Miss Cumberland Ag Expo, 2016 Edition

Yesterday I went over some plowed ground when I served as a judge for the Miss Cumberland Ag Expo Pageant.  Regular readers may recall that I was a pageant judge back in 2014…the year the emcee read the wrong name when he was announcing the winner. Oops!

As a pageant vet, I had a good idea of what to expect this year when my friend Lizzie once again asked me to be a judger. Lizzie asked me to recruit another judge, so I asked my friend Pam if she were interested. Pam’s game for most anything and said yes right away.

The Cumberland Ag Expo is in Newville, which is the one of the larger towns in You Can’t Get There from Here County.  Pennsylvania’s mountains run from southwest to northeast and getting to Newville from State College means driving east and then due south. The fields of corn looked great, and we sure passed lots of them when we weren’t driving up and down a mountain or two. Cell signal was spotty so we even used a road map to help navigate. It was almost like being back in the 1980s.

While it’s bigger than it was two years ago, the Cumberland Ag Expo is still pretty small. Even with the displays of new and vintage farm machinery, the occasional cow, I think the whole thing—soup to nuts—would fit in a football field. At best, two.

Pam and I had some time to kill before we were on the clock as judges so we checked out the exhibits building. There were the usual display of wilted flowers and vegetables that probably looked great a couple of days ago when they were picked. I did see the judges taking a measuring tape to a sunflower, and at almost 12 feet, it was plenty tall.

Over a dinner of a soggy hot sausage sandwich and fries (Pam, a vegetarian, wisely skipped the sausage), we met our partner in judging, Rosalie. Rosalie is a number cruncher (aka Specialist, Business Control Plan, Latin America Division) at Volvo Equipment’s huge facility in Shippensburg. She’s originally from Brazil and is here under some sort of Brazilian accountants’ visa.

Close readers of The Washington Post will remember that The Donald is looking to scale back visas for Brazilian accountants in order to expand the visa program for Slovenian models who are interested in in girl-on-girl photo shoots, Pilates, and life as arm candy for short-fingered vulgarians masquerading as Presidential candidates. But that story is for another day.

After we finished eating, the young women in the pageant started dropping by to introduce themselves.  This was an important part of the pageant process, unseen by viewers at home. We were to evaluate their poise, appearance, and general social skills. They all acquitted themselves very well, even the shy ones. Their career goals ranged from “I haven’t decided yet” to teacher to pharmacist. Interestingly enough, the young woman whose favorite subjects were math and science did not want to be an astronaut. Astronauts are yesterday’s news.

None of the contestants said anything totally crazy, so they were immediately all more qualified for the position of the Cumberland Ag Expo queen more than Donald Trump would be.

When it was time—ok, past time—for the pageant to start, Angela, the emcee introduced the visiting royalty—2016’s Miss Shippensburg Fair Queen, Miss Shippensburg Sweetheart, and the Cumberland County Dairy Princess. Their role was to sit on stage and add some pageant gravitas to the event. My view of them was blocked by the podium but since I didn’t hear any whoopee cushions going off in mid-pageant, I am assuming they sat there projecting gravitas the entire time.

Then the emcee introduced the contestants—in casual wear. Audry, Abigail, Lydia, Kelly, Rachel, Kayla, Brittany, Courtney and Samantha did a bit of runway walking (fashion runway as in "Work it gurl", not airport runway as in with the flashlights with the orange ends). The older girls gave two to four minute speeches on the topic of “If you were a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, what qualities or initiatives would you take to promote growth in agriculture?”

Yes, that’s the exact question. I brought the script home.

Fortunately, the younger contestants were spared that bit of word salad.

To a girl, the contestants were in favor of agriculture, since that’s food, you know? Even factoring in the ages of the contestants, there was plenty of room for improvement in the speeches. However, only one of the speeches made me consider putting my head in an oven. So, by my math, that’s a victory.

When the speechifying was done, all of the contestants demonstrated their physical fitness and coordination by performing a group line dance. All of them danced better than me. Every. Single. One.

After the dance number, the contestants went backstage to change into evening wear for the next part of the show. I thought about the old Wendy's commercial about the Russian fashion show and chuckled to myself.  ("Is next. Evening wear.....Very nice.") 

In the meantime, my fellow judges and I were introduced to the audience. Angela referred to me as a “Renaissance man”. I think most of the audience thought that was something like a Fuller Brush Man, but I did not stand up to explain the difference.

Since the judge introductions didn’t take very long, we quickly moved to the next entr’acte of an auction of the baked goods that had been on display in the exhibits building. A stout and somewhat gruff auctioneer who looked somewhat like an unemployed Humpty Dumpty sat on the lip of the stage and auctioned off plates of cookies and brownies, not to mention pies and cakes and the occasional plate of muffins. Each item had a slice out of it, since tasting is an essential part judging a baked goods competition.

Potential customers crowded around the inventory so they wouldn’t miss prize winning pan of apple pandowdy—with one slice gone, of course. A couple of things (“I think it’s mincemeat”) went for a buck or two, but the high demand items were in the twenty dollar range. Emcee Angela showed her colors as a Pennsylvanian by shelling out for a wet bottom shoo fly pie.

By the end of the auction, the contestants had time to put on their faces and whatnot and so were ready for Act 2 of the pageant to start. The girls also had more than enough time to get into an Alexis and Krystle style catfight backstage, but apparently chose not to follow that path.

In the evening wear section of the contest, Angela read a short bio of the contestant as she was escorted to the center of the stage by a gentleman—anyone from a six year old kid in his Sunday best to man in his U.S. Army dress uniform. While the biographies obviously emphasize the high points—prized rabbits, good works, church membership, and career plans, they didn’t gloss over the challenges the kids had met. These included bullying, autism, single parent households, and so on.  In a matter of a few moments, I went from thinking “Where did she get that gown, Bass Pro Shops?” to thinking “You go, girl!"

After the evening gown section, my fellow judges and I completed our score sheets and agreed which three girls would move on as finalists. While it wasn’t an easy decision, we all arrived at the same one independently. The finalists then had to answer an “impromptu question”, which wasn’t really that impromptu since it was right there on the program.

One of the girls got an unexpected snort out of me when she answered the question, “Would you rather live in the past, present, or future?”. She was in favor of living in all three time periods. She noted that one of the interesting things about the past would be black and white television. Oh my. Well, at least she didn’t mention the possibility of dating Elvis.

At this point there were a few claps of thunder and Angela moved to speed the pageant along since the judges and most of the audience were sitting under the stars. Pam and Rosalie and I completed our score sheets, and agreed again that we were all on the same page. Pam completed the prize envelopes—which meant that the emcee could not possibly announce the wrong name-—while the outgoing queen gave a speech, complete with tears that made me glad that the end of her reign was near.

As the winners were announced, they were crowned with tiaras, each one a bit larger than the last. The largest tiara went to the 2016 Cumberland Ag Expo Queen, Brittany Graham.

Soon enough the stage was filled with photographers, families, and friends as they congratulated the winners and consoled those who didn’t get a tiara. After a few pictures, Pam and I decided to head out before it started raining. It was a fun evening—I only wish I’d bought an apple pandowdy to enjoy on the ride home.

A Table of Joe and a Song in My Heart

June is a good time of year to visit the south Jersey shore. It’s not quite high season, but all the tourist oriented businesses are open.  In June, you’re no longer in any danger of stubbing your toe on an iceberg when you take a dip in the Atlantic.  And finally, it’s too early in the season for medical waste to have washed up on shore: always a plus in New Jersey.  There wasn’t anything exciting on the gang's dance card—no living history Clamshell Toss or parasailing, so I checked out the Cape May County CVB website to see what was up.

What ho! as my fictional mentor, Bertie Wooster, would have said. There was a food truck festival in Sea Isle City. SIC, as it's known on white oval bumper stickers, is the town immediately across Townsends Inlet from Avalon (as in, it’s close) and has—at least in my experience—sort of a working class shore vibe. You wouldn’t be shocked if you saw the former cast members of MTV's Jersey Shore there, the way you would if you saw them in Avalon, Stone Harbor or Cape May. It’s a gym/tan/laundry sort of town.

As a hipster wannabe, I am all in for food trucks. I like their cute names, amusing graphics, and quirky menus. The food is often both tasty and cheap. Cheap is appealing to their “core constituency” of hipsters, who are often sleeping on their parents Castro Convertibles. And because food trucks have that aura of au courant-ness around them, not everyone realizes that, at the end of the day, you can eat pretty much the same deep fried crap that you’d get at a fair or a carnival.

In addition to the food truck festival there was theatre in Cape May. Everyone knows I’m not a theatre kind of guy.  But I occasionally go. This was one of those occasions. It wasn’t community theatre, but the actors were real Actors Equity members. And it got better….it wasn’t an evening of Chekov or Strindberg, but an evening of SHOW TUNES. Show tunes: the lingua franca of the gay community. And not just any old show tunes but tunes by Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. In other words, the evening was going to be knee deep in old chestnuts. After getting the gang's assent, I bought tickets using my cellphone quicker than you could say "Beer Bust at the Eagle!".

Before a pre-theatre dinner at the food truck festival, there was plenty of time to do chores around the house and in the yard.

I had to buy some plants to fill in the flower beds here and there. I like my yard to look tidy and well cared for, even if it doesn’t compete with the folks who have sprinkler systems and a landscape contractor who employs lots of people who are adept with a leaf blower and can tell you where to go for good, cheap, Mexican food.  And besides, I got the gardening gene. I can tell a delphinium from a dahlia and a lupine from a larkspur. The difference between Chekov and Strindberg, well...I'm a little shaky there.

So M. and I headed off the island to the garden center of choice. It’s on Route 9, which used to be the main drag from North Jersey to Cape May before the construction of the Garden State Parkway.  It’s still where you find garden centers, a golf course or two, and closer to Cape May, a gaggle of big box stores and strip malls.

Still, on the undeveloped portions of the highway, there are some vestiges of Old Jersey: old churches, small towns with antique shoppes, and some houses here and there.

Before we got to the garden center, we came to a huge sign for GARAGE SALE. It was near the site of a garage sale where I bought a great Cold War era photo of a meeting of Air Force generals that’s been a fixture in my downstairs bathroom for years. So, with that great purchase in mind, I pulled over to see to what was for sale. In theory, lighting can strike twice in the same spot.

Among the tables of insulated coffee carafes, video game cartridges, record albums and miscellaneous boxes filled with household crap I zeroed right in on the Pot O’ Gold.

Interestingly enough, everyone was ignoring it.

It was a table stacked with a giant scrum of mostly naked GI Joes enjoying what seemed to be one big Hasbro themed orgy. Hasbromance, I suppose.
 

My first thought was, is this how they celebrate Gay Pride in Middle Township? But alas and alack, there wasn’t a single rainbow flag, Cher album, or poster from Promises Promises starring Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth to be found anywhere.
 

It turned out that the man who was selling them got them from his father, who drew for Marvel Comics in the 1980s. For whatever reason, Marvel sent his father LOTS of GI Joes to sketch.

 

And after a while, the father got bored with just the standard Joe (just like a guy, no?) and then decided to turn some of them into Zombies. As Dave Barry would say, no I am not making this up.

I was astonished that the folks having the garage sale didn't think it was at all noteworthy to be selling a pile of mostly naked GI Joes, some of whom were Zombies. They acted as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

And so right there, on a sunny Saturday in June, at a garage sale on Rte. 9 in Middle Township, NJ, I learned one of life’s more unusual lessons: you cannot take a bad photo of a pile of naked GI Joes.

Even though they were only a dollar each, I didn’t buy any.

As I'm sure you know, I have intimacy issues.

M. and I went back to the garden center in the afternoon and stopped again to take more photos. The guy told us that he was still waiting for his first sale of Joe. I gave him $2 and told him that it was for the photo rights. He laughed and invited us back on Sunday.

After reluctantly saying goodbye to the Joes, and planting the stuff I bought at the garden center, there was a bit of time for the beach. The water’s pretty cold, but once you’d gone past the shrinkage point it was really quite refreshing.

After a quick shower, we headed out to the food truck festival in Sea Isle City.

For starters, we were overdressed. And we could tell that pretty much as soon as we parked. You might have thought that they didn’t make horizontal stripes in those sizes, but they do.

The trucks were parked in a vacant lot behind a bar. There were about fifteen food trucks and they formed a U. in the middle of the U was a line of “vendors”, as in people who sell license plate holders about the Second Amendment, folks from the local animal shelter, and, believe it or not, someone selling Tupperware. Perhaps she was thinking that people might need to take something home in an EZ-2-Tote Deviled Egg Caddie, or the Overnight and Part of the Next Day Pineapple Schlepper.

We did a lap around the lot before splitting up to get the genuine food truck sourced Epicurean delight of our choice. I went with a boring pork BBQ, I wasn’t really in the mood for Alsatian Tempura on a Stick or Vegan Cactus Sliders on Home Made Matzo, not that I saw either of those things. The menus were pretty boring for the most part, except for some sort of Hungarian spiral bread called a spritzenflugel or volkdophschlaen or something like that.

Cutting to the chase, my Carolina pork BBQ was terrible. In fact, it was easily the worst Carolina pork BBQ I have ever had. Frankly, it didn’t even rise to the level of North Dakota Pork BBQ.  For starters, it took forever. I paid my $8 and gave them my name. And then waited and waited and waited. And they called Brandon and Jimmy and Kristen and Cassie and so on, and never Rick. The guy who ordered right before me got his sandwich, but alas not me.

Finally, a proto hipster in a pork pie hat asked me if I’d been waited on. I said that I had quite some time ago but was still waiting for my food. The woman who took my money, a middling student in charm school back in the day, informed me, in a tone postal workers save for people who fill out the wrong forms when they’re mailing boxes to countries with no vowels in their name, that they filled the orders in the order in which they were received and that my sandwich would be coming. I pointed out that Brandon, who’d ordered right before me, got his sandwich quite some time ago. That went over like the proverbial fart in church.

After the long wait, my sandwich arrived. It wasn’t Carolina Pork BBQ. It was some gristly roasted pork with a blob of what a dollar to a donut say was Heinz BBQ sauce plopped onto it. Ugh.  When I went back to the bit of standing cocktail table the gang was sharing with some perfect strangers, I told them all that it was the worst fucking pork BBQ I had ever had.

On the plus side, the milkshake I ordered at Shore Shake was really good even if opted for chocolate and not mango/persimmon/starfruit with candied ginger bits and quince flavored jimmies sprinkled on top.  But hey, the guy in the truck was wearing a hand crocheted visor and that made me feel hipper just by looking at him.

The rest of the gang liked their meals even down to the Hungarian ventlinzerfuble or whatever the hell that thing was. It was just my unlucky day.

After the food truck festival, we zipped down to Cape May for our evening of theatre.

Cape May is quaint and cute, especially at dusk.

"I can't believe I forgot the beach tags!"

The show was in the Presbyterian Church, which had some great 19th century stained glass windows. However, there was a large stage where the pulpit should be.  I’m not sure what that would do for Sunday service, but it did make a decent enough theatre.

The director spoke to us before the show and pointed out that the actors (two men, two women) were un-mic’ed, as they would have been in the old days so we would be hearing people as they sang when the songs were written. Cynical me thought, oh, well, the space isn’t very big and this saves them the cost of a sound guy. But hey, the singers projected from the diaphragm like old pros and a sound system wasn’t necessary.

But unlike in the old days, the accompanist played an electronic keyboard, which sounded like, well, an electronic keyboard. At least there weren’t Hammond Organ rhythm section. The world doesn’t need the sound of maracas in a cha-cha beat as the backdrop for “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No”.

And unlike in the old days, I don’t think there was any sort of costume professional managing the wardrobe. The women performed in home-ec class worthy sack dresses in a Liberty-esque floral print, and the men in our old friend, the goes-with-everything blue blazer. The costumes would have been nice enough had they not been fitted by someone who was used to work with Omar the Tentmaker. There was plenty of extra fabric in case the actors gorged on Hungarian zeppinstagpitzel from a nearby food truck between acts.

The brochure told us the actors would be ‘breaking the fourth wall”, and indeed the performer did leave the stage and come into the audience. One of the singers wanted me to dance with her as she sang, Ten Cents a Dance. Since I didn’t aspire to including a walk on role in an Equity show in Cape May on my resume, I channeled my inner stick-in-the-mud and passed on the chance.  I’m a gardener not a dancer, remember?

Since show tunes aren’t enough to put butts in seats, there was a trivia contest. We were asked to name twelve of the twenty-four songs AND the film or play where the song was heard first. Some of the songs were pretty easy but there were more than a few that I thought of as just a standard, and didn’t know that R&H had used them in a show.  Several of the people there looked as if they never missed a community theater production of Oklahoma!. I was sure that I didn’t have a chance.

After the show, we handed in our score sheets and the cast members performed an encore while the ushers tallied the scores. At the end of the song the head usher came out and called my name. What ho! My luck had changed!

I won a $25 gift certificate to the café at the Emlen Physick House, a local house museum designed by the well-known, at least to 19th century architecture nerds, Frank Furness. He’s no relation to Westinghouse pitchwoman Betty Furness.
 

Had I won a $25 gift certificate to a certain Cape May County garage sale, I would have bought a whole table of Joes. As it stands, I’ll be more than happy with a cup of Joe, and maybe even a piece of Hungarian grinzetmacfarch, if there’s a food truck nearby. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the Physick Estate, but I be sure to Whistle a Happy Tune when I do.

The New South: Tom Tom Founders Festival

After a detour at the Route 11 Potato Chip plant, it was time to head south to Charlottesville, where the Old South meets Berkeley, California. As such, it’s the perfect spot for a festival about innovation and named for, not just a signer, but the author of the Declaration of Independence.

I didn’t think seriously about going to the Tom Tom Founders Festival until someone in Penn State’s upper management intimated to me that the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts was lacking in a hip vibe.

Though at first I was a tad indignant—the words “hip vibe” do not appear in our mission statement anywhere. I learned, after griping incessantly to my friends, to close the gate on that. Sort of. And then I decided that checking out the Tom Tom Founders Festival was as good an excuse as any to go to Charlottesville. And if I played my cards right, I might even manage to get someone else to pay for some of the trip, since I would be doing research in how to acquire a “hip vibe”.

Alas, no OPM (other people’s money) was expended in my trip, but I managed to console myself with a bag of Route 11 Potato Chips and the thought of drinking bourbon in its natural habitat, i.e. below the Mason-Dixon Line.

According its program, the Fifth Annual Tom Tom Founders Festival takes place over Mr. Jefferson’s birthday week with “nonstop talks, workshops, panels, installations, and concerts”. Actually they do stop, but who am I to call someone out for a little hyperbole?

Tom Tom’s mission is to celebrate founding and inspire the next generation of artists and entrepreneurs. Like the founding polymath and namesake of the Festival, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Tom explores and melds diverse disciplines: scientific discovery, technology, the field to fork movement, education, and art that builds on the city’s rich history of founding and to chart a creative future. 

I wonder how many polymaths it took to write that?

Since my traveling companion Pam and I we were trying to embrace hipness on this trip, we looked for place to stay on Air BnB. What could be more hip than the gig economy? Actually, AirBnB wasn't our first choice: all of the outposts of corporate America with comfy beds, coffee makers, cable TV, free Wi-Fi, affinity points, and location location location were filled, even including UVa’s very own motel-for-executives, The Inn at Darden. Oh right…. there was a convention of polymaths in town.

In the end we didn’t do Air BnB, but rented an apartment through something called Stay Charlottesville. The apartment photos on its website included fewer bad tchotchkes and cats than those on AirBnB, and the places looked staged enough to appeal to my neat-nik sensibilities. And most importantly, we could be in a good neighborhood, not the sort of thing that the folks on Air BnB call “transitional” or “up and coming”. The apartment lived up to its billing, it was great!

The hot neighbor with the IMA NERD vanity plate was an added bonus not listed on the Stay Charlottesville website. He insisted that he had plenty of “nerd cred” though you wouldn’t know it by me, since in the few minutes of chatting he failed to mention high school band, particle physics, bagpipe lessons, or his Siamese cat named Steve Jobs.

We arrived in the late afternoon on Thursday, and after a dinner of “Asian tapas” at a place called Bang--which featured a drink reminiscent of my father's famous "Drop Your Panties Punch",  Pam and I went to the Paramount Theatre to hear that night’s speakers.

I went to see Craig Dubitsky. He’s the guy behind Hello Toothpaste (never heard of it), Eos Lip Gloss (never heard of that, either) and partly behind Method soaps and cleaning products (Bingo!) Somehow he met the guys who invented that stuff when they were less than nobodies and...actually, I’m not really sure what he did for them. The guy was totally entertaining --for two solid hours!--and at the end we got samples of toothpaste, that, although it has cute packaging, it is otherwise a solid “meh”.  Then again Crest and Colgate are a solid "meh" too. It's hard for me to get excited about toothpaste.

He put his phone number on the screen and his email and asked us to call him. Like many men, I never called.

Pam went to hear a talk on sports, and it sounded pretty neat but she didn’t get any toothpaste.

The next day, the Paramount Theatre was packed as the festival presented its "Founders Summit". There was a high concentration of blue blazers and man buns though not typically on the same person. I suppose Mr. Jefferson could have had a man bun if he’d wanted one.  What am I thinking?! He probably invented the man bun!

I had a feeling that all these folks would be on their way to Silicon Valley or Goldman just as soon as they could pull themselves away from the most hip coffee shop ever and their current project of monetizing something, anything—their social media following, unorganized sock drawers, or that cupboard filled with non-recyclable takeout Chinese food containers.

It was a day of TED-like talks. All were great with the exception of one that was too jargon-y, even down to the use of the phrases “bro drama” and “entrepreneurial ecosystem” within eye rolling distance of each other. No hyperbole here; I wrote it down.

First was Bill Crutchfied who told the story of his rise from selling car stereos from his mother’s basement shortly after he finished at UVa 50 odd years ago to heading a firm with $250 million in annual sales today. Amazon's Jeff Bezos even comes to him for advice. He was very impressive and told his story with a refreshing lack of self-aggrandizement.
 

Then toothpaste guy was back, with the Reader’s Digest version of the story I’d heard the night before. He was paired with a woman in killer high heels and what looked like a neoprene dress. She’d been something big at Google before founding something else and no doubt has Larry and Sergey and Mark and Sheryl in her phone.

During the breaks there was semi-tasty starfruit juice (emphasis on the "semi") and there was a man bun dense sea of earnest young people to chat up.

If you wanted coffee it wasn’t Maxwell House, or even Starbucks, but some ethically gown non-GMO fair trade heirloom low acid brew with notes of dark chocolate, cinnamon, and linty Hall’s Mentho-lyptus found in the bottom of a computer bag. There were sponsor tables too, but it was too crowded to get to any of those, so my guess that there were handing out some pretty decent stuff or else there was some bro drama going on in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and everyone was trying to get a good look.

The hit of the afternoon was Jason Flom, the founder of Lava Records. He was hellaciously entertaining telling the story of his career that included discovering many huge acts that are household names to those younger and hipper than me. According  to the Tom Tom website, he dropped the F bomb 24 times in his talk. I didn't notice the F bombs, I just noticed what an enthralling storyteller he was.

Things calmed down a bit when we got to Becca McCharen--a fellow grad of the UVa Architecture School--who's making a splash in New York designing clothes that look like exoskeletons and have biometric features, whatever those are. She was joined onstage by Doug Stoup, who takes rich people to the North and South Poles but is scared when his wife drives him to the supermarket. Then came Rodney Mullen, who won the Skateboarding World Championship 35 times. I didn't even know that skateboarding had a World Championship.

There were kids—as in under thirty—with great ideas that had attracted investors who were helping make those great ideas into viable businesses.  One of them went to UVa and he seems to have maxed out his credit card in the men’s department at the Urban Gay Store, which, even today, makes a guy stand out in Charlottesville.

We stayed there until the end of the day and then we met a friend (and reader…yay!) from S.C. and her husband who’d moved to C-ville not too long ago. They had friends in tow and so we had a beer off the beaten path before heading down the beaten path to the festival for a drink and dinner.

In the evening TomTom shed its TED Talk-ish demeanor and became a hipster city event. Lee Park (as in Robert E. Lee, who keeps watch over the park from the vantage point of a large equestrian statue in the middle of the joint) was a happening scene. There was a stage, with a band, with 32 video monitors as a backdrop. There were several beer trucks, so waiting in line was no problem. That's my idea of Southern Hospitality.

And there were food trucks where you could get Asian dumplings, Australian meat pies, Mexican stuff, and German things, too. We listened to the music, had dinner, and some beers, and had lots of laughs. Pam danced with someone in a Gumby costume: I embraced the hipster vibe as colored lights washed over Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler.  It was a delightful evening. Did I mention that there were cinnamon sugar donuts, still warm from the fryer?

Saturday we were up early and walked a mile or so across town to pick up baseball tickets for the afternoon’s game against UNC--we were not only embracing innovation, we were embracing Virginia baseball, too. Pam couldn’t believe that West Main Street, now hip and upscale, used to be the kind of place University students of my day were told not to venture.

Even I have a hard time believing it. It’s all so…. hip and upscale.

We had a tasty breakfast bagel at a C-ville institution, Bodo’s Bagels. One of our fellow diners was a rather disheveled looking young man, still in last night’s suit, dress shirt, and untied bow tie. His gf was in gym shorts, tee shirt, and hair hidden under a baseball cap. Pam and I agreed that it was nice that she was talking him out to breakfast during his Walk of Shame.

Since it was a beautiful day for a walk, we did a jiffy tour of the UVa grounds.  I checked out the new capitals on the Rotunda columns.

After picking up the tickets, we stopped at the City Market, which I’ve written about before. It seems to have grown since my last visit and was filled with organic, free-range, heritage, and non-GMO fill in the blank, plus chiropractors, DIYers, ROLFers, and a model UN worth of ethnic food.  Mongolian lunch? Philippine snacks? Something Ecuadorian? It’s readily available. I’m sure if I’d paid more attention, I would have found specialties of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

We had a great chat with Bo from Bo’s Bodacious Brownies. She had an amusing life story and a big personality. If her brownies were half as bodacious as the fudge sauce we sampled, then they are brobdingnagianly bodacious. I’m not sure why we didn’t buy any brownies since we both like them. Perhaps we were still stuff with another multiple B food, Bodo’s Bagels.

The woman selling scratch and dent orchids was there as were oodles of cute farmers from farms with cute names selling grass-fed hormone-free beef/pork/lamb/and so on. The cute guys with the sausage stand are now selling shirts that say “Bacon gives me a lardon”, which, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I found quite amusing. The shirts are a better deal than the meat, which seemed to be priced according to J P Morgan’s dictum about the cost of a yacht— “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

We arrived at the end of the Festival’s Iron Chef competition, where local chefs had a limited time and budget to cook up some tasty fare with food bought at the market. After the too hip MC announced the winner, he invited the audience to come to the stage to taste the entries. The crowd of frothing-at-the-mouth foodies rushed the stage in something that made a Black Friday doorbuster crush at Walmart look like a Mennonite church bazaar. I didn’t stick around for the EMT calls, but I had visions of grievous bodily harm inflicted by compostable forks.

I had a brief chat w one exhibitor who thought I might be an FBI agent. Seriously.  And this was after I asked if I could photograph her booth. She didn’t look as if she used lot of expensive beauty products; or inexpensive ones for that matter. She was an herbalist, acupuncturist, health educator, and then some, with what I think was the Visible Man of the acupuncture world in her booth. She wanted you to know where she’d stick a needle to jump start your chi or wangdoodle, or both, if you had good insurance or ready cash, as the case may be.

But if you rented one of her four tiny houses, yurt, or apartment on her farm and enjoyed a full farm breakfast of non-GMO pastured pork or non-GMO pastured goose and duck eggs, you would probably understand, unlike me, that true free-range non-GMO grass-fed probiotic heirloom beauty comes from within.

After the city market, we ducked in to the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, something that might be seen as a strange choice since we were at a Festival that was all about innovation.  At the very least I wanted to have a brief, as they say in L.A. real estate circles, lookie loo.  The building is a handsome Beaux Arts thing with neo-Jeffersonian touches, and I wanted to see if the interior lived up to the exterior.

Though the society is right next to Lee Park it’s not part of the Tom Tom tomfoolery. Presumably the society’s managers didn’t want to disturb the hushed aura of the place with an invasion of hipsters looking for the john and complaining—once they found it—that it wasn’t stocked with locally sourced lightly exfoliating toilet paper and Dyson Air-Blade hand dryers.

Except for the gracious and welcoming staffer, we were the only people there.

I know you’re shocked.

Fortunately, the building’s interior is as handsome as the exterior and was quite well preserved, right down to the oil portrait of Charlottesville’s early 20th century big kahuna, Paul Goodloe McIntire, over the fireplace in the library.

The building was designed as the public library, but it’s been the historical society for some time—the library moved next door to newer, bigger, better quarters.  Some of the exhibits were about what you might expect—on Charlottesville’s namesake, Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, on Charlottesville in the Civil War, and a real barnburner on the County Clerks of Albemarle County.

I didn’t peruse the County Clerks exhibit (though I do love the movie Clerks), but I did learn more than I thought possible about the former Princess Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It’s a good thing that Princesses of low-end German principalities didn’t have to take the SAT in the 18th Century since her name would never have fit in the blocks the College Board allotted to that purpose. That wouldn’t have mattered to George III since he didn’t even have time to evaluate which high school clique she was in (cheerleaders/brainiacs/hippies/goths/Jesus freaks) since he married her the day he met her, something they don’t even do on American reality shows. The King, who really knew how to turn a phrase, said she was “eminently distinguished by every amiable endowment”. They had fifteen children together, so I would say that she apparently found the king’s endowment amiable as well.

Another exhibit was on the now mostly forgotten writer, Julia Magruder. Magruder (1854-1907) was a Charlottesville native who authored sixteen books, some of which had illustrations by artists people actually remember including Howard Chandler Christy and Charles Dana Gibson.  The exhibit rather breathlessly informed us that "Magruder's life and writings offer a view of the complex world of the post-Civil War South from the vantage point of a New Woman of the New South."

I have to admit; I’d forgotten that in the post bellum period Random capitalization became More Common.

Magruder’s sixteen books included such soft porn worthy titles as Across the Chasm and The Magnificent Plebian.

Heaving bosoms aside, the exhibit left unanswered my obvious question. “Was she related to Jeb Stuart Magruder, the Watergate conspirator?

For my money (ok, the admission was free) the best exhibit, by was one on Kathleen Clifford, another Charlottesville local whose work has been lost in the mists of time. (I’m sounding a bit like Julia Magruder, no?)  At age 15 she met a theatrical producer at a dinner party, and even though she had trouble even recognizing a script—she threw the first one that arrived in the mail away, thinking it was a catalog—and memorizing lines, but in no time flat she was getting top billing in a revue called Top O’ the World.

After her success in that production, her career took off as a “male impersonator”, which, I suppose we would call a drag king. She wrote her own material (sadly, none of it was in the exhibit) and performed on stage in the “smartest” clothes: top hat, tails, and even a monocle.  (Note to self: perhaps I would do better on Grindr if my profile picture included a monocle?)

She was “America’s answer to Vesta Tilley”, a famous English male impersonator, and sometimes performed on stage with a female impersonator, Bothwell Brown. (Who?) Ms. Clifford moved on to silent films, performing as a woman, and even did one talkie.  The last text panel noted that we really don’t much about her, and essentially said don’t believe anything you read.

A drag performer with the "smartest" clothes and a monocle. Who says that local history is boring?

I asked the staffer—a charming woman of the age you’d expect to find in the historical society—about Kathleen Clifford and she said that it has been the intern’s project. We agreed that the exhibit was “quite something”, one of those expressions that means whatever you want it to mean.  After a little bit of small talk (she had a sweet Virginia accent) I learned that she used to go to church with my old neighbor from University Circle, the putative Grand Duchess Anastasia.

In the 1970s before DNA testing was possible, a number of thoughtful people thought this crazy woman had somehow escaped being murdered by Soviet secret police with the rest of her family in 1918 only to turn up in a canal in Berlin the 1920s. Anastasia ended up in Charlottesville, married to a kooky retired professor whom my friends and I called Mr. Anastasia. They lived in the Charlottesville version of “Grey Gardens”, with a light up plastic crèche (Santa included!) in the front yard instead of a cameo appearance by Jackie Kennedy as at the Hamptons Grey Gardens. They were Charlottesville's dyed-in-the-wool local color.

With our fill of hipsters and history (at least for the time being), that afternoon we went to a UVa baseball game. We did a bit of tailgating with acquaintances from State College whose son--no, not Connor Jones--plays for UVa. It was a welcome change from the hipster-dense atmosphere of the festival.

It was a beautiful day for baseball, but unfortunately the Tar Heels spanked the Wahoos, 8-1.

After the game, we had Festival food for dinner, and listened to some of the bands at the Festival and watched that night’s closing act, a documentary film on CLAW, the Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers.

My words won’t do it justice, but if it’s on Netflix, or whatever, watch it. The gist of the story was this vaguely Jennifer Garner looking woman who sounded like my former pastor’s wife was mourning the death of her husband and started to arm wrestle as a way to work through her grief.

Happens all the time, right?

And taking a leaf out of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s book (“We can put a show on in the barn!”) soon enough she’d founded an entire arm wrestling league.

Women who wrestle in the league have comic personas and wear costumes, like in professional wrestling. Except these Lady Arm Wrestlers perform as characters with a definite feminist slant: Pain Fonda, Darth Mater, Laura Ingalls go-Wilder, Homewrecker, C-ville Knievel. They all seemed like they could live next door to you, but once they were in character, look out!  They really arm wrestle, too—the film shows two of the women breaking their arms wrestling—one break was so severe that the woman was hospitalized. The film covered the league expanding into several other cities as it gave women an outlet to perform and raise money for charity. It was hilarious.

It was hard to top the Lady Arm Wrestlers, but we gave it a go with a nightcap or two. There was a lot of the festival we missed, the craft cocktail competition, some public art projects, networking out the ying yang, but in the end, our minds were broadened as the Founding Polymath would have wanted. I’m not entirely sure that saw anything that would translate directly to our non-hip, north of the Mason-Dixon festival, but we agreed that we’d come back…just as soon as I finished growing my man bun.