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There is Nothing More Festive Than a Monkey
My wife and I enjoy going to a good festival. The emphasis there would be on good. We love Lilyfest, which is festival dedicated to lilies (rather than Lily Tomlin). I went to The Mothman festival last year and had a blast (whole other story).
We stay away from the really crowded ones or we go early enough to avoid all the people. With Calvin with us, we have to be doubly aware of how easy or difficult it is to get around.
So, we thought we had it all under control when we packed up and went to the London, Ohio Strawberry Festival. The website for the festival said all booths would be open by 9am. So when we got there at about 10am and there was no crowd, we were sure we had planned well.
Except, about 75% of the booths weren’t open. Which was ok. Most of the booths were food related and we weren’t quite hungry yet. We strolled with our boy through wide-open streets. We quickly discovered something; The Strawberry Festival was suffering from a distinct lack of strawberries.
This isn’t something you expect of a festival is it? Having a hard time finding the object that a festival is named for?
I guess I envisioned strawberries everywhere! Bushels of them, piles of them littering the streets – and strawberry-related products just waiting to be devoured. But apparently, I dream too big. I managed to find a booth that sold strawberry crush, which was yummy, but in no way made anywhere near the strawberry festival (Did you notice I’ve stopped capitalizing the festival at this point?). There was one (one!) booth that sold strawberry pie. Another that sold strawberry shakes and ice cream and few other booths with lame attempts at incorporating the fruit into their menu.
Then of course, there were the booths with deep fryers. Yes, there was the typical street fair stuff – tenderloins, wings, catfish. But we managed to park ourselves in front of the one that sold…
Wait for it…
DEEP FRIED STRAWBERRY TWINKIES!!!! (Smothered in strawberry sauce, with slices of strawberry on top)!!!
Oh, yeah. My wife and I bought one. And split it. Not that splitting it really made the calorie count go down by much, but hey, we tried.
It was mighty, mighty, awfully, tremendously wonderful.
We had to wait fifteen minutes for them to fire up the deep fryer and prepare one for us. Oddly enough, they hadn’t expected anyone to want one of these monstrosities for breakfast. Huh. Welcome to Central Ohio.
So, the rest of the ‘festival’ (You notice I’ve not only stopped capitalizing it, but I’ve now left off ‘strawberry’, right?) consisted of people set up to sell their stuff, which was about 12% strawberry related. We opted not to stay for lunch and barely acknowledged the gentlemen who attempted to get us to try our luck at the ring toss, balloon bust and gold fish ping-pong ball games on the way out.
One odd note to the whole thing. There was a booth set up that consisted of a couple of stands, an umbrella and a stool. The sign (which you can read in the picture in the right hand corner of my journal) read ‘Give the Monkey 25cents for good luck… please no pennies nickels or dimes. THANK YOU!’ It said something on the other stand about giving the monkey $5 to get a picture with him.
Seriously? A good luck monkey at the fest (you see what I did there, right?)?
How does that work, exactly? I love monkeys, but when did it become good luck to give them your laundry money? Did I miss that rhyme in school?
Step on a crack break your mamma’s back, give a monkey a quarter, your life will be in order?
And is it bad luck not to give him your change? Am I screwed now that I didn’t do it? If I had given him a Franklin, would I have had really good luck? Or just a bunch of pictures with the little hairball?
I’ll never know. We left before the monkey showed up. Which was too bad because I feel like seeing that would have made everything else more forgivable.
