Klarinet Archive - Posting 000892.txt from 2004/10

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] An ode to the polka
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 17:15:32 -0400

Since the subject of polkas has come up, I submit a short story I
wrote some years ago when I was trying to get a collection of
short stories published. The dates in the title refer to the era
about which I am writing.

POLKA, POLKA (1950-1954)

"See me dance the polka," begins the thirteenth of 21 poems
created by Dame Edith Sitwell for Sir William Walton's Façade, a
sophisticated entertainment that requires both musicians and one
or more narrators. But Sitwell's elegant text and Walton's wry,
urbane, and jazzy music forces one to the unmistakable conclusion
that neither ever attended a Polish wedding or spent a Saturday
evening social at a White Eagle hall.

On this matter, Walton should have asked me for advice. I'm an
authority on polkas by virtue of having played at least 35,000
every Saturday night and another 35,000 every Sunday afternoon
for four consecutive years beginning in 1950. My entire nervous
system will never get over the event. When someone says, "Let's
have a polka," I get under the bed, insert a thumb in my mouth,
and put a blanket over my head. I live in fear of two things:
(1) that Frank Wocznarowski, Johnny Sopczik, or Harmony Bells
will find out where I live and call me; and (2) that I'll agree
to play the gig.

Let me begin by speaking of the "White Eagle." The national
symbol of Poland for several centuries, perhaps as long as a
millennium, has been a white eagle rampant on a red field. So,
wherever Polish immigrant populations settled in America, it was
natural for the community to construct and center its social life
in a "White Eagle hall." New England, which is where my
experience lies, was dotted with them. Almost every Saturday
night, dances were held at every White Eagle hall, the main
attraction being the polka band, and that's where I come into the
story.

If there is one group with whom a clarinet player with good
hands can get some pickup gigs, it's playing with polka bands. I
worked with at least six, though I can remember the names of only
three, and please don't insist on accurate spellings.

So there I was trying to learn Mozart and Beethoven while,
simultaneously, moonlighting on such archetypes as "Who Stole The
Kishka?"

The schedule was: arrive at 7:30 pm, start playing at 8, break
at 9:45, restart at 10:15, finish at midnight. Polka, polka,
polka. Oberek. Polka, polka, polka. Oberek. Da capo, ad
infinitum.

You already know what a polka is (or you think you do if you are
not Polish), but an oberek is less well-known. It's a dance in
3/4 time with the accent on the second beat: one-TWO-three,
one-TWO-three. Or maybe it's one-two-THREE. I forget. A lot of
years have passed and, after playing several obereks, I always
found myself leaning to the left and falling down occasionally.

But back to the polka. The orthodoxy is as fixed as the sonata
allegro form and the performance practices are as rigorous as
those of Johann Sebastian Bach. Deviate from form or practice
and a polka musicologist named "Stash" will shove an entire
kielbasa up your nose.

Each polka begins with a flourish followed by two choruses --
during the second of which the bassist (whose name must also be
Stash) sings in Polish. The text of the song is a little moral,
such as the things that will happen to you when you come home
drunk, or when you steal your girlfriend's garter, or some other
behavioral flaw. Very rarely would the text make reference to
the past events so typical to country-western music (i.e., you
stopped loving me and that was sad, or you used to be in prison
and that was bad, or some awful thing happened to you and that
made me glad). Polka lyrics primarily deal with future
mortifying events (i.e., if at some time in the future you should
pee in your pants, your humiliation will be total because the
entire community will know of this disgrace). Culturally the
Polish community's view about an individual's behavior was always
important.

During a repeat of one of the choruses, it was obligatory to
have whoops. Loud, terrifying whoops! That's when the
bassist -- he can always sing because he is one of the few people
in the band without an instrument in his mouth -- begins to
scream in a high falsetto on the off-beat, which also acts as the
signal for the audience to go into a frenzy!! The first time I
heard it done, I thought that the whooper was having an epileptic
seizure or had contracted the St. Vitus Dance. Frightened half
to death, I dropped my instrument. It cost $11 to repair it, and
that evening I made no profit.

For the final polka before the 9:45 (and only) break, I was
given center stage. Spotlights would be turned on me. The
preparation for a Mahler symphony was not nearly this intense.
The audience would become silent with expectation. Nubile women
positioned themselves at the front of the crowd in the hopes that
I might accidentally look at one of them for more than three
seconds, the protocol for which required the girl's father to
approach me with a shotgun, assert that I had ruined his
daughter, and demand that I marry her at once. To avoid that, I
made believe I was blind or looked at the ceiling. When the
number of exceptionally beautiful girls was large (which was
often true -- to my untrained eye, few women are more exquisite
and charming than those of Polish extraction), I wore a blindfold
and was announced as the fastest blindfolded clarinet player in
New England.

Then the bandleader (also called Stash) would say, in Polish,
that I was going to play the "Clarinet Polka." The hall would go
mad. Mothers would throw their daughters at me. Several of
them had moustaches (the daughters, that is). Then, making a
serious effort to play out of tune with the ugliest, most
unpleasant sound possible (another strict performance practice),
the band, with me as soloist, would begin the entertainment. At
the conclusion, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. So
favorable had the audience's opinion of me become, that I was
given liberty to look at anyone's daughter for as much as eight
seconds without being accused of having defiled her person and
taken her honor. This was a most unusual enfranchisement usually
available only to priests.

After the break, I invariably had to drag the piano player,
Dennis Mieczislovsky, back to the stage. Dennis was born in
Poland and had only recently come to the United States. He had
magic hands and played Chopin with great delicacy, or at least he
did before he began to play a lot of polkas. Like me, he needed
the money, so this talented and gifted performer began to play
polka gigs.

Dennis would complain, "Even in Poland we never played this many
polkas!" It became necessary to chain him to the piano. He
played oom-pah music all evening, a role that most people think
is the domain of the tuba. But that's not only false, but
impossible. The tuba can only play "oom." Someone else has to
execute the "pah." But a pianist cannot play "pah" by itself for
any length of time. Their eye-hand-foot-head-body coordination
collapses after a few minutes of that, and they start to twitch.
So, alone, they play the "oom" in the left hand, the "pah" in the
right, their coordination survives the assault, and they don't
get into spasms.

After a few years Dennis stopped playing Chopin, then all polka
gigs, and finally he gave up music, not only not as a profession
but as a listener, too. He left town, moved to Colby, Kansas and
is now a big man in the grange. By wild coincidence, I bumped
into him a few years ago when I took I-70 west out of Kansas
City. He denied ever having played the piano, no longer admitted
that he was born in Poland, and refused to dance with his wife to
any music in 2/4 rhythm. Sad case.

At midnight the band would crash in a local motel, two to a bed,
four to a room. I always slept with a guy named Stash. The rest
was only temporary because, on Sunday, we had to do it all over
again at an afternoon Polish wedding, an event for which the band
had also been hired. I'm told that wedding dates were
established years in advance based solely on the availability of
a particular polka band.

The religious ceremonies took place in the local Catholic church
and then, exactly at 12:59 p.m., the wedding party would arrive
at the White Eagle hall. The polkas began precisely at 1:00 p.m.

Did I mention anything about polka titles? Well, the fact is
that there are so many polkas, they are named after anything and
everything. On the way into town, the bandleader might see a
billboard announcing good auto service at the "West End Service
Station," and by that evening we were playing "The West End
Service Station Polka." If we had a good meal at Jimmie's Diner,
a polka was sure to be named in honor of that diarrhea palace.
When working Bridgeport, we had the "Seaside Park Polka." The
week before that, the never-to-be-forgotten "Greater Pittsfield
Polish Community Polka" made its debut. For some perverse reason
that I never understood, obereks were not named. They were simply
announced as "And now, we will play an oberek." Go figure.

After an hour and a half of hard playing, we were ready for a
break and something to eat. The band was always fed; it was a
part of the contract. So we would stuff ourselves with a lot of
kielbasa and sauerkraut, the net result of which was the
generation of a great deal of gas that was expelled in the bus on
the way home. I could eat two, sometimes three kielbasa with a
ton of sauerkraut and mustard, all washed down with several
glasses of beer.

Then, after only half of our break had transpired, the bride's
father would insist that we get back on the bandstand. He would
do so by threatening us with non-payment if "you don't get your
lazy asses back on stage and make some action, and when are you
going to play `Who Stole the Kishka?'." Occasionally, a brother
of one of the marriageable Polish women (the uglier the brother,
the more intelligent and beautiful the sister, and vice versa)
would come up to the bandstand and speak Polish to me while
waving a whiskey bottle and two empty glasses. I think he was
inviting me to have a drink.

"I'm sorry, but I don't speak Polish," I would say.

"You don't speak Polish? How come?," he would say with squinty
eyes, a sususpicious look on his face. "Aren't you Polish?"

"Well, my mother was born in Poland but I'm from New Jersey."

"So what? I was born in Massachussets and I speak Polish."

"Well, my Mom came here as a young child."

"My family has lived here for three generations and we still
speak Polish at home."

"Well, unfortunately we never did. But if you are offering me a
drink, I thank you for your hospitality, but I really can't drink
anything that strong when I play, and I don't drink very much
when I'm not." Then, using the hypothesis about the beauty of
the sister being in inverse proportion to the plug-ugliness of
the brother, I would say, "Nonetheless, I'd still like to meet
your sister."

"I don't permit my sister to speak to anyone who does not speak
Polish or drink. You'll have to look elsewhere for a bride."

In such ways the afternoon would pass, the bride and groom
Polka-ed themselves into exhaustion leaving the night's
activities -- which had not been practiced in advanced, you may
be sure -- to be postponed, and eventually we packed up and went
home. By the time we reached our destination, the smell was so
awful that we were happy to take our $24 for both Saturday night
and Sunday afternoon's gigs and get off the bus.

As I said, neither Dame Edith Sitwell nor Sir William Walton
knew much about polkas.

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

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