Podlasie Club

Dance… dance…dance…dance…dance…dance. This was possibly the only English the waitress spoke and she said it over and over again between three second pauses as she pulled my arm. Her tremendous physical strength and the vodka, which they serve by the half bottle, was too much for my poor muscles and cognitive function to resist. Polka can be transfixing like doing a whirling Dervish or injecting intravenous drugs. I could not stop, but I can soon be polka dancing with the rats in the alley if the trend continues.
With the Lucky Stop a memory of only the oldest inhabitants and the Baby Doll as dead as Li’l Wally, we must buy gallons of Stolichnaya from Podlasie club in order to keep them in business. This part of Avondale is slowly changing and the patrons are mostly elderly people who seem to enjoy several bottles of the aforementioned spirits; Podlasie may be next to go. The choice is ours, and we must not wait to act. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of polka.

Once upon a time, after several hours of drinking with librarians further north, I was summoned here to bear to witness to the truly holy and epic vodka consumption (approximately ¾ of a bottle the size of a large baby) of several friends and people I’d never met before.
The space was impressive – large, impossibly large, flanked by mirrors on all sides, culminating in a dance floor that my fourteen year old self at a school dance would’ve fled from in horror. Tables filled the space that was not dance floor, and bottles of icy vodka graced almost every table.
The waitress spoke one language: drinks. «Drinks? Drinks. More drinks?» Glasses were provided with beer bottles and the vodka glittered in the disco fevered lights.
In the dim light, I watched twenty or so couples, all on the further edge of middle age, dance to frenetic dance music performed by a two man band. Sometimes I could almost pick out the tune, as though they were playing recognizable hits through a polka filter, but other times I’m convinced they were playing the score of the greatest Polish rock opera the world has never known. Whatever they were playing, it was music made for dancing, and that’s what most of the people in attendance did. (I don’t dance, for good reason – but that’s another story for another time.)
One older man, with a mustache like John Waters but none of the charm, made a never ceasing rotation of visits to every table in search of new flesh that he could clumsily grope in the guise of dancing. When he approached our table I made a play at staring into the depths of my beer glass, searching for the meaning of life or perhaps the vision of the face of my future husband in the cloudy brew. All the ladies he danced with, whether geriatric or thirty something, were quite adept at rebuffing his advances, which eased my mind greatly. In fact, the blasé attitude that one older woman had while removing his hands from her nether regions was particularly amusing to me.
Shortly after I arrived, the group dispersed. I’m still not entirely sure it actually happened. Those librarians might have slipped me something. But as far as real experiences or fever dreams go, this one was a keeper.

The crowd on Saturday nights are mostly Polish seniors, dancing to a live synthesized polka band. I can’t tell if the dancing here is organized chaos or it’s just a rhythmic free-​for-​all.
For that reason, this is probably the only place on earth where I feel comfortable dancing in public.
Well-​dressed couples arrive as late as midnight, glowing like the day they were born. I can only dream that I’ll be so lively in my golden years, when I hope to come back here with regularity.
The folks at the bar are friendly enough; a stranger might buy you a drink or just rub your head like you were one of the three stooges.