Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 4: Land of the Glowing Giants

Side view of a T-Rex lying down with its mouth open and its tail sticking straight out horizontally.

Flee from the mighty T-Rex that gapes to all comers with its muscular jaws! Or relax at the table and chairs under its butt.

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…

As if Artscape and the chainsaw sculptures weren’t enough art: on the north end of the fairgrounds, the relatively new space known as The Backyard — which in 2023 was covered in basketball courts and dubbed Hoopfest — hosted an exhibit called Illuminate, comprising a collection of giant-sized organisms that look impressive in daylight but are actually huge lanterns activated at night. Online sources allege this is its second annual occurrence, except the previous works were Asian-themed and those same sources swear they were stationed in Expo Hall. Considering our 2023 visit to Expo Hall turned up only caged critters, I’d be curious to know the building’s exhibition timeline. It sucks to discover just now that we missed something cool.

Not this year, though. Behold: Illuminate! In daylight! I haven’t been to the State Fair at night in 23 years, and there’s no way we’d’ve had enough energy to stay awake and mobile from opening to closing time, so please enjoy some giant unlit lanterns in sunshine! With neon paint that’s, like, a kind of glowing!

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 3: Where the Art Museum Meets the Chainsaw

Blue cube suspended in midair with a light in the middle of it. Each metallic cube side is intricately patterned to project shadows on the surfaces surrounding it.

What if the Cosmic Cube were bigger so it’s harder to steal, prettier than a 6-sided die, and held a more enlightening kind of power?

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…

Every MCC miniseries devoted to the fair has at least one chapter devoted to the works of art we encounter in the various exhibit halls. Art took center stage this year courtesy of Newfields (f/k/a the Indianapolis Museum of Art), who stepped into the role of “presenting sponsor” and brought new flourishes to old spaces.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 2: Let’s Pretend We’re Influencers

Anne and I doing jazz hands on a fake Olympics pedestal. The wall behind us is an ad for WTHR's local Olympics coverage with a photo of the Eiffel Tower filling the empty space where a bronze medalist should be standing.

Thanks to Indianapolis’ NBC affiliate WTHR, we can pretend we’re Olympians! Everyone loves the Olympics, we’re told!

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 photo galleries typically showcase the places we’ve been, the things we’ve seen, or the events we experienced — i.e., the memories I want to retain that are also hopefully interesting and/or useful to anyone else in the universe besides just Anne. Sometimes we forget to take pics of each other, or I simply skip posting them because I already know what we look like. That’s the exact opposite of 99% of the entire internet; hence our perennially low traffic stats, apparently. I don’t get the whole “me me me” thing that constitutes a viable career for some folks, but I’m told that’s totally a thing and that an entire Insta-feed of selfies is in fact a form of psychologically responsible behavior and they have the tax forms to prove it.

For once, let’s give in to peer pressure from internetters half our age and compile an entire gallery of us and only us. As it happens, during our fairground day-date we wound up taking more photos of each other than usual (or having strangers snap the two of us), so here’s what it looks like when we’re enjoying each other’s company without worrying what anyone else thinks of us. Please enjoy! Smash those buttons! Share with your 50,000 nearest friends! If you don’t, you’re a judgmental, ageist hypocrite who enables body-shaming and you’re on the same side as the shallow, dump-worthy exes in every rom-com ever! It’d sure be a real shame if your S.O. ever found out! Cheers!

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour

Pulled pork marinated with rich barbecue sauce, served on a sugary biscuit.

All four State Fair food groups in one sandwich: meat, sugar, dough, and fruit.

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.

Most years, we’re all about the food. Each time our favorite part is the “Taste of the Fair” competition, in which vendors showcase ostensibly new dishes in hopes of enticing foodies and/or impressing attendees who seek more to fair-life than eating the same corn dog again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) The TotF lineup is announced weeks in advance so everyone can plan their meals and experiments accordingly.

This year’s Taste of the Fair dishes and drinks number a staggering 46 in all, a 50+% jump over last year’s assortment. We tried 10 of them across our 7½-hour stayand walked off several of those cumulative calories around the fairgrounds and the exhibit halls, whose contents we’ll cover in subsequent chapters. I was tempted to rank these in a gratuitous listicle, but I’m not in the mood to pit vendors against each other and right now cannot think hard about any of this because I am so exhausted. To keep things simple, everything’s presented in our purchasing order from 9:40 a.m. to 4:45 EDT.

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On the Unthinkable Occasion of Our 20th Wedding Anniversary

Us doing jazz hands in front of an enlarged photo of George Washington's mansion.

Fun times at George Washington’s Mount Vernon on our 2024 road trip.

It’s that time again! Another year of blessed bliss married to the amazing Anne, another “Happy Anniversary to Us!” entry, another dinner to celebrate, and another nearly unrelated lead image. This year’s milestone is also a multiple of 5, so society says it’s worth extra skill points!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: two geeks met in 1987 in high school German class, somewhat out of sync with the ordinary folks around us. Divine timing would keep our unplanned parallel paths intertwining over the years. Everything led up to our determinedly simple wedding in 2004, by which time we best friends had already started traveling together after growing up in families and lifestyles that didn’t lend themselves to much of it. All these years later, our story continues together through ups and downs, highs and lows, chuckles and tears, aches and pains, and mountains and valleys both figurative and literal.

We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

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The Blue 52

Chocolate dessert! Refer to caption.

Our Friday night dessert, one for each of us: Chocolate Terrine on graham cracker crust with ganache, blackberry cheesecake ice cream, blackberry sauce, and a real blackberry on top.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last Friday was my birthday, which I usually note here with gratitude for another year of survival. For years I assumed when I turned 52 I’d celebrate with some geektastic solipsism involving that very number’s use as a recurring DC Comics motif. I had at least one whole anecdote lined up and everything. So far the closest we’ve come to living out any DC homage is the cosmic irony of having the entire lead-up week disrupted by, to put it horridly, a major character death.

The week was instead overshadowed by the unexpected passing of my cousin Shawn on Mother’s Day at age 50, two years younger than me. I never throw parties anyway, but I begged off some of our traditions with hopes of resuming them next year — no evening spent entirely on Facebook (the only social media system remotely nice about birthdays), no one-day road trip with my wife Anne away from Indianapolis, and no ice cream cake. I never post about the ice cream cake, but it’s usually my thing.

Nevertheless we tried to find and/or create some bright spots where we could throughout the week. Mostly I mean food.

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Happy Free Comic Book Day and May the Fourth 2024!

11 different free comic books, including two Star Wars titles.

The second half of my haul, alphabetized — i.e., the half with the Star Wars comics in it. Happy May the Fourth for those who observe!

It’s that time of year again! Today marked the 23rd Free Comic Book Day, that annual celebration when comic shops nationwide offer no-strings-attached goodies as a form of community outreach in honor of that time-honored medium where words and pictures dance in unison on the printed page, whether in the form of super-heroes, monsters, cartoon all-stars, licensed merchandise, or entertaining ordinary folk. It’s one of the best holidays ever for hobbyists like me who’ve been comics readers since the days when drugstores sold them for thirty-five cents each and superhero movies were a rarity and an embarrassment to the genre.

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Our Modest View of the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse from Indianapolis

Me doing jazz hands on our sidewalk while the eclipse looks like an ordinary sun overhead. Skies are bluish gray.

3:09 p.m. EDT: Darkened skies during the window of totality here in Indy.

First things first: no, we didn’t catch any super awesome photos of the total eclipse itself looking like a cosmic coffee ring or the old Armageddon teaser poster. 600 million Instagram users got you covered. You did check with them first, right?

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Merry Christmas from MCC!

White Christmas tree with colorful ornaments, standing in a window. The noontime sun just so happens to be shining through the window behind it at the position where a tree topper would go.

One of many outtakes from my recent visit to the annual Festival of Trees exhibit at the Indiana Historical Society. This one was brought to them by Circle Centre Mall.

Hey, kids! It’s that beloved holiday tradition where we just post a few recent Christmas-themed photos with some short yet sincere seasons’ greetings, and we give readers a break from my usual self-indulgent verbosity. It’s the most wonderful time of the MCC year! Click, scroll, ooh, ahh, and keep on frolicking down the internet superhighway!

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Our Saturday Matinee at “A Christmas Carol” Live

My wife Anne wearing a blue Christmas sweatshirt and a red afghan scarf, smiling and standing in front of a theater stage covered in fake snow. It's mostly dark but with select house on, including a few replica London street lights.

My wife Anne amid the reimagined snowscape of Victorian London.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we don’t patronize live theater nearly often enough. Sure, we’ve visited New York City twice and strolled among those bright Broadway lights to catch popular favorites like The Lion King and Wicked. As for local theater here in Indianapolis…we’ve been shamefully negligent. My high school English classes took the occasional field trip to the Indiana Repertory Theatre — our most celebrated performance venue, but hardly our only stage — where my poor teenage self (whose family otherwise could never afford such extravagances) had the permission-slipped privilege to see productions of Macbeth (in minimalist postmodern with translucent walls), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals (original source of “malapropism”, a useful word to fans of The Office), and Julius Caesar (starring no less an American celebrity than Family Ties‘ Michael Gross). My last engagement was thirty-three years ago.

Fast-forward to today: Anne and I had been discussing our omissions of local cultural experiences when an opportunity came up this holiday season: free tickets to the IRT’s annual performance of A Christmas Carol, courtesy of my employer (one of their nonprofit organization’s longtime sponsors). We kept our calendar clear, took advantage of the offer, and enjoyed a Christmas activity that for once had nothing to do with crowded family gatherings or big-screen movies with snow in them.

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