by John Baldino

As I pulled into the parking lot of the Public Broadcasting Center I smiled, reveling in the fact that I’d finally landed a job in my chosen field of media communications. I was working in television. Although that’s what I had studied in college, I’d spent the past few years putting myself through school by working as a bank manager. Not anymore. I was a real TV professional. Okay, it was PBS, but at least it was TV and it felt good. 

I didn’t matter that I shared a tiny little office with two obnoxious people. It didn’t even matter that my job consisted of shipping Teletubbies and Andre Rieu CDs to ungrateful donors. And I didn’t care that my desk was held together with duct tape and rubber bands. So what if my annual salary barely compared to that of the fry guy at McDonalds! Dammit, I was in TV. I was officially that guy who interrupts your favorite television shows and begs you for money.

I was jolted out of the little go-Johnny party in my head when I noticed the parking lot was full … very full. It was Sunday and, with the exception of a couple engineers, most public television stations are pretty empty on a Sunday afternoon. 

Why are all these cars here? I thought to myself. 

Oh, well. My task was not a major one and surely wouldn’t be affected by whomever had arrived in countless Oldsmobiles and Lincoln Town Cars that now shared the lot with my 1991 Chevy Cavalier. So, I parked my car and headed for the entrance. 

I didn’t work on Sundays. I was going to a show later that evening and had left the tickets in my desk. The plan was to just run in, grab the tickets, and get on with my life. As I opened the front door, I was quickly aware of why there was an ocean of old-man cars in the parking lot. It wasn’t anything I saw; it was what I heard that gave it all away. 

“I don’t want her, you can have her. She’s too fat for me. Hey! She’s too fat for me. Ho! She’s too fat for me!” 

Oh, for the love of crap.

They were shooting The Pennsylvania Polka. It was one of the shows this local station produced. Simply put, it was a large group of over-eighty people—most of Polish and Italian heritage—dancing in front of television cameras to the music of bands with names like Stanky and the Coal Miners. It was something I was unsure I would ever witness in person; yet there it was, only a few feet away, behind the studio door. My morbid curiosity started to get the best of me, like when driving past a car accident or when someone collapses in public. We don’t want to look. We know we might be disturbed by what we see, but we just have to do it anyway.

I inched closer to the door. 

“She’s too fat for me. Hey! She’s too fat for me. Ho!” 

I stopped. I stared at the door, considered what I was about to do, what I was about to see: an ocean of blue hair moving in four-four time to the “Too-Fat Polka.” Yes, that’s a real song.

No.

I turned my gaze away from the door and slowly backed away. 

I’ll go into my office, get the tickets, and quietly leave. No one will ever know I was here. 

---

This room is the very absence of reality. 

---

So, I continued down the hall to the office (using the term very loosely) which I shared with two coworkers. I thought of my colleagues as I opened the door. There was her, the bitter woman who couldn’t hack it as a high school home economics teacher and was destined to live out her days stuttering and stammering on the phone with donors who didn’t get their Big Bird dolls in a timely manner. 

And then there was him—the cardboard cutout, pretty boy. God’s gift to television who only worked there because his brother was a VP at the station. This guy was actually convinced that one day a major network producer might just happen to be traveling through Scranton, Pennsylvania, see him hawking autographed 8x10s of John Tesh on a PBS station, and whisk him away to Hollywood to host the latest new game show. 

This room is the very absence of reality. 

Now, this office of delusional and broken dreams shared a wall with the studio. And, this being public television and all, soundproofing was not exactly the top line item in the budget. Needless to say, I found myself opening and closing my desk drawers in perfect musical rhythm with Stanky and the Coal Miners’ rendition of “The Parts of the Body Polka.”

“Hair, ears, eyes, and nose. That is how this polka goes.”

I actually didn’t even realize I was doing it until the music abruptly stopped. 

That’s odd, I thought. Oh well, Stanky must have needed a breather … I wonder if that’s his real name. 

The next thing I heard was probably the last thing I ever expected to hear at a television station on a Sunday afternoon. 

“Dancer down.”

It was the voice of Jim, the production manager—loud, yet matter-of-fact. “Dancer Down!” 

Did I hear him right? 

“Dancer down. Dancer down!” 

I’d heard him right.

Well, it can’t be anything serious. 

“Call 911!” 

On the other hand … 

“Dancer down! Call 911!” 

Holy shit. 

The way I saw it at this point, I had two options. I could A.) Stay in my office, very quietly behind the closed door, wait for whatever was going on to stop and then get the hell out of there, or B.) succumb to my morbid curiosity, go into the studio and see what the hell was going on and if I can help. I chose the latter. I sprung up from my desk, walked briskly down the hall and headed for the studio. I opened the door and saw what looked kind of like the Valentine’s Day dance at Shady Acres gone awry. There were a few people sitting on folding chairs, the band had stepped off the stage, and there was a large group of people gathered across the room. 

I hurried to the large group, navigated my way to the front, and saw it … her, actually—a 80-something-year-old woman in a pink pleated skirt lying flat on her back on the concrete floor. Yes. She was tacky, she was recumbent, and she was out like Whitney Houston in a bathtub. Too soon? Anyway, it looked a little like a geriatric frat party. I scanned the room for a beer bong. Didn’t see one. 

Now, kneeling over this woman was a young man. And by “young,” I mean 70-something. He was visibly nervous and unsure of what the hell to do. I looked at him and asked, “Does she have a pulse?”

Please say yes. Please say yes. Please say yes. 

“Do you know CPR?” He replied in audible desperation. 

What did I ask? 

My reply was definitive, certain and sure: “Uh…” He looked at me. I looked him. He seemed to be willing me to know what to do. It’s interesting to observe that in a crisis situation, there are usually two kinds of people: those who run around in circles, screaming for dear life and those who are able to keep a calm head and think logically. I came to regret being the latter. The former tend to desperately seek a leader. They don’t care how qualified that person may be, they simply need someone to take charge and make decisions, someone to tell them how big a circle they should run in and how loudly to scream. 

Now, I’m not sure if it was my youth, the fact that I’d asked that simple question, or what, but it appeared that, like it or not, I was about to become the leader these people so desperately sought. 

Shit. 

My next few actions were quick and take-charge. I had no clue what I was doing, but I was faking it, and they were buying it. In reality, I was scared shitless. 

Scared shitless. What does that really mean? Do I now have a week of constipation to look forward to?

Stop it! Back to the matter at hand. 

Grey-hair-70-ish-man was still staring at me. I looked at the woman standing behind him. “You,” I ordered her, “go into the hall and call 911, tell them what’s happened. Answer all their questions and don’t hang up until they do.” It was 1998. No one had a cell phone.  

Now, I had learned CPR in eighth grade. I’d been recertified annually ever since, but I never actually had to use it. Would it come back to me? 

Eh, it’s like riding a bike. Just try not to fall off and skin your knees. What? 

I crouched down, opened the woman’s airway and checked for breathing. 
Please be breathing. Please be breathing. 

She wasn’t breathing. 

Damn. 

I puffed a breath into her, and she inflated like a balloon. Then I felt the woman’s neck for a pulse, since no one had yet answered the one simple question that got me into this situation in the first place. 

Please have a pulse. Please have a pulse. 

She didn’t have a pulse. 

Damn! 

I looked up at 70-ish-guy, “Do you know how to give chest compressions?” He may have nodded, he may have said yes, he may have screamed and pissed himself. I’m not sure. I took his hands, showed him what to do, and we were at it. I counted with him “One and two and three and four and five.” I puffed a breath. CPR was different back then.

“One and two and three and four and five.” This went on for a while. Production manager Jim returned from wherever he had gone and took the woman’s hand. He held and patted it gently as if to console her. During my partner’s compressions, I looked up to survey the scene. There was Jim, fixing his ponytail while still holding this woman’s hand. I felt as though we were moments from singing “Kum Bai Ah.”

There was a lot of blue hair, the band in their red and white striped costumes. The trombone player was still holding his instrument. 

I wonder if that’s Stanky or one of the coal miners. 

I never fully understood the definition of surreal until that moment. There I was kneeling on the floor of a television studio, staring at a man in red and white striped pants with a trombone in his hand while I tried to breathe life into a 200-year-old Polish woman named… 

“Olga!”

What? 

“Her name is Olga!” 

Are you frickin’ kidding me with this? 

“Here’s her driver’s license.” It was the woman I’d sent away to call 911. She was rifling through the woman’s purse and handing me Olga’s driver’s license. 

What the hell am I going to do with her driver’s license? 

“Just hang onto it until the paramedics get here. One and two and three and four and five.” I puffed a breath. 

“Oh yeah, that. Uh, where are we?” Driver’s-license lady again.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Where are we? The paramedics can’t find us. They said they’ve never heard of our address. They don’t know where we are.”

“We’re the only God-damned television station in Pittston! How friggin’ hard can it be?!” Production Manager Jim stood up and announced that he’d call them back and give them directions. 

“You know, Jim,” I said as he was getting up, “this is not in my job description.” He either didn’t hear me or didn’t see the humor in my comment. You see, Jokes are what I do. Humor keeps me sane in strange situations. And this was certainly a strange situation … not to mention the PR story of the century. Assuming she lived, I mean. A dead dancer in your studio is bad press. 

It took the paramedics thirty minutes to arrive. When they finally did, three men stormed into the studio and pushed 70-ish man away. I backed up, but they told me to keep giving her breaths. 

Isn’t that what they’re here for now? 

One guy cut off Olga’s shirt. Oy. Another guy pulled out those paddles you see on TV medical dramas. He pressed them to her chest, looked at me and asked, “clear?” Now, I had seen this done countless times on TV and in movies. Someone always yells, “clear!” and then zaps the patient. But I really had no idea why they yelled that or what it actually meant. 

So, I responded. “Clear! … I guess.”

ZAP! Olga shot two feet in the air and came crashing back down onto the concrete floor. After a few more zaps and a couple of injections and stuff, the paramedics loaded Olga onto a stretcher and hauled her off in the ambulance. As the sirens grew fainter in the distance, I just sat there on the floor as others swept up the syringes and varied hazardous waste that surrounded me. I looked up and noticed everyone staring at me. That’s when I realized that no one there had any idea who the hell I was. I had met Jim earlier that week, but he had wandered off again. So, I introduced myself to the staff. “Oh, hi. I’m the new guy here … just started on Monday. I usually don’t do this sort of thing.” We exchanged a few pleasantries, and I exited the studio. 

Minutes later I was seated at my desk … sweating, shaking, trying to catch my breath and put together in my head what had just happened. I was just beginning to calm down when I heard it coming through the wall. 

“Roll out the barrel; we’ll have a barrel of fun! Roll out the barrel …” They actually kept taping the show. Those blue-hairs will stop at nothing.

I saw the episode of The Pennsylvania Polka on TV weeks later. In one shot, I saw Olga dancing her little pink pleated heart out—literally. In the next shot, she was gone. I take some comfort in the fact that she died happy, doing something she clearly loved, but I’ve never watched the show again.

I’ve had polka issues ever since.