On a Papa John’s napkin and everything.
Can you blame me? Look at these things:
On a Papa John’s napkin and everything.
Can you blame me? Look at these things:
Thinking about going home to Ohio in a couple of days for Christmas has me really craving the kind of fair food I can only get at the yearly pumpkin festival in the town next to mine.
Is it wrong that I evidently associate my hometown with deep-frying?
Kamran’s been bugging me to post pictures of our trip to Ohio for the Circleville Pumpkin Show (mostly to see himself, I imagine), and I guess pumpkins are still in fashion for another week or two before the holiday sales start and my favourite Christmas song begins to wear on me after only a few days, so here’s a recap of our fun:
My best friend, Tracey, has a long-standing tradition with some of her freshman-year college friends of gathering at her house a few towns over on the Friday night of Pumpkin Show and driving down together. We always park in Ted Lewis Park and then walk up the hill to Court Street, which begins the blocks and blocks of closed streets full of vendors selling pumpkin-related everything. On the way, though, we always pass a house that sells pumpkins (on the honor system! adorably quaint!) and has this pumpkin farmer sitting outside:
Before we had even made it one block into the thing, Tracey was already double-fisting a corndog and a bloomin’ potato that we all shared
and then we quickly moved on to calzones that my dad introduced me to a couple of years ago. I recognized the booth because the same wildly-stereotypical white trash woman was working in it, but she’s very nice and slathers the things in butter sauce before giving them to you, so I’m not judging.
We met up with my dad at the church booth where my cousins were selling hot chicken sandwiches (an Ohio phenomenon that involves cooking chicken in its broth, shredding it, and mixing it with, I don’t know, lots of black pepper and weird thickening stuff that gives the broth this kind of gelatinous texture; it’s awesome despite this disgusting characterization) and said embarrassing citypeople things to remind my dad how long I’ve been away from home.
And then he left, and we ate some more.
• deep-fried pickles
• pumpkin whoopie pies
• fried cheese on a stick
• homemade ice cream
• cotton candy
• deep-fried s’more
• deep-fried buckeyes
• apple cider slushes
and plenty more that I’ve forgotten, no doubt.
We visited the six-foot-wide pie and posed in front of the year’s biggest pumpkin (1436 pounds!)
before sidling up to the stretch of tables, where you can buy every kind of gourd imaginable, for the obligatory sexy pumpkin shot:
And then the HOLY CRAP, IS THAT A FACE ON A PUMPKIN? shot:
We could only guess that these things were grown inside of a face mold. They had the texture of the outside of a pumpkin, so they must not have been carved later, but whatever they were, they were creepy as can be.
When we got to the usual pile of various decorative gourds, Kamran picked up one that was especially weirdly-shaped and made a freaky face for me to take a picture of. Well, right at that moment, some big dumb Circlevillian stepped away from whatever meth he was smoking and yelled,
Now, if it had been me holding the gourd, I would’ve thrown it smack-dab in the middle of his big empty head and said, “I FLEW HERE FROM NEW YORK CITY FOR THIS THING!! IF ANYONE LOVES THE PUMPKIN SHOW, IT’S ME!! YOU’D BE MORE LIKELY TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH THAN I WOULD BE TO STEAL THIS GOURD, YOU SLOBBERING BEEF-WITTED CANKER-BLOSSOM!!
But it was Kamran holding the gourd, so he quickly put it back down and apologized, and I caught this picture of him halfway between making the funny face and whipping his head around to see his accuser:
The only thing I could do to get revenge on the guy was to continue hanging around the table and taking pictures so he and his redneck cronies were forced to watch us not stealing anything. I never got this sort of treatment before I owned a pleather jacket.
(I really hope I was making this face to be funny and not because I ever really look like that.)
I enjoyed that this picture harkened back to the days of yore when I had prize-winning potatoes as my blog header image but would love to know how anyone can judge what makes a good pie pumpkin without actually using it in a pie:
Tracey and I modeled our pumpkin earrings by Handmade by Sandi maybe slightly too creepily
and then humped Justin for good measure:
At the end of the night, well past the supposed closing time, we made our way back to the cars and couldn’t resist stopping for one last hurrah as we passed the farthest cotton candy/soda stand on the strip. As we stood waiting for Kamran to get his soda, someone noticed one of these wooden cane/stick things that I would say I associate with the Pumpkin Show even more than pumpkin burgers and pumpkin cream puffs and all of those things.
Growing up, we would spend hours at the game where you won these things. For $5, you’d get 50 rings that you’d try to toss onto one of the sticks, which were standing up in holes cut through a long table. There’d be 30 kids standing around the table, trying to ring one of the sticks or hook the crook of one of the canes, which were hanging above the table even more out of reach.
It was such a status symbol when we were teenagers to walk around the Pumpkin Show with a handful of these things, tapping the ground to remind people of how many you had. And also to pretend to be blind. Naturally Kamran wanted one after hearing about how cool having them used to make us, and he finally had his chance in the last moments of the evening:
But of course he actually left it there, because we’re adults who don’t need status symbols to feel good about ourselves. Except for our phones and laptops and vacations and clothes and cars and dinner reservations.
The next night, we came back with my dad, and my sister and her husband drove up from Kentucky, and we did it all over again. And we’ll do it again next year and every year for the rest of our lives.
I haven’t legitimately dressed up for Halloween for ages. Everybody else is already the Internet meme of the moment, and spending the night sweating in a rented gorilla costume doesn’t seem fun, and I don’t have enough boob to be Slutty Strawberry Shortcake or whatever.
But this year, my costume idea happened so organically I couldn’t not do it. My friend Anthony and I were sitting at lunch one day, discussing an article I’d just read about Zooey Deschanel. I may or may not have been rambling, and he may or may not have said Zooey’s name in an offensive voice just to shut me up, and it may or may not have come out sounding like “Doughy Deschanel”.
Okay, actually, it did come out sounding like “Doughy Deschanel”, and I said, “That’s the name of Zooey’s fat sister.”
And then we were both like, “Oh, crap, that’s the greatest Halloween costume ever.” So I bought myself a faux-vintage Modcloth dress, donned my pink velvet shoes that I so rarely get to wear, and used it as an excuse to buy a black wig and have straight hair for a night.
Great Halloween costume or greatest Halloween costume?
Remember all of the fun of last year’s Circleville Pumpkin Show? Well, it’s happening times twelve this year, ’cause Kamran’s coming, too!
He lived on the north side of Columbus from 2nd to 4th grade and somehow had never even heard of the Pumpkin Show! You guys, it’s THE GREATEST FREE SHOW ON EARTH. Now, Kamran was a little scared when I warned him about all of the toothless and the morbidly obese people he was going to see, but then when I told him that we, too, can become morbidly obese on pumpkin burgers, frozen pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin milkshakes, pumpkin whoopie pies, pumpkin fudge, and pumpkin corndogs, he was all in.
Apparently half of the states of Kentucky and Missouri are going to be staying with my dad and stepmom this week, so Kamran and I have the pleasure of spending it at my best friend, Tracey’s, house. Which means more Cheesecake Factory, more cat pictures, more visits to the abandoned Chi-Chi’s, and more tubs of cookie dough consumed in their entirety at 4 a.m. than ever before!
Plus, now that I have a DSLR, there will be more faux-artful photographs of pumpkins THAN YOU EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE!
Am I the only one out-of-my-mind excited about this?