Month: January 2007
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Babysitting the Monkey
When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a lot of things. I wanted to be Carol Burnett. I wanted to be a trapeze artist, performing death-defying loop de loops high above the crowds while wearing a dazzling bikini made entirely of rubies and sapphires. I wanted to be a kindergarten…
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Mick Jagger as You’ve Never Seen Him
As a relative newcomer to the Rake family, I was reassured and gratified by fresh research asserting that you, the average Rake reader, are not much of a couch potato. Or if you are, your eyeballs are fixed to a book or magazine rather than a TV screen. The numbers say twenty-six percent of you…
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Big Box Theater
A few months ago, while walking along the Stone Arch Bridge with a friend from Manhattan, the bright blue Guthrie Theater looming above us, I realized that Jean Nouvel’s big new thing might be one of the few places in Minneapolis that would actually impress a New Yorker. So we wandered into one of its…
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One for the Sons of Bitches
Do you know who wrote your favorite film? If the names Sidney Howard, Frances Goodrich, and Joseph Stefano fill you with a sense of admiration, then congratulations on recognizing what most of us consider trivial: These are the people who wrote the classics Gone With The Wind, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Psycho. Even among…
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Red Heat from Spain
I have often thought that the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia should be the patron saints of Minnesota. Never mind that they are most likely mythical; they can stand for all the other martyrs the Romans executed in the first three centuries A.D. And the myth is certainly appropriate to our chilly state. The Forty, it…
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Green is God
I never expected to find love at a roadside market. In Florida, no less. But there, down an aisle from stacks of bright oranges and piles of juicy grapefruit, was a small, plastic tub of guacamole so smooth and delicious, so perfectly spiced, that I fell head over heels. It’s uncommon to find guacamole that…