Dale Chihuly at the New York Botanical Garden

The Dale Chihuly show at the New York Botanical Garden has just closed, but the gardens are still beautiful and full of color. See more pictures from the Chihuly show and read musings at The Crow's Nest, companion site for this blog:http://home.earthlink.net/~sestemont

Curiouser and Curiouser: The Bloomsburg Fair 2006

Sometimes you can travel by staying home. For one week every autumn, the wide world comes to the Susquehanna river valley town of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.

Bloomsburg, the only town in PA (there are townships aplenty, the distinction is an administrative one) hosts the Bloomsburg Fair at the end of September. Begun as a one-day agricultural fair in 1855, the fair today encompasses several acres of animals, tractor exhibits, fiddle contests, rides, carnival games, and hot sausage stands. Thousands of people attend the fair each day (for a weekly total this year of 413,203.)

If you live in north central PA, you are either a fair aficionado, or a perennial fair curmudgeon. I’m something in between. It’s easy to mock the deep-fried sugar-slathered food, the demolition derby, and the livestock fun night, which involves dressing cows up for a yuk. But I was hooked several years ago when I visited the fair one foggy morning just after the gates opened at 7:30. While I ate my buckwheat pancakes and a priceless cup of coffee to ward off the river chill, one of the carnies let his monkeys out for a walk in a large open field nearby. Seven beautiful large brown monkeys in red velvet Sgt. Pepper jackets grazed calmly though the tall grass in the fog, stopping occasionally to yawn or scratch. The image will stay in my mind forever. I’ve been coming back to the Fair with a camera every year since, hoping for a chance to catch something as sublime again. It hasn’t happened yet, but I keep trying.

This year I was looking for carnie art.


The décor on the façade of Crystal
Lil’s, a fun house with a wild-west
theme, owes a lot to R. Crum and
also to Gilbert Shelton, the creator
of The Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers.

In another part of the fairgrounds, a trailer complex of animal oddities has an older kind of carnie atmosphere, reminiscent of revival meetings and roadside stands. Here you may see both the Smallest Horse and the Giant Rat. There was a rumor going around this year (Mike started it) that they were the same animal, but you entered from different doors.

Nestled between the Orient Express roller coaster and the Wild Claw, the "Smallest Woman in the World" is billed as an educational exhibit, promoting West Indian culture. She’s located apart from the regular midway with its bright banners advertising features like the mermaid "Aqualina…Tropical Temptress!" Here there is no pretense to education, just good clean fun. (And no, the irony is not lost on me.) The art of the midway is beautiful and strange, but I can’t justify buying a ticket to see the "exhibits" the art depicts. Does that make me principled, or just a hypocrite?

The Peruvian musicians were here again this year, but I couldn’t find the booth selling bright commercial lithographs of Gonesha and Krishna with the Milkmaids. Perhaps the frail old gentleman selling them has moved on or gone back home to Calcutta, replaced by booths with Spongebob Square Pants knock-offs and iridescent whirly-gigs.

The Fair is everything all at once. If you can look past the kitsch, there’s a lot here that’s creative and authentic. The local Polish churches serving up hot lunches of haluski, pierogies, and stuffed cabbage rolls--advertised as "pigeons"--aren’t bad either.