Chicken dance

This fall weekend I drove to Leavenworth to join some school chums for Oktoberfest in this most fake of all fake Bavarian towns. I missed the Leavenworth history lesson and brat-walk, so it's partly fact and mostly conjecture to record here that when the train stopped coming to Leavenworth between 20 and 50 years ago the little town decided to keep itself alive by going Bavarian. They certainly aren't the first town to resort to desperate measures to keep afloat, but they must be one of the most bizarrely successful. There were ordinances that shops display signs in Bavarian-style fonts and buildings look like they were transplanted from the German countryside and every restaurant serve sauerkraut and the clothing stores all sell lederhosen. Oktoberfest brings out the best of the bastardized culture as visitors pour in from across the state for beer and polka. I've never attended before and was a little trepidatious as I entered the beer tent. We were immediately shuffled into the lines for beer and started squeezing through the crowd to find a table near the stage. A word about the crowd: wowza. There were young people and old people. People in lederhosen and Heidi costumes. Drunk people and people shoving entire mustard-covered pretzels into their mouths with one fist. And hats. There was a guy in a robot hat. A group of old women in halo hats. A guy with a crab hat dancing with a girl in a flowerpot hat. A girl dressed as slutty Heidi in a green felt hat which proclaimed "Leavenworth" across the front very similar to those mickey mouse ear hats you get your name put on at Disneyland. There was a young guy wearing a pope hat that must have been three feet tall and two feet wide. An old man in a viking hat. A woman in one of those reggae hats with fake black dreadlocks down the back. As far as I could tell, there's absolutely no connection between hats and Oktoberfest and the only explanation I could come up with is beer-induced mass hysteria on the part of the crowd.

People were moving and shaking to the polka band, but never quite so ferociously as when the accordian started playing the chicken dance. People streamed onto the floor - some wearing chicken hats - to flap their wings and shake it.

I think I may have sprained my mouth after all of the jaw-dropping. K looked around though and noted that everyone there was so happy. And it was true. We were surrounded by a huge crowd of people in this crazy salute to a culture that no one actually belonged to and had been subverted to such an extreme that a German would have dropped dead of apoplexy, but everyone was smiling and dancing and chatting with strangers and drinking beer. When I travel to other countries I sometimes feel sad that in America I'm not exposed to the types of cultural identity and common traditions that I see in other countries. But it's there. In Leavenworth. In a beer tent. With hundreds of other souls who unashamedly dive headlong into celebration and do silly and weird things for no real purpose but to enjoy life.

If this whole nursing thing doesn't work out I'm moving to Leavenworth and opening a hat shop.