When I was a kid I lived in a small city that was surrounded by farms. Fall fairs were a chance to see prize animals, jams, pies, local school art, and all that went along with agricultural life. There was always a beauty contest and somebody got crowned Miss something or other. There is still a local Grape and Wine festival since I come from an area where wine is grown. One of the specialty wines that was considered a joke when it first came out in the Hamilton Niagara area, was ice wine. We all drank it because it was a local specialty.
I went on down to the fair at the agricenter in Memphis and what struck me was the distinct lack of an agricultural theme. Although Memphis is surrounded by rural areas, many of them are being turned into suburbs that are in "good school" districts and allow a convenient commute into the city for work. We are increasingly becoming a nation that does not know where its food comes from, and we are not that interested unless scandal erupts. The "slow food movement" and efforts to buy local and organic are clearly efforts to erase that. Since both my husband and I came from areas where that was available, I grew up always trying to buy local. It wasn't a consciously political act, we just thought supporting locals made good economic sense. ironically enough, if you sit down and watch TV for a few hours you will be pummeled by food ads extorting you to either eat out or eat something convenient. If an alien from another planet watched TV for a day they might think eating itself was a national sport. Eating actually is a sport if you ever happened to catch the contests on ESPN.
Here is my warning: since there was a lack of other traditional fair events, I attended the Rodeo, a sport that conjures up strong debate. My familiarity with Rodeo stems from friend who used to do competitive barrel racing and another friend from Texas who loved cowboys and ended up marrying a rancher. Rodeo can be a brutal and violent sport for those who participate. Participants often ride injured and only in the last few years has any protective equipment been added.It is a sport for young folks only. Many animal rights activists question whether it should be a sport at all. Frankly, one does not have to have a self perception of being "radical", to be uneasy about most sports that involve animals. Can the genesis of cruelty toward animals be found in activities that are a part of mainstream society? Did I perpetuate this by stopping by to take a few pictures? There are many human and animal sports that leave me wondering about what it says about our darker sides, that we have commodified into culturally acceptable pastimes, about the nature of entertainment itself, why we seek it out, and how we make our choices about it.
The Rodeo arena had patchy attendance, of course, since we are in the Bible Belt, a prayer was added after the national anthem and there was some patriotic rah, rah in the opening remarks. It seemed forced and flat.
Before stepping into the arena, I watched some border collies at work and saw some cute baby animals.
This one was clearly a pet because she was very interested in the people.
The border collies were very intense, they completely ignored the onlookers, nothing could dissuade them from herding the sheep unless they were leashed.
During the Rodeo, when the cowboys weren't competing, they were intently watching the action. Despite the actual competition, they appear to be a tightly knit group.
Only women compete in barrel racing, and on this night, as is the case often, the bucking horses and bulls won. There were also roping contests and chuck wagon races. The action is always short and intense. One of the Rodeo clowns also acted as the host, and he told a lot of annoying redneck jokes about being dumb and his ex-wives. Nobody laughed at his banter, it mainly seemed to be a way to plug in time in between the events. He did a few tricks with his horse and my guess is that the horse trained him not the other way around.
The action often took place over a span of a few seconds.
People still enjoy rides at fairs and you can't help but enjoy the neon.
Do people actually believe this?
Everybody needs to wolf down a half pound rib-eye sand which.
The food of choice there appeared to be those giant turkey legs and corn dogs. I confess I savor quite a bit of food that is not healthy but nothing there appealed to me because it was very mass produced nothing was uniquely local.
Next week I am going to check out the Millington annual International Goat Days.
Thanks for looking.