Author: Julie Bates

With its lion’s head door knocker and elegant front walk, Robyn Waters’ home in Deephaven is a world away from rural Minnesota, where she grew up attending one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. Waters herself has come quite a long way from the little girl who used to tie Lord Hathaway, her tri-color Paint…

It was a Tuesday night. On the lobby wall, two-dimensional children in roller skates and blue jeans frolicked amid neon-green palm trees and smiling dinosaurs. Stars and swirly confetti twists glowed orange, yellow, and red on faded blue carpeting. Above the glass ticket window, a large sign offered these instructions: “Conduct yourself as a lady…

“I never had a business dream,” admitted Dave Kapell, founder of Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc. “I aspired to be a starving artist.” In 1993, he was a thirty-year-old musician struggling to write song lyrics in his living room. He picked up a newspaper. He picked up a pair of scissors. He picked up adhesive, magnetic…

The floor of Ms. LaVie’s School of Loving Arts, inside the Golden Valley Wellness Center, is spread with cheap blankets and plush pillows. Fifteen pajama-clad students sit in this “cuddle puddle” nodding solemnly as Marcia Baczynski explains that dry humping, or “basically pretty much having sex with your clothes on” is not okay here (Rule…