The Rake Magazine

Month: September 2006

  • Politics at the Piano Bar

    Somewhere in the archives at the Richard M. Nixon museum in Yorba Linda, California, is a photograph of Nixon playing the piano in the White House with his wife, Pat, sitting in the foreground, clapping and singing along to some popular show tune.

    I was reminded of this scene recently while sitting stage right at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown, listening to Alan Fine entertain a standing-room-only crowd with his own piano compositions as part of an evening of “Piano and Policy.” No, Fine’s wife wasn’t singing along. But Fine is an old-school Republican, like Nixon, and apparently a man of some intellectual depth.

    In the lobby before the show, Fine campaign workers were hawking his book, an impressive-looking hardcover called Empower Your Self: A Framework for Personal Success.

    But the Republican faithful who filled Jason McLean’s cabaret weren’t there for the reading—or for the policy discussion that would follow the concert. They were intrigued by the notion of a political candidate doing something other than campaigning.

    “I love anything that’s different and out of the box,” said Barry Hickethier, a Northeast Minneapolis Republican who took a break from his own campaign against State Rep. Diane Loeffler to stop by. “Besides, if you have special talent, you might as well show it.”

    Hickethier was one of an army of young Republicans who showed up for the gig, a turnout that seemed to indicate something of a resurgence in the city’s long-dormant GOP. When I asked McLean whether the event might cast aspersions on his own political leanings, he suggested that any assumptions would be futile. “I think I’m a Republican, but I just don’t understand Republicans,” he said.

    He does seem to understand—and maybe even admire—Fine, whose daughter attends the same swimming class as McLean’s. “My first meeting with him was in a Speedo,” he noted.

    You or him or both?

    “He was in the Speedo. I’m more modest.”

    How did he look?

    “He was ripped.”

    Fine does look pretty trim for a 44-year-old business consultant and college lecturer. He got a nice intro from one of his campaign workers, and made his way through the crowd like a president making his way down the aisle in the House of Representatives to give the State of the Union address.

    But once at the piano, the maestro turned out to be less formal than the setting. “Don’t you feel like we’re on a music set?” he asked, as he surveyed the crowd.

    But he quickly launched into “God Bless America” (this is a bunch of Republicans, after all) before sitting down at the keyboard and warming up with a little “Chopsticks” and a bar or two of “An American in Paris.”

    “I didn’t write that,” he quipped.

    By way of explanation, Fine said he’d had a dream last December in which his late father asked him why he hadn’t been playing piano. The incident sparked a series of compositions. “It was kind of an eerie feeling, a conversation between me and my dad,” he admitted.

    The three short études that followed were parlor pieces, the sort of easy-listening classical music designed to produce a pleasant grogginess after a couple of glasses of wine. On number four, Fine said, “I think I’ll try to wing one without my music.”

    Moments later, he changed his mind: “I think I’ll get my music.”

    Much laughter and applause.

    Fine played eight pieces in all, displaying enough virtuosity to convince the faithful that he was no piker. But the evening was dragging a bit. Three young men sitting near the American flag planted by the bar got up to leave. And when Fine asked, “Is it okay if I sing a song?” the applause was rather muted.

    “Have you heard of South Pacific?” he ventured.

    Polite silence.

    “Well, I’m not going to sing anything from South Pacific,” he said, laughing, and he offered a lovely rendition of “That’s All,” the 1952 Alan Brandt and Bob Haymes love song that cropped up most recently on American Idol 5.

    “I can only give you love that lasts forever . . . ,” he crooned, and I wondered whether maybe there would be a CD. But before I could ride that idea to its conclusion, Fine finished up with a spirited, “That’s all, folks.”

    Later, Fine told me that it had been 15 years since he last performed in public and that he’d actually scheduled the concert before he decided to run for Congress. But he was happy to play during the campaign, he said. “It lets people know I’m a human being.”

    I wanted to bring up the Nixon analogy, but I found myself distracted by the nearby presence of Jens Christensen.

    Christensen, dressed this evening in cutoff denim shorts held up by thick suspenders, served on the Minneapolis City Council from 1965 to 1974, the year of Nixon’s resignation, back when Republicans ran the city. So I asked him about his reaction to the lively turnout of young Republicans and the polished performance of the city’s GOP standard bearer. Could we be seeing the resurgence of the Republican Party in Minneapolis?

    He allowed that the crowd was “a good mix” but said it’s a conservative resurgence he was pining for.

    Nixonian? I suggest.

    “I’m more of a Gingrich fan,” he said.

    And tonight’s piano player?

    “I need to check him out more,” he said. “Where does he stand on abortion?”

  • Park 'n' Pray

    At the former St. Croix Hilltop Drive-In Theater, on Sunday mornings from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the Cougar lies down peacefully with the Mustang, the Falcon with the Sunbird, and the Cobra with the Impala. These worship services, held by Trinity Lutheran in Stillwater, are the longest-running show at the Hilltop, which is about a mile north of the Stillwater lift bridge in Houlton, Wisconsin. For twenty years, rain or shine, the faithful have crowded their autos into the lot at this 1960s-era single-screen drive-in, and propped Bibles against their steering wheels.

    There are other drive-in churches in the Twin Cities area (Augustana Lutheran of St. Paul holds summer parking-lot services), but Trinity Lutheran is the only service held at an actual drive-in. (The theater closed in 1991, and the land is now owned by a member of the Trinity congregation.) The curtain will soon be coming down for good, however, when nearby Highway 35 is expanded to a four-lane divided highway in 2008. In the meantime, a committee is searching for a new outdoor location, but most drive-in worshippers lament the decision to pave this particular paradise.

    Sunday mornings at “Drive-In Trinity” might overall resemble a thriving car dealership, but attending church here is in many ways like worshipping at any other church. Congregants sing hymns, pray, and listen to a sermon—but all from their automobiles. Deacons walk past with wicker offering baskets, and arms stretch from car windows, proffering donations. Able-bodied worshippers leave their cars to take Holy Communion in front of the movie screen; those who can’t instead turn on their headlights, and celebrants bring Communion bread and wine to them. (Cars sometimes have to be jump-started when drivers leave their lights on throughout the service.) Pastor T.J. Anderson, who has been with Trinity since April, understands that churches must change with the times. While at St. Andrew’s in Mahtomedi, he created the “noisy service,” where energetic youngsters are free to run amok. Founded in 1856, Trinity is “always asking, How can we be innovative?” Anderson said. Having never seen a drive-in service before this year, though, he worried that “it wouldn’t feel like a real worship service. And I was wrong.” The only concession he makes in preaching to a sea of windshields is to use more theatrical gestures. For instance, in illustrating the concept of strength in faith to the assembled vehicles, Anderson did an exaggerated Hulk Hogan-style bicep flex. When he called for an “amen,” the response was a joyful noise of honking horns and the occasional high-pitched compressed air siren. And when the faithful are moved by their preacher, they don’t wave their hands, but flick on their windshield wipers.

    Tom Thiets has attended the drive-in church since the 1980s. Back then, the Hilltop functioned as both a Saturday-night passion pit (where God only knows what went on in the cars) and a Sunday-morning place of worship. Thiets, who is forty-eight and works as a trade-show supervisor in Stillwater, recalled that when his buddies first went to movies there, “it was a place to party and hang out with people. Now, years later, we sit in the same place going to church. We changed and so did the drive-in. But it’s still a very good gathering place.” The atmosphere is relaxed: part tent revival, part tailgate party. Many of the faithful are active types, dressed for boating or the golf course, and it’s common to see vehicles with kayaks or motorbikes in tow. Other congregants set up lawn chairs, combining their devotions with a little sun worship. Some even arrive on horseback.

    On the last Sunday of August, about 350 people worshipped at the drive-in, decisively outnumbering the assembly at Trinity’s home base in Stillwater. “We might have fifty percent more people at the outdoor service than in the traditional church,” said Pastor Anderson. “We’re inviting people to come and be themselves, come unshaven, in their pajamas, with their pets. In a building, it’s like we’re supposed to be quiet and reflective. The drive-in worship allows this kind of different freedom. I would say it’s fun.”

    Beautiful, too. No church in town has a finer ceiling. “Most every weekend, we see three or four eagles soaring on the air currents over the St. Croix Valley,” Thiets said. Appropriately, the welcoming song at a recent service was “On Eagles’ Wings.” “It’ll be sad when the drive-in closes,” he said, “but we’ll find a way.” Amen to that.

  • from Mumbai { What Next?

    Twelve hours before the U.S. government issued a terror alert for its citizens in India, I stopped by the Fatima Burqa Collection shop in Mumbai (officially known as Bombay until 1996). Located on Ebrahim Rahmatulla Road, a teeming shopping street in a crowded downtown Muslim district, the diminutive outlet is distinguished from its neighbors by the stately, headless mannequins draped in black silk in the entryway. Standing next to one of them, I peered inside. Peering back at me, behind the counter, was a thin, middle-aged man with a hennaed beard, wearing a skullcap. I adjusted my Twins cap, but I couldn’t fool him—or myself.

    “They probably thought you were the police,” laughed Rohit Shah, a friend who is president of the Bombay Metal Exchange. It was a few days later, and we were driving past the Victorian splendor of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station. Since terrorists bombed Mumbai’s commuter trains on July 11, killing at least 183 people, the terminus has been considered a major terror target, and security has supposedly been tightened. But from the backseat, I saw only beggars standing in the doorways. “There is nothing that anyone can do,” Rohit said. “In Bombay, we are in God’s hands.”

    Lately, God has been rough on Mumbai. If it isn’t terrorism, it’s an unusually powerful monsoon. I had come to Mumbai to report on India’s burgeoning recycling industries and rode into town during a downpour fierce enough to wash out roads and create car-sized craters in highways. My plan was to spend two days touring recycling facilities located in the city of Surat, north of Mumbai, but upon my arrival my contact—let’s call him Mr. S—informed me that his driver was terrified of the rains. Surat, home to two-and-a-half million people, was ninety percent underwater as a result of mismanagement of dam reservoirs during the monsoon.

    The next afternoon, as consolation, Mr. S’s driver arrived at the Hilton with instructions to ferry me to Mr. S’s country club. I had been watching the rain from my room all day, and I was anxious to go. But my enthusiasm soon waned; traffic was totally gridlocked due to washed-out roads. During long, dead stops in the middle of downtown, I watched from fogged windows as Mumbaikars—some in saris, some in business suits, and some in rags—waded barefoot through water that ranged from ankle- to knee-deep.

    Three hours and twenty miles later, the car pulled up to the gate of the club. Waiting for me were Mr. S and his friend, Mr. E, a manufacturer of brass ballpoint-pen tips. We retired to the empty, wood-paneled bar for drinks and lamb from the tandoor. My seat faced a glass wall that looked onto a pool overflowing with rain. “For the last three years, the monsoon has been very bad,” said Mr. S. “Unusually bad.” When I suggested that global warming might be the cause, he erupted into a high-pitched giggle. “Something must be wrong,” he replied, and ordered another round.

    Two days later, I was still stuck at the Hilton, awaiting word as to whether I could visit recycling facilities in nearby Sylvassa. As I lay in bed, CNBC reported that the U.S. Consulate in Delhi was advising U.S. citizens in India to maintain a low profile. Apparently, “individuals associated with al-Qaeda” were planning to bomb hotels, markets, and tourist sites, and special police units were being assigned to vulnerable and sensitive areas in Mumbai. One such site, it was noted, was the Air India headquarters next to my hotel. I walked out to the street, where I found the Air India building flanked by two traffic cops armed with bamboo walking sticks. Four other traffic cops sat, unarmed, on the stairs of the building, chatting amiably. Not exactly reassured by this show of force, I sought comfort by taking a twenty-minute walk up the street to the Gateway of India, Mumbai’s most popular tourist site. Aside from an admittedly larger regiment of traffic police standing guard, one of whom even sported a pistol, there was little indication that any serious effort was being made to halt potential attacks, despite the fact that more than fifty people were killed by a car bomb here in 2003.

    I called Rohit. He asked if I was keeping a low profile. When I admitted that I had, out of curiosity, just visited two likely terror targets, he chuckled. “In Mumbai, after the train bombings, the trains were running again in six hours. In London, after the bus bombings, the city was shut down for days.” He paused, and I waited for the moral to this story. “Anyway, Mumbai people are strong because they place their fate in God’s hands. You’ll see.” Actually, I had seen enough. Back at the Hilton, I noticed that the tall, fierce-looking Sikh guards who stood by the door were now augmented by two slight men in pale blue uniforms emblazoned with patches that said “Monitron.” Neither was armed. As I paused to pick up a FedEx package at the front desk, I noticed the pretty young concierge who had helped me change my departure flight from Mumbai. “Monitrons,” I said, nodding at the new security presence. She smiled politely in response. “Are you enjoying your day, sir?” she asked.

    Adam Minter, illustration by Charles Spitzack

  • A Thrift Affair

    Shopping is supposed to be about getting stuff and the resultant happy glow of ownership. Yet how did it come to be that retail, as we know it today, is based around wanting but not necessarily getting? While it’s counterintuitive, it does explain the stacks of miserable, desperate-looking people at the mall. Jeans, perfume, boobs—there are always better yet unattainable models.

    Let us observe a different shopping paradigm—that of Savers, the world’s largest for-profit thrift-store chain. Savers is about getting stuff. This explains its stores’ universally buoyant ambience despite their rawboned appearance and their clientele, many of whom have every reason to be miserable or desperate: seniors who forgot to contribute to their 401(k)s, madonnas with children at their feet, college students living on thirty-seven dollars per semester, roofers, writers, people who got laid off in 1995, people who live with a lot of cats.

    A recent trip to the Savers on East Lake Street in Minneapolis got off to a glad start as a woman flowing with robes and children exited. One cub was skipping and energetically pulling the cord on his new (to him) See ’n Say. Another walked in awe as the sun glinted like a million rubies off her red sparkly shoes, the ones with the tag still stuck to the bottom. Inside, Shakira was on the sound system as a middle-aged guy inspected a pair of size-nine women’s knickers. It was Steve Miller time when a chick with impressively architectural hair and I both reached for some six-inch, clear-acrylic platforms. When she saw they were size eight, she said, “Uh-uh, I need size nine-and-a-half.” But she watched as I tried them on, and kindly said I could really carry them off. Go on, take the money and run. A bouncing, shiny-red, hundred-percent-rubber dress turned up for $4.99. The Hansons mmmm-bopped, and a large woman sang along as she flipped through miles of jackets representing the design inspirations of everyone from Jaclyn Smith to Balenciaga.

    Outside the dressing room, two generations of a Hmong family waited restlessly until the narrow door opened and tiny grandma stepped out, looking positively transcendent in a floral dress, plaid men’s sport coat, stocking cap, and black Chuck Taylors. It might have taken her three days to quit smiling as her family gathered around, approving. Rock my body …

    Family-friendly and family-run, Savers is firmly grounded in reality shopping—the type of shopping in which thirty dollars can net a decent, even hip, wardrobe, or maybe a couch. The seeds of this enterprise were planted by Ben and Orlo Ellison, who worked with the Salvation Army in the 1930s. The next generation, Bill Ellison, opened the first Savers in 1954 in San Francisco and is succeeded at the helm by his son, Tom Ellison. Savers now runs more than two hundred stores in twenty-five states, Canada, and Australia. There are five here in the metro area, including the newly opened Maplewood location. A business that expands into Canada and Australia instead of, say, Japan and Switzerland cannot be accused of grandeur.

    Kaycie is a suitably pragmatic supervisor for a place that calls Miami-divorcée-goes-bad a dress. She started out pricing at the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, store and did a stint at the Bloomington location before transferring to St. Paul. Willingness to relocate is one of the things Savers looks for in an employee. “That, and a good work history,” she said. “They like to know you’re a hard worker.” In-store announcements are broadcast in English and Spanish, and the checkout staff, in particular, makes frequent use of second languages, though that is not required. In fact, diversity of customers, staff, and merchandise is what Kaycie likes most about her job. “Every day is different,” she said, expecting a wild day, as always, on the upcoming fifty-percent-off storewide sale. But lately, Tuesdays have been especially busy. Tuesday is seniors’ day, with forty-percent off Savers’ already modest prices for those fifty-five and older.

    Along came a wizened optimist, sporting an eclectic ensemble, who paid for a silk tie in coins. Noting the butter-soft, hand-stitched Donald J Pliner boots clutched to my chest, he smiled and said, “Blue tag. Good deal.” Blue price stickers were fifty-percent off that day, making these boots, which once cost someone hundreds of dollars, $6.49.

  • The Rituals of Boundaries

    The ancient Romans had an annual religious celebration called the Terminalia. It consisted of neighboring landowners coming together at the marker that divided their land to give thanks to Terminus, the god of boundaries. At the end of the Roman year, an altar was built, a sacrifice of a lamb or suckling pig was made, children offered grain and honeycombs, the fire was lit with coals brought from the families’ hearths, and the neighbors would feast on the riches they have shared with the god and each other. As the Roman poet Ovid explained it in his Fasti, “You [Terminus] are the limit of peoples, cities and vast reigns; Without you, all land would be strife.”

    Now that the political boundary lines have clearly been drawn after the September primary, would it be too much to hope that candidates concentrate on the common concerns that merit discussion, compromise, and possible solutions? Evidently and unfortunately, the answer to that question is a stentorian yes.

    The primary victory of Keith Ellison as the DFL congressional nominee in the Fifth District is the best wedge issue the Republicans could have possibly hoped for. Ellison represents the “perfect storm” of everything Republican strategists would like people to be afraid of. He’s African American; he’s Muslim; he’s liberal; he’s personally disorganized; he filed his taxes and other government reports late; and he said some really stupid things when he was a college student. Except for the African American and Muslim parts, he sounds a lot like me.

    Then there’s Alan Fine, the Fifth District Republican candidate. “Alan Fine will be a mainstream voice, and the kind of consensus builder the 5th Congressional District needs to cut through the partisan rancor”—or so says the quote from Ron Carey, Chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, on the home page of Fine’s website. From Fine himself, though, we get this last week: “[Ellison] is unfit to represent the voters of the Fifth District. … He is the follower of a known racist, Louis Farrakhan … a person who believes that the white man is the anti-Christ, a person who believes that Jews are the scourge of the Earth. I’m personally offended, as a Jew, that we have a candidate like this running for U.S. Congress.” (Did anyone besides me think it odd that Farrakhan would be misquoted to the extent that he would imply being an anti-Christ would be a bad thing?)

    If this is what we get from a “mainstream consensus builder,” I naturally wondered what a partisan hack could come up with. As if in answer to my question, Senator Norm Coleman, who is also Jewish, weighed in: “I think folks in the Jewish community are going to have to look closely at that, with his associations with Farrakhan.”

    Hey guys, remember the last guy who tried the “Self-Righteous Jew” argument? Does the name Rudy Boschwitz ring a bell?

    To cap things off, that old admirer of consensus building, Chairman Carey himself, tried to stick Democratic candidates Amy Klobuchar and Mike Hatch to the Ellison-Farrakhan tar baby, calling for them to “let all Minnesotans know if they support Ellison.” (As of this writing, Klobuchar and Hatch have bravely not commented.)

    Sounds to me like Fine, Coleman, and Carey are toeing the party line—a line drawn by someone in Washington to emphasize that some of us are on one side of it and some on the other. You want some strong circumstantial evidence of the party hand? Fine refused to answer Strib columnist Doug Grow’s question about whether he wrote his anti–Ellison statement himself. Evidently, he can play the “no comment” game just as well as Klobuchar and Hatch.

    I’m not saying Democrats aren’t engaged in similar guilt-by-association tactics, although they usually don’t so blatantly rely on religious differences. Their core strategy this year is to associate every Republican candidate with George Bush, Iraq, Katrina, tortured prisoners, gas prices, and warrantless electronic eavesdropping. Calling Bush a tar baby would be a gross underestimation of the Democrats’ allegorical aspirations. The Democrats hope Bush will be the whole damn La Brea Tar Pit of politics. If their wish comes true, the symbol of the Republican Party will morph from an elephant into a mastodon and be sucked down into oily oblivion.

    If both parties’ proscriptions prevail, your choice in November boils down to this: Who is more repulsive—a candidate who once associated with the blithering idiot who heads the Nation of Islam or a candidate who once associated with the blithering idiot who heads our nation?

    Two thousand years ago, Roman citizens got together at the cairn that divided them to celebrate the common interests that united them. Today, we tear up that pile of rocks and use the stones for weapons. No matter who wins in November, the feast we consume after our version of the boundary ritual will be bitter indeed.

  • “A Good Eye”

    The antique barber’s chair in Rocco Altobelli’s office—brick-red leather, brass studs, beautifully carved wood—stands as a reminder of his roots. Having just graduated from high school in Dilworth, Minnesota, the young Altobelli dreamed of becoming a photographer. But he opted for a safer bet: attending his uncle’s beauty school, Josef’s School of Hair Design, just across the state line in Fargo. “My father worked on the railroads,” Altobelli said. “My options were limited.”

    But the tide started to turn when, in the late 1960s, Altobelli traveled to London to study with Vidal Sassoon. There, he encountered more sophisticated, geometric cuts. This was the first indication that, rather than small-town barber, Altobelli was to become a big-city style icon. And while he’s done hair shows around the world and his products can be found in salons across the country, Altobelli has kept his business small and family-operated. His chain of salons—the first of which opened in St. Paul in 1974—have never reached past Rochester, Minnesota.

    Today, Altobelli looks more Geppetto than Giorgio with his signature shaggy paintbrush mustache. His eyebrows, still dark, are tipped with white, and silver sideburns accent his green eyes. But a penchant for refinement is confirmed by his Italian shoes—brown with an aerated white strip along the tongue. “I bought these in Japan,” he said, hinting at the shopping trips that are a favorite diversion while traveling. “I only have time to shop while out of town.”

    These days, you won’t find Altobelli behind a chair at any of his salons. “My son, Nino, is in charge of the artistic end of the business,” he said. “I basically oversee and work on new stuff.” By that, he means alto bella, his salon’s product line, and Greenway Research Lab, where salon products are tested and developed. As of late, Altobelli has been working on his dermAstage skin-care line. A forthcoming product is still under wraps, though Altobelli hinted at a seed-oil blend that’s applied by roller so that tiny holes can be punctured into the skin—a revolutionary method for the penetration of antioxidants, he claimed.

    As things turned out, Altobelli grew up to become a photographer of sorts, too. He proudly showed off his eight-by-ten photo (pictured here) of a cattle roundup at his friend’s ranch near Deadwood, South Dakota. This image points to another of Altobelli’s most fervent passions—horsemanship. (He collects artisan saddles and even keeps his own steed, Peso.)

    More of his work, mostly black-and-white images, lines the hallways of the Rocco Altobelli corporate offices. On display are photos of models sporting looks ranging from the Dorothy Hamill to the Farrah Fawcett to the shag—three ’dos Rocco swore would never die. The photographs chronicle the various hairstyle fashions Altobelli has seen in his thirtysome years in the business—some beautiful, some bizarre. They also favor the drama of shadow, lending much to the sideways, almost deconstructivist gaze Altobelli casts upon his models and the often geometric sculptures atop their heads. Of his artful use of the lens, he said: “Hairdressing is a lot like photography. They’re both very mechanical, and they both require a good eye.”

  • Slick Stick

    I used to be an overdressed runner. For example, at my first marathon, Grandma’s in 2002, I sported a pair of cropped cotton pants despite the steamy weather that day along the North Shore. The reason for this is that I, like many runners, was born bearing an extra-heavy burden, so to speak. But it’s not what you think; it’s not the half-moons stuck to the hips that plague so many women. In my case, rather, the saddlebags are slung on the other side, around the inner thighs. Long pants were my attempt to wrangle them.

    Aesthetically speaking, I don’t find inner-thigh fat at all displeasing. Like large breasts or shapely hips, it’s one of those essential, carnal ways in which females differ from males. The plumpness draws a womanly curve that’s especially appealing, I’ve found, to any number of men. From a biomechanical perspective, however, “thunder thighs” aren’t always so pleasant. Though mine barely brush against each other when I’m walking, the instant I pick up the pace, they begin rubbing violently—unless they are harnessed. The result is that wearing shorts puts some of the tenderest flesh on all the human form at risk for getting rasped into red, smarting rawness.

    A few months after that first marathon, an angel swooped down from the heavens and, masquerading as a clerk at my favorite running store, handed me a stick of BodyGlide. Previously, I had relied on petroleum jelly, which was successful in ameliorating but not eliminating some types of abrasion, as long as they occurred from the waist up. For instance, Vaseline shielded my chest from the stabbing seams of my sports bra. But it could not solve the problem of my thighs. Before I’d run so much as a mile, friction would have whisked the jelly away, and my thighs would be chafing along just as before. I had resigned myself to wearing Lycra yoga pants and biking shorts, which kept friction at bay but made me feel stickily and sweatily confined.

    BodyGlide changed everything. It isn’t greasy in the same way Vaseline is because it was invented by surfers who didn’t want to muss their expensive neoprene wetsuits. Neither is it gunky or sticky. Instead, BodyGlide is a silky balm. It’s made from plant-based triglycerides, better known as aloe vera and vitamin E, so in cold, windy weather, it staves off cracked, dry skin, too. Then there’s the packaging, much like that of a deodorant stick, which makes it a snap to apply. Amazingly, BodyGlide doesn’t absorb into the skin, nor does it rub off. One inner-thigh application lasts through an entire marathon. And, of course, this allows me to comfortably wear short-shorts (including those sexy, retro, Steve Prefontaine-inspired looks) again, for the first time since, oh, about fourth grade.

    So delightful have I found BodyGlide that it has inspired me to experiment with secondary uses. It’s wonderful when wearing summer skirts on especially hot, sticky days, and a few daubs on the ankles relieve the dig of the hard leather on those shoes that are too fashionable not to wear. Indeed, BodyGlide has ascended my list of household necessities and now ranks right up there with toothpaste and AA batteries.

    This product is hardly ubiquitous, however; it’s carried only at running specialty shops and other stores, like REI, that cater to endurance athletes (and ironically, are often staffed by skinny folks with no use for BodyGlide). So while it might require a special trip, stocking up on BodyGlide is never a problem. In the process, I can usually justify picking up a pair of hot new running shorts.

  • You Can Keep Your Boots On

    Boots provided courtesy of Mall of America. Left to right: spike-heeled
    boots by Jessica Simpson, $128.95, at Nordstrom, thigh-high boots by
    Aldo, $169.99, at Aldo, lace-up boots by BP. Shoes, $109.95, at
    Nordstrom.

    Anyone who likes watching women (which is pretty much everyone, including women) doesn’t like summer to end, for all the obvious reasons, but there is consolation. As the leaves turn and fall, as the temperatures drop, as the flesh gets covered back up, the FMBs return.

    FMBs are women’s knee-length black boots. If you’re unfamiliar with this mostly British acronym, the “B” stands for boots, the “M” for me, and the “F” for something that makes the earth move and the world go round.

    To put it bluntly: I’m a fan.

    Beta versions of these boots, not quite so calf-hugging, with heels not quite so tall and deadly, were everywhere when I was a kid, often paired with miniskirts. I saw them on television (Lt Uhura on Star Trek, Catwoman on Batman) and in magazines (dark-haired models with sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads). These weren’t the shorter, whiter, go-go variety worn by Nancy Sinatra and others to dance their little pony steps to. FMBs had something dangerous (Catwoman) and militaristic (Lt Uhura) about them.

    Still do. My friend Courtney, a twenty-nine-year-old editor, wears them, she said, “when I feel like kicking ass—mine or someone else’s.” She wears them not so much to attract, but not quite to repel, either. “A girl in a short skirt and tall boots,” she said, “drinking a Cuba Libre and kicking ass at pinball, is a girl to watch out for.” Another friend, Arlene, a grad student in her early thirties, said the boots “cause you to sway and stomp just enough to make people think twice about messing with you.” In this context, they are less FMBs than FYBs: the podiatric version of the rebel’s black-leather jacket.

    Boots in general have a long military tradition, and the tall black variety has often been associated with officers. High heels once designated not the FM in FMBs, but rank and class. The higher up you were, the higher up they were. They designated power.

    Still do. “They add height, and height equals power,” said Arlene, who at 5’1" is more aware of the height/power dynamic than the tall and obtuse. Kim, a forty-nine-year-old literary event planner, said her FMBs “are a mix of a power and sex thing. You just feel like you can do anything with them on.”

    Ah, yes . . . the sex thing. “I just feel sassier wearing them,” my girlfriend Patricia, a fifty-two-year-old graphic designer, said. “I swing my hips more.”

    Indeed, long before Lt Uhura and Julie Newmar filled my dreams with props, the German actor and director Erich von Stroheim used his own tall black boots to represent power and sex in silent films like The Wedding March. The son of a Jewish hatmaker, von Stroheim passed himself off as a German aristocrat and military officer after immigrating to the U.S. in 1909. He pretended in life to be what he pretended to be onscreen: a classic case of American self-invention. Which is exactly what the boots offer: a socially sanctioned way to be something you might not be. “They feel like an affectation,” Kim said, “as if you purposefully know what you are doing when you put them on. It’s like a Superman cape or something.” Patricia agrees—“You can’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing when you put them on,” she said—but at the same time, she uses them less for transformation than for aspiration. “You have to be up to your boots,” she said. “You can’t wear them if you have bad hair. That’s not how the boots work.”

    Arlene recalled the first day she wore her FMBs to work: “A male coworker peeped out of his office—and I mean peeped. He said, ‘Is that you? I heard that sound and thought something big and mean was coming.’ You might think that he saw me and adjusted ‘big and mean’ to ‘small and cute’ but actually, it’s the other way around. I swear that, subconsciously, he expanded his approach toward me to include Can be scary and make loud noises. Unpredictable. Proceed cautiously.”

    I would argue that this young man wasn’t truly scared. He wanted to be scared in the way that Arlene wanted to be tough. That’s the game, the pretense, the sexual charge. If you be that woman, I’ll be that man.

    Makes you wonder who the “me” in FMBs really refers to.

  • Party Doll

    “Lincoln’s deathbed physician said he had the body of a Moses. What do I look like, Bill?”

    The doctor, who had just finished examining my father, dropped the covers. He said, “You can’t put off that quadruple forever.”

    “Isn’t that where you take strips from my ass and sew them to my heart? You keep chopping bits off me, Bill. Christ, what am I going to have left, one nut and my elbow?”

    The doctor smiled coldly and put his hat on. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and left.

    The sick room, the whole house, smelled of turkey and onions. Bernard breathed in slowly. “My seventy-first Turkey Day. Whoopy do.” He turned to me, grinning slyly. “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen helping your mother?”

    “She isn’t my mother,” I said, “she’s your doxy. She can’t be my mother. She’s twenty-eight. I’m twenty-nine. Remember?”

    My father looked at me with interest. “You almost said that as though you minded.”

    My mother, my real mother, is sixty. Her name is Josephine. She is so short that my father, during his affectionate years, used to call her Runtkin. She gardens all the time, wearing rumpsprung corduroys, although when caught up in the excitement of the growing season she’s been known to weed at dawn in her nightie. My mother smells of cool ferny soaps, except on the days when she doses her plants with fish emulsion. She reads for hours every night, mostly Shakespeare. She rarely understood a joke in her life, and my father, who was a stand-up comedian for forty years, said that in the end that was why he divorced her. Actually he was looking for Shirleen, or someone like Shirleen.

    Shirleen is my stepmother. Her bulgy curves spring in and out under shiny fabrics printed with tiger stripes and jungle flowers. She smells of perfume with violent police-blotter names: Assault, Love Jump, Drug Delirium. When my father introduced her to me, secretly he lifted his eyebrows and shrugged a little.

    “What can I do?” he said to me later. “I like it like that.”

    My mother took the divorce quite well, although initially she was confused at being told that their marriage was terrible. “I thought it was rather nice,” she told me hesitatingly, in her gentle voice. I knew what she meant. She thought it was nice because to her, the marriage included everything she cared about. First of all there was me, Rochelle. I’m a cartoonist, sometimes even referred to in national publications as “rising.” She also included the big garden, the prize legumes with their roots going clear to China. Josephine counted the kitchen, and every meal she and Bernard had shared, from the wedding banquet crown roast and pink Lady Baltimore cake to the driest heel of rye, old maids in the popcorn pot. She’d thought the marriage had music. She would always listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast Saturday afternoons. My father liked jazz, and Coleman Hawkins would cool up the living room around midnight. My mother counted everything, and that is where she went wrong. She mistook her life for her marriage. People do this, but it’s the surest way I know to get your face stepped on.

    “Hey,” I said now to Bernard, craftily shifting ground. “Did I show you the cartoon New York Magazine bought?” I reached into my portfolio. “They’re asking me if I’ll do a series on this couple.” I put the drawing in his hand. He studied it silently. The cartoon showed a man and woman in colonial dress. The man was very tall and had my father’s face, with a stupid expression. The woman was very short and looked like my mother. She had her hands on her hips and was saying, “Well, one thing I know for sure, bud. From my heart will grow a red, red rose, and from yours, a briar.”

    Bernard, whose nickname is Bud, looked stone-faced at the cartoon for a long minute. Then he gave his short, harsh laugh. He always laughed this way at my cartoons, grudgingly, as though the laughter had been extorted from him with menaces.

    “Right,” he said, “and from my back will grow the knives you keep planting in it. I sent you to that fancy art school and you got good, good enough to humiliate me nationally. Hell, you’re a gifted little shit. Maybe someday you’ll humiliate me internationally.”

    “It’s what I aim toward,” I said. “But cheer up. Think of it this way. If I’m good, at least you got your money’s worth from the art school.”

    “Oh, did I?” he said, staring at the cartoon in his hand. “Right. What a sweet deal for me.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I’m a little surprised you decided to spend Thanksgiving with the old goat and his doxy.”

    “Mother said she wasn’t going to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.”

    There was a silence, during which we both visualized Thanksgiving the year before. Josephine had been up at dawn, stuffing a turkey the size of a pony and filling the house with bouquets, some in old milk bottles and blue quart jars, and others in Waterford goblets.

    In one instant the memory turned us both furious, short of breath.
    “You blame me,” my father said, “God damn it.”

    “I blame you because you’re to blame. You evicted her—”

    “It was better not to drag it out. Sometimes it’s necessary to be cruel to be kind—”

    “This whole concept of necessary cruelty really fascinates me. Take this year.” I spoke in a soft, innocent voice, as though I couldn’t taste smoking chunks of his guilty heart. “When you half-killed Mom by shoving her out of her own home, it was really all for her own good. Silly old Mom, if only she’d known.”

    “That apartment is a palace, she’s living like a queen, I’m paying a fucking fortune—” By this time he was yelling, climbing out of bed and waving his cane. I knew he wouldn’t hit me, he never had. “You’re lying,” he shouted, “you’re lying like a rug,” and as I dodged the cane without effort, I studied the eggplant-purple of his face. I always could jump-start the old man into near insanity. On the other hand, I didn’t want him to drop dead on me. I held my hand up in a truce. Gasping, he collapsed back on his pillow. For a full minute there was no sound in the room except my father mastering his breath. He made no attempt whatever to hide his terribly working face. His eyes were fixed on me, and neither of us blinked. Finally he spoke.

    “Go ahead, pour it out, swill it all over me,” he assumed a weary burlesque of my face and tone, a sniveling, snot-nosed crybaby, “how I faaiii-iled you and faaiii-iled your mother and flushed her whole life down the toilet. Well, you know what? Things are tough all around. Personally, I like having a wife who doesn’t wander around outside in her underwear, talking to herself—”

    “Your property has a wall around it, nobody saw her! She was wearing that flannel granny gown, it covers her from head to toe, and she was reciting sonnets from Shakespeare—”

    “Well, whatever,” he said. “It gave me the creeps. Then there was always the goddamned second cousin hanging around. Who ever asked him? I never did.”

    “Edward has been her best friend all her life,” I said.

    “Jesus Christ, what could be more pathetic than that? The truth is, I’m happy now, and she could be happy if she tried. She refuses.”

    I said, “You talk about her as if she’s some old cow who won’t let her milk down.”

    He smiled slightly and spread his hands, as though to say, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but …

  • The Genie and His Decorative Light-Diffusing Novelty Lamp

    For a guy who spends all year thinking about Halloween, Will Niskanen could hardly be described as scary. Slight and soft-spoken, dressed in khakis and brown loafers, and exhibiting the good manners of a Boy Scout, Niskanen greets me at one of his favorite haunts, Mill City Cafe, pulling out a chair and offering to order a beverage. His studio is just upstairs, so the café is a great place to take a break from sketching skulls and spiders and tombstones.

    Like several of his neighbors in the California Building, Niskanen is a graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. What’s rare is the fact that, at age forty-two, after years of “farting around,” he’s gotten to that enviable place of doing exactly what he wants to do. He’s not selling artwork in galleries, however; instead, his creations have names like the Flickering Flame Genie Lamp, the Skull Wall Candle Sconce, and the Flaming Skull Sconce—the last, a popular seller at Spencer Gifts.

    So how did a nice Finnish boy, raised on a Carver County farm, wind up inventing glow-in-the-dark geegaws, light-up novelties, and flaming decorations? Or maybe the better question is, why?

    Part of the answer can be traced back to that rural childhood. Niskanen’s dad, who was a forester with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, bought a run-down dairy farm in 1964, when Niskanen was a one-year-old. “He was really into preservation,” Niskanen said. “I think he bought this farm to try out a bunch of his ideas. My parents went to work picking up all the trash and renovating the barn. We had a horse, we had tractors, eighty acres of corn and soybeans. We always bailed hay. You always have to do that in the middle of a hot, hot day.” The elder Niskanen was also “a real disciplinarian,” his son said. “When we were kids, we all had crew cuts. My dad had a very firm idea of right and wrong.” And on a nice day, said Niskanen, if the kids were inside watching television, “he’d come in and pull the plug and wrap it around the TV.”

    That’s how young Will came to spend a lot of his time tinkering in the barn, using the shop equipment and hand tools to build everything from birdhouses to an elaborate train set, which he assembled in the barn’s loft. Tucked away in the country and on a limited budget, Niskanen had to create all the model-train accessories other kids might buy at a craft store. “I wanted so bad to go into town for more track,” he laughed, “but I couldn’t, so I thought, well maybe I can make it myself. I got a book to learn how other people made their mountains, and I made the mountains out of plaster. Because I lacked a lot of the cool mechanical devices you could buy, it ended up being a lot more scenery. Lots of tunnels and trees made out of weeds,” he said. “I learned how to solder, cut wood, do some carpentry, paint a background.” All of this fostered in him “a sort of self-reliance,” said Niskanen. “My first response when my car breaks down is probably to fix it myself. Most things in my life are like that.”

    Which brings us back to the present, in Niskanen’s modest and currently cluttered studio, where self-reliance has inspired an entire series of odd, glowing contraptions. A purple tube that vaguely resembles a lava lamp is throwing light against a black backdrop. Next to it is a gray light that looks as if smoke is wafting through it. A smaller orange light nearby is meant to sit inside a pumpkin. These are all products born of Niskanen’s pride and joy: U.S. Utility Patent 6,955,440: Decorative Light-Diffusing Novelty Lamp and the mechanical process it employs. For someone accustomed to tinkering and inventing and dealing with a constant flow of new ideas, the patent-application process was a sort of Zen teacher, a lesson in patience and detachment.

    Showing off his official U.S. patent certificate, Niskanen clucks over it like a new parent whose offspring arrived after a difficult delivery. “The whole patent process is this back-and-forth thing of denial and rejection,” he said. Despite all of the labor involved, he said he hopes to have “six or eight of these things someday.” Sitting down at his desk, he read choice passages from the patent, which he finds amusing for their colorful, sometimes titillating language; the wording must be absolutely precise while also addressing the object’s unique contribution to the world of gadgetry.

    “‘Novelty lamps have been used for years to provide entertainment and relaxation to persons throughout the world,’” he read, nodding. “‘For example, many persons are familiar with lava lamps, which by heating blobs of material, induce the material to change buoyancy and thus float and sink within a liquid bath. Sometimes, the blobs are colored.’ Don’t you love it?” he pauses, looking up. “Blobs!” He continues reading.

    “‘Sometimes the blobs may have different colors. The appearance of the floating and sinking globs’—Ha! Now it’s globs!—‘may be further enhanced by the casting of light upon the blobs. In any event, novelty lamps such as lava lamps often induce dangers to the environment.’”

    The various hazards produced by hot and blobby lava lamps were key to Niskanen’s invention, which is seen as a safe alternative for dorm room and bedroom decor. The Decorative Light-Diffusing Novelty Lamp, stripped to its essential bits, consists of a stand, a lightweight fan, a plastic tube, and a piece of silk that Niskanen mentions is officially referred to in the patent language as the “flexible member,” one of those terms that cause him to chortle. It is scheduled for mass production and distribution in 2007, and Niskanen is already building out variations, such as the smaller lamp for jack o’ lanterns, a light-sword toy, and a “wave panel lamp junior” for nightstands. He also envisions a much larger version of the lamp, one that would wave light six or eight feet high and create a cool atmosphere at proms and nightclubs. And there are all sorts of other things in the works. Niskanen is developing “yard luminaries”—those sandwich-board-style decorations with a design cut into the panels, which are lit from within—for all seasons and occasions, including, of course, Halloween. Those versions have waving green, orange, and red lights behind cutouts of a spider’s web, or a witch, or a pumpkin. “For some reason right now, I’m into things that light up,” he said. “And things for parties.”

    Musing over how he came to be an inventor of Halloween novelties, Niskanen noted it’s not necessarily something that he always wanted to do. “It just happens to fit,” he said. “All of the things I’ve done have sort of led me to this place. I’m a late bloomer, I guess.” He received no encouragement from his high school art teacher, whom Niskanen describes as “a load, a real turd.” Luckily, the faculty at MCAD recognized his talent, and he received a first-year scholarship to attend. He particularly admires one teacher who, in Niskanen’s early years at the college, stressed craftsmanship. “He would say, ‘If you’re going to weld on that chair, you better make that weld nice. If you’re going to paint that chair, you better paint it right. If you’re going to do it, do it well.’ Old-fashioned stuff. Do it well; distinguish yourself.”

    That approach was a good fit for the self-reliant Niskanen, who was interested in art’s practical applications. “Even when I was going through MCAD, I knew I had this interest in industrial design, and I had kindergarten knowledge of mechanics, but I didn’t know how to join the two in the real world. I had a good basic drawing skill, but I didn’t know how to apply it.”

    After graduation, he worked for a time designing props for Minneapolis’ Minnefex studio. He lived in Des Moines and worked as an illustrator for a woodworking magazine. After a few years, he found himself in Litchfield, sketching cabs for a construction-equipment company. Then he joined Paper Magic Group, a company that specializes in seasonal decorations and set Niskanen to the task of sketching new Halloween products. “I became a pollinating honeybee for ideas, so to speak,” he says. Soon he began to deal more directly with the buyers, and after a time he noticed he was selling himself short. “They’ve done very well with a number of the things that I designed,” Niskanen said. “I was offering all of this energy and creativity to the company.” And that’s when he decided to pursue his own patents and license his own products.

    These days, Niskanen’s creative process usually begins with sketches for a product. Then he’ll go through a period where he roots around at garage sales and Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. He might browse craigslist for a while, looking for electronics (especially old hi-fi gear) and items under the garage-sale or “free stuff” categories that sound intriguing. Then he’ll go get a coffee or wander the seasonal-product aisles at Target. His studio is littered with spray-paint cans and boxes upon boxes of detritus from his foraging trips: plastic parts from computers, hair dryers, and abandoned kitchen gadgets. He uses all of these in building three-dimensional models of his ideas so that potential buyers and Steven Thrasher, his patent attorney, can better envision the finished product.

    “Will has this unique combination,” said Thrasher, “of combining engineering competence with artistic creativity. But the most interesting part of Will’s story, I think, is his persistence. My granddad once said he spent ten years becoming an overnight success, and Will’s like that—he’s an inspiration to people who are just beginning to follow their passion. And he’s an easy guy to root for.”

    In a sea of Spider-Man costumes, Styrofoam gravestones, and fake Dracula teeth—Halloween is second only to Christmas in terms of consumer purchases, generating several billion in sales each year—Niskanen has managed to carve out his own niche. Last spring, at Transworld’s 22nd International Halloween Costume & Party Show in Chicago, he was gratified by the excitement his pieces generated. “Each time I do a show, I walk around and there are few new ideas. I see a product sometimes and think, Well, that’s great, but they missed the cool thing, the cool thing they could have done with it. “I don’t look at Halloween the way a normal person does,”

    Niskanen said. “When Halloween actually comes, I don’t really participate.” Instead, you can probably find him browsing store displays, trying to figure out the next cool thing to do.