Residents Use Whimsical Talents to Set the Tables at Ventura County Fair

Barbara Hagan shook her head as she stopped to look at one of the elaborately set tables on display at the Ventura County Fair this year.

“It’s nice to look at,” the Ojai resident said of the glitter-sprinkled table whose centerpiece features a grapefruit-sized silver ball and two plaster of Paris heads.

“But there’s no way you could use it in everyday life,” she said. “Not when you have kids, anyway.”

If Hagan’s two children sat at the table, she said, “the glitter would be in the air. The ball would be turned over. And they’d be using the two heads as goal posts.”

But the table setting that caught Hagan’s eye also won the approval of fair judges: It placed first in the contest for tables decorated with a magical theme.

The woman who created the winning table decoration agreed that the art of setting tables has limited practical value.

“But this is fun,” champion table-setter Francine Cabas said.

“You have to have some fun in your life.”

A Santa Paula resident and owner of a Ventura beauty salon, Cabas also placed first in the fair’s contest for table settings with a “December” theme.

In other table-setting contests, Dan and Karen Burgess of Camarillo won for tables with a Ferris wheel theme and Marie Hagman of Moorpark placed first for tables with a tail-gating theme. A contest for professional decorators will be held Saturday.

Cabas, 44, said she began her whimsical hobby three years ago when she had to design a table setting for her daughter’s wedding.

Now she changes the table setting in her dining room every month, even though her family never uses the table.

She got an honorable mention at the Ventura County Fair in 1991, and a sweepstakes award for the most winning entries in 1992.

But this year brought her first blue ribbon.

She has high hopes for the table-setting contest at the Los Angeles County Fair next month.

“It does feel good to win,” she said.