The Rake Magazine

Month: May 2006

  • from Yemen >> When is a Playground Not a Playground?

    The U.S. Embassy in Yemen was only a stone’s throw from my snug, little brick house. Next door, in a smaller home made of mud, lived my landlady Saida, her four young children, and her mostly absentee husband. I was a twenty-four-year-old aid worker, eager to help in any way I could.

    Saida’s kids were sweet-faced ragamuffins, fascinated by my red hair and delighted when I sat alongside them on my doorstep, laughing and practicing Arabic. They didn’t have many diversions; their only “playground” was a dusty field in front of our houses that was strewn with rusty cans and rotting food and frequented by scavenging dogs.

    Saida’s two older kids attended school, but four-year-old Maisa and five-year-old Abdul did not. Day after day, I watched them play in the dirty lot while, on the other side of the embassy wall, there lay immaculate lawns and an unused swing set. The kids’ friendship meant a great deal to me, and I daydreamed about all the things I would like to give them.

    One afternoon, only a few months into my stay, I decided to bring Maisa and Abdul inside the embassy grounds to play. I knew this probably wasn’t OK, but nobody had told me I couldn’t. I wanted very much to offer something special to my little friends, something that American kids took for granted.

    Holding onto the children’s grimy hands, I rapped on the embassy gate and then caught myself when I heard a repetitive sound. I always seemed to interrupt the guard during his afternoon prayers. “Allahu Akbaaaar,” God is great, he chanted, and we waited quietly. After a few moments, he opened the gate, prayer rug in hand, and gave me a surprised, slightly disapproving look as I sailed past him with Maisa and Abdul.

    The kids didn’t seem to notice the lush grass under their feet, but stood at my side, staring at the swing set. They appeared to have no idea what it was. I walked them over to it and Abdul put his foot on the slide’s ladder. “Yalla,” I encouraged him, go on. After much coaxing he climbed the ladder, and then suddenly curled himself into a ball and went hurtling to the bottom, landing with a thud and a scream. My pride turned into a kind of sheepish alarm as I picked him up and he sobbed in my arms.

    I took Maisa’s hand and led her to the swings. Her body trembled as I lifted her up onto the wooden seat, and her knuckles whitened as she gripped the chain handles. I tried to reassure her, but my gentle pushes only seemed to heighten her fear, and after only a few moments, I lifted her off.

    The kids had clearly had enough. They both seemed relieved when we walked past the silent guard, out the embassy gate, and onto the familiar packed-mud lane. Maisa stayed beside me, but Abdul quickly let go of my hand and went running, straight through the garbage field and back toward his house.

    Susan Narayan

  • Goddess Revealed

    I was beginning to suspect that I was the last person on the planet who hadn’t read The DaVinci Code, and so I remedied that situation last weekend. I like a good page turner as much as the next guy, and this was a good one. But man, I can sure see why this is riling up the orthodox Christians, especially the Catholics. Because if Jesus had a wife, and Constantine chose to unite the Roman Empire under Christianity for political rather than religious convictions, then myths are shattered, the center cannot hold, and some rough beast is certainly starting to slouch.

    The idea of the "Sacred Feminine" is a new one for most Christians. There are no sacred females in Christianity, unless you count Mary, who was a mother, yes, but not the sort of woman that most women, or men, can relate to—notwithstanding the images of the BVM painted on abandoned bathtubs in Stearns County. There was no sex, after all.

    Contrast this with the various other religions of the early Christian era. For example, here’s a description from the Aeneid of Venus, the goddess of love, and the mother of Aeneas, the Trojan hero and founder of Rome. He’s just been talking to her in the woods:

    She spoke, and as she turned away, her rosy neck brightened,
    And from her head breathed the aroma of divine ambrosia;
    Down to her feet flowed her garment,
    And by her step, she was revealed a goddess.

    Jesus certainly never talked about his mother that way, at least according to what we know from the Bible as it’s been transmitted. Venus is, well, hot. And Mother Mary—she’s pretty much the good old androgynous, handmaid-of-the-lord, giving-up-everything-for-the-kid kind of mom.

    People who have actually done their homework on the history of the early church don’t give a lot of credence to The DaVinci Code’s tale of Mary Magdalene as Mrs. Jesus Christ. (According to esteemed medieval historian and oenophile Oliver Nicholson, the Magdalene tale arose in the Middle Ages.) I am old enough to remember when Nikos Kazantzakis’ book, The Last Temptation of Christ, caused an uproar at my high school, years before Martin Scorsese scratched the scab again with his film version. (God bless the Jesuits for disregarding Rome and assigning it to high school juniors.) Jesus and Magdalene were married in that book, too, but since there wasn’t a hot Parisian cryptologist and a murder mystery involved, it sold about twenty-seven million fewer copies than The DaVinci Code.

    Silly history aside, The DaVinci Code does have a symbolic purpose. Dare I say a book about symbols is a symbol? Dare I opine that part of its appeal is its fictional struggle against the patriarchal nature of Christianity and the established church’s hold on the flock? Why not? This is just an essay in a magazine and probably won’t be reprinted in enough languages to tick off the Vatican to the point of excommunicating me. Also, if I do get in trouble, I can always blame it on the Jesuits, and whoever is currently filling Tomas de Torquemada’s shoes will just nod knowingly.

    So why does this all remind me of Michele Bachmann? Beats the hell out of me, but it did. OK, I admit it—it was the sexless obedient servant thing. And maybe we’ll throw in the omniscient overbearing church thing. While we’re at it, the hiding behind the trees at the gay rally at the Capitol and the cowering in the bathroom when confronted by some disagreeable lesbians recall some aspects of the thrilling DaVinci chase scenes, as well.

    Speaking of chase scenes, in the upcoming mad dash across the sixth congressional district, Michele, you can bet, will be playing the part of the Opus Dei-trained and Church-sanctioned albino assassin. She’ll be using the weapons provided by her church, and its armorer, Karl Rove, to try to squelch the story of Patty Wetterling, who actually does symbolize family values. Except, unfortunately for Wetterling, protecting children just isn’t as visually eloquent as the images of the yucky kissing gays that we’re going to be treated to, courtesy of Bachmann.

    In the last congressional campaign, Bishop Mark Kennedy put Wetterling’s pictures in ads right next to Osama bin Laden’s. How’s that for a powerful symbol? (And you thought the Church calling Magdalene a whore was bad.) I can hardly wait to see what Rove and Bachmann come up with this time. We don’t yet know any specifics of the Rovian symbology, but I’m willing to bet it’s going to involve Wetterling officiating at a gay marriage ceremony.

    But, like The DaVinci Code, politics is all about the supremacy of symbols over actual fact. That’s what makes a good story, after all.

  • Restaurant Rage

    Last winter, over the holidays, a restaurant manager I know clocked what she wryly calls the “Best Five Minutes Ever” of her career. Just seconds after punching in, she was called to the bar to break up a couple of brawlers. While showing one-half of the drunken duo to the door, she came across a couple of baddies dealing drugs in the entryway. Upon throwing all criminals out on the street, she was headed to the phone to call the cops, only to be sidetracked by a page instructing her to check out the men’s bathroom. Standing there in the middle of the restroom she found a guy, pants around his ankles, playing his own instrument, if you know what I mean. She had to literally pull up his pants so that she could usher him out without freaking out the diners.

    Now, humility is a crucial quality for people who work in the hospitality industry; the notion that the guest is always right has been deeply ingrained within them. And as guests, most of us appreciate the service we are provided, and we express that gratitude with generous tips. Usually, this arrangement works out just fine, but there are exceptions to both sides of the deal. In recent years, in fact, it seems that I’ve been privy to more and more horror stories about diners. Maybe it’s because finishing schools and etiquette manuals are largely obsolete. Perhaps it’s due to “fine dining” being touted as a form of entertainment unto itself, thus raising the expectations of both staff and guests. Regardless, the upswing in ugly behavior has many restaurant workers questioning whether the guest is always right—and also wondering what the hell has gone wrong.

    More from the local restaurant-worker pipeline: An older, affluent couple frequented a top steakhouse on a weekly basis, and they never failed to find something to complain about. The steak wasn’t cooked right, the wine smelled funny, the forks were poorly polished—whatever the problem was, they voiced their feelings, very loudly, to whichever server had been stuck with them. For a while, management went out of its way to appease the couple—moving their table, switching their server, pampering them with extra attention, and on occasion, a complimentary meal. Eventually it became clear that nothing would ever make this couple happy. A manager sincerely apologized for being unable to meet their high standards and politely suggested they find another restaurant. To everyone’s surprise, the pair kept coming. But from then on, they found everything to be fantastic.

    Bad service should never be tolerated. If your food is cold, send it back. If your server was rude or inattentive, seek out a manager. No restaurant worth its salt wants you to suffer through a meal. Their goal is to have you leave happy and return later, credit card in hand. But a certain set of people seem determined to publicly humiliate or otherwise punish restaurant workers for service snafus. I theorize that these types are often asserting their version of a pecking order. People who spend days cowering in a cubicle to avoid an impossibly demanding boss—or, conversely, clawing their way to the top and stepping on many others in the process—are often all too delighted to blast anyone they perceive to be below them on the socioeconomic ladder.

    Worse still, their chosen scapegoats are charged with the task of trying to please them. The worst offenders, outraged at the slightest mistake (say their Caesar salad arrived without chicken), demand justice. They declare their dining experience ruined, and expect their entire meal to be paid for. How would these people respond should a similar principle be applied to them in their work? Imagine a boss finding a typo in a certain status report and demanding that the offender forfeit a day’s pay as punishment. If this became the norm, employment litigation would sprout all over the place. Yet it seems to have become socially acceptable to belittle servers and bartenders, perhaps because they are mostly younger people whose work is not considered by some to be a “real job.” Never mind that restaurants in this country are a $1.3 trillion business that employs twelve-and-a-half million people—an employment force second only to the government.

    Not surprisingly, booze plays no small role in this rash of bad behavior. Servers can be held liable if a drunk goes off and hurts someone, but the law that decreed this does not acknowledge how delicate a task it is to cut off inebriated people. Drunk people do not like being refused service; rich drunk people seem to like it even less so. Another recent story from the frontlines: A clean-cut man who’d been drinking was cut off and asked to leave an Uptown restaurant. After a short while he returned, claiming his sunglasses had been stolen. The manager threatened to call the cops and asked him to leave, but before he did so, the man responded by kicking her in the gut, leaving a boot-print.

    Some restaurants are taking steps to ban anyone who behaves outrageously. But some good servers are also leaving the industry, tired of suffering the abuse. If this becomes a trend, owners will have to pay higher wages to less-experienced workers, which will only drive prices up and satisfaction down. It’s a bit of a conundrum. Owners and managers must make their guests happy, attempting to turn every complaint into an opportunity to create a guest for life; at the same time, they have to provide their employees with a safe and hospitable workplace.

    But there’s reason for hope. Four out of every ten people have worked in a restaurant at some point in their lives. They can appreciate good service and sympathize with a mistake here and there. If they team up with current restaurant workers, maybe those diners with rage issues will eventually find themselves eating alone, at home.

  • Bird is the Word

    When I first came to Minnesota twenty years ago, I had never taught a class larger than ten students—mostly I had conducted the one-to-one tutorials that are at the heart of the Oxford system. My first term here I was given a class on the Roman Republic that numbered some seventy souls. The learning curve for me was as steep as it was for them.

    After a few weeks I said to my teaching assistant, a clever young lady who had recently graduated from a cut-glass establishment on the East Coast, that I had really no idea whether I was making an impression. After all, though we speak a similar language, I am a foreigner. A few students kindly asked questions in class, but it was all quite different from the va-et-vien of individual tutorials. “What,” I asked, “do I do?” “That’s easy,” she replied. “You set a pop quiz.”

    The following Friday she and I marched into class with seventy sheets of paper, each roneoed with a dozen quick questions, and announced the pop quiz. Roneo, Roneo, wherefore art thou Roneo? I have never felt the temperature in a room drop so quickly—I might as well have walked into a convention of Southern Baptists wearing a false beard and announced that I was the Ayatollah Khomeini.

    One of the questions was concerned with divination, the Roman practice, learnt from their sophisticated neighbors the Etruscans, of examining the innards of the animals they had sacrificed to discover from their shape and size and knobbly bits what combination of divine forces was floating around in the atmosphere at the moment of the animal’s sacred demise. There is even a bronze model of a sheep’s liver dug up at Piacenza in northern Italy in 1877, which has mapped onto it the different divine forces associated with each area of the organ. This should explain that “the Etruscans” was the answer I expected when I asked my class: “Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?” The best answer I got was “Colonel Sanders.” Minnesotans are good souls, and I think they forgave me—I have certainly never repeated the experiment. And three years later, the teaching assistant and one of the men from the class kindly invited me to their wedding.

    Romans thought that birds furnished information about the world not immediately apparent to mankind. The trajectory of events and the pattern of ambient forces could be made out not only from the entrails of the dead but also from the flight of the living. No city could be founded ’til the woodpeckers were wheeling in a favorable configuration. A Roman admiral, told he could not go into battle because the sacred chickens were off their feed, exclaimed, “Let’s see if they will drink,” kicked the peccant poultry over the side of his ship and gave the signal for hostilities to begin. Naturally he was defeated.

    It is not only Romans who found birds made them think. A wild duck passes through the halls of memory, a duck roasted by my cousin, a talented cook fortunate in having friends who shoot more game than they can consume themselves. It came from the kitchen, warm, reeking, rich; from its crisp skin rose a fragrance that would have satisfied the most exacting classical god. The charger came to rest in front of my cousin’s husband, a noted wild-animal veterinarian. He raised the carving knife: “These mate for life,” he said. “Anybody want some?”

    Well, why not? At least it died flying, not flapping in panic on the conveyor belt of a crowded slaughterhouse. Honest men, says the poet Peter Levi, “dive after truth, know nature, fight pretence / admit we live at one another’s expense.”

    This was a memorable bird. And now, years later, I have found just the wine to go with it, a plummy 2004 Pinot Noir from the Hahn Estates in the Santa Lucia highlands of Monterey, south of San Francisco. This wine may be had hereabouts for around thirteen dollars. It has that clear red color characteristic of Pinot Noir, a fine, ripe, fruity taste with soft tannins at the center, only a little acidity, and plenty of alcohol—14.7 percent, according to the bottle, but you do not need to be told—you can taste it. This wine would go with grilled chicken (Hahn is German for cockerel) or summer barbeque, as well as with duck or grouse. Just be sure someone else drives home afterward, unless you wish to face a pop quiz beginning, “Would you mind blowing into this little bag?”

  • "They Smell Fear"

    The rooms in the labyrinth beneath the Christ the King retreat center in Buffalo, Minnesota, are sparsely decorated with religious iconography, and the place has a settled, monastic atmosphere of tranquility. Located on a quiet edge of town, on a bluff overlooking Buffalo Lake, Christ the King advertises itself as a “sacred place for meditation and quiet time.” The facility’s posted schedule is booked with retreats for Catholic singles, engaged couples, parish secretaries, and members of Overeaters and Emotions Anonymous. 

    One afternoon last summer, the small rooms on the lower level of the retreat center looked as if they had been hastily abandoned by schoolchildren who had been having the time of their lives. There were piles of inflated balloons twisted into myriad and occasionally recognizable shapes. Akimbo puppets and stuffed animals were heaped here and there, along with strands of knotted rope, wigs, and scraps of colorful fabric. On an easel in one room there was a large notepad on which was written such strange (and moderately disturbing, considering the context) phrases as “They Smell Fear” and “Don’t Become A Machine.”

    The place was eerily silent, and filled with crepuscular light that was swirling with dust motes. Down the hall, the corridor opened into a large room with a vantage of the lake and a sky that was in the process of being overrun by storm clouds. A group of people were gathered around a long, wooden table, hunched quietly over handheld mirrors and intently applying makeup. Most of them were wearing giant shoes that were embellished with bright stars and polka dots.

    Outside, the tree-covered lawn was swarming with clowns. Some of the clowns were dancing, arm in arm. Some were juggling. Others were crowding themselves into a tiny car, which is apparently a group behavior that is hardwired in the brains of clowns. One clown staggered around in the grass brandishing a shotgun.

    The temperature was almost one hundred degrees, but despite their Technicolor wigs, grease-painted faces, and bright and voluminous clothing, none of the clowns appeared to be sweating. A visitor, who happened upon this scene entirely by chance, watched as two clowns, a man and a woman, took a candy-apple red clown buggy (with a red star license plate and fluttering American flags) for a slow lap around a statue of the Virgin Mary at the far end of the lawn. The statue had its head tilted back and its arms raised imploringly to heaven.

    The clowns, eighty of them, from all over the globe, had traveled to this “sacred place for meditation and quiet time” to spend a week at the Mooseburger Camp for Clown Arts Education.

    The camp, now in its tenth year, is a big deal in the world of serious clowning. Since the 1997 closing of the legendary Ringling Brothers Clown College in Florida (and, in its later years, the Wisconsin Dells), the Mooseburger Camp has been a national and international draw for clowns, whether they be professionals or the sorts of community amateurs that make up a disproportionate percentage of today’s clown population.

    The director of the Mooseburger camp is a petite woman named Tricia Bothun, aka Pricilla Mooseburger. Bothun had something of an archetypal entrée into the world of clowning: Raised in Maple Lake, she ran away from home in 1982 to join the circus. She eventually ended up at the original Ringling Clown College in Venice, Florida, and then spent three years on the road with one of the Barnum and Bailey traveling units. When Bothun left the circus, she returned to Maple Lake and began creating clown costumes—Pricilla Mooseburger Originals—out of a little shop on the main drag. Today, she employs a team of eight seamstresses who help her produce hundreds of customized designs for clients all over the world, as well as stock costumes for the more casual hobbyist. She also travels around the country performing and teaching at workshops and camps, and is active in the Maple Lake Community Theater. It’s obvious, though, that Bothun’s annual camp—and the logistics and networking required to pull it off—occupies a good deal of her time.

    Clowns, you might think, have become something of a dodgy proposition in the age of irony, and there’s no doubt that the profession’s public image has taken a few hits over the last couple of decades. Think serial killer John Wayne Gacy; think Shakes the Clown or Poltergeist; think the Insane Clown Posse; or Stephen King’s It. Think every blundering clown you’ve ever encountered in a small-town parade. The Mooseburger campers seemed either too keenly aware of this fact, or blithely oblivious. Either way, a big part of the camp’s mission is to provide clowns with the skills to do battle with lingering negative stereotypes created by hapless greasepaint amateurs and fear-mongering clown haters.

    Joe Barney, one of the instructors at the Mooseburger Camp, has been a clown for forty-one years, and has carved out a specialty niche with New York’s Big Apple Clown Care Unit. “Ten years ago there was so much clown bashing going on,” he said. “Clowns were considered passé, and there’s no denying that the numbers were on the decline. Clowning was a dying art. That’s all really changing now, and this is the cream of the crop for clown training in the United States. I think clowns are more in-demand than ever, for a variety of reasons. Kids have been fed a steady diet of canned entertainment for years, and live entertainment is such a novelty for them. A clown that can actually work up a decent routine—maybe incorporate some magic tricks, some comedy gags, and material that both adults and children can enjoy—can get steady work.” Barney pointed out that he, for instance, works probably three hundred events a year, mostly in the New York area.

    Although Bothun and her camp staff use classic circus routines as primary teaching tools, they also offer classes in all sorts of specialized skills that wouldn’t have much place in the average circus clown’s performance. “There’s a big difference between what a circus clown does on a daily basis and what’s expected of what we call hometown clowns,” Bothun said. “In the circus, the clown’s job is to get in and get out before the elephants show up. When you’re working in the community, you have to be able to work up close and personal, and often you have to interact directly with a small audience. You really do need a work ethic.”

    Every year, Bothun assembles a crew of instructors with a diverse range of professional experience and skills. “We recognize that we’re part of a weird little subculture all our own,” she said. “People come to this from all sorts of backgrounds and with different needs and expectations, so we try to teach everything.” Bothun will generally have people on staff to teach basics like movement, makeup, and magic, and the camp’s schedule includes classes with titles like “Juggling and Ukulele Lab,” “Gospel and Greasepaint,” “Clowning and Puppetry,” “Bubble Magic,” “The Clown Hat as Your Friend,” “Parades and Props,” “Hospital Clowning,” and “Paper Plate Hats.”

    There’s also a dealer room on site, where the campers can purchase hats, costumes, props, books, and makeup. They can also be fitted for the incredibly beautiful, plus-twenty sized shoes that are handcrafted by Wayne and Marty Scott, the Manolo Blahniks of clown footwear.

    The clowns at Mooseburger Camp spend much of their time in character, and it can be difficult to see them as anything but the characters they play. They have names like Fitzwilly, Popcorn, Skippy Do Little, Toolz, Pastyr Clarence T. Funy Bone, and Little Pat. Some of them are Shriners or community clowns; others are professionals or semi-professionals looking to hone their skills or add something to their repertoire. Still others are strictly amateurs or curious beginners. Among last year’s crop of campers there was a New York cop, a gastroenterologist, a financial analyst, a retired shop teacher, a postman, and the dean of a university in Idaho.

    There was also Angela Knight, aka Annie the Clown, a lawyer from Barbados. “There is a real shortage of clowns in Barbados,” Knight said, in explaining her decision to travel to Minnesota to attend the camp. “The island is 166 square miles and has a population of 265,000, but there probably aren’t more than a dozen clowns and maybe one or two magicians. I’m a government attorney, and I’m thirty-five and childless. I got interested in clowning as a way to sort of balance out my job. I’d gone to the Clowns of America convention in the past and heard about this place. I wanted to be funnier and more magical to watch, and this has been a wonderful experience. You get so much individual attention, and the instructors here are part of so much great history and tradition, and they’re passing on time-honored skills. I’m also grateful to be able to buy the sort of props and supplies that are so expensive and hard to come by in Barbados.”

    On the last night of camp, the Mooseburger clowns stage a public performance in a nearby community. Last year, as the campers mingled outside the retreat center in full costume, preparing to board buses to the Annandale High School football field, Jose Rivera, a mime and clown from New Jersey who was teaching movement at the Mooseburger Camp, was talking about how rewarding it was to go into nursing homes. “It’s amazing,” he said. “It only takes an instant and so many of these old people remember how to dance and fall right into step with you. They remember that rhythm. It’s pretty wonderful to realize that you’ve just made someone remember part of who they once were.”

    After the All Star Clown Show in Annandale, as the campers gathered back at their base in Buffalo for a pizza and dance party, a burly Shriner from Florida by the name of George Dondero was literally bouncing up and down. “I’ll tell you what,” Dondero said. “This place is where you separate the men from the boys. It’s like boot camp, only pure fun. You’ll find out pretty quick if you’re a clown or not, and I just found out that I’m a clown.”

  • Rake Appeal { Sweet Spot

    There is probably no more beleaguered building in all of Minnesota than the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. If there’s one thing both sides of the stadium debate can agree on, it’s how hideous the place is for baseball. Nevertheless, in its twenty-four years, Minneapolis’ “Rec Room” has become surrounded by a nebula of strange little shops, odd industrial enterprises, and food vendors on game days. It is precisely these places that make the Metrodome area so promising to the meanderer.

    A casual walk through the area—the Dome peeking through gaps between buildings, like a mad scientist’s cloud floating through the city—reveals a pleasant mix of old industry, inner-city churches, the greenery of Elliot Park, government buildings and, to the north, the now-artsy Washington Avenue strip. You get places like the Justice Center, where a couple was recently wed by an ex-soap-star-turned-Ventura-appointed judge, and the eye-popping rainbow mural on the Valspar Building, by Peter Busa. There’s even three white clapboard homes with unkempt lawns. This section of the city is a reminder of the days when the game of bat and ball was considered blue-collar, attracting beer drinkers instead of cocktail sippers.

    It is also a pleasure for the greasy-spoon connoisseur. Hubert’s, the famed meeting spot for football and baseball fans, has a fine menu, offering what is perhaps the city’s best BLT. And for eighty-one days during spring and summer (and into fall, if the Twins are lucky) you can lay claim to a wax-paper tray of cheese curds or a corndog dripping with ketchup on the plaza outside the stadium, aka Kirby Puckett Place. Vendors hawk their wares, straining their voices over the pre-recorded train whistle that signals the light-rail train, and you can admire the man whisking cauldrons of hot kettle corn like a modern-day Vulcan. There are children everywhere, goofballs with their scorecards, vendors hawking those scorecards, and crazy scalpers buzzing around like bees in a dumpster.

    Crackpots abound on game days. The Metrodome attracts all manner of street musicians, for example. Just the other day, a guy was scraping a bow across his violin, turning “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” into a spine-tingling affair. There are fireworks. Police officers loaf about with assault rifles in plain view. These are to keep terrorists at bay, for “guys with weapons of mass destruction and stuff,” as one officer put it.

    You can also stop into the musty Dome Souvenirs Plus, owned by Ray Crump, a man who’s also running a museum out back. The Original Baseball Hall of Fame Museum of Minnesota is made of equal parts Twins memorabilia and celebrity photos. Of these, there’s a plethora of country-western singers, from Tom T. Hall to Porter Wagoner, and even a disturbing picture of Ray and his wife with a topless Hank Williams Jr., who lounges not-so-seductively on a cheap motel bed.

    Vikings owner Zygi Wilf has pledged that, should the football team get its new supercomplex in the burbs, he will redevelop the area. But for what purpose? The Dome seems to be the area’s sole raison d’être—aside from, maybe, the few who still punch time clocks over at Valspar Paints. Nevertheless, it’s inevitable that the Metrodome will go the way of Met Stadium or the old Armory, just three blocks west. When it does, the vendors, street musicians, and Ray Crump and his wall of heroes, will probably dry up and blow away, like empty peanut shells.

  • Rake Appeal { Show and Tell

    Gene and Jennifer Oberpriller rolled into work the other morning at about 9:00 a.m. They pulled up in front of One on One Bicycle Studio, the downtown Minneapolis coffee shop/bike shop/art gallery they own, and hitched their tattered, old road bikes to a signpost. Gene pushed his sunglasses into his dark, curly hair as he unloaded Hannah, the couple’s fourteen-month-old, from her Burley trailer.

    It’s hard to resist labeling the Oberprillers as part of the recently coined “grup” demographic—grown-ups who retain their youthful cool, eschewing minivans and the suburbs even as they bear children of their own. For instance, the Oberprillers commute seven miles by bike, almost year round, from their home near Minnehaha Falls, arriving in time to greet the early crowd of fellow bike commuters who file into One on One for their morning brew.

    The pair met as pro mountain bikers, both sponsored by Bianchi; Jennifer raced on weekends and holidays while attending the University of Minnesota, while Gene was able to make a modest income off the sport. He especially relished the itinerant lifestyle he lived on the U.S. race circuit. “It was sort of like being in a band,” he said.

    As with being in a band, bike racing isn’t meant to be a lifelong career. After retiring, Gene did stints as a bike messenger and at the Alternative Bike and Board shop in Uptown. Both he and Jennifer also worked at Quality Bicycle Products, a distribution company in Bloomington. Gene was fired (twice), but Jennifer eventually became the marketing director. Jennifer lived alone during this time while Gene maintained his footloose lifestyle, hanging and rooming with local rockers and hardcore cyclists. In fact, he first discovered the building that now houses One on One—back then, in 1990, it was the notorious Yoshiko’s Sauna—when he took over a room upstairs from the drummer for Soul Asylum.

    These days, Hannah is the most obvious sign of the couple settling down. Jennifer also does the accounting for One on One and oversees the café, while Gene curates the bike-themed art exhibitions and serves as the enterprise’s all-around style director. He selects the various offbeat brands, such as Bianchi and Surly, in which the bike shop specializes, and also deals in vintage bikes, hunting them down from as far away as Switzerland.

    Then there’s the clothing and accessories. Gene believes that cyclists operate at the forefront of fashion trends, and so he’s always on the lookout for cutting-edge gear—everything from seventies-inspired “heritage” Adidas jerseys to One on One onesies and riding socks that assert “Your Bike Sucks.”

    For himself, now that he’s something of a nine-to-fiver, Gene strictly eschews technical garb for the purposes of commuting. Instead, he goes for rock ’n’ roll T-shirts and rolled-up jeans. Carhartt pants are another favorite, especially when made into Bermuda-length cut-offs. He’s also a fan of Swobo, a San Francisco-based line of fashionable-yet-bike-friendly street wear, which includes designer tees and finely detailed jerseys—all without a lick of Lycra. Speaking of polyester, as the mercury pushes seventy, neither Oberpriller will be wearing the sort of high-tech, moisture-wicking fabrics that keep riders cool and dry. Both regard this style as being too fussy. In this matter, it helps that they’ve both put their racing days behind them, so that they can avoid reeking up the workplace. “We just don’t ride fast!” said Gene. “We ride fast enough to get there, but slow enough to not sweat.”

  • Rake Appeal { Road

    The word “cute” was uttered no fewer than five times when I test-drove the Mini. This is a car that appeals to my natural fascination with rounded objects. All those buttons and knobs on its dashboard? Cute. The big, round whatchamacallit, which is a tachometer, as my driving mates reminded me, but which is also, more important, reminiscent of a Swatch watch—super cute! On the exterior, the Mini has these adorable little dimples for exhaust pipes, and I couldn’t help but note the cuteness of these as well.

    But “cute” had to go a long way before I could actually get excited about this car, or any car, for that matter. I suffer a form of “auto-aversion,” common among city-dwelling females and partly attributable to the increasingly complex nature of automobiles: the infinite possibilities for malfunctions, breakdowns, and repairs, not to mention crashes. But it’s also partly due to the men in my life—from dad to brother and boyfriends and now, finally, the boss—who have always been poking their noses into my purchasing decisions.

    That said, being as it is so adorably compact and curvaceous, with ovular details in every little nook, I found the Mini rather un-intimidating as vehicles go. I had similar sentiments about the Volkswagen Beetle back when it was re-issued in 1998. Both of these cars look more like fashion accessories than insurance liabilities. As I slid behind the wheel of the Mini Cooper—an electric blue convertible S Series, to be more precise—I caught myself wondering: How do I look? And why on earth hadn’t I remembered to bring my Jackie O. sunglasses? Cruising by Highland Hills in Bloomington on a spring afternoon, I downshifted to second and slowed to a crawl, just to give all the good-looking joggers cause for checking me out. —Christy DeSmith

    This scheduled test drive was slightly worrisome. There was some question whether the Road Rake and I, both horsepower heads, would be able to overcome the femme factor and just drive. We did, and the Mini did not let us down; although Christy did let out some worrisome noises when we tested its cornering ability.

    As Sarah Britney, the salesperson at the dealership, said, this is a “BMW go-cart.” And if there are two things the Road Rake and I like, they’re BMWs and go-carts. Especially go-carts that will do eighty in third-gear, like this one.

    This car definitely displays its BMW lineage when you take it somewhere near the limit. Acceleration, cornering, and braking are all in the wow zone. (Christy might say the EEEEE zone, coined when we took our first high-speed turn.) The handling is maybe the best I’ve ever experienced in a front-wheel-drive car. If you take a closer look at the car, the reason for this is obvious. The wheels are actually placed at the corners of the chassis, instead of being inset from the front and back, like most cars. So there is almost no lean in the turns, because there just isn’t much to lean out there beyond the wheel base. Unfortunately, this also means there’s damn near no trunk, but there isn’t much of one on a Porsche, either. If you want trunk, buy a Buick.

    When Christy took the wheel, though, the Road Rake and I were holding our breath for nearly the entire ride. We both loved the car for what it was, but dreaded what Christy might say when it was her turn to drive. (If you want to know what that was like, here you go: I drove eighty-three miles per hour in third gear; Christy drove thirty-eight miles per hour in fourth gear.) We were finally able to exhale when it came. “This car is CUTE.”

    Damn, and we—and the Mini—almost got away with it. —Tom Bartel

  • Restaurant Decor

    Does anyone remember the House of Breakfast? It was this little counter-service joint run by two Eastern European women out of a house-front in South Minneapolis. The omelets were decent, the pancakes were fine, but that’s not why you went. It was the walls. Near the counter you could read the menu, which was scrawled on paper plates, but every other inch of wall space was covered in paintings: Pitiful puppies, sad harlequin clowns, waifish girls, and pathetic kittens—all with dark saucer eyes, rendered in the style of those kings of seventies kitsch, Walter and Margaret Keane—stood watch over your every cup of coffee. It remains the only restaurant that I’ve patronized specifically for the décor.

    Obviously, there are other places we go because of the buzz or to soak up a certain vibe, but often that has as much to do with the people attracted to the space as with how the space itself is put together. Would we still hang out at Chino Latino on a Saturday night if it were packed with nattering IRS auditors? The point is, décor and ambience are two distinctly different things. Case in point: The décor at Psycho Suzi’s, in Northeast Minneapolis, is a tacky tiki wonderland—but its patrons and cheeky staff give the place its edge.

    There’s no question that restaurant design—along with great food, service, and people-watching—is a crucial part of the magical and all-too-elusive formula that makes a restaurant successful. But there’s no template to follow, no style guide that ensures success. Note that I’m not including the theatrics employed by themed restaurants, as mechanical dinosaurs and timed thunderstorms are more than decoration; they’re more like a three-year-old’s chicken-finger-fueled acid trip. Those spectacles aside, you can basically define one end of the spectrum with casual-dining favorites like Applebees, which plaster their walls with flea-market finds (or impeccable imitations of flea-market finds). At the other end are fine-dining temples along the lines of 20.21, which artfully decline to put anything on the walls. The issue at hand isn’t whether one approach is superior. The question is: What does this all have to do with the dining experience?

    TGI Fridays, Applebees, Ruby Tuesdays, and the locally owned Famous Dave’s have become expert at the former approach. The collections of vintage photographs, battered musical instruments, wooden sleds, and all manner of other vaguely aged clutter serve to “localize” their restaurants, with the aim being to insinuate the place into the community. All that stuff on the walls is also supposed to grab our attention, make us feel at home, and incite conversation. But in some cases these heaping helpings of junk become a blur—a visual version of white noise that we’ve trained ourselves to ignore. Sensing a growing indifference, TGI Friday’s began reworking its design concept a few years ago, adding more contemporary objects like PeeWee Herman shoes, BMX bikes, and skateboards. The hope is that these things, more so than a Radio Flyer, will strike a chord of relevance with the younger consumers of mozzie-sticks.

    Moving up the scale in expense and prestige, the basic rule seems to be that the better the food, the less crap on the walls. Take the year-old Fugaise, in the East Hennepin neighborhood: an austere, windowless space with grayish walls and dark abstract art by a single artist, Daren Steneman. Some find the heavy color scheme severe, but when the food arrives, it’s clear that the focus is meant to be on the vivid squash soup set before us. As many of us can (and do) passionately argue, food is a conversation-worthy art form all on its own.

    Furnishing a restaurant can be a huge gamble if you’re looking to make a striking impression. Let’s not forget the ill-fated Rock Star restaurant and the first line Star Tribune restaurant critic Jeremy Iggers wrote in his 2002 review: “Loved the food. Hated the décor.” The room featured oversized black-and-white photos of pseudo-celebrities, harsh lighting and horrible acoustics, tacky carpeting that looked like it could have come from Elvis’ attic, and an unfortunate location in the Piper-Jaffray building. You couldn’t get comfortable, but neither did you quite feel glamorous (the only acceptable reason to sacrifice comfort). Not even the amazing dishes from Chef Steven Brown could overcome the drastic décor. But now that he’s at the warmer, friendlier Levain, which is tucked into a quiet neighborhood of South Minneapolis, Brown’s food is rewarded with a consistently packed restaurant.

    In response to an increased emphasis on interior design: Locally, restaurant design has become big business as Twin Cities-based entrepreneurs continue to test new concepts. When they demolished Nora’s just northwest of Lake Calhoun and rebuilt it as Tryg’s, the owners hired Shea Architects, a firm that has created a plethora of local restaurant spaces, from Solera to Famous Dave’s, to come up with something beautiful yet safe. (We might call it “Café Gabberts.”) Bucking this trend, the owners behind a newer Minneapolis venture, Five Restaurant and Street Lounge, hoped to strike upon something fresh by seeking out architects who’d never designed a restaurant before. The result is unexpectedly soft while maintaining a modern edge, keeping the diner at ease while introducing new ideas. Then there’s the much-anticipated Cue, the restaurant in the new Guthrie Theater. With a menu created by Lenny Russo (of St. Paul’s Heartland) and interior design by another well-known firm, the Durrant Group—all wrapped in a building by the vaunted French architect Jean Nouvel —it will be exciting to see whose influence leaves the most lasting impression.

    However, let’s not forget the middle of the restaurant-design spectrum. Call it a laid-back backlash against all the gloss and dough being shelled out for high-concept design, but there seems to be a trend toward a more organic approach to creating a dining room. The colors and artwork somehow tie in with the food (which is why some of us go to restaurants in the first place). The estate-sale finds, local artwork, and hand-carved furniture at Café Barbette in Uptown all work together to give the place its whimsical feel, and fit nicely with a menu that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Midtown’s new Town Talk Diner could have styled itself retro, but didn’t. Instead, the owners kept diner pastiche to a minimum, allowing the old, original counter to be reborn as their bar and evoke the spirit from which their snazzy menu draws. Restaurant Alma, in southeast Minneapolis, is another example. Its clean lines, modern maple tones, exposed brick, and birch branches give the dining room a fresh, natural feel, which makes sense given the menu’s focus on seasonal ingredients. Colors are easy and play well with candle light. Decoration is simple, timeless, and yet the minute we try to soak it all in, it fades to the back, allowing for the simple enjoyment of food and good company.

  • Rake Appeal { Object Lust

    It’s been a few years since Montblanc, the German jeweler, brought out the Meisterstück, the world’s grandest fountain pen. In fact, it was an old design going back to the early twentieth century, but through some kind of marketing alchemy, the pen suddenly became ubiquitous in American malls and upscale catalogs in about 1988. I received one, as a gift, upon graduating from college; it had been one of those presents I told my girlfriend to tell my parents about, and crossed my fingers. The silly thing was as big as a Cuban cigar, and probably the most spendy stock fountain pen one could ever hope to find. I put the price tag at about three hundred dollars. (There are limited-edition, precious-metal versions of the Meisterstück and its competitors, but I like to think that the standard jewelry-store versions top what is reasonable for a normal person.)

    It is, of course, the kind of pen you want to reserve for signing declarations of war and bilateral trade agreements. This is true of fountain pens in general, I suppose. They are a delight to write with, once you’ve mastered them, but they can be a pain to master. Fountain-pen ink has not yet been developed to the point where it will dry as fast as the ink from your typical ballpoint, felt-tip, or rolling-ball pen. This is both a weakness and a strength, because fine pen ink is silky, almost oily as it goes onto the page. It is a widespread fallacy that fountain pens are “scratchy.” They are only so when they have a cheap nib, or when the ink is inferior. Like vintages in wine, you can’t really go by brand. The finest bottle I ever had was an inexpensive, opaque black Platignum that flowed like my grandmother’s chocolate syrup poured over a sundae. I’ve never found another bottle like it, though a well of Pelikan turquoise came close. Also, you can tell a lot about a fountain pen’s owner by the ink color she chooses—blue-black and brown are especially eccentric and beautiful.

    The Montblanc’s main selling point is its nib, which contains both yellow and white gold, along with some dramatic filigree. Although I felt terribly self-conscious about using it to take notes in grad school, I quickly got over that, due to the pure sensual pleasure of using it. When I missed a lecture, I mostly regretted the missed opportunity to take notes that day. I believe I developed a kind of iron grip with my right hand that has—like my brain—atrophied considerably since then.

    A good fountain pen with real gold in the nib will quickly form to the hand of its owner. It will feel as if it intuitively knows the slope of your words. When people ask to borrow my pen, I know it will not work for them. When I first got my Montblanc, I thought it might become an heirloom, something I’d pass along to my children or grandchildren. Surely the price justified that sort of exaltation. But it will never quite write in anyone else’s hand, and that seems a shame.

    A pen like that you constantly worry about. I had several close calls when I left a book bag in a bathroom, or dropped the uncapped pen and watched in slo-mo horror as it pin-wheeled down to the floor, only to bounce off the safe end. Eventually, I retired the Montblanc to my home office; sadly, I don’t use it much anymore. I bought a cheaper and more modest Pelikan, and the truth is, it fits my hand better than that massive Meisterstück. Besides, the first and last peace treaty I’ll ever sign was my wedding license, fifteen years ago. Other than that, I’m not really in the business of signing Important State Papers. But it’s nice to know that I’d be well equipped when the next opportunity comes along.