David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

It’s something of a relief to see no fast-food buyers on the dais awaiting Auction. As with Beef, though, a young beauty queen in a tiara presides from a flower-decked throne. It’s unclear just who she is: “Ms. Illinois Horseflesh” sounds unlikely, as does “Ms. Illinois Draft Horse.” (Though there is a 1993 Illinois Pork Queen, over in Swine.)

08/15/ 0930h. Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit. I’m once again at the capacious McDonald’s tent, at the edge, the titanic inflatable clown presiding. (Why is there no Wal-Mart tent?) There’s a fair-sized crowd in the basketball bleachers at one side and rows of folding chairs at the other. It’s the Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals. A metal loudspeaker begins to emit disco, and little girls pour into the tent from all directions, twirling and gamboling in vivid costume. There’s a symphony of zippers from the seats and stands as video cameras come out by the score, and I can tell it’s pretty much just me and a thousand parents.

The baroque classes and divisions, both team and solo, go from age three (!) to sixteen, with epithetic signifiers — e.g. the four-year-olds compose the Sugar ‘N’ Spice division, and so on. I’m in a chair right up front (but in the sun) behind the competition’s judges, introduced as “Varsity Twirlers from the [why?] University of Kansas.” They are four frosted blondes who smile a lot and blow huge grape bubbles.

The twirler squads are all from different towns. Mount Vernon and Kankakee seem especially rich in twirlers. The twirlers’ spandex costumes, differently colored for each team, are paint-tight and really brief in the legs. The coaches are grim, tan, lithe-looking women, clearly twirlers once, on the far side of their glory now and very serious-looking, each with a clipboard and whistle. It’s all a little like figure skating. The teams go into choreographed routines, each routine with a title and a designated disco or show tune, full of compulsory baton-twirling maneuvers with highly technical names. A mom next to me is tracking scores on what looks almost like an astrology chart, and is in no mood to explain anything to a novice baton-watcher. The routines are wildly complex, and the loudspeaker’s play-by-play is mostly in code. All I can determine for sure is that I’ve bumbled into what has to be the single most spectator-hazardous event at the Fair. Missed batons go all over, whistling wickedly. The three-, four-, and five-year-olds aren’t that dangerous, though they do spend most of their time picking up dropped batons and trying to hustle back into place — the parents of especially fumble-prone twirlers howl in fury from the stands while the coaches chew gum grimly — but the littler girls don’t have the arm-strength to really endanger anybody, although one of the judges does take a Sugar ‘N’ Spice’s baton across the bridge of the nose and has to be helped from the tent.

But when the seven- and eight-year-olds hit the floor for a series of “Armed Service Medleys” (spandex with epaulets and officers’ caps and batons over shoulders like M-16s), errant batons start pinwheeling into the tent’s ceiling, sides, and crowd with real force. I myself duck several times. A man just down the row takes one in the plexus and falls over in his metal chair with a horrid crash. The batons (one stray I picked up had REGULATION LENGTH embossed down the shaft) have white rubber stoppers on each end, but it’s that dry hard kind of rubber, and the batons themselves are not light. I don’t think it’s an accident that police nightsticks are also called service batons.

Physically, even within same-age teams, there are marked incongruities in size and development. One nine-year-old is several heads taller than another, and they’re trying to do an involved back-and-forth duet thing with just one baton, which ends up taking out a bulb in one of the tent’s steel hanging lamps and showering part of the stands with glass. A lot of the younger twirlers look either anorexic or gravely ill. There are no fat baton-twirlers. The enforcement of this no-endomorph rule is probably internal: a fat person’d have to get exactly one look at herself in tight sequinned spandex to abandon all twirling ambitions for all time.

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-wharp ing 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.