Come and Get Your Cozy Dawgs!

The Neverland Ferris Wheel at the Central Alabama Fair (2009)

 Don’t you just love a local fair?

Ours opens tonight, and how I’d love to go back to the early ‘90s when my boys were small and the sights and sounds of roller coasters and country music revved their bodies like little engines that could. 

The two in the back are mine, circa 1993?

It was at Lions Fair Park where my kids timidly tried their first Midway rides, then worked up the courage to get scrambled, swung around and turned upside down.

 It was just steps from the old armory exhibit hall where they ate their first Cozy Dawgs.  

“Cozy Dawg! Cozy Dawg! Come and get your Cozy Dawg!” 

That’s the Civitan Club’s marketing spiel for “Please buy one of our corndogs!”

And boy do they market! They have a microphone that blasts your name through the cool night air. 

“AND HERE COME THE GRESHAMS AND THE GRESHAM BOYS 3!

COME AND GET YOUR COZY DAWGS!”

How could we say no?

That’s another thing about local fairs. Practically everybody knows everybody else. I love to browse the exhibits where I can see paintings, photographs, crafts and cooking created by folks I know.

Sweet Potato Cake

One year, I finally spent the weekend cooking and entered a few baked goods of my own. My mother-in-law’s roll recipe and sweet potato cake won ribbons. So the next year, I persuaded my father-in-law to let me enter some of his bread-and-butter pickles, plum and scuppernong jelly and pear preserves.  

Ouch! He won nothing, nada, nary a thing! Such is the competition!

On to entertainment!

Back in my days as a newspaper reporter, the fair was the big news of the week. We had it highlighted from Monday through Saturday with news staffers scheduled for almost every event. One year, I covered entertainment and got to interview Ava Barber. Remember her?  She was the country singer on The Lawrence Welk Show. She looked so different from her television persona where I thought she appeared much older than her years. At the fair, she wore her hair in a younger, more modern style, had on jeans and sang a few Conway Twitty songs.  

The Big, Blue Chair

Another great thing about the fair is my big, blue chair!

Yes, I won the chair at the fair!

The girl who hates ‘rithmetic and most especially problems dealing with estimation, estimated the number of matches in a big, glass jug and came closest to the correct amount.

I'm thinkin' those Cozy Dawgs must have worked miracles in my brain!

What are your favorite things about a fair?