Year: 2006

It was a Tuesday night. On the lobby wall, two-dimensional children in roller skates and blue jeans frolicked amid neon-green palm trees and smiling dinosaurs. Stars and swirly confetti twists glowed orange, yellow, and red on faded blue carpeting. Above the glass ticket window, a large sign offered these instructions: “Conduct yourself as a lady or gentleman”; “Be neatly groomed and clean”; and, “Hold down the noise when leaving.” For six dollars, a set of industrial doors opened to reveal the trippy time warp of Adult Skate Night at St. Louis Park’s Roller Garden.

Throbbing rock music pumped from the speakers of an elevated DJ booth, and a deserted snack bar advertised cotton candy, hot dogs, and strawberry shortcake. The walls were lined with pink “Treasure House” vending machines (stocked with gaudy jewelry and zebra-striped watches) that glowed eerily in the dim light, and everything smelled faintly of … well, roller rink. It was an unmistakable scent, the mélange of musty leather, stale popcorn, and sweaty palms.

Beneath a giant silver disco ball, fifty skaters swept effortlessly around an open arena. They skated alone and in pairs, dipping, twirling, spinning. Their hips rocked, their limbs extended, and some of their wheels lit up like firecrackers.

Who were these people, and how did they get so good?

“I’ve been coming here since I was seventeen—that’s twenty-five years,” boasted Jim, a squat baby boomer in a black beret and stonewashed jeans. The tongues of his skates hung fashionably over his laces. “I skate four times a week.” He held up three fingers. “It’s wild.”

Two months ago, twenty-six-year-old Andy Sturdevant began attending adult skate nights regularly. “It’s this pop-culture equalizer—some new amazing roller-derby continuum. The late seventies, the eighties, the nineties—it’s all here; Backstreet Boys and Grandmaster Flash. Cyndi Lauper. The Cars.”

According to Sturdevant, adult skaters fall into one of four major categories: “First you’ve got your roller dads.” Sturdevant nodded toward the middle of the rink, where Jim and two other balding men were showing off some incredible footwork. “These guys have been doing this for, like, thirty years. They’re middle aged; they have potbellies and moustaches, and anywhere else, they’re just regular guys. But here—” He glanced again at the freestylers. “They’re gods.”

Three twenty-something young women sauntered toward the locker area. They wore ponytails, tall socks, short pants, and baby tees. Each woman carried a shiny skate case in her left hand: red case, yellow case, blue case. Their makeup was impeccable.

“Roller-derby girls.” Sturdevant smiled knowingly.

Category two. The Minnesota RollerGirls league rolled into town in 2004, and, well, you know ‘em when you see ‘em. Especially when you see them skate.

“It all comes back,” explained Rusty Sahly, whose aunt and uncle have owned the Roller Garden since 1969. “In the mid-seventies, it was boy meets girl, girl meets boy. Now it’s jam skating, dance skating, floppin’ around on the floor. It’s the next generation, that’s what it is.” Sahly’s eyes shifted and he smiled ruefully. “I love adult nights out here—it’s adults re-living their childhood.”

Sturdevant’s third category of adult skater consists of “Your standard teenagers—post-teenagers. Whatever. The social thing is pretty much the same as high school.”

“I used to live and die roller skating, you know?” panted Brian, a skinny young guy in jeans and a green camouflage jacket. “Mankato, Rochester, Cambridge, St. Cloud—we’d just go, you know? Every weekend.”

“It kept a lot of us off the streets.” With his black Mohawk and pointy devilish goatee, Jeff’s brown eyes were surprisingly soft. “We’d get on these buses to Wooddale or wherever—five hundred kids some days.” He paused, thoughtful. “It just becomes a part of you, something you do. And if you’re good at it, you keep doing it.”

In his brown Dickies, beige button-down shirt, and black 1950s-era glasses, Sturdevant himself fell into category four: the disaffected hipster. When asked to sum up the adult-skate community, he smiled, shook his head, and gestured toward the skating floor. “It’s a demographic mess. Or Utopia.” —Julie Bates

One Saturday morning about six weeks before April 15, our national day of fiscal confession and atonement, an Orthodox Jewish man and his son walked along Highland Parkway. The two passed a nondescript side-by-side duplex, where a half-dozen tax preparers were knee-deep in paperwork—the kind of work, the onerous old stereotype goes, usually handled by the dark-suited men now walking to temple on the Sabbath. Across the street, the Lubavitch Day Care Center and Day School sat in darkness while clients continued to stream in and out of the duplex, which houses Mohs Tax Service, until 9:00 in the evening.

Through the last thirty years, Linda Mohs has turned her one-woman shop into a virtual empire by working with artists, musicians, actors, and other margin-dwelling, small-business taxpayers. She has ten thousand clients. Her full-time, year-round staff of twelve mans the calculators twelve hours a day, six days a week during the tax season. Mohs herself finds an almost unholy joy in doing taxes. She says it’s “superfun.” She may be working on another man’s Sabbath, but her principles are one reason so many people are drawn to Mohs.

Among the business cards in her waiting room and the names listed on her website are caterers, geriatric care specialists, freehand faux finishers, early-childhood Spanish teachers, and doulas. There are a sprinkling of listings in other languages. Mohs said that half of her job consists of counseling people through crises like divorce or severe financial loss. “My clients are sane and insane, rich and poor, nice and naughty. I love the variety.”

When you walk in the front door of Mohs’ office a computerized voice announces, “Front door, open.” That’s where the formalities end. The wild style of the interior makes one wonder if the rooms are just as noisy when they’re empty. The waiting room is a museum of coffee mugs. Elsewhere, shelves are bowed with paperweights, glassware, and souvenirs. The “South of the border room” is filled with fishing nets and plush toy parrots. The walls are thick with lurid-hued paintings, printed slogans, postcards, one-liners, and family portraits. Employees and their clients sit in ersatz cubicles made from turquoise Naugahyde restaurant booths. Even the kitchen is operational: During tax time, a cook serves homemade lunches and dinners.

Mohs is diminutive and sports a short cap of brown hair and a dazzling array of rings. She has a wide open face and darts from room to room like a squirrel in a giant oak tree as she fields questions about esoteric tax laws, or chirps requests for copies or files over the din. She buys coffee and toilet paper by the vanload and is notorious for her thriftiness, no doubt the result of her childhood among eight siblings on a farm with no electricity or plumbing in Ogilvie, Minnesota. Her family was miserably poor, she said. Her mother worked and her father’s income was negligible. “If we could shoot it or grow it, we ate.” Many times, they went hungry.

Mohs’ relationships with her own children are as distinctive as her business. She can’t tell you how many children she and her husband Tom have raised. They made three of their own, but informally fostered, adopted, and cared for so many other kids, they’ve lost count. She estimates that she has shepherded a dozen kids to their high school graduations. She took in her ninety-year-old great aunt and adopted a three-month-old girl simultaneously. “They were the best of buddies. The little one would hitch a ride on the wheelchair and they had lots of tea parties together.”

In the seventies, Mohs had been doing taxes for her friends in exchange for pizza and beer when she realized she’d lost her appetite for the compensation, but not the work. She did the books for two photographers, Boyd Hagen and Joe Giannetti. When they dissolved their partnership, their employee, Ann Marsden, started her own business and Mohs followed.

Susan Thompson, who has worked with Mohs for ten years, had to leave work early on Saturday for a family emergency but made a point of pausing on her way out to testify about Mohs’ charitable nature. “She’s amazing.”

“She’s more than amazing,” said another employee, Desiree, jumping in when she overheard Thompson.

In addition to her open-door policy to those needing a home or a meal, Mohs and her husband cook and prepare forty turkeys in their kitchen each Thanksgiving and serve dinner at their church. She’s been known to encourage altruistic pricing among her staff.

Despite her advocacy on behalf of her artistic and often beleaguered client base, Mohs believes that the current Republican-controlled legislature has given more breaks to taxpayers than any other administration. She adheres to the commandment that government mind its own business—that may be why so many people return to her for their annual reckoning, and leave uplifted. —Sari Gordon

As I was standing recently in front of MinneNAPolis PowerNap Suites, a dimly lit store in the Mall of America, a herd of teenagers in hooded sweatshirts and sagging, crack-revealing jeans sauntered by and collectively stated the obvious: “Dude! Check it out. No way. This place is, like, for napping. Who would do that?”

In fact, according to owner Steev RamsDell, the suites have hosted just over 1,250 soporific souls since they opened in November. He showed me the “Deep Space” room, which could also aptly be titled the “Teenage Star Trek Geek Suite.” Deep black and speckled with glow-in-the-dark paint, the room has a bunk bed with a desk, small TV, a constellation lamp, a lava lamp, and a handful of plastic spacemen who seemed to be descending an electrical cord. Lying in the bunk bed, one can stare at the starry ceiling and imagine any number of alien invasions.

Which begs a few questions.

“We do a lot of cleaning here,” said RamsDell, who explains that fresh linens and robes are brought in after each use. “We’re always cleaning.”

“About sixty percent of our traffic is from out-of-towners,” he said, listing tired flight crews and pooped shoppers from Wisconsin among his customers. “Some people want to take a nap before they do the two- or three-hour drive home.” And not everyone naps. The suites, he claimed, have helped at least one person garner employment, a man who got a call for an interview while he was at the mall, “so he came in here and booked an hour to talk on the phone.” Could he get reception in the “Deep Space” room? Replied RamsDell, “I’ve called China from in there.”

Though paying up to a dollar per minute for a short snooze may seem like a nutty idea, RamsDell envisions an America where, “in three to five years, places to nap will be everywhere, like ATMs.” Places to nap, in fact, are already everywhere—heating grates on any number of city sidewalks, for example, or bus-stop shelters, or at the mall, on any number of benches—but it’s a matter of comfort. Take the massage chairs in the mall. “You close your eyes and try to relax,” noted RamsDell in his lullaby voice, “but who’s watching your bags? How can you relax when people are walking by and staring at you?” He’s banking that America’s insomniac millions might just be ready to shell out for some quality Z’s. Popular MetroNap, for example, offers the poor, tired, and hungry—well, just the tired—of New York quality napping in one of its partially enclosed pods, but even that leaves the fatigued open for public viewing. The powernap suites are locked. “Take Starbucks,” says RamsDell, who conducts business in bedroom slippers. “No one believed people would pay five dollars for coffee.”

The Mall of America has been a test location of sorts for PowerNap Suites and the company is currently in negotiations to open at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the nation’s sixth-busiest hub. The hardest part about opening at the airport, said RamsDell, are issues related to insurance and liability. How do you figure out, as he put it, “the risk of resting and relaxing?” For insurance purposes and for the public’s information, there have been a few misconceptions to clear up. Only one person is allowed in the napping room at a time, with some exceptions—nursing mothers, for example. But RamsDell said that there really is no downside to this gentle enterprise in our sleep-deprived culture. “It’s one hundred percent beneficial,” he asserted.

All of the rooms had a kitschy, homemade quality. The “12 Fathoms” suite had a leather massaging chair and a flat-screen television screening a scene of roaring surf, but it was also decorated with what appear to be rummage-sale finds—shower curtains with underwater scenes, a stuffed shark, and, tacked to the wall, a toilet seat with a fish design.

When it was time for my nap, the “Asian Mist” room was taken, so I chose the “Mesa Plateau,” with a cattle skull on the wall that would make Georgia O’Keeffe feel right at home. A staff member settled me in, placing my feet in the Chi machine, adjusting the support pillows, spritzing an eye pillow with aromatherapy spray, placing the body-warming panels over me, putting the music on a “rain and thunder,” setting, then, finally, closing the door. There’s no way I’ll fall asleep here, I thought as the thunder gently rumbled the table (it’s connected to the audio system). A rainforest monkey screeched in my headphones, and I made a mental list of things I’d like to buy at Williams-Sonoma.

The next thing I knew, a girl in a staff T-shirt was handing me a glass of water. “Take your time,” she said, “waking up.” —Shannon Olson

A few years ago, we had more interest in Canada’s hockey players than its ballet dancers. Les Grands Ballets Canadiens had a reputation for stodgy, brittle, ultra-traditional interpretations of classics, and, short of an underfed ballerina passing out mid-plie, nothing too exciting was going to happen on its stage. But in 2000, artistic director Gradimir Pankov took over and snapped those tiny Canucks into one of the world’s most startling and inspiring modern companies. With cutting-edge, European-style performances and creative interpretations of traditional works, its shows are one of Montreal’s finest attractions these days. Currently the company is touring with a program featuring “Six Dances,” “Forgotten Land,” and “Bella Figura”–which, by the way, contains partial nudity. Oh, Canada, indeed. 84 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-624-2345; www.northrop.umn.edu

If you don’t like how the government is spending your tax dollars, you could stop paying them. But that approach will only bite you in the end, as Henry David Thoreau discovered in 1846, when he withheld his taxes in protest of the United States-Mexican War. He was tossed in the clinker. This play, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (of Inherit the Wind fame) during the Vietnam War, makes a timely reappearance, but it likely won’t rile up the public the way it did in the seventies, when its controversial anti-war message led to it being shut down on various stages. As for Thoreau’s act of civil disobedience, he may have paid the taxman in the end, but he never did cough up the five bucks Harvard College wanted before it would issue his diploma. So there. 245 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-333-3010; www.theatreintheround.org

Timing can be a blessing or a curse. Floyd Collins, a bluegrass musical that premiered in 1994, is based on the buzz that arose, almost seventy years earlier, in 1925, when a Kentucky cave-diver became trapped underground. The incident is said to have sparked the first-ever American media circus. Although the parallel to recent tragic events is uncanny, Latte Da artistic director Peter Rothstein said he programmed Floyd Collins long before the mining disasters in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Rothstein had entertained thoughts of postponing the show’s run to avoid accusations of poor taste. But the sweet sounds of country music pulled him through. Loring Playhouse; 1633 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-486-5757; www.latteda.org

Ten Thousand Things is a company that specializes in bringing theatrical works to halfway houses, battered women’s shelters, and prisons–in other words, to folks who could use a little more art in their lives. The company usually performs in lunchrooms and common spaces, often under fluorescent lights and with minimal props. Still, their work has been consistently heralded by critics whoÕve ventured into, say, the state-penitentiary system to take in shows alongside the inmates. In a Garden pairs two comic operettas by Gertrude Stein with one by living legend Kevin Kling. After bringing fall-down laughter to various lockdown facilities, Ten Thousand Things is giving a less captive audience the chance to see In a Garden in a limited public run in downtown Minneapolis. 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-215-2650; www.tenthousandthings.org

Frank Theatre continues its love affair with Suzan-Lori Parks, the contemporary African-American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter with a talent for sharp social commentary. Parks’ Obie Award-winning play Venus is based on the life story of Saartje Baartman, a legendary performer of South African descent who, in the early 1800s, traveled to London in hopes of striking it rich as a stage dancer. But instead, thanks to her profusely padded posterior, she wound up on the freak-show circuit, bearing the stage name “Venus Hottentot.” Baartman’s story is a tragic one; all her life, she was mocked and treated inhumanely. Her dubious performing career–possibly under circumstances of enslavement–sparked a court battle. She was subjected to scientific experiments. After her death at age twenty-six, her remains were displayed as an oddity at Paris’ Musee de l’Homme, where they remained until 1976, when finally her body was returned to South Africa for proper burial. Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art; 250 3rd Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-724-3760; www.franktheatre.org

If the Happy Gnome is any indication, the gastro-pub craze has finally hit town. At this friendly Selby-Dale joint, the quality of the food matches the high caliber of the twenty-five select beers on tap–plus the more than ninety bottled options. Some might even consider the Gnome’s menu slightly upscale for a pub. For instance, the open-faced chicken sandwich comes with bright, fragrant pesto slathered on a crusty baguette, and the hefty bison patty offers a surprise of bacon tucked inside. Crowd-pleasers like the salty rosemary fries seem heaven-sent when paired with a frosty Belgian ale. 498 Selby Ave., St. Paul; 651-287-2018

The presence of Margaux is almost reason enough to buy one of the sparkly new lofts in downtown St. Paul. Imagine strolling just a few steps from home to tuck into a steamy bowl of mussels, followed by a crusty grilled ham and Gruyre sandwich. Why, it could be more convenient than your own dining room! You might also sit at the bar and lose yourself in the giant Van Gogh-inspired mural while taking comfort in perfectly seared scallops with a confit of leek and vanilla sauce. The crispy, buttery frogs’ legs Provenal could redefine the bar snack. Margaux excels at hosting intimate gatherings, so save the big parties for your big loft, and share Margaux with someone you want to get close with. 486 Robert St. N., St. Paul; 651-407-6438