It was a hot August morning, and I was enjoying a hamburger for breakfast. Skyride cars slid overhead with silent grace. The early morning crowd had thinned out, and the noon push was still ahead. Quiet enough to hear the amplified delight from the Big Slide down the street.
You know exactly where I was, don't you? Except for this detail: I was sitting on a curb. All the seats were taken. All the brightly colored benches were occupied. No matter how many of those benches they put out, there's always someone there, and you wonder if they thank the beneficiary whose name is stamped in the back.
The State Fair has announced that it no longer will be offering the memorial benches, and I'm glad, for two reasons.
1. A news release from the fair in January makes you think of the summer to come. The temp might be seven below, but here's a reminder that you will be enjoying a day that will be 92 degrees hotter. We never think of winter at the fair, but we should always think of the fair in winter. (The part about the fair being the end of summer and the start of inevitable winter — well, we can skip that part for now.)
2. The benches were getting too numerous. Nothing against the families who provided them — a lovely thought, and many a weary soul has been grateful for the chance to sit. But at the current rate of multiplication, I think they would have comprised about 67% of the fairgrounds by 2042.
They would've had to eliminate the rides from the Midway and just fill it with benches, except for a Ferris wheel, which would've had benches for cars. They would've had to stack the benches three-high and provide ladders to get to the top. There would've been benches on pontoons in the DNR pond.
But how can people memorialize a loved one who found their annual joy at the fair? Another plaza of bricks embossed with the names? It's been done, and you don't want to locate Grandpa Joe's brick and find it covered with gum or dribbled mustard. Laser-engraved names on corn dog sticks? Same mustard problem.
Perhaps we could go high-tech and institute the GTDB, or Get-Together Database. Install a booth at the fair's historical center where people can get a full-body scan while they record a few lines about their love of the fair.
Bob Anderson, Motley, and I like to hit the Beer Garden, then totter through the Fine Arts building and criticize what I regard as — hic! — a resurgence of sentimental representational art at the expense of — hic! sorry — new forms of abstraction. Also, cookies.
Over the years you'd get a big database of fairgoers in digital form, something family members and curious strangers could enjoy. Just two problems with this:
1. It's incredibly creepy to think of Uncle Bob holding a corn dog, rotating in holographic form for all eternity.
2. At some point the database would be hacked, and all the 3-D scans sold to unscrupulous vendors, and we would all end up as CGI-generated crowd extras in a Chinese movie set in America.
Perhaps there's nothing to be done. The era of memorials at the fair is over, and that's fine. You don't need a bench to know that some stranger visited for a day, had a list of favorite things to do and eat, saw a cow and left. That's all of us.
Maybe one more bench, and it just says: EVERYONE ELSE.
