You know all the superlatives about the Minnesota State Fair, or you should: Highest attendance outside of the Texas state fair, which is far longer; held every year since 1859, a year after statehood (except on five occasions, due to various wars, epidemics, etc.); a corn dog you could wear as a belt.
I hated it. Just the idea of it. I went once in the first 20 years I lived here, and then only for a story. It was too hot, too crowded, the air heavy with grease, a kind of dark, satanic mill of lowbrow entertainment. “For 12 days of the year,” I once wrote, “the devil wears stretch pants.”
Then I met a regular. A woman who entered the baking contests, whose relatives had actually won them. She went every year, sometimes more than once. And now…so do I.
In fact I love it. I love it the way Tom Arndt captures it in these classic photos from the 1970s and ’80s. From a distance. Tender. Stuck in the perpetual dusk of adolescent hopes. In the great aching alchemy of community gatherings, we redeem ourselves through sheer proximity, a kind of paradox in which we become less base by rallying around our lowest common denominators: food, forced frivolity, and frighteningly large vegetables.
Enjoy.