Author: Christy DeSmith

“I’m not materialistic or anything,” said Dave King, sprawled on his living room shag carpet with his infant daughter. “I’m just interested in being around things people have really labored over.” King, of course, knows well what it means to labor over one’s work. As a songwriter and drummer for Happy Apple, the Bad Plus, Halloween, Alaska, and a heap of side projects, he’s constantly on the road, touring with one of his bands or collaborating with other far-off artists. Collecting art and scouring vintage shops for modernist treasures is a favorite diversion while he’s away. He has a long list of can’t-miss shops in Paris, Chicago, and, of all places, Phoenix, but he’s also a regular at Twin Cities spots like Theater Antiques, Succotash, and Classic Retro at Pilney.

“Clean lines make for good creative energy,” King said, crossing his arms and surveying his domain, a modestly sized apartment in downtown St. Paul. “When you’re in a room filled with things that people really thought about, it makes you do the same.” In his living room, King gets inspired by a wall-sized drawing by local artist David Paul Schmit. “This one I love ’cause it’s got rockets,” he said. “A lot of mid-century design is concerned with rockets.” Nearby, a Werner Panton moon lamp and a six-foot stainless steel lamp with tiny star-shaped cutouts also play to the celestial theme. King is adept at creating a high/low mix. A Philippe Starck “Eros” chair (the one that looks like a tilted martini glass) is perched in the corner, and hanging from the ceiling is sculpture by King’s four-year-old daughter, created from a water bottle and red string. “This is her trying to be Marcel Duchamp,” he said, giving it an affectionate spin.

In the bedroom, one focal point is a trio of striking portraits on cardboard. King literally bought them out from under the artist, a Parisian hobo, who had been using them as a mattress. But, as in the living room, the eye is also drawn to the spare yet striking furnishings: a low-lying bed flanked by tubular Philippe Starck side tables and Italian office lamps (King has a special thing for lamps), a custom-made desk with cabriole metal legs, a curvy Eames dining chair.

It’s clear that King has a strong vision, and, one might think, a lot of money. But he points out that his collection was amassed slowly, over time, and that he and his wife are still saving for a down payment on a house. “We never had that much money, so we just started picking up small things,” he said. “My wife found a few here and there; I picked up others. Luckily we have the same taste. There’d be nothing worse than the love of my life being into La-Z-Boys.”—Christy DeSmith

If you were a Minneapolis bohemian ten years ago, you might have found yourself packed into a downtown nightclub for what was then one of the city’s most popular bands, the Beatifics. Back then, the band was promoting its first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, a collection of gloomy love’s-lost lyrics and power-pop melodies. The now-legendary radio station Rev 105 was giving it a regular spin right up until the day Rev died, in 1996. As a result, track one—“Almost Something There,” a swell bubblegum anthem—had become a local hit with crusty hipsters and high school cheerleaders alike.

Since the demise of Rev 105, and thus of most programming of local music during waking hours, the Beatifics suffered a fall from radio grace. Their 2002 album, The Way We Never Were, fell on deaf ears at Drive 105 and Cities 97, the surviving corporate FM stations that feign devotion to local music. (The Beatifics remained darlings of the AM dial at the low-powered, student-run Radio K, God bless them.)

Their luck changed in late January when Minnesota Public Radio launched its new station, the Current. Beatifics frontman Chris Dorn and his friends report that the new station, staffed by some of the same Rev 105 personalities who championed his band’s first album, plays a song from How I Learned to Stop Worrying almost daily. (They don’t yet have Dorn’s second album in rotation. “I’ve been meaning to drop it by,” he said.)

Suddenly, Dorn’s music is being blasted again across the prairie on high-powered FM radio. This represents an opportunity to him and many other earnest musicians who wouldn’t otherwise be heard. In its early days, the Current aggressively worked to build a representative library of local music, one that reached beyond the Replacements and Soul Asylum (bands that somehow suffice to define the Minnesota sound farther down the dial). MPR staffers brought in their personal music collections, much of which was residual from Rev 105 days. They also called bands. They called promoters. They called distributors. They went shopping. Mary Lucia email-strafed all the musicians in her address book—all in a blanket effort to invite more local CDs. ’Twas certainly a fertile moment for musicians with stars in their eyes.

“The Current could make celebrities out of some local rockers,” said radio maven Jerry Steller, who owns a St. Paul-based promotion company that helps unsigned and indie bands get airplay. (Now that must be a long row to hoe.) Steller said there are a handful of stations like the Current in cities like Seattle, Santa Monica, and Philadelphia. Depending on their wattage and marketing might, these stations are freed from corporate playlists and can cultivate healthy music communities in their midst—replete with income-earning, recognized-by-fans-on-the-street musicians. In Steller’s estimation, the ninety-eight-thousand-watt Current has that potential, especially under the able watch of Minnesota Public Radio. “It’ll affect CD sales of local artists,” he predicted. “And a lot more people will go to shows.”

The Current is exhuming many other Rev 105 superstars, too, including Matt Wilson, Lifter Puller, and Dan Israel, who got misty about it when he appeared on Local Music with Chris Roberts, a recently added weekend show. At the same time, the station is fortifying post-Rev acts like Valet, the Olympic Hopefuls, and Atmosphere—a group so popular with concertgoers it surpassed the Replacements’ 1985 five-show-feat when it packed the Seventh Street Entry for seven days straight in January (but still hadn’t been played on a local commercial radio station). For flavor, the station also tosses in the occasional unlikely track from local jazz vocalist Prudence Johnson or folksinger Ann Reed. (This may be a consequence of forcing the square-pegged Morning Show with Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole into the station’s otherwise hip aesthetic. But it seems to work in the Current’s oddly felicitous iPod-on-shuffle way.)

Although Dorn is happy to be in the company of bands getting airplay, he’s sheepish about revealing his pipe dreams. When pressed, he conceded, “Yeah, it’s nice to have someone saying ‘We like your stuff. We wish you made more of it!’ And when a radio station plays your music five times a day and is constantly telling its listeners you have a show and then parks its van out in front of that show, you tend to bring in more people,” he said, pondering his Rev 105-induced stardom. “I wonder if MPR will get a van.”—Christy DeSmith

According to hundreds of billboards, bus sides, and direct mailings: Do.

Of course, you are already doing something. You are reading a billboard. As you do, you learn this is not enough in the doing department. You should “groove your body for ten minutes three times a day.” Grooving includes such agreeable activities as dog walking, skipping, and snowman building. It does not include reading. (Reading about the Do campaign in a magazine is, one hopes, a sort of awareness-building limbo.)

On the other hand, if this all sounds pretty unambitious to you, you’re probably not in the target market. Even as the Surgeon General is recommending sixty minutes of physical activity per American adult each day, it is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota that is taking this more direct approach. It is aiming to get the most sedentary—and expensive—Minnesotans on their feet.

“Do is directed at people who aren’t physically active,” said Dr. Marc Manley. He is the director of Blue Cross’s Center for Tobacco Reduction and Health Improvement. That is the rather flat-sounding name of the organization responsible for these upbeat ads. “We’re trying to get them on something that’s manageable. We’re trying to help them understand that moving’s fun.” The campaign’s most guerilla feature is something Manley calls “decision prompts”—strategically placed ads that guilt-trip you into, say, taking the stairs instead of the escalator.

Some people are confused by the bite-sized exercise tips, which are communicated via billboards, television and newspaper ads, bus wraps, and “spectaculars” (that’s ad lingo for 3-D installations, most notably the mirror ball hanging above Block E). There is no indication on the billboards as to who is worried about their health. Blue Cross’s name does not appear anywhere on the billboards, although its logo does show up in newspaper and television versions, alongside its co-sponsor, the American Heart Association. Manley said, “We didn’t want to clutter it up.” As a result, many Do admirers assume it is a state-sponsored public service campaign.

So what’s in it for Blue Cross? Put simply, because fat people contract cancer and heart disease almost as often as smokers, the state’s largest health insurer claims to pay out the nose to treat the inactivity-related illnesses of an increasingly corpulent populace. It would seem, then, that Blue Cross’s strategy is to save money by spending; the company said it expects to save two dollars on health spending for every dollar spent on Do—with the fringe benefit of possibly improving the health of some people whom it does not insure. (By contrast, United Health Care—the Minnesota-based insurer that pays CEO William McGuire around $100 million per year—is apparently too hard-pressed to care about the public’s laziness.)

Dr. Manley’s office is, in fact, now the de facto public health arm of Blue Cross of Minnesota. It was founded in 1999 after the company, which was then preoccupied with smoking, successfully sued a group of tobacco companies. Blue Cross’s very public, very lucrative payout in that lawsuit compelled it to launch the center, which is wholly devoted to spreading good health across Minnesota.

As the center gained momentum over its first five years, a survey of the public-health situation revealed a landscape in which love handles are more pervasive than smoker’s cough. This inspired Do. The $6.7 million campaign—Blue Cross’s biggest initiative ever—buys a lot of billboards and bus shelters. It seems like an earnest effort rather than a perfunctory public-relations campaign, especially since all $460 million of Blue Cross’s tobacco settlement is still tangled up in litigation.

Manley won’t venture a guess as to when the tobacco settlement dollars will be available, but in the meantime, he said, the center won’t be twiddling its thumbs. “We’re going ahead as best as we can with health improvement programs, but not at the level we will once we can use those dollars,” he said. In other words, those commands to “groove your body,” as widespread as they seem, are just the beginning of what may be a permanent ad campaign nagging you to get off your duff. That huffing sound you now hear is the result of a sort of corporate body-groove: It is local ad agencies and media companies hyperventilating.—Christy DeSmith

It’s hard to tell for sure, but the trend may have started with bright tangerine five years ago. That’s the color that the then-newly arrived owners of Two 12 Pottery, a potters’ studio-cum-gift-shop, painted their building on Northeast’s Thirteenth Avenue. Since then, art and color have swept into Minneapolis’s old Polish quarter: storefronts along this stretch of street are embellished with cheerful balloons and cherry-topped metal art signage; some homeowners have splashed their porches with golds and teals. The vacant Ritz Theater, anticipating its rebirth as home to the flamboyant Ballet of the Dolls, is now cloaked in hot pink particleboard. And most recently, the once-inconspicuous 331 building at University and Thirteenth was transformed with a coat of fluorescent yellow-orange, signaling the imminent arrival of the neighborhood’s newest restaurant-bar.

The 331 Liquor Bar will join a thriving scene of galleries—ArTrujillo, Easel Street, and Rogue Buddha, among them—along with fine restaurants, an upscale spectacle shop, and the Minnesota Center for Photography,. It seems almost contagious—even the chiropractor and prosthodontist are embracing an artsy identity.

But this is no simple tale of gentrification. Thirteenth Avenue, known as “New Boston” in the early twentieth century, has long been a popular destination for fun-seekers. Until 1956, two streetcar lines crossed here, delivering hordes of diners to Robotins, the restaurant that preceded the Modern Café (two Modern regulars, an elderly couple, used to come in way back when for cherry Cokes) and enough moviegoers to form lines around the block at the Ritz.

According to the new wave of enthusiasts and red house painters, the Polish immigrants who founded this quarter laid a foundation of irreverence and open-mindedness, thus paving the way for today’s artists and offbeat businesses like the Match Box Coffee cooperative. Ethnic and religious diversity was welcomed, too—both a Hindu temple and the metropolitan area’s largest Spanish-language Catholic church service are a stone’s throw away. Polish heritage is firmly rooted, however, at Europol Delicatessen, which stocks Slavic provisions and magazines, and the Polish White Eagle Association building, which presently serves no practical purpose other than as a venue for chess tournaments. But the Polish immigrants’ friendly yet tight-knit sensibility is best embodied by the longtime characters along this tree-lined street—most notably, vintage queen Madame Dora and Art the barber, who has been buzz-cutting at Boike’s Barber Shop for forty-seven years.—Christy DeSmith

With its cast of starving poets and musicians and creative squatters, Puccini’s La Bohème has not only inspired generations of bohemians; some would say it’s the best known and most accessible opera in the canon. When someone goes to the opera for the first time, frequently it’s to see La Bohème. It has also been the touchstone for many hip, latter-day shows, such as Rent and Moulin Rouge. Yet a modern-day Rodolfo who showed up in hopes of cadging a rush ticket to the Minnesota Opera’s recent production would have been disappointed; the entire run was sold out to business suits and little black cocktail dresses.

So it is with perhaps a little romantic vengeance that one should anticipate Theatre Latté Da’s intimate production of La Bohème, opening later this month. It will feature a stripped-down, hot-rod cast and a small musical troupe, instead of the typical hullaballoo. This Bohème comes on the heels of many other tiny opera productions that have been staged recently, a trend spearheaded by Theatre de la Jeune Lune and the North Star Opera Company.

Traditionalists often cringe when smaller, underfunded arts organizations go capering with Rossini, Stravinsky, and the like. There are good reasons to worry. These shows minimize ensemble singers, reduce orchestrations for a small band or piano quintet, and they often cast a singer or two who can’t hit the score’s original key. In other words, the producers of these operas are saving money and passing those savings along to you. Tickets to see these shows are in the ballpark of fifteen to thirty dollars, a relative bargain.

In the case of Theatre Latté Da, it’s taking some bold liberties with the world’s best-known opera. Although the company has kept the score and libretto intact, and all singing will be in the original key, artistic director Peter Rothstein is tearing La Bohème from its 1830s roots and planting it in the 1930s—still in Paris, still in the Latin Quarter apartment of some starving artists, but this time on the eve of Nazi occupation. “I think La Bohème is rooted in a specific place but not a specific time,” said Rothstein. “I wanted to put the show in a world that heightens its theme of loss of innocence.”

Minus the usual orchestra and large ensemble of singers, Rothstein’s production amplifies the story’s darker elements. “It’s difficult to find a character’s vulnerability when there’s an eighty-piece orchestra playing below them,” said Rothstein. The real trick in transferring Bohème to the 1930s was to orchestrate the score for guitar, piano, violin, clarinet, flute, and—mon dieu!—accordion. In other words, the full complement of Parisian street and café instruments.

“It’s going to sound extraordinarily different,” said Joe Schlefke, who, as music director on the project, is the guy responsible for introducing an accordion to Puccini. “But it’s not sacrilege. We’re trying to be respectful of the whole piece.” As it is written, La Boheme’s characters—Mimi, Rodolpho, Colline, and the rest—are all in their twenties, but the show’s vocal demands usually require well-seasoned singers in their forties or fifties. The dimensions of the 130-seat Loring Playhouse Theater loosen those restrictions, allowing Latté Da to cast age-appropriately (read: cheap grad-student talent). “Our singers aren’t made for big houses,” said Schlefke, who gets to add whispers and other subtleties that wouldn’t play well in the 1,900-seat Ordway. Besides, said Rothstein, “Mimi dies of consumption. You can’t believe that when she weighs two-twenty.”—Christy DeSmith

One reason so many lapsed Christians find themselves back in church on Christmas Eve is to hear the music. This year, you might be surprised to discover that those wonderful old carols have changed in your long absence. While you were away sinning, there has been a bit of an internecine scuffle between fans of the classical canon and what we’ll call the “Kumbayah” sect.

Traditionalists uniformly deplore the “Life Teen” church services that seem to be flourishing in the suburbs. For example, the Upper Room service at Christ Presbyterian Church in Edina is essentially a Christian rock concert with candlelight, velour seats, and a joyful noise. The result is a little like a parish talent show. At an Upper Room service the other day, the pastor served as emcee, music director, Mick Jagger-like rock star, and liturgist. He even performed an interpretive reading—a spoken-word performance, in heathen terms—of the Lord’s Prayer. While teenagers and twentysomethings sprang to their feet and flailed their arms (to the beat of music that, for the most part, pats them on the back for having found Jesus), a skeptical writer in the back pew wondered how this counted as churchgoing.

It is a national crisis: Out with the pipe organs, in with the drum sets and acoustic guitars. By introducing modern music into their worship services, many churches are trying to make the sanctuary a friendlier, more worldly place. Of course, this often merely splits both clergy and congregation along contemporary versus classical music lines.

“There are churches in the Twin Cities that literally have an upstairs church and a downstairs church,” said Dr. Lynn Trapp. He is the director of worship music and the organist at Saint Olaf Catholic Church in downtown Minneapolis. “They won’t allow the guitar into the upstairs church.”

The doctrinal loosening of Vatican II back in the sixties spawned a slow, steady, but ultimately radical transformation of sacred music, first in the Catholic Church and then among Protestant denominations. Churches increasingly made music that sounded like pop, folk, rock, even saccharine love ballads—but they often saved this kind of thing for special events that were more social than worshipful. That began to change, however, and in the last decade, younger clergy have tried to incorporate more contemporary music directly into regular services.

The past year has seen an especially pointed battle between contemporary and classical worship music, with some church members preferring—even demanding—their sacred music sound more like what they hear on the radio. Their sworn enemies are the traditionalists, who are recognized by their white-knuckled grip on the old choral hymnal.

From this pew, it appears that contemporary music is winning. In the past year, many Twin Cities churches uprooted music directors and organists, fired well-paid sopranos, and switched formats. And even though the organ is to hold a “pride of place” according to Roman Catholic dogma, the majestic pipes of this instrument, so often incorporated into the very architecture of church buildings, stand silent. They have been displaced by a crop of friendly, goateed guitarists playing sacred music that sounds like something off the Sonny and Cher Show.

The sweep has the choral community in a fuss, because many are professional singers dependent on the income from their lucrative “church gigs.” Snobbery and self-preservation aside, they argue that contemporary music is too individualistic for congregational worship. The lyrics, they say, are self-referential and self-indulgent. Jeffrey O’Donnell, associate producer for WCAL’s nationally syndicated sacred music program Sing for Joy, suggests that contemporary music is inevitably New Age-y in tone and content. It “looks inwardly rather than outwardly. ‘Lord, let me be your shepherd’ and all that kind of stuff,” he said. By contrast, traditional music is concerned with “the wonders of God’s creation, God’s work, God’s people.”

O’Donnell said that the rhythms of contemporary music are often too jarring for a group to successfully join in, thereby forcing reliance upon soloists and excluding parishioners from singing along. “This style of music is written to be embellished or improvised,” he said. “It works for smaller groups or meditative sessions, but not necessarily for congregational song.”

Dr. Trapp, who leads a diverse music program for Saint Olaf that includes both contemporary and classical music as well as African chanting and other genres, argued that this is but one movement in the constant evolution of worship. “Gregorian chant was the basis of Christian music,” he said. “We only moved into the standard hymnody after Martin Luther and beyond. In history, there is always a need for the charismatic.”

If you like what you’re hearing, Dr. Trapp said, the Twin Cities are especially ripe with new Christian music, thanks to a concentration of renowned composers who live here alongside some of the best church choirs. “We have worship styles far left and far right and everything in between,” he said. “Where else in the country do you have this hotbed of experimentation? And along with that you have the divisiveness.”

Some of the best-known modern services—or most notorious, depending on your confessional preferences—include the bluegrass service at St. Paul’s House of Mercy and the rock ’n’ roll service at Spirit Garage, the nonconformist, nomadic south Minneapolis church. While both are successful in attracting the unbaptized and the backslider alike, organizers acknowledge that their music programs alienate, even offend, others. “What we’re doing may not work for you,” said John Kerns, minister of music for Spirit Garage. “It’s cool to us, but it may not be cool to you.”
—Christy DeSmith

In 1996 I was a junior at the University of Minnesota when a friend invited me along on her family’s annual outing to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. At the time, I was taking Gender and Geopolitics, a class that had me deeply engrossed in the study of socioeconomic strata. Naturally, I thought their little family tradition tediously bourgeois.

At the age of twenty, I had never before participated in such a holiday ritual—not A Christmas Carol, not Black Nativity, not The Nutcracker, not the Lorie Line Christmas Show. My own family lived in a working-class exurb. We weren’t the kind to trek into the city for Dayton’s twelfth-floor holiday exhibit, let alone a play at the Guthrie Theater. Up to then, my theatergoing experience consisted of obligatory field trips and rinky-dink school plays. But beneath the skepticism with which I regarded my inaugural Guthrie visit, there was a longing to participate in a holiday tradition for privileged folks. I was curious about why my friend’s family, most notably her mother, and so many others like her, went to the same show year after year. And why did she demand full participation from every family member, and why did they comply (albeit each in his own way—the father, deferentially; my new friend, apathetically; her youngest sister, the resident theater geek, enthusiastically)?

The Christmas Carol production was altogether underwhelming. What struck me, however, both then and now, was the ritual preamble that led us to the theater lobby: The pre-show feast at my friend’s split-level suburban home, Little Drummer Boy on the car stereo as we exited I-94, walking up Vineland Place with the icy air cutting through my nylons.

Eight years on, my friend and her sister live on opposite coasts, and are therefore relieved of their Christmas Carol duties. I, on the other hand, have now seen the show several times, usually with friends raised under similarly orthodox circumstances. I have softened to this tradition and grown to appreciate the opportunity to don some gay apparel for a night out with loved ones. Each year’s production—not just A Christmas Carol but the pre-and post-show routines surrounding it, no matter which family I tag along with—is virtually a carbon copy of the one before; the only variable, really, is the increasing presence of corporate sponsorship.

A Christmas Carol, of course, is an institution. To some, it’s a smart business practice that nurtures the financial health of a community asset; to others, it’s a crass cash cow. The play earns about twenty percent of the Guthrie’s annual ticket revenue, so there’s plenty of demand, regardless of the heavy rotation. Other theaters have their signature holiday heavyweights, most as immutable as the Guthrie’s: There are Ballet Minnesota’s Nutcracker, Theatre Latté Da’s Christmas Carole Petersen, Illusion’s Christmas show with Miss Richfield, among many others.

Of all the holiday mainstays, Penumbra Theatre’s Black Nativity undergoes the most adventuresome transformation from year to year, skipping across venues and trading up performers. But in 2001, the company premiered a radically re-imagined, rather avant-garde version of Langston Hughes’ Christmas vision, infused with jazz rather than the usual gospel flavor. Black Nativity had been gaining popularity the previous few years, therefore earning an increasing share of Penumbra’s overall revenue. The company made a bold move that year by moving Black Nativity to the Pantages Theater, a far larger venue than the Fitzgerald, the show’s previous home. The hope, it would seem, was to beckon even more people to their show by planting it in the middle of the Hennepin Theater District, where hordes of fair-weather theatergoers already make annual pilgrimages.
Black Nativity nose-dived at the box-office that year, failing to meet revenue projections assigned to it by the perennially cash-strapped Penumbra Company. While folks at Penumbra acknowledge that 2001’s Black Nativity strayed precariously far from the show’s original spirit, they blame the shortfall on the venue, saying capacity at Pantages was greater than demand for tickets. Although the company resurrected its gospel version of Black Nativity the following year and has stuck close by it since, audiences seem to have trouble forgiving the Penumbra for tampering with their favorite show. Facing reduced ticket demand and a seemingly insurmountable deficit, Penumbra cancelled Black Nativity in 2003 and is putting the 2004 production on its quaint home stage, a venue with markedly less seating than those from previous years. If they’ve learned anything by the Guthrie’s example, Penumbra will cast Black Nativity in bronze, rebuilding it as a permanent, reliable standard for families to include among their holiday traditions.

The Christmas Carol experience I had as a young college student is hardly unique: It’s safe to say that most of the people flocking to this year’s staging didn’t see Guthrie productions of Death of a Salesman or Sex Habits of American Women. They’re more likely to be among those milling about the Hennepin Theater District for The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera. In other words, these are “entry-level” theatergoers, like me circa 1996, which is precisely why the Guthrie does not include A Christmas Carol in its subscription packages. Of course, this breed of theatergoer is probably more common than season subscribers, which makes the once-a-year holiday show a lucrative venture.

Financial dependence on holiday revenue is not unique to theater, of course; retailers and restaurants also earn hugely disproportionate slices of their revenue pies between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. ’Tis the season for personal budgets to go on hiatus. This time of year, millions of us are happy to lighten our wallets in exchange for mood-enhancing holiday novelties, be it $24.99 for a candy-cane-spangled turtleneck or $150 for tickets for the family to see The Nutcracker Suite. Complaints about materialism during the season of peace and goodwill to all mankind are now as much a holiday tradition as maxed-out credit cards, hangovers, and the pressure to give (and get) till it hurts. Underpinning all of this festive self-indulgence is a conservative desire to bathe ourselves in comfort and familiarity, to revel in family and friends and A Christmas Carol—in other words, the holidays are no time for the new, the challenging, or the experimental. We want familiar old transgressions and redemptions.

So maybe that explains why non-repertory theaters have been half-empty during the holidays in recent years. Not that smaller theater companies haven’t tried to appeal to our sentimentality with their own mirthful Christmas shows. Open Eye Figure Theatre, a small but renowned puppet and theater company, staged a joy-riding version of the nativity with The Holiday Pageant, which played to marginal success for three consecutive years before taking this season off. Other ambitious companies needing to pad their pockets produce modest versions of the classics. Actors Theater of Minnesota does its own Christmas Carol, for example, while Ballet of the Dolls and Minnesota Dance Theatre are noted for their interpretations of The Nutcracker.

This year, however, Ballet of the Dolls has decided to take Cinderella to the Christmas ball, pointing to another competitive strategy for a saturated holiday market: the staging of a tried-and-true classic from the company repertoire (yes, more shows that lots of us have already seen). Among other iconoclastic companies, the Jungle Theater has established its own tradition with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood, a show that has gone gangbusters on its stage during four previous runs (despite seeming too textual for the average holiday theatergoer’s palette). Theatre de la Jeune Lune, too, is known for slating reprises; this year it offers Molière’s The Miser, a production that won robust ticket sales (and critical enthusiasm) wh
en it played in Boston earlier this year.

Grinch and Scrooge aside, nobody laments this seasonal redundancy like theater critics. To spare its writers, the local newsweekly has a policy of not covering productions it has previously reviewed (which detrimentally affects companies like Open Eye Figure Theatre, which can’t afford advertising and depend upon publicity and word-of-mouth). Critics at the two daily papers, accustomed to spending their time on new work, awake each December like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day. Each year they endeavor to dig deep for something “fresh” to say about A Christmas Carol and Black Nativity, reducing them to trivialities such as recounting each show’s already well-known legacy, or noting the gracefulness with which cast members are aging.

Competition among the Guthrie, Penumbra, Ballet Minnesota, and Theatre Latté Da—all of whom cling to December ticket revenue—has only grown fiercer with the advent of touring and off-Broadway Christmas productions. Armed with New York City glitz and colossal advertising budgets, shows like Scrooge—The Musical (starring yesteryear’s TV icon Richard Chamberlain, which just wrapped up a run at the Orpheum Theatre) arrive annually to plunder entry-level theater audiences. (This year, the Twin Cities has escaped the mother of all these productions: The Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes, although the show continues to maraud all over the rest of the country.)

Minnesotans and millions of other non-New Yorkers devour these shows in part because they’re imported, and thereby play upon our cultural inferiority complex. It’s hard not to fall for the bigger-is-better hype that attends most traveling Broadway shows—and it is also true that most of our homegrown companies lack the financial wherewithal to match Broadway’s Busbee Berkeley aesthetic. Like the New York Yankees, Broadway shows offer the biggest spectacle and the best talent that money can buy. Devoted patrons of local companies might find this glut of outsiders and opportunism tacky, but on the other hand, it could be that this exploitation of holiday sentimentality and tradition is simply meeting demand with supply.

Come December, theatergoers are in no mood for thought-provoking stories or political discourse (especially this year). Who, besides a jaded critic, really wants to confront dilemmas, or ponder poetic texts, or be challenged with avant-garde stagings? And we most certainly do not want sex, not right now (though nudie-theater is a big sell the rest of the year—the Jungle, the Guthrie, and the newly defunct Eye of the Storm, for example, have all used nudity with great success in recent years). For now, we will tolerate moderate conflict as long as it has a warm, fuzzy resolution. We also want dancing. And carols. We want mean-uncle reform. We want the biggest present under the tree to be ours, and we want to know what’s inside.
A Christmas Carol endures because it reconnects us with a time when life (and Christmas) seemed as simple as milk and cookies. The holidays put a strain on all of us, but we’re still longing for those carefree Christmases of our youth. We want to wake up fresh and eager and innocent at five a.m. on Christmas morning. What did Santa get me? Another pair of flannel pajamas? How many melting moments can I shove into my mouth when mom’s not looking?

Christmas is truly our most childish holiday, but I suspect we all want in on the magic. So we bake lots of cookies and buy lots of presents, just like our parents did. And if we grew up attending A Christmas Carol every year, we go again. (Those who loathe this cyclical dumbing-down of theater can always spend December at the cinema, where a host of artful movies get released to vie for Oscar nominations.) Like the ornaments we resurrect each year to trim the tree, A Christmas Carol looks as it did thirty years ago—making it more reliable than even a Broadway show. So long as we can keep watching it through young eyes, it will always be passably fun.

So who can blame me and the rest of the theatergoing public for not wanting to spoil our happy reminiscences with the likes of Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht? There’ll be plenty of time during the doldrums of January and February for challenging and risky work to counter the wet-rag discourse pervading our increasingly capitalistic theaters. After the Nutcrackers are packed away and Dickens’ Christmas ghosts are laid to rest for another year, I will look forward to Penumbra’s Slippery When Wet and the Guthrie’s Oedipus the King, and to the next offerings from the likes of Frank Theatre and Ten Thousand Things. But for now, I figure, why not buy into the December brain freeze?

After Richard Avedon, the famous portraitist and New Yorker staff photographer, died on October 1, the owners of the Black Forest Inn in South Minneapolis draped their notorious Avedon print in black chiffon. The colossal photograph—a black and white portrait of eleven members of the Daughters of the American Revolution—covers a wall in their backroom bar. It is a fine counterpoint to the Teutonic woodwork and Bavarian kitsch in the rest of the place.

The piece was given in 1970 to Erich and Joanne Christ, the Inn’s owners, by Avedon himself. The artist frequented their establishment during his exhibit just down the street at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which was the first museum retrospective of his work in the country. The gift surprised the Christs, as they never got close to Avedon during his brief stay here, despite the many visits he apparently paid to their bar.

Sixteen years later, Ellis Nelson, a regular at the bar, was sitting on his favorite stool when he pulled out a revolver and opened fire on the photograph. “That was a wild day,” remembers Erich, who was walking his wife and infant son through the parking lot when the shooting occurred. “People came running out of every hole in the place shouting ‘He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!’ and I said to myself, ‘Ellis, this time you really did it.’” When police later questioned the shooter, trying to uncover a motive, Nelson was reported to have answered, “That photo always bugged the hell out of me.”

“It does have an element of satire,” says Joanne, referring to the piece. The subjects—members of a patriotic national women’s organization—range in age from roughly fifty to seventy and, being posed in full formal regalia, look more than a little smug. Avedon was branded by some as an unsympathetic photographer known to sucker-punch a trusting subject—making his sitters appear drugged and burned-out in some instances, coaxing them to expose themselves in others. In this case, the Daughters’ personalities are disparate, but all equally repellent. One looks paralyzingly self-conscious. Another lifts her chin, beaming like a queen in what seems an emphatic assertion of superiority. Another wrinkles her nose as if she’d caught a whiff of something pungent. And another, turned from the camera, showcases the fine satin and lacework decorating her expansive backside.

Popular opinion about the piece varies, but most of the regulars, known to asperse the Daughters once they’ve had a few Hefeweizen, find the piece disagreeable (though many enjoy slipping their fingers into its bullet holes). Unfortunately, the window of opportunity appears to have closed on understanding what pushed Ellis Nelson over the edge. According to the Christs, who are still in contact with him despite a lifelong restraining order preventing him from returning to the Black Forest Inn, he is fragile.

However agitated Nelson might have been back in 1986, his aim was impressive. Sure, he was within fifteen feet of his target, but he did not miss his mark. He fired just two bullets into the Daughters, hitting one in the chest, another right through the temple.

The Christs say Avedon was not pleased by the shooting. To appease him, they researched the costs of repair. But after receiving some frightfully steep estimates, they opted to leave the Daughters of the American Revolution forever wounded. Besides, by then the piece was attracting a new crowd of gawkers and urban folklorists. “Rather than losing a bunch of business on account of it, we got busy,” says Erich. “The damage Ellis did was off-set by the notoriety he established.”—Christy DeSmith

Somewhere between West River Road and Summit Avenue, blood will begin to seep through the shirts of a good many Twin Cities Marathon runners. It will seep from a particular part of the anatomy—their nipples—which makes this a delicate subject. It doesn’t happen spontaneously, as many non-runners might think. “This is caused by the abrasion of cloth on skin,” explained Dr. William Roberts, the medical director for the Twin Cities Marathon. One might think that a loose cotton T-shirt would be a comfort, but it so happens that such a shirt grates against the skin while a runner bounces perkily along the 26.2-mile journey. Over time, this will wear down anything that might stand out on a person’s chest.

Minneapolis runner Jason Butler had his first encounter with bloody nipples during a ten-mile training run. Afterward, despite an odd outpouring of general condolences from pals in his marathon-training group, he was oblivious until somebody shouted indelicately, “Dude, look at your shirt!”

“I looked down and there were these peach-sized spheroids of blood where my nipples had bled and bled,” he said. Not yet schooled in the indignities of long-distance running, Butler had left himself unprotected beneath a cotton shirt that became increasingly abrasive as it soaked up sweat. Being a relatively heavy-set runner with full-bodied pectorals, Butler is particularly susceptible to a recurrence. But the painful experience of showering his mangled nipples inspired vigilance: “I wear cotton only if I’m going five miles or less,” he said. “If I’m going really long, I use tape.”

Butler is lucky. Bloody nipples happened early in his running career, long before he strode down Summit Avenue, a spectacle in front of thousands of fans lining the Twin Cities Marathon course. While Butler expects to finish this year’s race with nipples fully intact, many of his peers will be less fortunate. Most are vaguely familiar with the
dangers long-distance running poses to their most beloved body parts, yet many fall prey to misapplied lubricant or they have trained with prudish running mentors who never broached the impolite subject of chafing. “It does not spare any gender, nor is it relegated to the back of the pack,” cautioned Dr. Roberts.

Occasionally, the ax does fall on women (they are mostly safe in sports bras, though) or on the pros. “I have a picture of the London Marathon male winner with a blood spot in the correct anatomical position,” he bragged. From time to time, the same unlucky circumstance has plagued champions of our own humble marathon. Most recently, Oregon-based elite runner Dan Browne broke tape at the 2002 Twin Cities Marathon with two dripping bullet holes on the front of him.

According to Dr. Roberts, few runners report the condition to medical personnel at the finish, thus the exact incidence is unknown. “It’s such a funny injury,” said Butler, affirming the doctor’s hunch that some runners are too ashamed to present with the condition. “My nipples chafed and bled,” he quipped with a whining tone. “How pathetic is that?” He favored a manlier affliction—say, a broken collarbone or a ruptured spleen.

Officially, Dr. Roberts recommends runners buy a runner-friendly synthetic shirt before race day. If they want insurance against nipple misfires: “Duct tape or anti-blister pads work, as do adhesive bandages,” he said. Or, they could follow the lead of one veteran marathoner at Grandma’s in Duluth earlier this running season, who cut two holes in his shirt, exposing the circumference of both pectorals. Fans along the course may have winced at the sight of his pasty white flesh bouncing in the sunlight, but surely they appreciated his efforts at self-preservation. His nipples looked fabulous!
—Christy DeSmith