Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and it all comes down to this: all the other pics fit to print. Obviously we had to lead off with the cheese sculpture.

Next up: the entrants in the annual CANstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “Oh No, We Overordered Mushroom Soup Again”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them.

Rather than the fair’s official theme of The Year of Baseball, the CANstruction competitors celebrated the Harvest Pavilion’s headline exhibit, “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. So this year, the cans are all about the movies!

The cheese sculpture and CANstruction entrants shared the AgHort Building with the year’s largest vegetables, which returned this year after a brief relocation to the Coliseum.

After their success sponsoring last year’s music exhibit, the good folks at Indy CD & Vinyl brought their pop-up shop back to the Harvest Pavilion. Ironically, they had exactly zero CDs on hand this time. I consoled myself with a used copy of WKRP in Cincinnati Season 1. I didn’t get the show as a kid because I didn’t recognize any of the music or have any real appreciation for music-biz behind-the-scenes jokes. Now that I’ve gotten into AOR and classic rock a bit more in my advanced years, of course the DVD set’s back cover carries some saddening fine print: “Some of the original musical content has been edited for this DVD release.” BOOOOOOO. Sure, I understand the legal hassles of re-licensing all the original tunes. Nevertheless: BOOOOOOO.

…and that’s pretty much it. Not pictured: we got to meet the local Republican party’s next sacrificial lamb they’re running next Election Day against the seemingly unbeatable Andre Carson in District 7; and we bumped into one of Anne’s distant cousins, whose name she couldn’t remember. I blame the heat.

We left around 4:00, inched home through rush-hour traffic, collapsed for a while, and did some Googling to verify the new red splotches blanketing my legs were most likely exercise-induced vasculitis. That’s since faded, but the happier new memories and photos remain.

The End. Thanks for reading. Lord willing, we’ll see you next year.

Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour, Worst to Best
Part 2: The Year in VHS
Part 3: The Year of America’s 250th
Part 4: The Year in Cakes
Part 5: The Year in Lego
Part 6: The Year in Art
Part 7: The Year in Antiques
Part 8: Morning Midway Meandering