...But You Can't Take the Country Out of the City

When I was reminded this summer of the last remaining functioning farm in New York City, the longest continually farmed land (by white people) in the state, there was no question that Jeff and I had to go check it out. Of all the crazy things to do in this city, surely this must be among the craziest. And the Queens County Fair, held in mid-September out on the Nassau County border in Floral Park, a neighborhood I'd never heard of, was the perfect opportunity.

Being good Midwesterners, we love a good fair, and having lived in Minnesota for a good chunk of time, we've had a taste of the best. (The Minnesota State Fair, though it is the second largest state fair in the country after Iowa, will always get my blue ribbon. But I am not without my prejudices.) The Queens County Fair is a charming escape from urban frenzy, recalling the ghosts of an agrarian past that New York City has all but forgotten, but it seemed to me ultimately a desperate recreation of a Queens that no longer exists. (I have found that Queens is often the site of such grand anachronisms. Witness the World's Fairgrounds in Flushing Meadows.)

For the owners of the prize-winning chickens and wood carvings, this is still obviously a very present and real lifestyle, but for the vast majority of us, this is all a vision of "the old days." The farmhouse, the fairgrounds, the vegetation, the animals — the odors — it is all an exhibit. The site is in fact a museum — a source of amusement and distraction for us city folk, no longer front and center in our minds as the backbone of a way of life.

Also, it's a very white audience, which may have reflected the local demographic 50 years ago, but not today. The clearest example of this that I saw was the Bavarian tent, with its beers and brats and lederhosen. It's a long-time staple of events like this, but why? The gyros and kebabs of the midway could have come out of Astoria, maybe, but a far better representation of the county might have included empanadas, halal chicken and rice, or maybe some tandoori or curry. Not that I have anything at all against beers and brats. Or lederhosen.

A woman working in the livestock tent said to a patron, "City kids don't have a chance to see this stuff." Goats and cows and chickens are exotic to us now. Ironically, these days, as suburbs and exurbs encroach on the shrinking countryside, many country kids don't get to see so much of this stuff either. Neither good nor bad, I suppose; just true.

A pictorial:

Green Acres — You can see we're still in the city.


MENSA Chicken — Some of the chickens were wandering around the fairgrounds, while others among them were too stupid or unlucky to figure out how to escape their pens.


Big Cock — Roosters really are sort of beautiful, even if they're standing next to a dirty man-made "pond."


Turkey — "When Thanksgiving time is here, then it's our turn to gobble, gobble, gobble."


Ouch! — Do you cook with these or defend yourself against burglars?


Orange Crush — I have a perfectly healthy obsession with pumpkins.


Eat 'Em Up — Oh, what I couldn't do with a sharp knife and a cutting board.


Purple Haze — Look at all the shiny, purple lusciousness. This was one of the most beautiful things I saw at the fair.


All Tarted Up — Midwesterners like me have a special fondness for rhubarb.


Super Size — These hogs are so painfully obese, they can hardly stand, and their bellies scrape the ground when they walk.


Face to Face — I can hardly tell the difference between this goat and my husband! They're both so cute.


Man and Beast — Arley tries communicating with a billy goat.


Charmer — This guy popped up all over the place. I couldn't tell if he was officially part of the fair or if he was just some creepy guy who showed up with a snake to show around. Touch my snake! Touch my snake!


White Men Singing — Seeing these guys sort of reinforced the whiteness of the whole thing.

The petting farm, pony rides, hay rides, magic shows and blue ribbon-winning jams and cakes and breads locked away in acrylic display boxes, each one with a single piece missing, were all standard fare. (Jeff wants to enter his zucchini bread next year!) Other random oddities, like the guy with the snake, and a kid in a hot air balloon basket demonstrating his flaming apparatus to a small crowd, rounded out the offerings. And of course there was a cornstalk labyrinth, the "Amazing Maize Maze," which sounds funny no matter who says it. (What happens if the kids can't find their way out? I imagined little skeletons scattered around the maze at harvest time.)

I was disappointed to have missed the pig races. Watching those little frenzied curly tails bobbing around the track was always a favorite part of my own home town's annual fair.

The frog jumping sounded promising, too. I was imagining something out of Mark Twain, but the emcee frustrated much of his audience, including me, by dragging the show out to exhaustive lengths (much like this blog post) before actually pulling any frogs out of his buckets. All I saw in the time I waited around was a tree frog peeing repeatedly on some poor little girl's hand.

And maybe that's the best place to close. I'm glad to have seen the Queens County Fair. It was precious. I am amazed that such a thing can still exist at all. And at the end of the day, I guess, we wash the animal excretions off our hands and return to our city, leaving the farm behind us.

Orange Cones, Beware!

A friend of mine who writes a column and blog about transportation for the Minneapolis Star Tribune took a cameraman with him to the annual MetroTransit "Roadeo" to do a story. He ended up behind the wheel of one himself with hilarious results. This is what most of us would look like driving a bus.

Read more here.

More Treat, Less Trick

Halloween used to be fun. My mom and I would Scotch tape paper skeletons with metal rivet joints all over the house. My dad helped me carve the most elaborate jack-o'-lanterns, using the leftover pieces for ears and horns and other accessories. Then I'd take the biggest pillow case I could find and run around the neighborhood taking candy from strangers.

These days, it's all about Saw IV and pictures of pale, creepy babies with googly-eyes. What was once cute and cartoonish is now dark and serious and disturbing. The kids of the '80s have not yet grown up. They've hijacked Halloween and taken it away from the kids of today.

I was in line at Rite Aid a few days ago when I heard an electronic shriek behind me. It's not unusual to hear kids playing with the noise-making toys stationed throughout the store. This is most notable later in the fall, when the poor Rite Aid employees are assaulted for hour upon hour with a cacophonous melange of Christmas carols.

Sure enough, right next to an arts-and-crafts front-yard signpost directing passersby to Witch Way and Ghoul Gulch, a little boy was taking an appealing package's advice seriously: TRY ME! But this electronic shriek was far worse than tuneless renditions of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Silent Night" all playing over top of one another, because its source was a plastic skeleton about 9 inches tall, sitting in a miniature electric chair. At the touch of a button, a blue light flashed from behind the skeleton, and he jolted and jiggled about in his restraints, moaning and screaming. The light went out, the skeleton stopped shaking, and he said something like, "Whoa ... Let's do that again!"

This isn't even a proper toy. It's not something you can really play with. You just press a button and laugh along at the merry spectacle of a human's death by electrocution.

And the kid's mother was standing there without an expression on her face. I'd rather have the kid play with a toy gun.

Fears for Spears

By total coincidence I watched Factory Girl last night directly before Britney Spears' opening act at the MTV Video Music Awards. I think the pairing offers some notable parallels. Edie Sedgwick was broken down and shattered by publicity and celebrity. Then she died unceremoniously of a drug overdose. Britney has been similarly chewed up by the machine, and she has had her share of public breakdowns. Unlike Edie Sedgwick, however, Britney Spears is fighting back. Unlike Edie Sedgwick, Britney Spears lives. And she probably will for a long time.

I was totally on Britney's side when she went bat shit on those photographers at the gas station. Not insignificantly, her strategic use of an umbrella brought her closer in my mind to a childhood idol of mine. But more to the point, I think I'd lose it too, if I were constantly denied the opportunity to take control of my life by the people who want to record every frame of it.

The girl is working some stuff out. So she turned in a lackluster performance last night. Why should I sing when I can lip sync? Why should I dance when all these other dancers can do all the work? I can just phone in this thing.

And y'all are gonna watch anyway.

And we did.

OK, so last night's performance in Las Vegas wasn't exactly a show stopper. There are a lot of second-rate showgirls in that town who could have given her a run for her money. The sea of blank faces among the who's who in attendance was more entertaining than Britney. But she was out there. And she wore that sequined bikini. You know that had to have been her choice — no one would have recommended it to her. Maybe she's taking some control after all.

I will say this: She looked healthy. Some said fat, but I disagree. I think she looks better as a woman than as an anorexic stick figure.

Whatever she does next will be better. It could hardly be worse. But no one likes to be fooled. I hope we're still there to watch her next time.