White Sunday Mornings

Yesterday was snow day - long awaited.  The NorthFork Patch ran this picture and it caught my eye if for no other reason than there are NO footsteps down to the bottom of the stairs so it goes to figure that someone ventured out of a basement and saw the above. Just a hunch.

Cement blocks and show always look colder than it is. Long ago, I actually played  in a polka band that had a regular Sunday morning gig called the Michigan Polka Party.  Most of the time it was taped on Saturday afternoons at the Germania club in Saginaw, Michigan.  Germanias were common in heavily German areas and this place had a big auditorium, lots of rooms and a space where the Polka was treasured.  I played in this ensemble when my trumpet teacher was in an auto accident and laid up and to be honest I was plenty nervous - TV and all. I was also pretty nervous because I wasn't very good. 

The place was a maze of corridors, little reception rooms, endless bars all done in black wood and glass, and one felt a time warp to some place in the middle of Bavaria but on Saturdays, about 3pm we would show up and so would more German speaking people than I knew existed and pretty soon we would play the Pennsylvania Polka (the show's theme song) and the crowd would go to town.  We played for an hour and a half and everyone (not me I was 15) shot to one of the many bars and then to a dinner of potatoes and boiled meat.

The second or third week there I was feeling a bit more confident and went exploring after our performance.  The place was old - see picture - and once was the Academy of Music which explained the stage and all, and I of course got lost - a bridge too far. Long story short, I found a door and a stairway out of the place and when I saw the picture in the NorthFork Patch that was the first thing I thought of. Very cold northern Michigan day with the usual new snow, block stairway up and out and not a footprint.