Blue Ribbon Blues

In one arena and out the other

by Max Alexander

Since quitting my day job and moving to Maine, I no longer attend the Cannes Film Festival. Instead, I go to county fairs in Union and Windsor -- the only places in rural Maine where you can see purple hair and navel rings, if that's what you're looking for. A Maine agricultural fair, with its tractor displays and dusty poultry halls, is a world away from the alleged glamour of the French Riviera (where you can see purple hair and nipple rings, if that's what you're looking for), and I can't say a stroll down the Windsor Fairgrounds' Beano Boulevard transported me back to the Rue d'Antibes. Still, nothing like a Maine fair instills the feelings of excitement, confusion, and angst that greeted me every year on the Côte d'Azur. Consider:

Film festival and Maine fair both feature bewildering and overlapping event schedules that are invariably wrong. Both are administered by impenetrable commissions whose representatives communicate using the international sign language of the bureaucrat -- the shrugged shoulder. Both are good places to lose your wallet at night. Both lure rubes into vast halls of wagering where the odds are stacked tremendously in favor of the house. Both transform quiet communities into chattering linguistic Babels, where strangers from exotic places like Burkina Faso (Cannes) or Rhode Island (Maine fair) mingle with wide-eyed locals. Finally, both feature overpriced food whose principal ingredient is the french fry.

Nowhere is that delicacy more celebrated than at the Windsor Fair, where the potato schools include Old Orchard Beach Style, Lady Tish's, Kevin's, Patti's, Bob's Famous, Mr. C's, Fresh Cut, and World's Greatest. Yes, the french fry connoisseur enters another world at Windsor -- a world that includes Reggie's World of Sausage and his can-you-top-this competitor across the midway, Bacon Dogs (eggs or mustard?).

Maine fairs also elevate the indigenous cuisine -- best represented by that Yankee classic, fried dough. A masterpiece of function over form, fried dough is essentially a doughnut without all the bother of shaping. It's the same noble do-it-yourself aesthetic that informs everything from barn building to alewife netting in rural Maine. At the Union Fair I ran into my friend Mark Hannibal, who owns a local restaurant, and he mentioned his own kids' addiction to fried dough. "Every year after the fair we try to make it at the restaurant, but it never comes out right," he confessed.

"Have you tried letting your grease get really old and rancid?"

But he was already gone, towed through the crowd by youngsters to the looming Witch Castle. My family followed his, where we joined a throng of fidgeting grade schoolers watching the operator attempt to repair one of the ride's cars. His diagnostic test, which involved repeatedly striking the undercarriage with a claw hammer while cursing in pentameter, confirmed my suspicion that carnival technicians do not take core studies at MIT, much less Harvard Divinity. And the booming economy makes these rides even scarier; workers are hard to find ("Help Wanted" signs papered the Union Fair), and potentially deadly amusements like the Pharaoh's Fury and the Skymaster appeared to be operated by runaways.

Tired of the noise and filth of the Union midway, I left the kids at home when I ventured to the Windsor Fair a week later in search of livestock displays, and was glad I did: there again were the Pharaoh's Fury, the Skymaster, the same glassy-eyed operators. I shivered and headed for the farm museum.

Here I was in my element. Keep your fried dough, just give me a dank barn full of corn binders, potato diggers, and manure spreaders. I suppose today's purple-haired visitors are expected to wonder in awe how people ever used these primitive wooden tools, but I found myself wishing I had them on my own farm today.

Of course I would need some draft animals to pull them, and my next stop was the livestock arena. Strangely enough it was there on the sagging bleachers, while watching the judges rule on Junior Yearling Heifers, that I first felt as if I were back in Cannes. This absurd competition, in which way-too-serious teenagers (no purple hair here) used metal gaffs to pull cows' feet into formation for the inspection of ribbon-wielding experts, reminded me of the equally ridiculous film competitions I'd seen at festivals from Cannes to Berlin to Venice and the Oscars. The golden palms, lions, and bears handed out at these media frenzies are all golden calves -- and while I've never been a huge fan of Woody Allen, I've always admired his refusal to participate in artistic competitions.

It's a lonely outpost, I know. The pressure to be the world's best -- in life, sports, films, heifers, and french fries -- is great. But I think kids in rural Maine should lighten up next summer. Yes, that means less blue ribbon mania, but also less body piercings and bacon dogs. Besides, they need to save their appetites for the blueberry pie eating contest. n

Max Alexander lives in Washington, Maine.

He can be reached at malex@midcoast.com.