Author: Colin Covert

A lot of the house pets that arrive at Morningstar Healing Arts are like aging athletes with sports injuries. They come in limping after chasing a rabbit to the end of their tethered leashes, or suffering hip dysplasia and joint malfunction from jumping in and out of cars and climbing on and off furniture. “Ergonomically, they’re living in a world designed for people, whose legs are a lot longer,” Christine Grams explains.
While Grams mostly does chiropractic work on humans from her South Minneapolis clinic, she also takes several massage appointments a week for dogs, cats, horses, hamsters, cows, sheep, goats, llamas, hedgehogs, ferrets, and even chickens (she charges more for “barn calls”). A genial, animated redhead in her late forties, she uses her hands (size XL) to communicate as well as to heal. They fly about vigorously when she speaks, sculpting the air like those of an orchestra conductor.
Her clinic offers a decidedly soothing environment, with a bubbling fountain, tubular chimes, and lamps fashioned from pumpkin-sized salt crystals. A soundtrack of what Grams calls “new-age woo-woo music” calms man and beast alike. While the place is outfitted with the usual massage tables for two-legged clients, pets get their rubdowns either on the reception-area sofa or a rug spread on the floor. “It’s just the same as I do with toddlers,” she says.
Some twenty years ago, when Grams was working as a registered nurse, an injury from lifting a patient left her with an unstable, constantly painful hip that was resistant to conventional therapy. “I shouldn’t say this,” a colleague whispered to her, “but see a chiropractor.” She did, and the damage was swiftly put right. Grams then soon left nursing to study chiropractic health care. Her animal specialty came about as a happier sort of accident: She was trying to find babies on whom she could practice infant massage, but discovered that few parents were willing to volunteer their offspring to be manipulated by a neophyte. Then she realized that cats, dogs, and even goats were of comparable size—and almost infinitely willing to put themselves in her hands.
Having spent her childhood clutching piglets and chickens on farms that her relatives owned around Hutchinson, Grams was at ease with her practice patients. Once she earned her degree, she continued to practice massage on animals, and soon began receiving calls to “help out” animals belonging to friends, and then friends of friends. Now, her animal clients come entirely through referrals, and in most cases they arrive eager for the treat. “When they realize I’m not the vet and I don’t give shots, dogs will drag people in the door,” she says.
While Grams’ hands-on therapy is rehabilitative, she notes that she is not a chiropractor for animals: In Minnesota, those practitioners are accredited veterinarians, while animal bodyworkers are unlicensed. Still, her therapy has achieved remarkable results, restoring even animals injured in car accidents to tail-wagging good health. Services like hers are growing in popularity. According to the American Animal Hospital Association’s 2003 National Pet Owner Survey, twenty-one percent of pet owners have used some form of complementary medicine on their pets, up from six percent in the 1996 survey.
Animal masseurs face many unique challenges, Grams says. For instance, it’s rare that an animal will remain still for an entire session. For that reason, it is “important to be still within your own body,” to soothe them, she says. “Animals are essentially captives in our lives. We let them know when it’s OK to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, and go outside. Animals are very much the psychological receptors of whatever is going on within the house. This is true of children also, but more so of animals because they are at our mercy. If the household is busy, as many modern households are, the animals tend to get nervous, irritable, or depressed, and these emotions can quite easily mutate into antisocial behaviors, or physical ailments.”
Though she sometimes works with fighting breeds like pit bulls and mastiffs, Grams has never been bitten by a client. “It’s about being comfortable around them,” she explains. “If you’re scared, they’ll be on the defensive and wondering what’s wrong. A gentle touch helps their nervous system to unclench.”
She has also found that pet therapy can be a two-way street. “Animals have taught me I don’t have to be a workaholic. I can have an awful day after a client tells me they’ve been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. But when I go home, my animals are completely in the moment. At the end of the day I’m attacked by a dog and two cats that say, feed me, love me, take care of me. If I’m blue, they always snap me out of it.”

Nancy Nelson was a blur as she readied her new shop, Our Little Secret, for its grand opening a few weeks ago. She had lots of help transforming the storefront, which is across the street from the former Lyndale Garden Center in Richfield. Aged relatives stuck price tags on bric-a-brac. Daughter Susan and grandchildren Sarah and Megan uncrated fashion accessories and decorative objects. Nelson’s husband, veteran WCCO news anchor Bill Carlson, attended to middle-management tasks as visiting friends were charmed into service arranging merchandise. All the while, Nelson—best known in recent years as the reigning queen of infomercials—buzzed around, clearly in command of the mission’s complex logistics. And with the same tsunami-strength enthusiasm she used to pitch Power-Flo paint rollers and Juiceman II Automatic Juice Extractors to insomniacs, Nelson made it all seem like fun.

Nelson is pep personified, a product of the showbiz gene pool that brought us such spunky girls-next-door as Mary Tyler Moore and Katie Couric. Propelled by 1000-megawatt moxie and more than a smidgen of wholesome sex appeal, she worked her way from community theater to newscasting to late-night As Seen On TV fame. As a teen in the mid-60s, she made her professional stage debut at the Old Log Theater in The Impossible Years. Her entrance, in a bikini, prompted her father to exclaim from the audience, “Oh my God, Florence!” That reaction was echoed in many local households when Nelson became a miniskirted late-night weathergirl for WCCO-TV. “People started to recognize me after that,” she recalled. “They’d say, ‘I don’t know your face, but the ankles are familiar.’ ”

For years, Nelson and anchorwoman Pat Miles were the Mary Ann and Ginger of Twin Cities television, friendly rivals for the unofficial title of Hottest News Personality. Nelson graciously yields to Miles in the looks department (“I’ve got the second-best boobs in the market,” she once told a local media reporter), but she’s second to none when it comes to perkiness.

The woman also has a serious knickknack habit. Her new store is so overstuffed with merchandise, it suggests an aggressively girly version of Ali Baba’s cavern. There are paisley Pashmina shawls, bejeweled watches, lacquered fountain pens, pop-up picture books, and iridescent glass lamps that would make a peacock look drab. All of it was acquired through the network of wholesale vendors Nelson met as a pitchwoman—and, of course, purchased at low, low prices, with the savings passed on to you!

Nelson got her business education young, tagging along with her father in his Flav-O-Rite Sausage delivery truck. In the process, she got to know everyone from the guys behind the meat-market counter to customers at the mom-and-pop corner stores.

Performing came naturally. As an only child, Nelson said, she was always entertaining “the mirror, the cat, the dog, or any unfortunate visitors.” Her second-grade teacher arranged for her to study drama at the MacPhail Center for the Performing Arts. There, she acted alongside high school students and told everyone her future plans were “to go to Broadway and be a star.” At 17, while hostessing at a Perkins, a customer told her to shelve her Broadway plans and come work for him at KMSP-TV. By the time she was a Roosevelt High School senior in 1964, Nelson was hosting Date with Dino, a live, daily teen-dance program that ran for a year on Channel 9. She learned to ad-lib commercials alongside spielmeister Mel Jass, the WTCN Matinee Movie host renowned for his ability to improvise sixty-second pitches without rehearsal or cue cards. At the Old Log, she played romantic ingénue parts opposite Nick Nolte for half a decade.

Nelson’s sincerity on camera led to positions anchoring newscasts and talk shows in the Twin Cities—where she spent the first dozen years of her marriage to Carlson as his on-air competitor—and in Los Angeles. She eventually found her niche in chatty, long-form commercials, convincing America that the Popeil Food Dehydrator was “fun!” Ron Popeil bought a mansion and a yacht with the proceeds; Nelson got a modest paycheck but also public renown and respect in her peculiar industry. The CBS Morning News called her “the best-known and most effective TV saleswoman on the planet,” and, in fact, her work has been seen around the world, from Russia to Malaysia. These days, she not only hosts but also produces and creates TV infomercial campaigns.

Flitting about her store, Nelson showed off its inventory with the wide-eyed wonderment she brought to hawking George Foreman’s Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Every item elicited a “Wow!” a “Look at this!” or an “Isn’t that great?” Since Nelson plans to personally greet and assist customers at the store, a trip there promises to offer patrons both a shopping experience and a sort of personal show.

Nelson’s husband beamed as he watched her in action and pointed out a pair of gold bumblebee ornaments on Nelson’s denim shirt. He explained that he’s made it a tradition to give her jewelry that features bees. “Aerodynamically, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly,” he said. “But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just soars merrily along. That’s Nancy.”

At the former St. Croix Hilltop Drive-In Theater, on Sunday mornings from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the Cougar lies down peacefully with the Mustang, the Falcon with the Sunbird, and the Cobra with the Impala. These worship services, held by Trinity Lutheran in Stillwater, are the longest-running show at the Hilltop, which is about a mile north of the Stillwater lift bridge in Houlton, Wisconsin. For twenty years, rain or shine, the faithful have crowded their autos into the lot at this 1960s-era single-screen drive-in, and propped Bibles against their steering wheels.

There are other drive-in churches in the Twin Cities area (Augustana Lutheran of St. Paul holds summer parking-lot services), but Trinity Lutheran is the only service held at an actual drive-in. (The theater closed in 1991, and the land is now owned by a member of the Trinity congregation.) The curtain will soon be coming down for good, however, when nearby Highway 35 is expanded to a four-lane divided highway in 2008. In the meantime, a committee is searching for a new outdoor location, but most drive-in worshippers lament the decision to pave this particular paradise.

Sunday mornings at “Drive-In Trinity” might overall resemble a thriving car dealership, but attending church here is in many ways like worshipping at any other church. Congregants sing hymns, pray, and listen to a sermon—but all from their automobiles. Deacons walk past with wicker offering baskets, and arms stretch from car windows, proffering donations. Able-bodied worshippers leave their cars to take Holy Communion in front of the movie screen; those who can’t instead turn on their headlights, and celebrants bring Communion bread and wine to them. (Cars sometimes have to be jump-started when drivers leave their lights on throughout the service.) Pastor T.J. Anderson, who has been with Trinity since April, understands that churches must change with the times. While at St. Andrew’s in Mahtomedi, he created the “noisy service,” where energetic youngsters are free to run amok. Founded in 1856, Trinity is “always asking, How can we be innovative?” Anderson said. Having never seen a drive-in service before this year, though, he worried that “it wouldn’t feel like a real worship service. And I was wrong.” The only concession he makes in preaching to a sea of windshields is to use more theatrical gestures. For instance, in illustrating the concept of strength in faith to the assembled vehicles, Anderson did an exaggerated Hulk Hogan-style bicep flex. When he called for an “amen,” the response was a joyful noise of honking horns and the occasional high-pitched compressed air siren. And when the faithful are moved by their preacher, they don’t wave their hands, but flick on their windshield wipers.

Tom Thiets has attended the drive-in church since the 1980s. Back then, the Hilltop functioned as both a Saturday-night passion pit (where God only knows what went on in the cars) and a Sunday-morning place of worship. Thiets, who is forty-eight and works as a trade-show supervisor in Stillwater, recalled that when his buddies first went to movies there, “it was a place to party and hang out with people. Now, years later, we sit in the same place going to church. We changed and so did the drive-in. But it’s still a very good gathering place.” The atmosphere is relaxed: part tent revival, part tailgate party. Many of the faithful are active types, dressed for boating or the golf course, and it’s common to see vehicles with kayaks or motorbikes in tow. Other congregants set up lawn chairs, combining their devotions with a little sun worship. Some even arrive on horseback.

On the last Sunday of August, about 350 people worshipped at the drive-in, decisively outnumbering the assembly at Trinity’s home base in Stillwater. “We might have fifty percent more people at the outdoor service than in the traditional church,” said Pastor Anderson. “We’re inviting people to come and be themselves, come unshaven, in their pajamas, with their pets. In a building, it’s like we’re supposed to be quiet and reflective. The drive-in worship allows this kind of different freedom. I would say it’s fun.”

Beautiful, too. No church in town has a finer ceiling. “Most every weekend, we see three or four eagles soaring on the air currents over the St. Croix Valley,” Thiets said. Appropriately, the welcoming song at a recent service was “On Eagles’ Wings.” “It’ll be sad when the drive-in closes,” he said, “but we’ll find a way.” Amen to that.

Attention, restroom patrons. Please do not assault the tall, dark-haired, suspicious-looking man taking pictures in there. He is not a deviant who will soon be cackling over his snapshots like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. Jon Thompson is the co-founder and creator of Restroom Ratings, a pithy online guide to public conveniences. He is merely there to help patrons of public conveniences flush out the best that are available.

When he is not powdering his nose or walking the dog, Thompson is a web designer for Lifetime Fitness. He is twenty-five, he lives in Uptown, and he has been posting his illustrated reviews at www.restroomratings.com for almost five years. His evaluations range from the Loring Pasta Bar’s “enchanting,” “stunning,” “truly wonderful” facilities to the “high-pressure vacu-crappers” aboard Northwest Airlines’ Airbus A319s to certain abominations where the patron, loath to touch the seat, must assume the hovering position of a downhill skier.

It was at one such facility that the project was born. “We were on a road trip through Wisconsin and stopped at a run-down gas station to fill up. My wife had to go to the bathroom, and when she came out she said there ought to be a sticker on the door so you know from the outside what you’re getting into.” Thompson pondered the idea of a rating website with downloadable stickers. That aspect of the project never materialized, but the two hundred or so restroom critiques he has posted offer an authoritative guide to the form, function, and aura of lavatories from the Twin Cities to the U.K. and Japan. He rarely takes a vacation without filing reports on half a dozen WCs or washiki toires.

It’s not exactly a hobby, and not quite a business, since the web advertisements on his site don’t really compensate Thompson for the time he puts into his endeavor. He considers the work “a calling.” The son of a plumber, he spent his early years shadowing his father on many service calls, inheriting a discerning eye for bathroom hardware.

“We’d go into someone’s restroom and Dad was like, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting, they have the older model American Standard. You can’t even get ball cocks for that kind of toilet anymore.’ ”

The idea of rating public washrooms isn’t unique, but other sites take a prosaic, cursory approach. “They’ll say there are two urinals and it’s handicapped accessible,” Thompson noted. He prefers ambience-rich descriptions that evoke the sights, sounds, and feel of the place. Also the aromas, of course, not all of which are lemony fresh. His report from one northeast Minneapolis landmark, Mayslack’s restaurant, has a sour, nostril-stinging immediacy. “If a smell could punch you in the face,” he wrote, “I would have two black eyes.” Thompson’s writing is sharp, concise, and packed with poetic humor. If his works were collected and bound, they’d make great bathroom reading.

“It’s an essay, it’s creative writing,” Thompson said. He delights in restrooms with a touch of character, such as the retro facilities at the Riverview Theater, the terry cloth hand towels and framed ad posters at Babalu, the Caribbean restaurant in the Warehouse District, and the outhouse in Taylors Falls’ Interstate Park that featured a bird’s nest with live chicks nestled beside the toilet. Of course, he also includes scores of generic chain restaurants. “There’s a lot that are exactly identical. The tough part is writing a review that’s different and sets it apart.” Still, even a run-of-the-mill loo such as that in the Mankato Wal-Mart can serve as a springboard for some off-the-cuff sociology. “Not too filthy, but not too clean, either. Still, a welcome refuge from the dozens of watchful in-store security cameras, reminders of Wal-Mart’s god-like presence in every aspect of our humble shopping experiences.”

If his site has a shortcoming, it is that reviews of men’s rooms far outnumber those of ladies’. Thompson’s wife has contributed a few items, but “she hasn’t latched onto it the way I have,” he said. So for male readers, and even for Thompson, many mysteries remain. “In Chili’s restaurants, they have the Sports section of USA Today mounted on the wall,” he said. “In the women’s, do they have Lifestyle?”—Colin Covert

It’s Saturday night at Lili’s Burlesque Revue, and Sweetpea is center stage, vibrating her derriere like a paint shaker at Home Depot. The diminutive brunette’s dance routine is a combination of kooky showmanship and gymnastic prowess. Arriving onstage in a frumpy 1950s housecoat, bath cap, and cat’s-eye specs, she peels off the Grandma outfit layer by layer while giving a Hula-Hoop the hip-swinging ride of its life. The near-capacity crowd, about sixty men and women, yowl and applaud as she puts the hoop into overdrive.

Tawnya Konobeck, who performs as the dorky/sexy Sweetpea, is part of a new generation trying to revive the sass, the glamour, and the art of the old-fashioned strip tease. Lili’s troupe of a dozen or so regulars might each bring home thirty dollars a night, which of course barely keeps them in sequins and pasties. With that kind of financial reward, this is hardly a case of women exploiting their bodies for money. Laura Libby, stage name Ophelia Flame, is a veteran of the Twin Cities exotic dancing scene. She told me that she could easily make a thousand dollars a night by taking off a bit more and doing a lot less work, but she’s drawn to the girls’-club atmosphere of the cabaret.

“It’s less expensive to perform at Lili’s than for us to go out. We get all dressed up, go downtown, have a few cocktails with our friends, do a couple of numbers and go home. We get to wear fake eyelashes, be the center of attention, and still walk home with money in our pockets” after a night of fun, she explained. “Although I’d be lying if I said we wouldn’t be happy to make more, I think it’s healthy to have a hobby that isn’t purely motivated by filling your pockets.”

“Why do any other kind of labor but a labor of love?” chimed in Michelle Langer, a Gustavus Adolphus music grad and erstwhile Christian rocker who becomes Nadine DuBois, the revue’s sultry emcee. “I would have done this gig for free. What I do every weekend is get all dressed up and fabulous, sing fantastic songs, watch my friends perform their hearts out, hang out with lovely people in the audience, and feel awesome about who I am as a woman in her sexuality. Seriously, what’s better than that?”

In this age of Internet sleaze and primetime wardrobe malfunctions, the show has an innocent, PG-13 feel. Nipples remain chastely covered at all times and panties are de rigueur. You see more flesh exposed at the gym. While the striptease has stimulated much conversation, Lili’s is a variety show, mixing bawdy comedy, clowning, mildly suggestive dancing, and music. By definition, burlesque is good humored. Libby, who calls herself “the June Cleaver of strippers,” does an act called “Laundromat Blues” with a prop washing machine that tumbles clothes and blows bubbles. A winter favorite is “The Minnesota Striptease,” in which she removes endless layers of long underwear and flannel, finally hiding her bare bosom behind a tater tot casserole and hot pads.

If Lili’s is the Land of Peekaboo, it is surrounded by the World of Spread’em—otherwise known as the Warehouse District. There are numerous bada-bing variants in the neighborhood; you could shoot a garter down the street to Sex World or Choice. Unlike some cities, Minneapolis makes no liquor-licensing distinction between establishments featuring full nudity and more discreet enterprises. But there is probably not a lot of crossover in the clientele. The audiences that choose Lili’s conceptual, stylized titillation want “a bit of naughty fun delivered with a wink and a smile,” said house pianist Karen Paurus. As burlesque queen Ann Corio observed decades ago, “A woman’s greatest asset is a man’s imagination.”

From its opening last August through May, the annex next to the Urban Wildlife bar was called Le Cirque Rouge de Gus. It took a new name in honor of Lili St. Cyr (born Willis Marie Van Schaack in Minneapolis on June 3, 1918), a very popular stripper in the 1950s famed for her champagne bubble-bath routine. There was also a change of management after an acrimonious split between most of the performers and founder Amy Buchanan. When I spoke to the troupe, the ousted Buchanan was threatening legal action, but the mood was upbeat and crowds were growing.

They are not stereotypical strip-club patrons. “We get a lot of woman coming down—perhaps more woman than men,” observed Patrick Tierney, who performs blues classics under the moniker “The Dusty Balladeer.” “Tons of couples. They not only adore the dancers, they sing along to the songs, they laugh at the jokes, they cheer for the jugglers.”

“I think people are drawn to simpler times when life gets scary and feels unstable,” theorized Libby. “There’s safety in looking to the past, remembering and seeing, ‘Okay, they made it through that. We can do this.’ ”

She is probably onto something. As historian Irving Zeidman put it in his 1967 book, The American Burlesque Show, “burlesque thrives on depression.” Gina Woods, a Macalester College Dance Ensemble alum who performs as Gina Louise, thinks the form is timeless. “Women have been doing this dance since the dawn of fabric,” she said.

With venues emerging in New York, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and San Francisco, the revival appears to be swelling. The second annual New York Burlesque Festival, held in May, had one hundred and fifty performers—three times as many as last year—and a few corporations, such as Target and Bloomberg LP, have hired burlesque artists for private events.

Langer isn’t surprised. “People who choose to see a burlesque show are looking for something different and more fabulous than what they usually do,” she said. “I knew a guy who came to our show, and then went to one of those more explicit clubs up the street. He said, ‘Damn. I spent a lot more money there, but your show was way sexier.’” —Colin Covert

Wynne Yelland and Paul Neseth are partners in Minneapolis’s design firm Locus Architecture. They recently set down what looks like a spacecraft over by Cedar Lake. It is a polycarbonate-walled, metal-roofed, four-bed, four-bath, postmodernist machine for living. They call their sleek structure Nowhaus 01, and it stands out from the ramblers and cottages on its block like a pink Prada frock at a PTA meeting.

From the outside, behind the translucent sheathing panels, a passerby can discern the indistinct shapes of billboards—hey, is that a PT Cruiser ad trapped in there?—recycled as weatherproof insulation. Inside, 3440 St. Paul Avenue is a beautiful, harmonious house. Daylight streams through a corner bank of windows into the gracious two-story living room. The colors are warm; the walls are birch veneer paneling and slate, set off with inventive industrial details. A steel staircase hangs in midair like a sculpture. One bedroom window offers an artistic view of tall pine trees; another frames an intriguing composition of the copper gutters on the neighboring house.

It could be the dream home of art-loving hipsters. In fact, it’s strictly the architects’ vision, unencumbered by the questionable taste or idiosyncracies of an actual client. Whiles most houses are designed like a personal ad, not to attract anyone specifically but only to avoid rejection, Nowhaus was created to showcase Locus Architecture’s style, generate buzz—and ultimately, of course, snag a buyer. With an asking price just south of one million dollars and its radical chic look, Yelland and Neseth concede that it’s a house in search of a very special buyer.

Some neighbors have reacted with gasps of admiration, others with snorts of derision. Jay Isenberg, a residential and commercial architect who lives across the alley, is enthused. The Locus partners are “stretching ideas, pushing boundaries, using different materials in new ways,” said Isenberg, who has lived for twenty years in a traditional cottage he designed. “My design motif is far different from theirs, but I respect what they do. Without taking risks, architecture would never move forward.” He has invited the Locus partners to speak at the architecture courses he teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Nowhaus’s next-door neighbor, Dave Alan, is irritated. A homebuilder responsible for seven high-end houses on St. Paul Avenue, he is exercised by the alien presence beside him. He summed up his reaction in multiple-choice form: “What the hell is that?”; “You’re kidding!”; and “When’s he going to paint it?”

While Locus had no legal obligation to present its plans to the neighborhood association for approval, Alan feels it was disrespectful of the firm not to explain what it was planning, initiate a dialogue, and consider the residents’ comments—a process Alan said he has been through himself. “These neighborhood committees have a lot of cool people on them. Why wouldn’t I want to listen to their viewpoints? What is Locus Architecture really committed to—building relations in the community, or making a statement in architecture?” Still, Alan gives the designers their due. “On the inside, I think it’s pretty cool. It really is. I could see myself living in that home.”—Colin Covert