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…

When I was a kid, the Midway was the only part of the fair that mattered. The food was a nice change of pace, but was more of a necessity than a highlight, at least until I discovered elephant ears. The adults wanted to see the exhibits and didn’t care if I was bored stiff. I liked animals, but our family never adapted to toxic barn stench. Sometimes the special events and scheduled entertainment were okay, but I didn’t scour their schedule for appointments and never attended a concert there until I was 29. No, far as I was concerned, the Midway was the be-all-end-all of the State Fair experience — the rides, the games, the fun houses, and especially the video arcade they added in the mid-’80s.

In our 50s the State Fair is still an annual tradition for the two of us, but ordinary carnival rides aren’t our thing anymore. (Disney World is a different story, but the fair is no Disney World.) My son aged out of it long ago and we have no other youngsters to drag around, or to drag us around. In the last dozen years or more, we’ve only bought ride tickets there once — that time in 2019 we took to the Skyride and rose above the fairgrounds for photographic fun and fresh air.

Even as a kid, I had limits. I got motion sickness on any Technicolor centrifuges that spun faster than the Scrambler. Roller coasters could be touch-and-go. Upside-down rides were an immediate nonstarter. I didn’t discover the magical power of Dramamine till adulthood, but I don’t get excited about relying on any pharmaceuticals for kicks except caffeine. As I got older and wider, I didn’t fit into some rides, though my 2004-2005 diet solved that problem for the next several years. Last time we drove out to Kings Island for a company picnic, I’d regained enough weight that I couldn’t fit into the seats of their latest roller coaster — not a joyful revelation when hundreds of people are in line waiting their turn and you personally are the one obstacle holding up the entire works.

I peeked through the MCC back pages and discovered I’d anticipated our withdrawal from thrill-ride pastimes and already wrote about it in the site’s first year:

…I expect to be slow to consent and slower to avail myself of the ride options…unless, perhaps, they might be willing to accept some of my suggestions for new, calmer, gentler, barely mobile “thrill” rides tailored to meet the wishes and fussiness of those disinclined against disorientation. Examples in my new, personalized ride demographic could include:

• Gently rotating teacup ride, except with broken motor so there’s no actual rotating.
• Antique autos driven by chauffeurs and stocked with elegant snacks.
• Perfectly motionless lazy river, three inches deep and using state-of-the-art technology to prevent any kind of current or even the slightest Brownian motion.
• Sensory deprivation chamber, with inside walls lined with pictures of cute kittens. No lolcat captions, though. When they’re unfunny, they angry up the blood.
• Amazingly lifelike “Mattress Firm showroom” simulator.
• Out-of-order video games that require you to imagine you’re playing the game in your head.
• The Happy Fun Park Mascot Presents the Wonderful Wacky Padded Benches for Sitting and Watching Other People Ride Rides.
• TVs. Enormous ones everywhere, like up-close drive-in screens.
• The lines for the concession stands, but with extra neon lighting so they look more like rides than chores.

(I forgot “lolcats” were a thing. Ah, 2012 was such an innocent time.)

…so in MCC’s annual Indiana State Fair write-ups, the Midway has consistently been filed with the Department of Not Appearing on This Blog. I suppose I could also gripe about how ticket prices haven’t gotten better in this economy: technically they seemed to have resisted inflation at $10 for a sheet of 20 tickets, but some rides also required 18-20 tickets per person for a single turn. Then again, considering how much cash we ended up blowing on Taste of the Fair dishes, I kinda waived my privilege to complain about the Midway costs.

This year was a slightly different story, though not for the pulse-pounding machinery merriment: early in the morning, we had time to kill.

The fairgrounds opened at 8; we arrived at 8:45 to ensure we got a decent parking space. That plan was successful thanks to a statewide fear wave. The previous two weeks’ thunderstorm onslaught and record-breaking floods had taken several lives and left Hoosiers skittish at the sight of gray clouds, same as covered the skies this particular Thursday. Also, even in the sunniest of summers, nobody but retirees ever show up at the fair first thing on weekday mornings. It’s why we take the day off work for all this — it’s the perfect time to avoid crowds for the first several hours till school lets out.

Major drawback for us Taste of the Fair fans: most food stands don’t open till 10. The exhibit halls don’t open till 9.

To pass the time and warm up our legs for the miles of walking we’d get in later, we wandered around the Midway hours before it’d open. The place was virtually deserted except a couple workers setting up, two police officers pounding the Midway beat in a golf cart, and a handful of other stray passersby like us. Wistful nostalgia didn’t take long to set in.

The Midway was smaller than I remembered — not out of a sense of “Everything seems so huge when you’re a kid!” but because the Midway literally has less square footage than it did 40-50 years ago. It no longer stretches down toward Expo Hall because all the innocuous rides for the tiniest tykes were moved years ago to their own separate mini-Midway on the southeast corner of the fairgrounds. We didn’t feel compelled to journey over there.

As a tween aging out of the Midway experience, the last rides I recall enjoying were the giant slides and the fun houses. The fun houses were particularly accommodating — they were easy puzzle-book mazes with interactive decorations. They didn’t make me sick. I didn’t have to worry about fitting into seats. They cost fewer tickets than the adult G-force accelerators. In hindsight, admittedly The Simpsons‘ mockery of car-based fun houses got it right. (“BEHOLD THE RAVAGES OF AGE!”)

My favorite was the hall of mirrors, or hall of glass, or whatever the official name was. The first floor was all glass hallways, but with a fair amount of confusing reflections. The end of the maze was a stairway to the top floor, which had a collection of curved circus mirrors for value-added body-distortion fun. I went through those houses so many times that I memorized the layout and could get upstairs in less than a minute without bumping into a single pane.

Sadly, I’m now exiled from their domain because today’s fun houses have size limits for kids-only gatekeeping. One Midway feature that knows no such exclusions: the games! I also used to love those as a kid until I realize many were rigged, and the ones I could win had terrible prizes. Kids don’t much care about evaluating whether or not they’re worth the cost and hassle: they love a sense of accomplishment, victory, and competence — even more so if they win anything substantial. I’m pretty sure I no longer have anything I ever won from carnivals, festivals, or theme parks in general — various stuffed animals, the 4-x-4-inch Michael Jackson Thriller mirror, the goldfish that lived for two weeks, and other clutter I wouldn’t have bought with my allowance from a department store.

Our leisurely stroll through the territory of someone else’s future State Fair memories did the trick: we returned to the Harvest Pavilion shortly after it opened at 9, then we got a S’Mork and a flag-colored shake from the concession stands that opened first, and then we kept walking and walking and enjoying other activities that would’ve bored kids stiff.

To be concluded! 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 9: [coming soon]