CORN!!!

I can see at least a dozen identical signs littering the downtown shops, just on my way to the pancake house.

"SAVE CORNFEST!"

Mysterious. Austere. Neon Yellow. These signs sum up the majesty and wonder that is Cornfest. This signs lead me to hope that this year, Cornfest will use a Ferris Bueller's Day Off theme. It should be possible, even for a small town that derives all of its profits from corn and college students. Perhaps the organizers can't afford Matthew Broderick, but I understand that Ben Stein has been back on the work-for-hire bandwagon ever since some damn kids won all his money. And wherever there is lifeforce to be taken, Jeffery Jones will be lurking nearby.

Sssssnap.

I moved to this town just in time to see the previous cornfest. That year, the organizers had apparently decided to try out a theme based around "Five cover bands and the guys who sang Eye Of The Tiger. Disappointingly, there was very little corn involved in the festivities. You could go to a trailer, and get a free ear of corn, unless you opted to pay the fifty cents to get gourmet spices rubbed onto the corn by a team of eunuch maizemasters. But everywhere else, the festivivalgoers were allowed to travel in a corn-free world.

It's to be expected, I suppose. I used to live in a town that had a "Ham And Yam" festival. The first year, there were yam-craftsmanship contests, Ham cook-offs, and hundreds of booths that could inform a person about how many tubers it would take to equal one Cornish Hen. And so the festival continued, for a few years. But time went on, and it seemed much more economical to replace some of the meat fact kiosks with more carny games. Soon shopkeepers began to offer nontraditional items, like pizza and fried dough. Eventually, the festival slunk away from the main downtown streets, abandoning any pretense of being an event worthy of destroying traffic patterns for an entire city.

I think it was then that they got rid of the Wicker Ham. I've never returned since... I've heard that things have improved, but my loyalty still lays with the old pagan festivities of the mid-eighties.

Here, I am surrounded by summer festivals. Each town has raised its banner, trumpeting to all that there is a reason it exists, beyond being a cheaper suburb of the capital city. Many of these towns are lying. Many know that they are lying, but they also know that a city identity has to start somewhere, so why the hell not with a Pumpkin Festival?

And then there's Cornfest. Which needs to be saved from... something.

I'll let you know if I find out anything interesting.