Author: Brian Voerding

  • Mikenastics: 50 Years and Tumbling

    They don’t know what to expect, and why would they, they’re just passing by with dogs or strollers on this sleepy Coon Rapids sidewalk, and out of nowhere a stout bald man wearing nothing but cutoff jeans or tight shorts comes bolting down the side yard, throws his hands forward, leaps toward a padded sawhorse,…

  • Living Room Licks

    Fifty twenty-somethings crowded into Two Pines, a dark living room in South Minneapolis, on a sweltering Sunday night, flowing into any space not filled by six musicians and their guitars, mandolins, and banjos. The singer, clad in drooping denim overalls, strummed a few chords of a Mazzy Star song and chuckled. “What does this song…

  • 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…

  • Sweet Salvation

    In January, when the Winona Pie Lady, aka Mary Zimmerman, baked her one-thousandth pie, she called up Governor Tim Pawlenty to see if he would accept it. She talked to someone in his office but never heard back. So the seventy-three-year-old great-grandmother phoned Representative Gil Gutknecht, the Republican congressman from Rochester. Gutknecht agreed immediately and…

  • Planet(arium) Rock

    On a recent Thursday evening, Courtney Tucker—a tall, blonde twenty-two-year-old art major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse—stood behind a twenty-four-channel effects console in the school’s darkened planetarium, her face reflecting colored shadows from a baffling array of buttons and knobs. She tapped several of the buttons, and shooting stars showered down from the white…

  • Diamond in the Bluffs

    Wabasha is a mighty fine place to see an eagle. The city is a ninety-minute drive south of Minneapolis on U.S. Highway 61—yes, Dylan’s Highway 61—one of several old settlements wedged between the five-hundred-foot bluffs and the Mississippi River, built in deference to the commanding geography. Originally established as a fur-trading post in the 1820s,…