While Lakeville has been developing at an astronomical rate around Interstate 35, the downtown area has been trapped in a bubble that’s hardly changed since my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s. (There’s one main street that has a single stoplight, maybe a mile long, it still has a four-lane bowling alley… very old, very quaint. I like it.) But once a year, the Lakeville Lions turn it into a loud and obnoxious party town.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s still Oktoberfest and there’s still plenty of beer, loud (accordion) music and people wearing lampsh… lederhosen. Since my dad is a member of the Lions and was selling brats that evening, I thought I should at least come by to say “Hi”, grab a bite to eat, maybe win something in a drawing, find some girls who recognized me from TV… two out of four wasn’t bad.
Aside from those, I didn’t have any expectations. … Scratch that. I had one thing I wanted to do: stay off the dance floor. There was an open space in front of the bandstand and one of my mom’s friends was determined to get me to polka with her. Sometimes I hate to disappoint people, but this was definitely an exception to the rule. Hell, disappointing her was a big part of the fun.
Getting away from the music wasn’t always my doing, though—when you get a phone call from Bill (the Geek) out in Pennsylvania, you run off behind the tent where there’s the least amount of noise coming from the accordion and have a 20-minute conversation. Or maybe for some of you, it’d be a couple hours of hot and sweaty phone sex. But hopefully not behind the tent at Oktoberfest.
The band was done playing by the time I got back. My food was cold, but it seemed like a fair trade. Inevitably, the music started again, which was when the real fun began.
I’m gonna flash back for a moment to a pig roast I attended a year or two ago. It went late into the evening and they had a live band playing, so a bunch of people were dancing around in the yard while I sat on a bench off to the side. They tried everything they could think of to get me on my feet. There were two problems:
1) I didn’t want to dance.
2) The harder they tried, the more fun it was to foil their attempts.
They suggested, they asked, they compared dancing to sex (something I didn’t need to worry about, given that I hadn’t had a girlfriend in about two years) and someone eventually tried grabbing me and dragging me up. She took my hand, tugged hard and I didn’t let my arm move. They finally gave up and I sat contentedly on the bench for the remainder of the night.
Mom’s friend used similar methods (aside from the sex part), but she had one advantage—I was sitting in a chair instead of on a bench. Thus, she tried asking me to dance, insisted that I go with her to join the group when they were doing the Bunny Hop, drag me up onto my feet… nothing was working. (Ain’t I a stubborn bastard?)
Then she talked to her husband. Their next attempt? Pick up my chair and move me to an open area when the band started playing the Chicken Dance. The “shame and embarrassment” of that maneuver didn’t work, so she tried to heap on some more “shame and embarrassment” by gathering a circle of people around the chair to do the Chicken Dance with her. Apparently, there was some do-si-doing involved, so I kept my arms pinned against my sides to keep anyone from sneaking theirs inside.
When the dance ended, that was it. Game over, score one for Shawn. (Boo-ya!) She and her friends had to leave, so Mom and I bought something to drink, said goodbye to Dad and took off. So here’s my official notice to anyone feeling a little light-headed about the possibility of getting me on a dance floor: I don’t do polkas. End of story. Well, okay, when I was younger, I used to love the Bunny Hop and might still do it among friends, but I draw the line at the Chicken Dance—there’s just no way to relate sexual skills to sticking your hands in your armpits and flapping them around.
