08/15/0840h. A Macy’s-float-sized inflatable Ronald, seated and eerily Buddha-like, presides over the north side of the Club Mickey D’s tent. A family is having their picture taken in front of the inflatable Ronald, arranging their little kids in a careful pose. Notebook entry: Why?
08/15/0842h. Fourth trip to the bathroom in three hours. Elimination can be a dicey undertaking here. The Fair has scores of Midwest Pottyhouses brand portable toilets at various strategic sites. Midwest Pottyhouses are man-sized plastic huts, reminiscent of Parisian pissoirs but also utilized for numero deux, clearly. Each Midwest Pottyhouse has its own undulating shroud of flies, plus your standard heavy-use no-flush outhouse smell, and I for one would rather succumb to a rupture than use a Pottyhouse, though the lines for them are long and sanguine. The only real restrooms are in the big exhibit buildings. The Coliseum’s is like a grade school boys’ room, especially the long communal urinal, a kind of huge porcelain trough. Performance- and other anxieties abound here, with upwards of twenty guys all flanking and facing each other, each with his unit out. All the mens rooms have hot-air blowers instead of paper towels, meaning you can’t wash your face, and all have annoying faucet controls you have to keep a grip on to operate, meaning toothbrushing is a contorted affair. The highlight is watching Midwestern ag-guys struggle with suspenders and overall straps as they exit the stalls.
08/15/0847h. A quick scan of the Draft Horse Show. The Coliseum’s interior is the size of a blimp hangar, with an elliptical dirt arena. The stands are permanent and set in cement and go on and up forever. The stands are maybe 5 % full. Echoes are creepy, but the smell of the arena’s moist earth is lush and nice. The draft horses themselves are enormous, eight feet high and steroidically muscled. I think they were originally bred to pull things; God only knows their function now. There are two- and three-year-old Belgian Stallions, Percherons, and the Bud-famous Clydesdales with their bellbottoms of hair. The Belgians are particularly thick through the chest and rear quarter (I’m starting to develop an eye for livestock). Again, the Official wears a simply bitching white cowboy hat and stands at ease, legs well apart. This one has a weak chin and something wrong with one of his eyelids, though, at least. All the competitors are again shampooed and combed, black and gunpowder-gray and the dull white of sea-foam, their tails cropped and the stumps decorated with girlish bows that look obscene against all this muscle. The horses’ heads bob when they walk, rather like pigeons’ heads. They’re led in the now familiar concentric circles by their owners, big-bellied men in brown suits and string ties. At obscure PA commands, the owners break their animals into thundering canter, holding their bridles and running just under the head, stomachs bouncing around (the men’s). The horses’ hoofs throw up big clods of earth as they run, so that it sort of rains dirt for several yards behind them. They look mythic when they run. Their giant hoofs are black and have shiny age-striations like a tree-stump’s rings.
It’s something of a relief to see no fast-food buyers on the dais awaiting Auction. As with Beef, though, a young beauty queen in a tiara presides from a flower-decked throne. It’s unclear just who she is: “Ms. Illinois Horseflesh” sounds unlikely, as does “Ms. Illinois Draft Horse.” (Though there is a 1993 Illinois Pork Queen, over in Swine.)
08/15/ 0930h. Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit. I’m once again at the capacious McDonald’s tent, at the edge, the titanic inflatable clown presiding. (Why is there no Wal-Mart tent?) There’s a fair-sized crowd in the basketball bleachers at one side and rows of folding chairs at the other. It’s the Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals. A metal loudspeaker begins to emit disco, and little girls pour into the tent from all directions, twirling and gamboling in vivid costume. There’s a symphony of zippers from the seats and stands as video cameras come out by the score, and I can tell it’s pretty much just me and a thousand parents.
The baroque classes and divisions, both team and solo, go from age three (!) to sixteen, with epithetic signifiers — e.g. the four-year-olds compose the Sugar ‘N’ Spice division, and so on. I’m in a chair right up front (but in the sun) behind the competition’s judges, introduced as “Varsity Twirlers from the [why?] University of Kansas.” They are four frosted blondes who smile a lot and blow huge grape bubbles.
The twirler squads are all from different towns. Mount Vernon and Kankakee seem especially rich in twirlers. The twirlers’ spandex costumes, differently colored for each team, are paint-tight and really brief in the legs. The coaches are grim, tan, lithe-looking women, clearly twirlers once, on the far side of their glory now and very serious-looking, each with a clipboard and whistle. It’s all a little like figure skating. The teams go into choreographed routines, each routine with a title and a designated disco or show tune, full of compulsory baton-twirling maneuvers with highly technical names. A mom next to me is tracking scores on what looks almost like an astrology chart, and is in no mood to explain anything to a novice baton-watcher. The routines are wildly complex, and the loudspeaker’s play-by-play is mostly in code. All I can determine for sure is that I’ve bumbled into what has to be the single most spectator-hazardous event at the Fair. Missed batons go all over, whistling wickedly. The three-, four-, and five-year-olds aren’t that dangerous, though they do spend most of their time picking up dropped batons and trying to hustle back into place — the parents of especially fumble-prone twirlers howl in fury from the stands while the coaches chew gum grimly — but the littler girls don’t have the arm-strength to really endanger anybody, although one of the judges does take a Sugar ‘N’ Spice’s baton across the bridge of the nose and has to be helped from the tent.
But when the seven- and eight-year-olds hit the floor for a series of “Armed Service Medleys” (spandex with epaulets and officers’ caps and batons over shoulders like M-16s), errant batons start pinwheeling into the tent’s ceiling, sides, and crowd with real force. I myself duck several times. A man just down the row takes one in the plexus and falls over in his metal chair with a horrid crash. The batons (one stray I picked up had REGULATION LENGTH embossed down the shaft) have white rubber stoppers on each end, but it’s that dry hard kind of rubber, and the batons themselves are not light. I don’t think it’s an accident that police nightsticks are also called service batons.
Physically, even within same-age teams, there are marked incongruities in size and development. One nine-year-old is several heads taller than another, and they’re trying to do an involved back-and-forth duet thing with just one baton, which ends up taking out a bulb in one of the tent’s steel hanging lamps and showering part of the stands with glass. A lot of the younger twirlers look either anorexic or gravely ill. There are no fat baton-twirlers. The enforcement of this no-endomorph rule is probably internaclass="underline" a fat person’d have to get exactly one look at herself in tight sequinned spandex to abandon all twirling ambitions for all time.