Month: March 2003

When Joel and Ethan Coen made Fargo and gave the world a generous serving of the rounded, marbles-in-the-mouth outstate Minnesota accent, it seemed a little over the top. But we all knew it was out there. Just 20 minutes of any WCCO-AM call-in show will prove it. Even those of us in the metro have the long O and the hard R, though we think we talk like newscasters.

Of course, we’re always adding to the mix. Norm Coleman, a New Jersey native, brought us vowels that sounded, oddly, sort of South Boston. First he told us, “I wanna be yah Mayah,” then “I wanna be yah Govenah,” and finally, “I wanna be yah Senatah.” With his thumb ever poised for action, there will doubtless be more of these announcements, but that’s a different story. More recently, Coleman has turned his Southie accent against one of his own party, scolding State Representative Arlon Lindner. He is the Corcoran legislator who has lately brought shame on the state with language that sounds more like Deliverance than Grumpy Old Men.

Coming from a guy who represents a district just outside the 494/694 beltway, Lindner’s twangy drawl has been just as startling as the content of his speech. To find out how this dialect might have emerged on the edge of the prairie, we turned to the late Harold Allen, who painstakingly mapped Minnesota speech patterns for a masterpiece of research titled The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. Samples taken near Lindner’s congressional district (32A) found farmers with “speech of moderate tempo, with unusually distinct articulation of emphasized words. Deliberate, even-tempered, carefully articulated speech. No special peculiarities.” Hard to see where Arlon Wayne Lindner fits in there.

But maybe things have changed since 1973, when the atlas was published. So The Rake loaded up the wagon and headed northwest to Corcoran, almost smack in the center of district 32A, and Lindner’s current hometown.

The Stanchion and its ornamental fiberglass cow sit at the intersection of County Roads 10 and 50. The morning crowd on a weekday is a mix of retired locals in seed caps and somewhat younger guys who have just finished with the morning’s snow removal. They work for a lawn service company with contracts in the new developments that are now paving over the few remaining farms in Hennepin County.

Some of the crowd warmed to the topic of Arlon Lindner with racial jokes. A few seemed embarrassed by this, but one guy with a big white beard and a long thin ponytail couldn’t be stopped. He loves Lindner, and it turns out, he’s pretty unhappy about African Americans.

“I’ve worked hard my whole life to support myself. Why should I have to pay for a bunch of niggers who don’t want to work?” What part of Lindner’s legislative agenda remedies this problem he didn’t say. But he wanted me to know he’s not a racist, offering this proof: “Go out in the parking lot and look at my truck. I’ve got one white mud flap and one black one.”

Francis Pomeroy, a World War II vet who says he votes both DFL and GOP, hopes Lindner will do something about illegal immigrants.

“These citizens [sic] that come over have more rights than you and I and they’ve only been here ninety days,” said Pomeroy. “There was a picture in the paper the other day of an illegal alien protesting. What have they got to protest about?”

Others at the bar seemed a bit more acquainted with the current crap-storm involving Lindner, and they seem to think he’s on the right track, too. Doug Theis, a former truck driver, is no fan of gay rights.

“I don’t want to see AIDS become an epidemic like it is over there in Africa. Those diseases are coming from people living, let’s just say, a tasteless lifestyle,” said Theis gravely.

Vernon Peterson, a stocky Korean War veteran, got his coffee refilled and echoed this view. “There’s no racism in it. He tells it like it is,” said Peterson. “If we want to turn into the greatest AIDS nation in the world, we can compete with Africa. It’s a proven fact that Africa is rampant with AIDS and HIV and all that stuff. And that’s all he said. If we want to be equal with them, keep it up.”

Lindner is currently serving his sixth term in the House and has been gay-bashing pretty much from the start, informing the public as early as 1997 that same-sex marriage is like “a man marrying a dog.” When State Rep. Karen Clark took umbrage at this, Lindner replied, “I don’t know why you felt that was insulting.” He apparently did not have a set of mud flaps coordinated to demonstrate his benign intentions, but eventually acknowledged that Clark, a lesbian, was “one of God’s creations.”

While it was quaint to discover that these and other of Lindner’s views are in step with his constituency, the feeling persists that he’s a good ol’ boy in the geographic, as well as the cultural sense. His middle name is Wayne. His wife’s name is Shirlee. He’s got three German Shepherds. And as “down home” as the fellas at The Stanchion sounded, none spoke in anything remotely like Lindner’s drawl. They all spoke pretty much with the diction and style described in Allen’s samples from Wright County, if not in the way encouraged by Rosalie Maggio’s Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage.

Well, it turns out Arlon Wayne Lindner is from Texas, born there with a rawhide spoon in his mouth in 1935. He got his B.A. from North Texas University, and went north. After receiving his Master of Divinity from Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, he decided to stick around and help the State of Minnesota make up for its alarming shortage of concealed weapons. Sure, Lindner might not be able to help out right away with the African-American problem in Corcoran. And his efforts to save Minnesota from becoming “another African continent” might not get traction this year; his proposed repeal of civil rights protections for gays and lesbians has not got the Governor’s nod. But the conceal-carry bill, also popular with the guys at The Stanchion, has good prospects in both houses. If it becomes law, perhaps the good people of Corcoran can take care of their other problems on their own.—Joe Pastoor

“Do you think you can make an all-star wrestler out of me?” I asked Sheriff and Shifty at Midwest Pro Wrestling in Maple Grove. They looked me over—I’m 5’ 9” and weigh only 155 pounds—and assured me, “Sure, just give us enough time. Size doesn’t matter anymore.” In fact, Terry Klinger (stage name “Sheriff”) is slightly shorter than I am, so I signed up for a trial session.

“The first six months is wrestling training, then the second six months we work on costumes, talking in front of the camera, and riling up the crowd,” Sheriff told me. How did he get his snazzy name? “I can still remember the day! I was channel-surfing and heard the theme song for Cops. I went down to the cop shop on Hennepin for a uniform and even got a badge with my name on it. The fans love it!”

Shifty, aka Dan Schaffner, chimed in. “There are basically two kinds of characters. ‘Heels’ are the bad guys, and ‘faces’—or ‘baby faces’—are the good guys. If you can’t make people hate you, then you’re a face. You can be a heel for six months, then the fans love you and you become a face. It used to be that the heel would come out and insult the crowd. Nowadays, everyone likes the heels because people like the bad guys better.”

I asked if I could still wrestle if I don’t have an alter ego yet. “You probably don’t want people to know your real name, because then you’re in the phone book and then they show up at your work. That’s no good,” Sheriff told me.

I couldn’t wait to get started. Shifty and Sheriff told me I could begin wrestling in front of crowds at their Sunday evening performances in Maple Grove after six months of training. “We get up to 225 people in here for the shows at three dollars each,” Sheriff said. The matches are then aired on channel 20 in the northwest suburbs and on channel 6 everywhere else, starting in May.

First, I needed to meet my adversaries: The Punisher, Kid Krazy, Joey E. (a cruiserweight champion), The Anarchist (“Right now, he’s a heel, but he used to be a face”) and Joessiah (as in Joe-Messiah, who has his own religion with his Joesciples and dreams of Joetopia). Absent tonight were Chaos, Pretty Boy Delgado, and Ice Cream Man (“He comes out in his white pants and hands out ice cream bars to the fans”). I wanted to shoot some photos of these young wrestlers, but Sheriff stopped me. “I don’t want people to see them without their costumes because the fans will start talking on Internet chatrooms about how they’ve seen that these guys are actually friends.”

Before we started training, I asked Shifty if the rumors are true that professional wrestling is fake. He obviously didn’t like the question and surprised me by breaking into a semantic discussion. “Define the word fake,” he challenged. “Fake meaning it doesn’t hurt, then you’re wrong. Fake meaning it’s a show, then you’re right.”

I got suited up in a dressing room that was wallpapered with WWE posters, swimsuit centerfolds, and 93X banners. Hoping to intimidate my rivals, I donned my “Big Ole” T-shirt, which depicts a viking. Sheriff then introduced me to the wrestlers. “This is Eric. He’s a journalist for The Rake and doesn’t think this is real, or that we get hurt. Who wants to get in the ring with him first?” These motley characters snickered as though they could smell fresh blood. Sheriff stopped them. “Before we do anything, you have to learn how to ‘take a bump.’” In other words, how to fall.

“The floor has a car spring in the middle covered by two-by-sixes and a horse-hair mat,” Sheriff said, as he demonstrated correct landing procedure. I mimicked his moves. My legs flew into the air, and I hit the canvas with a painful thud. The mat wasn’t nearly as soft as I expected; my first ‘bump’ almost knocked the wind out of me. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Breathe out before you fall. And tuck your head.”

The next move was “running the ropes,” or taking no more than two steps across the eighteen-foot ring and springing off the garden-hose-covered cables. The goal was to build maximum speed, and thereby reap devastation on my giant opponents. Luckily, they refrained from giving me the “Leaping Neckbreaker Clothesline” as I ran back and forth.

Since neither “taking a bump” nor “running the ropes” seemed to be my strength, the Sheriff suggested I take a “Flying Leg Drop” across my neck. “Lay down in the middle of the mat. And whatever you do, don’t move a muscle or you’ll get hurt.” Joessiah flew off the rope and landed with his enormous right leg across my Adam’s apple. I thought this was surely the end, as the deafening thunk of his body crashed over me. Unbelievably, I was fine. Joessiah miraculously broke his fall with his other leg, which crashed harmlessly near my head.

Unscathed, my confidence was building. Maybe I truly could become a professional wrestler. Joessiah took that as his cue to fly off the ropes and nail me with a punishing “Running Elbow Drop.” Once again I forgot to breathe. As I staggered to my feet, gasping for air, he was eager to demonstrate the “Full Body Slam.” I politely declined.

Tag off! It was The Anarchist’s turn. “Don’t resist! Just relax or you’ll get hurt,” the Sheriff warned me, as The Anarchist dropped me on my stomach and tied me into a submissive pretzel. While my limbs were a limp knot behind my back, he asked if I wanted to see his “finishing move.” At least the questions were getting easier. No, I said.

Instead, The Anarchist showed off his “signature” on another new student named Joe. “Total Anarchy” consisted of leaping from the ropes onto Joe, spinning him like a sack of potatoes, and then flinging him on the mat as if he were a booger.

While The Anarchist was reveling in victory with his back turned to me, I looked around for a folding chair to get in at least one cheap shot. The Sheriff read my mind, though, and said the chairs only come out for the performances.—Eric Dregni

You can keep your J.Lo; we’ll take the Jayhawks. Rainy Day Music, their seventh disc, pulls back from the slickness of 2000’s Smile for a sound anchored more deeply in the acoustic. It’s an evolution that sprung in part from continued lineup shifts and the impossibility of touring with a full band in the wake of 9/11’s chaotic effect on air travel, but the effect is positive nonetheless. We liked Smile quite a bit, but it’s a real pleasure to hear Gary Louris and company pushing toward a rootsier sound; that’s always helped make the joy and humanity in their music more manifest. And there’s no shortage of the Byrdsesque singable tunefulness that has always been our favorite part of the Jayhawks sound. The bright pop tunes “Save It For a Rainy Day” and “Tailspin” are the most obvious earworms, but for pure, unadulterated harmonic splendor, we’ll go with “Madman,” so reminiscent of Crosby Stills & Nash that all it’s missing is for Neil Young to refuse to go on a reunion tour with them.

Once upon a time, medical students learned from real people in actual hospitals, interviewing them about their all-too-genuine conditions. But thanks to the insurance-industry bean-counters, hospitals began discharging patients after shorter and shorter periods of time, and only the sickest hung around long enough for study. These patients could tolerate only so many repeated exams from a stream of medical students, and they began to suffer from the stress of having to answer the same tedious questions again and again.

The University of Minnesota’s solution was the standardized patient program. Basically, it’s a theater that employs a small cast of actors—professional hypochondriacs. Rookies need only to play themselves and act natural, as medical students look into their eyes and ears and down their throats, check their reflexes, and walk through other non-intrusive aspects of a standard exam. No blood is drawn. “Patients” are invited by doctors and recruited by on-campus fliers. “They don’t need to have any particular problem,” said Josh Chapman, who was a paid patient before he was hired to coordinate the program for the U’s medical school. “But it’s nice if they have an enlarged liver from a drinking problem or they had a stroke twenty years ago and their reflexes aren’t quite normal.”

Many standardized patients are people with disabilities who can’t work full-time jobs; others are retired. The average age is 50, but several U students work for the program, and one five-year-old employee gives medical students a chance for pediatric practice. Typically patients work for three hours a week. They’re often used in testing too, during which students go room to room and diagnose as many as 20 different patients with teachers grading them.

Once standardized patients have some experience playing themselves, they begin to take on more challenging roles, dramatizing different scenarios that aspiring physicians are likely to encounter, such as a confrontational patient or a patient who’s tested positive for a terminal disease. Scripts are used, and the actors practice with staff before meeting with the students. “Ideally the patients act the same way for every student so they can be graded fairly,” explained Chapman. His office can’t afford professional, dues-paying actors, but he said the people they have do a good job.

Evaluations suggest that the patients gain as much as the students do. “It’s almost therapeutic for some patients,” Chapman said. “They can talk to medical students and teach them how to interact with other people who have the same problem.” The continuing dialogue means that patients gain an understanding of doctors’ perspectives, and they feel less intimidated and more empowered to speak up and ask questions of their real doctors.
So how much does hypochondria pay? Employees of the program start at $10 an hour, and work their way up to $15 for the more challenging starring roles. It’s not exactly Screen Actors Guild scale—but probably better than a similar program over at the U’s school of veterinary medicine.—Katherine Glover

We’re sports fans around here, no matter what our other pretensions. One of our favorite diversions is watching the tournaments that clog the calendar in this season. This year, though, we’re oddly sensitized to the fact that most sports coverage is heavily dependent on military metaphors. To judge from our local sports journalists and commentators, it’s virtually impossible to call a game without resorting to some battlefield turn of phrase. It’s cool, though. We live in confrontational times. Now that the DFL and progressive politics are a thing of the past, we can expect other quaint Minnesota traditions like non-confrontation to go away too. If you can’t beat ’em—well, you know the rest.

The battles all started a few weeks ago, with the high schools. We’re convinced the one Minnesota tradition really worth defending is the state high school hockey tournament—what used to be the only pure (single-class) thing left to us. Who could have foreseen the perfect symmetry of the Warroad Warriors humiliating Simley for the Class A championship? In the less prestigious Class AA tier (the moneyed suburban schools), Anoka took no prisoners against Roseville Area. (Sorry, Area? Now there’s a moniker that smacks of a military lack of imagination.)

There’s been a lot of flak over the failures of Gopher men’s basketball late in their campaign to get into the NCAA tournament. A show of force in the NIT is, of course, a little like a show of force at the Y on Sunday afternoon, but there’s some consolation in being the best among the losers. Personally, we think it’s a crime against humanity that sports fans and journalists aren’t getting more excited about a couple other contests: The Gopher women are poised to crack the top five in basketball this year, and there’s a fair chance the women will repeat as national champions in hockey.

There’s also an exciting story blowing up in the WCHA: Mankato State and St. Cloud State both survived into the final five, just months after making the big jump from Division III to Division I hockey. (The Gophers, the Fighting Sioux, and the Bulldogs have kept hostilities limited to JV scrimmages through the years—many of which resulted in serious embarrassment that could be blown off as easily as an NIT result. Now they’re wishing they hadn’t been so diplomatic in expanding the conference.) Mankato State has been the most exciting story in college hockey this year—but why should we be surprised? They’d been policing Division II for decades, playing in three national championships (and winning one) going back to the 80s.

It’s tough to compete with a war, of course. The other day, CBS television announced that they’d asked ESPN to cover day games in the NCAA tournament—because the network has responsibly decided to cover the war in Iraq. The only question that remains is how many viewers will go AWOL and switch to buckets or hockey.