Photo Illustration by Alexis Pinchuk

I actually considered the South Florida Fair to be fun. I now know how wrong I really was. One day, standing in a one-hour line with a crowd of sweaty people, I realized how disillusioned I had become. The overwhelming smell of fried foods and cigarettes must have gone to my head.

Year after year, fewer teenagers attend the fair. It seems that once one has reached a certain age, one comes to the same conclusion as myself: the fair is nowhere near as enjoyable when one has grown up.

Perhaps, it is knowing that the man who practically controls your life on a ride is a pimple-faced teenager working for minimum-wage. Trusting that the employee cares slightly about your safety is wishful thinking. Nevertheless, attendants hand over their lives to the creepy man and his shoddily constructed ride.

The many attractions like the Mooternity Ward have also lost their spark. The concept of the Mooternity Wards is built off the chance of people getting to watch cows giving birth. As a kid, this was an interesting experience to see firsthand. The natural birthing process of animals isn’t something the average person sees every day for good reason. Experiencing this as a teenager was much more horrific. The whole scene is a bloody mess. Not to mention the odd feeling that comes with dozens of people oohing and aahing while surrounding a cow as it struggles through giving birth to a 60-pound calf.

The disappointment of the South Florida Fair does not stop there. “Freak Shows” are worth a chuckle, and that is about it. My young mind always found signs like “Real-Life Spider Woman” to be the most mind-blowing thing ever. A few dollars seemed to be a small price to see something so crazy. As a teenager, I noticed why it was priced as such. A couple of bucks is actually a lot to pay to see a shoddy costume on a normal, non-spider woman. One would think that after being fooled, I would not fall for something like that again, but I awed at the thought of seeing the world’s smallest horse. It turns out that the “World’s Smallest Horse” is a prematurely born horse that was born a few days before its show.

Something about growing up ruins the fun of the South Florida Fair. Age seems to expose the shortcomings of a place that held so many great memories as a child. I can only hope the same does not happen to other loved places from my childhood like Disney World and Universal Studios.