State Of A Fair

Deep-fried Oreo Balls and bacon dipped in chocolate.

These two inexplicably edible items were fired up in Hell’s Kitchen, placed on the Diabetes Dumbwaiter and made available for mass consumption by the public at a state fair I recently went to. In pairing together such a corrupt combination, this also serves as the culinary industry’s answer to the question “How would you best describe the May 2014 wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West?” Well, let’s just put these two horrible, awful things together in the hopes that they aren’t able to bother anything else that has a fighting chance of doing some good in someone’s life.

If you’re looking for a hillbilly hilarious take on the ins and outs of a state fair, I strongly suggest that you check out the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, I’m just here to share my singular experience. In fact, just so you see that phrase once more in your lifetime allow me to reiterate, I strongly suggest that you check out the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

The fair featured six life-size replicas of each of the New England statehouses. The New Hampshire house had a sign reading the states’ motto of “Live Free or Die” a quote from General John Stark which, while it is very inspirational, citing it did not save me from the repercussions of missing curfew in high school. At the front of the house, Adam Sandler’s parents stood profusely apologizing to each passerby for the first Grown-ups movie.

The Vermont house had a single man standing in it, trying way too hard to sell me on maple syrup like he was some early morning mealtime evangelist. I’m sorry, but Log Cabin and Aunt Jemima are just fantastic and if I have to deal with the artery obstructing consequences later in life and the guilt trip of my gluttonous behavior in the life after this, so be it.

I made an absolute killing in the Massachusetts statehouse, betting its booth workers a dollar that they wouldn’t be able to pronounce my name correctly.       

One of the booths at the fair was a weather disaster trivia game that my brother and I absolutely destroyed. (In this case, the word destroyed means “excelled in displaying accurate knowledge of.” Much like George Thorogood makes being bad to the bone sound like a positive thing, here the word destroyed is not a reference to vandalism or defacing public property.)  So long as all of the stratospheric situations were hypothetical, my brother and I knew exactly what to do in blizzards, hurricanes and tornadoes. However, I do possess enough foresight and self-awareness to know that, based on my body type, if I am cast in Day After Tomorrow sequel, I will not be lifting cars off of people or carrying anyone to safety, I will be the guy behind the computer telling the main characters where the storm is headed.

The critical part of our story brings us to a particular booth set up by the United States Marine Corps. Now, I’m not going to pretend that anything in my blog has had some sort of life lesson or takeaway for you as the reader and for that, I sincerely apologize, but if there’s one message I’d like you to clearly grasp through all of the silly storm clouds and haze of hilarity it’s this, fully read any document that you are signing.

The Marine booth had an information station and a pull-up bar to the side of it. Much like the medieval citizens in The Sword in the Stone, many musclebound men approached the pull-up bar and attempted to win the admiration of onlookers whose aspirations included eating chili cheese fries and successfully finding somewhere to sit. For reasons unclear to me even today, the trailer trash tractor beam somehow got a hold of me and I found myself in a line where my height, weight and lack of facial hair density put me as a far outlier in the anabolic amped up anxiously awaiting group. I got to the front of the line and waited for the Marines at the booth to get the step-stool so I could reach the pull-up bar. I began a slow, up and down motion     

While I was in the middle of doing pull-ups, members of my family were:

A.    Cheering me on and being encouraging and supportive

B.     On their cell phones

C.     Texting others from their cellular devices

D.    Definitely cast under some sort of smitten spell from their cell phones

Which means that now, when I tell them that I was capable of doing 25 pull-ups it just sounds like a fabled fishing story where someone says “Seriously, the fish was THIS BIG!” and of course is met with unbelief on their part. The Marines gave me a piece of paper to sign, so I lifted my aching arm, made my mark (no pun intended) and went on my way.

A few days after the fair while I was standing in my kitchen, a black SUV pulled up in my driveway and out of the vehicle popped two fully uniformed Marines. The sight of these two vascular visitors made me question both what they were doing in my driveway and my own sexual orientation. I wish I could say that my first thought was “Oh good, company!” But it wasn’t so much that as it was “OK, maybe that traffic light I went through this morning wasn’t yellow, but I thought that would be dealt with at a local level.” I answered the door and one of them said “Are you Mark Woonton?” 

Historically, answering this question has led to something either very good or very bad so I hesitantly said “Yes.” The officer told me that in my haste to get back to Freddy Krueger’s frialator, I had checked a box saying that I was very interested in getting more information about joining the Marines. He said this with a tone in his voice hinting that he knew it must have been some sort of mistake. I put down my Go-Gurt, wiped a few tears with my Aerosmith T-shirt and thanked him for coming to see me. He went on to tell me that an occurrence such as this warranted a very rare case of having to go through a house call dishonorable discharge.   

Dishonorable discharge from the military for someone who hasn’t even left for camp yet involves Mushu, the dragon from Mulan, jumping out of his military pack and shouting “Dishonor on you! Dishonor on your cow and dishonor on your whole family!” Which made me happy and sad at the same time.