Let's Go To The Fair!

Day 336: It's that time of year again, and today was my first shift at the 2015 Puya...Washington State Fair. It will always be the "Puyallup Fair" to me and to many local residents, although it is quite different from the agricultural festival it was when I first began attending. It's become much more commercial, a place where attendees shop for vacuum cleaners, car squeegees, fireplace inserts, hot tubs, silverware polish, plastic trinkets, and with every advancing step, noses are assaulted with odors of foods which would not be considered fit for human consumption outside the fair venue. The Fair is all about money these days, as I discovered when I paid an additional $8 to walk through the Star Trek exhibit.

A Trekkie of the first water, I expected something special, perhaps a scale mock-up of 1701-D, Klingons lurking in dark corners, phaser blasts I should dodge or something of that nature. What I found instead were lighted panels showing the Star Trek timeline, stock photos and text straight out of the various concordances for the series. There were lighted instrument panels, but without any explanation of the functions, again falling way short of anything found in the concordances, and there was a mock-up of the 1701-D's bridge, but you could not enter it unless you shelled out an additional $15 to have a single photograph of yourself taken in the captain's chair.

There were four or five larger-than-life facial sculpts including Data, a Cardassian and Neelix, all with bulging artificial and unrealistic eyes. There was a Borg in its cubicle and Worf, standing life-sized in a dark bay, again both very bad works in resin or plastic. Largely, the exhibit consisted of costumes in cases, purportedly those worn by the actors, but every one looked dingy and dirty, like something which had been in grandma's attic for the last fifty years. You'd have thought they'd have had them dry-cleaned before putting them on display. I left the building after a mere ten minutes, feeling as if there were Ferengi gloating in the gloom over having bilked me for the price of admission. Trust me, there's more to see in any Trek convention's dealer room than you'll see here.

Although I was disappointed in the Star Trek building and the overall commercial nature of the modern-day fair, what I really enjoy most are the animals, grange displays and the Pavilion where all types of needlework from quilts to tatting are well-lit and nicely shown. Those things are to me what define a county or state fair. Give me pumpkins and sunflowers and 4-H sheep, and I'm a happy camper, even if I do have to walk through a concourse thick with a fog of deep-fried Oreo grease to reach them.