In the Pioneer Valley, there are a lot of folks who tell “coming out” stories. So it wasn’t all that surprising to be sitting in Millside Park in Easthampton, enjoying a nice Friday night free concert, accidentally overhearing one of those stories.
“I didn’t come out till I was in my 40s,” the man sitting near me said. Good heavens, I thought. That must be rough—being gay and in the closet well into adulthood.
“I’d always heard the music,” he said. “On the radio every weekend.”
Music? Were we talking weekends spent crooning along to a soundtrack of gay liberation? What radio show was that? Did they play the glittery cliches, or was this a whole other, secret world of music I knew nothing of? This could get interesting.
“You know, on WMUA,” he said.
A bulb sputtered somewhere in my brain: weekends, WMUA. This wasn’t about his coming out as a gay man. This was about embracing something entirely different. This man’s deep dark secret had nothing to do with closets. He was “coming out”—as in coming out to live music shows. I was witnessing a liberation, the final giving up of resistance to and public embrace of polka fandom. Granted, the big clue came from the band shell, where Lenny Gomulka and Chicago Push held forth in high style.
Many is the weekend my radio’s more or less accidentally ended up on one of WMUA’s several polka shows. The music has its moments, and then it has other moments, in which running to change the dial becomes a necessity—polka singing, in particular, varies from on-pitch and well-sung to grating and weird, and the whole gamut is apparently acceptable.
There is little doubt, though, that polka serves a specialized need. It’s much like the “happy helmet” on the old cartoon Ren and Stimpy. Even if you’re forced to listen, the wildly speeding melodies, whoops and calls and jumping polka beat will visit happiness upon you. Granted, the effect, born as it is of a certain relentlessness, may expire quickly. But while it lasts, it’s a good one.
In a way, it makes sense that embracing unbridled polka fandom would be something of a “coming out”: to tune in to WMUA’s polka shows (four of them, Saturday and Sunday mornings) or visit a performance like Lenny Gomulka’s is to enter an alternate universe, at least for those of us who don’t have a “babcia” and have a low ratio of consonants to vowels in our names. On shows like Billy Belina’s live Polka Bandstand, evidence of the vibrantly active world of local polka abounds. Dedications often go out, and mentions of birthday good wishes often seem to include personal knowledge of the celebrants.
Lenny Gomulka himself brought home the insider nature of the polka world when he mentioned from the stage another Valley polka performance. “You’ll be around your kind of people,” he said. By which he seemed to mean nothing untoward.
I’m an outsider looking in, but to me, the Valley’s polka world looks something like a scene I know from the inside: the Irish music scene. There’s a stout dose of national identity, and sometimes the tones of a very different language come from the stage (granted, the sometimes nasal mash-ups of Polish sound very different from the fearsome melodiousness of Irish). Gomulka explained that certain tunes were old polka standards, others newer material. The musicianship was often top-notch.
But what brought home the sense of a whole different world took place on the margins of the Easthampton show, and it wasn’t even overhearing that polka “coming out.” Go to the right place, of course, and polka is legit dance music, music people know the steps to. One older woman at the show had clearly been to a fair number of real-deal polka dances. The summer revelers of Easthampton, a fair number of whom, like me, weren’t polka regulars, sat straight-faced in their lawn chairs underneath straw hats. But not her.
She wandered over to the nearby basketball court, and, as the clarinet and trumpet wailed and the accordion pumped along, she showed the rest of us what it’s like to really inhabit this most Polish of genres. She put her hands up to embrace an invisible partner and deftly stepped and twirled, shuffling her feet in the spaces between the beats. I didn’t know what the strange words coming out of the P.A. meant, but they must have been something happy.
