You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!

That’s the only possible explanation we could think of to explain our Wisconsin weekend at the Ziegler Kettle Moraine Jazz Festival.  Either that or we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.

So, we get off the plane, pick up our luggage, and head to the car rental counters.  The woman behind the counter is friendly and efficient.  Okay, that’s pretty normal.  After all, it’s all about customer service, and we are customers.  It doesn’t stop there.  The people in the lot are also being very nice and polite to us.  They’re courteous and more than willing to give a couple of east coast denizens some driving directions.

We arrive at the hotel and the front desk people are just wonderful!  Everything you’d want and expect hotel staff to be – also, primo customer service.

As we head out to the festival venue in West Bend (with the help of the directions printed out by the hotel’s front desk personnel), we hit the beginning of Milwaukee’s “rush hour.”  Rush hour?  Are you kidding?  Where is the road rage?  Where are the cars cutting you off to make their exit?  Where is the loud and annoying music coming from the car next to you?  Where are the obscene hand gestures?  And, more importantly, where are the cars?  For those of us in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, we know all too well that Friday evening “rush hour” begins on Thursday afternoon. So this was quite the refreshing change.

But the strangest part of all is just how darned nice the people of Wisconsin are.  It must be a Midwest thing because we’re just not that nice on the east coast.  There must be something in the Atlantic Ocean that causes perfectly normal people to revert to actions that are less than stellar, sometimes embarrassing, and borderline criminal if caught.  We’re hard-core east coasters (by way of New Jersey, NYC and Baltimore) and we’ve seen our share of people guilty of some questionable behavior.  Of course, we would never do anything like that.  (As current DC area residents, we follow a grand tradition in denying any involvement of inappropriate behavior on our parts.)

The people we met at the venue, from the staff down to the festival participants were so friendly.  Since this was a general admission venue, we were worried when we left our seats.  They told us not to worry, that no one would take them.  And they didn’t.  People talked, laughed, and socialized with one another.  It didn’t matter that we were strangers.  The music was our common bond and we shared our interests all weekend.  It was wonderful. 

Ah, Wisconsin… where the only hand gesture we saw all weekend involving the middle finger was either a wave or a handshake; where the people were all sunshine and lollipops instead of salt and vinegar; where folks do not growl at one another or curse a blue streak if something is wrong, where people were laid back and not frantic and stressed out all of the time; where strangers on the street were willing to give us their cell phone numbers in case we got lost again on the way back to the airport.  This was Wonderland.  This was the Twilight Zone.  It didn’t take long for all of this niceness to start rubbing off on us.  Before we knew it, we were paying it forward, being nice to everyone around us.  Who knew we could be this nice?   We actually enjoyed being friendly and civil.  It didn’t feel weird at all.  It felt so natural.  We didn’t want to leave our newly discovered Wonderland, but alas, the festival ended, and we had to return home.

It didn’t take long for reality to set in again.  We could feel the weight on our shoulders settling in as soon as we deplaned at Reagan National.  We’ll be growling and giving the finger in no time.  (Note to self: install battering ram attachment on car.)  Wisconsin was fun while it lasted.  Oh well!  Back to the %@$&%$@& real world!

- Mary Bentley