Hungarian mushroom soup, Anne’s favorite bite of the day, from Off Broadway Taproom.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together, often traveling beyond Indianapolis to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip -— partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never seen before. That’s every May for me and every October for her. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.
Last weekend it was Anne’s turn. This year she wanted to see one of Indiana’s state parks that we hadn’t previously visited. In researching the area around the park that she’d chosen (which we’ll cover in its own separate photo gallery), I learned it’s next door to the city of Madison, which — as luck purely had it — would be holding a special occasion on the very weekend we’d be observing her special occasion: their 24th annual Soup, Stew, Chili and Brew Festival. The name is self-explanatory — dozens of vendors and organizations have tents up and down the length of quaint ol’ Main Street Madison and (mostly) offer one or more of the items proclaimed in the festival name.
The west-end cordon at Broadway and Main.
Two different locals that we spoke to told us their current mayor loves holding festivals and the SSCBF is apparently one of many on their calendar. So we figured, when in Rome, et cetera. We pulled into town around 12:30, found a streetside space over off Fourth and Mulberry, walked two blocks south, and joined the crowd. We didn’t get a chance to explore most of the businesses — some of which were closed for the event anyway — but we found a little sightseeing around the edges.
We entered near a mobile stage semi, one of the festival’s three live-music spots.
The busy view down Main Street.
One of their bespoke street clocks.
The Broadway Fountain, which was originally displayed at the 1876 Phidelphia Centennial Expo and gifted to the City of Madison a decade later.
We found a few of their painted electrical boxes.
Or utility boxes or lightboxes, whatever.
Madison welcomes you to Pandora!
The largest mural we saw, facing Broadway and Main.
An alley mural.
Even the garbage areas are livened up with art.
Halloween repertory showings at the Ohio Theatre.
City Hall was likewise festooned for the holidays. Local live performers included the Bee Camp Bottom Boys.
Rockin Cowboyz played us in as we stepped onto Main Street.
Madelynn Cuneo has an extremely bouncy fan.
Halloween swamp selfie station!
Of course I had to spend money at the nearest bookshop. The Book Haven offers its upper two floors as community spaces, and carried more Gene Luen Yang than you’d expect in a shop its size.
The Big Two political parties each had booths. The Republicans gave away free candy; the Democrats sold soup and brought some Peanuts that weren’t farmed by Jimmy Carter.
We enjoyed chatting for a few minutes with one of the Democrats’ volunteers, a fellow Trekker who noticed our shirts. Things got cut short when he finally asked where we were from and realized we weren’t in his candidates’ voting vicinity.
And then there were the soups, stews and chilies! (No brews for us; we don’t drink.) Most of the booths and stands didn’t take cash or cards — attendees had to purchase tickets from tables on either end of the thoroughfare and redeem those for each purchase, just like rides at a carnival, except the rides here were all culinary. We did a terrible job of tracking which vendors we bought from, but I managed to identify a few.
(About this last photo set: my Strange New Worlds shirt was not a planned intrusion in these. I held a cup o’ soup; Anne snapped a pic. Neither of us thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we made it look like Captain Pike was judging every dish?”)
Off Broadway Taproom, purveyors of the soup in our lead photo, also offered this great curry butternut soup.
Elsewhere on the strip: a cheesy potato soup (though the cheese was too subdued — Parmesan, maybe?) and soda bread with an orange marmalade.
For a welcome change of pace, PFLAG’s Hanover/Madison chapter had pork dumplings.
The Democrats presented 3-bean garden chili with cornbread.
The cornbread was free if you agreed to take an online survey first via QR code. It largely solicited opinions regarding a possible program for selling ready-made meal kits composed entirely from local organic products. As out-of-towners I’m not sure my answers were terribly helpful. Also, the cornbread was too dense and overdid it on the salt.
Billed as “Ana’s Birria Stew”, this spicy dish was my best taste of the day.
From Life Choices Clinic, a chocolate chili with only faint cocoa traces. I’d imagined it’d be a mole, but the spice level was near zero.
A warm, homey white chili from The Forge, a local men’s home for addiction recovery.
The Forge’s mission statements.
Chicken cheese tortilla soup, from Toyota of Madison. It tasted like pretty great nacho cheese, fine by me.
…and then we blew our remaining tickets on home-baked goodies from the American Legion: a chocolate-dipped apple, brownies nearly as good as mine, and cookies.
We were stuffed when we left shortly after 2:30 pm, before stray rains were expected to drift northward from Hurricane Isaias. Only a few sprinkles tagged us before we returned to the car, left town, lost all sense of direction, and wound up in Scottsburg for a minute. I blame all that soup for making me too comfy and relaxed.
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