Did I do anything to get this title?
No.
But, did someone take the time to recognize me, print up an award and name me fair insider of the year?
Also, no.
I have officially declared myself the Eastern Idaho State Fair insider because I love the fair so much. There’s nothing like this an event that’s been going on for 124 years that brings me right back to the days of my childhood. My grandparents would take us every year, via the old highway, slap carnival wristbands on our arms and buy us all the food we wanted. Those memories mean everything to me. In fact, its not the end of official end of summer until I eat a corndog covered in a little bit of dirt.
I remember the specific sound of the old highway under the tires, with the recently harvested fields out the window. I remember arguing about who got the window seat. I remember my grandmother saying we could each pick one thing and then watching her cave completely by noon. That was the deal, unspoken and always honored: the rules existed and the rules were going to lose.
Then it’s the sound. That specific fair sound that is somehow every sound at once. Carnival barkers and diesel generators and a distant PA system announcing something nobody can quite make out. A sheep, somewhere.
Screaming, but the good kind. All of it layered together into one enormous noise that means the same thing it has meant for over a century: you’re here, and nothing else is happening today.
Now that I’m well into my 40s, I fund my own fair journeys and the journeys of my genetic leaches. It’s much more expensive this way but still worth it. My grandparents made it look effortless. It was not effortless. It was a lot of cash and a great deal of patience, and I understand that now in a way I could not have understood it while holding a stick of cotton candy the size of my own head.
There is a specific moment, usually around hour four, when you do the math. You’ve bought the tickets, the wristbands, the food, the game where nobody wins anything, the second round of food, and the inexplicable stuffed banana wearing sunglasses. You look at the receipt in your head. Then you look at your kid, who is currently negotiating for a third corn dog with the confidence of a labor attorney, and you decide the math is not the point. It was never the point. My grandparents figured this out decades before I did.
The kids do not care about any of this. The kids want to know if they can ride the thing that spins twice. They can. They will. They will also want a funnel cake immediately afterward and I will say yes to that too, because apparently the caving is hereditary.
Remember when the fair was the only place you could see a concert? But nothing will ever convince me there’s a better place to see them. Of course, I’m old enough to remember when Toby Keith performed at the Eastern Idaho State Fair on September 7, 1994. He appeared on the Grandstand stage as the opening act for Wynonna Judd, shortly after releasing his hit debut single, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.”
Think about that for a second. Opening act. A guy who would go on to fill arenas for the next 30 years, and you could have seen him from the Grandstand with a corn dog in your hand and dust on your boots. That’s the thing about this place. The fair has been booking talent for 124 years, which means somewhere in that history, somebody’s grandparents watched somebody become somebody, and they had no idea. Some of you reading this were in that crowd. Some of you will be in the next one.
Because the arena show is fine. The arena show is a parking garage, a merch line, and a drink that costs more than the ticket used to. Nobody at an arena show has ever looked up at the sky between songs and noticed the stars coming out over a grandstand that has been standing there since before their grandparents were born.
The fair concert experience is more than just music. Fair insider tip coming. Since every Grandstand ticket includes fair gate admission, your concert experience just leveled up with a plethora of food options and a full day of entertainment.
That’s not a small thing. That’s an entire day. Arrive in the afternoon. Walk the barns. Eat something you’d never eat anywhere else and don’t examine it too closely. Lose a shocking amount of money at a game with a rigged milk bottle. Watch your kid go on the spinning thing twice, then a third time, because you have already lost this argument and you knew you would.
And then, as the light goes soft and the whole fairground turns gold for about 20 minutes, walk over to the Grandstand and sit down in the same seats where somebody watched Toby Keith open for Wynonna Judd in 1994.
That’s not a concert. That’s a day. And 124 years in, they still know exactly how to build one.
I’ll be there. Corn dog in hand. Little bit of dirt on it. Summer’s not over until it is.