Astaire, Rogers, Hines, Baryshnikov dance to a polka by Smetana
March 25, 2019
Tonight, Terry, a friend from the condo, and I walked the three tenths of a mile to Shaker Square and SaSa, a Japanese restaurant of good reputation, and one of eleven food serving places around the square (one reason I like living here). We went for Monday evening happy hour. We shared a vaguely Asian dish of potato fries (it had sea weed on top) and Terry had a hot pot –beef and I don’t know what—while I ate sashimi, two pieces each of raw salmon and tuna and two of cooked eel. We washed it all down with bourbon sours, which were, I must say, very very good.
An hour for so after getting back, I was hungry yet so I put four eggs –I was worried that I had too many eggs in my refrigerator and had to use them before they passed their due date– in a pan, added water, and started making hard boiled eggs, which would eventually become part of an egg salad, with chopped onion and celery and lots and lots of capers, harissa and mayo. While they were cooking, I put a CD in the boom box and listened to pianist Andras Schiff, play a suite of polkas by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana. It was beautiful music.
***
What it wasn’t, though, was the polka music I grew up with in northern Ohio, 1950s and early ’60s. That was a rowdier music, more primitive and driving. It was music to dance to, although you could listen to it in the popular Lawrence Welk variety show that aired every Saturday evening, and it was intended for the large ethnic audience that existed in Ohio and elsewhere in those long past times.
I grew up hearing the polka –they usually played one or two at the high school dances I attended, but I couldn’t get how to dance to it. But then, I had the same problem with all three-steps — polka, minuet and waltz. I was a pretty hot dancer when I was young –my college friend Jeannie Brown said I was the best dancer she knew—but I proved over and over that I was dud at the polka, much less the waltz.
***
I met Esther. This is 1963. She was Slovak, one hundred percent. Her parents were the first generation born and raised in America. They went to a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Elyria, Ohio. One of the services every Sunday was still done in Slovak. Esther did polka well. As did her sisters, Evelyn, Irene, and Eleanor. Her parents, aunts, and uncles. Her cousins, the family’s friends and fellow churchgoers, neighbors and who knows who else around the periphery. Just not me.
It wasn’t a problem at our wedding, though, because we didn’t have a reception beyond cookies, punch or coffee, talk and hugs.
A year and a half later, her sister Irene got married, to a Polack no less, and then it became a problem. Because we went to a hall afterwards and there was a band and everyone was dancing, and there I was with Esther, in the middle of that decidedly eastern European dance environment.
And of course, there was aunt Mary Ladegaard.
***
Aunt Mary was my mother-in-law Sue’s sister, the volatile face of the Gall family. She had married a stolid but fanciful Scandinavian, uncle Walter, who had long since given up on trying to rein aunt Mary in when she went off on an emotional rampage. She was great and lovely but not given to small gestures of any kind. Everything was big with aunt Mary, including dancing.
(Uncle Walter didn’t look it, but he had a sense of humor of his own. One of the nieces or nephews, I forget which, told me of a stunt he used to pull whenever someone young visited aunt Mary and him. He’d get up from the sofa where he was sitting and say, “Wait here. I have to get something. I’ll be right back.” Then he’d walk behind the sofa and it appeared as if he was descending a flight of steps into the basement, first his hips vanishing from sight, then his torso and arms, and then his head. There’d be a pause and up he would pop again –head, then shoulders, then abdomen, and lastly his legs, and he’d walk back around the sofa and sit down. The child, who of course wanted to see where he had gone, would walk behind the sofa to take a look and see –absolutely nothing, just floor and carpet.)
***
Fortunately, I’d had a few liquid reinforcements at Irene and Len’s reception by the time aunt Mary cornered me. She stood in front for me and said, “Come on, Dave. Let’s dance!” I say “fortunately” because my big problem with polkas and waltzes was loosening up enough to match my body to the rhythm. But that night, it really didn’t matter. For dancing with aunt Mary, whatever the dance was, she led, not you. I was her satellite. It was fun. That was a night of happiness and merriment.
I’ve danced the polka since then, but never better than I did that night. I still find the on, off, on again rhythm of three-four hard to negotiate. I feel stiff, awkward, but hey, sometimes I still try it!
I cherish that memory –aunt Mary dragging me around the floor, one polka and then another. She wouldn’t be around for too many more years, nor would Esther’s mom, and by now, all those wonderful Bendiks and Galls (Esther’s mother’s maiden name) are gone too, and we’re the older generation. Esther’s gone too.
***
Esther was a great polka-er. She and her sister Eleanor came alive when there band played a polka.
One time in California, in 1992, when I had just started as vice provost for student affairs at CSU Stanislaus, Esther arrived with our furniture and our car (both shipped cross-country while she flew out) just in time to go to a dance on campus with me. It was the culminations of a week-long celebration of la Semana de la Raza, honoring our Mexican-American students’ heritage. The band for the night was the hottest band in the Bay area (San Francisco and south and east), Dr. Loco and His Rockin’ Jalapeno Band. Esther has been there less than twenty-four hours and she was exhausted. She didn’t want to go to the dance but I was new on the job and had to make an appearance and it gave her a chance to meet some of my new colleagues, so she went. But she made me promise we’d leave. Early.
We pulled up in front of the dining hall, where the dance was taking place. The band was playing a polka. (Mexico has polkas too. I suspect every ethnic culture has its own variety of the polka.) I wasn’t even out of the car before Esther had left me for the dance floor. By the time I got inside the hall, she was in the middle of the dance floor, polkaing away with Judy Graves, my new assistant director of Admissions and Records. I danced a lot that night but I took occasional breaks and she never did. She danced every dance. She never stopped dancing until the evening was over.
During one break, I ended up drinking a beer next to Jaime Alcaraz, my director of Recruitment. “That Esther is something, isn’t she?” I said. “You got that right,” he said back.
***
(We danced the Chicken Dance that night as well. I remember dancing that with my friends Irv and Hannie –Hannie was German, Irv met her on military duty in Germany– at a rundown German restaurant near the Flats in Cleveland. That has to have been in 1961 or 1962.)
Frankie Yankovic Lawrence Welk
This is what I thought polkas were in my younger years.
Walter Ostanek: Let’s Have a Party Polka