“When you're on a construction site in -35 C, you don't have time to pee the ‘ladylike’ way,” she says, setting down her mason jar of beer. “The She-wee is the only way to go.”

And that is the gist of my first conversation in the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne, Alberta. The middle-aged patrons in Levi's that pack this place look like the kind of folks you'd see in any small-town Alberta bar. But something about the elk heads on trucker caps, the sign with two randy pigs under the caption “Makin' Bacon,” and the giant jar of kielbasa floating in an ambiguous brine make it clear that this is not your typical watering hole.

The woman's name is Sherry. My friend Aviva and I have known her for about three minutes. Mid-40s from Red Deer. Worked on a construction site. Hence the She-wee: a plastic funnel that allows women to urinate while standing.

As I start telling Sherry how I've always wanted to write my name in the snow, the music begins. The band is Sweet Potato: honky-tonk rock and roll that pulls you out of your seat and makes you shake your boots.

Suddenly, a group of women crowned with white doilies float into the bar. Some are shrouded in long white gauze – mosquito nets standing in for wedding veils. They all start to bust a move.

Three ladies in their late 60s are getting way down, gyrating their hips and fist-pumping, veils in hand. Soon they are joined by a man in a ruffled tuxedo and a woman in a shiny seafoam dress, complete with matching eyeshadow and a corsage.

Sherry's friend pulls out a pack of rolling papers. “Ladies. Tune-up in the parking lot?”

It turns out that what we happen to be participating in is a surprise party for a couple that met at the saloon exactly one year ago. And now they are getting hitched in a month. Some had been in on the surprise. Some, like the sixty-somethings, had heard about it two hours before and rushed to Drumheller to buy mosquito nets and tinfoil. That's just how it goes at the Last Chance Saloon.

By the end of the night, after downing several mysterious shots, Aviva and I have doilies in our hair and know most everyone else in the bar. And they all say the same thing: “There is just something about Wayne.”

The groom, Dave Neufeld, is the drummer in the band. When he first laid eyes on Angela across the bar, he knew.

“She had an incredible laugh,” Dave says. “We were up playing and I was looking at her smile through the crowd. And next thing you know, after the gig they were outside on the tailgate of a truck and her friend Rayanne invited us for a drink. Later they invited us back to the campfire, and by that point I was sitting on Angela's lap and drinking Jägermeister out of the bottle. It was quite the vivid picture — she's five foot 10 and I'm five foot two.”

PICKLED EGGS AND GRILLED STEAKS

The funny thing is, Angela had never even heard of Wayne before that day. Friends dragged her out of her warm bed in Edmonton one Saturday morning to party it up at the Last Chance Saloon. Her friends had been eating pickled eggs and grilling their own steaks behind the bar that same September weekend for the past eight years.

They were the core Edmonton contingent at Waynefest, an intimate music festival that ran from 2002 to 2007 and featured the likes of Corb Lund, Carolyn Mark and Kris Demeanor. When the festival stopped, Angela's friends just kept coming.

Wayne, located 14 km east of Drumheller, is a Badlands community of 27 people that was once a booming coal-mining town. The Rosedeer Hotel and its adjoining saloon were set up by the coal mine, which shut down during the Depression. Even in daytime, the place has something otherwordly about it. You feel it the moment you cross the first of the 11 narrow bridges that lead to the ghost town. You feel it in the eerie shadows of the prehistoric hoodoos that surround you. If the moon was hospitable to sagebrush and rattlesnakes, it would look like the Badlands.

“Last chance saloons” popped up in the 19th century U.S., when county governments started prohibiting alcohol consumption. The saloons were the last spot you could sneak a drink before you headed into a dry county. Wayne's Last Chance, with its Sergio Leone-style facade, has the added legend of being the last spot you could get a beer for a day on horseback.

Fred Dayman's family bought the bar in 1948. When his dad passed away in 1963 at the age of 51, his mom took the reins. Dien Dayman ran the hotel while raising six kids. She also changed the face of partying in Alberta.

In the 1970s, you could shake it at the Legion or the Elk's Club, but dancing in a bar was illegal. At a liquor board meeting, Fred recounts, Dien pulled the director aside. “And with her wisdom she told him, ‘Wouldn't it be better if people could just walk over to my hotel in my little town rather than driving the eight miles?’ That was before drinking and driving was a real big taboo. The guy said, 'Lady, you got a point.'”

And within two weeks there was dancing in the bars in Alberta. “So, she is solely responsible, pretty much, for bringing in dancing in the bars,” Fred continues. “It was a really big thing to have that. Nowadays people dance their heads off and never think about it.”

Fred is a strapping guy with a dark moustache and a gentle smile. He and his wife Alisa have been running the place for the past 20 years. When Aviva and I arrive at the bar after 8 p.m., we are starving. We ask Fred if the kitchen is still open, and he apologetically shrugs. “Maybe in a couple hours, but it's pretty busy right now. Have a homemade meat pie.”

We dig into the juiciest, tenderest pie I’ve ever had. Halfway through the night, Fred swaps his plain cotton T-shirt for something a bit more snazzy: a button-up with a flaming sunset and cacti across the chest. He then hops onstage, washboard in hand, to join the band.

BARTENDING: IN HIS FAMILY’S BLOOD

The only thing that explains how unphased Fred is by the bikers (the town is home to the annual Harley Davidson Wayne Rally), tourists from every corner of the globe, and partiers in blue afro wigs, is that he grew up in a hotel once nicknamed the Bucket of Blood. At the Last Chance, wild times are the norm. And Fred has plenty of bizarre stories to attest to that.

In the 1970s, the bartender, Lawrence Wilson, was alone in the saloon. Three rowdy customers refused to pay for their beers. Lawrence calmly reached under the bar, pulled out his shotgun and fired three shots just above their heads. You can still see the holes in the wall above the pinball machine. It was also Wilson who used to bring Tinkerbelle, the Shetland pony, in from the outside corral and let the patrons feed her drinks. “She seemed to enjoy it,” says Fred.

Then there's the ghosts. Some say they're on the third floor. In the 1920s, a Jewish couple honeymooning at the Rosedeer Hotel got lynched. Wayne Immonem, who plays guitar in Sweet Potato, mentions them in a song he wrote called Wayne. “I found it so compelling — the thought of this young couple being killed at the heat of their passions,” he says.

Fred says there are spirits everywhere – and he isn’t just talking about the liquid kind. He thinks one ghost may be his great uncle. “He was an avid pipe-smoker,” Fred says. “Sometimes when nobody else is around you can smell pipe smoke in here. That's the only place I can think it may come from.”

And the stuff. It covers almost every inch of wall: rusted mining picks, old Brownie cameras, signs like “If your wife is driving you to drink, tell her to drive you here.” Yellow-worn news articles. Letters. It can make you nostalgic for an Alberta you never knew existed. Most of it is stuff that Fred has been collecting since his youth, which isn't hard in an abandoned mining town. But his favourite is the Bandbox.

To be precise, it's a very rare Chicago Coin's Band Box Jukebox Orchestra: a small coin-operated red stage with eight miniature musicians who move as if playing when you turn on the music. Bandboxes were only made from 1950 to 1952. Fred's came from the old bus depot in Calgary. “When they tore the depot down, the bandbox was in the basement, all in disrepair.”

His friend, Ted Carter, got hold of it and spent three years fixing it up. “As far as we know there's only two in Canada — one in Toronto, one in Wayne,” says Fred. “Mel Aspen, the former mayor of Toronto, owns one. But this is definitely the only one in a public place in Canada, I can guarantee you that.”

The Bandbox is Kelly Sysak's favourite. She's one of the original Waynefesters and a Last Chance devotee. “It's like Fred and Alisa are the hosts of some really great rec room party,” she says. “Complete with all the kitsch.”

BONES, EGGS AND GHOSTS

I ask Sysak what that funny magic is that makes bikers and farmers and bankers get along and party together at the Last Chance. The ghosts? The dinosaur bones? Some secret ingredient in the pickled eggs?

“You have to be a certain type of person to hear about this place and go, 'It's where? It's what? Oh heck, I'll try that out!’” she says. “It's a person who's adventurous, and who's open to anything, has a love of music and is also really open to meeting people. Because that, to me, is what Wayne is about.”

Of course, she doesn’t definitively know what it is. So she emails her friends, people she's dragged to Wayne and people she's met there along the way. They all reply to her the same day. Patti Sherbaniuk responds:

“I keep going back to Wayne because something always surprises me there — the people I meet (singing Mexican pig farmers, anyone?), and the fact that the locals just shrug when faced with a bunch of out-of-towners in afro wigs or tuxedos or wedding gowns or bad polyester suits, drinking out of plastic pails or bedpans, singing and dancing like idiots (or streaking across the bridge) and having a great time.”

Neufeld, the newlywed, says: “I almost think it evokes this small-town pioneer spirit where people would gather and help each other. Maybe back in the day where we valued community more than we value individuality.”

Wayne Immonen, the Sweet Potato guitarist who wrote a song about Wayne (both himself and the town), says it's because you're literally on a different level when you're here. “You have to go down into the valley to get to it,” he says. “You're vaguely subterranean. And when you go down into the valley, there's shadows. The sunlight in Alberta can be pretty oppressive. There's no grey area. But when you get to a shadowy place like Wayne — well, things are open to interpretation.”

“The difficulty we had with getting people to come to Waynefest,” says Sysak, “was, we would say 'You have to come. We can't explain it to you, there's something about this place. But if you just come and try it once, we guarantee you'll get it.’”