A HUGE Thank You to all of my new friends who dropped by my booth at last weekend's Denver County Fair at the National Western Complex!
I've never shown at the Denver County Fair previously, and it's still a young show, with 2015 being its 5-year anniversary. I admit I felt some trepidation when I started hearing about things like the Kitten Pavilion and Davey B. Gravey's Tiny Cinema. I'm used to art fairs, gallery showings, and other affairs where everything's quiet and subdued.
This was not that.
Thunder and cacophony abounded throughout the entire Complex, with contests, classes, dancers, bands and poetry readings coming from every available stage, and those stages were everywhere. There was a huge kid's area, the biggest model train setup I've ever seen outside of a permanent installation, food and diorama contests (sometimes in the same contest, with Peeps dioramas), an art gallery as big or bigger than any retail location, cosplay characters roaming the aisles, and none of that even touches on the vendor booths that were present.
Every imaginable type of booth was there, and then a bunch more you never dreamed could exist. Not only clothing, food, souvenirs and storm windows, but also fortune tellers, booths hawking other conventions, knives, sculpture, travel, and I don't even know what else. Local Legend Kenny Be had a booth too, offering giant prints of his utterly fantastic new Colorado Map.
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| My Booth at the Denver County Fair! |
Other than meeting new people, the biggest highlight of the whole Fair for me was seeing the poetry reading contest, when one of the guys from Poetry on Demand was delivering a particularly dramatic reading during one of the contests on a nearby stage. His mic had some feedback, but instead of standing there waiting for someone to do something, he instead used that opportunity to put the mic in the stand, walk out to the front of the stage, and quite forcefully address his audience one-on-one, intimately and aggressively. It was so effective, he got the most rousing, cheering response of any reader that day, and it was very well-deserved. I don't know his name, but if anyone does, let me know and I'll update this entry. It was truly unforgettable.
In the end, it was far from ordinary. One might even say it was off-center. But it was a larger gathering than any of these individual groups would probably experience in Colorado. And despite (perhaps because of) the disparate nature of all the groups, everyone got along just great. There was no rivalry or territorialism, only fun, and people who came only for their specific interest still got to experience other cultural phenomena, and interact with people they would otherwise never see.
I had a great time, and if you did too, I invite you to go again next year.
See you then!
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