Ironically, it’s the botched maneuvers that allow one to see how baton-twirling (which to me had always seemed sleight-of-handish and occult) works in terms of mechanics. It seems to consist not in twirling so much as sort of spinning the baton on your knuckle while the fingers underneath work and writhe furiously for some reason, maybe supplying torque. Some serious kinetic force is coming from somewhere, clearly. A sort of attempted sidearm-twirl sends a baton Xing out and hitting a big woman’s kneecap with a ringing clang, and her husband puts his hand on her shoulder as she sits up very rigid and white, pop-eyed, her mouth a little bloodless hyphen. I miss good old Native Companion, who’s the sort of person who can elicit conversation even from the recently baton-struck.
A team of ten-year-olds from the Gingersnap class have little cotton bunnytails on their costumes’ bottoms and rigid papier-mâché ears, and they can do some serious twirling. A squad of eleven-year-olds from Towanda does an involved routine in tribute to Operation Desert Storm. To most of the acts there’s either a cutesy ultrafeminine aspect or a stern butch military one; there’s little in between. Starting with the twelve-year-olds — one team in black spandex that looks like cheesecake leotards — there is, I’m afraid, a frank sexuality that begins to get uncomfortable. You can already see some of the sixteen-year-olds out under the basketball hoop doing little warm-up twirls and splits, and they’re disturbing enough to make me wish there was a copy of the state’s criminal statutes handy and prominent. Also disturbing is that in an empty seat next to me is a gun, a rifle, real-looking, with a white wood stock, which who knows whether it’s really real or part of an upcoming martial routine or what, that’s been sitting here ownerless ever since the competition started.
Oddly, it’s the cutesy feminine routines that result in the really serious casualties. A dad standing up near the stands’ top with a Toshiba viewfinder to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls forward onto somebody eating a Funnel Cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them, and there’s an extended halt to the action, during which I decamp — steering way clear of the sixteen-year-olds on the basketball court — and as I clear the last row yet another baton comes wharp-wharping cruelly right over my shoulder, caroming viciously off big R.’s inflated thigh.
08/15/1105h. A certain swanky East-Coast organ is unfortunately denied journalistic impressions of the Illinois Snakes Seminar, the Midwestern Birds of Prey Demonstration, the Husband-Calling Contest, and something the Media Guide calls “The Celebrity ‘Moo-Moo’ Classic”—all of these clearly must-sees — because they’re all also in venues right near the Food and Dessert Tent Grotto, which even the abstract thought of another proffered wedge of Chocolate Silk Triple-Layer Cake in the shape of Lincoln’s profile produces a pulsing ache in the bulge I’ve still got on the left side of my abdomen. So right now I’m five acres and six hundred food-booths away from midday’s must-see events, in the slow stream of people entering the Expo Bldg.
I’d planned on skipping the Expo Bldg., figuring it was full of like home-furniture-refinishing demos and futuristic mockups of Peoria’s skyline. I’d had no idea it was… air-conditioned. Nor that it comprises a whole additional different IL State Fair with its own separate pros and patrons. It’s not just that there are no carnies or ag-people in here. The place is jammed with people I’ve seen literally nowhere else on the Fairgrounds. It’s a world and gala unto itself, self-sufficient: the fourth Us of the Fair.
The Expo Bldg.’s a huge enclosed mallish thing, AC’d down to 80°, with a cement floor and a hardwood mezzanine overhead. Every interior inch here is given over to adversión and commerce of a very special and lurid sort. Just inside the big east entrance a man with a headset mike is slicing up a block of wood and then a tomato, standing on a box in a booth that says SharpKut, hawking these spinoffs of Ginsu knives, “AS SEEN ON TV.” Next door is a booth offering personalized pet-I.D. tags. Another’s got the infamous mail-order-advertised Clapper, which turns on appliances automatically at the sound of two hands clapping (but also at the sound of a cough, sneeze, or sniff, I discover — caveat emp.). There’s booth after booth, each with an audience whose credulity is heartrending. The noise in the Expo Bldg. is apocalyptic and complexly echoed, sound-carpeted by crying children and ceiling-fans’ roar. A large percentage of the booths show signs of hasty assembly and say AS SEEN ON TV in bright brave colors. The booths’ salesmen all stand raised to a slight height; all have headset microphones and speakers with built-in amps and rich neutral media voices.
It turns out these franchised Expo vendors, not unlike the Blomsness carnies (any comparison to whom makes the vendors show canine teeth, though), go from State Fair to State Fair all summer. One young man demonstrating QUICK ‘N’ BRITE—“A WHOLE NEW CONCEPT IN CLEANING”—was under the persistent impression that he was in Iowa.
There’s a neon-bordered booth for something called a RAINBOW-VAC, a vacuum cleaner whose angle is that it uses water in its canister instead of a bag, and the canister is clear Lucite, so you get a graphic look at just how much dirt it’s getting out of a carpet sample. People in polyester slacks and/or orthopedic shoes are clustered three-deep around this booth, greatly moved, but all I can think of is that the thing looks like the world’s biggest heavy-use bong, right down to the water’s color. There’s a predictably strong odor surrounding the Southwestern Leatherworx booth. Likewise at Distressed Leather Luggage (missing hyphen? misplaced mod?). I’m not even halfway down one side of the Expo’s main floor, list-wise. The mezzanine has still more booths. There’s a booth that offers clock-faces superimposed on varnished photorealist paintings of Christ, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe. There’s a Computerized Posture Evaluation booth. A lot of the headsetted vendors are about my age or younger. Something ever so slightly over-groomed about them suggests a Bible-college background. It’s just cool enough in here for a sweat-soaked shirt to get clammy. One vendor recites a pitch for Ms. Suzanne Somers’s THIGHMASTER while a lady in a leotard lies on her side on the fiberboard counter and demonstrates the product. I’m in the Expo Bldg. almost two hours, and every time I look up the poor lady’s still at it with the THIGHMASTER. Most of the Expo vendors won’t answer questions and give me beady looks when I stand there making notes in the Barney tablet. But the THIGHMASTER lady — friendly, garrulous, violently cross-eyed, in (understandably) phenomenal physical condition — informs me she gets an hour off for lunch at 1400 but is back on her side all the way to closing at 2300. I remark that her thighs must be pretty well Mastered by now, and her leg sounds like a bannister when she raps her knuckle against it, and we have a good laugh together until her vendor finally makes her ask me to scram.
The Copper Kettle All-Butter Fudge booth does brisk air-conditioned business. There’s something called a Full Immersion Body Fat Analysis for $8.50. A certain CompuVac Inc. offers a $1.5 °Computerized Personality Analysis. Its booth’s computer panel’s tall and full of blinking lights and reel-to-reel tapes, like an old bad sci-fi-film computer. My own Personality Analysis, a slip of paper that protrudes like a tongue from a red-lit slot, says “Your Boldness of Nature is Ofset With The Fear Of Taking Risk” (sic2). My suspicion that there’s a guy hunched behind the blinking panel feeding its slot recycled fortune-cookie slips is overwhelming but unverifiable.