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Every year for the past 32 years, the weekend before the Super Bowl is Concertina Bowl (CB). A couple hundred people pack the Blainbrook Bowl Even Center for 12 hours of non-stop concertina music, KOC bratwurst, and lots and lots of dancing. I went for the first time last year on a bit of a lark, but found the even so damn interesting I went back again this year.

I grew up near the city of Blaine, where CB is held. 20 years ago it was the edge of the suburbs, full of sod fields and pumpkin farms. All that land has now been turned into housing developments and KFCs, and the edge of the suburbs is now more like East Bethel, or Ham Lake (what we used to consider the ‘country’). But the Blainbrook Bowl has always been there. Even with the expansion and widening of Highway 65, which now lumbers just beyond the parking lot behind a wall of concrete, Blainbrook has endured. It’s not fancy. It never was. It was just where you went to hang out at night. After the place closed for the night the mass exodus headed just a mile north on 65 to Perkins. High schoolers and bar closers alike would sit for hours drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and eating Country Club Melts.

I’m sure this nostalgia plays a large part of why I’m so enamored with CB. But the strangeness of it all is what really attracts me. It’s fo alien, so foreign to me. I attend Concertina Bowl without irony or condescension. I am just truly fascinated with it. I’m not a fan of concertina music, although I secretly enjoy the fact that I can’t tell one song from another. I can usually discern the waltzes from the polkas but after that I’m lost. I guess I just really enjoy seeing people who have enough passion to carve out an event for what they love, even if I don’t understand it. I guess it all boils down to what the great Reine Motschke said about his love for the concertina:

“If I have to explain it to you,
you ain’t never gonna get it!”