TBT~ Fair Game!

           

           I know TBTs are more fun when we show pics of shoulder pads and bad haircuts, but when  a dear friend booked the date (months in advance) to make sure we didn't miss it...well, just thinking of fairs I've known and loved triggered a floodgate of memories, (especially from my past two years)~

Now that I’m back home, the Wilson Country Fair and I are starting a new relationship, complete with grown up photo ops and all new fair memories. For instance, three years back, (my year of firsts) I was back home full time; I was growing my first garden ever, and I was brand new into cookbooks, which gave me the bright idea of hanging at the fair in daylight hours just to see what kinds of people entered baking contests. I wanted to know these ladies…Study them like a hawk…Ask them trade secrets… Get them to share a recipe or two if they would. So I called my best bud to come hang with me at the women’s building so I could study bake-off competitions and their people.        

  Since we were going to be there a few hours anyway and because my friend is a seriously good baker herself, (her name is even “Baker”) she said, “Well, if we’re going to be there anyway, I’m entering a cake~I have a recipe that never loses.”

  “Knock yourself out. Grab the ingredients. Win or lose, we’ll take a picture and put it in the next cookbook. I'll pay for things."

  She came into my house, touting 2 bags of groceries and one sad face. “I can’t enter," says she, spilling bags on counters…You have to be a resident of Wilson County.” (She hails from Dekalb.)

  “How hard is it?” asks the girl whose never made a scratch cake in her life.

  “It takes time, but if you can read and follow instructions, you can do it…I’ll walk you through it, but I can’t do it for you. That would be cheating.”

     With that, I began the tedious process of baking from scratch, sifting every ingredient, squishing up bananas, doing everything by the book. I was up for the experience, both on how to bake a decent scratch cake and how to enter a contest. (2 more firsts) Standing in line with some seriously fine looking cake people, I was asking myself “What WERE you thinking, Evins?”

 Good news is, sometimes you gotta put thinking aside and go with the flow…When in Rome… I was loving the experience and amazingly I DID win! My friend was right. It was an awesome recipe (in book 2). Why I left that women's building with my very first blue ribbon that day…The Wilson County Fair and I were a match made in heaven... well on our way to being best of buds, UNTIL…

            The next year’s fair, where I was no longer entering contests, but now invited to judge one. (Another first and one I didn’t think through when I signed on; mostly I was just thinking “next cookbook” and meeting more nice ladies I could turn to for advice on more baked goods…This time “pies”~)

            In the moment it was a fun experience, albeit not an easy one. I saw old friends (like Lisa Patton from Channel 2); and I made oodles of new ones. But believe you me, judging is HARD work. As if making a final decision wasn’t hard enough, the amount of pie I digested in a 2 hour window of time was really hard and what became really, really hard were my insides after eating too much gluten in such a short window. (I’m not blaming anyone’s pie; they were all delightful. I’m blaming poor judgment by a girl who’d forgotten her family history of Crohn’s). Yep, that little photo op landed me in not one, but two emergency rooms before the weekend was over. My doctor said I was in “gluten” shock. Having never sweated the whole gluten free kinda stuff, I didn’t know you could have such a shock, but turns out, you can!

            Ah, the memories of fairs past~ I can’t say as I didn’t have a blast at the time, but from now on, I must curtail my intake of all things  junky and limit myself to portions more in keeping with my size. 37 bites of 37 different pies with a pickle in between for palet-cleansing purposes, was probably not my wisest move. But I'm not a total gluten virgin, corn dogs and funnel cakes being what they are...

          So here's to year 3 at the hometown fair~

          This time I'm neither entering or judging. 

          I'm just going.

          (And I can't wait!)

Nothing Compares to County Fairs

         

           It was a portal in time…a wormhole of the country kind. Walking across that bridge was like walking back into my childhood, complete with the memories that came gushing with that first whiff of funnel cake (as if the drive to get there hadn’t primed us already). The only thing better than a county fair is a friend to share it with ~

Country’s in my blood, and fairs are in my bones. I come from a long line of fair-lovin’ fools. At the time of my birth my daddy was part owner of the Wilson County Fair, an honor he shared with my great, great uncle A.W. McCartney, (a.k.a. “Mr. Wilson County Fair” from way back in the 1920s). They say Uncle Andy lived and breathed that fair… he literally took his last breath wrapping up one Saturday night. As Daddy told it, it was the fair’s biggest attendance to date and the man just keeled over dead doing the final count of the tickets. “Everyone should die doing what they love…” Daddy would say. “At least the man died happy.”

While the Wilson County fair is our state’s largest, it’s the DeKalb County fair that I knew best. This one gave me my very first paying gig of selling season passes the week prior to--money that went right back to the fair the next week in exchange for every gold fish and stuffed critter my little arms could carry.
        They call it the Grandpa Fair of the South. DeKalb County Fair is Tennessee’s oldest. (This year marks 158). While Wilson’s is a much larger fair, you’ll find none more charming than the one that rolls into Alexandria each summer. (They used to have it in October, but one year it snowed, so that ended that. Now it’s in July.) Once privately run, in 1994 fair ownership was re-configured and today it’s the residents of Alexandria (population 973) that make it happen-- one of the sweetest little hometown efforts you ever did see!

Between puppet shows, squealing kids and the Little Miss and Mr. competition, it was a busy night for a small town. We got our fix of corndogs, snow cones and cotton candy and threw enough darts to win a big red velvet rose. Taking back roads home we reminisced with falling down store fronts and old church cemeteries all that remained to commemorate the people, places and events that served to shape us into the adults we never thought we’d become.