Confessions Of An Indiana State Fair Addict

I’M AN INDIANA State Fair geek to the core, the enter-an-ugly-lamp-in-the-Indiana-Arts-competition-and-win-a-purple-ribbon (the highest you can receive) kind. The kind who gets ridiculously excited and wildly embarrassed when I see any color ribbon on one of my entries.

Clearly, I think about the Indiana State Fair more than you do. Probably more than is healthy.

And yet every August when I walk through those gates, it feels like home. So much so that I go every day of the two weeks the fair is open. I spend most of my time skipping between the Indiana Arts Building and Pioneer Village, with side trips to the livestock barns and whatever intriguing new exhibit or event catches my eye. By the end of the fair, I’ve usually walked enough miles to justify every milkshake and pork burger.

The Indiana Arts Building is chock-full of cakes, artwork, quilts, antiques, knit goods, and every other kind of handiwork you can imagine. All Hoosiers are welcome to enter the open competitions in everything from decorative arts, to photography, to professional fine arts. I have fond memories of entering baking competitions as a part of the culinary arts division with my mom—though we never competed in the same category. She was a much better baker than I am, and I was smart enough not to challenge her directly. I still enjoy entering the baking contests even though I often don’t place. (Let’s blame appliances older than I am.) Occasionally, I do win a big prize. My rhubarb cake did once win Best of Show, even though I had to start over just hours before it was due, go to a neighbor’s in my pajamas to beg for an egg, and bake it in the oven at a friend’s house.

There are also a few quirky competitions—vintage toothpick holders, doorstops … and those ugly lamps. I have a good eye for an ugly lamp—or at least I used to. I was knocked off my ugly-lamp high horse last year after reigning as champion for nearly a decade.

Pioneer Village and I were both born in 1961, which means we’ve both spent decades celebrating Indiana’s agricultural traditions. Fortunately, Pioneer Village, which is full of vintage machinery, dairy cows, music, storytelling, and a bushel of corny jokes, has aged better than I have. It’s impossible to spend an afternoon there without learning something you didn’t know you wanted to know. I once got to play a typewriter as an acoustical instrument—with sharp timing and grand flair, as one does—in an all-woman jug band on the music stage.

The Indiana State Fair isn’t just a 15-day event. It’s my year-round obsession. I spend the other 350 days of the year plotting my arts entries, scouring thrift stores for ugly lamps, testing recipes, coaxing my vintage oven through one more season, and pondering what new thing I’ll learn from my friends in Pioneer Village or what new amazing recipe my friends in the baking competition will introduce. They might not know they’re my friends, but I’m thinking about them.

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