Month: November 2003

The ordinary menu and strikingly brief wine list could make Marcus Samuelsson run screaming from this place, but perhaps there is a lesson of survival in the forty-seven years of steadfast service Al and Alma’s has offered Lake Minnetonkans. Overlooking Cook’s Bay in Mound, this once-seasonal hangout for boaters now remains open nearly year-round, closing only for part of January and February. It’s not the kind of place you find by accident, even if you come by water. The reward for your voyage will be a comfortable, kid-friendly setting, a nice view and a truly Minnesotan selection of steaks, ribs, and fish. Regulars tell us everything there is dependable, but we recommend the filet mignon perched atop a grilled portabello mushroom cap in a puddle of creamy blue cheese sauce with garlic mashed potatoes crisped and cut into pie-like wedges. If you like to aid digestion with something stronger than wine, bring your own bottle and buy a set-up.

The trees outside were blowing and the sky was threatening to open up for the first time in months. It was a perfect night for a Grimm Brothers-style fairy tale, and Elizabeth Von Beringberg was treating ten members of the Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop to her version of exactly that. Gathered around a table in a Zuhrah Shrine Center in South Minneapolis, the group listened closely and scribbled madly on formal comment sheets as she read through intricate descriptions of castles, countesses, and cobblestone streets.

Peggie Carlson, the evening’s mediator, called time. The hands shot up. Von Beringberg listened as historical fiction writer after poet after novelist volunteered their comments and suggestions. Although each complimented the incredibly descriptive work, all suggested significant changes to the story’s format and language. Minnesota Nice wasn’t exactly checked at the door, but the constructive criticism was unfiltered. At first, the soft-spoken Von Beringberg attempted to explain away the critiques, but she had not uttered more than a sentence when Carlson kindly hushed her. “I know you’re new to the group, and I know it’s hard,” the children’s book author and memoir writer told her. “But you have to be quiet and not respond. We’d be defending all night otherwise.”

Publication has been the members’ aim since the workshop first began, back in the Depression era. Thought to be the oldest meeting of its kind in the country, it was originally started with Works Progress Administration funds; state WPA director Hubert Humphrey approved monies for two “Writing to Sell” classes at the downtown library. Students soon requested that one of these classes be changed into a workshop format and voilà! The Minnesota Writers’ Workshop was formed.

The group hasn’t received federal funds since 1939, and the location has shifted more than a few times in the last sixty-odd years (most of the moves came after a long run at the 620 Club on Hennepin Avenue), but the premise remains the same: Support writers of all kinds and help them write and edit their way to publication. It seems to work. Back in 1971, the last time anyone counted, workshop members had 400 published books.

On this fall evening, the reading and critiquing continued into Mary Boyd’s anticlimactic end to a romance novel; through Charlotte Sullivan’s hilarious poem about the loss of her feminist principles when her husband looks under the hood of her car; to Kate Kane’s funny but rushed memoir of her father. Then, exactly two hours after it began, Carlson brought the gavel down and the workshop adjourned for the several thousandth time in its existence. A call was made to head to the bar (the Shriners have one in-house!), but some things have changed, and most people passed on the invite, gathered their manuscripts, and rushed out into the restless night.—Katie Quirk

David Sedaris’s wry and reliably funny tale of his soul-flattening job as a Macy’s Christmas elf has become a holiday tradition in its own right, taking its place in a sardonic sub-pantheon of Santa tales that includes A Charlie Brown Christmas and Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story. After gaining fame in monologue form on NPR in the mid-nineties, Sedaris’ story has taken small theaters by storm, and with each new December gets staged by what seems like eighty dozen companies. Locally, that happy duty falls to Theater Limina, who last we saw this October doing Harold Pinter’s backwards bit of breakup bathos, Betrayal. Santaland shares the BLB stage this month with the equally irreverent holiday show from local thesps Craig Johnson, David Mann, Joseph Scrimshaw, and Sarah Gioia, whose Fringe Festival comedy The Worst Show in the Fringe was comical and snarky and smart and totally failed to live up to its name. (And you’ll forgive us if we give a small holler about Rake columnist Colleen Kruse’s Christmas Overeasy, Thursdays this month at BLB.)
BLB, 810 W. Lake St.,
(612) 825-3737, blb.ciceron.com

The Guthrie’s annual spot of Dickens, as always, remains a recommended option for your holiday theatergoing this year, but it’s always possible that four dead people scaring the hell out of an old man isn’t Christmassy enough for you. In that case, why not try a story about a kid whose parents are dead, or at least missing (perhaps they’re off frightening the miser in the other play), who winds up living in the gutters with a street gang, belting out cheerful songs about pickpocketing, love and food! Glorious food! Kidding aside, this national touring production of the Oliver Twist-based musical is well worth your time if you’re a fan of musicals. This is the slightly darker and more sinister Oliver! as revised by producer Cameron Macintosh, which debuted in London in 1994. Despite a successful run, it’s only now getting a stateside debut, and we’re fortunate enough to get the opening slot. Just don’t go picking any pockets to raise the price of a ticket, OK?
Ordway, 345 Washington St., St. Paul,
(651) 224-4222, ordway.org

Minneapolis’s Lake Harriet is known for many things—its bandshell and summer concerts, multitudes of strollers, kamikaze inline skaters talking on cell phones, and cyclists shamelessly riding the latest goofy recumbent bike. As an urban lake collecting runoff from treated lawns and storm sewers, it’s not the first place I’d go for drinking water. On any given day, though, there’s a steady stream of pilgrims lining up to fill bottles and jugs at a green pump on the northwest side of the lake, just below the trolley tracks.

Many appear to be in or close to their golden years, so you’d be forgiven for wondering if this is some kind of fountain of youth about sixteen hundred miles north of where Ponce de León was last seen. According to devotees, the water tastes great and is chock-a-block with iron. It is drawn from a deep well separate from the lake’s water supply. Bob, who drives up in a silver Mustang, says he has been getting water at the pump for more than thirty years. “It just tastes good, you know?” At least it’s better than the tap water at his home in St. Louis Park. “If you let it sit long enough, the sediments settle at the bottom of the bottle!” he says with enthusiasm. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly persuasive endorsement.

Pho, a Vietnamese transplant in his sixties wearing a Bahamas sweatshirt, reckons he has been visiting the pump weekly for at least seven years. “It has a very natural taste and it’s very good for coffee,” he says.

For Jane, a dignified, blue-eyed bifocaler from Edina, the well is more than a source of water. “It’s a very interesting place to come because of the people,” she says. “It’s almost symbolic—how deep it is and how people come together around it.”

As the sun is going down, Paul pulls up on a well-worn road bike with a big empty jug tethered to it. He is forty-seven years old, a stay-at-home dad who describes himself as a “refugee from the world of advertising.” He has sideburns that would look good on Crosby, Stills, Nash, or Young. Paul says the water from the pump reminds him of childhood camping trips in Canada where he could dip his hands in the lake and just take a drink. “I keep coming back to this water. Somehow my body knows the difference when I’m drinking other water,” he says. He relates some pump lore to me: Supposedly, it takes so long for water to drain into the deep aquifer that the water presently flowing from the pump may never have been exposed to manmade pollution. That strikes me as unlikely, but we end up discussing a variety of political outrages until it’s dark.

According to Jim Fagrelius, director of operations for the Park and Recreation Board, the pump was installed in 1910 and it pierces 262 feet down to a level of sedimentary rock called the Shakopee Formation. His agency maintains the pump year-round, clearing snow away and chipping ice off in winter. The Minneapolis Department of Health checks the well’s bacteria levels every two to four weeks, and—this may come as a shock to some of the pump’s regulars—the Park Board occasionally treats the water with chlorine when those levels pass a certain threshold.

After all the hype I’ve exposed myself to, the water is a little disappointing on the palate. Although it lacks the chemical or floral overtones of city water in midsummer, it has a distinctive metallic tang that makes my lips pucker and my tastebuds shrink. Still, it is pleasantly cold, and it may be worth getting used to—if not for its rejuvenating properties, then for its social possibilities.
—Dan Gilchrist

There’s a saying that goes something like this: I against my brother, and I and my brother against the world. That’s also a fair, if laconic, synopsis of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-winning play, the first ever won by an African-American woman. Topdog takes on issues of race, masculinity, sibling rivalry, and devastated family structures in furious and acidly witty dialogue that flows out in its own peculiar rhythm, like a jazz riff. In fact, Parks takes care to turn not merely the dialogue, but the entire story structure off-kilter. The two brothers of the story, ominously named Lincoln and Booth, are both down on their luck and desperate to advance their lives. That they have no one but each other might be more harmful than healthy. Older brother Lincoln has already walked away from his former life as a street-hustling card swindler. Instead, he’s taken a humiliating job in a sideshow impersonating his namesake president, complete with stovepipe hate and white makeup, so that carnivalgoers can pretend to assassinate him. But Booth is no good at anything but shoplifting, and desperately wants Lincoln to teach him how to deal three-card monte. Things get weirder from there. Mixed Blood’s production is a collaboration with Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theater, starring actors Thomas Jones and Jahi Kearse, who bring their Capitol version of the Broadway play to Minnesota.
Mixed Blood, 1501 S. 4th St.,
(612) 338-6131, www.mixedblood.com

They are ageless, the last surviving of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, three vast and tapering monuments of stone standing in the desert. For thousands of years they were the tallest buildings on Earth, and yet their function was at best symbolic: tombs designed to hold the lifeless kings of Egypt until they were finished being dead. A myth like that doesn’t come along every day. So it’s no wonder that the Pyramids been a favorite subject for photographers since the invention of the medium. The Weinstein’s exhibit gathers the Egyptological exposures of nearly three dozen artists, ranging from stark shots of the structures looming in the sand, to more playful takes on their ancient, immovable iconography. Our favorite is Alec Soth’s portrait of an old stogie-chewing man framed underneath the angled roof of his two-car garage, like an American pharaoh. Unless it’s Lee Friedlander’s shot of a pack of dogs lazing around on the sand,while behind them the Sphinx peeks over the horizon, as if checking out the animals next door.

Weinstein Gallery, 908 W. 46th St., (612) 822-1722.

Red Rock Road is a thorn in the side of the St. Paul police. “You actually have to go into Newport to get to this part of town,” Officer Tim LeGarde tells me, as we career through the Highway 61 off-ramp at about fifty. We stay in the turn lane on I-494 for the exit to Maxwell Road, which leads to Red Rock.

The street is situated on a long strip of land running parallel to the railroad tracks south of downtown St. Paul. It is the address of truck depots, metal scrap yards, and warehouses. Most nights, it’s also the domain of illicit drag racers. Red Rock is a private street, but the businesses along it have declined to put up a gate with a guard. Closing it each night isn’t an option, because of the number of trucks that come and go at all hours. So when someone calls and complains about the drag racers, the best the cops can do is hand out tickets and shoo the crowds across the city line. There they’ll wait for the squad to leave, at which point they’ll go right back to what they were doing. A sharp scofflaw knows another patrol is at least twenty minutes away.
Just driving down here takes a cop out of circulation in the rest of the district for most of an hour. If anyone is actually busted, it can be much longer. When we pull up, we see a battered white Crown Victoria, almost a twin to the car we’re in, and an even more damaged Dodge Spirit. The driver of the Crown Vic hands over his license. It says he’s sixteen. He looks younger. His eyes are red—from crying, probably. Officer Tim takes the license, then goes to talk to the stocky boy standing next to the Dodge. Its grill and hood have imploded, and he’s looking at the car in disbelief. The red-eyed boy is back in his car, digging for his insurance card. I see wavy skid marks going about a hundred feet south, and chunks of pavement and dirt erupt next to a fire hydrant, ten feet from the Dodge. Tim takes license and insurance from chubby and walks over to the crier. “Have you been drinking?” “I had three shots of eighty proof.” Tim isn’t happy to hear this. He expresses his displeasure as he drags the boy back to the squad. Tim asks him to take a Breathalyzer. He refuses, and is then frisked and cuffed and deposited in the back seat. “Might as well sit; we’ll be here for a while,” he says, taking blank forms out of a box in the trunk. We get into the squad and he calls for a tow, then starts on the first form. The kid tries to suck up, saying he could have left, he was doing the right thing by staying, but it’s all lost on the cop. The kid admitted to driving under the influence, refused the test, and now Tim has much paperwork to do.

About ten minutes later, the kid’s father shows up. Dad doesn’t help things much. He’s noisy and pushy, asking why Dodge isn’t getting a ticket. He tries to sneak past us, apparently to get to the cars. This annoys Tim to the point that he threatens Dad with arrest for interfering with a crime scene. He calls for some backup to watch Dad while he does the paperwork. A K-9 unit arrives, but Dad’s simmered down, and the dog stays in the car. Tim explains that the kid refused the test, that he’ll be taken downtown and photographed. After the paperwork is all done, he can probably be released to Dad’s custody rather than landing in juvenile detention for the weekend. But that’s an option, if the behavior of father or son deteriorates. The car will be impounded, and he can get it in the next day or so.

As we pass the city line near the freeway, cars start streaming back in. They know we won’t be back tonight, not with someone in the back seat.

In downtown St. Paul, we pull around to the back of the station and park in a small garage. Tim walks the kid up a flight of stairs to the juvenile holding cells on the right, and then we go into the report room. Four hours later, we’re back in Officer Tim’s squad. His shift is half over, and he’s made one arrest. —Matthew Green

Masha Frank is late for work. Hugging a mug of black tea between her knees, she throws her car into drive and starts buckling her seatbelt. She is listening to Carte Blanche Volume 1 and it’s getting boring fast. As she merges onto I-35W, she momentarily compromises her view of the road to stretch her fingertips in the direction of a new CD, stashed in the door pocket on the passenger side of her Hyundai. Driving is tedious, Frank says. She craves something to occupy her racing mind. So music and speed are her distractions. She turns up the volume as she darts through traffic on the busy freeway. It is, she says, like choreography.

“Lots of times I imagine being in a race, like I weave in and out of cars. I don’t always use my signal,” she says. “I always wear a seatbelt, but I don’t even put it on right away before I start. I do that as I’m pulling out of the block, with one hand, and one hand holding my mug, and my knee…driving. It’s pretty crazy.”

The only possible explanation for Frank’s unashamed confession is that someone or something else is to blame. Caffeine? Techno? It is adult Attention Deficit Disorder, a condition that affects her and thousands of other adults. As a recent TV campaign makes clear, ADD and its cousin, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), used to be considered kids’ diseases. Only recently have psychologists found that ADD is a highly genetic disorder—more inheritable than, say, height—that persists into adulthood. Those same kids who wiggled in their seats and threw spitballs while your math teacher lectured on obtuse triangles? They’re all grown up now, and they’ve gotten behind the wheel. ADD adults are characterized as being impulsive, easily distracted, and unable to stay focused. This doesn’t bode well for their insurance premiums.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina are using a high-tech driving simulator to study ADD drivers. Their research proves what is probably obvious to the rest of us: These drivers are at a greater risk for automobile accidents, speeding tickets, and even road rage than their calmer, less impulsive counterparts.

“If there’s an obstacle in the distance, a non-ADD adult will slow down, check what it is, and make a decision whether they need to pull over to the side of road, stop completely, or keep going,” says Dr. Deborah Anderson. She is a licensed psychologist using the driving simulator to research the effect of ADD on driving. Conversely, she says, drivers with ADD tend to speed up and go around the obstacle before they even know what it is.

Many adults may secretly envy those with attention disorders. It’s an open secret that functional ADD folks can be astonishingly productive. In other words, hyperactivity can sometimes lead to over-achievement. One Minneapolis woman I know spent a recent Sunday running thirteen miles, working a part-time job, keeping two business appointments, going grocery shopping, completing a school assignment, calling her mother, and finishing the day with a beer. She described it as a “restful day.”

Still, this kind of nervous energy has its downside, especially when you try to contain it in an automobile. Back on the roads, Frank recently backed into a parked car and got speeding tickets on two consecutive days. Professor Anderson says Masha and others with ADD are not willfully negligent while driving. Rather, their brains do not have the capability “to naturally consider the consequences of various actions, and choose the one with the most favorable outcome.” Meanwhile, Frank safely makes it to work, even if she occasionally steers with her left knee.—Christy DeSmith

Jasper Johns has long been considered one of the most influential artists in Pop Art. His flag and number paintings, in which he repetitively worked the canvas using layers of encaustic wax, challenged the idea of iconography as art, blurring the division between a highly recognizable symbol and the artist’s creative labor. Johns deliberately chose methods and subject matter that would mask his own identity, once explaining, “I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions… but eventually it became a losing battle.” Past Things and Present is a triumph, punctuated with deeply personal commentary by the artist and an invitation into his surroundings. Many of the works have never been publicly exhibited, and others are from the artist’s own private collection, including some recent intaglio prints that resurrect his Seasons series. Johns lets us into his studio, his childhood, and his admiration for other artists. In the 1983 canvas Ventriloquist, he even lets us into his bathtub, a fitting viewpoint from which to watch the mask of his earlier work being washed away layer by layer. You can catch some of those early pieces in the exhibit Pop3, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Warhol, also running through February 14.
Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Pl.,
(612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org