Welcome to Olean

I've been meaning to get to Olean for years, but I'm usually just back from a student Study Abroad trip, and forget.   But since I wrote up this festival in a recent essay, proclaiming the need to participate in local festivals and non-academic, non-Blue-pocket-in-a-Red-state life, I really had to go this year.  I asked a bunch of people to go along, including my lawyers, but no takers.  So off in the Jeep, into the Ozark foothills, for the 22nd Annual Olean Testicle Festival ...

Eventually arriving at a sign on a road not on my web directions, but it seemed likely...
   

So I followed another car, which seemed to keep slowing down to make sure I was still there, down the more than 1.7 miles of not-paved road...

Arriving a creek bottom level, where a clutch of town volunteers, in bright safety yellow shirts, took my $5 admission to the town, and pointed toward roadside parking.  And here we are...Olean, Missouri, pop. 128.

Ok, so much here was what you'd expect from a small town festival, one that is pretty far off the usual path.  The same funnel cake and kettle corn...

With deep-fried-everything...

And food jokes you'd expect, and a few food treats you don't.  I should have bought a packet of this...

But then we get to the festival's main attraction, the deep-fried turkey testicles.  There was a line stretching half-way up the main street, a good 120-folks strong, so I fortified with a can of Busch Light, sold at Rebecca's Hut, for $3 a can (Margaritas would have been $5, with $4 refills), and got in line.  Lots of the expected jokes about eating testicles, all told in that kind of 'I know it's adolescent to make these jokes, but hey, I drove all the way out here, and it's the whole point' tone. And a few complaints about there being only one line.  Behind me, I heard:  "After 22 years, I guess they don't want my advice, but seems like they'd have more than one line."  The gal with them explained how that was just the sales window, and pointed out that dozens of volunteers were off in a shed by the tracks, frying them up and bringing them over in their greasy glory in Styrofoam chest.  This led, of course, to one guy commenting on how the gal knew all about nuts...Yep. Just like that.

And people posed in front of the sign.  And posed with their baskets of nuts.  (Yeah, I had to.)  A Vox photographer from the Columbia magazine was there, and picked out the old couple in front of me to pose and pic, I suppose because of the visual irony they'd be able to portray, the happy old couple holding up their basket of crunchy nuts.  

Then the choice of condiments--ketchup, various mustards, hot sauces.  I went with tobasco and ranch:

Oh.  The big question.  They aren't chewy.  More melt in your mouth, in a way meat isn't really supposed to.  And they taste like...not chicken.  They taste deep-fried.  Well, it's the town's big event, but I still don't know why.

But another surprise. Sure, out here, you expect a little more country than Columbia.  Less Mizzou, which only my bright yellow, muddy-dog-print t-shirt proclaimed.  Fewer undergrads, more of these beard-stalks...

 What I didn't expect, and still can't explain, is that the Olean Testicle Festival is also a Harley rally.

A good 3 to 4 hundred spiffy, not a spot of rust, chrome-dazzling Harleys, which were parked in a double-row through the whole center of town, and a row on each side, and down every side street.

Shiny, with the expected skulls here and there...

 Interesting affiliations...

Nice customizations...

 

 The not-unexpected leather biker jacket, that would have worked in one of the old movies...

But a whole new, to me, realm, in the helmets, dozens of them not the football helmet sort with the face screen, but helmets that would meet Missouri law.  Maybe that's why they seem to be the place for these stickers, which are not exactly law-loving, PC:

 

A few of them clearly female-gendered...

 

Lots of others...

 

My favorite--gotta love a Harley helmet that meditates on unicorns...

Amidst all this, one lonely cop, whose job, I assume, is mostly not to notice, and be ready to call in and survive if all hell breaks loose...

Ok.  After eating my basket of nuts, wandering the few vendors (hats, stickers, knives, jerky, Missouri-made hot-mustard, Hit-or-Miss Ice cream, the freezer powered by a noisy John Deere engine, some jewelry), buying the orange festival t-shirt some of you will see me wearing shortly, listening a bit to the lady singing country in the town pavilion, I looked around the town a bit.  It's really in the middle of a lot of green...

 And there seems to be a former business and commercial glory, with the old mill (and an owner's name up at the top, which I saw on other buildings)...

Likely linked to the age when we still linked up by railroad...

I was intrigued by this fading sign, announcing dancing at the Starlight Club.  I tried to ask one town guy in a staff shirt.  He didn't say much, though commented to a lady volunteer that maybe he should buy that place.  The lady, in her 30s perhaps, remembered dancing there, how nice the floor was.

But that's about it.  None of my side adventures panned out, so just the hour-long drive home.

Would love comments.

later, bob