I went to my first ever Oktoberfest this weekend.  I was dragged there kicking and screaming.  I was sure I wouldn’t like it.  I knew I wouldn’t like it.  We waited in the car for a while before we could get parked.  That’s always fun.  It was a long walk up to the event grounds.  Everything was going exactly as I had planned it.  It was sucking and I hadn’t even gotten in yet.  I could tell right off that these were not my people.  I’m a country boy.  I have been all my life.  These folks were city dwellers.  I could tell this by how so many of the men wore shorts.  My people don’t wear shorts in public.   We finally got in the gates and after my wife showed me where she would be performing later that evening I was free to wander about for a bit.  My first stop was a beer stand.   I had a pitcher of local beer that was really tasty and stout.  Things started to make much more sense to me after every swig.  Oktoberfest started to look like fun. 

     I wandered into a tent where dances were being performed.  Normally I would not have been very interested in dancing unless I’m cutting a rug myself which is usually after some pretty  hard drinking, but the beer put me in the mood to watch a little.  The dancers where  doing a hybrid form of dance which I have named tap-cheer dancing.  They very much looked like cheer leaders but were doing tap dancing.  The beer let me understand this odd form of Octoberfest revelry.  Without the beer I couldn’t have taken much more than thirty consecutive seconds of this tap cheering stuff, but with the beer I was really getting into it.  The tap cheerleaders did a version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  It was incredible.  The beer and I were thrilled.  The tap cheerleader’s Thriller had a lot of kicking and tapping and big toothed smiling.  No one grabbed thier crotch.  There was an attemp at a moon-walk.  It was Thiller River Dance style.  I’m afraid of what this may have looked like without the beer.  Thank god for the beer.

       After being thrilled by the tap cheerleaders me and my son walked over to the carnival rides.  My son rode a swinging boat while I stood and watched.  The ride didn’t look terribly exciting.  My son didn’t look terribly excited riding it.  It’s too bad he’s not old enough to drink a picture of beer.  That would have been the greatest ride of his life if he had been old enough to bring the beer with him on the ride.  I saw some older gents on the ride with him.  They had had beer.  They were really liking the swinging boat.  They had their hands in the air as if they were on an enormous roller coaster and were fixing to plunge off the highest peak instead of gently rocking back and forth.  I stood and watched as my son almost fell asleep rocking back and forth.  By the time the ride was finished it was time to go to the main tent and watch  his mother, my wife, dance her dance.  A thunderstorm had popped up by this time so when my wife finished her dance we high-tailed it out of there.  She drove.  I get German culture now.  It really doesn’t matter how bad what you’re watching is, good beer will make it better.   A  lot better.  I get it.  Give me a pitcher of beer and I’ll watch men in skirts walk around and slap their legs and think it’s the best damn thing I’ve ever seen.  I’ll need some strudel as well.  Cheers.