The Rake Magazine

Year: 2002

  • The Accidental Terrorist

    On the one-year anniversary, security checkpoints at Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport’s Lindbergh terminal looked-well staffed and efficient. Most ticket holders moved through with only a whiff of delay, even young men dressed entirely in black. And if a profiling pattern emerged at all, security staff appeared to select elderly white men for closer inspection at about double the rate of other demographics. They were ushered to the side where adjacent stations were installed to allow passenger flow to continue. Green-gloved screeners with metal-detector wands drew outlines around the men, requested unbuckling of belts and shoe removal and maintained a calming stream of barbershop patter. Surviving this trial, the old men shuffled in socks to a chair, recovered their shoes, and headed to the concourse, in no discernable way bent on jihad.

    The nascent Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has taken pains to alert the flying public to new rules about what you can’t take with you on a plane. But in a state where folks take only ten weeks to forget how to drive on snow, the security process still produces a reliable stream of dangerous items orphaned at the checkpoints by people who head for the airport with corkscrews, scissors, lighter fluid, mace, lock-blade knives, and daggers. Believe it or not, one year after the main event, nice Minnesotans still occasionally show up with box cutters. All of the above were harvested in about three hours at a single checkpoint the other day. Asked to name the strangest thing he’s come across, Northwest employee Ken Lahti’s memory was fresh. “This morning I found a quart of acetone.”

    The bulk of these items are surrendered voluntarily, says Acting Deputy Director for the TSA’s local field office, Becky Roering, a polished 30-something from Melrose, Minnesota who learned her chops as an air marshal. “Two months ago we put amnesty bins in front of the checkpoints for passengers to get rid of these prohibited items and save themselves some time in the screening process. We’re going to find it anyway, and here’s a chance to get rid of it before you get to the area,” said Roering. Other accommodations recently offered to passengers include a mail station at Traveler’s Assistance where you can mail your Swiss Army knife back home instead of tossing it.

    The bins are well marked to avoid being mistaken for trash cans, but the compression of decision-making in this situation has yielded an odd slice of traveling life: Sandwiches, salt and pepper shakers, sewing kits, and marijuana have all found their way into the bins. Mace and pepper spray are common. One security staffer who declined to be named also declined to name the specific items in a collection of “sex toys” that had been discovered in the bins recently. Nor could he guess exactly how they might have been used to threaten the security of a flight.

    Most of these orphans are the product of idiocy, not evil. Many end up here precisely because their owners are not in the habit of leaving home without them. Keepsakes or keychains tossed by habit into a briefcase can undergo a surprising transformation when they are brought near an airplane, where a humble pen-knife can receive a field promotion to a Legitimate Threat To The Free World. Marc Mannes, a research director for a local non-profit, lost his Swiss Army knife in just this way last year, not long after it was proved that you could take on the world’s only superpower with $20 worth of utility knives. “I just had it in my pocket with my change,” said Mannes. He wonders to this day if his confiscated treasure has found a new home.

    It has not. Checkpoint jetsam is inventoried, but not saved. Northwest Airlines runs an incinerator on site, said Roering. “It’s all dumped in there and melted down.”

  • Lucy Jago

    The Vikings thought the northern lights were the unearthly spirits of Valkyries pointing the way to the warrior’s afterlife in Valhalla. Eskimos thought they were evil spirits who decapitated the heads of children for sport. A former BBC documentarian tells a true story no less strange and tragic in The Northern Lights . Turn of the century Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland was obsessed with unlocking the mystery of what causes the aurora borealis, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that it was the interaction of solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field. It was a gifted deduction, but after that his career was guided by an unlucky star. Other scientists refused to accept his unorthodox theories, forcing him to scrounge for money as an inventor. Despite some spectacular successes, that backfired when his business partner attempted to cheat him out of his profits, and even scuttled Birkeland’s Nobel Prize nomination out of jealousy. Meanwhile, Birkeland became so fixated on scientific pursuits that he absentmindedly double-booked his own wedding, and began to spiral into drug abuse. Strung out and paranoid, he died alone in a Japanese hotel room, armed with a pistol to protect himself from the British spies he thought were out to steal his ideas. (A fear that may not have been entirely unfounded.) As is so often the case, his ideas were accepted only years later, long after it was too late to halt his downward spiral. Jago’s clear prose, quoting extensively from the letters of Birkeland and contemporaries, is a worthy attempt at posthumous vindication. It’s also a compelling portrait of an archetypal unheralded genius, destroyed by forces both external and internal. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

  • Citizen Kane

    The persistent claim that it’s the “Greatest Movie Ever” leaves us a little cold—it seems a little too easy to put this at the top of the list, a safe choice nobody can really argue with. And the Rosebud mystery that bookends the drama seems more heavyhanded and gimmicky every time we watch it. Those quibbles aside, Orson Welles’ film debut is a true milestone, with fine acting and writing, direction and cinematography that from a technical standpoint were light-years ahead of their time. The most impressive achievement is that it was made at all, given that the motivating force was Welles’ ferocious loathing of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It was no mean feat to get away with such a stealthy character assassination, deserved or not, on one of the most powerful multimillionaires of the time. And of course Welles didn’t escape unscathed—Hearst’s counterattacks poisoned the rest of his career. But even if he’d never made anything else, Kane assured his place in cinema Valhalla. This new three-disc special edition has all the behind-the-scenes story you could want: It is essentially last year’s two-disc set that included the terrific documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane plus HBO’s RKO 281 , a dramatic retelling of the same events featuring a perfectly cast Liev Schreiber as Welles.

  • Five Thousand Wings a Day

    When the wind is right, a battalion of vents pushing through the roof of 3753 Nicollet Avenue pump a fried, spicy scent into the sky that can reach you as far away as Stevens and 38th. There are throngs of eaters who are cultishly devoted to the soul-food of Shorty and Wag’s Wings and Ribs. They come from as far away as Stillwater, Faribault, and north Minneapolis. For 23 years, this take-out stand has been getting people four-cornered on the cheap. On a recent afternoon, The Rake met the master of the joint. Not the famed Art Song, under whose name the establishment first opened in 1978, and not Wag, who left about five years ago. It was Harold Preevish, a.k.a. Shorty, the only constant in a series of partnerships at this location for more than two decades.

    A full-time staffer named Carrie led me through a Wonka-like stainless steel maze of kitchens, coolers, and food-processing machines. There stood Shorty and his fry-cook. They had been forcibly relocated to the most remote of his kitchens when city workers broke the gas line serving his main operation. With a long pole, he worked a massive pot of greens in smoked-turkey broth. The short and soft-spoken chef took the accident in stride. Luckily, his redundant kitchen is served by a different gas line, so half of his dozen deep fryers kept the wings moving to the front.

    At 2 p.m., he unloaded 60 pounds of ribs from his vintage electric smoker. They had slowly roasted since 6 that morning. The smoker, which has lasted longer than most marriages, is fed with hickory sawdust. Shorty proudly described how he repairs and maintains it himself. Another machine he demonstrated looked like a stainless-steel raffle-ticket barrel; a motorized crank tumbled dozens of wings in batter and spices. A salted bucket then received the wings for delivery to the fryer.

    In a reversal of its decline as a functional part of living chickens, the wing has here undergone a dramatic evolution in the after-life. It dominates over menu habitat once shared with Art Song’s egg rolls and the legendary Siamese hot dog (a hot dog slit length-wise to accept a strip of cheese, wrapped in a wonton skin, deep-fried and covered with spices). Like Art Song and Wag, egg rolls and Siamese hot dogs have left the partnership, but chicken wings thrive.

    On a wall-mounted calculator, Shorty figured how many wings he serves in a two-day production cycle. “Forty-three cases, 240 wings a case. Let’s see… that’s 10,320 wings.” He seemed dumbstruck by the number, and did the math again. It was true.

    The retail end, a window-walled store front in the southwest corner of the building, has changed nothing but the prices since this writer first stepped through the door 13 years ago. Cravings and budgets still reach their compromise during long staring matches with the light-up menu. There is fried okra, greens, hush puppies, black-eyed peas, and other sides to the wings-and-ribs staples. Chit-chat is sparse to none among the counter crowd gathered over the boomerang-patterned Formica.

    A customer named Jenny, packing off with a carton of wings, had come some distance. She professed her taste for Shorty’s hushpuppies, which I had never tried. She promptly produced a bag from her take-out carton, and offered one. It was smooth, light, hot, and deep-fried. “I’m eating them on the way home in the car,” she said. I could understand why.

  • Home on the Range

    We are flat-landers in fly-over country. There is nothing spectacular about the geography of Minnesota. Sure, we have our granite-rimmed lakes and our occasional tracts of pine, aspen, birch, and oak. We even have the relatively inspiring North Shore, Taylors Falls, the bluff country of Winona, and Cabella’s. But there is nothing here that compares to the grandeur of, say, the Rocky Mountains or the Maine coast. Instead, the geography of Minnesota is a thing of subtlety, its beauties not particularly lavish. Big Blue Stem and Norway Pine? Let’s not kid ourselves. Our natural attractions are as understated as we are.

    If you need to be reminded, consider the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s staggering American landscape show, currently in progress. Aside from the remarkable fact that “American Sublime” came to our humble burg at all, we note that Minnesota was never a huge inspiration to the likes of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, or Frederic Church. Which serves to remind us that we often cling to the slimmest references to ourselves in American arts and letters. A Thomas Moran painting in this show depicts “Hiawatha,” one of our more durable local myths (a myth which, incidentally, has no grounding in reality or history). At least Moran traveled to Minnesota in 1861, researching his painting on the shores of Lake Superior. The poet who inspired him, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, couldn’t be bothered to set foot anywhere near here. (In composing “The Song of Hiawatha,” he was provoked by photos and descriptions of Minnehaha Falls.) No wonder we suffer from low self-esteem.

    This perennial inferiority complex fits so well that we barely notice it anymore. If people start to look like their pets, then why shouldn’t they start to take on some of the qualities of their natural environment? In these parts, there are notable similarities between the people and the plains, a notion that dates back at least as far as Ole Rolvaag. We are not a loud and gregarious mountain people, nor are we mysterious and complex like desert dwellers. We are not expansive and dramatic like people who live near the ocean. Essentially, we are farmers and freshwater fishermen—in spirit, at least—and those with other pretensions move to New York or L.A., where they are praised for their work ethic and mocked for their hard R’s.

    Those of us who remain, of course, are modest and stoic, and we like our natural surroundings that way too. Autumn is as spectacular as it gets around here. That’s pretty spectacular, to be sure, but it’s fleeting. The landscape artists of the 19th century might have been inspired by our favorite season, but they were frightened off by the inevitable intimidations and depredations of winter. No, if we want to believe that the clouds have parted and the hand of God has lighted permanently on our fair state, we’ll have to look for more mundane evidence, like the arrival of West Nile and the immutability of KQRS Classic Rock. God is in the details, right? Or is it the Devil?

  • The Puppet Master at Rest

    He is responsible for getting Paul and Jesse elected. Minnesota’s premier political ad consultant is the very best in the business. So why’s Bill Hillsman sitting this one out?

    Photos by John Noltner

    If American politics were the fount of democratic possibility it’s made out to be, Bill Hillsman would be a very rich man for one simple reason. In the fortysome-year history of media-driven political campaigns, there has been no one else remotely like him, no one who possessed his particular combination of razor-sharp ad skills, an impeccable feel for the spirit of the moment, and a gift for making people talk about his candidate. The media critic at the online mag Slate, Scott Shuger, called Hillsman “the greatest political adman who ever lived,” and by whatever yardstick you choose—the sheer inventiveness of his work, or its overwhelming role in electing not one but two populist longshots to prominent office—there is really no contesting the proposition.

    With Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Jesse Ventura in 1998, Hillsman proved it was possible for outsiders to crash the party on a shoestring budget. He did it with ads that were funny and engaging and, most important, plainspoken. Hillsman’s spots, from “Looking for Rudy” to “Jesse the Thinker,” threw away the insular, sloganeering language of conventional political advertising; they made jokes instead, elegant little 30-second jibes that tapped workaday outrage over the tyranny of politics as usual. There’s just one problem with Hillsman’s professional prospects: The national political parties want nothing to do with him. “No,” Hillsman agrees ruefully, “we don’t get asked to play very much. The pollsters are against us because I’ve knocked polling. None of the established consultants have anything good to say about us, for obvious reasons. And the Democratic party…” Hillsman trails off without finishing the thought: The Democratic party machine doesn’t want to deal with any media guy whose specialty is getting the unanointed, insurgent candidate elected. At the end of the day, both major parties would rather lose with the known quantity than win with the unknown. The Rake sat down with Hillsman recently, to get his views on this fall’s races and to talk shop about the art and science of the modern political campaign.

    The Rake: Do you agree with the argument Kevin Phillips and others have made recently—that scandals involving wealth and power and politics have reached a critical mass and there’s a sea change in public attitudes taking shape?

    Hillsman: I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think I do. One thing that’s happened now because of corporate malfeasance is that a lot of people are hit where it hurts the most. Normally you would expect politicians to react fairly quickly when that happens, especially in an election year. Which is why you saw that legislation passed so quickly. But was the legislation meaningful? It was mainly window dressing. And maybe I’ve just been doing this job for too long, but I think by and large people will buy the window dressing until the next crisis comes.

    The Rake: You made your mark in political advertising with Wellstone in 1990. What did you sense about the public mood that made you believe that style of political advertising would work?

    Hillsman: It wasn’t so much what we sensed in the public mood. It was more a matter of trying out some theories developed for commercial advertising in the political arena. Paul really had nothing to lose, and he didn’t really know he was being used to try out theories.

    The old theory of political advertising, which still holds in Washington even these 12 years later, is that media is nothing more than a commodity—and if you layer it on thick enough, you can convince the public of basically anything. That’s how you wind up with Al Checchi spending $40 million in California, [Jon] Corzine in New Jersey spending $60 million, and Mark Dayton spending $12-14 million in Minnesota, which is equivalent to spending about $60 million in Jersey.

    It’s a benighted notion about how you win elections. But Paul’s bought into it in the last two elections—the notion that you have to fight fire with fire and keep pouring on the media so people can’t turn around without seeing a spot. Then the message will somehow invade their consciousness, and they’ll go out like robots and vote for that person.

    My counter-theory—and this was out of necessity, really—was something that we started to fool around with in the commercial sector in the early 1980s. Commercial advertising used to be framed by this same view about media, that it was more or less a commodity and the number of ads you ran determined your success. When I first came up in the industry as a copywriter in the mid to late 1970s there was a formula for doing commercial ads. In a 30-second spot, you needed to mention the product name in the first five seconds, you needed to mention it at least three times overall, and you needed to show the package or the logo for the last 3-5 seconds. If you did all those things, you had a successful ad. But all this approach did was telegraph to viewers that they were watching a commercial. And most people don’t like commercials. They try not to watch them. What we decided in the early 1980s was, let’s not telegraph that we’re making a commercial. Let’s keep them in suspense, sometimes for up to 20 seconds. And let’s give the people watching a real payoff. It might be making you laugh, touching some emotion, or giving information that’s genuinely of value to you.

    What we proved in the early 1980s, and a lot of it came straight out of Minneapolis, was that if somebody pays attention to your commercial, you don’t have to spend as much on media. And that’s significant because media is the single highest line-item cost in any sort of ad campaign. You’re talking tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.

    That was the theory. And with Wellstone you had to do it that way, because there wasn’t any money. We basically decided to make the entire campaign a media campaign. Paul had already been out there on the stump, and he was in danger of losing the primary to someone who hadn’t campaigned at all. That’s how little interest there was in this guy’s campaign. Rudy Boschwitz, on the other hand, was going to be on the air a lot. So we tried to pre-empt him, to make every Boschwitz ad that came on work against him: “Anytime you see a Boschwitz commercial, it just means he’s trying to buy the election.” That was the positioning for Paul in a nutshell. It was entirely a media campaign and we pulled it off.

    The attitude of the spots was different enough that they appealed to a lot of people who hadn’t felt interested or involved in politics since the 60s or early 70s. It brought a lot of progressives out and united a lot of people. It caught the attention of younger people who had pretty much given up on politics. In many respects it was a precursor to the Ventura campaign. It took people that wanted to believe in politics but had been so disappointed they practically gave up.

    But none of those people would have voted for him if you had told them that in 12 years he’d be running an $8 million re-election campaign.

  • Woebegone Me

    illustrations by Brian Barber

    The Rake gains access to one of public radio’s most celebrated—and feared—geniuses, Harrison Taylor, the mastermind of A Prairie Groan Companion and all subsidiaries, subdivisions, copyrights, and service marks thereof. Since this is a pure work of parody and satire (we couldn’t decide what the difference is) any resemblance to living persons is fully indexed in a separate story.)

    In the wake of his ruthless climb to stardom as the syest celebrity ever to make Playgirl‘s list of sexiest men,(1) Taylor has left a trail of broken hearts and bruised egos. Taylor sat down with The Rake for a rare chance to come clean with his adoring public as he roosts upon the acme of his fame.

    With permission negotiated by my editor (he’s missing some fingers now and won’t say why), I was escorted to an elevator at the secure wing of Minnesota Parochial Radio headquarters in downtown St. Paul. Ninth Street had already been closed, at Taylor’s request, by the city council, so parking near the compound was tricky. But some sacrifice was inevitable to get face time with Taylor, who could cancel your career as quickly as he could make it.

    The elevator was down only and operated with a key held by my escort, a serious, bearded man with the posture of someone who spends a lot of time on folding chairs in support groups. My ears popped from the pressure changes as we rode the elevator down about a thousand feet into the sandstone crust beneath St. Paul. I was then led down a brightly lit, steel-walled passageway past a series of bank-style vaults.

    We stopped at a vault flanked by a pair of severely straight-backed, flat-seated Aeron chairs. My escort told me we would have to wait; the vault required two keys to open.

    Two hours later, just as I realized the time had expired on my parking meter, the sound of expensive heels clicked over the polished floor. Coming into view I saw none other than Will B. King, president of Minnesota Prudent Radio. He wore a ten-thousand-dollar Armani suit bulging like he kept a lawyer in every pocket. He produced a key, as did my escort, and they inserted them into the pair of locks on the vault door and turned the barrels. King then turned the wheel-sized knob and opened the vault. The interior was about the size of a large gardening shed, and stacked from floor to ceiling was the largest pile of U.S. paper currency I had ever laid eyes on.

    “Oops,” said King. “Forget you saw that. Wrong room.” He locked it back up and we proceeded to the next vault. I asked my escort about the pile of cash.

    “That’s the DNC vault,” he whispered.

    King suddenly rounded on a three hundred dollar shoe. “What are you telling him, you idiot? Now we might have to kill him! Are you a valued member?”

    “No,” my escort mumbled.

    “You’re fired. First help me open the Taylor vault.” As the door to the Taylor vault complained on its massive hinge, King looked at me for the first time. “Are you a valued member?” he asked.

    It seemed like a good time to lie. “Yes,” I said, “ I joined at the ‘lap dog’ level during the spring drive. Ten dollars a month.”

    “Then you know what to do,” he replied. He stood there, waiting for something. On a hunch, I knelt down and licked his shoes. They tasted like dust from Tuscany.

    “Good boy,” he said, and motioned me into the Taylor vault. I found myself face-to-face with Harrison Taylor, tall, waxen-faced, and startled, obviously disoriented by the intrusion.

    And his fly was down. Will B. King saw it, too, but said nothing. This was going to be an awkward start. Rather than say something embarrassing, I decided to write him a discrete note—EXAMINE YOUR ZIPPER… YOUR COWS ARE GONNA GET OUT OF THE BARN… He took the note, read it, then held it in front of his lap for the entire interview.(2)

  • Any Resemblance to Living Persons…

    Being a concise survey of bizarre coincidences in the life of real public figures and wholly manufactured fictional characters.

    1. Astonishingly, Garrison Keillor was included in the top 10 of Playgirl’s sexiest men of 1986. Others on that list included Sen. Robert Dole, Billy Crystal, William “The Refrigerator” Perry and Donald Trump—so one begins to sense how horribly wrong things had gone with that particular list.

    2. Keillor suffered this exact fate during a recent performance of A Prairie Home Companion. His fly remained down, though he knew the audience knew he knew.

    3. Keillor’s first piece in the New Yorker appeared in 1970.

    4. Michael Fedo’s biography of Keillor, The Man From Lake Wobegon (St. Martin’s Press, New York 1987), documents donor friction at KSJN over Keillor’s format choices in the early 70s, leading to a series of Keillor resignations and re-hirings.

    5. “St. Paul is a city that does not mind having a class D baseball team. Minneapolis is a city that would die if it were associated with Sioux Falls and Fargo and Duluth. They would absolutely perish. So that’s why God made us number 2.” Garrison Keillor to the St. Paul City Council. Star Tribune, October 25, 2001, p.3B.

    6. See St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 9, 2002.

    7. Protagonist John Tollefson loses his job as a public radio station manager over a “douche bag” joke in Wobegon Boy, Garrison Keillor, (Penguin Books, 1997).

    8. Michael Fedo made a similar, if kinder statement regarding Garrison Keillor’s red socks.

    9. “I look like a tree toad who has changed into a boy but not completely.” Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, Garrison Keillor, (Viking/Penguin, 2001), p. 18.

    10. You don’t believe us, do you. Check it out: Zeus changed his lover Io into a white cow to conceal her from his wife. She was discovered by Hera, who sent a gadfly to chase her through Egypt. She came to rest in the Aegean sea on the island named for her—Ios.

    11. The similarly named Greenspring Companies was the holding company of for-profit Rivertown Trading Company, which began in 1981 to handle sales of Powdermilk Biscuit merchandise. Under pressure from an investigation by the state Attorney General’s office into the for-profit partnership with non-profit Minnesota Public Radio, Greenspring unloaded Rivertown to Dayton-Hudson Corp. for $120 million in 1998. Bill Kling was bought out for a reported $2.6 million.

    12. MPR routinely declines to disclose Keillor’s earnings from APHC and Writers’ Almanac.

    13. Twenty five cents per word.

    14. Keillor savages one of his families in “Family Honeymoon,” a chapter in We Are Still Married, Garrison Keillor, (Penguin Books, USA, Inc. 1990), pp.188-191.

    15. “The newspaper will walk up to your house and pee on your roses.” We Are Still Married, p. 143.

    16. Something similar was printed on an invitation to Keillor’s wedding to Ulla Skaerved, as reported by the Pioneer Press, December 29, 1985.

    17. Both Rick Shefchick and Nick Coleman verify that, contrary to a legend that maintains traction to this day, Coleman was at the Star Tribune when the Pioneer Press published Keillor’s Portland Avenue address in 1986.

    18. In 1995, MPR and the Democratic National Committee exchanged donor lists, and MPR admitted to purchasing such lists from the DNC prior to then. In 1996, MPR bought donor names from the Wellstone for Senate campaign. (Pioneer Press, July 24 1999, p. 2D.) In 1986, after Lake Wobegon themes were used to promote a DFL fundraising appearance by Garrison Keillor, Bill Kling wrote the Pioneer Press to express dismay over the “crass use of public radio programs and images to promote the DFL party.” (Pioneer Press, October 18, 1986.)

    19. Keillor complained, “I wrote a book called Lake Wobegon Days. They put me in my place but good. They marked my front yard with orange rinds . . .” We Are Still Married, p. 141.

    20. See the New York Times, March 2 1988, p. 1C. One of the most startlingly sycophantic interviews conceivable of any person, ever.

    21. Noah Adams bravely stuck it out for one year as Keillor’s replacement on MPR’s APHC replacement, Good Evening.

    22. MPR has declined to disclose endorsement fees collected from SelectComfort for Keillor’s weekly sales pitch for their product. Ditto Premier Radio, distributor for Rush Limbaugh, who reads a nearly identical script for them. SelectComfort has also declined to disclose what they pay for their advertising with Keillor and Limbaugh.

    23. Valente is smarter than he appears. He is quoting The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 182.

  • The Op-Ed Slam

    Top honors for the July 11 Op-Ed Slam went to Tim Shea of Minneapolis.

    Judges were an assortment of folks who were challenged by the wide range of 3-minute presentations. Some sang, some shouted, some railed, some simply read, and some waxed poetic. Some had opinions.

    Other awards went to Colleen Kruse of The Rake fame (see one of her entries in this month’s column) and Omaur Bliss.

    Read Tim, Colleen and Omaur’s slams on the following pages

  • Uptown Diner

    So you walk out of a late show at the Uptown Theater on a Friday night and your stomach is angry with you for stuffing it with Sour Patch Kids and popcorn instead of dinner. You only have $10 in your pocket and you don’t feel like sitting in a dingy, smoky bar waiting for a greasy waiter to serve greasy food. One of your friends suggests Perkins, but your stomach growls in disgust. What should you do? Stagger a few blocks north to the Uptown Diner, one of the Cities’ great unsung secrets. The Uptown Diner has long been a popular place to get a coffee and a muffin or a breakfast big enough to last you until dinner. Now open Thursday through Saturday nights until 3:30 a.m., it’s the perfect place for an early morning smorgasbord. As for the poor fools still stuck in the coffeehouse chains? The diner’s giant, fluffy pancakes made from scratch and the hash browns made from fresh potatoes will make them wonder what in the world they were thinking. Uptown Diner, (612) 874-0481