Once a year, on the last Saturday in September, the population of the town my parents live in swells by ten times, reaching nearly fifteen thousand. Most of this number congregate on Queens Bush Rd, where long picnic tables and a large stage become the focal point for all kinds of yummy goodness (apple fritters, pancakes and sausages) and entertaining displays of the local residents' talent, be it musical, line dancing ability, culinary, or crafty. It's the Apple Butter and Cheese Festival, or the ABC Festival for short, but it encompasses so much more than just apple butter and cheese.
We're talking pony rides, oldey timey bands that set up on front porches, a craft show that has lots of things like handmade sweaters, hobby horses and rag dolls, and more. I like this festival so much that I make a point to visit it whenever my schedule makes it possible for me to do so, and needless to say, there was no way Morgen was going to spend her four-month birthday anywhere but in the midst of it all. Even if she was going to be cranky about it. Which she was, unfortunately. I think it was asking too much of her to set her so near the sausage without allowing her to eat any of it.
The Wellesley community peacefully throws together old order mennonites with people living what we non-old-order mennonites consider a "normal" life. In previous years, I was always convinced of the innocence of Wellesley in general and of the ABC festival in particular. But this year, I noted the presence of worldly intolerance in the form of a racist musical marionette being played by an elderly white man (think: antique percussion instrument that looks like a tap-dancing black man). I suppose the uncomplicated way in which the marionette was presented on the front porch in the middle of a down-home country band is an argument in favour of small town Ontario - at least it doesn't hide its prejudices behind nods to political correctness. Or perhaps I missed the point of the whole display, and it really was a self-aware reference to the undercurrent of regionalism and insular life embedded in the lyrics of the music the band was playing? Those lyrics that encourage you to marry your neighbour, stick to your own kind, that sort of thing. Either way, the doll was disturbing. It is so rare to see an artifact from the era of open racism outside of a museum that I have to confess that I was shocked. And I'm not certain if my naive notion of the ABC Festival will ever recover.
Long story short: although I'm still processing how I feel about the marionette (Did the performer know it was racist? Did the performer care? Was its inclusion actually paying homage to and or raising awareness of this element in his music? Did it matter that there weren't any people of colour in the audience? Down, musicologist, down. If you really needed to know, you would have asked the musician. Why didn't you ask? Etc. ad nauseam) I will say that the rest of the festival is fun for the whole family, even if one third of your family is a cranky baby who looks like a pumpkin.
By the time we got Morgen home and settled with her Daddy and Grandpa, she was back to her usual smiley self. And, as we say in the Manning family: "Lookit!" We finally snapped a picture of her "'I think you're goofy!' grin" that nearly does it justice. This picture is nothing to the ones Angela took on her spiffy camera. But in my defence, my camera only takes one shot at a time.
