A real knife (and fork) fight

Marie and Christel Schoenfelder looked down the rows of tabletops with a mix of anxiety and anticipation.

Many thousands of dollars of silk, china, crystal and silver were spread out before them. Months of planning, shopping, cleaning and crafting were about to climax under the horse-racing concourse at the Los Angeles County Fair.

The mother-daughter duo from Rancho Cucamonga are two of the reigning queens of one of the most esoteric competitions at the fair: who can set the best dinner table.

They would vie against about 30 other contestants -- and each other -- transforming a function that might take five minutes for the typical American family meal into months-long quests for displays that in the end no one would eat at.

Down one row, an upturned table flanked by silky cushions and swathed in fabric looked like a Moroccan tent. To its right, a table decorated with lacy runners, busts, corset frames and glass cake platters evoked Victorian times. A row across, a James Bond-themed table featured martini glasses, lady’s lipstick and a handgun.

Each setting was designed to accommodate an elaborate menu: beef tenderloin, grilled asparagus and mint juleps at one. Chicken tagine at another.

But no food would touch these bowls and plates. Eating is very much not the point.

And please, no touching that might disturb the setup. Exact distances separated utensils. Plates were placed and layered precisely. Linens were coordinated with the color of the wine.

Marie, 61, began working on her entry in July. Her table looked like the Kentucky Derby. A racetrack centerpiece included toy horses and miniature white picket fences. Red napkins were folded precisely into four pyramids, and Kentucky Derby racing tickets were spread over the end of a white tablecloth.

This was the first time she had competed head-on against Christel, 34, who also started work in July. Her Dr. Seuss table relied on a mash of bright pastel colors, stuffed toys and a menu written in the style of the famous children’s author.

Tablescaping got its start as an outgrowth of breeding schools and etiquette classes. But what was once about stemware, linens and understated style has become more artistic and outlandish -- tables based on such movies as “Pirates of the Caribbean” and one even based on a Monopoly board (Christel’s grand prize winner from a few years ago).

It’s not about enhancing appetites.

“We want to shock people,” Marie said. “It’s about the ‘wow factor.’ ”

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For all the emphasis on creativity, rules dominate tablescaping: no professional tablescapers are allowed, contestants use equal-size tables, settings must correspond with menus and themes, no food is permitted on tables. Contestants are guided by etiquette books, which set down the exact distance from the center of a dish to the center of its neighbor -- 24 inches -- and mandate that chargers and silverware be one inch from the table edge and on and on.

It’s why the Schoenfelders constantly measure and set, measure and set, and do it again.

The most maddening part is aligning your tablecloth, they say.

“You think you have one corner perfect, but it’s uneven on the other side,” said Christel, who often refers to a dog-eared copy of a book titled “Napkin Magic.” “So you move it slightly, and then the other side is off. It’s never exactly even.”

A smudge on a wineglass or knife is a point off. A piece of cutlery aligned incorrectly is another point off. And don’t even get started about having the salad fork on the inside.

“It’s pretty cutthroat, this tablescaping,” said Liisa Primack, who oversees all the craft competitions and exhibits at the fair. “People come in with ironing boards, Windex, DustBusters, lint brushes, safety pins -- a whole toolshed.”

“It’s nail-biting,” said Bonnie Overman, past winner for many tables, including an “Out of Africa” entry. This year Overman was competing with a design modeled after the musical “Wicked.”

Fans of the competition expect precision. One fairgoer approached Primack to tell her that the table arranged for a tablescaping seminar that evening was all wrong.

“The knives are pointing outside,” the woman said. “You’re going to stab someone.”

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A great, creative table setter not only knows what to buy but also how to craft objects. Marie discovered crafting after graduating from high school, when she opened a gift shop in Culver City with her twin sister. She later moved to Rancho Cucamonga and became a real estate agent -- but the crafting continued. She passed her passion on to Christel, teaching her how to make candleholders, Amish peg boards and painted flower pots.

They came across the tablescaping exhibit at the fair 11 years ago and were immediately hooked.

“We could do better, or at least equal,” thought Christel, an attorney who specializes in workers’ compensation disputes.

Nothing was ever quite the same -- especially during the spring and summer, when the pair begin hoarding their material.

Lunchtime often means making runs to the outlet malls in Cabazon to find dishes. Weekends mean trips to home stores at South Coast Plaza, then to Macy’s and then the series of chain stores like Linens ‘n Things on the ride back home.

Marie’s home is littered with wood shavings, glue spots, unused moss and plastic foam. She keeps the stock of plates and glasses down by giving many of them away after each contest, but her husband nevertheless bites his lip as she ramps up.

“I can’t use the dining table for four months when they’re testing out their tables,” said Les Schoenfelder, 62, an accountant. “We just eat in the kitchen.”

As the ribbon prizes stacked up, so did the clutter in the house.

“My biggest problem is finding garage space, with all the stuff they hang on to,” Les said. “One thing is we have new silverware every year. I don’t toss anything, so it’s been accumulating.”

Les said the inconvenience is worth the joy the activity brings his wife and daughter.

“It’s something they look forward to,” he said. “They enjoy the chance to show their creativity.”

The next generation may follow. Christel entered her 8-year-old son, Gable, in a children’s tablescaping competition last year at the fair, and he won.

Adults weren’t supposed to help, but when Christel saw that Gable had set his Harry Potter-themed table widthwise instead of lengthwise, she had to say something.

“I told him, ‘Look at the table again. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with it?’ ” Christel said. “Then it dawned on him, and he changed it.”

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In the days before the Sept. 9 judging, both Marie and Christel were optimistic about their chances.

But on the eve of the show, Marie’s Kentucky Derby table was thrown into crisis.

A plastic-foam horseshoe covered in red roses cracked the night before the competition. Marie tried using pins to put it back together, but it was too heavy. She tried using an easel to hold it up, but it was too big. At the last minute, she scraped the horseshoe and displayed ladies’ hats instead.

“Boy, was she mad,” Christel said. “She was ranting and raving and talking to herself.”

The judges were picky, as always, and left written comments for each entry.

“Forks placed incorrectly,” read one by judges that only gave the table 10 of 20 possible points in the “correctness” category.

“Knife is turned the wrong way. Spoon should be above the plates,” another said.

“Everything spread out too far. Silverware should be closer to the plates. Butter knives are upside down and silver where all other flatware is gold,” read another.

Marie was penalized for offering a glass of Cabernet first on her menu and for leaving a dessert fork on the table when her menu said Kentucky Derby pie would be served on the veranda. The judges thought the forks would have been handed out on the imaginary veranda and did not need to be on the table.

Marie appealed the fork demerit. “The rules clearly state utensils for all courses should be included,” she said. “I said last year my menu was set up the same. And I was correct. I got five points more.”

Marie and Christel refer to two time-honored bibles of etiquette, one by Emily Post and the other by Amy Vanderbilt.

“If I know I’m right about something, they will hear from me,” Marie said.

But in the end she got only 85 out of a possible 100 points.

Her daughter, on the other hand, ran the table with a perfect score, and took the blue ribbon.

All her plates were different and meant to represent Dr. Seuss characters: the red-and-white-striped salad plate for the Cat in the Hat, the green square Mikasa plate for Yertle the Turtle, the salad plate with berries for Gertrude McFuzz, because berries made her grow. Christel’s menu was a Seuss-like original. “First we would like green apple slices and watermelon dices over schlopp with a cherry on top,” she wrote.

The judges were impressed. “This table made us laugh,” they wrote. “Could there be anything incorrect about Green Eggs and Ham?”

Perhaps. But some of the fairgoers who viewed the exhibits had a more basic question about the tabletops cluttered with mini cake platters, dolls and feather boas .

“Do you really want to sit down and eat on the Mardi Gras table over there?” asked Joani Golnik of Oxnard.

Fair officials are wondering the same thing. Primack said the judges are considering adding a new component to next year’s competition. The new rules would include a question: “Can you eat on it?”

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david.pierson@latimes.com