Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In Which I am Colossally Disappointed by a 40 Foot Colon

Meelyn, Aisling, Kieren, Dayden, Nanny, Poppy and I piled into Nanpop's minivan yesterday and drove to the Indiana State Fair to spend a happy day of riding on rides and eating, playing carnival games and eating, touring the livestock buildings and eating, going through the 4-H fine arts and crafts exhibit building and eating, getting Dayden's picture taken by Tony Stewart's car and eating. And eating.

But one thing we also did was go all the way over to what seemed like Terre Haute or maybe even the Illinois border to go to the Clarian Healthly Lifestyles Pavilion and tour the "colossal colon" I heard about on 93.1 FM-WIBC earlier in the week. I'd like to point out here that I was the only one in the group that wanted to go; even seven-year-old Dayden, whom I had pegged as a sure thing for wanting to go through the colon, was unenthusiastic. So I had to cheer on our little band, some of whom showed signs of rebellion and kept getting sidetracked by deep-fried Twinkie and corn dog concessions, by saying in a perky voice which grew gradually more rebuking, "This is going to be fun. How many people can say that they walked through a colon? This will make a great story for my blog! Oh, you complain now that it's too far to walk, but you will all thank me later. Yes, you will, so stop lollygagging along like that. March!"

Panting, we made it to the pavilion where my dad very kindly held the door open for about sixty people, all of whom were pushing baby strollers that were the size of Volkswagons. There must have been some pre-school thing going on there, and as much as I love to watch the antics of little kidlets, I was totally focused on that colon. We finally made it inside, me forging ahead and everyone else stravaging along behind, as Mary Poppins noted when she walked in the park with Michael.

And there it was, straight ahead. My first impression was the remembrance of a Joan Rivers comedy routine I saw about a hundred years ago where Joan chatted about going to England for the first time. She had gone to Salisbury Plain to see Stonehenge and was decidedly underwhelmed by the experience. "People always say, 'How did they get those stones up there?' and I can tell you how they did it," Joan said snarkily. "They just reached down on the ground and lifted them up. Seriously! Stonehenge was just a tiny little place."

The "colossoal" colon struck me in that same manner. Where was the forty feet of walk-through educational experience I'd so been looking forward to? The only person who could have walked through that colon was my niece Kiersi, who is two. And she can't read, so the depictions of colo-rectal woes and their accompanying explanations would have done absolutely no good. It looked more like a larger-than-life earthworm exhibit built by a sixth grader than a giant colon.

Dayden did halfheartedly crawl through it a couple of times, but he's not at an age where his colon matters much to him. My mother gamely went to the little info-windows that were sliced into the colon tissue (bleeaaaaarrrgghh) and read about polyps and the like, but my dad, Kieren and the girls kept their distance and kept shifting from foot to foot in barely concealed impatience.

I stood alone, crushed. Even a free pamphlet about maintaining my colon health couldn't cheer me.

So I have no story to relate about polyps the size of basketballs and hemhorroids as big as canned hams. I have nothing to tell about Coco, the Colossal Colon, nothing at all.

So if you'll just un-read the preceding eight paragraphs, we'll be back at square one and good to go.