It’s fair week! Remember going to (what’s now called) the Carolina Classic Fair in your student days?
Fall starts to feel more festive with the ferris wheel twinkling beyond the Joel. I remember riding to its top and seeing Wait Chapel’s steeple lit up like a beacon poking out from the trees. Years later, when my son was 2, Homecoming and the fair coincided. Like many alumni with small children, I delighted in watching the pig races, livestock and fire-truck ride through his eyes.
Erin Greene (MA ’23), program manager for Hospitality and Auxiliary Services, happened upon the produce hall a few years ago, and noticed contests for decorating apples and potatoes. The theme involved magic, with many Harry Potter incarnations. “I said, ‘I can do better than this,’” she recalls.
It turns out this was no small claim to make. This year’s fair had more than 20,000 entries in an eclectic range of categories from “Adult Lego” to “Fairy Garden Displays.” WFDD even produced a story about this year’s contestants.
Some background: The fair got its start as a wheat exposition in Salem in 1882, quickly expanding to include cattle and then moving around Forsyth County until it settled for good at today’s fairground in 1951 — the same year as the groundbreaking for Wake Forest’s Reynolda campus. While we may think of this annual attraction as our next-door neighbor, it draws a crowd of about 325,000 visitors a year and has become North Carolina’s second largest agricultural fair.
Even with so much stiff competition, taking on the ribbon-winning challenge was totally on brand for Erin. Full disclosure: She’s my niece, so I’ve known her since birth. I have long admired her ability to DIY. Everything she touches becomes Pinterest worthy. She also has the Greene competitive streak, in high school entering Richmond, Virginia’s Shamrock Queen contest with no previous pageant experience, because who better to hold that mantle than a ginger of Irish descent? (She won.)
As a true Wake Forester, Erin has channeled these gifts for humanity, overhauling and creating new fundraisers — including Halloween Bingo — as a former board member of the Junior League of Winston-Salem, with the proceeds fueling local literacy and education equity initiatives.
Last year, she poured her creative talents into two fair entries. The theme was “America (not political),” so Erin created a buffalo potato covered in fur. Her green apple became singer-songwriter Chappell Roan as the Statue of Liberty. The judges, inexplicably to her family, denied to award her with any ribbons.
With this year’s “Western” theme, Erin came back strong. Her “Cowboy Carter” potato took third place. “Her sash is actually my Cowboy Carter wristband that they give you at the concert,” Erin explains during a viewing of her creations this week. “I saw her in Atlanta on Night Three, the best night. … She has eyelashes, and she’s wearing sparkle boots that she’s hot-glued into.”
Her “Chappell Apple,” dressed as “Pink Pony Club,” the singer’s Grammy-winning hit, earned the coveted first-place blue ribbon. “She is a Red Delicious apple wearing a ton of her big red hair,” Erin says. “She has on pink accessories and sits on a base of pink feathers, and she looks genteelly out over everybody else, and epitomizes a really fun, fabulous cowboy aesthetic.”
“So those are my babies,” Erin says. “They won. I love it.”
Will she be back next year, perhaps with a Demon Deacon potato? Or will it be Beyoncé all the way? “I think I have decided that no matter what the theme is, I’m going to use a strong woman of some kind as my inspiration,” she says. “And yes, I will continue the legacy. It might not always be Beyoncé or Chappell Roan, but I think it will continue to be iconic women.”
