Porn sets taken down, uproar over cake, millions for a ham. The KY State Fair can be weird | Opinion
Let’s recap this year’s Kentucky State Fair so far:
We have an uproar over a pretty pink peach cake whose creator lives in Ohio.
We have some very rich people (with political aspirations) who paid $10 million for a country ham. For the third year in a row. While at the same time, a giant puppet named Freda Fairness wandered around outside protesting the retro bigotry of the Kentucky Farm Bureau, which puts on the ham breakfast.
And then, best of all, we have an award-winning miniature artist who was slightly peeved that last year the state fair rejected his depiction of a small but sexy sex dungeon and so decided to make a reproduction of a famous porn site known as The Casting Couch that made so many people laugh the fair officials decided to hide it away so the artist had to call on the Kentucky State Police to find it again.
Outside of the silky-eared rabbits, the basket weaving, the quilts, the jams and the bands, are we doing enough to celebrate the wonderful weirdness of the Kentucky State Fair?
Tiny subculture
Maybe some of the weirdness comes from a showcase of niche worlds that many of us aren’t aware of. For example, there’s a category called “Hobbies,” where people who make dollhouses show off their intricate art.
A lot of it looks like dollhouses, tiny replicas of houses that generations of little girls played with. Then there’s the work of people like Preston Poling, aka the Bearded Miniaturist. He started doing miniature “builds” during COVID, and now in that small but passionate world, he’s famous.
He’s also funny, in the sense that instead of making Edwardian villas out of balsa wood, he recreates things like Frasier’s (the TV show) apartment, with a tiny computerized screen of the Seattle skyline outside. That’s how he started getting so much attention. It got a blue ribbon at the Fair in 2020.
When you’re a burly, bearded house painter who now makes miniature rooms for a living, you better have a sense of humor. The people who run the Fair Board, alas, do not. So when he submitted the small sex dungeon, they didn’t even let it compete.
So Poling tried for another joke this year, a very small replica of the The Casting Couch (which I can’t link to here because I would lose my job).
“It was supposed to be a tongue in cheek,” he said in a phone interview. “For the people who didn’t know what it was, there’s zero imagery. But if you know, you know.”
He won third place, but by that time, the internet had gone wild with the joke. One day he showed up at the Fair and the piece was gone. He lassoed some Kentucky State Police, who were fans, to look for it, and found out the Fair folks had pulled it.
“I’m a repeat offender,” he said. He’s allowed to collect the piece after the Fair ends on Sunday.
Now the Nicholasville native who lives in Louisville is even more famous. If that’s possible. Poling has already appeared on a Canadian TV reality show called “Best of Miniature” in which he competed with a tiny 1960s Palm Springs mid-century modern after the apocalypse complete with a flickering television. He made the top three.
For the traditionalists out there, Poling has also created the most perfect recreation of the bedroom from the children’s book, “Goodnight, Moon,” complete with the green striped wallpaper and the tiger skin rug.
You might be able to see more of Poling’s work at the Louisville Miniature Club show, or maybe he’ll try again next year to tweak the State Fair officials again.
“Some people are open to fresh new funny ideas and concepts and others are not,” he said.
Frankly, the State Fair should be thanking Poling for the Casting Couch; one TikTok account about it has gotten close to one million views. Yes, the little boy and his calf, both dressed as cows, are adorable. But the Fair goes way beyond Future Farmers of America these days, and we should all embrace it.
This year’s motto was “120 years. 120 counties, one heckuva good time.” But we can do better than that. How about “Giant puppets! Tiny porn sets! Outlaw cakes! Something for everyone at the Kentucky State Fair.”
This story was originally published August 23, 2024 at 8:53 AM.
