‘Hat’s Off’ To Another Great Carnival Weekend
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By Coulter Fussell
I write this column on the Monday morning after Watermelon Carnival. It is a cool 64 degrees outside! This means that the Watermelon Carnival did its job in definitively marking the high peak of the sweltering summer. We are over the hump! Or the watermelon, if you will. We are now sliding down the green striped rind on the other side. Can we expect more hot days to come? Of course. But those days always seem a little less like the surface of a blazing steam iron when they’re post-Carnival. We now rest on the other side of the year, in the cool shadow of the great melon.
For better and worse, the Watermelon Carnival always carries the full weight of its season. It’s not the Watermelon Carnival’s fault that it falls on the hottest weekend of the year. It’s inherent to the nature of the beastly melon. If temperatures weren’t categorically nuclear then the melons wouldn’t be ripe and, in turn, wouldn’t taste as sweet or refreshing. We should be thankful that the weekend is always hotter than the inside of a microwaved bag of popcorn, otherwise we’d have a theme-less carnival in an existential crisis. Instead, we can let the weather and the fruit just do their thing and the Carnival writes itself. Because of the heat, we know who we are! We are the town with the crazy-hot Watermelon Carnival!
Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson greets the crowd during the carnival parade Saturday morning. Gipson’s visit to Water Valley was part of his Make Mississippi Healthy Again tour. He was chauffeured by Jerry Hill in his 1926 Ford.
That being said, the Chamber of Commerce clearly put in a prayer request with weatherman Matt Laubhan because he showed up on Friday with the best weather I can remember in all my years of Watermelon Carnival-ing. This weather was custom ordered and delivered with a red, watermelon-themed bow on top. The skies were cloudy enough on Friday to keep the temps from soaring to the surface of the sun but not cloudy enough to rain on our parade (speaking of, let’s add a watermelon parade to the event! Easy enough. Somebody get on that!) On Saturday, the skies were clear, the breeze was medium-hot, and there was just enough heat to make the Carnival legitimate.
I did my annual sneak-peek Carnival walk-through on Friday morning to ascertain the year’s popular offerings. This year was definitely little snake-toys made out of little pieces of something. Folded paper? Lego-esque plastic pieces? I never quite figured it out. But there were lots of them. Nothing will beat the year that the popular booth items were the “Floozy Koozy” – zebra-striped beer huggers with fluorescent pink feathers hot-glued to them.
My favorite craft offering this year was a sweatshirt made out of other sweatshirts. The seamstress had cut up like 20 cheap sweatshirts and made a single handmade expensive sweatshirt. This sort of exercise felt very familiar to me, as an artist.
Most of all, I enjoyed the watermelon weigh-in and the subsequent heaviest-watermelon live auction. A friend of mine from Oxford waved at me from across the crowd during the live auction event, resulting in her accidental bid on a $200 watermelon. Fortunately, one of the Water Valley high rollers immediately outbid her.
I could go on about the great weekend but I’m past my column’s word limit. Good job, Chamber of Commerce, and to quote our Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson during his animated speech at the live auction, “My hat’s off to ya, God bless ya!”
