Friday, June 06, 2003

Polka Party in Benton Harbor

Something in the entertainment listings for the Memorial Day weekend caught my eye. “World Concertina Congress,” I read, “Runs all three days… Hmmm… Must be a pretty big deal.” Like bagpipes, concertinas provoke strong reactions in most people. Some love the sound, others loathe it. Myself, I’m an accordion agnostic. But the venue listed sounded intriguing, like a Bond villain’s headquarters: “D - A - N - K, DANK, Pipestone road, Benton Harbor.” So off we drove to Michigan, in search of adventure. Pipestone road leads us through the beat-up downtown of Benton Harbor, then under the roaring interstate, and finally to an alpine chalet plunked down in the middle of a parking lot. A sign welcomes us to DANK.

As we step into the dark-panelled lobby, the woman at the admission table looks up from a paper plate of bratwurst, and we realise that we’ve stumbled into a German-American social club: the D in DANK surely stands for “Deutsch”. The lady beams at our tentative inquiry and asks for a donation of two dollars for the music that issues from an inner room. Clearly, this Concertina Congress runs on love, and not lucre. We pause and go in.

The room is encrusted with heraldic emblems of German cities and stenciled with mottoes about gemutlichkeit, women and song. The bar is draped in bunches of plastic grapes that light up and twinkle. In front hang rows of beer steins, with club members’ names written underneath. The drinkers note the arrival of strangers briefly, then turn back to their conversations.

All around the walls are long tables, where knots of people sit chatting and listening to a roster of polka bands on stage. The rule seems to be that polka bands must have at least two jovial accordion-players in their sixties, all Polish or German, who play well but sing badly. This encourages the drinkers to join in the singing, and some improvise on harmonica and spoons. It’s very cheerful. The accordions are gorgeous objects: pearlescent and ornate and ponderous.

Under a golden chandelier, a few couples dance. There are grey-haired couples who have been dancing together for years - each one anticipates precisely where the other will turn. Then there is a group of ladies with tidy blue perms and polyester outfits, who dance with each other decorously. A gentleman crabbed with arthritis regains his youthful spring on the dance floor. All the dancers know exactly what they are doing.

The hiccuping rhythm of a polka takes me back to rainy highschool days when it was too wet to play field hockey and we’d troop into the gym to learn English country dancing instead. Our teacher would shout instructions to us over scratchy LP recordings: “Now round you all go, in a big circle. That’s it girls: One two three hop! One two three hop! Jolly good.” From those girls- school days, a quarter-century ago, I retain just the rudiments of polka, schottische and waltz, and a proclivity to lead when I should follow.

I am hesitant to try my skills in the present company, but my husband is an accomplished dancer, and soon has us circumnavigating the room. After a few tunes, we sit down to let my spinning head catch up with my feet. An elderly gentleman comes over. He is delighted to see some young people learning to dance. He sighs, “It’s so important, you know. Without the young people, the dancing will die out.” After he’s left, it dawns on me that my husband and I - both of us forty-somethings - are the young people in question.

At this moment, the band strikes up “America the Beautiful” and a DANK club officer carries the Stars and Stripes to the centre of the dance floor. A white-haired lady seizes my hand and explains that we are to remember the real point of Memorial Day. Her eyes are fierce, and her hands are shaky, but she joins us to the chain marching behind the flag. Feeling like an outsider in a private observance, I hover between reluctance and respect, suspended between generations, the Old World and the New. Then the moment passes, and a new polka starts up.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on June 06, 2003
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