The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

By the time you read this, Mule Mania will have come and gone. It was great. I especially enjoyed a timed competition called the "Saturday Social". I won't go into logistics. Let's just say it involved watermelon, a wilting palm tree, and coconut bras.

Crazier things have hap- pened there. Trust mehellip;

It was last year. I was serving for the first time on the Columbia County Fair Court along with three other girls my age. The four of us were clustered beneath a blue pop-up pavilion near a side gate to the arena at the Columbia County Fair- grounds. We were at Mule Mania to sell souvenir pro- grams and hand out ribbons.

There was music playing, like there always is at these events; country music, pri- marily. I'm not a big country fan.

But a song came on that I knew and grudgingly liked- Cotton-Eyed Joe.

What can I say? I was feeling stir-crazy. I knew a line dance. I started doing said line-dance, right there on the dust-covered lawn, in my Rock 47 jeans and my sparkle-encrusted belt and my nice red shirt with the silver flowers.

Apparently, my fellow hostesses were feeling a bit stir-crazy as well, because they immediately hopped onto the lawn and demanded that I teach them the dance.

So I did - one step at a time, as slowly as the fast tempo would permit.

That's when the gorilla dropped by.

A man in a gorilla suit, a grass skirt, and a lei had noticed us dancing and started doing random gorilla moves near us, improvising to the twangy beat.

Of course, a spectacle like that is bound to be noticed by the arena photographer, who insisted that all five of us go out into the arena so she could get decent shots of us.

We trotted out there, smil- ing and waving. The an- nouncer introduced us. We arranged ourselves with me in front so that the other girls could follow along with me.

Then, the announcer put on some music, but it was a slow, beatless piece. I tried to dance to it, but it didn't work. The other girls cop- ied me, which worked even worse. The gorilla scratched his forehead. Finally - finally - the an- nouncer put on Cotton-Eyed Joe.

It was all a blur after that. I started dancing. My fellow hostesses followed suit. The gorilla wove in and out of us, bouncing up and down, beat- ing his chest. I forgot about the camera, the audience, and that pesky announcer. I was absorbed in the dance, utterly absorbed.

The song finished. We ex- ited, smiling and waving and sweating and panting. It was just beginning to dawn on us that we had done something completely crazy - and loved every minute of it.

Naturally, the photogra- pher had a ball. The photo- graphs she took are posted on her website, www.entire- lyequinemarketing.com.

But even more bizarre was the fact that a news sta- tion from Seattle was doing a story on Mule Mania as part of a series called "The Other Games." They filmed the entire escapade and inserted a two-second clip of it into the news story.

In that clip, my shirt is coming untucked. I am hav- ing too much fun to either notice or care.

And that's pretty much the spirit of Mule Mania right there.