Whirligig Dreamin’
It's Drew Time! And today we're bouncing from Saweetie - Huh? - to peanuts to a Hallow's eve chase to whirligigs, which aren't kids toys but still something to poke fun of. Confused? Read on.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
In my role as humorist, I have discovered that there are many gaps in my cultural knowledge. My children are painfully aware of these gaps, and those gaps were exposed again when I had to ask my teenage daughter who Saweetie was when the rapper made a recent appearance on Sunday Night Football.
I felt better that my neighbor Tyrone had no clue either because he teaches teenage kids who probably listen to Saweetie more than him. (It does beg the question though how Saweetie feels about 49ers’ star Nick Bosa and his history of liking racist posts and displaying his MAGA hat after San Francisco beat Dallas. I think there was a 49er quarterback who once took a very public stance against racism, but that contradiction is best suited for a column that is not about to dive into whirligigs as an art form.)
I have tried to learn as a humorist, and in the past year I have learned about things like the National Peanut Festival pageant in Dothan, Alabama. The way I learned about this cultural landmark was when 2005’s second runner up, Lindsay Shiver, hit my phone’s newsfeed for allegedly trying to have her husband killed by her bartender boyfriend in the Bahamas and, during her 15 minutes of infamy, she was referred to as a former beauty queen which led me down a rabbit hole to her second runner up status.
The National Peanut Festival’s assorted crowns and sashes also proved to be a springboard for the “fantastically attractive” Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s rise to political prominence when she was crowned Little Miss National Peanut Festival (known as NPF by the cool kids) and now has Donald Trump’s ear on women’s reproductive rights—after two minutes of telephone conversation with the “fantastically attractive” Senator (his words), Trump said he had a firm grasp on IVF and declared that he is now in favor of IVF and that he is the father of IVF which means it was born between Donald Jr. and Ivanka and is also a British citizen since it was first introduced in Manchester in 1978.
My point is that there are seismic events going on in this great country of ours, and I am regrettably ignorant of many of them including one that is a mere three hours south of Fredericksburg, and that is the North Carolina Whirligig Festival in Wilson.
(As a wedding gift, my wife bought me an Oxford English Dictionary at Borders bookstore, and the enormous tome requires its own book stand and a magnifying glass which allows me to tell you that the first usage of “whirligig” was in 1440 and that there are at least six different definitions of the word with the most common being a name for various toys that are whirled. There is also a definition that refers to something that is continually whirling and lists all four of Trump’s Press Secretaries as examples.)
The Whirligig Festival in Wilson though is not about the whirling toys of a child—although I’m certain there are some for sale in the gift shop at the museum which is open Tuesday through Saturday 10-5. It’s about massive, spinning, whirligig sculptures that were created by folk artist Vollis Simpson. At first blush, I did not think that Simpson and I had much in common, but upon further exploration, I realized that when I took the filter out of a bathroom faucet to use for a makeshift bong years ago it was eerily similar to when Simpson made a power-generating windmill out of scrap metal on Saipan during World War II so his fellow troops could do laundry.
To further our parallel lives, I also learned that Simpson once designed booby traps on his property to thwart vandals who were shooting up his whirligigs. On one recent Halloween, I sat in my driveway and watched Tyrone chase a couple of teenagers who were egging a neighbor’s house. (And I am certain that the teenage vandals who saw the former JMU defensive lineman chasing them down Kingswood Boulevard were wishing that it was the elderly Vollis Simpson with a round of birdshot chasing them instead of the recently enshrined Chancellor High School Hall of Famer who was a few Bud Lights into his Hallow’s Eve celebration).
The North Carolina Whirligig Festival, now in its 20th year, came to my attention when a recently-retired Stafford teacher expressed delight in the fact that he could now attend the festival during the first weekend in November. Some teachers might exult in the ability to have lunch at a reasonable time, in a restaurant, with friends who don’t have to shout over the cafeteria noise, or golfing on weekdays at a fraction of the greens fees with a mid-morning tee time, but this teacher was giddy about the prospect of the Whirligig Festival, and he didn’t even know about the cake diving event that closes out the festival.
For cake diving, the town’s baker man (or woman) bakes a cake as fast as they can, roll it, pat it, and mark it with a P and put it in the oven for Prizes and Thee. The lucky cake divers gather around a table that is large enough to hold this massive confection and then dive into it with their hands (or faces if they are hungry) in search of winning numbers baked into the cake that correlate with an equal number of prizes donated by Whirligig Festival sponsors and include a chance to watch the 4-4 East Carolina Pirates play a home football game or win a gift certificate to The Novel Nest Bookstore which sounds infinitely better.
The festival is free and features two days of music and, equally important, nine pubs according to the helpful Festival Map posted online. Over the years, visitors to the whirligig offerings of Vollis Simpson have opined that watching his whirling creations while stoned out of your mind is the preferred way of experiencing this unique art form. (This further research has made it a bit more clear why a public school teacher, after more than 30 years in the classroom, might be a bit giddy about the North Carolina Whirligig Festival with its nine pubs and six public bathrooms featuring multiple faucets with filters.)
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