MILLERTON, PA — The folding tables stacked outside the Veterans Memorial Pavilion on Tuesday afternoon belonged to two different events, both scheduled for Saturday, both refusing to be the one that moved.
The borough’s inaugural Pride celebration, organized by a six-person committee that began meeting in February at the back booth of Yatsko’s Deli, will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The St. Stanislaus Polka Mass and Covered-Dish, now in its 41st year, runs 10:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. and has, according to its program, included a kielbasa raffle since 1987 and is not prepared to stop including one now.
“We looked at moving to the firehouse, but the firehouse has the gun show,” said Renee Talarico, who chairs the Pride committee and teaches eighth-grade earth science at the consolidated middle school. “We looked at the Legion, but the Legion has a wedding. The pavilion is what’s left in June in Millerton, and the pavilion is what we have.”
Mrs. Helena Kowalchuk, 78, who has coordinated the Polka Mass since the Reagan administration and signs every email “Sincerely Yours In Christ, H. Kowalchuk,” said her people would be using the east half of the pavilion as they have always done, and the west half was, quote, none of her concern. Asked directly whether she had a problem with the Pride event, Mrs. Kowalchuk said she had a problem with the accordion player’s nephew, who is unreliable, and that one problem at a time was already plenty.
The two events will share a single 30-amp electrical outlet, an arrangement Borough Maintenance Supervisor Doug Pfeiffer described Tuesday as “the part I’m worried about, frankly, more than anything else anyone is worried about.” Pfeiffer noted that the Polka Mass sound system pulls hard during the recessional and that the Pride DJ has requested a fog machine, which Pfeiffer said he would be pretending he did not see.
A printed schedule taped inside the pavilion’s bulletin board shows the kielbasa raffle drawing at 12:45 p.m., approximately eleven minutes after the Pride committee’s scheduled performance by a drag artist from Wilkes-Barre who goes by Miss Anthracite. Talarico said the timing was not deliberate but was, on reflection, perhaps providential.
Township Supervisor Brent Zelinsky, reached at the lumberyard where he keeps daytime hours, declined to characterize the arrangement as either a conflict or a celebration of pluralism, calling it instead “a Saturday” and adding that the borough had not received a single formal complaint, which he attributed less to civic harmony than to the fact that the people most likely to complain were on both committees and had run out of time.
Pastor Kevin Drabik of St. Stanislaus, who will celebrate the Polka Mass, said he had reviewed the situation in prayer and concluded that the Lord, having survived 41 years of accordion arrangements of the Sanctus, could probably manage a rainbow flag at thirty feet. Pastor Drabik then asked whether the reporter had ever tried Mrs. Kowalchuk’s haluski, and, upon learning he had not, declined further comment until that was rectified.
Nick Yatsko, whose deli has hosted the Pride committee’s planning meetings and also caters the covered-dish, said he had been asked by both groups not to mention the other to the other, an instruction he had honored for four months and was, as of Tuesday, prepared to honor for three more days.
Rain is forecast for Saturday morning, which Pfeiffer said would solve approximately sixty percent of his remaining concerns and create the rest of them.