The Rake Magazine

Month: April 2007

  • Art Under the Influence

    It can be difficult to find one’s way in Northeast Minneapolis’ labyrinthine Northrup King Building, an old seed-warehouse-made-creative-center housing more than 130 artists’ studios. But on a recent Saturday night, painter Patrick Pryor was hosting an event and had kindly started a trail of flower petals out by the front entrance that led to his studio on the second floor.

    The crowd assembled there was impressive for both its attractiveness and broad age range. A couple of middle-aged women, sleekly dressed in black blouses and slacks, squatted side-by-side on leather stools, chatting and sipping complimentary cherry martinis. A young mother carried her swaddled newborn through the crowd, bouncing him while surveying Pryor’s collection of paintings. A forty-something woman stopped by to discuss Pryor’s work. She explained that she had purchased one of Pryor’s paintings in 2005. “It looked like that,” she said in her Russian accent, pointing to a gestural rendering of black vines painted over a flat, seafoam green surface. “It could be blood platelets; it could be cherries,” suggested another attendee of the curious red fruit that hung from these painted stalks. In any case, said the woman, she and her husband have been fielding invitations from Pryor ever since.

    Another attendee, Karin Olson, a marketing consultant, described herself as a fan of Pryor’s. Her affinity was understandable; Pryor’s art strikes the eye as playful and cartoonish, with allusions to winding foliage and bulbous ladybugs. Having made this point clear, however, Olson quickly segued to another topic: As of late, she said, she has been recruiting fabulous Twin Citians to host parties for her client, Level Vodka. In fact, according to Olson, it was she who had initiated this event by offering up free liquor to Pryor and his fashionable guests. (An alternative to reaching her target market through advertising, she said.)
    Since this was Pryor’s eleventh such “Music Sketch,” an event that combines improvisational piano and painting, the occasion might have happened even without sponsorship, as it has every time before. After a couple hours of mingling over stiff drinks—Level Vodka with grapefruit juice, Level Vodka with rosemary—fifty or so partygoers were told the main attraction was about to get under way. Filing out of Pryor’s studio, everyone followed yet another flower-petal path to a larger room upstairs. A grand piano and blank, six-by-ten-foot canvas awaited. The Level Vodka bar staff, dressed entirely in black, was there, too, pouring generously into plastic cups.

    As with prior Music Sketches, Pryor invited his friend James Tyler O’Neill, a pianist, to provide accompaniment to his live-action painting. The structure of the exercise was explained like this: “Basically, I play an hour or so on the piano, and Patrick paints,” said the no-nonsense O’Neill. If an onlooker hadn’t yet noticed the thirty-three-year-old Pryor’s super-friendly, down-home style, matched by his wide, child-like smile and rosy cheeks, he certainly would now. Speaking over some hullabaloo, Pryor made a short, breathy speech concerning a recent incident in which Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten recruited virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell to play in a metro station during morning rush hour. As it turned out, commuters hardly noticed the superstar. In his indignant chronicle of the experiment, Weingarten gave an account of a child who demonstrated interest in Bell’s playing, only to be yanked along by a hurried parent. Pryor spoke passionately, albeit a bit clumsily, of this remarkable episode before vowing, with signature earnestness, to indulge that inner child within everyone present.
    Taking a drink from his cherry martini, O’Neill took his seat at the piano and started to play.

    At first, his riffs were as unimposing as Philip Glass’s theater music—the ideal soundtrack for an uninterrupted workday. O’Neill’s benign overture found Pryor blotting yellow and green paint on the canvas and then pulling it westward in long, serpentine streaks, creating what appeared to be a gothic dragon. Several minutes later, Pryor’s use of fire-engine red seemed to inspire O’Neill’s aggressive, staccato playing. Soon after, smooth jazz ushered in primary blue.
    An audience cannot be expected to behave perfectly under such festive circumstances. Over time, O’Neill’s simple melodies found percussive backbone in the constant crashing of the revelers’ emptied cups as well as the polyphonic ring of someone’s cell phone, which was answered in this instance by the tall, glassy-eyed blonde woman sitting at the center of the crowd, followed by the beat of her high heels rat-a-tat-tatting across the hardwood floor, as she exited for a private conversation.

    As for the painting, in early moments, its swirls and billows resembled that of Vincent van Gogh’s. He might have stopped there and had something. But the exercise continued for another forty-five minutes. During this time, the amount of black- and flesh-colored acrylic squirted and dripped across the canvas was about equal to the amount of Level Vodka in everyone’s guts. Pryor’s messy mural ended up looking like a Jackson Pollock, if anything at all.

  • Dakota Diaspora

    Twenty-eight-year-old identical twins Kate and Carly Beane share similarly striking features—demure brown eyes and hair, high cheek bones, and quick smiles that precede regular bouts of easy, endearing laughter. Both say they are now content with their lives, a state of being that had eluded them until a few years ago, when they decided to end their family’s exile from Minnesota—almost a century and a half after their ancestors were uprooted from Cloudman’s Village at Lake Calhoun.

    In the spring of 2003 the Beane twins gathered with their parents and older sister Sydney around the dining table of their home near Berkeley, California, and reached a consensus: The time had come to return home.

    “Kate had just pulled herself out of an unhealthy relationship, my mom had just lost her job because of budget cuts in the Oakland School District, and the Center for Community Change office where our dad worked was closing,” Carly said. “The family needed a fresh start. We held a meeting and decided to move to Minnesota. We thought of it as home even though most of us had never spent time there.”

    Following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people throughout southern Minnesota were rounded up, imprisoned at Fort Snelling, and eventually forced onto steamboats and exiled from the state. Many Dakota ended up where thousands still remain—on the barren prairie reservations of South Dakota and Nebraska. Many others, like the Beane family, wandered from place to place searching for somewhere to call home.

    The Beane twins were born in Phoenix, moved to Lincoln, Nebraska at age four, and moved again to the San Francisco Bay Area at fourteen. “We just didn’t feel we belonged anywhere,” said Carly, who, along with Kate, dropped out of Berkeley High at age sixteen.

    The twins had long been frustrated with school, which never matched the rigor of the lessons they received at home. By the time Kate and Carly were twelve, their parents had them reading radical philosophers like Saul Alinsky and their great-great uncle’s books about growing up in what is now Minneapolis. As a result, they can rattle off family lore like memorized prayers, quickly filling in details when the other hesitates. “…Seth Eastman was a famous painter, and a lieutenant in the army. His daughter, Winona, married Many Lightnings. They raised several kids, including Charles Eastman, the author of Indian Boyhood, and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, and one of the first Indian doctors … ”

    “When I dropped out of school I told my dad, ‘I’ll just be a waitress. I’ll be fine.’ But I was not fine,” Kate said.

    “One day in 1998,” Carly interjected, “Kate’s boyfriend pulled up in his pickup; she jumped in and was gone for five years.”

    “I moved to Tennessee, Atlanta, back to Phoenix. My boyfriend was a carpenter and I waited tables. I didn’t realize at the time that I was looking for home. In 2003, I ended up in Chicago and had to get away quick because my boyfriend had a drug problem and had gone off the deep end. I called my sister in the middle of the night and told her I was afraid and needed to get out. She sent me a plane ticket and I went back to California. I had to change.”

    Six months later the Beanes were on the road to Minnesota. The first thing they wanted to do, upon arriving in Minneapolis, was see Lake Calhoun. “We thought, that’s our lake; let’s go see it. So we drove around it and were shocked. I guess I was picturing it to look like a Seth Eastman painting. He depicted scenes of traditional Dakota life with tipis, lodges, women cooking, trees, kids playing and lots of dogs.”

    “It was the middle of summer,” Carly said, “and Lake Calhoun was packed—people rollerblading, tons of traffic, mansions everywhere. All we knew was that this lake was where our people came from, and that it was sacred.”

    “It’s not as if we were expecting Cloudman’s Village to still be here,” Kate added. “We knew things would be different. But we saw Lake Calhoun with our hearts; we saw how it used to be, because that was the last time our family was all together, living in our homeland, and in peace.”

    Realizing the incongruity between their vision of traditional Dakota life and the reality of modern-day Minnesota was one of the most disappointing experiences of their lives. And the Beane twins soon learned Lake Calhoun was not the only place that had been significantly altered in the past 140 years. Many of the cultural sites of which they had long heard—such as the Dakota mounds on the bluffs of the Minnesota River—were buried under the city’s concrete footprint.

    It took some time for the twins to realize that coming home was right for them. The sisters eventually found jobs at Louise Erdrich’s Birch Bark Books, enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s Dakota language program, and discovered that the Dakota community, which seemed to have evaporated like a dream upon waking, was still here.

    “It’s in the people. It’s in the language. You see it everywhere in the names of places like Wabasha, Chaska, Winona, Shakopee, Minnetonka, and Minnewashta,” Kate said.

    Today the twins’ lives are deeply engrained in Dakota culture. They teach Dakota classes to preschoolers and kindergartners at the Wicoie Nandagikendan (Learning Language) Early Childhood Urban Immersion Project, and are working with the legislature on measures to protect Minnesota’s native languages from extinction.

    “In the boarding schools our people were punished for speaking Dakota,” said Carly, who recently lobbied state legislators in support of the establishment of a Minnesota Office of Indigenous Language. “When I speak to these politicians, I’m not just speaking for myself. It can be daunting. But when you speak for your ancestors, that’s a beautiful thing.”

  • Cardboard for Christ

    Brother Finbar McMullen entered the Winona Middle School woodshop at just before seven on a recent Monday evening with several door-sized pieces of cardboard balanced on his arms. They were material for the eighty-three-year-old’s community education class on the least commercial, but perhaps most intriguing, of his varied pursuits: building furniture from cardboard.

    This is the second year he’s offered the class and the first year he’s taught it (no one signed up last year). McMullen built his first cardboard concoction thirty years ago in a decade of disposability, and continues to hone his technique today in an era of recycling, where the latest buzz-phrase is “carbon neutral.” Still, he often jokes that cardboard furniture construction isn’t widely popular because it hasn’t yet caught up with the times.

    McMullen is short and trim with buzzed hair and the face of an ex-marine, square and etched with wrinkles that disappear into weathered flesh when he laughs. He’s endlessly social with the exuberance of someone half his age, despite an increasing reliance on hearing aids and a wooden cane.

    Just before class was to begin, student Marla Markhamarrived, a middle-aged woman with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and an unrelenting fear of X-ACTO knives. “Too much time in the ER,” she deadpanned. She wished to build a decorative garbage can, but her husband, also enrolled in the class, was at home studying Greek and unavailable to do the cutting. She decided to stay anyway, partly to draw up blueprints, but mostly to talk McMullen out of some of his cardboard.

    Two other women came in, both roughly Markham’s age, and McMullen began the lesson. Building with cardboard is simple, he said, if you plan ahead and use various tried-and-true design tricks (build surfaces with the grain running horizontally so they don’t sag; place reinforcing honeycombs of cardboard between the smooth layers). A barebones toolbox includes an X-ACTO knife, a framing square, a pizza cutter to crease corners for bending, and copious amounts of Elmer’s glue.

    In 1940, McMullen joined the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a worldwide Catholic ministry, to get an education of sorts. He enjoyed the life so much that he never left it. The Brothers took a vow of poverty in the 1970s, and McMullen took up building with cardboard. It was around that same time that St. Mary’s University in Winona hired him to manage its dorms. Retired for almost a decade, he still receives free room and board and, most importantly, has full access to the woodshop.

    Over the years, McMullen has crafted enough cardboard accoutrements to furnish an entire apartment, including tables, chairs, bookshelves, desks, and dressers. His unpainted designs are boxy and simple, as if a craftsman had cut a frame but never bothered with sanding or making curved edges.

    He used to score plum cardboard from computer boxes, which came by the hundreds as St. Mary’s entered the digital age. When that supply dried up, McMullen turned to the dumpsters behind the nearby ShopKo. “If they came out, I would say, ‘Hey, recycling. Conserve resources. Don’t get mad at me,’ ” McMullen recalled. That source evaporated also, when Winona’s city council passed an anti-dumpster-diving ordinance. Now, McMullen collects mostly from the university, though he still occasionally calls on local furniture stores. Their boxes, he said, are the sturdiest.

    McMullen’s friends call him an inventor, though he is more modest, claiming only to solve problems, such as with his handmade cane, are placement for a metal one he left in a gas station in Montana. “It’s always something I need,” he said. “It’s not a matter of some bright idea rattling around in my head unrelated to my life.” He invented the Finbar Hood, a piece of insulated camping headgear so popular that Ann Bancroft wore one on a trip to Antarctica. And Finbar’s Fabric Tucker, a corn-skewer-like device that assists in the sewing of hoods, sold thousands in craft stores.

    The lesson concluded with McMullen imparting a few rules of construction (cut twice so the cardboard doesn’t tear; always use more glue than seems necessary). Then his class of three was let loose in the shop. One student worked on a desktop organizer. Another drew plans for wall shelves. Markham pulled a Palm Pilot from her purse and scribbled down garbage-can dimensions. “I really want to put it in the bathroom,” she told McMullen.

    He nodded, thought for a moment. “If you take long showers it’ll get soggy,” he said. “Just put it outside when you’re showering.”
    Markham frowned. “My husband will never remember to do that.”

    “I got it,” McMullen said. “Get a can of spray lacquer and the cardboard won’t absorb the moisture.”

    “That’s a good idea,” Markham said.

    McMullen laughed congenially and then turned to help another student with a different matter: how tall to build her organizer.

  • Trouble in Slumber Land

    In the looks department, I’ve been compared to the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings with a big afro—not exactly George Clooney. Only adding to these charms is the fact that I have Crohn’s disease and a catalog of allergies. And yet, I am by far the luckiest man alive because I’m married to the most beautiful woman in the world. After five years of matrimony, my wife’s honey red hair and rosy Irish cheeks still have me whipped. If she ever leaves me, the lights will go out; there’s zero chance of my landing someone of her caliber again. Naturally, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make her happy. And so, earlier this year, when my wife was upset about turning thirty-three (she thought she was getting old), I set out to make her birthday extra special. I promised anything her heart desired.

    “Stop snoring! Stop snoring!” she blurted out like a game-show contestant. This anger over my nocturnal emissions had apparently been building for some time.

    I wasted no time in addressing her concerns. Within days I was sitting on my doctor’s table imploring him to help me cure my snoring. He peered down my throat and up my nostrils. “It’s a mess in there,” he said, snapping off his flashlight scope. “You’re probably suffering from sleep apnea, sinusitis, or allergies. I’m gonna have you spend the night in a sleep clinic.”

    The back parking lot at Methodist Hospital was eerily deserted when I arrived, just weeks later, for my 9:00 p.m. appointment. I rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Stray wheelchairs littered the hallways; a security guard was slumped in a folding chair. I pressed a buzzer and, in so doing, summoned a bookish middle-aged white guy in scrubs who met me at the sleep clinic’s door.

    Ken’s hand was limp and moist; he was creepy in a Jeremy Irons kind of way. I imagined he spent long hours sitting in his one-bedroom apartment, bare-chested in cut-off shorts, typing anti-government manifestos.

    My dubious docent gave me a quick tour: The room in which I was to stay looked as if it had been plucked from a cheap motel. But instead of a stain on the pillow, there was an enormous machine at the headboard with allsorts of blinking lights and buzzing tubes. Next to the bed, there was a dresser with a Bible in it, which I imagined might come in handy later on as I warded off the ghost of Vincent Price.

    Ken attached wires and pads to my scalp and explained how they would measure my eye movements and sleeping depth. Straps were applied to my torso that would monitor breathing, snoring, and heartbeat.

    I told Ken I was at the sleep clinic because I wanted to stop snoring. He spun me around on the swivel stool so that we were nose to nose.
    “The only way you’re going to stop snoring is if they pound it out of your face,” he said threateningly. For a second there, I thought he was going to clock me.

    “Excuse me?”

    “A doctor told me they can cut open your face and pound out the crap that’s clogging your sinuses using a special hammer and chisel. Then they put all the crap in a dish called ‘The Custard Cup.’ ”

    “Yucky,” I replied.

    Ken wished me sweet dreams and turned out the lights.

    I missed my wife.

    The nurses out in the hallway made microwave popcorn and the room filled with the aroma of buttery goodness. Buttons beeped and bells dinged like the arcade at Chuck E. Cheese’s. I tossed around for more than an hour, the wires on my scalp, neck, and face twisting around my throat. Clearly, this was never going to work. I clicked on the Minnesota Wild game. I love my wife, but my mistress is hockey, and she eventually seduced me into a few hours offitful rest.

    The results of my sleep study showed the snoring was caused by a compacted sinus and massively swollen tonsils. I underwent a medieval sinus scraping and tonsillectomy shortly thereafter. The anesthesia from the surgery made me sick, so I was given a pill to control the nausea. Since I couldn’t swallow the thing, the pill had to be inserted up my backside. I asked my wife to do the honors, but she declined. Needless to say, if the tables were turned I would have happily obliged.

    A few weeks after the surgery I was healed and no longer snoring.

    My wife said I was the most romantic man she had ever known; going through the painful surgery showed her I was a person of serious conviction. For the first time in years we fell asleep together. Bliss reigned supreme in the home of Todd J. Smith—until one day, when I came home from work and scattered my muddy clothes all over the basement floor. As my wife walked by, she let out a frustrated sigh and quipped: “Is there a pick-your-shit-up clinic you can go to?”

  • Purple Prose

    A few weeks ago the new owners of the Star Tribune threatened to send the jobs of thirty-two of their advertising production employees to India, unless the employees agreed to find “expense reductions” of half a million dollars—or about $15,600 per employee. This business came hot on the heels of the Strib’s announcement that Pioneer Press publisher Par Ridder would be moving across the river. Local media watchers barely had time to wonder aloud about the rationale behind the hiring of the guy who had done such a good job destroying morale in St. Paul before the answer became obvious: The staff cuts that had just been made at the Pioneer Press were about to be duplicated on the other side of the river, and here was the experienced hatchetman who could do it.

    However, at the same time as the advertising production jobs were headed for the subcontinent, and reporting jobs to oblivion, other jobs at the Strib were being filled by former Pioneer Press staffers. Several managers who had worked with Ridder in St. Paul were offered jobs at the Strib, but it’s worth noting that, with the exception of an offer made to Pioneer Press Editor Tom Fladung, who turned it down, none of the new Stribbers were to be journalists. No seasoned, crusty columnists; no hard-hitting investigative reporters; no eloquent editorial writers were among those recruited. Of course, it’s very rare that publishers at big papers recruit their own ink-stained wretches, but it’s unlikely that any new wretches would have been sought when the resignations of two dozen old wretches had just been gleefully accepted.

    So, let’s just leave it that Ridder was going to have to wage the newspaper war short one of his hand picked Myrmidons. Er, make that two…

    Ramsey County Judge David Higgs decided that there’s another job that’s going unfilled, at least for a while—that of Director of Targeted Publications. In his first ruling in the lawsuit brought by the Pioneer Press against the Strib, Ridder, et al., Higgs ordered on April 20 that Jennifer Parratt, who held that job at the Pioneer Press until about ten minutes after Ridder landed at the Strib, had to abide by her signed non-compete and confidentiality agreements and not work at the Strib. At the Pioneer Press, Parratt was the publisher of Spaces (subtitled “Places and Faces”). A recent issue was very short on faces, but had plenty of pictures of highly designed rooms in highly designed homes right next to ads that looked as though they’d been designed by the sort of newspaper ad designers who soon might be working in Mumbai. Spaced among those ads and photos were words.

    The lead stories in the February/March issue of Spaces concerned two remarkable examples of the journalism most valued by the people now running our state’s largest newspapers—journalism that generates advertising directly without any messy detours through the intelligence of a reader. Yup, if you read Spaces, you would be treated to the startling revelation that jewelry, candy, flowers, and lingerie (but only if you are already sufficiently intimate enough to have asked your lady for her bra and panty sizes) make great Valentine’s Day gifts. Top that off with a recommendation that silk-covered pillows will enhance your décor better than polyester ones, and by golly, you’ve got yourself forty pages of advertising you can deliver to the right zip codes.

    The Star Tribune, of course, already has a publication like Spaces, called Marq. (Who thinks up these names?) Marq has an even higher class of advertisers than Spaces, because Marq goes a step further toward eliminating those pesky concerns about providing any pretense of objective service to readers. Marq lets the advertisers actually provide the exquisite photography that graces the exquisite stories about the advertisers’ exquisite products. Combine this with the fact that the Strib has easy access to a larger number of the right zip codes than its competitor to the east, and you’ve got yourself a luxury magazine. Of course, Marq has slightly higher journalistic aspirations, too. In its last issue, we were treated to the musings of erstwhile publisher Monica Moses on personal style, and how her expression thereof includes arranging the books on her home bookshelves based on the color of their spines: “The blues drift into purples, which drift into fuchsia. Let me tell you, book publishers aren’t doing enough with fuchsia.”

    Unlike their publisher counterparts in the newspaper industry, who are doing plenty.

  • The Patriotic Pragmatist

    Eugene Sit’s grandfather was one of the twelve thousand Chinese immigrants who were paid one dollar a week to build the Central Pacific railroad in the 1860s. But before the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were all but forced to return to China by the Chinese Exclusion Act legislation of 1882. Although the Sit family prospered in China, the Japanese invasion of World War II and Mao’s subsequent takeover put an end to that. Sit’s father had escaped to the U.S. in 1938, and his son was finally sent to join him in 1948. His mother stayed in China and was a political prisoner for thirty years.

    Today, Sit has rebuilt the family fortune, and then some. He is the founder of Sit Investment Associates, which has built an initial $1 million investment portfolio to over $6.6 billion under management. But what he’s most proud of these days is the Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund, which he started with $1 million of his own money. He has continued to raise more to give financial grants to every Minnesotan serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in a combat zone since September 11, 2001.

    Were you in the military yourself?
    I was in ROTC, and I was excused when I started having a family.

    You have a son, who went to the Air Force Academy and served in the Air Force.
    Yes. Roger. We chose Roger to serve because we felt very strongly that freedom is not cheap, and every family has to do its part.

    You say, “We chose Roger.” Did Roger have something to do with the discussion as well?
    In his letters from first year, it was clear he was not a happy camper. “Get me out of here, get me out of here” every day. But later, he became an upperclassman …

    Why did you start the MMAF?
    Basically the genesis of it is, we understand the sacrifices that are being made by the military in terms of the financial sacrifice, the personal hardships, the family hardships. Most of these people are citizen soldiers, part-time soldiers who are giving up their regular jobs, not only career opportunities, but taking fifty- to seventy-five-percent pay cuts. It’s hard enough for a middle-class family to make ends meet, but then when you separate the family, losing the heads of the household, families take a tremendous financial hit. That is something we need to recognize.
    We realized that relatively few people are doing the heavy work for us. There are only a few of us that are really making sacrifices, and that is quite different than in other conflicts—Korea, World War II, even Vietnam.

    And the third part of it is that it is part of our values, our family’s values, that I truly believe that when you are doing well and are fortunate, you should think really hard about giving back to the community.

    You have said that the fund takes no political position. Do you personally?
    Well, I do and I don’t. I’m a pragmatist. I’m a patriot. I’m appreciative of what we have in this country. I’ve voted both Democrat and Republican.

    What would a pragmatic person do in this war? That’s a loaded question.
    I think there were many mistakes made in the beginning. But having said that, the alternatives are so bad that we have to find some way to give it one last try and hopefully send a message to the factions that “Listen, we’re not going to be here forever. We believe in helping you, but you guys are going to have to cut this ethnic conflict between yourselves.”

    We have to find a way to stabilize the situation and find some way to extricate ourselves.

    It’s very hard on our men and women.

    You suggested that you think people could be doing more. Do you think there should be a draft?
    I think we can have something similar to that for young people, and maybe old people like me, whether it’s community service, whether it’s neighborhood service, whether it’s helping in the Appalachians—I think all these things would be very good.

    You are in the finance business. I have a financial question around the topic of sacrifice. Do you think there should have been a tax cut while we were at war?
    Number one, I believe in the private sector. I believe in the market and the economic system. We’ve had growth twenty-four of the last twenty-six years. A lot of that could be due to economic policies that I call incentive economic policies, which included incentives for people like you and me to be enterprising, creative, and entrepreneurial. Lower taxes on capital gains allow us to invest more, to be more competitive, and that contributed to the growth of the economy. But having said that, I do believe in times of war, we should not have a segment of society bearing the burden. I think the whole country should be asked to join in to make this a unified effort. We should have had a gas tax and a higher tax on people like me.

    I don’t believe we should mortgage the future—putting the burden on future generations.

    You are an immigrant. What advice would you give to new immigrants coming to the United States?
    This is a great country, a great community. You can do a lot to help yourself. There are a lot of things here that will help you. And don’t forget to be responsible and do your part.

  • The Least I Can Do

    I love television. Loves it! The only thing that is better than watching television is eating while watching television. I especially love what I call “helper television.” It’s vulgar entertainment with a psychology lesson—all rolled into one fun-filled half hour.

    Do you live in a filthy, dysfunctional, crap-clogged house? Then I guarantee one of your favorite shows will be The Learning Channel’s magical Clean Sweep. Each week, a team of attractive, non-judgmental strangers descends upon a burgeoning garbage house. This elite team consists of a carpenter, a perky-breasted hostess, a designer, and an organizer/life coach. They pick the two worst rooms of the hovel, enforce a mandatory yard sale, slap some paint on the walls, and run a Swiffer.

    All the denizens of the remade cave cry and swear that they’ll keep it clean this time, and that they didn’t know organized living could be so easy. But we the viewers know that as soon as the cameras shut down and the carpentry truck pulls away, Tearful Emotional Mom will start ferreting away scraps of quilting fabric and dried flowers with all the spastic energy of a squirrel in late November. When there is no room left, she’ll stuff her cheeks with it. Why? Because she just never knows when she’ll see damask at that price again.

    Not to be outdone, Gruff Dad in Ill-Fitting Shorts will begin re-hoarding NFL bobblehead figurines and antique stereo equipment. Why? Because half of his tunes are on vinyl, and those bobbleheads (still in the box, natch), will double in value forty years from now. Soon, their bedroom will be even more cramped than before because the TV carpenter left brand-new shelving to fill.

    It’s like giving the house gastric bypass surgery. The doctor has cleared out the pipes, but the brain of the house is still a pathological overeater. And putting this process on TV is even more brilliant because people who are attracted to that kind of show probably know a thing or two about living in filth. (Not me, of course!) And people who watch that show are actively not cleaning their houses while they watch that show. Can you hear Satan laughing?

    My very favorite helper television show has got to be the Food Network’s Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. Semi-Homemade is the Insane Clown Posse of cooking shows—mediocre pre-made ingredients with a layer of busywork added. It’s a cooking show for people who cannot cook at all but love to pretend. Instead of raw ingredients, her recipes go something like this: Buy an angel food cake. Smear Cool Whip on top. Thrust a Barbie into the center. Presto: Barbie’s Hot Tub Party Cake!

    Sandra caps off every episode by stirring up a big pitcher of girlie cocktails as a reward for all our hard work. Instead of just slapping grocery-store rotisserie chicken on the plate, Sandra will dump half a jar of salsa over it and accent the plate with a tiny plastic sombrero. And you know what would go extra good with that? Giant margaritas! Olé!

    Sandra’s show always includes a signature cocktail related to the meal. For a birthday, it might be Sandra’s famous “Icing on the Cake” martinis (peach Schnapps, Kahlúa, and vodka in a sugar-rimmed glass). For a Halloween treat, the tantalizingly named “Witches’ Brew” (Mountain Dew and vodka served from a plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket, with a sugared rim). I wish they just called the program Half Baked, starring your favorite alcoholic neighbor … Sandra Lee!

    For me, the only thing that could be better than watching TV and eating would be watching TV, eating, avoiding cleaning the house, and getting sloshed all at the same time. Because I am so good at this kind of multi-tasking, I should have my own show. I’d call it The Least You Can Do, with your host, efficiency expert Colleen Kruse! I would demonstrate the ultimate in streamlined existence. For my kitchen segment, I’d prepare a feast of box wine and Dinty Moore stew: Hobo party! For my housekeeping segments, I’d show my viewers how to use sheets and blankets as window treatments. You won’t use actual drapes or blinds because you’ll sleep in your recliner in your bathrobe, snug as a swarm of bedbugs. Now that you won’t be needing that bedroom, the home-finance segment will show you how to market that space as prime rental property. Working from home is so now.

    And now a word from our sponsors: Febreze Air Freshener and Colt 45 malt liquor.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at mscolleenkruse@yahoo.com.

  • Kuwait

    Here are two photos from our recent trip to Kuwait.

    While there, we went to the Kuwait fish market where they hold daily auctions of local fish and “foreign” fish (caught in non-Kuwaiti waters). The action’s wild, with a few hundred buyers vying for bucketsful of various varieties of fish and shellfish to be sold in restaurants or in the public market located in another part of the same hall, or even to private buyers buying in bulk. We even got to eat some the next day at a wonderful home-prepared meal.

    The auction started with people milling about until suddenly the action started and little by little became more frenetic. It lasted about 15 minutes untill all the fish was sold off.

    In the first photo, Chris Kunz is on the right and Hassan Saffouri is on the left—we took the picture shortly after the auction ended. For some perspective, the second photo is of the auction area before it started.

    Hassan Saffouri

  • Mexico

    These are a couple of recent pics from a recent trip to Jalisco, Mexico
    – where humpback whales migrate for their mating season. In the first,
    you can see The Rake, the tops of a couple of whales, and a “water
    spout”. There were four males and one female in this group, where the
    males were competing for the female. The second shows a few of these
    whales swimming.

    Greg Vinson

  • Dance Dance Contributions

    I am writing in reference to the “Dance Dance Competition” article in the April issue. Although I appreciate any visibility that dance receives in this community, I do not feel this article speaks to the comprehensive nature of dance education available to my students at Summit School of Dance nor to the positive benefits gleaned from the competition experience. Let’s face it, why in this community where education and the arts in general are so valued, would so many students and their parents spend so much time, sweat, and money if the value of the experience was as limited as the article implies?
    At Summit School of Dance our students train in a conservatory-level ballet program alongside their competition classes. They are exposed to creative movement, improvisation, and modern dance from a very early age. Instead of participating in “nationals” our students travel during the summer months to study at many prestigious conservatory programs. Last year, four out of the forty-four students attending the Juilliard summer program were Summit students. This year, we have three students heading to Juilliard with an additional student accepted into the freshman class.

    Just as in any conservatory program, not all Summit students pursue a career in dance, but they do build skills that translate into valuable assets in the corporate world. The competition dancers incrementally learn how to audition as it is a process they are required to go through each year to make their danceline. They learn to be prepared and thorough, presenting themselves as a complete package, confident and put together in spite of the “butterflies.” The rehearsal process builds team skills and students learn about their strengths/weaknesses, what they bring to the group and how to value what others bring. The ability to perform on unknown stages and having to immediately adjust without a spacing rehearsal is an invaluable skill for a professional dancer, but it also breeds flexibility and confidence in all competition participants.

    My students are encouraged to pursue excellence regardless of venue and idiom. Competition dance is a much-beloved venue and something my students share with other dancers. It does serve a social purpose, but it is also an entrée to dance as an art form. By dismissing something so stimulating, and culturally invested, one misses the chance to create openings and bridges between the diverse dance worlds … and we all lose.

    Finally, I resent the term “penis points.” I have never heard that reference prior to this article and find it infinitely demeaning and derogatory. I value the fact that I have young men to teach and that those young men enjoy and pursue their ballet training with gusto. They expand the training possibilities for our young ladies and offer me many choreographic options and opportunities. Outside of a competition studio, I have had very little opportunity to instruct male dancers. Thus, my association with Summit has expanded and nurtured my own professional artistic experience.

    Linda S. Muir Finney, Plymouth, Director of Ballet, Summit School of Dance