The Cheese Carving Judge and the Look-Alike
At the Stephenville cheese carving contest, a block of cheddar comes out looking exactly like the head judge, and she finds out last.
Every fall we hold a cheese carving contest at the Erath County dairy day, and every fall somebody takes it a little too far. The year I am thinking of, a retired schoolteacher named Opal Spradlin entered a forty pound block of cheddar and spent three hours in the shade of the pavilion with a set of wire tools and a look of enormous concentration. Nobody was allowed to peek.
When the tarp came off, there was a gasp, because the cheese was a bust of a woman with a firm chin, round glasses, and a particular little curl at the front of her hair. It was beautiful work. It was also, to the eyes of everyone in the pavilion, a perfect likeness of Dr. Margaret Teasdale, the head judge, who happened to be standing right there in her round glasses with her particular little curl.
The trouble was Dr. Teasdale did not recognize herself. She walked around the sculpture twice, nodding thoughtfully. She said it showed great confidence in the jawline. She said the artist had captured a certain no-nonsense quality, and she wrote down a score of nine out of ten. The crowd was dying to laugh but nobody dared, so the whole place hummed like a hive.
I did my best to keep a straight face on the microphone. I said the entry was titled 'Authority,' and the crowd clapped politely. Then a small boy in the front row, who had no fear of anything, said very loudly, 'It looks like her!' and pointed at Dr. Teasdale. She turned to see where he was pointing. Then she turned back to the cheese. Then she took her glasses off and put them back on, and I will never forget the look on her face.
She gave it a ten. She also asked if she could take it home, and the artist agreed, and the bust sat on her kitchen counter for three days until her husband ate its ear. We still talk about it at every dairy day. If you like stories from the fairgrounds, the guides at fairs and rodeos cover the practical side, and my silliest ones live over at farm.FM.
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