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.
Vendor, Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul, 1974. Gift of Tom Arndt. Top photo also of the Minnesota State Fair by Tom Arndt, from 1976, gift of First Banks.