Westmoreland County Fair 2012, Part 1

By this point of the summer, even I was a little burnt out on amusement parks and fairs, but I couldn’t open the door for September without one last hurrah at the Westmoreland County Fair, which is my second favorite of the summer. It’s much smaller than the juggernaut of the summer fairs, Big Butler, but it gets it done. And it’s a different company that puts it on, so while the rides are fewer, they’re also ones that we don’t get anywhere else.

Like the High Roller, which sadly has not made a reappearance in the last two years and I’m pretty sad about this. That ride is one of my favorites due to its complete ridiculousness.

Seri and Pete joined us with their kids. Seri’s frown of the day is brought to you by the color brown and the letters FML:

• she had lost a high-stakes fight with Pete over what color Henry’s shirt was. (Black, not brown like she had vehemently insisted. Looks like my brother Corey will have company at the Color Blind table!)
  • Although in her defense, her sunglasses made her do it. What excuse have you got, Corey?!
• our kids had staged 4 coups and formed 23 mutinies in the first hour.

Plotting.

There was no High Roller this time around, but the Aladdin was back! I wanted to ride this so badly last year, but it was all sorts of broken. I kept doing random walk-bys during the day last year to get a status update on it, but Henry was like, “Do you seriously want to ride that after it’s been dead all day?” I guess he was sort of right. But no sputtering motor or freak death was stopping us this time around, so Chooch, Seri and I rode and I wanted to mock her children for being too short to have all of the fun with us, but they had departed for the award-winning chicken barn and didn’t seem to be bothered at all by the fact that we were getting our stomachs churned like buttermilk in an Amish cottage.

Colored chickens were the big draw, I guess. Don’t worry, there was a big sign swearing that the chickens were dyed with non-toxic shampoo. It still made me feel sad, though.

The Aladdin is similar to the Music Express, only with less cars and roofless. The platform tilts  when the ride starts and the cars swing like sleighs, or miniature flying carpets, which I guess is the point of calling it Aladdin. Thank god I blew all that money on college else I might not have been able to make that connection. It was relatively mild for a carnival ride, which is how I conned Henry into riding it with me later. That, and that there were small icicles beginning to form in Hell.  The first time I rode it, all the kids were making their cars sway wildly before the ride started, and because I take all of my cues from pre-teens, I started throwing myself into Henry’s side, rocking our car against his wish.

“Stop doing that! You’re going to get us in trouble!” Henry hissed, worried that the carny was going to turn him into their brethren at the Blue Collar Bureau.

“Everyone does it!” I shot back, pummeling my body against his shoulder like a skin-suited battering ram.

Just then, the carny barked, “HEY! STOP ROCKING THE CAR!” which made Henry drag his hand over his face in embarrassment. We were literally the only adults on the ride, and of course we’d be the ones getting chastised.

“Why do you have to do stupid shit?” Henry yelled as the ride finally started, but I was too busy trying to prevent my urine from escaping because I was laughing so hard.

I went on the swings with Pete and Seri, leaving Henry alone with all three kids. I was already irritated in line, because no one was standing in an orderly fashion and the queue snaked out into the middle of the walkway instead of against the ride, so we were smack in the middle of foot traffic. And then some little bitch in front of us started crying because she was too short to go on, and instead of finding a ditch to throw herself in, she just stood there blocking the entrance with her height deficient body so no one could get around her. My patience ran out faster than Snooki’s Vagisil.

Hey girl, sorry you’re too short to ride the Swings at the fair & that you’re crying to your mama about it, but kindly get the fuck outta my 42″+ way so I can enjoy the ride.

My heightism would come back to bite me in the ass in approximately 5 seconds.

I was unaware that the seats were raised at different levels, and I wound up on the Tall People side, which meant my squat chubby ass couldn’t get up into the seat. It was incredibly awkward, and Pete finally had to help me. No, he did not present me with a toadstool to step upon like I had hoped, but he did hold the swing steady for me so I could raise my midget body up into the seat without kickboxing the air like I had been on my solo attempts.

It was a beautiful moment of people of opposing heights coming together, though I am really glad no one has it on video.

Then we enjoyed a block of Destiny’s Child songs and pretended like that never happened.

Thank god Pete stepped in before the carny got to me and hoisted me up with calloused hands dangerously close to my boobs. You can’t see it in this picture, but this particular carny had a humungous goiter-like growth perched on the side of his face, like it was preparing to jettison off into the ether at any minute. I’m sure it plays some part in his molestation games, serves as a decoy and before you realize how long you’ve been staring at it, he’s already led into you into the back of his tinted windowed carny trailer.

More later.