Why Linus Never Found the Great Pumpkin
For the longest time, my aunt has been trying to get the rest of the family to come down to Circleville, Ohio for the annual Pumpkin Show. My wife Robin and I inexplicably started going a few years ago. We went when we lived in Columbus. We still go now that we live near Cleveland, even though it’s a three-hour drive. If you’ve never been to Pumpkin Show, that drive might seem excessive. If, on the other hand, you have been to Pumpkin show, you’ll know that it is, in fact, excessive.
Meet Sarah and Mike Glazzman — the other half of our Pumpkin Show cadre. Sarah is a friend of mine from way back, and I think she picked up Mike at a highway rest stop or something in the years following high school. For the past three years, the four of us have made our way down to Circleville to walk around and partake of a pumpkin-laden atmosphere.
It’s a wonderland.
At the Circleville Pumpkin Show, you can peer through a window and see the world’s largest pumpkin pie. It’s about six feet across. Pumpkin Show lasts four days and we always go on the last night, so the world’s largest pumpkin pie always has a lot of green mold growing in its cracks by the time we see it.
At the Circleville Pumpkin Show, you can buy pumpkin donuts, pumpkin waffles, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin fudge, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin taffy, pumpkin brittle, pumpkin burgers, pumpkin cream puffs, pumpkin fritters, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pancakes, and of course, pumpkin sticky buns. I’m only getting started. There’s a sort of Pumpkin Show Santa who walks around wearing orange sweatpants and an orange Santa hat while playing a guitar painted to look like a pumpkin. There’s Pumpkin Man, who wears an orange helmet and face paint and glides around on roller skates. Fair-type rides look like pumpkins while simultaneously looking highly unsafe. This year, I saw in the official Pumpkin Show publication that Buddy Conley, who has a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, won the “Largest Pumpkin” contest with his 897 lb. monster. If you didn’t actually go to Pumpkin Show, you might be duped by this misinformation. There must have been a late entry, because we saw the real winner in person. It weighed 932 pounds. If I were Buddy, I’d be angry that someone outdid me.
I’m noticing now, with unspeakable regret, that I’ve never seen the hog-calling contest. We did see a line-dancing demonstration. It is physically impossible for people to be whiter than when they’re line-dancing.
On most of the streets, people mill aimlessly. If you stay too long, you’ll get trapped by the Queens Parade — the longest parade known to man. The parade circles the festival zone so that nobody can escape. In the Queens Parade, approximately five billion teen queens ride by on floats and wave at the crowd. There’s the Pumpkin Show queen, the Pickaway County queen, fair queens, other festival queens, the Wal-Mart queen, the Quaker Steak & Lube queen, and so on.
In the streets, before the Queens Parade, Mike will stand and watch the taffy stretching machine for hours if you let him. Last year, after noticing Mike’s absence, I looked back and there he was — frozen in front of a vendor’s booth, watching long loops of taffy go around and around and around.
“It’s amazing,” he said.
“It is hypnotic,” Paul agreed. Paul’s a guy who went with us last year. He’s this exceedingly jolly 40-something gay man Sarah works with.
“It’s beautiful,” Mike said.
That was when I noticed the hookers.
“Look,” I said. “Hookers.” I shrugged toward the two young girls in short skirts and black stockings. They were relatively exposed despite the chill and had their hair teased up into frozen curls.
“Those are the queens,” Sarah said.
Then Paul told us about a shirt he had seen the other day. “It said, ‘I’ll be your friend if you’ll be my piece of ass,’” he said. He giggled excessively.
This year we saw three people wearing strobe-light earrings. Two of them were men. We saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that read, “I’m on the brink of insanity and you just ticked me off.” Another woman was carrying a framed drawing of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur. Mike ended up in front of the taffy machine again.
On their first night away from their three-week-old baby, Sarah and Mike were like freed birds. They watched taffy. They walked the busy streets of Circleville, people-watching. We all talked about how having a difficult last name (like mine, or like Glazzman) is annoying because you constantly have to spell it for people, and we fantasized about having an easier handle — like “Thompson.” We ate Pumpkin donuts. We looked at the big, moldy pie. On the way back, we ate dinner at The Spaghetti Warehouse. They asked how many were in our party. Mike said four. They asked our name. Mike said, “Thompson.”
The girl wrote it down and Mike stopped her, saying, “That’s spelled with an ‘h’.”
While the waiter was ignoring us and a cracked glass was drooling all over our table, I said, “The 897-pound pumpkin guy says he gave that pumpkin 2000 gallons of water every other day.”
“That’s a lot of water,” Robin agreed.
“It says in the Show newspaper that he’s going to give one 2500 gallons next year.”
“Ooh,” said Sarah.
How do they even transport these pumpkins? Do they use forklifts? Can Buddy outdo the guy next year who outdid him this year? I wonder these things. Will Sarah and Mike bring the baby next time? I happen to know that she’s already got a pumpkin outfit, though I wonder if it will still fit in a year. Their dog, who has maybe five or six teeth — he’s got a pumpkin outfit, too. And come to think of it, my mom’s dog Margaret has a pumpkin outfit. I have no pumpkin outfits. Zero. I didn’t know how popular they were.
Every year, I wonder why we do this. And every year, we come back. It must be the taffy. Or that ridiculous moldy pie. Or maybe the hookers.
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Wed, 28th Jan 2009 9:53 am
[...] Raspberry Sparkling Water may be the worst product ever made We were over at our friends Sarah and Mike Glazzman’s house this past weekend, and Sarah offered me a [...]
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