Month: May 2006

Some believe that really good barbeque is made by divine intervention. If that’s the case, then Pastor Luches Hamilton has the inner track. Working out of a tiny space adjacent to his church in St. Paul, he turns out sticky ribs and jo-jo potatoes that answer a higher calling: selling barbeque to raise funds for his church’s youth programs. Even though he does a brisk lunch-and-dinner business Tuesday through Saturday, the friendly pastor doesn’t mind chatting while he cooks—just don’t ask him to reveal the family’s secret sauce recipe. On Fridays when the weather’s warm enough, the operation moves outdoors for an old-time cookout. The prices are almost sinfully humble, too, considering you’re being served a big slab of paradise. NOTE CORRECTION ON ADDRESS: 1150 7th St. E., St. Paul; 651-772-0279; www.pastorhamilton-bbq.com

There are some who would contend that women can’t—or shouldn’t—block, hit, or tackle. But one Saturday morning in late April, the players and coaches who constitute our state’s premier women’s tackle-football team, were demonstrating just how tough the gentler sex can be. For the team’s annual tryouts, the Minnesota Vixen had congregated in the lobby of Klas Center, Hamline University’s student union. Even though there had been a steady downpour that morning, the team held out hope that some promising newbies would show, prepared to run through drills with the returning players. “In the rain?” whined a young offensive guard. “This is football!” howled an elder teammate.

Then Michelle Braun, a veteran center, marched in, her new, custom-made “Zena” shoulder pads in tow. “Are those the boob pads?” asked Sara Schoen, a lithe, thirty-something tight end. Schoen grabbed the silvery, robotic-looking shoulder pads, and fingered the breast plate, as if trying to figure the cup size. The problem with traditional shoulder pads, complained Schoen, is that they ride up. Some women cannot fit them over their breasts, and so must wear this essential equipment uncomfortably high on their shoulders. But these “Zena” numbers, tailored to fit a C-cup by prominent pad maker Douglas, are, Braun asserted, much more comfortable.

The players were dressed in waterproof pants and embroidered team sweatshirts. Bandanas were tied around many of their foreheads, or they wore their hair pulled back into ponytails and buns. Many of the teammates hadn’t seen one another since last season’s finale; as they gathered at four round tables, they dissolved into a huddle of chatter and hugs. Meanwhile, visitors and hopefuls were made to feel welcome. Life partners were introduced. Many women related stories of having played on boys’ football teams. There was even a little gossip; the juiciest tidbit involved the team’s twenty-four-year-old star linebacker, Kim Miller, a tall, thin (but sturdy) player who grew up in a Mennonite family of ten children. Miller, it turns out, is dating one of the team’s coaches, although her teammates seemed uniformly pleased by how professionally the pair has handled their entanglement.

Through all this, a trim, blond-haired young man with a wide smile and sunny disposition was buzzing about. Doug Farwell has never played football—the closest he came was marching band. But he now finds himself serving as the team’s volunteer president nevertheless, lured in by his wife, Carrie, an offensive tackle. Farwell busied himself handing out waivers, checking for proof of health insurance, distributing the player handbook—which included the eight-game 2006 schedule—and collecting player fees (one thousand dollars per player per year—plus equipment). The best thing to come of Farwell’s advanced organizational skills of late: securing the Klas Center Field, a modern, comfortable facility, for the Vixen’s four upcoming home games, where fans will finally be able to get a beer.

Farwell was not the only X-Y chromosome in this fray. The Vixen have seven coaches—all men. Segregating themselves at their own table, the coaches were rarely seen interacting with players. What’s with the all-male coaching staff? Men know the game better, having been given the opportunity to play high school and college football, claimed Head Coach Wayne Erickson. His explanation seemed reasonable enough, but then, venturing an amateur psychosexual theory, Coach Erickson attempted to elaborate, saying, rather quietly, “You know as well as I do that, in certain situations, women tend to become a little headstrong. One woman defensive lineman trying to teach another woman defensive lineman? That’s just not going to work.”

Out on the soggy field, the women were directed through endurance, agility, and footwork drills. A walk-on emerged as a promising candidate for running back. The participants in the passing drills consistently fired precise lasers and bullets; and as it turns out, naught a one Vixen threw like a girl.

“Big girls come with me,” shouted defensive coach Dann Lickness, gesturing with his arm. The self-identified burlier players scampered after him. Down at the opposite end of the field, they practiced blocking exercises. Meanwhile, the leaner quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers continued to pass and catch.

“This brings back so many memories,” said Dave Mora-Clark, a squat assistant coach. Although he had taken refuge off the field, and was now standing under an umbrella, he seemed to be getting only more drenched while admiring the wet fieldscape. Raindrops dripped from his eyelashes. “Now this,” he said, with a sigh, “this is football.”

I’m missing something. Not like glasses or dignity, things easily mislaid. No, it’s something essential, like a helix of DNA that should have come matched with my two X chromosomes. It’s the handbag gene.

I exhibit other double-X-linked traits. For example, I’m exquisitely literate in clothing and shoes. I can identify a handmade buttonhole on the fly at twenty paces. The Tod’s wearer is telegraphing a house in the Hamptons and a loveless marriage to a real-estate developer. The correct pronunciation of “Sorbonne student” is loose, transparent florals worn over a black bra, with emphasis on the eyeliner. See? It’s easy.

But when it comes to handbags, I’m deaf and dumb. Not only am I unable to make a personal statement, I can’t read what others are saying via their reticules. Like intuition, bag-speak is the lingua franca of women. Freud or some other guy with a bit too much time on his hands postulated that women’s wombs are the original tote bag from whence comes our fascination with more visible variations on the theme. Remember Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint, the very definition of femininity, solving perplexing mysteries via the immutable laws of handbag rotation to which no woman was immune? Would they have been caught dead carrying their compacts and tiny, pearl-handled micro-revolvers in a stained tri-color backpack purchased at Cub for four dollars? Unlikely.

Now more than ever, handbags, which often come accessorized with women, loom large in terms of square footage and their imprint on the sartorial landscape. Ergo, my purse disability has become painfully evident and unacceptable. I thereby devised a plan to trigger a handbag sensitivity, like an allergy, through wanton over-exposure.

I started with two-dimensional magazine images of the whole genre—shoulder bags, handbags, totes, clutches, satchels, reticules, what have you. This went surprisingly well. Through intense scrutiny, I was able to discern minute differences between a dispirited briefcase by Chloé for $1,275 and quite a lot of fortified Naugahyde by Target for thirty-nine dollars (clue: the Chloé bag has a leather zipper loop that resembles the key fob of a Hummer; the Target species has a zipper pull that also works as a room key at Motel 6). Repeated exposure made me aware of the importance of hardware—washers, gaskets, buckles—and the recurring bondage theme. For example, Kenneth Cole used Godzilla-weight hardware to wrap, zip, strap, and buckle a purse the size of a Twinkie that would secure a tube of lipstick against nuclear disaster. Irony. I get it. Or I might have, if I had $785. More enigmatic are the many organ-inspired catch-alls. The very shape and color of a healthy kidney, liver, or spleen—what can a bag of this sort possibly say about its woman? Introvert? Cannibal with a credit card?

Obsessive attention to the patterns and rhythms of bags has indeed nurtured a basic facility in understanding the language spoken by handbags. Wicker in the shape of a rural mailbox: Williams College English major does a yoga retreat once a year; bronze paillettes over crocheted hobo: Stops for tanning salons; tank of a handbag, buttressed and buckled: My people will be contacting you. I was encouraged recently when a handbag spoke to me for the very first time. It said, Your Cub-bought backpack has a hole in it and you have left a trail of lip balm and pennies from here to New Jersey.

With his uncommonly graceful way with words, sharp eye for details, and knack for getting along with just about everybody, John McPhee can write compellingly about virtually any topic. His enormous body of work includes books about oranges, geology, watercraft, basketball, and characters both famous and anything but. In his latest book, the Pulitzer-winning journalist turns his attention to the world of heavy transport, tagging along with various freight haulers, from the UPS man to towboat captain, as they go about their business. Everything we eat, wear, use, and own comes to us from somewhere else, and McPhee has coaxed some amazing, seldom-heard tales from the people who make their livelihoods moving all manner of commodities from one place to another.

It sounds like an easy enough job: Just fill in a little box with some scratchy pictures and a handful of words that will make people laugh. For even the best comic strip artists (i.e. Gary Larson, Bill Watterson, and, most recently, Aaron McGruder), however, it’s apparently hard work with a serious burnout risk. Yet for more than twenty years Alison Bechdel has managed to keep her Dykes to Watch Out For strip funny, moving, and relevant by engaging her characters in a world that has changed and grown in step with our own. In Fun Home, Bechdel tells the story of her own deeply sad childhood in a graphic novel that casts a family drama in literary and wryly funny fashion.

How tough would it be to juggle careers as a successful visual artist and an accomplished novelist? Mighty tough, one would suppose, although hardly pitiable. Such was the dilemma for Julia Glass, one of those rare people with bankable talent in two art forms. Having already achieved acclaim as a painter and rug hooker, Glass decided to try her hand at writing and ended up with the 2002 National Book Award for her novel Three Junes. She’s apparently decided to stick with writing for the time being, and is back with a complex new tale about a New York pastry chef who takes a break from her life and her marriage to ply her trade for the governor of New Mexico. The Whole World Over also features cameos by a few characters from the Three Junes, which should please readers who hate to see a good story end.

It seems unfair to brand a writer as talented as Melissa Bank with the increasingly meaningless and disposable “chick lit” label. But there’s no denying that Bank’s Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, published in 2000, was on the leading edge of an avalanche of thinly veiled romance novels that have since come to dominate (and, some say, destroy) women’s fiction. In their defense, chick-lit titles often reflect the realities of modern dating better than anything with Fabio on the cover ever did. Bank’s new book, The Wonder Spot, is a coming-of-age tale marked by abundant cultural wit and intelligent prose. Who knows why the follow-up novel was such a long time coming, but perhaps the hiatus allowed Bank to cultivate a bit of distance from the genre she inadvertently helped create. 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-625-6000