If I hear one more egg pun, I won't be held responsible for my actions

So it's time for the annual Chicken Show in my hometown. I'm a little nostalgic about it, although it was always a pain in my ass growing up. As M4 likes to say, "It was fun the first year, and after that...eh, I've got laundry to do."

I was trying to explain the show last night to friends, going on the assumption that every small town has a festival that celebrates something not really worth celebrating. However, it became clear in the course of the discussion that the Chicken Show is a little...different.

The Chicken Show has been around for 24 years and attracts about 20,000 people every year—four times the actual population of Wayne, where it's held. There are, not surprisingly, T-shirts and a parade and a concert, all the normal accoutrements of a podunk holiday. The Chicken Show likes to take things a little farther than that, though. There's a theme every year; this year's is "Wayne's World (Egg-cellent)." The sidewalks downtown have giant chicken footprints painted on them in yellow paint, supposedly left there by "Sasquawk." There's the National Cluck Off, where the person who sounds most like a chicken wins a chance to go on The Tonight Show and cluck for Jay Leno. (Though we did have a two-year winner not too far back whose technique in the cluck-off was yelling, "Hey you all chickens, come ovuh he-uh.") The parade features the Chickendales, who used to be a group of middle-aged men with exposed paunches and paper bags over their heads, dancing like idiots on a float. Evidently they've given way to college students, but it's no less frightening.

A guy runs around town in a chicken suit, harassing small children and posing for pictures; in 1993 or 1994 that guy was my dad. I remember being proud of the fact that he was the chicken, despite the fact that he was probably miserable in that stupid costume—it's invariably 95 degrees the day of the show. The night before the Chicken Show is Henoween, which features the World's Largest Chicken Dance: a lot of semi-drunken farmers acting like idiots and making chicken puns. The next day is the parade, followed by insanity in the park, including dropping eggs off a cherry picker, deciding who has the most chicken-like legs and nose/beak, and chicken-inspired singing contests.

As weird as it is, though, the show plays out pretty much the same way festivals in thousands of little towns across the country do. The theme is an annual point of contention, as are the design of the T-shirt and the identity of the person in the chicken costume. The Chicken Show Committee gets a little too big for its britches every year, drunk with power; merchants have weird theme sales, children spend the entire weekend high on sugar from snocones and parade candy, and everybody eats a lot of omelettes and barbecue.

I don't know if I miss the Chicken Show itself, or the feeling of amused condescension it inspires when I watch it. I do know I miss that barbeque, though.