State Fair — SONG OF BOB

Here in Seattle it’s fall. Leaves are turning, as much as they turn. Skies bring more shades of gray than you thought possible; rains have begun. Days are shorter than nights; mornings hint at the chill of winter.

The great cultural signal of all this is the Puyallup Fair, now known as the Washington State Fair. Washington’s largest fair, it brings over one million people to the valley beneath Mt. Rainier. The fair wrapped up last weekend, but I bask in its afterglow.

I’ve loved the fair ever since I was a kid, and our family attended the Great Geauga County Fair, Ohio’s oldest fair (since 1823) and in Burton, OH, not far from our home in Russell. We’d park in the middle of a far cornfield and take the hayride to the fairgrounds. There, the screams from riders on the Scrambler and the Dutch Shoes. The tang of birch beer and a hot pretzel. The muddy pathways and midway with barkers and chaos of all kinds. We kids convinced my father to pay good money to see the Lobster Family (of whom Grady Stiles would end up being a notorious murderer) and the biggest rats from the sewers of Paris! (“Down, down, down!” intoned the barker, “into the dark, rat-infested sewers!”).

The fair of course featured plenty of farm implements, crafts and country games. We kids demonstrated at the 4-H booths: my sisters having sewed their own dresses, and me having made a cutting board for the woodworking booth. Firefighters raced up poles. Kids took turns trying to catch a greased pig (I failed)—man could that pig run! At night, the demolition derby was the main attraction, with Miss Becky Smith getting shot out of a cannon as the opener. With the last wrecked automobile limping across the field and the echoes of revelry receding, we tramped back to our car, having exhausted every second of summer.

Is it any surprise that years later, I would run away to the fair? OK, if not the actual fair, then the festival: I joined the production circuit of Seattle’s great seasonal events: NW Folklife, the Seattle International Children’s Festival (RIP), Bumbershoot. Eventually I worked on the curatorial team for Bumbershoot—can you understand why Tesla coils and fire-sculpture, a bike circus, and a vegetable parade ended up at that festival? And along the way I produced my own events (such as The Seattle Poetry Circus/ Seattle Poetry Festival), and helped open a full-fledged theatre and arts center.

Attending the state fair remained an annual pastime, but it didn’t occur to me for some time to make any explicit connections, which I finally did in a production for the Seattle Fringe Theater Festival in 2003. “Fringe the Puyallup” was born, featuring over 50 writers, videographers, actors, directors, production staff, and a live band! From the show’s program:

Ladies and Gentlemen! What you are about to see defies description as conventional (or sane) “theatre.” What you are about to see did not exist nine days ago: the scripts, the video, the set, were all mere possibilities inherent in two coincidentally concurrent spectacles, namely the 104th Western Washington Fair, and the 13th Annual Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival.

And so, on a mission of cultural reconnaissance, teams of writers and videographers set out to document, extrapolate, and interweave, in a most immediate sense, our most esoteric and popular traditions--theatre and the fair (you decide which is which)--without the luxurious filter of time.

Here are five messages cribbed from the swirling night of neon, and the long echo of 1.4 million visitors to this year’s Fair, presented in that oldest of performance media, the theatre.

From my memory: a plain set Jeb Lewis helped me design, with three small rear-projection screens featuring footage from the fair, and some interchangeable props: for one play, a couple of chairs as a carnival ride. For another, pallets as an animal stall. Within the simplicity, five short plays, including a surreal tale involving the hypnotist and the cookware vendor (by Heidi Darchuk), and another, a poignant visitation of the Fairground’s true history as an internment camp for Japanese-American citizens during World War II (by Tim Barr).

The dark theater held all these stories and more: who knew the paint in the lobby was barely dry when we opened? Who knew that this would be the last Fringe Festival for many years, as it was going bankrupt? Who knew that I’d end up marrying Amy Baranski whom I met there at the Capitol Hill Arts Center?

Somewhere in a basement crate now I have the mini-DV tapes, footage of smeary lights and night sounds of the fair some 16 years ago. And a handful of printed posters too. But our production crew was simply too exhausted after documenting over a week of the fair and creating new material to document the production itself. So like the best theater—or fair—the truth of it remains in the moments, the moments told on stage, the moments of people coming together to celebrate end of seasons, the beginnings of new stories, together.