susanstinson (
susanstinson) wrote2007-09-02 10:52 am
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Dolls at the Fair
My apartment is on a street that borders one side of the fairgrounds, and during the fair, there's a police officer at the corner directing traffic as cars and people walking flood the street. Lights from the rides shine in the windows, and there's music and shrieking and such. People who have lived here for decades (or maybe generations) pull out their lawn chairs, pompoms and "FAIR PARKING $3" signs and try to make a bit of money by persuading people to park on their land. Some years, free tickets to the fair show up in my mail box, as a nod to the inconvenience, and some years they don't. This year: two tickets and a program with a rooster on it.
I've been working pretty hard on revision on the novel. I'm lucky to be able to do work I love, and working hard on it doesn't begin to compare to what most people have to do at their jobs every day. It's a particularly intense stretch, though, and I've been feeling both the pleasure and the pressure of it, have been trying to keep to a very tight schedule, haven't been taking any days off. Yesterday, I worked all day at the library as I've been doing lately (I'm kind of in love with that library), and thought I'd work at home after it closed, but when I got here, there were lights, noise, distracting/exciting email. And I had a free ticket. So, what the heck, I spent a couple of hours at the fair.
I've been working pretty hard on revision on the novel. I'm lucky to be able to do work I love, and working hard on it doesn't begin to compare to what most people have to do at their jobs every day. It's a particularly intense stretch, though, and I've been feeling both the pleasure and the pressure of it, have been trying to keep to a very tight schedule, haven't been taking any days off. Yesterday, I worked all day at the library as I've been doing lately (I'm kind of in love with that library), and thought I'd work at home after it closed, but when I got here, there were lights, noise, distracting/exciting email. And I had a free ticket. So, what the heck, I spent a couple of hours at the fair.
- I chose to go around six-thirty because there was supposed to be a new event, a tug-of-war, at seven. Sadly, cancelled. I only caught a bit of the garglely loudspeaker announcement, but I think it might have been because not enough teams signed up.
- At the beer shed: the Skidmarks. Fifties cover band that sounded okay when I arrived, but by the time I left, they were very unwisely encouraging the drunken people at the picnic tables to screech out the first line of "Blueberry Hill."
- At the music tent: Tony's Polka Band. I liked them. Excellent accordion, good trumpet, and women playing sax and clarinet. They did moves and were throwing themselves into it and also tossed in what they described as a Polish disco song that cleared the dance floor: bold. Most of the time, the dance floor stayed pretty full, and included parents, with and without patience, and their wildly gyrating children, with and without face paint; lots of older couples with interesting rhythms together; plenty of women who didn't seem to be couples dancing together; and, my favorite: one of the oldest women on the dance floor, who was a very good, energetic dancer, had a baby doll she had dressed up with a white shirt and bow tie, so that if she felt like dancing, which she did most of the time, she didn't wait for ANY kind of partner, but started hopping and spinning around the floor with the doll. Fairly often, another woman roughly her age would cut in. Pragmatic.
- Also, thumbs up for new management at the Polish Kitchen.
- I was on my way out, happy from the polka band, when I saw the marionette act in progress on a little stage under an inadequate street light in the dark. I've seen really bad puppet shows at the fair, but this was unexpectedly charming -- and harder to do than those other puppets. When I got there, two monkeys were waltzing, with the guy visible with them on the stage. My favorite: the roller skating disco rabbit. (Okay, so, I was seventeen in 1977 and, like it or not, disco was a formative influence for me.) The strangest: the dancing mushroom. At the end, the guy hopped off the stage and had his Humphrey Dumpty marionette give a little hug to everybody who seemed willing, so, not completely unlike the polka lady with her doll, I got one. Then -- as I discovered, feeling strangely overstimulated -- I went home.