Parish festival.

So, my dad and I went to this parish festival when we were downstate visiting relatives. A few years ago when we were downstate the same one was going on and we were able to hit the Sunday morning polka mass -- all the music from the mass is polka, and the instrumentalists walk down the aisles with the priests holding their clarinets and accordions and whatever, and they're all wearing gaudy silver vestments, including the priests -- but, since we were leaving town Saturday, we were only able to hit the first night of it. We kept buying 50-50 tickets, and I got a huge Polish plate, and my dad kept looking around for people he might know, when he finally ran into some guy he knew who was there with his family.

"How you doing?", he was like, and then I met the guy's wife and his one son, who was in his 40s.

"Hi, I'm Carol," the guy's wife was like, and then she added, "I've always had a crush on [my uncle]."

Later, I asked how they knew my dad, and they said it was through my uncle, who the guy knew growing up, and my uncle was best man at their wedding.

"Look at your dad," the wife said at one point, "He's just like [my uncle] -- his sense of humor, the way he looks, the way he moves his hands."

(Later, when we talked about everyone, my dad was like, "What the piss was up with that woman? ")

Anyhow, after that, we went and sat down and had some beer and listened to the oldies cover band, only like five songs in, we realized it wasn't a cover band, but an actual band 'The Reflections', who had had the 1964 #1 hit song "Just Like Romeo and Juliet", and now going around doing covers and playing local festivals or Oldies Nights at community auditoriums.

Every once in a while, my dad would go take a piss in the portajohns out outside the beer tent, and when coming back, he would do a sweep of the crowd to see if he knew anyone else, only he didn't.

Towards the end of the concert, the 50-50 woman came by again to sell tickets -- they had a 50-50 raffle every hour, and this over-tanned woman in her late 30s with a halter top and a baseball cap over her bleached hair that had the roots showing through and big clunky wooden jewelry was going around selling them -- and me and my dad bought some from her, and so did this gruff young cop who filled them out really intensely and really didn't pay any attention to her. After he filled out the tickets, he got up and left, and the woman was like in her smoky bar voice, "Maybe he was anxious about something, didn't he seem anxious to you?"

"Yeah, he was probably anxious about money," my dad was like, "but he should be anxious about you. I mean, look at your nice earrings, and that shirt you got on, and your hair got a little wet in the rain, but it's still looking mighty nice," and she laughed and was like, "Thanks hon," and squeezed his upper arm before she left.

"You get along really well with tough women, don't you?", I asked my dad after she left.

"She ain't tough," my dad said, picking his teeth. "That's just the look."