Beware Oktoberfest

I was lured out to Oktoberfest events twice last week, once by free sausages
(yum) and once by free pancakes and sausages (alas, the line was too long). I had a good time at each event, but... there was the music. I enjoyed it at the time. I enjoyed watching the crowd bobbing up and down to polka time. I even enjoyed watching parents teach their kids the chicken dance.

But it's been over a week, and I still have the Pennsylvania Polka stuck in my head.

I made the mistake of emailing my brother about it, and he cruelly emailed back the lyrics.

Strike up the music the band has begun
The Pennsylvania Polka.
Pick out your partner and join in the fun
The Pennsylvania Polka.
It started in Scranton, it’s now No 1
It’s bound to entertain you
Everybody has a mania
To do the polka from Pennsylvania

I sing out of tune even in my head, and I really can't hit the notes on that last line.

I'm a little paranoid about ear worms because I once had Hail to the Chief stuck in my head for two years. That was a rough time. When the Pennsylvania Polka knocks around in my head I have tried displacing it by thinking of the scene where it's played in Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies, but that has just made it worse.

A cautionary tale.

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Barrels

Oktoberfest is set to begin again, and with it our annual barrel race (Saturday, 10 am, Waterloo Public Square). This will be the first year we've had the barrel race since we lost our last barrels. The remaining ones were purely ceremonial, piled in a pyramid in front of the CIGI building (formerly the Seagram distillery) at Erb and Caroline. Last year City Hall said the pyramid was rotting and gave the barrels away. Now the spot is part of the new Balsillie School of International Affairs.

(A local theater group has started the Barrel Project to commemorate the barrel diaspora. "While the wooden slats and metal rings may be scattered all over the county, their memory remains..." I kid you not.)

All we have left of barrels is the name of the Barrel Yards development on Erb at Father David Bauer Drive. The Barrel Yards used to be the Canbar lands where whiskey barrels were made and stored. The land is soon to be a complex of apartments, office buildings, retail space and hotels... or at least it will be if reported water table issues can be resolved.

Canbar shut down in 1992, and I can clearly remember when barrels were part of the culture of Waterloo. When you drove down Erb you could see the barrels piled high.

The best part was that after Seagrams was done aging whiskey in them Canbar practically gave the barrels away. Cut in half, they were used in backyards all over town as planters.

If you got a fresh one it would still have whiskey soaked into the wood. When I was a grad student at UW, a popular party drink was called swish. We'd buy a barrel, add some water, let it sit a bit, swish it around, and voila - a large supply of half strength, nearly free, blecchy tasting whiskey.

My dad aged a batch of homemade peach wine in a Seagrams barrel once and brought the whole barrel out for a pig roast. The problem with the stuff was it was delicious and didn't taste nearly as lethal as it was. A large crowd of respectable people became completely blotto very rapidly. (I watched it all, completely sober, because that was my first day of work as a waitress at the Kent Hotel... once again, a story for another day.)

The distillery (and brewery) dominated Waterloo in other ways. All the time I was growing up in Waterloo, you could tell what day it was by the smell - and they were nice smells, or at least I thought so. Certain days of week we could smell the Seagrams distillery at Erb and Caroline, and other days we had the smell from the Labatt brewery (formerly Carling, and before that the Kuntz brewery) at King and William. Everyone had a different description of the smells: some days it was bread, molasses, oatmeal or Raisin Bran, and some days it was martinis.

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Kitchener-Waterloo's Oktoberfest - Time for a Change

Article in today's Record: Bavarian Festival is at a Fork in the Road.

Indeed. The Oktoberfest festival, which runs every year around the Canadian Thanksgiving, is a travesty. It's all about tackiness and drunkenness. It attracts people who like tackiness and drunkenness - and it attracts a lot of them. There's a tacky beauty pageant, there are crappy beer halls selling mass quantities of cheap beer, there's a parade. I can't comment on the quality of the parade even though it passes less than 100 meters from my home because it starts at some ungodly hour on a Saturday morning (8 am?) and I don't like parades.

Kitchener-Waterloo has loads of Germans and loads of German culture. German culture is fabulous - there's so much we could be celebrating: good beer, German white wine, the wide range of German cuisine beyond the Oktoberfest sausage, Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, on and on and on. What does the K-W Oktoberfest festival celebrate of German culture? Oompapa music, lederhosen and cheap beer. It's not a cultural festival: it's a parody.

A long time ago there used to be an Oktoberfest operetta. I recall a charming performance of Der Rosenkavalier. It was sold out. Why was the operetta cut?

My guess is that the problem with the festival is the management, and a focus on short-term profit instead of building a community organization. For example, the operetta was popular among local residents, but wasn't popular with tourists, which is probably why it was cut - and which is completely wrong-headed. That focus probably also explains why we don't have little independent Oktoberfest events sprouting up around town during the festival: restaurants and community groups would be widening the appeal of the festival if the festival's organizers reached out to the community.

Keep the tacky beauty pageant if you want. Keep the beer halls that sell only Blue or Canadian in pitchers. Keep the early-morning parade. And especially, keep the polka music. All this stuff is wildly popular and it brings lots of tourist dollars to our town. But give us something more. Make it part of the community and something that the community can be proud of. As it is, I try to leave town during Oktoberfest. I think its extreme tackiness and focus on a cheap drunk diminishes our German heritage. It diminishes our whole community.

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