I was never really a ‘State Fair’ type of person. I have no disdain or active dislike towards fairs, I just don’t feel any pressing need to go to them. When I was younger and in scouts, I recall going to the Wisconsin State Fair a few times, but since then it had probably been about 20 years since I had stepped foot on the grounds.

That trend seems to be changing as I’ve now gone to the State Fair three times in the last three years; Each time for the sole purpose of seeing a band. This year it wasn’t even for a nationally known act, but rather to see a local cover band called Rhythm Method. Rhythm Method is a band I discovered about 4 years ago while at Summerfest. That day I had gotten to the Summerfest grounds a bit early and had several hours to kill before any of my friends would be coming down to meet me. Looking on the schedule I saw a band called ‘Light Up’ which was billed as a Styx tribute band. Having always liked Styx (one of top 5 bands all time) , and at that time, having never seen Styx live, I figured I’d check them out. I was blown away. The singer sounded exactly like Dennis Deyoung and the band recreated the Styx sound to perfection. They sounded more like Styx than the real deal did since Styx was no longer touring with Dennis DeYoung. After their show, they mentioned that ‘Light Up’ was the named they used for their Styx Tribute show but for most of the year they went by the name of ‘Rhythm Method’ and were a 70′s and 80′s rock cover band. I made it a priority to see them in their Rhythm Method guise. They did not disappoint, and have completely changed my opinion on cover bands…in that they have set the bar in which a cover band should strive for. They are just that good.

Anyway, I went to the Wisconsin State Fair on Friday with my friend Gwenn to see Rhythm Method. She was very impressed with the show and vowed to see them again with me sometime. The fair itself was uneventful, we had no time to look at anything else, so other than drinking and eating fair food we did little beside listen to the band.

On Saturday I went to the Ozaukee County fair with a bunch of people. The itenerary there was to walk around the fair for a few hours and then go see the Demolision Derby at 7pm.

The Fair, being a county fair as opposed to state fair, was somewhat small but they did have the usual buildings full of animals so I saw my fair (pun intended) share of pigs, rabbits, chickens, ducks, horses, cows, goats, and rednecks.

The last, being a species our group actively seeks out during fairs outings as part of a drinking game. The rules of which are simple and few:

1) If you see a mullet, everyone drinks.
2) If you see a family or couple in matching outfits everyone drinks half their glass.

The girls in the group decided to play a game in addition to this one they called ‘Your new boyfriend’, which was basically finding the most redneck, or red neckish stereotype they could find and declaring that this would such and such’s new boyfriend. Ok, stupid but we were pretty drunk by the end of the day.

My highlight of the day was winning a stuffed monkey at the midway in a game of Carney pool. Carney pool is basically a regular bar-sized pool table in which there are 4 balls racked. You need run all four without missing or scratching to win.

Now I’ve been practicing my pool game quite a bit over the last 6 months or so, and for me to run 4 balls in a row (in any order) is frankly somewhat easy. I should be able to do this 75-80% of the time. One of my practice/warmup drills is to throw 4 balls on the table and then try to run them IN ORDER, and I can do this about half the time, so having to do it in any order seemed pretty easy to me.

I realize that not everyone is good at pool and that for an average person running four balls without missing is going to be somewhat difficult. Still, I wondered if the game was rigged somehow to prevent a good pool player from just cleaning the carney out. Well once I saw the pricing I realized there was no gimmick to the game. For this particular game the pricing had 4 tiers, each tier allowing you to pick a larger stuffed prize if you won; $2, $5, 10$, $20. In essence, all you were actually doing was buying the stuffed animal outright and then playing the game for the right to take it home. Whether you made all 4 or not, the Carney still had your money for a prize in which he probably paid half as much for to stock.

Still, I won on my first try and gave the prize (A stuffed monkey riding a banana) to Gwenn for her kickball team (The Drunken Monkey).

The demo derby was very fun for about the first 10 minutes, after which I became increasingly bored. Thankfully, a steady supply of beer and good company help pass the time.

I will say one thing about fairs I don’t like; The food. Well, let me rephrase that, I like the way the food tastes, I just don’t like the what it does to me. I gained almost 10 pounds over the weekend due to eating nothing but deep fried snickers, oreo cookies, cheese, nachos, burgers, brats, and various other fair goodies. Ah well, just need to make my bike rides this week a bit longer to work it off.