A Carnival
There was a carnival in Astoria last weekend.
I have many fond memories of carnivals as a kid, of walking about half a mile to an empty field near my school every year and stepping into a magical world.
I had a neighbor on my street who worked for much of his life in a carnival (his wife, too). He taught me how to speak carny, a language used by the workers to talk amongst themselves without customers knowing what they were saying.
For a kid living in a town with just over 7,000 people, it was fantastic.
This carnival was not that.
It still had all the same elements (they haven't changed that much over the years), but the space was far too small, and there were twice as many people as the space could actually support. It was chaos, generally, and not fun at all.
Still, though, just walking around and seeing the rides and the food trailers, it brought back so many special memories.
One thing has changed over the years, though: the prices.
Check this out as an example:
That's the basketball game, the bog-standard one where they use smaller rims and it's almost impossible to make a shot. You might need to click on the image to enlarge it to see the prices, but to have a chance at a jersey, it was $10 a shot.
You could also try to win a crappy stuffed animal and it was "only" $10 for three balls, but I didn't see many people going for that. Almost everyone wanted a jersey.
Here was the incredible thing: I saw multiple people pay $10 for one shot and not even reach the basket. Far short, in some cases. Grown-ups! Always men, too. What a disconnect between the illusion of athletic skill and reality.
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