But then again, America is full of ethnic subversion, an ongoing tour de force of people mixing and matching, hiding and denouncing, publicly pronouncing, more often reveling in their ethnic origins. Not surprisingly, Queens, New York is an urban anthropologist's nirvana, a combination of Noah's Ark and Garden of Eden, where it seems that examples of every stripe of teeming immigrant happens to breathe remarkably free in this concentrated urban setting. It is also host to a large, albeit diverse and not so monolithic German-American community, with members hailing from a wide variety of backgrounds, all too numerous to describe here. German-Americans in Queens originate not only from the more obvious regions that comprise contemporary reunified Germany. During my four hour strolling shifts I have encountered patrons from the entire present-day German geographical expanse: from Hamburg to Munich, Schleswig-Holstein to Bavaria, Aachen on the French frontier to Bautzen on the Polish border. Other hints at German ethnicity abounded as well, vestiges linked to that old fading map of pre-1945 Europe. Indeed, I was always surprised to encounter a variety of German ethnics from such far-flung parts of Europe as the Russian Volga (these people known as "Volga Deutsche"), as well as from the Danube colonies of Eastern Europe, such as those that were found in more abundance prior to World War II in  Rumania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia (from whence hail the "Gottscheer Deutsche" stemming from what now compromises the breakaway republic of Slovenia). .

Oktoberfest, 1999, with a little visitor to the restaurant, all dressed up in her traditional Bavarian outfit