Twenty-four days of sequins
PERRYVILLE, Ark. — Twenty-four days is not soon and it is not never. It is the exact distance at which a municipal goat park starts getting swept as if eight thousand people might judge the corners, and a vendor list starts answering the late emails with a sentence that sounds like a locked gate.
Arkansas Goat Festival remains Saturday, October 3, ten to four, Perryville Park. Free gate. Two stages. Parade, costume contest, lingerie show, soap-making demo, food trucks, a row that has already told the stragglers they may wait. Dogs stay home. Intact bucks are discouraged because October is not shy about the calendar. Pre-register the goat if you can; the thank-you gift is real and so is the math of knowing how many horns are coming.
Nanny Belle does not pretend the lingerie show is her favorite paragraph. She will cover the parade. She will hide near whoever is demonstrating soap, because soap is how Marshfield and Perryville shake hands across a state line. She will not invent a quote for a nanny in sequins. The nanny does not need help.
What has changed since the last packet is not Perryville. What has changed is the ground you will drive across to get there. Burn bans on both sides of the line. Hay already moving. A flash drought that does not care you packed a costume. Pack the costume anyway. Pack the water first.
Checklist Nanny Belle will nail to the tack room:
- A costume that can survive grass, opinion, and a forecast that still thinks it is July.
- No dog, not even the one who “does great with goats” in the living room.
- Cash for the booth that remembered pricing signage.
- A plan for leaving before the last song if your animal has had enough of applause.
- Confirmation that your county, and theirs, still means what it said about fire.
Sarah French said years ago that if you have a motorcycle you go to Sturgis, and if you have a goat you go to Perryville.
The Bleat Sheet adds: if you have a dog, you go to a different Saturday. If you have a match, you leave it at home.
Dixon, the same week-and-a-half before, will raffle a cow at Cow Days, which is how Pulaski County reminds the rest of us that livestock can be a prize and a neighbor at once. Go if a cow is your language. Come back in time to rinse the sequins.
October 3. Perryville. Sequins yes. Dogs no. Put it on the same nail as the burn ban and the second tub.