Last weekend I played in a fastpitch tournament that happened the same time as the Cushing Fun Days.
Cushing Wisconsin is a town of less than 60 people (I'm being very generous) and every year they host a day of fun activities that are for kids and adults alike. The afternoon is mostly for the kids. The night is for the adults. Friday night is when the softball tournament, we lost our game and after I got my cleats off I believe I was quoted as saying, "I'm going to fucking rage."
I drank a lot and that didn't sit well with me the next morning when the Fun Days started. I did get to help out a little bit with some of the activities. I filled a whole bunch of water balloons for the balloon toss. Oh, hey, filling up water balloons is kind of the worst. You can rub a lot of dumb skin off your finger from tying balloons. Some of the balloons will break on the stupid spout. Or better yet you go to place a filled balloon in the basket and it and two others break. You're welcome kids! The one thing that did sort of help though was the extra water helped me get a little more hydrated.
The first big activity of Cushing Fun Days that I actually saw was the kiddie parade. A parade of floats that only have kids on them. The winning "float" was 4 kids dressed up as KISS walking down the street. Now it's just kids, but come on you need to actually ride on to something to float down the street it. Not only that but I have a hard time believing that those kids actually know who KISS is. Cool, you dressed up like a band that your grandparents probably listened to. The only thing notable from KISS now is that they own an arena football team. And most people don't even know that.
The first big event that I helped with was the frog jumping contest. Kids caught frogs and then brought them to compete. I should probably reiterate, their parents probably caught the frogs, or actually maybe reiterate again, someone they knew that had a lot of access to frogs gave them some frogs the day of.
The frogs started on a circle, they would jump and where they landed was marked, the frog would jump two more times and however far the frog traveled was recorded. Here's the thing about frogs they kind of suck at jumping in a competition format. When you don't want them to jump, and when they are trying to escape they do a great job of jumping. The winning distance was 108 inches. That seems pretty low, but what do Iknow it was my first year there.
Next up was the turtle races. Which isn't as slow as you would think. Once again, some people caught their own turtles, some were picked from a big bin of turtles that were provided. The turtles were placed in a container and when all of them were ready the judge lifted the container and the race was on. The turtles were unleashed and found themselves in a 8 foot diameter circle. Whichever one got completely out of the circle first was the winner. For this I had to do crowd control. Apparently turtles don't like to move when people are near, and to no ones surprise kids like to get as close as possible to the action. It was my job to make sure that everyone stayed back so the race could happen.
The other great thing about this was that the announcer called it the "arena" which was quite the term for the park basketball court where these activities happened.
After the turtle races was the money pile. It was a saw dust pile that had $40 in it. But it was $40 in coins. The coins ranged from quarters to dollar coins, so you weren't going to go rich from it. Also, this was for kids age 0-10. So any money they got was going to be good.
They had water balloon toss which was simply taking a water balloon throwing it to your partner taking a step back and continuing until your water balloon broke. If you won you got 50 cents. But to the announcer you got some "cash." Cash should only be referred to any amount over $10 and involving paper.
That night there was an adult soap box derby. A crowd of probably 200 people lined the streets to watch people take their wheeled contraptions down the street of Cushing WI. There were people who tried and had aerodynamic vehicles, while some were just there for fun. The American Legion car was just rusty bicycle that took 25 seconds to get down the hill. The best went down in 14 seconds.
After the derby was the street dance. A band took the stage and people drank their beer outside, or tried to cram into one of the two bars in town. I didn't get to partake in these festivities because I was playing ball and at 10:30 PM I was still exhausted from the night before.
But Cushing Fun Days was exactly that. It was a good time for the kids and the adults and if you find yourself in Northwestern Wisconsin in mid-August you should probably check it out.