OK, because I like to practice what I
preach, I actually drove up this weekend to see the Green Corn Festival in the Hudson Valley. Why? Because it was a
lovely summer day and I figured there’d be lots of corn and, hey, I like corn. But was there any corn? No. None to be
eaten, anyway.
The corn festival, it turns out, was a nauseatingly hokey waste of my $10 entrance fee (actually $20 since I took my
wife). The festival was spread out over the Philipsburg
Manor, an old mill and manor where they interpret life in colonial days. What does that mean? It means goofy,
retarded-looking people dressed in faux colonial garb who explain how the colonists and Indians “did things” in the
kind of detail only a stamp collector or Civil War re-enactor can appreciate. In other words, I spent an hour listening
to some lady explain how corn silk baskets are made and watched a half-naked guy (pictured…although you can’t
really see that he was half naked…that’s a leather apron he’s wearing…behind it was a pair of skivvies) who looked
like Eric Idle but claimed to be Cherokee shoot arrows at a block of styrofoam. And did I mention there was no corn to
eat?
Oh, the things I do for this blog.