Punk or Traditional, There’s a Polka for All Persuasions

Polka in your ear.

I had been thinking polka for several days when I read the newspaper reviews of the Michelob Street Scene, the two-day musical bash in the Gaslamp Quarter.

Normally we vacation in western Michigan for a week every summer. There, I get exposed to enough polka music and Polish sausage to last me a year.

But we didn’t get to Michigan this summer, and I was feeling polka-deprived.

This was exacerbated last weekend by renting “Home Alone.” John Candy does a wonderful cameo as Gus Belinsky, Polka King of the Midwest, who offers the frantic mother a ride home to her 8-year-old:

“You don’t mind going with some polka bums?”

Thus I was polka-vulnerable when I approached the Street Scene review in The Times.

Deep in the review by John D’Agostino was a mention of a Texas group “performing a furious punk-polka-ish reading of ‘Hava Nagila.’ ”

For a cross reference, I checked the review in a Competing Paper. Sure enough there was a citation about “new-wave polka from the American heartland.”

Punk polka? New-wave polka?

I called D’Agostino. He informed me: “Polka has invaded the pop world.”

San Diego, it turns out, is on the polka circuit, and not just during Oktoberfest. Nouveau polka bands (including calypso polka) play to good crowds at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, the Casbah near downtown and the Spirit Club in Bay Park.

San Diego, a polka kind of town?

A trend. A small-bore trend to be sure (most of the big trends have long ago been strip-mined by the media) but a keeper nevertheless.

For traditional polka (heavy on accordions), I called the Musicians Assn. of San Diego County, Local 325.

I learned that local polka bands (and a woman who does a polka solo) deliver high-quality polka music at a fair price and that unionized polka musicians are superior to non-union polka musicians (scab polka?).

Polka is apparently all around me and I never knew it.

Now, if I can find some decent Polish sausage, I’ll be fine.

Came to Him in a Vision

Words, words, words.

* It’s not that San Diego Councilman John Hartley isn’t taken seriously at City Hall, but . . .

Hartley, elected in 1989 by 1.3% of the city’s voters, told reporters Monday that he’s considering running for mayor next year.

He said the mayoral idea came to him during his recent vacation in Tahiti.

Which prompted one reporter to ask whether Hartley was the victim of too much sun or a coconut dropping on his head.

* Money talks.

Lionel Meeker of Temecula swears he heard a Japanese tourist at North County Fair ask a clerk: “How much is this in real money?”

* Classified ad in the North County Entertainer:

“Artist in North County looking for cheap or old bones for making unusual sculpture. Please call . . . “

* Time Traveler, the hologram video game invented by Oceanside’s Rick Dyer, has been at arcades only a month.

But it’s already listed as the third most-played and most-profitable video game nationwide in its category by RePlay magazine, the video game bible.

* Best Political Insult of the Year Award.

To Councilman Wes Pratt, for his comment to the San Diego Union about his talky opponent, George Stevens:

“As they say, the empty wagon always makes the most noise.”

Whirlie Gigs

Flushed with excitement.

Innumerable readers (by actual count: six) have called-faxed-shouted to say I was wrong last Friday in doubting that whirlie is a real word.

Wayne Richards of Carlsbad says that whirlies (head dipped in a toilet, which is then flushed and creates a “whirlie” hairstyle) were common during fraternity Hell Week at San Diego State College two decades ago.

Pledges were assigned to scrub a urinal in preparation.

Some submitted to a whirlie voluntarily; others pulled a ruse by running upstairs, flushing, running sink water in their hair and returning disheveled.

The latter, of course, went to the head of the class.