A Camel in the Klondike

I was over at the Needville Harvest Festival last weekend, the same place I’ve been every third Saturday in October since 1983. I’ve served as a cookoff judge since the start of the thing. I look forward to it all year long because it’s filled with real cowboys, not the drugstore kind.
People camp out overnight to enter the bar-be-que cookoff. If you can kill it, they’ll cook it and make cowboy boots out of the hide. There’s pretty near 40 cookoff teams. They line up along a dusty road next the baseball field and cook for days on outdoor bar-be-que pits the size of Vermont that have to be pulled to the location by a semi.
I, along with a couple of women I truly adore, judged something called, “Ladies’ Choice.” The women on each cooking team make a dish and set a fancy outdoor table. The judges walk from camp site to camp site and judge the food and the table.
Getting to be a judge is more fun than recess in heaven, and you pretty much have to wait for someone to die to get a slot. I know one lady over in Pleak who keeps check the obituaries to see if my name is in it.
Anyway, my friends and I were judgin' out little hearts out, dustin' off our jeans and sandles and laughing with the cooks, havin' a dandy time. Did I mention that some teams try to bribe the judges with Tequilla Sunrises, Margaritas, and Sangria? I didn't? Well, keep that in mind as this story progresses.
So, when we're about half way through some of the best cookin in the Texas, I look up and see ... you're not gonna believe this ... right smack in the middle of the cookin' yard, there she stood lookin' as out of place as a camel in the Klondike, Shelley Sekula Gibbs.
I admit it. I spit Miss Holly Sue's Famous Chicken, Sausage, Squirrel, and White Wine Gumbo across the picnic table all over one of my friend's favorite "I Heart Bull Riders" tee-shirt.
You would have, too.
There was Shelley, dressed like she was tryin' out for the cover of Vogue magazine, standing right there amid the cookoff teams. People all down the quarter mile road were gawking, bug eyed, because .... well, darn, it was real obvious she'd never been to a Texas festival before.
I am very sorry I didn't have a camera with me because you would have loved it.
So then, one of the cooks asked me who that was, dressed for the opera. I explained that she was a congressional candidate. "Well bless her heart," the cook replied, "I figured she was either drunk or lost."

And the Republicans had a "booth" at the festival. A friend got a picture of it on her camera phone.

With the way they've been fighting, we can't decide if it's a booth or a boxing ring. Maybe they can't either and that's why nobody was staffing it.