Polka
In America, the cliche for teenage rebellion is sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. For my son, it’s polka.
While other kids his age are levitating with Dua Lipa, Jonathan is ranking the greatest polka bands of all time (the Six Fat Dutchman take the top slot, in case you were curious). He gets in trouble for blasting his favorite versions of “Clarinet Polka” while he’s cookings supper. He uses an online music program to arrange unlikely songs as polkas, and in his spare time he is—and I wish I were kidding—learning accordion.
Parenting this child is not for the faint of heart.
Still, you want to encourage your children in their interests. And so last Friday Jonathan and I drove 110 miles to Gregory, SD, for Polka Fest.
If your mental image of Polka fest includes a hundred or so gray-haired people in funny hats drinking huge steins of beer, then you’ve pretty much got the idea. The Gregory Area Polka Band promised to “play until 9:00 or when the beer runs out, whichever comes first.” A half dozen couples got up to dance, and did so with surprising grace for farmers in their 70s.
And Jonathan? He was in heaven. Each time the band started in on one of his favorite tunes, he grabbed his phone to record it. After every song, he told me the title and offered commentary on the arrangement and musicianship. It felt a lot like trying to watch cricket with a veteran of the sport. I didn’t doubt his expertise. I just had no clue what he was talking about.
Halfway through the concert, the band leader took the mic and said, “Well, there’s really no need to introduce the band, since I’m sure you know everyone.” Then his eyes fell on Jonathan and me, sitting at one of the front tables. He cleared his throat. “Then again, there may be some of you—well, what the heck. Let me tell you who we’ve got.”
And so he did, from the gray-haired trumpet in stars-and-stripes shoes all the way down to “the third best high school tuba player in the state of South Dakota.” It was a nice gesture done, I would guess, mostly for our sake. We were clearly outsiders and possibly—and I suspect this is true—the only ones in the crowd without residential or family ties to Gregory County.
The introductions were meant as a courtesy, a way to include us in the shared knowledge of the community. But they threw me off balance for a moment. I thought about how some of my other friends might see this place and these people. The 4H Building is essentially a barn, with no climate control and bare concrete floors. The beer-guzzling crowd were overwhelmingly old and almost all white. From the south end of the building, I could see houses flying Trump flags.
Some of my urban friends would be having none of this. The first things they noticed in town would be the politics. Close behind would be the homogeneity. This, some of my friends would say, is the worst of Middle America—the people who, however nice they may seem, are blind to their prejudices and blissfully unaware of how much harm their preferred policies to do real people.
Fair enough. I doubt I watch the same news channels or vote for the same candidates as most of the people in Gregory. My guess is that, if we talked long enough, we could find plenty to argue over.
But let’s also be fair to these rural South Dakota folks. Many of them sported t-shirts for the Gregory Community Foundation, the beneficiary of Polka Fest, which supports the local hospital, parks, youth sports, and arts. The town may not have deep pockets or first-rate facilities, but they pool what they have so that their public resources are available at virtually no cost to individuals.
And polka, the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the musical universe? It is a cliche of local culture (notice how often you hear the “Pennsylvania Polka” the next time you watch Groundhog Day), an easy target of ridicule for its cheery brass and cheesy shave-and-a-haircut endings. The lederhosen don’t help matters any.
Still, this is music with a heritage, and it brings people together in places like Gregory. By the end of the night, I was getting pats on the shoulder from dancers as they walked back to their seats. Jonathan—the most stoic and reserved kid I know—engaged one of the locals in conversation, blowing the poor man’s mind by telling him that he (and not his father) was the polka connoisseur. And when everyone is singing along with the “Twins Win Polka,” it’s hard not to crack a smile.
I have lived in enough places like Gregory not to look at it with rose-colored glasses. If I moved there, I would always be an outsider. I would struggle with small-town power dynamics. I would hate the local politics and probably voice my disagreements too loudly. I would be frustrated by monotony and isolation. Life in a town more rural than Mitchell isn’t for me.
Neither do I want the patrons of Polka Fest to be drawn in caricature. Like their musical genre, they are easy to mock for those with the sense of cultural superiority that has always been a hallmark of urban dwellers. But, as David Brooks likes to point out, it’s very hard to hate people from up close. When you get up close at an event like Polka Fest, you enter a world of unselfconscious welcome that requires only minimal buy-in.
If the rest of us could learn that same easy hospitality, how much better would we feel about the world and our communities and—most importantly—each other?
