Last Weekend Was Grand

I've neglected to write what has been happening in my life (as opposed to the life of the world, the nation, the poor or otherwise) these past few weeks, and now it is a time to put an end to that.
Last week saw the annual Singers Glen "Lawn Party". For those of you not familiar with the parlance of the Rural Virginian a Lawn Party is a town carnival. Now for those of you who don't know of Singers Glen it is the purported home of sacred music in the south due to the publishing of the first collection of American sacred music, The Harmonia Sacra, by one Joseph Funk in 1832 (first titled A Compilation of Genuine Church Music).

This lawn party concept encompasses several days of activities put on by the local Ruritans featuring auctions, carnival type games and even a parade (this years was somewhat disappointing). Thursday evening while I was out walking the canus familiarus I wandered through the festivities (before being told dogs were not allowed) and saw some rather touching mid-American scenes. You see, Thursday was the beauty pagent night. So among the farmers, and head-covered Mennonites were these young women dressed to the 9s in ball gowns and heels. People were snapping off all sorts of photos and the atmosphere was truly festive.

It would be easy to condem this display as hopelessly idyllic, or quaint, but in many ways the stereotypical displays of gender and southern culture were beautiful. There was a real sense of community in the air, this was in complete opposition to my feeling like an outsider despite having lived here for 3 years- which is definitely more my fault than the communitity's. The sense of genuine mid-Americana was further reinforced over the weekend as we viewed the parade with several friends (terry, elizabeth, tracey, heather and lilly). There were several fire companies, including the local SG branch (whose very cool logo would be on the left if blogger would let me upload it) muscle cars and old tractors, baton twirlers and floats for various vacation Bible schools.

See what I mean by quaint? Sometimes small town life is wonderful.