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…

Our favorite part is the new food, but some of their most ingenious uses of food are available neither for purchase nor consumption. Exhibit A: 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 “Soup on Clearance in Aisle 6”. 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.

Elsewhere around the fairgrounds, food appeared in display cases in a variety of forms, some more edible than others. The music theme rocked on.

Not for the faint of heart: a few of the entries in the annual Ugly Cake Contest…

In recent times the AgHort Building had to give up much of its agriculture and horticulture to make room for all the vendors who were evicted from Expo Hall. Because if one State Fair tradition had to be preserved, it was the challenge of trying to rush through the Expo Hall desperate-salespeople gauntlet without making eye contact. That always feels like wading through my AOL spam folder, which got ridiculously overfilled after I signed up for Angie’s List.

Meanwhile, the 4-H vegetable competitions were relocated to the Coliseum, which doesn’t have much display space in its lobby, but there they were anyway. Sadly, I understand the annual Awesome Giant Gourd Contest wasn’t held till after the day of our visit, so we missed out on the best part.

And finally, we present the annual cheese sculpture, which was unveiled August 7th at noon. We got to the AgHort Building an hour after the big moment. Once again Sarah Kaufmann the Cheese Lady carved another hefty load of cheese bricks into Art. One new drawback this time: the cheese is now kept in temperature-controlled environs behind glass. This sensible choice for cheese preservation doubled as a security system to deflect any amateur photographers from recording the finished product(s) for their own visual records, such as scrapbooks, blogs, or dairy shrines. We lacked the authority to command State Fair officials to shut off the hundreds of lights in the AgHort just for li’l ol’ us, not even for a few seconds so we could share a clean shot with You, The Viewers at Home.

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To be continued! Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour
Part 2: The Soundtrack of Summer
Part 4: The Year in Lego
Part 5: The Year in Art
Part 6: The Year in Antiques
Part 7: Outtakes and More!