An excerpt of an article by Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune, reporting from the Duct Tape Festival in Avon, Ohio:
But to get to that tent, the artistic heart of the second annual Avon Heritage Duct Tape Festival in this city some 18 miles west of Cleveland, first you must negotiate your way through that odiferous thicket of snack food. The sun is hot. The come-hither scent of deep-fried dough is overpowering. The crowd is thickening -- both collectively and, thanks to the dough, individually.
And even a casual visitor to last weekend's festival, which celebrated the legendary adhesive associated with household repairs and homeland security, might have been struck by the notion that duct tape and fried dough occupy competing ends of the spectrum of Americana:
Duct tape, that ubiquitous accessory without which no home, office, dorm room, tool kit or glove compartment would be complete, is America at its plucky, resourceful, lend-a-hand best. Duct tape is America at its gee-whiz, can-do zenith.
Fried dough, a symbol of all that's sugary and sluggish, is another America. It's the America of wide-hipped SUVs. It's America at its blustery, bragging, swaggering, get-outta-my-way worst. America the fat-bottomed bully.
And yet here they are together, coexisting just fine under a blue and ideologically neutral Midwestern sun on a summer Sunday, duct tape and fried dough: the height and depth of the American dream.
(via my Mom!)
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