It Begins.

Picture this: it is now October, 2008 Sunday morning, around 11am. I'm doing my typical "I'm gonna bake a cake!" when for some reason I was reminded of when I was a boyscout collecting dead Christmas trees in February as part of a fund raiser.

People would pay $5 to have their old Christmas tree taken from their lawn ($1 for wreaths!) and disposed of so they wouldn't have too. I had stopped by this old lady's house, she was probably in her 70's, and she opened the door and ordered me inside because it was so cold out (in retrospect, this was a bad idea. This is how you wind up in a chest freezer, or as a lamp shade of skin. But she was an old woman, and I was a spry, chubby 13 year old. I had my bets that I could take her).

I heard in her kitchen some lively, jaunty music playing. Tubas and Trombones and an Accordions Oh My!! She came back, handed me a ten and said keep the change (What a nice lady!) and I asked her what that music was. "Oh that? That's Polka! I luvadaPolka!" and she did a quick skip-hop dance in front of me. I loved it! I said thank you and I left. This woman, this saintly, generous woman, had instilled in me a lasting love of fine Norwegian dance music that should only be described as "deeply disturbing".

Polka. It's fun, and you can actually dance to it. This is true white guy music! To dance to it, all you do is hop from one foot to the other! Sometimes you hop in a circle! No rhythm, or style, just hopping!

So back to October, I'm baking a cake, and I'm remembering this old woman in her kitchen, and I think "I wonder if Reading has any polka stations?" So I turn on the Wave Radio (I love that thing!) flip the dial over to the AM stations, and I listen for the familiar diddy of Tubas and Trombones and Squeeze boxes all chiming together with some (obviously) white guy singing (usually badly) about his love of beer, or women, or sausages. Sometimes all three at once.



1020 - "Praise be to JESUS!!!" - Good bye

1030 - WBZ Accuweather forcast of the boston area... - Fuck off, I can look outside.

1230 - "Hastabliando Caliente!!!!" - No Megusto

1390 - Berusnakov Doshvedonya ... - The cold war is over, no need to broadcast missile plans on AM frequency anymore.

God damn it... nothing. All forgien languages and bible thumpers. Oh well. For some reason, I figured "Go through each frequency, one at a time". So I did. What the hell, I had 30 minutes whilst the cake baked.

1210 - nothing

1220 - nothing

1230 - You're listening to 1230 on your AM dial, POLKA TIME!!!!



No. Fucking. WAY!!!!!!



I think I had just evacuated in my pants from the sheer excitement. Polka Time! READING! This little piss ant town of Reading, has POLKA TIME!!!!!! AWESOME!!!!

"TIM, GET IN HERE! ENJOY THIS WITH ME!!!" I bellowed.

Tim can running, heard it was polka, then turned around and said "Whatever" - He woke up from the coma 2 weeks later, luckily with no real lasting damage.

So now I can hear some old fat white guy every Sunday morning from the hours of 11am to 1pm play such classics as "My heart of Polka" or "My Beer Queen" or "I Love You Almost as Much as Polka!". How can you not love this?!

Even as I type this, I'm listening to the diddy about the Squeeze Box being broken (gasp)!

Praise be to God, Maker of Beer and Polka, Ruler of the music of Polka, give us this day our Daily

Sausage, and forgive us our Dance, techno, and pop, and lead us not into temptation of good music, for thine is the Kingdom of Polish American Halls, The Power of Tuba, and the Glory of Polka Forever, Amen.