(Client: Farmers Market)

Being from Texas, anything involving country music and pie appeals to me. And four years in Los Angeles have taught me that our city seldom provides these joys in concert.

My friends are probably tired of my lamentations. “Why is there no low-lit bar in an old train car where you can square dance in this town?” I once dragged a friend to the gay country-western bar Oil Can Harry’s, in Studio City, for line-dancing. There was no pie, but I did the Boot-Scootin’ Boogie beside a man in skin-tight pocketless white jeans. I thought it was great, but my companion was not as enthused.

When I invited all my friends to the Fall Festival at the Farmers Market at Fairfax and 3rd over the weekend, only two of them accepted. The rest missed out on pie in the face, baby goats, and western swing à la David Lynch.

This annual festival is L.A.’s ideal place to be a throwback. We were last-minute contestants in the ten-person pie-eating contest. The scarecrow/referee told us we had three minutes to eat a cherry pie from Du-Par’s, no hands allowed. Whoever ate the most would take first prize, a 40-dollar gift certificate to the market. One would think this would all be in good fun, but it was intense. There were children everywhere, screaming and closing in on the table. Some contestants had entire cheering sections. All I’d eaten that morning were rice cakes. I felt unprepared.

Few things compare to the moment when you plop your face into a cherry pie for the first time. A completely new sensation, and much colder than I expected. I had no strategy. It was incredibly loud, a news camera was pointed at the table, and I barely managed to swallow. After the three minutes were up, and I was a clear loser, the little girl standing behind me criticized my process.

“You didn’t need to stick your face in it so much,” she said.

“Well, isn’t it more fun that way?” I said.

“Fine,” she said, and walked away. Her dad won third place.

Champion status went to Jamie Donovan, from London. “I’ve never entered a food eating competition, and I think I found my calling in life,” he told me. “Damn good pie.”

Overly satiated, we made our way to the music via the petting zoo, where a baby kangaroo was sharing a pen with a duck, and two baby goats were enclosed with a donkey. Interesting curation.

The remainder of the evening was spent in a digestive haze listening to a local western swing band called the Lucky Stars. They may be my new favorite band. Steel guitar, trumpet, acoustic guitar, fiddle, drums, and a wagon wheel front and center onstage. These guys wear matching cowboy hats and shirts with tassels. They cover Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. And their fans know how to dance. My favorite dancer bore an uncanny resemblance to the Cowboy from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

My impression leaving this event was that everyone there, including myself, was giddy. Angelenos don’t know how country they are until they suddenly find themselves—what else—eating pie, listening to the steel guitar, and loving it.

—Yvonne Puig