Flashback

I've been listening to Elton John's Greatest Hits 1970-2002 in the car lately (along with CDs of Elvis music and a couple of others). While driving home from the movies this afternoon (The Dark Knight, finally, now that the crowds have died down), his duet with Kiki Dee came on. You know, "Don't Go Breaking My Heart." That song was a huge hit in 1976, particularly during the summer that I turned 13. I was listening to the song and had the most vivid memory. Isn't it amazing how much one song can summon forth from your past?

Each summer the County Extension Service, which oversaw (perhaps still oversees) the 4-H program, took a couple of busloads of kids to the Mid-South Fair in Memphis. I went two or three years in a row; I don't recall the exact number, but I do know one of them was in 1976. The Mid-South Fair is enormous--well, at least, it was. I haven't been in a long time, naturally, so I can't vouch for its size nowadays. It featured all of the usual exhibits you might expect from a fair and all of the food and all of the rides and all of the performers. Sometimes we would buy tickets to see whatever singer it was that was headlining at the rodeo that year. If I recall correctly, that's where I saw Mel Tillis perform. Hey, it is the South, after all, and who are you to judge?

No, we didn't see Elton John at the Mid-South Fair. He would have been pretty popular at the time, and the fair circuit, particularly in the South, wouldn't have been his ideal audience, anyway. We just heard him and Kiki. A lot. Everywhere, actually. If you've been to one of these kinds of fairs, you know that there's always music playing at the rides. And this song was so huge, it was playing at every ride. Every one of them. No, not over and over like it was on an endless loop, but it was repeated quite often on each ride. I suppose it's a way of attracting people to the ride. I can't imagine why else they would play contemporary music if not to get the crowd in the right upbeat mood.

So as I'm driving today, I had the clear image in my head of watching one of the rides spinning so fast you can barely recognize there are people on board. There's dust, of course, because the fairgrounds are always just large patches of earth, aren't they? The sun was out, and it was one of those glorious days that you can really only experience in Southern states. I'm sure it was humid, but I was 13 and such things didn't really affect me as much then. The smell of cotton candy and corn on the cob, both staples of fairs in the South, were just as clear today as they were 32 years ago. And it would have been on a Saturday, too, as I recall.

I always had friends from school to hang out with on those trips. Four or five of us would spend almost the entire day going from ride to ride, eating way too much food that isn't good for you, trying to win a prize at those carnival games no one ever really seems to master, going to the exhibits now and then to see the cows and hogs and what not, and even spending some time at the rodeo. And we'd usually try to do some things that only one or two of us wanted to do. I myself could never pass by one of those booths advertising "The World's Smallest Horse" or "The World's Biggest Alligator." I'm a sucker for such nonsense. (Someday, perhaps, I'll write a post about spending good money to see "The Devil Chicken.") We'd climb back on the bus at the end of the day, and on our trip home, a few couples would try to make out in the back of the bus. Surprisingly, they never seemed to get very far, probably due to the dozens of pairs of eyes watching them all the time. (Hey, we were 13 or so, after all.) Our families would be there waiting for us when we got back to the park where we'd started our journey early that morning, and we'd go home exhausted and fall asleep.

I haven't thought about those days at the Mid-South Fair in decades. I can't really believe how powerfully evocative that one song was this afternoon. I must have heard it hundreds of times since its initial release in 1976, but it never brought back such strong memories for me until today. I don't think I still have any souvenirs from those trips and, sadly, I don't have any pictures either--I wish I did--but I guess if Elton and Kiki can make me remember the details this well, maybe I don't need pictures. Maybe the song itself is my souvenir.