers at the sight of pigs with nicknames like Flapjack or Buster being trucked off to Oscar Mayer, where the USDA assures us they’ll be humanely bled to death.

All that other junk is for the rest of us.

Like a dog whose owners have installed one of those invisible fences around their yard, most non-farm fairgoers don’t even attempt to venture through a barn or go watch the pygmy goat show.

It’s not that they’re afraid of being shocked — it’s that they know which side of the fair has the free plastic flyswatters.

But even if getting a free plastic flyswatter meant having to take a slight electrical jolt to the neck, I have no doubt that some of these people would actually go through with it, provided they could also make a grab for a News-Sun chip clip, a refrigerator magnet from the National Guard recruiter and a cardboard fan adorned with that painting of Jesus banging on a door.

I manned the News-Sun booth earlier this week — watching people grab chip clips and flyswatters off our table like we’d just laid out $100 bills — but left the newsroom an hour early in order to take in the sights, the sounds and the smells of the county fair.

I was done in 10 minutes.

You know, after a while, it’s no longer all that fun to walk by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union booth and see that same picture of what happens to the liver of someone suffering from cirrhosis.

The inner workings of the Clark County Engineer’s Office no longer hold the same sort of mysticism that they once did, either.

I’m also not in the market for senior pictures or a funeral or a Curves membership.

Even the midway isn’t all that exciting after a certain age — like being a middle-aged woman at a rock concert, the carnies won’t even look at you anymore except out of desperation late on a Wednesday night.

They know that you know there aren’t enough bb’s in that little machine gun to actually shoot out the star.

Even the famous food loses its appeal when you’re older.

“I wonder how long I’ll have to be on the elliptical,” you begin to think, “after I eat this fried Ding Dong and a pork tenderloin the size of a Smart car?”

Now I finally know why my parents always got this look of dread whenever we begged them to take us to the fair.

I can’t wait to give my kid that same look.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.

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