Year: 2004

Kyan Douglas from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy was due to appear, but he was a half-hour late. The regulars at Boom, the chic gay bar in Nordeast, nonchalantly settled into shiny silver perches around the bar. A few had dinner while the bartender confirmed and poured their usual drinks. Even with a twenty-five dollar cover charge for the main event, and the traffic that kept the celebrity from a timely arrival, the mood was strictly relaxed. The regulars were simply biding their well-groomed time until the pod’s scheduled return to the mother ship. There would be no need for fashion advice around here tonight; Kyan was coming home.

The bartender slid a Sam Adams to a handsome older man at the bar and gave his update: “My therapist won’t let me make any major decisions right now; I just had another divorce.” Next to Sam sat another good-looking gentleman, a single gold ring offsetting the dark skin of his hand, which occasionally touched his glass of white wine. Across the bar, two young couples drank cocktails and spoke like old friends, batting the conversational shuttlecock back and forth. Farther down, two neatly bearded professorial types and a plain middle-aged woman arrived. They accompanied a nervous-looking man with a slight combover. Were they his support group for his first night “out”?

“I know one good thing about breaking up,” said the bartender, patting his flat stomach. “And that’s going back to the gym.” Another regular named Anthony drank a rum and Coke with a girlfriend. She obviously wasn’t trying to hook up with Anthony or anyone else in the bar. “I just like looking,” she said, before shrinking back into her supporting role. Anthony didn’t see any other of his usual friends in the crowd. “All these weird people are freaking me out.”

Just as a woman wearing strappy spring sandals and nude pantyhose leaned in to order a pinot grigio, Douglas arrived. He looked slightly frazzled—no surprise, considering the full day of appearances he’d performed for his handlers from Clear Channel Communications. Douglas, though, looked like he’d barely survived his stop at the Mall of America, where mullets and nose hairs roam free.

If there really were a gay S.W.A.T. team, Carson Kressley (Queer Eye’s snippy fashion guy) would be the bad cop, arriving at the accident scene to check for clean underwear, ready with a naughty double entendre. But Kyan Douglas would be the listener, gently guiding the hapless breeder to the bathroom for a product check. Sending Carson to Minnesota may very well have resulted in a horrible necktie lynching incident. “What the hell are you talkin’ about, puttin’ my tie around my waist like a belt?” Douglas was the perfect fit for a Minnesota visit; locals here seem to like their queers a lot like their ethnic food: not too spicy—well, maybe with just a little “zhoojzing.”

Douglas moved through the crowd, displaying a tasteful medley of queer-eye tips on toast: firm handshake, direct eye contact, receptive and attentive introductions. He leaned in for questions and threw out a big laugh, while executing a perfect sister-don’t-I-know-it upper arm squeeze at the same time.

Asked if it felt good to return to the secret clubhouse where all the eyes were queer, he ducked in to share his answer, “Once I got here I realized I got to say ‘nice shirt’ and ‘nice pants’ a lot more.”

Reminded of the surprisingly transcendent episode in which Douglas coaxed a man out from under his toupee and his mother (and possibly the closet, according to fans on the Queer Eye Web site), Douglas closed his eyes briefly and said, “Yes, that was one of my favorites.”

Kyan Douglas, the patron saint of product, looked a tad overwhelmed by his own transformation to product. Luckily his fans were there to keep him in touch with his perfectly colored roots. As he passed through to the heavy curtains to Oddfellows, where he would dine with people who had ponied up a hundred bucks to watch him eat, a man standing at the coat check said, “No, I didn’t get his picture. If I want one, I’ll just call him. I’ve got his cell phone number.”—Sari Gordon

In December, the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board hired a new superintendent, a fellow who had neither applied nor interviewed for the position. The candidate was not even at the meeting when the board voted 5 to 4 to hire him. The board president, a guy named Bob, simply said that they were lucky to get someone of the candidate’s caliber.

And so I ask the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board: What am I, chopped liver? I didn’t apply for the job either. At the time of the board’s meeting, I believe I was home watching CSI and paging through fashion magazines—and if that’s not not applying for the job, I don’t know what is.

This surely gives perpetual job hunters like me hope for the myriad ways one can land a job. Over my working life I have sent out millions, maybe even hundreds, of résumés. I have gotten rejection letter after rejection letter. I decided to be more proactive and I wrote to all the companies to which I had applied, and simply rejected their rejection letter.

To whom it may concern:

Thank you for your interest in my interest in your company. Unfortunately the position your company has does not meet my specific needs at this time. Therefore, I am requesting the return of my résumé, to be sent to a better company with a better position. I will, however, keep my résumé on file in case another opportunity for which your company may be qualified becomes available.

Sincerely,

Mary Jo Pehl

It is clear now that I have simply shot myself in the foot by actually applying for jobs in the first place. Statistics show that if you don’t send a résumé to a potential employer, it is less likely to get lost in the mail or to be ignored. Experts say that if you do not have an interview with a potential employer who never got your résumé in the first place, you are less likely to say the F-word during the interview process. And now, after the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s bold innovation in the employment process, I’m awfully excited about all the jobs I may be up for that I have no idea even exist.

In fact, I daresay the whole employment scenario would be perfected if, after I were hired for the job I didn’t apply for, I could do the job at home in my pajamas while watching television, making personal calls, paging through magazines, and eating chocolates. Somewhere out there, a team of human resources professionals is about to make me a very lucrative offer for a high-paying position as a chocolate-eating magazine reader. I await.

It was 5:30 a.m. and it was pushing thirty below outside the Kemps Dairy on Minneapolis’s North Side. Mike White whistled a sunny tune as he loaded milk crates into the back of his truck. Like Dick Gephardt’s dad, he’s a milkman. Unlike Dick Gephardt’s dad, he’s still on his route. He delivers five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year—in the snow, rain, heat, or humidity. “Just another day for a milkman,” White said, with a wink. “We’ve done this before.”

The milkman legacy runs three generations deep in the White family. It began with his grandfather, Emmett White, who delivered for the Ewald Dairy on Golden Valley Road in the late thirties. Back then, most of the deliveries were made by horse, although the first Divco trucks were just then going into service.

When people think about home delivery today, they picture mega-companies like SimonDelivers or Schwan’s, operating with hundreds of employees. Mike White is a member of a group of fifty independent milkmen. In a kind of nod to the new competitors on the block, the loose association is called Milkman Delivers. White thinks both the association and the competition are good for his own business, because they promote the idea of home delivery—an idea that has more or less vanished in a cloud of single-occupancy cars headed to the grocery warehouse.

The stars were fading from the blue-black sky as I followed Mike to the door of his first stop. It was a two-story house with a gray Volkswagen Passat parked in the driveway. “These people won’t mind if you come in,” he said. Mike and I walked right into the kitchen without so much as a knock. The mother of the household, Mary, greeted us as if we were family. She was still combing out her morning hair. “Girls,” she called. “Mike’s here.” Two girls ran down the steps to spy on us. “I love my milkman,” Mary said. “I just like it simple. Old-fashioned. I’m not into technology.”

Mike got hooked on the business as a kid. His father, Jim, took him to the dairy to watch the bottles getting filled. “We would grab a chocolate milk right off the line,” he recalled. He helped his dad pack the truck with ice and ran the glass bottles to the doorsteps.

Some of Mike’s customers have been with him for twenty-six years. A few are second generation—kids he watched grow up, now with families of their own. “I have all kinds of customers, from everyday people just scraping by, to some who have so many millions they don’t know what to do with them,” Mike said. He loaded cottage cheese for his next stop. Decades on the truck have made it possible for him to divine the empty spaces in the refrigerators on his route. “Some customers don’t even give me a list. I just put it in the fridge. They come home and it’s all taken care of.”

A typical day spans ten to twelve hours, and he carries as much as sixty pounds of dairy and frozen food into a customer’s home. “I wouldn’t recommend it for the non-hardy,” he said, stooping for a plastic crate. In almost three decades, he’s had a total of two weeks’ vacation. “I don’t break. I eat my sandwich as I go. No time for lollygagging.”

The snow crunched under our feet as we approached a Kenwood home. Mike pulled a doggy biscuit from his pocket. “Secrets of the trade,” he said, as two freshly trimmed poodles circled in the kitchen. Darla, a pretty blond housekeeper answered the door. There was an antique Ewald Dairy milk box at her feet. Milkman and loyal client chatted amiably, but Mike suddenly looked alarmed and stopped short. “I forgot something!” He jogged back to his truck, and Darla looked at me with a coy smile. “Sometimes he brings me a treat,” she confided. Mike returned with a box of orange creme bars.

Back on the truck, I asked him how the milkman was different from the dot-com upstarts, and he laughed. “We’re the guys who show up and the old lady asks, ‘Can you change the light bulb?’” he said. “We deliver. They drop the stuff off at the curb and run.”—John Tribbett

If you hold on to your hat and hustle over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, you might catch the Werner Bischoff exhibition. Bischoff did as much as anyone to define photojournalism in mid-century magazines like Du and Paris Match. His work appears on the walls in sixty or seventy frames, a pretty healthy sampling. The MIA staff have helpfully provided about 940 more images on a CD, for a grand total of about one drop in the bucket of Bischoff’s collected work. Which is a telling conundrum. Typically, no museum worth its endowment can exhibit more than a tiny fraction of what it owns.

More recently, the Web has allowed museums to hold their cards a bit further from their vests. I was pleasantly surprised to find out about the MIA’s extensive photography holdings beyond the Bischoff materials. In an idle moment scanning their collection online, I saw one of my favorite photos ever—a rusty tricycle composed by William Eggleston, titled “Memphis.” Personal obsession and screen resolution being what they are, I called the MIA right away to find out what it takes to get inside to see the real print, in the flesh. Ted Hartwell, the curator of photographs, agreed to be my guide with such eager grace that I wondered if they let just anyone off Third Avenue paw their priceless stuff.

In tweed and eyeglasses with gray hair and a charming smile, Hartwell fits nicely in the MIA’s small, book-lined photography offices. Meeting with him feels a little like talking to a professor in his office. On the other side of an unmarked door, thousands of photographs sit in a sort of platonic netherworld, art waiting to be reclaimed by living eyes.

The room is cold and bright, and it brims with black boxes stacked like drawers on metal shelves. The only hint of treasure within is printed on small white labels. Some bear anonymous catalog numbers, others show off iconic names like Hine, Evans, Friedlander, Muybridge—the heavy hitters of photographic history. Basically, it’s the most comprehensive collection in the region, outside of Chicago.

Though “Memphis” has made its way to the upstairs exhibition gallery within the last year, many works can go years without a public appearance. “What’s on the wall at any given time is only the top layer,” noted Hartwell. Less than five percent of the Institute’s 100,000-piece collection is on display at any given time.

After an appetizer of Gary Winogrand photographs—I’ve always enjoyed his slightly skewed New York street scenes—I asked Hartwell to track down the Eggleston print. In a moment, “Memphis” was perched without pretense in front of me.

To remove the added layer of a frame, to touch the matting and carefully peek beneath the protective film, to look as long as you like—well, think of it as the difference between merely meeting someone and establishing a relationship. You may think you like the look of her, but a relationship implies a whole other level of interaction, a deeper connection. Looking at the Eggleston print in person, I notice more, I relate more. It demands all of my attention.

Hartwell started the collection from scratch about thirty years ago. Through a carefully tended arbor of relationships with photographers, collectors, and donors, he has created a highly personal, stridently “balanced” collection. The holdings do have surprising breadth, ranging from Hartwell’s very first acquisition, a complete set of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Works periodicals, to one of the nation’s definitive collections: the work of Gilles Peress, one of the contemporary artists who pioneered photography in the New Yorker.

Hartwell’s own list of rarely shown favorites from the collection includes both the famous and the obscure. He’s a fan of the relative unknowns Bruce Davidson and Bernice Abbott but is not afraid to embrace the overexposed Edward Weston. At the moment, he’s particularly fond of Adolf Fassbender. If I didn’t know how easy it is to request an audience with all this wonderful art, I’d be jealous of all the alone time Hartwell gets here and how frequently he must revise his list.—Stephanie Xenos