First off, my bad. I haven’t posted on here in a week, mostly due to my family being around. Trying to write when company is over is hard enough, but try to get some writing done when there are six people spending time in a one-bedroom apartment! It’s a superhuman writing feat. I, alas, am not superhuman.
So what did I do with my family the whole time we were here? I’ll get to that this week. The thing that stands out most in my mind, though, is the Minnesota State Fair. The Minnesota State Fair has the distinction of being the third largest state fair in the United States, and with that kind of recognition comes a responsibility, if you will, to have events that are truly great, to have displays lesser state fairs might shy away from having. This translates to having some truly awesome bands at the grandstand. Such as Def Leppard, who I saw and cheered without any trace of irony.
The Minnesota State Fair also means butter sculptures of the Princess Kay of the Milky Way contestants. If you’ve never heard of the Princess Kay of the Milky Way before, then you’ve probably never been to Minnesota. The Princess Kay of the Milky Way is the ultimate winner of an annual competition organized by, wait for it, the Midwest Dairy Association. The winner of the competition becomes the goodwill ambassador of the Minnesota dairy industry, a job that includes…well, I don’t really know what it includes, as the Princess Kay of the Milky Way page is currently down. According to Wikipedia, though, the Princess has to make “numerous media and public appearances during the Fair’s 12 days and throughout the coming year on behalf of Minnesota Dairy Farmers.” The contestants all have to be unmarried, childless women under the age of 24, and completed high school. If those standards weren’t strict enough, the contestants also have knowledge of the dairy industry.
So what do the contestants get for their trouble? Again turning to Wikipedia, the Princess gets a scholarship, which is reason enough to enter almost any contest. They also get plenty of media attention, at least in Minnesota. I suspect this would make me more excited if I were a Minnesota native.
The big thing about even being the contestant for the Princess Kay of the Milky Way, though, is the butter sculpture. Each contestant gets her likeness engraved in a 90 pound block of butter that is roughly life-sized. As my family and I went to the butter sculpture exhibit, one of the princesses was having her likeness carved in butter. For obvious reasons, the butter sculptures are stored in a glass-walled refrigerator. The Princess Kay contestant was sitting in the refrigerator, too, a parka over her evening gown, wearing her sash, and smiling and answering questions for the gathering crowd as a woman was carving the contestant’s face into the butter. I am not sure what I would do if I were to enter a contest where one of the prizes was to sit in a refrigerator while I had a 90-pound block of butter molded in my image.
Then there’s the matter of the sculptor herself. There was a news item that the sculptor, one Linda Christensen had been making these butter sculptures for 40 years. That’s mind-blowing if you think about it. Carving butter has to be one of the most specialized skills on earth, and I can’t imagine that your average art school has a course on using butter as a medium for sculpture. If there was such a school, though, I’d love to hear their thoughts on margarine. Regardless, I wonder what Ms. Christensen does during the other 353 days of the year when she isn’t carving butter at the Minnesota State Fair. Does she refine her technique? Does she take butter sculpture commissions? For that matter, what does she do with all the leftover butter from the sculpture? Is her family sick of butter yet?
One last point about Ms. Christensen is that you would expect a woman who had been carving butter for 40 years to be, well, old. Ladies and Gentlemen, I can tell you that she does not look like a woman who has been carving butter for 40 years. Maybe 20, tops. She looked timeless, in the same way Paris Hilton won’t after another 20 years. Women who want to look timeless may want to visit Linda Christensen at some point and see if butter carving is the next beauty regimen.
Another point to be made is that the Princess Kay contestants are not selected on looks alone. This is either good or bad, depending on your point of view. I heard a few unkind comments about the size of the Princess Kay contestant seated in the refrigerator, and I suppose if you want to hate a contestant in one of these pageants for not looking good enough, fine, but let’s face it—beauty is a part of any pageant, and the 2011 Princess Kay of the Milky Way looks fantastic. So justice has triumphed in the universe, etc. etc. I’m actually surprised the people with the nasty comments kept it to themselves—it would have been pretty easy to humiliate the woman, because I would think when you’re in a refrigerator having your sculpture carved as a reward, you’re probably not at your most guarded. The haters had the shot, so why didn’t they take it? I’d like to hope it was because they had some shred of dignity.
As my family and I were watching the butter sculptures, I noticed a face in the crowd I had seen the previous year—a young woman who was hard to miss, for all the wrong reasons. She was obviously not well. She had no hair, and her physique was somewhat less hardy than your standard famine victim. Her face had a kind of squashed-in look, but what got me was her smile. The year before, I hadn’t seen her smiling much at all, and when she did it was as though she was trying to copy the way she thought a smile should be. This year, she was smiling a lot more, which made me happy. It was still a smile that was brittle, but it was there. I wanted to go over and talk to her, but something didn’t feel right about it. Next year, however, if I see her there I intend to. Both times she’s been at the Princess Kay exhibit, and I wonder if it’s a coincidence or if there’s something that draws her there.
After the butter sculpture exhibit, I actually got a chance to shine at a karaoke stage. I got up, sang U2’s “Vertigo,” and I actually did a pretty good job with it! It’s hard to look at a crowd while you’re doing karaoke, but I could see some people clapping and bobbing their head in time with the music, and I got some pretty decent applause when I finished. One of the nice things about karaoke is that everyone accepts that you’re about to get up in front of people and potentially make yourself look foolish. If you get up there and it turns out you have the singing talent of a trout, you can still get points from the audience if you grit your teeth and finish the song anyway.
The high lasted until the Minnesota State Fair’s annual talent competition, where it was replaced by awe. There are some seriously talented people in Minnesota including a 10 year old girl who—I’m not making this up—played Chopin blindfolded. Blindfolded. As my brother Steve pointed out, “Not even Chopin played Chopin blindfolded!” By far the most fun I had was in the open division, where a guitarist blasted out his own original composition, a power metal guitar solo that by all rights should have had everyone’s hair blasted back. It was wonderful.
After that, we started to head home. It was a great day, but the addition of family made it that much better.
No comments:
Post a Comment