800,000 people, more or less, will gather in a downtown Cincinnati this weekend, drink beer, do The Chicken Dance, listen to polka, and in general celebrate the German heritage of the city.
I will not be attending. (I have bad memories of Cincinnati Oktoberfest, and the Chicken Dance. Don't ask.)
This is Tim's America video Germans CAN'T EXPLAIN Why 800,000 Americans Throw An OKTOBERFEST In Cincinnati
The visitor from Munich, can't explain the chicken dance because it was never [music] German in the first place. It's a Swiss tune given words by a Belgian named in Oklahoma and made enormous in Ohio.
The video is 20 minutes long.
I guess my question would be why is Oktoberfest in September? I can't imagine October in Cincinnati would be snowed out. Maybe that's because of living in a place where water almost never appears as a solid.
ReplyDeleteAnd I never associated the Chicken Dance with anything other than the old Pinky and the Brain cartoons. But that quote, "The visitor from Munich, can't explain the chicken dance because it was never [music] German in the first place. It's a Swiss tune given words by a Belgian named in Oklahoma and made enormous in Ohio." sounds about as American as it gets.
Oktoberfest is in September in Cincinnati, because that is when it is held in Munich. I think it started in October (100 years ago or so) and got moved forward because of weather.
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