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So Jack Black is going to play Polka King Jan Lewan in a new movie. Ever since the news broke in March one question keeps popping up.
Who’s going to play What’s Your Name??
No, I didn’t type gibberish. “What’s your name?” is the pseudo-profound moniker used by fans and — distressingly, as far as I’m concerned — journalists for years when referring to Carl James Joseph, the Christ-a-like who rose to fame after strolling into Hazleton barefoot, bearded and white-robed, preaching his take on the Bible.
Ask his name and his response was “What’s your name?” For some, that ersatz introspective dodge apparently never got old.
He went viral before the term existed. Time Magazine did a piece, ABC’s 20/20 Downtown did a segment (including me as the local skeptic), Hazleton cable guy Sam Lesante hosted Joseph on his talk show repeatedly, and filmmaker Sean Tracey made a documentary called “The Jesus Guy.”
What does the pauper preacher have to do with the polka player-turned Ponzi schemer?
For his final two years, my dad went in and out of hospitals fighting infections, coming home for the last time in January 2000 to die on his own sofa. During one of those hospital stays, I went for a visit and boarded the elevator to be greeted by the glinting grin of Jan’s perpetual smile.
We chatted periodically: When Brave Combo’s “Polkasonic” album won a Grammy, when the House of Representatives voted the polka Pennsylvania’s official state dance, during a visit to his amber-laden gift shop, and when I stopped by during a polka block party he hosted outside that shop.
Lewan was schmaltz incarnate, but it was enjoyable schmaltz. In his Atlantic City shows, he shimmered in sequins and tossed sweaty kerchiefs to a crowd described by one of our reporters as “frenzied seniors who shove and scream in a geriatric recasting of the Beatles’ ‘Help!’”
I bought a Lewan CD just to hear one song, and this is real: “It means she loves me (when she makes pierogies).”
So there I was in an elevator with Lewan, an accordion strapped to his chest. He said he was visiting patients and brightening moods with musical interludes.
Behind him, almost invisible by comparison, was Joseph, white robe blending into the floor. I didn’t ask, but doubtless he was spreading his own kind of comfort to kindred souls.
Consider the juxtaposition: The Polka King fated for prison in a multi-million dollar investment scheme, and the peripatetic preacher famous for convincing people to feed and shelter him while never calling him by name.
It was a tableau fit for the big screen, a character beat to add to the Lewan lore.
There’s Lewan in a car trailing a touring bus full of fellow musicians from communist Poland, staying in a Canadian traffic circle to affect defection. He’s in Rome, introducing fans to the pope. He woos his future wife with “O Solo Mio,” stands behind her during the Mrs. Pennsylvania scandal, and faces divorce after his conviction and prison sentence, hitting a lifetime low when a fellow inmate slits his throat.
Somewhere in there add the elevator trip with a guy who survives on the kindness of strangers by dressing like a version of Christ.
The scene needs no back story, and works best if you forget what happened later. It’s two men who did the same thing in very different ways with strikingly different outcomes: Create a persona that wowed crowds, winning trust that provided a livelihood.
My dad, by comparison, quietly raised nine kids on a modest plumber’s salary.
Even if I wasn’t Jake’s son, I’d know which of those three truly earned such trust.