Formerly an upscale pop-in-and-order-crepes-at-the-counter-type eatery, Savories shook things up last spring and transformed into a classy yet cozy dining nook with a distinct European flair. And then there’s the food. It starts with the fresh-baked bread, then eases into a heaping antipasto plate, slides full-force into an applewood-smoked bacon and smoked Brie salad, and then falls decadently into the moistest, most mouthwatering slice of fresh-strawberry-infused chocolate cake ever created. Stop by on a Tuesday, when Savories offers a three-course dinner for a mere $18. Menus change every four to five weeks.
Month: September 2003
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Arcadia
Every fall for the last three, we Tom Stoppard fans have been blessed. Following up on the wonderful productions of The Invention of Love by the Guthrie in 2001 and Hapgood last year by the Jungle, Theatre in the Round will present us Arcadia this month. Arcadia deals with the typical Stoppard theme of taking a thorny intellectual problem, in this case chaos theory, and using it as a metaphor for a discussion of love, landscape architecture, and the inability to know the past or predict the future. Don’t be intimidated—no math beyond a vague recollection of algebra is required. And while you’re contemplating the unknowable, don’t forget to laugh, because Stoppard is also the wittiest playwright since Wilde.
Theatre in the Round, 245 Cedar Ave., (612) 333-3010, www.theatreintheround.org -
First Born
My great-aunt lived in three centuries. She remembered seeing her first automobile. “It was such a novelty. I never thought I’d actually get a ride in one,” she said. She lived through ten popes and twenty presidents.
Born in St. Paul, in 1894, Sister Esther was the oldest of eight girls. Her parents moved to Madelia, where she spent most of her childhood. At 107, she was the oldest of more than four thousand School Sisters of Notre Dame worldwide. She died in Mankato on September 22, 2002. Her youngest sisters, twins, are the only siblings still alive: Olivia Nelson of St. James and Otillia Erber of Austin, Minnesota.
Back in the sixties, when I was growing up, I remember my entire family going to the convent in Pipestone to visit my dad’s aunt. We must have been quite a sight: Mom, Dad, and five kids—seven of us dropping by to say hello. All the other nuns would come and see us, too. And Sister Esther always made sure that we got cookies and milk.
It had been years since I had the opportunity to visit Sister Esther. Last summer, I went to see her with my sister and brother. Five minutes after we checked in at the convent, Sister Esther came strolling in with her walker on wheels, which everyone called “the Cadillac.” Attached was a basket, where she kept her Bible and a few other items. Sister Esther still pedaled an exercise bicycle and enjoyed doing crafts. She kept busy reading, solving crossword puzzles, and writing letters.
We explained that we were Margaret’s grandchildren. Margaret was her sister, and my dad’s mother. I told her I’d been reading about her in national publications and more recently in the book Aging With Grace. Sister Esther was part of an ongoing project known as the Nun Study, started in 1986 and headed by Dr. David Snowdon, author of Aging With Grace. She’s one of 678 nuns donating their brains to a long-term study of Alzheimer’s disease, as scientists explore why some people get the disease and others don’t.
In his book, Dr. Snowdon mentions that when he started his research, Sister Esther was 92 and told him she was too busy to be in a study about old people. Someone asked her when she was going to retire and she said, “I retire every night.” My cousin exchanged letters with Sister Esther over the years. She said, “In one of her letters from Montana, she told me that she was going to retire and move back to the convent in Mankato so that she could take care of the old people. She was 98 at that time.”
In recent years, the family would gather to celebrate her three-figure birthdays. Just before the turn of the millennium, on December 29, 1999, Sister Esther celebrated her 105th. There was a large turnout of family and friends. The twins, then 89, were wearing matching outfits. “You two look so cute,” my sister Beth said to them. “Sister Esther gets upset if we don’t dress alike,” Olivia said.
On September 26, 2002, in the chapel on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, the nuns sang like angels as they put Sister Esther to rest. Her twin sisters were there, perfectly matched with soft teal jackets and pants and white embroidered knit shirts.
Dr. Snowdon was there too. My sister chatted with him. “So what’s the key to a long life?” she asked. “Exercise, fruits and vegetables, and keeping active,” he said. In the next two or three years, he would be studying Sister Esther’s brain, and would probably publish the results in another book. It would include his findings from more than a dozen other nuns who became centenarians and have passed away in recent years. Olivia, now 91, has her own theories about longevity. She told me she kidded Sister Esther that she lived so long because “she didn’t have a man to worry about.”
Fortunately, Sister Esther didn’t suffer from Alzheimer’s. Still, her memory in the past couple of years wasn’t as good as it used to be. As we left the convent that afternoon last summer, she asked us again how we were related to her. “Margaret’s grandchildren,” we repeated. “You’ll have to come back another day,” she laughed, “and see if I remember who you are.”
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A Delicate Balance
Listen closely: That’s not the sound of cicadas or crickets. It’s local theater critics tittering about A Delicate Balance, the Jungle’s revival of the Edward Albee play. What they’re rubbing their legs about seems to be that they can’t handle the formal speechifying and the “two-dimensional” characters, and isn’t it just a cut-rate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and worst of all, What Does It All Mean, Anyway? Well, we won’t spoil it for them–other than to say that sometimes God is in the details, and a play is in the dialogue. We guess reality TV has whetted their appetite for more naturalistic, realistic language. But look at it this way: A Delicate Balance didn’t win the Pulitzer for the acting company, the stage set, or even the director—though these are all up to snuff in this fine production of an American classic. (By the way, Albee’s in town next month, November 19-20, as part of the Pen Pals lecture series.)
Jungle, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S., (612) 822-7063, www.jungletheater.com -
Dard Hunter: Master of Graphic and Book Arts
DIY? As a graphic designer for New York’s Roycroft Colony, Dard Hunter invented the concept. Hunter’s participation in the Arts and Crafts movement (which embraced an ideal of human craftsmanship over the machine-made) yielded impressive results. Hunter dabbled in a variety of media, including stained glass and metal, but his true legacy lies in his accomplishments in papermaking and typographical design. This exhibit reveals a diligent American artist whose designs are cleverly handsome, making even the decapitated head of John the Baptist, a cover design for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, into an elegant work of art.
MMAA, 505 Landmark Center, St. Paul, (651) 292-4380, www.mmaa.org -
The Long Bomb
The last time our Golden Gophers won a Big Ten football championship, none of this year’s players had been born. It’s possible that some of their parents hadn’t either. In 1967, we had a shifty quarterback named Curt Wilson, a bruising fullback from South St. Paul named Jim Carter, and an All-American defensive end in St. Louis Park’s Bob Stein. The team finished 8-2 and shared the conference title with Indiana and Purdue.
The Rose Bowl invitation went to the Hoosiers, even though the Gophers had trounced them 33-7 during the season (conference officials gave them the nod because Indiana had never won a conference championship). Even as a sixteen-year-old fan I was convinced that some sort of curse had been placed on my team, though I told myself hopefully it wouldn’t be long before the Gophers would rise again. They never did.
It’s been nearly forty-two years since the Gophers have been to Pasadena, California, home of the Rose Bowl, on New Year’s Day. Four decades have passed since that marvelous 1960 team—featuring the legendary Sandy Stephens, Tom Brown, and Bobby Bell—was crowned national champion. Since then, the University of Minnesota’s football program has wheezed its way through five coaches, a handful of minor bowl appearances, and an annual struggle with major college football reality.
Sure, there have been moments; but shockers like the 1977 upset of top-rated Michigan and the 1999 squeaker over second-ranked Penn State really only served to illustrate the futility of the team’s mission. And the periodic trips to places like Shreveport or Memphis for bowl games named after lawn-care equipment have done little to push the program toward respectability.The sad fact is this: The economics of major college football essentially disqualifies the Gophers from competing with the Ohio States or the Michigans or the Penn States of the world. And to spend any time, energy, or money on this particular pipe dream is neither helpful to the university’s mission nor charitable to the dwindling number of Gopher football fans who still happen to care.
Since 1997 the University of Minnesota has invested more than $17 million on a football program that in a good year might generate $12 million, about what Michigan takes in from a couple of home games. And now there’s talk of building a new stadium on campus, a $100 million exercise in delusion that, coming on the heels of major budget cuts at the university, is guaranteed to generate more campus controversy than quality competition.
It is, in fact, a kind of neurotic enabling pattern, not unlike offering a drink to the guy right out of Hazelden. There’s nowhere to go but down. Yet here we are again this fall, hearing the perennial silliness about Rose Bowl prospects and the great young running backs and the improved defense and how, if things break just right, anything can happen.
You can argue, of course, that this is no different from any dreamy-eyed sporting delusion that strikes at the beginning of any season, but it’s different when you’re talking about Gopher football. Here the deck is stacked as it is nowhere else in sports. Not only do the Gophers have almost no chance to rise to the top of the Big Ten, they have almost no choice not to try.
Writing in the New York Times Magazine last year, Michael Sokolove described the trap that is major college football thus: “Football is the SUV of the college campus: aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and potentially destructive of everything around it.” To Sokolove and other critics, big-time college football is a no-win situation for all but a handful of schools whose gridiron tradition easily lures the top high school recruits, rakes in millions in endorsement and TV money, and supports a lavish athletic department. None of these apply at the University of Minnesota. The football team averages barely 40,000 fans at its home games and generates less revenue in a season than the University of Michigan rakes in during a couple of home games.
Gophers athletic director Joel Maturi understands the ultimate futility of this pursuit probably better than anyone else in town. His arrival last year coincided with the near-death experience of three Gopher teams during a massive athletic department budget deficit. The men’s and women’s golf teams and the men’s gymnastics team eventually cobbled together enough donations to survive another year, but the cup-in-hand episode (which included a uniquely humbling telethon) had to inspire some doubts about the viability of Gopher sports in general and the football program in particular.
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Handsome Family
It was cosmically appropriate that our review copy of The Handsome Family’s sixth disc, Singing Bones, arrived the day that Johnny Cash died. The New Mexico husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks are true artistic children of the Man in Black, mixing traditional roots music with postmodern macabre about haunted all-night chain stores and doomed expeditions down bottomless pits. Brett’s deep bass is a perfect complement to Rennie’s lyrics, which aren’t so much standard verse-chorus-verse as melancholy story-poems with a dark, dry humor Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated. Bones is rich with somber alt-country, recorded and mixed entirely in the Sparks’s living room. Turn down the lights, knock back a whiskey and sing along.
400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave., (612) 332-2903, www.400bar.com -
Georgie Fame & Ben Sidran
Born Clive Powell in Manchester, England, Georgie Fame rose to, er, fame as a footsoldier in the sixties British Invasion, fronting the Blue Flames on a string of modest hits including a cover of Mongo Santamaria’s “Yeh Yeh” that went to number one in England, knocking out the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” Admirably, he never stuck to just one style, but mixed up jazz, rock, pop and R&B, and helped introduce ska to Londoners. The next couple of decades found him struggling, but by the nineties Fame had found his groove again, playing organ on Van Morrison’s Clinton-era albums and building up a solid body of his own work in the jazz style known as vocalese. He’ll play the AQ with Wisconsin-based jazz pianist and musicologist Sidran, whose Go Jazz label put out Fame’s acclaimed recent albums Poet in New York and Cool Cat Blues.
AQ, 408 St. Peter, St. Paul St., (651) 292-1359, www.mnjazz.com -
Dido: Life For Rent
Dido takes life at a slower, more deliberate pace than the rest of us—and it seems to work for her. Remember No Angel? That was her last (and first) record, the 1999 chartbusting album that featured, most prominently, the song “Thank You,” which the evil Eminem sampled improbably in 2000 on his psychopathic tune “Stan.” It was a great song that became a calling card for an album that we still keep close at hand, a trip-hoppy classic of the modern torch-singer genre. Now Dido finally follows up with an album that’s touted as an even stronger CD. We’re not entirely convinced, but then we haven’t spun the new one a thousand times like we have the first. Prospects are good, though. Listen especially for “White Flag” and “Don’t Leave Home,” Best of Show for this enchanting ingénue.
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Belle & Sebastian: Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Back for their first proper album in three years, Glasgow’s finest exporters of sensitive, bespectacled pop have lost two founding members, switched labels and picked up a superstar producer in Trevor Horn, whose previous credits range from Rod Stewart to Yes to Tatu. None of these events has significantly changed the band’s sound, which is good. Horn gives Catastrophe a certain amount of orchestral lushness, but the heart of B&S remains Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting—heart-on-the-sleeve emotionality that’s utterly soaring at its best and twee at its worst—it’s no wonder he’s so often compared to Morrissey. There’s a bit of both on Catastrophe: “If She Wants Me” is a lovely piece of glossy, sophisticated pop, and “Stay Loose” filters the New Pornographers through skinny-tie new-wave-era Joe Jackson. But then there’s the earnest “Lord Anthony,” an anthem about a bullied schoolboy, which is Exhibit A in what makes Belle & Sebastian irritating to those who aren’t true believers.