Festival

I’m lucky (unlucky?) enough to live quite close to the small town of Bell Buckle, TN, and every year they host the “RC Cola and Moon Pie Festival.” With Bonaroo in town and having nothing else to do, I decided to go with my family to this little shindig. We arrived after most of the festivities had ended, but we still got to grab a late lunch—a lunch including a deep-fried Moon Pie.

Now, I know what y’all are thinking: “What the hell is a Moon Pie?” For those of you unaccustomed to the quaint, southern part of the United States, a Moon Pie is three layers of soft short bread-ish cookie and two layers of marshmallow cream covered in chocolate (or vanilla, or strawberry, or banana). They are quite tasty (or dry and nasty, depending on who tells you about them) and are great when heated in the microwave for 8 seconds and accompanied with a glass of cold milk.

At the festival proper, I got a giant corn dog (advertised as such, but it really was larger than an average corn dog), a curly potato (fried, sliced potato, much like potato chips), a glass of lemonade (self-explanatory, but much lighter than the heavily-sugared ones I’m used to—very refreshing) and a deep-fried Moon Pie (dipped in batter, fried, covered with chocolate syrup and powdered sugar).

I found a hay bale sitting in the shade and ate my breakfast-lunch-dinner meal (it was my first meal of the day, at 4:00PM) while listening to the live bluegrass band playing on stage. As I ate the meal and listened to the music on the hot summer day, I couldn’t help but realize this: The average bluegrass band has ten-times the musical talent of the typical main-stream rock band (Creed, Shinedown, Breaking Benjamin stuff). The skill of these guys is phenomenal—their plucking, picking, strumming abilities made me want to buy their CD, and my dad actually did. It’s sad more bands don’t have that kind of skill.

After spending a few hours at the festival and checking out the wares and women, I was glad to go home; however, little outings like that into the small towns that still exist make me long to live a simpler life—not a less intelligent life, necessarily—and although I know I probably never will, it still gives me good material to dream about on these warm summer nights.