Month: May 2005

Clint Maxwell works out of an old creosote-smeared boathouse in East Beaver Bay on the North Shore of Lake Superior. His boat is a seatless iron tub, twenty feet long, like a dumpster with a prow and an outboard. The other day, he was casting off to check his nets. It was a bitterly cold, windless morning. “Just because I’m a commercial fisherman doesn’t mean I don’t get seasick,” he said, standing in galoshes and thick rubber bib overalls, his salt-and-pepper hair a fringe around the bottom of his stocking cap.

There are not many commercial fishermen in Minnesota. For many years, the state has had a strong, official preference for sport fishing, a natural result of several factors. First, there is our self-image as a state full of lakes and lake cabins. Second is the tourism that results from this self-image. Third, there is way too much mercury in most of our fish for it to be sold in quantity and in good conscience to the public. The idea seems to be that you may go ahead and poison yourself, but no one ought to profit commercially from it. Still, there are a few old salts working the largest lakes, especially Lake Superior. (Overfishing and the sea lamprey also nearly killed the commercial fishery by the 1960s.)

After an hour, Maxwell came back with two bins of gasping herring. Each fish weighed around two pounds. It took him thirty minutes to scale and filet the lot, about sixty pounds. This he divided into two piles, one with the skin on, the other without. He is a taciturn but companionable man, the type who finds religion and family life after years of robust living. “These aren’t really herring,” he said with a quiet chuckle. “That’s what the Norwegians called them when they came and settled here, because they look a lot like ocean herring. Actually, they’re whitefish.” Gulls began to gather and cackle at the mouth of the boathouse.

Whitefish have made a comeback since the state began to restrict the activities of mining companies, some of which had been dumping tailings directly into Lake Superior. It is a large-eyed fish with a handsome gun-metal color and a snow-white belly. A seven-year-old herring is the size of a nice walleye; a person would be proud to catch one on a hook and line.

Maxwell grew up on the North Shore, and eventually went to the big leagues of commercial fishing—he moved up to Alaska for the salmon. It was a good living in the mid-nineties, before commercial fish farming. Then, almost overnight, fresh salmon went from a dollar a pound to forty cents a pound. Fishermen were squeezed out by fish farmers. Maxwell took his earnings, invested in Treasury notes, and promptly lost everything. “I went up against the Bank of Japan, and I lost. I still haven’t recovered from that,” he said. He moved back home and took up the nets and the filet knife again. Today, he just wishes to make ends meet, however modestly. “Take a look around this place,” he said, pointing into the boathouse, which contained a couple of pairs of galoshes, a gas tank, an old winch, lots of rope ends, and, incongruously, some worn-out dress shoes. “There ain’t a lot of money in the commercial fishery.”

He razored into a whitefish behind its gills, made a quick, popping turn of the knife, and then sliced down the length of the spine. “I haven’t eaten them myself in a while, because I have to fill my customers’ orders first.” It’s a delicate balance, especially in the early season before summer tourism. The cancellation of a small order—say, eleven dollars’ worth—not only puts Maxwell into money trouble, but it threatens to lead to wasted fish, an idea he cannot abide. “These fish are precious,” he said. By July, demand will be very high.

Maxwell sells to just a few businesses—the Lemon Wolf, which is a small cafe in Beaver Bay, and Cove Point Lodge, a delightful new resort down toward Split Rock. The rest of his fish go to home customers. “Old folks especially,” he said, “because herring is really mild tasting and easy to digest.” That is not the only benefit. Maxwell claimed that a person can eat a normal meal, and then eat a couple of his herring, and lose weight. His visitor suggested that he could be the next Dr. Atkins, and make another million. Maxwell laughed modestly, and cut into another herring with a sharp crack of his knife.—Hans Eisenbeis

So who is that guy who’s seemingly been hogging the karaoke machine for four hours straight in the Hunan Garden bar? He is Ray Evangelista, and he has been offering evening entertainment at this downtown St. Paul restaurant three nights a week, six hours each night, for the past sixteen years. Hunan Garden owner Joe Chang said, “Sometimes people still call and ask, ‘What time is he gonna play?’”

The other night, the crowd was sparse and a little sluggish, but it was still early. The fat Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling swayed slightly, and neon Corona and Miller signs buzzed in the windows looking out onto Sixth Street. Ray stood on the little stage at one end of the room and belted out Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo” while a large-screen TV flickered at the other end. Behind his head, a splashy sign read “Ray Evangelista, One-Man Band.” Between sets, he told the story of how he came to log nearly fourteen thousand hours as the only live entertainment at Hunan Garden.

Ray grew up in the Philippines and got his first gig on the radio when he was six years old. By age fourteen, he was the reigning champion on the Philippine version of Star Search. Later, he had a stint with the USO, where he entertained soldiers with his musical stylings. He eventually landed in Minnesota. Here, Ray flirted with bona fide rock stardom.

In the dining room at Hunan Garden, he sipped water to stay hydrated for his next set, and said, “I used to play at the Glam Slam in Minneapolis. I played with New Nation.” He smiled, took another shot of water and said, “These girls would say, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ and you know, backstage … Because we’d open up with Chaka Khan, and you know … ” He made a star-struck girlish face, rolling his eyes and clapping his hands to his cheeks. Then he folded his hands on the table again and said, “So I’ve felt that before, but that was twenty years ago.” Thus, he wasn’t always a one-man show. It turns out he went solo only to combat his arch nemesis—the karaoke machine.

Ray found his band’s gigs began drying up when bar owners replaced them with cheaper entertainment on most nights of the week. That’s when he decided to go it alone, but there were limits to what he could do. Patrons at Hunan Garden clamored for R&B, soul, and other modern stuff that required more than an acoustic guitar. So Ray followed a time-honored tradition: He co-opted the enemy. He said, “When I first started, I recorded the drums at home and then put in a cassette at Hunan to use as the background music.” He knew he was onto something, but sometimes his new technology cramped his stage presence. He recalled, “Somebody would request ‘New York, New York’ and I said, ‘Just a minute sir, I gotta rewind this.’” Though he eventually worked out those bugs, he still kept his day job at J.C. Penney.

A decade and a half later, Ray is still at Penney’s by day, as a maintenance supervisor, but by night—Tuesday through Thursdays, anyway—he’s “Ray Evangelista, One-Man Band.” Well, except for Thursdays. In fact, on a recent Thursday, Ray and his one-man band sign were nearly obscured by the small army of people jamming with him. He explained the crowded stage. “It’s a one-man show, but I told them, ‘Every Thursday night you guys can just jam with me. Everybody can sing anything and bring any instrument you want.’” So they came.

The previous week, a regular named Stephanie had asked Ray to do “Fever,” a song he didn’t know. He went home and learned it, but now Stephanie was on the verge of chickening out. Alyce, the other female vocalist that evening, was having none of it. “That’s the deal,” she said. “If Ray learns a song, you’ve gotta sing it.” So Stephanie sang. Ray backed her up with electric guitar, occasionally adjusting little knobs and dials on the equipment next to him. When they finished, he took the microphone back and said, “Give it up for Stephanie!”

The secret to keeping things fresh, said Ray, is to do “a lot of recording and try and learn new material so that people don’t get tired of the same things.” And as far as retaining his status as the only live entertainment at Hunan Garden, he said he’ll keep it up for “probably another ten years—who knows, twenty years. I don’t have any contract with Joe. I just keep going and going.”

By eleven, there was more of a crowd, things were getting raucous, and Ray was in the zone. He launched into Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” and his friends jammed along on the bongos and congas. When they hit a feverish crescendo, Ray flipped a switch and colored lights blinked and swirled around the room. A few people cheered and Ray gave a quick smile, then looked down to concentrate on his guitar. When pressed as to whether he still meets women as a one-man band, he said, “Yeah, but I’ve got my girlfriend at home, so …” So he can’t live the true rocker lifestyle? “Well, maybe just a little,” he allowed.—Kelli Ohrtman

Last year, Bob Dylan turned up in a Victoria’s Secret ad, and I’ve been troubled about it ever since. On a possibly related note, a couple of friends recently mentioned their discomfort with “the dudes who seem to be permanently wandering” the larger lingerie departments, who don’t seem to be shopping or accompanying anyone in particular. One was convinced that some stores even put out chairs for them, “to keep them at least from roaming so much.” She’d seen one of these happy wanderers the last time she’d shopped Marshall Field’s downtown. The other said she’d spotted a few at the downtown Target. None of this really rang a bell with me; mostly my visits to Target are surgical strikes, and my occasional forays to Marshall Field’s lingerie section had been pervert-free. Nevertheless, I scratched out a shopping list and decided to investigate.

Marshall Field’s, downtown Minneapolis: I made my way past the children’s clothing, through the party dresses and maternity wear (cruel juxtaposition), past the active wear and into the intimates corner, and sure enough, a middle-aged man with his head tucked was walking quickly to the elevators, shoving a receipt into a crumpled Target bag. I looked for a spot from which to observe, settling near the Hanes thigh-highs. It didn’t take long before I was approached by a sales associate. To establish my plausibility as a customer, I asked her if she thought it was okay to wear hose with sling-back shoes. As we looked for an appropriate pair of sandal-toe hose, I confessed that I was also writing an article, and asked if she ever saw men wandering around the department for no reason. She screwed up her face as if I’d just asked her to smell bad milk.

“Huh-uh,” she said. She stopped to think. “Huh-uh,” she said again. “Except, like, once in a blue, blue moon. Men usually come in who are with someone … ” She trailed off as an Elton John-ish type guy dressed all in black sashayed by and said hello.

“He works here, huh?” I said.

“He works here,” she said.

“What about the guy with the receipt who left a few minutes ago?” I asked.

“He was returning a robe,” she said. I bought a pair of Donna Karan hose that can apparently be worn with sling-backs, and made my way to the escalator.

Field note: Research expensive. Apply for grants.

Victoria’s Secret, Mall of America: A friend agreed to be my research assistant. On a Friday night, we plunked ourselves down on a bench in front of Victoria’s Secret, next to a pale teenager in a black hooded sweatshirt, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets. Men came and went from the store, but most of them were pushing baby strollers (with real babies in them), and each was with a woman. Some couples happily laced hands as they left with those striped bags dangling at their sides. For a good twenty minutes we kept an eye on a man who was pacing in front of the store, looking furtively inside.

“What if the guys who sit on these benches really are just sitting and relaxing?” I whispered to my assistant. “What if they just happened to be sitting here?”

“I asked my husband,” she said, “and he said that any normal guy would go out of his way not to sit in front of Victoria’s Secret, so people wouldn’t think he was a perv.” The teenage boy got up and left. Eventually, the loitering man’s female counterpart emerged from the store, swinging her shopping bags.

Nordstrom, Mall of America: Aha! Spotted. Homo erectus reclined in customer seating, staring at granny panties and gigantic support bras. Playing with cell phone and jiggling leg nervously. Glances at me and my friend. Scratches head and makes phone call as if to appear busy. After call, screws index finger around in ear.

Wife emerges from behind Wacoal display.

Victoria’s Secret, Roseville: I had made the mistake at the Mall of America of identifying myself as a reporter when I’d asked a sales clerk if she ever noticed unwanted male browsers. She told me that she would have to ask her manager before she could answer my question. Her manager directed me to the Victoria’s Secret media hotline.

At Roseville, I talked to the customers instead, and asked two young women who were rifling through a drawer of red-lace demi-cups if they’d ever been bothered by staring strangers. They both said no. “I mean, most of the guys who come in here are with someone and they’re just totally clueless,” said one. “Look at him.” She pointed to a man in his twenties, standing in front of the cash register with the vacant look of someone standing in line at a methadone clinic. From his fingers dangled a delicate beige thong. Both girls burst out laughing. “They have no idea what to do with themselves, so they try not to look at anything.”

It was true; outside of the fitting rooms stood three men, all of whom seemed to be in their early twenties. They all looked supremely bored, even willfully bored, masters in the art of the middle-distance gaze.
I asked one young man holding a woman’s coat and an orange handbag how he liked being in a lingerie store. “I wish they had a place for us guys to sit down,” he said, before his girlfriend emerged and he dutifully helped her pick through a bin of pink polka-dot 32C bras.

My search for the urban lingerie pervert seemed to be proving fruitless. Though, in addition to my earlier Marshall Field’s purchases, I’d now picked up a white T-shirt, a raincoat at thirty percent off, and a pair of espadrilles. Weary and thirsty, I headed toward the food court.

Where were the greasy, salt-and-pepper-haired men? The ones with beat-up tennis shoes, jeans hanging low enough to reveal their cracks, and nylon jackets with “Bear Essentials” embroidered on the back, along with a spirited tableau of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends? Where was the mulleted guy with the windbreaker that said “DAVE College,” shuffling around and fondling merchandise? The pasty bachelor in the brown blazer, who looks just a little bit too long after making eye contact and darts nervously to another display?

I finally found them. At the Apple Store.—Shannon Olson

The Michael Jackson trial in Santa Maria, California, is actually an autopsy. Anyone with a pocketful of perspective understands that the King of Pop has already died a slow public death, remembered less and less for his musical gifts, recognized more for his eccentricities. The best that can be said about this is that it makes most of us happy to be neither rich nor famous.

Autopsies on TV are hot these days (see Law & Order, CSI, HBO’s Autopsy and so on). And luckily for viewers, not even a crab-apple superior court judge can keep Jackson’s salacious postmortem off the air entirely. Using fresh-from-the-courthouse transcripts—they’re public records, you know—and a cast of look-alikes, the E! network’s The Michael Jackson Trial: An E! News Presentation has become an instant basic-cable addiction by delivering the juiciest bits of each day’s proceedings as live-action re-enactments. The producers may have stopped short of building a scale model of the courthouse parking lot, but they do take the trouble to re-create a gallery of faux courtroom spectators. On a sunny spring day in Los Angeles, a visitor from Minnesota was among them.

The actor who plays Michael Jackson is Edward Moss. Unlike the rest of the cast, he has his own dressing room, in which his makeup and fake hair are applied. On camera, he’s pretty much restricted to occupying his seat at the defense table, silent and vaguely wounded-looking. Between takes, he’s very chatty, flirting with a few girls in the gallery and drawing pictures of his fellow cast members. There’s banter among the lot of them; sometimes they take congenial swipes at one another in character.

Because the court transcripts come straight from Santa Maria as soon as they’re released, and because the program is on deadline to assemble each episode as quickly as possible, an actor may not receive his lines for a particular scene until moments before the cameras and teleprompters roll. There are lots of stops and starts, perhaps more than usual, since the production is shooting as little as thirty seconds of testimony at a time. At a couple of points, everyone takes a break simply because there are no freshly edited scenes to shoot. The actual script pages arrive in chunks throughout the evening, presumably after somebody somewhere has pored over the day’s unabridged record and selected which segments are best for prime time.

Some casting has to be done on the fly, too, since it’s tough to say how many or what kinds of actors might be needed until it’s known who actually testified that day. Numerous witnesses have been auditioned right there on the set. But there’s also a lot of downtime. The chatter gets heavy between takes. Cast members and the extras in the gallery volley opinions about the actual trial; a few of the latter even talk to themselves. Others read or doze off. A director frequently asks actors to simmer down (or wake up) and focus as the evening wears on.

On a first take, when the script reveals some new juicy bit of testimony, someone might let loose a bona fide gasp or a click of the tongue. One wonders if the same is true at the crowded courthouse about three hours to the north, and if not, whether the actors here might be corrupting the reenactment, or slandering someone by not looking or behaving like their real-life counterparts.

The Michael Jackson Trial has a few key advantages over most television shows. For one, the dialogue is unimpeachable, coming as it does from court stenographers instead of screenwriters. For another, the characters, including a global pop icon who’s better known than any pope or president, were fully developed from the outset. Not even the sexy coroners on CSI enjoy such assets.

As the night drags on, a bewigged actor named Rigg Kennedy, who is playing defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr., echoes an objection that took place in the real world several hours ago. The visitor realizes with a sinking feeling that she’s missing CSI.—Sarah Benedict

Just the other day, tickets for the next Cirque du Soleil show in Minneapolis went on sale. Cirque du Soleil has a lot to answer for in these parts. Five years ago, Charlie and Julie Zelle took their children, Charlotte and Nick, on a family trip to see the trampoline queens and contortionists at a Cirque show. It appears to have changed the course of Zelle family history.

“Nick was absolutely transformed,” Charlie said proudly.

“Afterwards he started hanging from bedsheets tied to the banister.”

Nick, now ten years old, is hard at work chasing his big-top dreams. He takes both private and group aerialist lessons, studying, among other things, hand-balancing and trapeze. His parents don’t lose sleep over his threats to run off with the circus one day; rather, they’re encouraging him. Charlie takes his son shopping for tight-fitting, glittery costumes. He recently rigged an eighteen-foot gymnastics structure in the backyard. In February the family even traveled to Montreal so Nick could audition for a part with Cirque du Soleil.

In the Twin Cities, there are enough brave parents like the Zelles to sustain two circus performance schools: St. Paul-based Circus Juventas and Minneapolis-based Xelias Aerial Arts School. Nick began his studies at Circus Juventas soon after his first encounter with Cirque du Soleil. Then, as his enthusiasm grew, he moved on to study with Xelias, regarded as the more “serious” circus school. (Juventas and Xelias offer classes for adults, too. It is said to be great exercise—fear undoubtedly burns a lot of calories.)

Lessons are a little pricey, but no more than sending a child to an average dance studio. At Xelias, a one-on-one lesson costs eighty dollars, whereas a more affordable group class costs fifteen dollars. It’s certainly less expensive than hockey, which many parents regard as the money pit of all sports. Nick, standing four feet tall and with round, daydreamy eyes, doesn’t want to play hockey because he can’t stomach the thought of falling on the ice.

The Xelias studio is in a small warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis. Inside, the floor is carpeted with mats and crash pads. Aerialist playthings hang from the ceiling like dense jungle undergrowth, giving the place a tangled feel. Students can climb as high as thirty feet, but generally hover at a comfortable ten. During a recent session, Nick performed an exhausting hour-long circuit workout that took him from trapeze to ropes to silks (huge diaphanous drapes suspended from the ceiling). Then, after pausing to give a visitor a wet-noodle handshake, he completed an acrobatic routine of round-offs, handsprings, and backward tucks. Soon he was supporting his own body weight on a high hoop and doing no-handed “dead man” dismounts. After his feet hit the floor, he raised his chin, stuck out his chest, and stretched his thin, white arms toward the sky with a little flourish. Then he glanced over to see if anyone had been looking.

“I’m torturing the children,” joked Meg Elias, a professional aerialist and founder of the school, who was drilling another student through sit-ups and pull-ups. (The would-be aerialist has plenty of earthbound exercises.) All along, the lithe and bendy young Nick bounced between apparatuses. He made a string of elegant poses on the high hoop, even touched his heel to his head while hanging upside-down from the thing. Then he gracefully climbed and wound himself in the silks. In between sets, he panted and sipped orange Gatorade.

Most of the training is directed toward a performance, the aerialist’s version of a recital. At one such event, two years ago, Nick performed thirty feet above the audience on an apparatus called the Spanish Web. It is a long, hanging rope with a high loop in which the aerialist can tie a hand or a foot. Nick’s little wrist was knotted in, and a seemingly wicked grown-up aerialist on the ground violently twirled the rope cowboy-style. Nick’s rigid body quickly picked up RPMs, like a ceiling fan turned to high. It was a sight that induced not just gasps, but actual knuckle-chewing. Charlie remembered, too: “Nick was spinning around and the whole audience went Ohhh! Everybody was thinking, What kind of parents would let their kid do that?”—Christy DeSmith

Everybody seems to have a blog these days. Your angry libertarian neighbor probably has one, not to mention the cat hoarder across the street, and the tortured teenage poet up the block. In the public mind, unfortunately, the excitable political bloggers tend to be regarded as representative—or perhaps symptomatic—of the whole phenomenon, and they certainly hog the media attention and the traffic. That’s a shame, because there are all sorts of other blog niches—literature and music, for instance—where the spirit of the enterprise takes on the quality of a lively and civilized dinner party conversation, rather than the cacophony of Babel.

In Minnesota, there has been an unusual proliferation of baseball blogs devoted to everything from the history of the game to hardcore statistical analysis to general Twins love.

In the Twin Cities, there are dozens of good baseball blogs and a number of excellent ones. A fascinating give-and-take has developed between the creators and readers of many of these sites, to the point where there now seems to exist a genuine symbiosis in which the various blogs feed off each other for traffic and fodder.

In a couple of notable cases, a real sense of community has been achieved. John Bonnes’s already successful Twins Geek site (www.twinsterritory.com), for instance, has evolved this season into a group blog in which readers are welcome to become members and create their own regular posts, or simply join in the fray through the comment threads.

Anne Ursu’s Batgirl (www.anneursu.com/batgirl) has in the last year become a true phenomenon that is generating the kind of traffic and reader enthusiasm that would be the envy of most political bloggers. Ursu is a Twin Cities writer (she has published two novels, Spilling Clarence and The Disapparation of James) and a lifelong Twins fan. With the help of her husband and her brother, Ursu launched Batgirl early last season. The site’s colorful logo, lively voice, and truth-in-advertising slogan, “Less Stats, More Sass,” quickly distinguished it from the prevailing boy’s-club vibe among local baseball blogs. Its unabashed enthusiasm for the Twins, along with an entertaining mix of imaginative prose, playful graphics (including Lego re-creations in lieu of a highlight reel), and interactive game threads have also garnered Batgirl a huge and fiercely loyal audience that is too large to be dismissed as a mere cult.

That audience includes Twins manager Ron Gardenhire and, apparently, the majority of the players in the clubhouse. The crowning achievement for the Batlings thus far has been the creation, earlier this season, of a short animated DVD starring Gardenhire and a handful of Twins, entitled “Oh Five, The Musical!” Gardenhire got his hands on a copy, allegedly called the team together, and showed the clip in the clubhouse to uproarious laughter, creating in the process the most high-profile legion of Batgirl fans to date.

On a recent Friday night, I talked Ursu into accompanying me to the Dome to see the Twins play the Angels. An acute observer of detail, she immediately took note of the World Series trophies on display in the Twins office, something I hadn’t noticed in nearly a half dozen years of trekking through there en route to the field and clubhouse. I am, of course, a Batgirl fan, and well aware of her loyal following, but I wasn’t prepared for the reception she received at the Dome that night. It was humbling, to say the least.

As we made our way through the bowels of the Metrodome to the field for batting practice, Ursu was greeted like a celebrity singer of the national anthem by virtually everybody I paused to introduce her to, from clubhouse legend Wayne Hattaway to the beat writers who cover the team for the papers and wires, and even the batboys.

As a rule, women are still seriously underrepresented in the press box at a baseball game, but Ursu settled in and held her own—it surely helped that the place was packed with Batgirl fans. Although she seemed to be sincerely thrilled to meet Andy Price, the Twins’ game-day ringmaster and the genius who invented Twingo (the fan participation game based on Bingo), she managed with considerable and obvious effort to avoid breaking the press-box interdiction against cheering.

After the game, which the Twins won 7-4 behind a gutsy performance from starter Carlos Silva, we ventured into the inner sanctum of the clubhouse. When Ursu was introduced to Gardenhire in his office, the Twins manager reacted with almost terrifying enthusiasm, and gave her a spontaneous bear hug. He followed us into the clubhouse, announced Batgirl’s presence to Joe Mays, Johan Santana, Terry Mulholland, and bench coach Steve Liddle, and even taunted Mulholland by singing the veteran lefthander’s single line from “Oh Five!”: “My life is over.” Mulholland looked at Ursu with a bemused expression and deadpanned, “What’s that all about?”

From that point on, everything else was pretty much a blur. I got bored as Ursu and Lew Ford yakked about video games for what seemed like fifteen minutes, and walked over to talk with Torii Hunter, who was nursing a giant ice pack on his knee. When I told Hunter that Batgirl was in the clubhouse, he went … well, batshit. He hobbled across the room and waited patiently as Ursu and Ford continued their conversation. When I finally got Ursu’s attention and she turned around to find Hunter standing there, her impressive composure wobbled noticeably for the first time. Hunter expressed his admiration, requested copies of the DVD, and gave her a hug.
“I’m sorry,” Ursu apologized to Hunter. “I swore I wasn’t going to be a gomer.”

“Oh, man, that’s all right,” Hunter laughed. “We’re all fans in this clubhouse.”—Brad Zellar

Not much has changed in the hoarse conversation about pro sports stadiums here in the Twin Cities, at least not in the last five years. Public antipathy and skepticism remain about the same, which is to say very high. If decision-makers have learned anything, it is that one does not speak about a new stadium and a public referendum in the same breath. Almost every poll in memory has shown a clear majority of Minnesotans rejecting the idea of public funding for new sports facilities. Yet here we are again. The latest plan to make its way through the daisy chain of hearings, committee meetings, and newspaper editorials would build a $478 million downtown ballpark for the Twins, to be funded mostly by raising sales taxes in Hennepin County.

Sports professionals and fans seem to be taking advantage of the public’s exhaustion with the subject. It is hard to deny the success of the Xcel Energy Center. New stadiums in many other cities certainly raise the pulse of billionaires everywhere. And if the University of Minnesota can drum up thirty million dollars in seed money from TCF Bank, surely the Twins and the Vikings can do the same. Oddly, public outrage also has mellowed with time, as the threat of leaving has time and again turned out to be a feather-filled bluff. Minnesotans will not be blackmailed into an immediate payout, but if the empty threat is repeated for a decade, perhaps we’ll eventually cave.

At some point, though, Minnesotans need to accept certain unpleasant realities. The more inflexible we are about a public payout today, the more likely it is that we’ll pay twice as much tomorrow. It is not a particularly righteous thing, but professional sports are permanently woven into our civic identity. The fact is, we see ourselves as a Big League city, and we will not stop seeing ourselves that way if the Twins decamp to Iowa, or the Vikings move to Nevada. In other words, only a fool would fail to see that, within five years, we’d be paying top dollar to lure professional sports back to the Twin Cities.

You disagree? Let history be a guide: The National Basketball Association approved moving a Detroit basketball team here in 1947. That team cost $15,000, and thirteen years later, the Lakers moved to lakeless Los Angeles. Three decades later, the Timberwolves cost $30 million, the going rate for an expansion team in 1989, and we shelled out $104 million for a new facility. The Minnesota North Stars packed their bags and left “the state of hockey” in 1993. Seven years later, the Wild expansion fee cost $80 million, the team price tag rounded up to about $116 million, and St. Paul coughed up $175 million for a new arena.

Thus it seems to be a question not of whether we’ll pay, but how much and when. Our main problem with the present plan is part of a larger, more general gripe. Just as the cities of blue America pay the bills for red America, it’s generally assumed that people in the city will shell out for what is a region-wide amenity. Normally, this is justified in one way: People who use the stadium will pay for it. But that is not exactly how it works. For years, those of us who live and work here have been forced to pay higher prices—whether or not we are buying tickets at the Target Center or the Metrodome. If you come downtown, you already pay a higher rate of sales tax, there are plenty of fees, and parking costs are almost criminal. Thus there has been a slow but perceptible outflow of leisure dollars from our downtown districts to our suburbs, where parking is free, taxes are anathema, and surcharges minimal.

However, now that the Twins have delineated “Twins Territory” (discovered to be roughly the entire state for which the team is named), why not reduce the burden for any proposed stadium by further spreading the cost? A microscopic sales tax increase statewide would easily pay for an amenity all Minnesotans can appreciate and use and lend their name to. We should stop punishing the city for being so popular.

Last summer, the “Space T.U. Embrace” project performed for the first time at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. Space to embrace? Space tee-you embrace? Why so cryptic? There was definitely buzz around Toni Pierce-Sands (“T”) and Uri Sands (“U”). They had launched their experimental project the year before, at the University of Minnesota, and the rumor was that the couple had created something unusual and captivating.

That was immediately clear at the Southern, as the muscular Sands powered across the stage with weightless precision and god-like intention. He was a revelation, effortlessly sculpting space with an original blend of African and Indian, ballet and modern dance, symbolic and ritualistic moves.

His perfect complement, Pierce-Sands was long, lean, and lithe as she gathered the space around her; then she turned loose-limbed goddess as she and Sands became the core of “Lady,” with the project’s entire cast—fifteen dancers of varying skin tones, ages, and sizes—engulfing them in a celebration of grace and generosity. Little question remained as to what space the dancers were embracing. This was a performance of uncommon openness, and the audience reciprocated with emotional enthusiasm.

In the year since that performance, “T” and “U” have transformed their experiment into a proper dance company, complete with nonprofit status and new name, TU Dance, which debuts with a program of premieres this month (June 16-18 and 23-25 at the Southern Theater, 612-340-1725). Just as one of the Twin Cities’ most beloved companies, Jazzdance by Danny Buraczeski, was performing its final concerts and closing a remarkable fifteen-year chapter in local dance history, TU Dance was making a commitment to some kind of longevity. Coincidence? Perhaps. More likely the turn of events is a testament to the fertile ebb and flow of creativity in the local dance community.

Still, it’s not every day that dance companies get founded here, and so the question remains: Why start a company? Why here, and why now? Sands and Pierce-Sands have enjoyed fruitful, high-profile careers as performers, in the U.S. and abroad. Sands’ choreography is in the repertories of numerous dance troupes. “We wanted to grow as artists and individuals, and to bring that growth into our community,” says Pierce-Sands of their decision. “The dance world has given us so much,” Sands adds; creating a company is a way for the pair to give back.

But behind that contribution is a mission. “The Twin Cities is at a point where art isn’t reflecting the cultural richness that exists here,” Sands says. “So we decided to create a company that demonstrates that diversity, as well as the expertise of this area’s dancers. We think audiences, even people new to dance, will gravitate toward that.”

The pair trace the origins of TU Dance back to Johnye Mae Pierce, who, according to her granddaughter, Pierce-Sands, was the first African-American woman to work in downtown St. Paul (she operated an elevator). Grandma Pierce’s support was unwavering as Toni grew up at Minnesota Dance Theatre, joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in New York, moved to Paris to dance with Company Rick Odom, came back to St. Paul to have a son, returned to Ailey, and, eventually, began dating the company’s charismatic star, Uri Sands.

“I met Uri twelve years ago in Philadelphia. He was dancing with Philadanco, and I was visiting a friend who was the rehearsal director,” recalls Pierce-Sands. “He was topless and wearing black spandex jazz pants,” she adds, laughing. “I honestly thought he was a little cocky at first.”

Two years later, they met again at Ailey. “It took time for us to get to know each other, because we were both involved with other people at the time,” Pierce-Sands says. “Uri very much kept to himself and wrote a lot in his journals. He’s a thinker and that’s what attracted me to him.”

The true test of their devotion came when Pierce-Sands returned to St. Paul to raise her son and be close to the rest of her family; she also had offers to join the faculties of the Minnesota Dance Theater school and the University of Minnesota dance program. Sands followed for two reasons: “Toni and walleye fishing,” he says. (An avid angler while growing up in Miami, Sands fishes Minnesota’s rivers and lakes, often with his stepson. Last year, his wife bought him a fishing boat for his birthday.)

After briefly dancing with James Sewell Ballet, Sands became a Minnesota Dance Theater company member and resident choreographer. In 2002, he signed on as a dancer and choreographer with North Carolina Dance Theatre in Charlotte, where he’s been stationed about half of the year. “It’s a lucrative situation for me and my family,” he explains. But after a couple of years of watching the couple run hither and yon, Grandma Pierce sat them down. “She told us, ‘Why don’t you guys try to work for yourselves and make your own stuff look good, instead of making everybody else’s stuff look good?’” says Pierce-Sands. “That really inspired us.”

The duo started off with research, assessing foundation support, opportunities for performances, and the variety of dance artists and companies already in the Twin Cities. “We were looking for something we could piggyback on, some way to enhance what the community had started,” says Pierce-Sands. While they’re hesitant to say they discovered an unfilled niche, the couple did find one characteristic troubling. “The Twin Cities has one of the most diverse communities I’ve ever seen,” Sands says, “but its audiences are segregated.”

Audiences, he argues, are loyal to specific niches—ethnic, ballet, modern, improvisation, dance theater, or even ballroom—but they rarely cross into other disciplines. TU Dance aims to attract those various niches, in part by featuring dancers schooled in a variety of disciplines, who “reflect the cultural diversity here in the Twin Cities,” he says.

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Among the company’s eighteen members are guest artists from Complexions in New York City and Alonso King’s Lines Ballet in San Francisco—both of which have African-American artistic directors and repertories with work inspired by the African-American experience—and from North Carolina Dance Theatre. For local representation, TU’s founders cherry-picked from Twin Cities companies, including Venezuelan charmer Abdo Sayegh, a longtime company member of Minnesota Dance Theater; Stephanie Fellner, the petite powerhouse from Ballet of the Dolls; and Penelope Freeh and Peggy Seipp-Roy, who are dynamic regulars with James Sewell Ballet. The exquisite Mary Ann Bradley was a Jazzdance member, and also performs with the postmodern troupe ARENA Dances.

In other words, TU Dance may aim to draw together and integrate audiences, but it will not sacrifice artistic excellence. “They [Toni and Uri] are driven to be an exemplar of high-quality dance performance,” says Jeff Bartlett, curator of programming at the Southern Theater. “Actually, they’re somewhat intolerant of a mindset that allows for anything less. For them, that’s not okay.”

A third component of TU Dance’s strategy is accessibility. Pointing to the long-term success of their alma mater, Sands says that Alvin Ailey’s shows consistently sell out because the company’s works “speak to the human experience.” Similarly, the pieces he has choreographed for TU Dance “reference particular cultures, social situations, or life events. Accessibility comes through work that taps into the emotional, spiritual, and psychological aspects of our being.”

Audiences may find other ways into TU Dance’s work, adds Pierce-Sands. “One of the lessons we learned at Ailey was that you could bring your father, who doesn’t know anything about dance, but he enjoys the music. That’s making dance accessible. We don’t have any expectations on how some
one should look at dance. We just try to give audiences as many opportunities as possible to grasp something meaningful.”

Sands and Pierce-Sands didn’t just look locally for dancers; teachers, choreographers, company managers, and presenters throughout the Twin Cities offered advice, especially on the mounds of paperwork necessary for incorporation and tax-exempt status. “As we launch this endeavor, one thing in particular we’ve found is that nothing in life is done on your own,” Sands says. “The dance community is helping us form this company.”

The Southern’s Bartlett has been instrumental. “They have good heads on their shoulders,” he says of the couple, “and part of why they do is because of their experience outside this town, specifically in the Ailey company. A life in that company educates you about the reality of the dance world, it provides a lot of tools, and gives you a glimpse of what success looks like.”

Danny Buraczeski also played a critical role. “He’s an incredible artist and mentor, whether through advice or example,” says Pierce-Sands. “Does his company folding make us apprehensive? No. Actually, we feel even more compelled to continue.” Her partner sounds equally determined. “The only way we know to start a dance company is like the only way we learned how to swim,” he says. “Just jump in the water.”