The Dance of Death
I'm spending most of the holiday weekend volunteering at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I wanted to be a photographer, but instead they put me back stage to help the multitude of Albertan folk singers coming through.
Yesterday there was a Ukrainian music quartet (lots of Ukrainian immigrants in Alberta, apparently,) and at one point an older gentleman from the crowd walked onto the dance floor, alone, and started doing a Ukrainian dance of some sort. The crowd gave him a big hand. Afterwards, he walked past where I was standing with another volunteer, and started talking to her. He told her that he was Serbian, not Ukrainian, but that the two countries shared a brotherhood or something, so they all did the same dances. “Oh,” my colleague said, “What a coincidence, my father is Croatian!”
“What?! You are Croatian? I KILL YOU IF YOU POLKA!” And with that he stormed off.
And so we acquired the catch phrase for the rest of the afternoon.