The Expo Bldg.’s a huge enclosed mallish thing, AC’d down to 80°, with a cement floor and a hardwood mezzanine overhead. Every interior inch here is given over to adversión and commerce of a very special and lurid sort. Just inside the big east entrance a man with a headset mike is slicing up a block of wood and then a tomato, standing on a box in a booth that says SharpKut, hawking these spinoffs of Ginsu knives, “AS SEEN ON TV.” Next door is a booth offering personalized pet-I.D. tags. Another’s got the infamous mail-order-advertised Clapper, which turns on appliances automatically at the sound of two hands clapping (but also at the sound of a cough, sneeze, or sniff, I discover—caveat emp.). There’s booth after booth, each with an audience whose credulity is heartrending. The noise in the Expo Bldg. is apocalyptic and complexly echoed, sound-carpeted by crying children and ceiling-fans’ roar. A large percentage of the booths show signs of hasty assembly and say AS SEEN ON TV in bright brave colors. The booths’ salesmen all stand raised to a slight height; all have headset microphones and speakers with built-in amps and rich neutral media voices.
It turns out these franchised Expo vendors, not unlike the Blomsness carnies (any comparison to whom makes the vendors show canine teeth, though), go from State Fair to State Fair all summer. One young man demonstrating QUICK ‘N’ BRITE—“A WHOLE NEW CONCEPT IN CLEANING”—was under the persistent impression that he was in Iowa.
There’s a neon-bordered booth for something called a RAINBOW-VAC, a vacuum cleaner whose angle is that it uses water in its canister instead of a bag, and the canister is clear Lucite, so you get a graphic look at just how much dirt it’s getting out of a carpet sample. People in polyester slacks and/or orthopedic shoes are clustered three-deep around this booth, greatly moved, but all I can think of is that the thing looks like the world’s biggest heavy-use bong, right down to the water’s color. There’s a predictably strong odor surrounding the Southwestern Leatherworx booth. Likewise at Distressed Leather Luggage (missing hyphen? misplaced mod?). I’m not even halfway down one side of the Expo’s main floor, list-wise. The mezzanine has still more booths. There’s a booth that offers clock-faces superimposed on varnished photorealist paintings of Christ, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe. There’s a Computerized Posture Evaluation booth. A lot of the headsetted vendors are about my age or younger. Something ever so slightly over-groomed about them suggests a Bible-college background. It’s just cool enough in here for a sweat-soaked shirt to get clammy. One vendor recites a pitch for Ms. Suzanne Somers’s THIGHMASTER while a lady in a leotard lies on her side on the fiberboard counter and demonstrates the product. I’m in the Expo Bldg. almost two hours, and every time I look up the poor lady’s still at it with the THIGHMASTER. Most of the Expo vendors won’t answer questions and give me beady looks when I stand there making notes in the Barney tablet. But the THIGHMASTER lady—friendly, garrulous, violently cross-eyed, in (understandably) phenomenal physical condition—informs me she gets an hour off for lunch at 1400 but is back on her side all the way to closing at 2300. I remark that her thighs must be pretty well Mastered by now, and her leg sounds like a bannister when she raps her knuckle against it, and we have a good laugh together until her vendor finally makes her ask me to scram.
The Copper Kettle All-Butter Fudge booth does brisk air-conditioned business. There’s something called a Full Immersion Body Fat Analysis for $8.50. A certain CompuVac Inc. offers a $1.50 Computerized Personality Analysis. Its booth’s computer panel’s tall and full of blinking lights and reel-to-reel tapes, like an old bad sci-fi-film computer. My own Personality Analysis, a slip of paper that protrudes like a tongue from a red-lit slot, says “Your Boldness of Nature is Ofset With The Fear Of Taking Risk” (sic2). My suspicion that there’s a guy hunched behind the blinking panel feeding its slot recycled fortune-cookie slips is overwhelming but unverifiable.
Booth after booth. A Xanadu of chintzola. Obscure non-stick cook-ware. “EYE GLASSES CLEANED FREE.” A booth with anti-cellulite sponges. More DIPPIN DOTS futuristic ice cream. A woman with Velero straps on her shoes gets fountain-pen ink out of a linen tablecloth with a Chapsticky-looking spot remover whose banner says “AS SEEN ON AMAZING DISCOVERIES,’ “ a wee-hour infomercial I’m kind of a fan of. A plywood booth that for $9.95 will take a photo and superimpose your face on either an FBI Wanted poster or a Penthouse cover. An MIA—BRING THEM HOME! booth staffed by women playing Go Fish. An anti-abortion booth called LIFESAVERS that lures you over with free candy. Sand Art. Shredded-Ribbon Art. Therm-L-Seal Double Pane Windows. An indescribable booth for “LATEST ADVANCE ROTARY NOSE HAIR CLIPPERS” whose other sign reads (I kid you not) “Do Not Pull Hair From Nose, May Cause Fatal Infection” Two different booths for collectible sports cards, “Top Ranked Investment Of The Nineties.” And tucked way back on one curve of the mezzanine’s ellipse: yes: black velvet paintings, including several of Elvis in pensive poses.
And people are buying this stuff. The Expo’s unique products are targeted at a certain type of Midwestern person I’d all but forgotten. I’d somehow not noticed these persons’ absence from the paths and exhibits. This is going to sound not just East-Coastish but elitist and snotty. But facts are facts. The special community of shoppers in the Expo Bldg. are a Midwestern subphylum commonly if unkindly known as Kmart People. Farther south they’d be a certain fringe-type of White Trash. Kmart People tend to be overweight, polyestered, grim-faced, toting glazed unhappy children. Toupees are the movingly obvious shiny square-cut kind, and the women’s makeup is garish and often asymmetrically applied, giving many of the female faces a kind of demented look. They are sharp-voiced and snap at their families. They’re the type you see slapping their kids in supermarket checkouts. They are people who work at like Champaign’s Kraft and Decatur’s A. E. Staley and think pro wrestling is real. I’m sorry, but this is all true. I went to high school with Kmart People. I know them. They own firearms and do not hunt. They aspire to own mobile homes. They read the Star without even a pretense of contempt and have toilet paper with little off-color jokes printed on it. A few of these folks might check out the Tractor Pull or U.S.A.C. race, but most are in the Expo to stay. This is what they’ve come for. They couldn’t give one fat damn about ethanol exhibits or carnival rides whose seats are hard to squeeze into. Agriculture shmagriculture. And Gov. Edgar’s a closet pinko: they heard it on Rush. They plod up and down, looking put out and intensely puzzled, as if they’re sure what they’ve come for’s got to be here someplace. I wish Native C. were here; she’s highly quotable on the subject of Kmart People. One big girl with tattoos and a heavy-diapered infant wears a T-shirt that says “WARNING: I GO FROM 0 TO HORNEY IN 2.5 BEERS.”
Have you ever wondered where these particular types of unfunny T-shirts come from? the ones that say things like “HORNEY IN 2.5” or “Impeach President Clinton… AND HER HUSBAND TOO!!”? Mystery solved. They come from State Fair Expos. Right here on the main floor’s a monster-sized booth, more like an open bodega, with shirts and laminated buttons and license-plate borders, all of which, for this subphylum, Testify. This booth seems integral, somehow. The seamiest fold of the Midwestern underbelly. The Lascaux Caves of a certain rural mentality. “40 Isn’t Old… IF YOU’RE A TREE” and “The More Hair I Lose, The More Head I Get” and “Retired: No Worries, No Paycheck” and “I Fight Poverty… I WORK!!” As with New Yorker cartoons, there’s an elusive sameness about the shirts’ messages. A lot serve to I.D. the wearer as part of a certain group and then congratulate that group for its sexual dynamism—“Coon Hunters Do It All Night” and “Hairdressers Tease It Till It Stands Up” and “Save A Horse: Ride A Cowboy.” Some presume a weird kind of aggressive relation between the shirt’s wearer and its reader—“We’d Get Along Better… If You Were A BEER” and “Lead Me Not Into Temptation, I Know The Way MYSELF” and “What Part Of NO Don’t You Understand?” There’s something complex and compelling about the fact that these messages are not just uttered but worn, like they’re a badge or credential. The message c
ompliments the wearer somehow, and the wearer in turn endorses the message by spreading it across his chest, which fact is then in further turn supposed to endorse the wearer as a person of plucky or risqué wit. It’s also meant to cast the wearer as an Individual, the sort of person who not only makes but wears a Personal Statement. What’s depressing is that the T-shirts’ statements are not only preprinted and mass-produced, but so dumbly unfunny that they serve to place the wearer squarely in that large and unfortunate group of people who think such messages not only Individual but funny. It all gets tremendously complex and depressing. The lady running the booth’s register is dressed like a ’68 Yippie but has a hard carny face and wants to know why I’m standing here memorizing T-shirts. All I can manage to tell her is that the “HORNEY” on these “2.5 BEERS”-shirts is misspelled; and now I really feel like an East-Coast snob, laying judgments and semiotic theories on these people who ask of life only a Republican in the White House and a black velvet Elvis on the wood-grain mantel of their mobile home. They’re not hurting anybody. A good third of the people I went to high school with now probably wear these T-shirts, and proudly.
And I’m forgetting to mention the Expo Bldg.’s other nexus of commerce—church booths. The populist evangelism of the rural Midwest. An economy of spirit. It’s not your cash they want. A Church of God booth offers a Computerized Bible Quiz. Its computer is CompuVacish in appearance. I go eighteen for twenty on the Quiz and am invited behind a chamois curtain for a “person-to-person faith exploration,” which thanks anyway. The conventional vendors get along fine with the Baptists and Jews for Jesus who operate booths right near them. They all laugh and banter back and forth. The SharpKut guy sends all the vegetables he’s microsliced over to the LIFESAVERS booth, where they put them out with the candy. The scariest spiritual booth is right up near the west exit, where something called Covenant Faith Triumphant Church has a big hanging banner that asks “WHAT IS THE ONE MAN MADE THING IN HEAVEN?” and I stop to ponder, which with charismatics is instant death, because a breastless bushy-browed woman is out around the booth’s counter like a shot and in my personal space. She says “Give up? Give up do you?” I tell her I’ll go ahead and bite. She’s looking at me very intensely, but there’s something off about her gaze: it’s like she’s looking at my eyes rather than into them. What one man-made thing, I ask. She puts her finger to her palm and makes screwing motions. Signifying coitus? (I don’t say “coitus” out loud, though.) “Not but one thing,” she says. “The holes in Christ’s palms,” screwing her finger in. It’s scary. Except isn’t it pretty well known that Roman crucifees were nailed at the wrists, since palm-flesh won’t support weight? So but now I’ve been drawn into an actual dialogue, going so far as to let the lady take my arm and pull me toward the booth’s counter. “Lookee here for a second now,” she says. She has both hands around my arm. I feel a sinking in my gut; I’m programmed from childhood to know that I’ve made a serious error. A Midwestern child of academics gets trained early on to avoid these weird-eyed eager rural Christians who accost your space, to say Not Interested at the front door and No Thanks to mimeoed leaflets, to look right through streetcorner missionaries as if they were NYC panhandlers. I have erred. The woman more or less throws me up against the Covenant Faith counter, on which counter is a fine oak box, yay big, with a propped sign: “Where Will YOU Be When YOU Look Like THIS?” “Take you a look-see in here.” The box has a hole in the top. Inside the box is a human skull. I’m pretty sure it’s plastic. The interior lighting’s tricky. But I’m pretty sure the skull isn’t genuine. I haven’t inhaled for over a minute now. The woman is looking at the side of my face. “Are you sure is the question,” she says. I manage to make my straightening-up motion lead right into a backing-away motion. “Are you a hundred percent surer.” Overhead, on the mezzanine, the THIGHMASTER lady’s still at it, on her side, head on her arm, smiling cross-eyed into space.
08/15/ 1336h. I’m on a teetery stool watching the Prairie State Cloggers Competition in a Twilight Ballroom that’s packed with ag-folks and well over 100°. An hour ago I’d nipped in here to get a bottle of soda-pop on my way to the Truck and Tractor Pull. By now the Pull’s got to be nearly over, and in half an hour the big U.S.A.C. dirt-track auto race starts, which I’ve already reserved a ticket for. But I can’t tear myself away from the scene in here. This is far and away the funnest, most emotionally intense thing at the Fair. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest clogging venue.
I’d imagined goony Jed Clampett types in tattered hats and hobnail boots, a-stompin’ and a-whoopin’, etc. Clogging, Scotch-Irish in origin and the dance of choice in Appalachia, I guess did used to involve actual clogs and boots and slow stomps. But clogging has now miscegenated with square dancing and honky-tonk boogie to become a kind of intricately synchronized, absolutely kick-ass country tap dance.
There’s teams from Pekin, Leroy, Rantoul, Cairo, Morton. They each do three numbers. The music is up-tempo country or 4/4 dance-pop. Each team has anywhere from four to ten dancers. They’re 75% women. Few of the women are under 35, fewer still under 175 lbs. They’re country mothers, red-cheeked gals with bad dye jobs and big pretty legs. They wear Westernwear tops and midiskirts with multiple ruffled slips underneath; and every once in a while they’ll grab handfuls of cloth and flip the skirts up like cancan dancers. When they do this they either yip or whoop, as the spirit moves them. The men all have thinning hair and cheesy rural faces, and their skinny legs are rubberized blurs. The men’s Western shirts have piping on the chest and shoulders. The teams are all color-coordinated—blue and white, black and red. The white shoes all the dancers wear look like golf shoes with metal taps clamped on.
Their numbers are to everything from shitkicker Waylon and Tammy to Aretha, Miami Sound Machine, Neil Diamond’s “America.” The routines have some standard tap-dance moves—sweep, flare, chorus-line kicking. But it’s fast and sustained and choreographed down to the last wrist-flick. And square dancing’s genes can be seen in the upright, square-shouldered postures on the floor, a kind of florally enfolding tendency to the choreography, some of which features high-speed promenades. But it’s adrenaline-dancing, meth-paced and exhausting to watch because your own feet move; and it’s erotic in a way that makes MTV look lame. The cloggers’ feet are too fast to be seen, really, but they all tap out the exact same rhythm. A typical routine’s is something like: tatatatatatatatatatata. The variations around the basic rhythm are baroque. When they kick or spin, the two-beat absence of tap complexifies the pattern.
The audience is packed in right to the edge of the portable hardwood flooring. The teams are mostly married couples. The men are either rail-thin or have big hanging guts. A couple of the men are great fluid Astaire-like dancers, but mostly it’s the women who compel. The males have constant sunny smiles, but the women look orgasmic; they’re the really serious ones, transported. Their yips and whoops are involuntary, pure exclamation. They are arousing. The audience claps savvily on the backbeat and whoops when the women do. It’s almost all folks from the ag and livestock shows—the flannel shirts, khaki pants, seed caps, and freckles. The spectators are soaked in sweat and extremely happy. I think this is the ag-community’s Special Treat, a chance here to cut loose a little while their animals sleep in the heat. The psychic transactions between cloggers and crowd seem representative of the Fair as a whole: a culture talking to itself, presenting credentials for its own inspection. This is just a smaller and specialized rural Us—bean farmers and herbicide brokers and 4-H sponsors and people who drive pickup trucks because they really need them. They eat non-Fair food from insulated hampers and drink beer and pop and stomp in perfect time and put their hands on neighbors’ shoulders to shout in their ear while the cloggers twirl and fling sweat on the crowd.
There are no black people in the Twilight Ballroom. The looks on the younger ag-kids’ faces have this awakened astonished aspect, like they didn’t realize their own race could dance like this. Three married cou
ples from Rantoul, wearing full Western bodysuits the color of raw coal, weave an incredible filigree of high-speed tap around Aretha’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and there’s no hint of racial irony in the room; the song has been made these people’s own, emphatically. This ’90s version of clogging does have something sort of pugnaciously white about it, a kind of performative nose-thumbing at Jackson and Hammer. There’s an atmosphere in the room—not racist, but aggressively white. It’s hard to describe. The atmosphere’s the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It’s not like if a black person came in he’d be ill-treated; it’s more like it would just never occur to a black person to come in here.
I can barely hold the tablet to scribble journalistic impressions, the floor’s rumbling under so many boots and sneakers. The record player’s old-fashioned and the loudspeakers are shitty and it all sounds fantastic. Two little girls are playing jacks under the table I’m next to. Two of the dancing Rantoul wives are fat, but with great legs. Who could practice this kind of dancing as much as they must and stay fat? I think maybe rural Midwestern women are just congenitally big. But these people clogging get down. And they do it as a troupe, a collective, with none of the narcissistic look-at-me grandstanding of great dancers in rock clubs. They hold hands and whirl each other around and in and out, tapping like mad, their torsos upright and almost formal, as if only incidentally attached to the blur of legs below. It goes on and on. I’m rooted to my stool. Each team seems the best yet. On the crowd’s other side across the floor I can see the old poultry farmer, he of the carny-hatred and electrified wallet. He’s still got his billed poultry cap on, making a megaphone of his hands to whoop with the women, leaning way forward in his geriatric scooter, body bobbing like he’s stomping in time while his little black boots stay clamped in their stays.
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