As an arts writer, I am often asked: What show should I see this summer? With all due respect to the performance halls around the state, my answer in August is always the same. Want to see a good show, something with immediate gratification and lasting value? Go to your local farmers market.

Humor me for just a moment while I draw a few small comparisons between dramas and comedies and concerts and farmers markets. A play and a cucumber may have more in common than you may realize. Each requires vision, preparation, hard work, a fine director and a cast, a stage and an audience. At its best, a play sends you home with a new idea. At its best, so does a farmers market.

Last week at the Deer Isle Farmers Market, one of many I’ve been to this summer, I arrived early to watch the farmers set up their stands. As I waited, more than 50 cars pulled into the parking lot across the street. Their drivers – from Massachusetts, Florida, New York, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey, New Jersey, New Jersey – waited patiently if covetously as they eyed the garlic, lettuce, squash, beets and flowers.

Some, carrying empty baskets and canvas bags, strolled bravely onto the market site. But just as lights and curtains control the beginning of a show, so does a bell, call or drum beat control the opening of a market. Even in the outdoor setting, a hush comes over the scene in the minutes before the opening. Then there is a buzz of chatter and anticipation, like orchestral instruments tuning before Beethoven.

Jennifer Schroth, a farmer in Brooklin, compared the pre-selling moments to the excitement performers feel before a show. A musician friend of hers once made the analogy, and it stayed with her.

“It’s great because people are talking to you about what you do and they are waiting to buy your food,” said Schroth, who runs Carding Brook Farm with her husband John Ellsworth. “It’s just what a farmer needs. John used to work only at the farm, and I would go to the market. But when he started going with me, his whole feeling about farming changed.”

If there were an equivalent to a standing ovation at successful markets, it is the line. In Deer Isle, the lines stretch 30-people long. At the small market in the coastal village where I live, the line may gather up to a dozen or more people hoping to make it to the front before the mesclun runs out. Mesclun, it turns out, is one of the most popular sellers at markets. Schroth, who specializes in the mixtures of tasty greens, told me she took 30 pounds of mesclun to the market last week to sell in quarter-pound bags. She sold all but a half-pound.

I was in one of those lines with a woman on vacation with her family from Manhattan. She had sent her daughter to another line and her son to a third line. Her boyfriend was in a fourth. They consulted each other across the lot, shouting about blueberries and arugula.

“What are you in line for?” someone asked the woman in front of us.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Maybe it is the element of surprise, or the knowledge that anything she got at the end of that line would be flavorful and rich, but the wait was a small price to pay for the very last peas of the season and a sculpturesque head of leafy lettuce.

The food, of course, is the thing. But it’s not the only thing at a farmers’ market.

“It’s a community experience,” said Chris Hurley, who runs Lazy C Farm in Penobscot with his wife, Nancy Veilleux. “More than anything, people want to get together. It’s almost like church. People come here to meet. It’s a nonthreatening environment. The kids are there. People get to choose what they like, and they are entertained.”

For Hurley and other farmers in the Hancock County area where I live, the season has been a late and cold one. The corn is only 4 feet tall, he said, when it should be 6 feet by this time. He fears the clipped season will make it a challenge for farmers to make ends meet. Most already have to take on additional winter employment away from their farms.

His comments reminded me of many artists – actors, musicians, painters, dancers – who also struggle to work in a field, so to speak, that lights up their passion rather than their bank accounts. Creative work, whether on the farm or the stage, can often be a labor of love. But it also is their livelihood.

“My husband got out-sourced and I needed to find a job,” said Simone Cromwell, who owns Fox Hollow Bakery in East Blue Hill and sells brownies, bear claws, croissants and Danishes at the Blue Hill Farmers’ Market every Saturday. She’s not a farmer, but she keeps farmer’s hours, and the market is 50 percent of her weekly business. She also sells baked goods to a nearby general store and a garden center.

“Someone said farmers’ markets were a good idea,” said Cromwell. “I didn’t think there’d be an interest. It turns out I was wrong. I sell a ton, and the scene is great.”

In Belfast last Tuesday, a small crowd was gathered around the truck of Abigail Friel, an apprentice at Peacemeal Farm in Dixmont. A woman was asking Friel about weeding – to weed each day, the workers practically crawl down the rows of vegetables, she said – and another man was handing out fliers to an upcoming show. Having already purchased bread and green beans, two men stood on the sidelines and licked ice cream cones. One had complained about the price for lettuce.

“A lot of people are excited about food,” said Friel, who comes from Pennsylvania. “But a lot of people balk at the prices. I imagine they don’t know the time we put into it and what it takes labor-wise to not use chemicals. We spend an inordinate amount of time weeding, weeding, weeding.”

That’s offset somewhat, said Schroth, the woman with the farm in Brooklin, by the number of patrons who really know food and how to prepare it. While many of her customers are local, many also come from urban centers where fresh locally produced vegetables, herbs and fruit are more commonly available.

“It’s such an appreciative audience,” said Schroth. “For the people who live on Deer Isle, getting fresh food means a long drive. People don’t even want to go as far as Blue Hill.”

At the Deer Isle market, which takes place in a church parking lot, the buyers range in age from children (sent by their parents to hold a place in line) to senior citizens looking for pickling cucumbers. The white church next door, with its looming tower, seems to look on with approval, as Hurley suggested.

Divine intervention aside, there is no question about the art and entertainment value of a farmers’ market. Consider that a hilarious comedy or a poignant symphony or a perfect brush stroke in a painting stays with you once you leave the auditorium. The idea is that art inspires.

After the Deer Isle market, I went home and got out my biggest and best platter. I began layering: lettuce, mesclun, cucumbers, green beans, peas, peppers, yellow beets, cherry tomatoes, scallions, basil, garlic, goat cheese, hard-boiled eggs. Around the rim, I placed a row of blueberries. All of it was grown locally. The greens had been in the ground that morning. When I brought the dish to the table that night for dinner, I, too, received an applause.

Want to see a good show? It runs through October. And, if all this isn’t enough to entice you, Schroth has the one magic word that would get any food enthusiast excited: tomatoes. Watch for them. They’ll be onstage in about a week.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.