Cheese curds, art shows, and other things that don't go together...

I had my second art show experience, though to be fair once again, calling it an art show might be a stretch. We were at the Ellsworth Cheese Curd Festival, and it was "art" versus Small Town America. And Small Town America won, hands down.

I think that we should have known that this show was doomed on Friday night after more than three inches of rain fell in an hour, hail fell in a tin-pinging deluge, the tornado sirens went off twice, and there were five inches of water in the tent and the power converter for the computer was swimming at the bottom of the puddle. And then it got worse...

Seriously, how can you compete against a tractor pull? It wasn't really that as much as the simple fact that the people who go to tractor pulls don't really care that the pendants were made hand-made with dichroic glass, and that the coasters really were different than the ones their six-year-old made at school, that the pictures were all "tooken" by me, and yes, there is an Eiffel tower in Las Vegas, but the photos I had carefully printed on archival paper with archival ink were of that other tower in Paris that just looks like the one in Las Vegas.

And we learned once again that the economy really isn't recovered--it wasn't like these patrons of the arts were gorging themselves at the trough of art somewhere else on the fairgrounds. All the vendors (who were to a person all nice, helpful, and generous with their advice) reported that things were slow.

We made the rent for the booth today about 3:30, and that is about all we did. But we learned a lot and had some fun. And ate some cheese curds. And that was what it was what it was supposed to be about anyways.

The pictures are a hodge-podge of photos and are in no particular order One shows my part of the booth, while others show the venue on Friday night in the rain and then on Saturday against the background of threatening skies and the inevitable silos. There was a parade, with tiny portrayals of key local dairy products, and local royalty in front of the creepy green symbol of their festival,the June Bug. The blow-up slides and other amusements were popular and colorful, and the chain saw artist was, well, an artist with a chain saw. The pond was where I wanted to be with all the peace that it symbolized.