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Celebrity milkers go for the white
By CHASE SQUIRES, Times Staff Writer DADE CITY -- So this is how they feel in Salt Lake City. This is what it's like up in the lights. This is the quest for gold. This is the athletic pursuit of excellence. This is the world of competitive cow milking. It's mean. It's intense. It's gross. As the Pasco County Fair opened Monday, two dozen celebrity milkers heeded the clarion call to combat and stepped into the fairgrounds arena, ready to squeeze victory from the bottom end of a cow. The lure of golden cow trophies had competitors digging for every advantage. Representing Downtown Dade City Main Street, Claudia Madani sported pink rubber gloves adorned with rhinestones and lace. "It gives me more traction," she said. Kermit Kauffman, an apparent ringer imported from Tampa, admitted, "I grew up on a farm." And Miss Pasco County Kristen Eady employed a cheering squad of associate beauty queens, tiaras sparking in the pop of photo flashes, to help her into third place. Yes, there were cow-milk-off cheerleaders. Master of ceremonies Joey Wubbena paired off the competitors: music instructor against music instructor; news person against news person; beauty queen against beauty queen; hospital spokesperson against hospital spokesperson. Milk droplets splashed into plastic bottles. Judges held up the white gold to the light, checking levels and charting results. The air filled with the sound of cheering spectators. Yes, there were cow-milk-off spectators. In the end, it was Kauffman, vice president of finance for the Tampa Tribune, who scored a runaway victory, nearly doubling the effort of his nearest finals competitor, Pasco County Commissioner Ted Schrader. Schrader was second, Eady -- her tiara still firmly in place -- took third and San Antonio surveyor Dan Johnson captured fourth. If there were such at thing as a try-hard award, I may have been in the running. But there was not. Squeezing a cow's unmentionables for a few milliliters of milk isn't my calling. The whole process is a little weird, if you ask me, and I'm not sure anyone should be drinking anything that originates down there. But I did walk away with a better understanding of the dairy industry. Like many in this rapidly urbanizing county, I assumed milk came from a supermarket. I know now, it does not. It comes from the Pasco County Fair.
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