Author: Julie Bates

With its lion’s head door knocker and elegant front walk, Robyn Waters’ home in Deephaven is a world away from rural Minnesota, where she grew up attending one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. Waters herself has come quite a long way from the little girl who used to tie Lord Hathaway, her tri-color Paint horse, to the merry-go-round every morning after riding him to school. Armed with thirty years of service at Target Corporation, culminating in her appointment to vice president of trend, design, and product development, Waters embarked on the consulting phase of her career in 2002, not just as a run-of-the-mill “trendspotter,” but rather a full-fledged “trendmaster.”

“It’s not about predicting the next trend,” Waters explained. “A trendmaster gives you the thirty-thousand-foot view from above—she tells you what the trend means.” And right now, the trend Waters is busy defining is paradox—the subject of her forthcoming book. “Look at the Hummer and the Mini,” she said, referring to the models she named in the title of her book. “Cars are getting bigger and smaller. It’s yin and yang.” Waters gestured toward a carving of the black-and-white symbol on her coffee table. Waters’ home is a trove of rare and eclectic objects from her travels around the world. She embraces paradox—devoting her life to analyzing the future while surrounding herself with relics from the past. “It all ties to my fascination with symbols, discovering the story behind the story.”

A tour through the trendmaster’s house revealed other ways in which Waters lives out her trend theories. A sandstone bust from Cambodia was carved by young landmine victims—an example, she said, of “social capitalism.” The antique apothecary chest on which it sat demonstrated how “everything old is new again.”

A stunning pair of hand-painted waist-high statues represented Waters’ interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy of need, and her place in that order. “When you get to the top, you ask yourself what really matters. All of my things have meaning. They’re more than decorations … I bought these statues in Udaipur, India, and they represent a Hindu feast day, when the wealthy would bring offerings to the Rajistani—the lower castes—and wash their feet. That resonated with me.”

Bright red tassels are attached to the knob of every door in Waters’ home. When asked for their story, the trendmaster paused. “Actually,” she said, cracking a smile, “I found those at Target.”

It was a Tuesday night. On the lobby wall, two-dimensional children in roller skates and blue jeans frolicked amid neon-green palm trees and smiling dinosaurs. Stars and swirly confetti twists glowed orange, yellow, and red on faded blue carpeting. Above the glass ticket window, a large sign offered these instructions: “Conduct yourself as a lady or gentleman”; “Be neatly groomed and clean”; and, “Hold down the noise when leaving.” For six dollars, a set of industrial doors opened to reveal the trippy time warp of Adult Skate Night at St. Louis Park’s Roller Garden.

Throbbing rock music pumped from the speakers of an elevated DJ booth, and a deserted snack bar advertised cotton candy, hot dogs, and strawberry shortcake. The walls were lined with pink “Treasure House” vending machines (stocked with gaudy jewelry and zebra-striped watches) that glowed eerily in the dim light, and everything smelled faintly of … well, roller rink. It was an unmistakable scent, the mélange of musty leather, stale popcorn, and sweaty palms.

Beneath a giant silver disco ball, fifty skaters swept effortlessly around an open arena. They skated alone and in pairs, dipping, twirling, spinning. Their hips rocked, their limbs extended, and some of their wheels lit up like firecrackers.

Who were these people, and how did they get so good?

“I’ve been coming here since I was seventeen—that’s twenty-five years,” boasted Jim, a squat baby boomer in a black beret and stonewashed jeans. The tongues of his skates hung fashionably over his laces. “I skate four times a week.” He held up three fingers. “It’s wild.”

Two months ago, twenty-six-year-old Andy Sturdevant began attending adult skate nights regularly. “It’s this pop-culture equalizer—some new amazing roller-derby continuum. The late seventies, the eighties, the nineties—it’s all here; Backstreet Boys and Grandmaster Flash. Cyndi Lauper. The Cars.”

According to Sturdevant, adult skaters fall into one of four major categories: “First you’ve got your roller dads.” Sturdevant nodded toward the middle of the rink, where Jim and two other balding men were showing off some incredible footwork. “These guys have been doing this for, like, thirty years. They’re middle aged; they have potbellies and moustaches, and anywhere else, they’re just regular guys. But here—” He glanced again at the freestylers. “They’re gods.”

Three twenty-something young women sauntered toward the locker area. They wore ponytails, tall socks, short pants, and baby tees. Each woman carried a shiny skate case in her left hand: red case, yellow case, blue case. Their makeup was impeccable.

“Roller-derby girls.” Sturdevant smiled knowingly.

Category two. The Minnesota RollerGirls league rolled into town in 2004, and, well, you know ‘em when you see ‘em. Especially when you see them skate.

“It all comes back,” explained Rusty Sahly, whose aunt and uncle have owned the Roller Garden since 1969. “In the mid-seventies, it was boy meets girl, girl meets boy. Now it’s jam skating, dance skating, floppin’ around on the floor. It’s the next generation, that’s what it is.” Sahly’s eyes shifted and he smiled ruefully. “I love adult nights out here—it’s adults re-living their childhood.”

Sturdevant’s third category of adult skater consists of “Your standard teenagers—post-teenagers. Whatever. The social thing is pretty much the same as high school.”

“I used to live and die roller skating, you know?” panted Brian, a skinny young guy in jeans and a green camouflage jacket. “Mankato, Rochester, Cambridge, St. Cloud—we’d just go, you know? Every weekend.”

“It kept a lot of us off the streets.” With his black Mohawk and pointy devilish goatee, Jeff’s brown eyes were surprisingly soft. “We’d get on these buses to Wooddale or wherever—five hundred kids some days.” He paused, thoughtful. “It just becomes a part of you, something you do. And if you’re good at it, you keep doing it.”

In his brown Dickies, beige button-down shirt, and black 1950s-era glasses, Sturdevant himself fell into category four: the disaffected hipster. When asked to sum up the adult-skate community, he smiled, shook his head, and gestured toward the skating floor. “It’s a demographic mess. Or Utopia.” —Julie Bates

“I never had a business dream,” admitted Dave Kapell, founder of Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc. “I aspired to be a starving artist.”

In 1993, he was a thirty-year-old musician struggling to write song lyrics in his living room. He picked up a newspaper. He picked up a pair of scissors. He picked up adhesive, magnetic tape, and a pie tin. In the space of an afternoon, he had created Magnetic Poetry, which would, within three years, earn something like six million dollars. “The thing that happens when people see words bump up against each other; it takes their brains to a completely weird place they never would have gone.”

Kapell’s brain has no problem going to completely weird places. His office in Northeast Minneapolis looks like a cross between an artist’s studio and a toy store, and it suits him perfectly. Hardwood floors sparkle beneath warehouse walls alternately painted bright yellow and sea-foam green. Directly across from the front door, huge black-and-white magnets spell out things like “ask / his / behind / for / sizzle / time,” “long days / are not blue,” and “my music plays / a sad & sweet / symphony of life.”

Perched on the edge of his desk-chair, Kapell gestured toward his shiny red violin. “I took my first violin lesson on 9/11. What a bizarre day that was. My teacher was this elderly woman who was sort of rigid in her ways, you know. And I walked in and had to convince her to turn on the TV.”

He pulled a ukulele out from behind a potted plant. “Music started for me with my mom. She used to do tours to Hawaii back in the fifties—it had just become a state—and she’d wear this grass skirt and teach people ukulele songs. She taught them to me when I was really young; the ukulele’s great for small hands.”

These days, Kapell’s hands are busy building featherweight canoes. “I wanted to build a fiddle,” he explained. But after outfitting his “creative lab” with woodworking tools, Kapell decided to begin with something simpler. “It’s a similar process … you build molds, and stretch the wood over the mold.”

After one canoe, Kapell was hooked. He built one for his wife. He built one for his son. And then he built another so his son could bring a friend. Kapell’s single-person canoes look like topless mahogany kayaks. On one, a small wooden block attached to the bottom houses a unique Kapell accessory: a cello string. “You’re in the middle of a lake, and you pull it taut and pluck it, or use a bow … it vibrates the whole boat.”—Julie Bates

The floor of Ms. LaVie’s School of Loving Arts, inside the Golden Valley Wellness Center, is spread with cheap blankets and plush pillows. Fifteen pajama-clad students sit in this “cuddle puddle” nodding solemnly as Marcia Baczynski explains that dry humping, or “basically pretty much having sex with your clothes on” is not okay here (Rule Number Seven). Here, we are allowed to press together firmly, but each cuddler must remain still from the waist down; under no circumstances should there be any grinding, gyrating, or pulsing. Pajamas must stay on the whole time (Rule Number One), and there will be No Sex (Rule Number Three). Because this is not your parents’ love-in. This is a cuddle party.

Marcia’s cotton pajama pants are blue with yellow bath ducks. She and Cuddle Party founder Reid Mihalko are serving as “cuddle lifeguards” for Minneapolis’ first-ever cuddle party, the adult eventertainment phenomenon sweeping the nation.( I use this cliché purely for dramatic effect. While cuddle parties are increasingly popular in New York, Los Angeles, and, randomly, Ontario, the nation—as well as its northern neighbor—remains intrigued but largely unswept.) Translation: Two spiffy young cuddling professionals have flown in from New York to put on this thing where a bunch of strangers pay forty-nine dollars each to sit on blankets and touch each other from six to ten o’clock on a Saturday night.

“Can I kiss you?” A curvy woman in her early forties smiles at me.

“No.” I wink and lean forward. “Can I kiss you?”

“You’re good at this.” She giggles and looks at her hands. “I mean, no.”

The purpose of this partnered exercise is twofold: We “cuddle monsters” are honing our rejection skills while practicing being rejected.

“In this room,” Reid announces to the circle, “‘No’ is a complete sentence.” He explains the importance of being able to say “No” without qualifiers or apologies. “It’s very empowering.”

Four people ask me for hugs during the next exercise. I reject each of them with an unqualified, unapologetic “no.” I do feel empowered, but there is no time to bask. It is time to hit the floor.

Fifteen adults crouch on their hands and knees in a tight circle, heads in, butts out, mooing. There is an attractive couple in their early thirties, looking for an “interesting shared experience”(his idea); a P.T.O. mom wanting to explore “positive touch” after encountering some “not-so-positive” touch; a hot-ish twenty-ish guy wanting to “be touched”; a burly couple hoping to “teach him to cuddle” (her idea); and an otherwise eclectic assortment of divorcees, new-age peaceniks, social misfits, and sexual pioneers. Some are lonely, some are curious, and one or two are definitely hoping to get laid. Hips and shoulders pressed firmly against the cuddle monsters to my left and right, I open my mouth and moo.

“Cow tip!” calls Reid from somewhere in the circle. Like dominoes, we collapse into a coordinated heap. “This”—Reid and Marcia exchange smug looks—“is how we trick you into your first cuddle!” It’s true. Lying on our sides, each of us is awkwardly spooning our neighbor. On my left, Barbara and Mike remain curled in their collapsed-cow positions. The cuddle puddle rumbles with murmured conversation:

May I spoon you?

Yes.

May I hold your hand?

Yes.

“May I cuddle you?” Reid’s sexy surfer smile is wider than my face. “No.” Damn, I think, as he walks away. I should have had more wine. Alcohol is not allowed at cuddle parties, but I stopped for a glass of Pinot Grigio on my way to Ms. LaVie’s. I’m not sure how far I’m willing to go for this story; I haven’t yet decided whether lying in the arms of a complete stranger—multiple strangers—is kinky-bold and risqué, or simply sad and icky.

Barbara and Mike are engaged in a complex cuddle-positioning conversation:

So, your bottom fits in the small of my back … while my bottom rests on your stomach … They agree upon a position, and thank one another for being willing to sit up and discuss the matter face to face.

My cuddle buddy is a divorced man in his mid-sixties. “May I rub your head?” he asks. Swallowing hard, I provide the requisite verbal “Yes,” and turn, cross-legged, to face him. There is a small thump as his right hand makes contact with my skull. “Tell me if it’s too much!” he calls, cheerfully scrubbing my head like a bathroom floor.

Within ten minutes, the hot-ish twenty-ish guy is working the knots out of my shoulders while a frustrated young wife uses the arch of my left foot to demonstrate a simple massage technique. My cuddle buddy has just gotten the hang of giving a head rub when something incredible happens. All at once our energies align, and six hands are moving on my body in perfect synchronicity. Every movement; every twist, every thrust, every swirl—in Reid-and-Marcia-speak, I am Blissed. Out.

And then someone burps, and the moment is gone. There are six too many hands touching me; the snack table is calling my name.—Julie Bates