It’s fair season! Live animals, greasy food, games of chance

I feel it’s obligatory, when touring a county fair, to at least make a brief pilgrimage to see the winners of the 4-H animal competitions. Last weekend, at the annual Wyandotte County Fair, I paid homage to all the farm animals.

Don’t ask me why the pigs, chickens, rabbits and lambs receive the blue ribbons and various titles. But I did ask one of the participating farmers if the animals were judged for “cuteness,” and he looked at me as if I were a lunatic. I mean, there I was — someone who has never had the slightest interest in “farming” — walking about in the oppressive heat, looking at ducks and chickens pecking hopelessly in their wire cages, and all I could think about was the cruelty of it all and how it really was time for me to become a vegetarian. But then I got the hell out of the animal displays, ate a corn dog and drank a Hi-C fruit punch and considered playing one of those carny games (the one where you use a mallet to boost a rubber frog onto a lily pad). 

My friends like to go to county fairs to see the animals, see the people, maybe get on the Dragon Wagon or the Ferris wheel. I only go for the food: cotton candy, fried Oreo cookies, corn dogs, snow cones, and that delicious-sounding but always terrible “fresh-squeezed lemonade” that tastes like lemon-scented Pledge furniture polish diluted in swamp water. It was so hot, the concoction was actually kind of tasty.

I eat corn dogs only once a year — at a county fair. Ditto funnel cakes and snow cones. The rest of the year, I never even think of those culinary creations. But the unbearable heat along with the combined fragrance of penned animals, burnt sugar and bubbling vegetable oil works almost as an aphrodisiac. But instead of sex, I crave carnival food. The more unhealthy, the better.

The Wyandotte County Fair closed on Saturday, but the Johnson County Fair in Gardner, Kansas, is now open and selling all of that glorious carny cuisine for the next five days at the Johnson County Fairgrounds (136 East Washington Street, Gardner). The coronation of the 4-H Rodeo Queen and Princess is tonight at 6:45 p.m.; the carnival midway officially opens tomorrow at 5 p.m.