Year: 2004

Thanks for Clinton Collins, Jr.’s comments on gay marriage [Free the Jackson Five, March]. It’s admirable that he uses his column in a way that reflects compassion for people in general. I should mention that I’m straight—not that it matters except that it shows that I’m writing purely out of a desire to commend Clinton and not… yeah, you know. I think it’s ridiculous that so many people can hate something which is natural and doesn’t harm them personally in any way. It’s no different than saying that “non-whites” should drink from separate drinking fountains. I’m twenty-four and I can only imagine that someday I’ll have kids and will be embarrassed to have to tell them what the state of humanity was when I was young. Keep up the good work.
Chauncey Peppertooth
Minneapolis

THE VICTIMLESS CRIME
I just read Clinton Collins on gay marriage [Free the Jackson Five, March]. Thank you for writing such a thought- provoking and insightful article. I could not have said it better myself. If two people want to spend their lives together, it is nobody’s business but theirs.
Lisa Carlson-Douma
Minneapolis

CONFESSION OF A SCENE-STEALER
As the opening act for the run of Puppetry of the Penis I appreciate the acknowledgement and kind words of Sari Gordon, or perhaps Jeff Mihelich, regarding my act [The Rakish Angle, March]. To get a blind, gay man to enjoy my show… well, my work here is done. I thought I might attach a name to the middle-aged woman in the boa and cocktail fog. It’s Darlene Westgor. I’ll be here all week.
Darlene Westgor
Burnsville
PROVE YOUR INNOCENCE
Oliver Tuanis writes, “When Oklahoma reinstated the death penalty after a twenty-five-year moratorium, murders increased.” [“Dead Serious,” March] Doesn’t that statement at least deserve a footnote that the Oklahoma City bombing occurred after the reinstatement? How can we take anyone seriously who omits such a relevant fact? The writer also cites the fact that “108 people have been sentenced to death for crimes they were later proven not to have committed” for the assertion that the system does not work. In my opinion, that statistic proves that the system does work. Show me the evidence of the people actually put to death for crimes they didn’t commit. Furthermore, it is worth noting that those 108 would have languished in prison for life if not for the fact that the specter of death garnered them extra attention. The alleged racist application is perhaps best disproved by the fact that the author cites no statistics showing minorities receive a disproportionate share of death warrants. Instead, the author claims that the death penalty is disproportionately meted out to those who perpetrate their crimes on whites. How this statistic is calculated is unclear. There are approximately 350 percent more white people than black people in this country, so if the likelihood of being a victim is spread evenly over the races, one would expect that statistical disparity to exist. Even if the methodology was more sophisticated than it appears, it is folly to try and claim all crimes are identical. A substantial number of black murder victims are the result of gang conflict. While the circumstances might warrant a capital charge, the passions are not likely to rival those when a completely innocent woman is kidnapped and murdered. I respect the opinions (though rarely the facts) of those who oppose the death penalty. Personally, I favor it and I’ll tell you why. I don’t care if it doesn’t deter crime, if it’s more expensive, or anything else. People who commit such crimes are a stain on our society. Viewing the situation from the perspective of a non-perpetrator and a non-victim, I want the death penalty because it gives me a sense that there is justice. My rationale is admittedly visceral, but at least I haven’t tried to prop it up with fuzzy math.
Robert Gust
Minneapolis

Oliver Tuanis responds: The study of the Oklahoma murder rate covered the period 1989-1991. The Oklahoma City bombing occurred in 1995. If there were any deterrent effect to the death penalty, it should be easily observable in Texas, where there are the most executions by far. The murder rate there has stayed relatively constant for the last several years. As for the stats on racism, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund study completed in 2003 found that, in cases where an execution has occurred since the restoration of the death penalty, more than eighty percent of the murder victims are white, even though nationally only fifty percent of all murder victims are white. (The likelihood of being a victim is decidedly not in proportion to one’s race, as Mr. Gust guesses for the purpose of his argument.) So, if the victims are equally likely to be white or not, yet the killers of whites are four times as likely to be executed—well, you figure it out. Maybe, as Mr. Gust implies, the white victims are more “innocent” than the non-white, although to me, it would be hard to find a more innocent victim than Tyesha Edwards, an eleven-year-old African-American girl who was sitting in her living room doing her homework when she was shot dead. I guess she was guilty of living in a worse neighborhood than most white people. Finally, Mr. Gust makes the most bizarre assertion I’ve heard in a long time: that the 108 exonerated people released from death row “proves the system does work,” because of the “extra attention” they got. “Show me the evidence of the people actually put to death for crimes they didn’t commit,” he says. To do that, I’d have to do some more digging—literally, I’m afraid.

Editor’s note: The Death Penalty Information Center has identified five men executed since 1992 whose convictions have since been called seriously into question. The DPIC points out that it’s impossible to know how many more wrongly accused prisoners may have been put to death, since “Courts do not generally entertain claims of innocence when the defendant is dead.”

Days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, a car bomb desecrated a five-story hotel in Baghdad, killing seventeen people and wounding at least forty. No matter what the complex politics of this act, the truth is that somebody did it because they hate somebody else.

I teach my fourth-graders over and over: Don’t hate people. These kids are so good-hearted, I think they’re really getting it. Then somebody calls somebody else a fatso, and that kid calls the other kid stupid. And one tells me that the other one hates him, and then the other one starts to cry. And I know these kids: one really is afraid of being a fatso, and the other really is afraid of being stupid, and they’re both wounded and angry, and they’re both good kids. Now they’ve got to sort it out and forgive each other, or else the anger festers and turns hard. So I help them listen to each other, and then we start again.

I have yet to find a faster route, a more drastic means of teaching human decency and acceptance. But others have tried. On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Jane Elliott tried. That morning, in the tiny, all-white, all-Christian town of Riceville, Iowa, the third-grade teacher threw out her lesson plans and walked into her classroom with a terrible, powerful idea for one of the most memorable and controversial classroom experiments in American education: the brown-eyed/blue-eyed exercise.
Elliott had talked about discrimination countless times, but still her students carried the persistent assumptions of their time and place—a place without a black person in sight, but with plenty of negative stereotypes anyway. She suggested that it might be fun to divide the class for two days into groups based on eye color; they would pretend that one group was better than the other on the first day, then switch roles on the second. “Would you like to do that?” she asked the class cheerfully. “Yes! Yes!” they chorused, hands raised dutifully in the air.

Elliott explained the rules. Being on top meant five minutes’ extra recess, second helpings at lunch, always getting in line first, and lots of praise and compliments from the teacher. Being on the bottom meant not being allowed to use the drinking fountain (“Brown-eyed children will have to use paper cups, of course”), shorter recesses, no seconds at lunch (“You know those brown-eyeds will take too much”), and constant put-downs from Mrs. Elliott. Inferiors also had to wear cloth collars so there would be no mistaking one sort of person for another.

Elliott watched her normally kind, cooperative class turn nasty within fifteen minutes. Name-calling and fights erupted. Inferior children turned in poor schoolwork. Superior children offered Elliott advice about how to keep the inferior children in line, such as placing the yardstick within reach at all times.
Elliott hated the immediate effects of her eye-color exercise, but believed that it got through in a way nothing else had. She repeated it year after year; today, she tours the globe teaching it to adults, while teachers everywhere have repeated it with students across the grades.

In 1970, ABC News produced Eye of the Storm, a documentary showing Elliott conducting her exercise with her third-grade class. In 1985, Frontline’s “A Class Divided” documented a 1984 mini-reunion of those third-graders, now speaking as adults about the positive effects of Elliot’s lesson. One woman recounts with a potent freshness the hatred she felt for Mrs. Elliott during the experience.

“A Class Divided” is one of the most requested programs in Frontline’s twenty-year history. “I absolutely hate this exercise,” Elliott told Frontline in a 2002 interview. “But the worst of it is that it is as necessary today as it was in 1968.”
I understand why people laud Elliott and her work. But still, I just don’t know. I watch the expression on a small girl’s face some thirty years ago as Mrs. Elliott points out, “Laurie is not ready yet… What color are Laurie’s eyes? Yes, Laurie is a brown-eyed. You’ll notice we spend a lot of time waiting for brown-eyed people.” The camera zooms in on Laurie’s face collapsing. I cringe.

Teaching is inefficient, muddy work. But with all due respect, I cannot imagine doing the brown-eyed/blue-eyed exercise with young children. I’m bound to the challenge of teaching them not to hate without manipulating their capacity to hate in the process. Can children understand discrimination, oppression, or violence without experiencing them for themselves? I think they can, I really think they can. And it is we who must teach them.

Mark Twain was being a contrarian when he said “great writing flatters all writers” because he knew that most writers are constitutionally incapable of this kind of largeness of spirit. Lesser writers—and we are all lesser writers—agree: That was easy for him to say.

Those of us who write for a living are often guilty of harboring vast reserves of schadenfreude. Almost to a person, we are a jealous, spiteful group who cannot abide the success of rivals. And we are all rivals.

Well, not all of us. There is a special class of artist who is so engaged in his own earnest philosophical and spiritual questions, that even the most jealous among us are powerless to feel anything but profound admiration. Paul Gruchow was one those selfless artists. He lived and worked and loved and wrote and despaired and died in Minnesota.

Despite modern restlessness, history works slowly. Gruchow’s influence and significance will not be fully known for decades, but we have long been convinced that he will, in due time, be shelved with John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. In other words, he was among the English language’s finest essayists on nature and the environment and the value of place, and one could certainly make the argument that we need him more today than the world needed his predecessors.

Gruchow had agreed to write for The Rake a few months ago, but he took his own life on February 22. We’d been especially excited to have one of Minnesota’s finest (and least appreciated) essayists in these pages, but somewhere along the line we realized something was terribly wrong. When we last spoke to him about his assignment, Gruchow had just emerged from the hospital, and he was having trouble even remembering where he had been or what he had been doing before that. Much to our impoverishment, we were never close enough to the man to know that he’d suffered with depression for more than twenty years, and that this latest suicide attempt followed four previously unsuccessful ones.

It may be especially fitting that Gruchow’s final gift to the world is a book about his long journey into night. He had recently finished a collection of essays that considered the interior landscape of clinical depression. It is not clear whether this will be published at all; his agent realizes now that it is essentially a 300-page suicide note. But excerpts published in the Star Tribune suggest that this book, like all his previous books, gives a generous and transforming view of a subject as rife with stereotype and misunderstanding as mental illness.

Self-obsession is the fuel of writing. But there is too much writing that reflects the writer’s love of the writer. Gruchow loved the world, the thing-in-itself. His eloquent argument was that the natural world had a dignity and a reality sufficient unto itself; that it does not depend on humans for its innate value, that nature is in man as much as man is in nature. It is heartbreaking that this particularly bright and self-aware spark of nature has fallen on wet ground.

“Psst! How about a case of meat? Good stuff. Great price. C’mere and have a look.” It happened to Joe’s wife one day as she pumped gas on her lunch break. She and a friend followed the peddler to a van in the Amoco parking lot to have a look. It was tempting. The beef was nestled in a box, frozen and shrink-wrapped so tight it looked like dark red ingots. And it was cheap—$130. To make a strange story short, they bought the meat. They split the case, and Joe’s wife drove her share home, where she struggled for half an hour to get it all in the freezer.

Not everyone thinks of beef in terms of “a case.” We all know that a case of beer is twenty-four bottles, and a case of the flu is about ten days. A case of beef, to help you get your head around it, is four T-bones, ten filets, eight strips, ten sirloins, twelve to eighteen tips, and eighteen patties—a five-year supply for Joe and his wife. And Joe was, to say the least, suspicious of the circumstances. “It could be stolen,” he scolded his wife, “or recalled for contamination.” He would exercise more caution, he claimed, if he were buying crack.

Because Joe is me, and because I get paid to do it, I checked out the only lead in the case. On the side of the van, one witness said she saw lettering: “The Meat Guys.” A Dex search yielded a pair of phone numbers. The Bloomington number was disconnected. Messages left at a number in Newport, Minnesota, went unanswered. The website MeatGuys.com displayed the message “The Meat Guys website is temporarily down. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

Inconvenience be damned, I spent a Monday morning driving to the address attached to the Newport phone number. If there was a pair of guys butchering neighborhood cats in some remote exurban garage and selling it to gullible suburban wives, I was going to get the story before the I-Team.

I was greeted in the small front office of the Meat Guys building by the Meat Guy himself, Mike Meyer, a tall, fit thirtysomething in a clean white shirt and jeans. Qwest had been out to fix their phone system last week, he apologized, but the “Spirit of Service in Action” had somehow left them without Phone Service in Reality. Meyer was amused by the cloak-and-dagger story of the clandestine purchase, and explained that drivers with something left over from their delivery routes are free to sell it off. “How do you like the meat?” he wanted to know. My favorite was strip steak, marinated in Worcestershire, olive oil, and wine, grilled fast over charcoal and hickory. The T-bones ended up smoked, shredded, and simmered with garlic, peppers, and onions to make a delicious burrito filling.

Meyer and co-owner Michael Gott have just wrapped up an unexpectedly good first year, with around one million dollars in home-delivery sales, and he chatted for a bit about The Meat Guys’ future. They are opening a branch in Phoenix, and he has dreams of nationwide markets. “My personal goal—it’s kind of goofy,” he mused, “but if we could get the money, I’d like to sponsor a Meat Guys NASCAR car.” I can’t wait to see the decals.—Joe Pastoor

Rick Sordelet knows how to fight dirty. “When you’re going to Wisconsin bars as a college kid, you’re going to get in fights, that’s just a given,” he said. He also knows his Shakespeare. He has choreographed fight scenes for sixty-three productions of Romeo and Juliet, including the Guthrie’s current staging. He’s plotted fisticuffs and swordplay for at least a dozen other Shakespeare plays, not to mention twenty-five Broadway shows, a handful of productions for Disney, the Public, the Roundabout… but I digress. He is a certified fight director, and I guess he talks like one.

“Let’s take the Mercutio-Tybalt fight,” he said the other day during final previews. “It’s about honor, not killing. It’s about humiliating the guy in his own town, so that he has to hang his head low. You got Tybalt calling out Romeo, and the crowd is going, ‘Alright, now Romeo’s going to kick Tybalt’s ass.’ But Romeo can’t kick his ass because of Juliet, so Mercutio has to pick up the flag.”

The color commentary continued: “Mercutio’s not up to par with Tybalt as a swordsman. But he’s a good scrappy street fighter.” Based on that interpretation of the famous brawl in Act III, Scene I, Sordelet turned Mercutio into a goofball scene-stealer who gleefully parries Tybalt’s angry prowess. He grabs Tybalt’s sword and kisses both it and its owner; he leaps with mock-fright into the arms of his page; he pauses to swig from his flask, then sprays a mouthful of booze in his adversary’s face. It’s all great rowdy fun until Romeo, as he is destined to do, bursts into the fray with the cry of a true pantywaist, “The prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in Verona streets!”

Sordelet’s job is to make murder and mayhem seem as real as possible—or, as he puts it, to create “truthful behavior under imaginary circumstances.” As one of the busiest fight directors in the country, he notes that “the sun literally never sets on my work. I have shows in times zones all around the world.”

Born and raised in Duluth, Sordelet described himself as “very cocky” while attending the University of Wisconsin at Superior, where he got his initial theatrical training and was first exposed to stage combat. “I felt like I should be a part of that—it seemed so exciting and swashbuckling,” he said.

He now lives with his wife and kids in Montclair, New Jersey, a short commute from Manhattan’s Theater District. Currently he’s choreographing nearly a dozen productions, and gets twenty-eight emails every night about different shows he’s got onstage in the U.S. These are reports from stage managers, which include notes from the fight captains, the appointed actors in each play who “keep the integrity of the show” and watch over their fellow actors’ swordplay, punches, kicks, lunges, and so forth.

Also helping keep things in line are the “fight calls” preceding each performance, right before the actors get into costume. With Sordelet having returned to the East Coast to work on other productions, Michael Anderson (a local certified fight director in his own right) acts as his on-the-ground assistant at the Guthrie.

“Ready?” shouts fight captain Michael Booth (who plays Peter). “Let’s fight!” The run-through of Romeo and Juliet’s fight scenes is curiously wooden, with lackluster acting and slightly slowed-down, belabored motions. Anderson explained, “This isn’t for show, but more for memory. You can’t fix things that are wrong with the choreography if you’re going full speed. Fight call lets actors look at targeting, distance, and traffic patterns. They can pick out the moments they have to breathe. The slow tempo lets them try things on, and revisit their movements so they become natural, absorbed into the actor’s body.”

Afterward, the actors discussed problems (“we can struggle a bit longer there”), practiced extra-slow-motion groin kicks, and got advice from Anderson. “You’re both tending to stand up,” he cautioned Karl Kenzler (Mercutio) and Alex Podulke (Tybalt) on the last night of previews. “It’s a little bit rote, and that will come back to bite you in the ass, hard. In a real fight, you’re running—either toward the guy you want to kill or from the guy who wants to kill you.”

Sordelet compares theatrical violence with songs in musicals. “The character is saying, ‘I can no longer express myself with words, so I have to sing.’ In some cases, he has to fight. This is where Shakespeare is so brilliant. In Henry IV, Hotspur says to Hal, ‘I can no longer brook thy vanities.’ Or when Macduff sees Macbeth, who’s just killed Macduff’s family, he says, ‘I have no words: My voice is in my sword.’ The idea is so clear: ‘I can’t talk about it anymore, I have to come kick your ass now.’”

Suffice it to say that Romeo’s proclamation, “fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!” unleashes much spectacular pugilism in this production, including stabbing, stage-diving, and an act that would give Mike Tyson (the ear-biter and the boxer) pause. “I know a good fight scene’s not going to save a play if the rest of the production is awful,” said Sordelet. “But even though my wedge of the pie is small in a lot of cases, often it’s got the most berries.” —Julie Caniglia

To lots of people, John Kerry often looks as if he’s brooding or unhappy. But that’s just his neutral expression—his thinking face. Throughout the early primaries, pundits wondered if Kerry “had enough Elvis” to be prez. For that matter, do any of us have enough Elvis?

If you can’t impersonate Elvis, then you could do worse than impersonate a member of the “Memphis Mafia,” the coterie of good ol’ boys who flanked the King in public and hung out with him in private. I recently got to practice my own John Kerry face doing just that.

The circumstances of my service to Elvis were a little weird. Kemps has created a new ice-cream flavor called Las Vegas Fudge. (Did the King’s favorite flavor, fried-peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich, fail to make it out of the test kitchen?) This inspired them to host an afternoon of Elvis impersonations at Ridgedale the other day. My job was to “guard” Elvis onstage. There would be two Elvises (which people oddly kept Latin-izing into “Elvi”).

In a makeshift green room at the mall, I observed the pecking order of Elvis impersonators in action. I also learned that some prefer to be called “Elvis tribute artists,” such as Jesse Aron from Janesville, Wisconsin. Aron is a second-generation tribute artist who as a child watched his father play the King. He was prompt and professional; he brought a pallet of high-tech equipment and his own sound engineer for his performance, and he looked pretty credible to me in a homemade white jumpsuit with flame piping.

To the chagrin of Jesse and the folks from Kemps, the second Elvis impersonator arrived late. He also brought a cassette tape, which was not compatible with Aron’s laptop-based sound system. He was even momentarily stingy with the satin baseball jackets he was expected to supply to the Mafia.

Rick Marino is a famous, grizzled veteran. He has been playing Elvis for twenty-eight years, versus Jesse’s six, and he does not have to fake his Southern drawl. Unlike the kid, he doesn’t mind being called an Elvis impersonator—he’s the president of the Elvis Presley Impersonators International Association and the author of Be Elvis!: A Guide to Impersonating the King.

Marino’s costumes looked expensive—especially the wide, white belt decorated with what looked like miniature brass doorknockers. His manager (he has a manager!) confided that since Marino recently lost seventy pounds, he can now squeeze into a black leather get-up like the one Elvis wore in his 1968 comeback TV special.

Marino’s set was mainly later ballads like “Stranger in the Crowd” and Elvis’s version of “My Way.” As his bodyguard, I wore oversized blue-blocker sunglasses and walked him to the stage, where a couple dozen fans and/or shoppers loitered. While he worked this crowd with a wireless microphone, I resupplied him with scarves to drape around the necks of besotted admirers.

Onstage and off, Rick channeled a weary, late-era Elvis warped by the weight of the world and trapped in the trappings of show business. He certainly was the man, right down to the Brut by Fabergé cologne Elvis favored (according to Rick’s book). It was impressive.

Still, I couldn’t help rooting for the upstart; Jesse Aron nailed a lot of high notes, and his enjoyment of the material—heavy on the seventies, like Marino—seemed more genuine, if that’s a good thing. One of his costumes featured a shiny golden Aztec sundial, just like the one Elvis wore on his last tour. This blinded me temporarily when it reflected the afternoon sun.

Even a half-century after Elvis first shocked the nation by shaking his hips on TV, a Saturday tribute to him at a suburban mall is not without controversy. During one of Aron’s numbers, a representative from Ridgedale came over and whispered into the soundman’s ear. Could he turn down the music? It was bothering some shoppers. The soundman ruefully complied. Even the King bows to commerce.—Dan Gilchrist