Sucking wind: A poodle that looks like a moose, other balloon tales from the county fair

The guy wearing the straw hat and the American flag vest handed me a balloon and told me to blow.

My cheeks puffed out like Louis Armstrong's on the trumpet. My face turned a color that made an apple look pale. Nothing happened. The balloon stayed long, skinny and empty.

Dennis Forel had my back. He's the balloon guy, has been since he was working at a pizza parlor in the '70s and discovered his knack for pinching and twisting party favors into animals. He has roamed the Ventura County Fair since 1989, breathing life into balloon hippos, koala bears, penguins and dozens of other critters.

All are presented to fairgoers for free.

"You have food, fun and frolic to pay for. That's expensive enough," he tells parents many times each day.

He agreed to show me how to make the simplest balloon animal – a four-legged, thin-bellied wiener dog. Prepared for my inflation issues, Forel brought a pump to the fair's Main Street.

A handful of fairgoers gathered to watch. Forel placed his hands over mine, showing me how to trap and shape the air. We pinched, twisted and lifted to make a head and ears appear. We did it again for a neck and a final time for the back legs and tail.

An orange dachshund was born.

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Forel's hands flew over another balloon and, in seconds, churned out a litter mate. We asked 9-year-old Charlie Skeath to choose. He picked blue.

"The professional made it," he explained with a smile before heading off with his mom for the Ferris wheel and the Alaskan pig races.

Our strip of pavement pulsed with parents and grandparents pulling kids in wagons or strolling with teens in FFA T-shirts. Forel spotted Tatianna Gaviglio. She's 6 and wore a green wristband, good for as many rides as her tummy could take.

"Excuse me. You're a child aren't you?" Forel said, kicking off a patter as practiced as his balloon art.

He told Tatianna he makes one special animal each day for one pure-of-heart fairgoer. He sculpted a balloon into a pony. He crafted a long red horn from another balloon and attached it to the foal.

It was a unicorn, matching the one on Tatiana's T-shirt. She beamed. So did he.

Daniel Mooney, an adult from Ventura, wanted something different. Forel told him about giraffes from Okanagan, British Columbia, that feed on the region's McIntosh apples. He pinched and twisted, repeated the steps, then tore and tied. In a moment, a tiny apple was bouncing in the long belly of a yellow giraffe.

"Look at this!" Mooney said.

Forel, 69, makes mice with long tails, owls that perch on fairgoer's fingers and a snake as curly as spiral fries. The reptile balloons sometimes explode in a belch of sound, setting up their creator for one more punch line.

"Excuse me," he says.

He makes 100 different animals and a few more he won't reveal until the tinkering is complete. He performs at fairs, shopping centers, nightclubs and the Magic Castle in Hollywood, sometimes calling himself a balloon sculptor. He prefers plainer terms.

"If you need some guy to do balloons, I'm the guy," he said.

He spent much of the pandemic home in Torrance taking care of his parents estate. They died of natural causes three months apart in 2019. His mother was 88. His dad was 90.

It was a trying time. COVID-19 restrictions shut down fairs the first year and limited Forel's performances to 16 days in 2021.

This year has had bumps, too. Forel tested positive for COVID in May but the symptoms were almost non-existent and the down time minimal.

Now, he's back on a circuit that takes him from a Sacramento fairgrounds one day to Lane County, Oregon, and then back again. By October, he'll have performed 83 days – a good year.

When he welcomes people back to the fairgrounds, he thinks of how much the events and the human connection were missed.

"It's a great year to be out here," he said.

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We strolled Main Street. I twisted and coaxed balloon canines into being. Forel helped at first but I made progress. When he made Makayla Giles, who is 9 and wore a tie-dyed shirt, a snake, she agreed to wait longer for one of my pups.

"I would love to," she said.

I presented another dog to Luna St. Clair, 7, of Oxnard. She cradled the gift and named it "Sweetie Pie."

I was ready to graduate from the elementary math of wiener dogs to the algebra of French poodles. I pinched and contorted like a mad scientist. Forel offered advice and then made one of his own to show me the steps.

His poodle was stylized with a pompom hairdo, the last tuft revealed with sleight-of-hand flourish as he presented the gift to Sofia Manzano. My creation sported a giant snout offset by far too many oddly shaped pink spheres. It looked more like an airborne Bullwinkle the moose than Fifi the poodle.

Sofia, 14, of Santa Paula, looked my work over. Her brother gave it a thumbs down. She was more diplomatic.

"It just needs a little work," she said.

I went back to wiener dogs. Forel made a spider that turned into a starfish. He confided his performance isn't really about the balloons.

"My real job is to be at places where people go to have a good time and to help them have a good time," he said.

Tom at the Fair

Staff writer Tom Kisken covers the Ventura County Fair by belly-flopping into it. He has walked on stilts, twirled like a ballerina in a hypnosis show, misplayed the cymbals in a marching band and sold hot tubs. His to-do list this year includes vegan Mexican food and balloon animals.

Fair details: The fairgrounds, at 10 W. Harbor Blvd. in Ventura, open at noon on weekends and 1 p.m. on weekdays. Buildings generally close at 10 p.m. with concessions shutting down an hour later. The fair runs through Aug. 14.

Admission: $15 at the gate for age 13 to 64; $10, age 6 to 12; $10, age 65 to 99 and free for anyone 100 and older

Parking at the fairgrounds site: $20. People can also park and use free shuttle service from several different Ventura sites.

More information: venturacountyfair.org.

Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tom.kisken@vcstar.com or 805-437-0255.

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This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County Fair reporter deflated by a balloon French poodle