Serendipity in a small town

Many of Texas's small towns were built around a central business district back in the early part of the 20th century and follow the same model: court house in a plaza and a few main streets around it, with the big-name businesses on those roads. The court houses are often beautiful, showing off fantastic stonework or Lone Stars worked into finials. Unfortunately, now that going to town is a matter of hopping in the SUV, a lot of central districts are dying for lack of parking. The big stores set up on the edges of town, where acres of asphalt desert are possible, and the few small family businesses that try to hang on in town are hurt by the lack of pedestrian traffic. It sucks, not to put too fine a point on it, partly because it's hard to feel much community spirit at a WalMart and partly because the architecture of a big box store will never have the charm of the older two-story places witht their elaborate facades and pressed-tin ceilings. People keep trying, but it's depressingly common to see new enterprises in the town centers set up in a blaze of optimism and slowly wither away.

I'm not the first to lament the woes of small towns, but at least the communities aren't going down without a fight. The weapon of choice? The festival. Luling's got its Watermelon Thump, Flatonia goes for the Czhilispiel (featured sport: hurling), Poteet gets enormous crowds for the Strawberry Festival, and Hallettsville's Kolache Festival was once cancelled for Hurricane Rita evacuations. Tonight La Mere and I grabbed an early dinner and headed downtown for the Fiddler's Frolics, a local event that we had long anticipated never heard of. We figured it wouldn't be a bad way to spend an evening--better than listening to my grandmother and her sister argue out the bad mood they both seemed to have caught--but I wasn't harboring high hopes. I will now admit that the massing of the RVs in the KofC parking lot should probably have tipped me off to the size and awesomeness of the party.

It turns out that the Frolics stretch for an entire weekend and are taken seriously by a lot of people. Food on offer was listed as Cajun a la carte, which translated as $12 for a box lid full of scarlet crawdads, steamed potatos, and corn on the cob; for an extra couple of bucks, you could add a Lone Star or a Shiner bock (cans only; long-necks plus concrete is not a promising recipe unless the EMTs are standing nearby chewing their toothpicks and waiting for the inevitable). Tomorrow there is supposed to be a barbecue contest, and given how important barbecue is to this part of the country, I shouldn't have been surprised by the elaborate nature of the set-ups. One pit was surrounded by a split fence, a fake outhouse, strings of carp lights, and handmade wood signs with the team's name burned into the wood. Another pit was decorated with A&M logos on one side and UT labels on the other; maybe the brisket inside was simmering on a bed of delicious multigenerational hatred. (For the uninitiated: the A&M/UT rivalry isn't some polite Ivy-league grumble. A&M once stole and cooked Bevo, UT's mascot; UT partisans have been known to make slighting reminders about putting the big logs at the bottom of a bonfire. Families have been ruined over a child's choice to go to the other university, and without bowl games to keep the entire state distracted, Texas might be an even bigger pain in the national politics.) Bottom line: can there really be a loser in a barbecue cookoff? And no, the four-feet don't count.

The fiddling competitions take place in the cavernous hall, and after getting ADMIT ONE tickets stapled to our shirts, we grabbed spots to watch the seniors' fiddling competition. Some of the guys were pretty good, and the only one who was actually bad turned out to be 98 years old and suffering from arthritis. He cramped up halfway through a song and had to be massaged before he could continue. I cheered for him, because at that age I'll damn sure want applause if I'm doing anything but turning up for naps. Between players, the emcee chatted to the audience and I watched the crowd, counting pairs of cowboy boots (surprisingly few) and Texas-themed button-down shirts (lots), admiring feed caps and stetsons, and wondering about the combination of jeans and physique that makes so many rancher guys have absolutely no ass (really, you could run a plumb bob from shoulder to heel and not hit anything on the way on most of these guys; how does that work?). Nobody was quite sure what to expect from the next event, billed as the "Anything Goes (As Long As It Involves a Fiddle)" competition. La Mere was disappointed at the rule that pants had to stay on, and nobody took the organizers up on their suggestion that playing in a headstand was allowed, maybe because the mic wouldn't permit it. The crowd favorite was a group family from Minnesota, which was variously rendered as Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota by the emcee, who apparently couldn't be arsed if it wasn't Texas. The two girls, both sweet-looking teens, played fast and clean, keeping in perfect synch even after one of them tucked her fiddle tucked behind her back and the other propped hers up on her right shoulder, and they got the lion's share of the whooping and stomping fromt he audience. A ten-year-old boy from California did a sharp version of a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune, and one of the seniors did a set of mockingbird calls to break up "Listen to the Mockingbird," but most of the other groups stuck with just...playing well. Which was nice, but not terribly wild. Maybe next year they'll ease up the no-nudity rule and we'll get to check out a few G strings. And yes, since you ask, that is the oldest joke in the book.