Author: Sarah Barker

About seventy-five people who had not won the lottery waited outside the Department Store Formerly Known as Dayton’s at Rosedale Center. The manager of the store talked into a microphone that rendered his voice unintelligible, then some instigators tried to incite the crowd with a rousing countdown. After a lackluster “ … two, one,” the manager cut a ribbon, a deejay summoned upbeat music, and consumers shuffled into Macy’s North, clutching complimentary ten-dollar gift cards that, I discovered two weeks later, expired on opening day, September 9.

I’m not sure what I was expecting—maybe orange-haired, Brooklyn-accented salespeople—but everything was as before: wool skirts and matching sweaters, Nine West shoes, crystal, Ralph Lauren bedding, ties, gifts-with-purchase. The Oval Room was looking very White Plains/Hamptons, with Michael Kors up to there. Evening gowns were overwhelmingly long and black. I drifted through departments with disconcerting names like Better Sportswear, touching things, until I was drawn into the juniors department by something pretty and inappropriate for my age. As I flipped through the sale rack—thick with droopy modal tunics, chunky sleeveless turtleneck sweaters, and size-zero pants—a red Asian-inspired top jumped out. What had we here? Heavy silk that didn’t slither off the hanger, a unified design statement, and the dignity of a tired refugee washed up on some benighted shore. The tags read Prada, a line once harbored in the exclusive Oval Room but jettisoned when the store became Macy’s North.

A few weeks later, there was a much larger and very much giddier crowd skittering across the red carpet outside the Orpheum Theatre turned out for the fourteenth annual Glamorama, née Fash Bash (ouch). Sponsored by whomever is currently residing at 700 Nicollet Mall, this fashion show-cum-pop music extravaganza is one of the Twin Cities’ few opportunities to dress up for the sake of dressing up—top down, no-holds-barred, well-shut-my-mouth glamour. So where—in this day of Target whores, ateliers.com, vintage on celebs, revolving-door department stores—does one find the perfect outfit for such an occasion? I asked around in Macy’s downtown Minneapolis store for the specially created Glamorama Shop and was sent, serially, to third floor, the Oval Room, Cosmetics, Handbags, and “by the loud music on first floor,” only to learn from a floor manager wearing a headset that glamorous pieces are endemic to Macy’s, like chipmunks in Minnesota. They’re everywhere.

Obviously, the 2,100 style mavens at Glamorama had spent considerable time and money exploring the glamour question as well, and it appeared that many of the sisters had got themselves down to Fiftieth and France, in Edina, to snag something fluttery, with smocking or pleats and a fetching finish. Certainly, there was a whiff of A. B. S. by Allen Schwartz and BCBG, and some prom-like dresses, sparkly and low-cut, that might have been of Macy’s origin, but the feeling was that shopping at Macy’s for a Macy’s-sponsored event was a bit too formulaic. Glamour calls for risk, creativity, and provocative spirit—none of which has ever been stocked by department stores.

Considerable cleavage, bare backs and legs—all staples of glamour—held their own without a lot of props. Manicure? Si, si. Hair professionally constructed? I don’t think so. Accessories were limited to a delicate necklace and a man. A Profound Geo-Fashion Thought occurs: Maybe stepping out in the middle of the country is a lot like a tectonic meeting of the coasts: West Coast sexy (without the ballistic breasts ’n’ baubles) merges with East Coast sophistication (minus the Upper East Side snarl). Oh, on with the show!

The gilded lobby fairly bubbled with air kisses, shiny faces, and camera flashes as a photographer captured somebodies at their botoxed best. Thumping house music gave way to a bilingual announcement that we were about to enter the Glamosphere, where the official languages were Beauty and Spanish. Since Beyoncé—the philosophical, musical, and stylistic muse of Glamorama—could not be present, she delivered her fundraising message that fashion rocks, and so does children’s cancer research, via video. Fast-flashing international images, including a sweat-slicked torso and a bare international bum, got us in the right frame of mind and, bing bang, the magic began. Cavalli, who has gotten a lot of good ideas from Keith Richards over the years, put an obi over a gothic shirt and some thigh-high boots and, herro, Kyoto-infused business casual. The designers behind Tuleh found it elementary, my dear Watson, that formfitting tweed solves the case of the missing ass. In a design coup, Badgley Mischka transformed a chenille bedspread into the most stunning flamenco evening gown. A hot Latin beat ran through that collection like pink-eye through a kindergarten class. YMCA: Moschino sent out a sexy cowboy, a sexy priest, a sexy conductor, a sexy boxer … and just in time for Halloween.

On and on; it only got sexier with a brief interlude for hideous by Marc Jacobs. Wrapping things up, House of Deréon kind of took advantage of its connections (founder Tina Knowles is Beyoncé’s mom, for heaven’s sake) to show a whole compound’s worth of curvaceous clothes: House of Excitement, House of Hotness, House of Mild Interest (housecoats, pants liners, compression socks, and that ilk).

As the lights blinked on, those 2,100 surprisingly nimble fashionistas sprinted the three blocks to Macy’s for more sensual pleasures at the after-party. But little did the partygoers know that the hot-blooded, Rio-flavored frocks from the runway would not be hanging in the Oval Room and, in fact, can be ordered only through Macy’s personal shopping service. At the click of a mouse, however, they could be in Temperley’s ateliers. Or they can always pop over to Neiman Marcus or Stephanie’s, in Highland Park, to try on that drop-dead gown. They can shop Bluefly or Girlshop or any of a myriad online boutiques for that upwardly, utterly flare-out-to-there-wardly, sell-my-clothes-I’m-going-to-heaven incarnation of glamour. Macy’s may have whetted the appetite for glamour, yet I wondered, can it deliver the whole feast?

Shopping is supposed to be about getting stuff and the resultant happy glow of ownership. Yet how did it come to be that retail, as we know it today, is based around wanting but not necessarily getting? While it’s counterintuitive, it does explain the stacks of miserable, desperate-looking people at the mall. Jeans, perfume, boobs—there are always better yet unattainable models.

Let us observe a different shopping paradigm—that of Savers, the world’s largest for-profit thrift-store chain. Savers is about getting stuff. This explains its stores’ universally buoyant ambience despite their rawboned appearance and their clientele, many of whom have every reason to be miserable or desperate: seniors who forgot to contribute to their 401(k)s, madonnas with children at their feet, college students living on thirty-seven dollars per semester, roofers, writers, people who got laid off in 1995, people who live with a lot of cats.

A recent trip to the Savers on East Lake Street in Minneapolis got off to a glad start as a woman flowing with robes and children exited. One cub was skipping and energetically pulling the cord on his new (to him) See ’n Say. Another walked in awe as the sun glinted like a million rubies off her red sparkly shoes, the ones with the tag still stuck to the bottom. Inside, Shakira was on the sound system as a middle-aged guy inspected a pair of size-nine women’s knickers. It was Steve Miller time when a chick with impressively architectural hair and I both reached for some six-inch, clear-acrylic platforms. When she saw they were size eight, she said, “Uh-uh, I need size nine-and-a-half.” But she watched as I tried them on, and kindly said I could really carry them off. Go on, take the money and run. A bouncing, shiny-red, hundred-percent-rubber dress turned up for $4.99. The Hansons mmmm-bopped, and a large woman sang along as she flipped through miles of jackets representing the design inspirations of everyone from Jaclyn Smith to Balenciaga.

Outside the dressing room, two generations of a Hmong family waited restlessly until the narrow door opened and tiny grandma stepped out, looking positively transcendent in a floral dress, plaid men’s sport coat, stocking cap, and black Chuck Taylors. It might have taken her three days to quit smiling as her family gathered around, approving. Rock my body …

Family-friendly and family-run, Savers is firmly grounded in reality shopping—the type of shopping in which thirty dollars can net a decent, even hip, wardrobe, or maybe a couch. The seeds of this enterprise were planted by Ben and Orlo Ellison, who worked with the Salvation Army in the 1930s. The next generation, Bill Ellison, opened the first Savers in 1954 in San Francisco and is succeeded at the helm by his son, Tom Ellison. Savers now runs more than two hundred stores in twenty-five states, Canada, and Australia. There are five here in the metro area, including the newly opened Maplewood location. A business that expands into Canada and Australia instead of, say, Japan and Switzerland cannot be accused of grandeur.

Kaycie is a suitably pragmatic supervisor for a place that calls Miami-divorcée-goes-bad a dress. She started out pricing at the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, store and did a stint at the Bloomington location before transferring to St. Paul. Willingness to relocate is one of the things Savers looks for in an employee. “That, and a good work history,” she said. “They like to know you’re a hard worker.” In-store announcements are broadcast in English and Spanish, and the checkout staff, in particular, makes frequent use of second languages, though that is not required. In fact, diversity of customers, staff, and merchandise is what Kaycie likes most about her job. “Every day is different,” she said, expecting a wild day, as always, on the upcoming fifty-percent-off storewide sale. But lately, Tuesdays have been especially busy. Tuesday is seniors’ day, with forty-percent off Savers’ already modest prices for those fifty-five and older.

Along came a wizened optimist, sporting an eclectic ensemble, who paid for a silk tie in coins. Noting the butter-soft, hand-stitched Donald J Pliner boots clutched to my chest, he smiled and said, “Blue tag. Good deal.” Blue price stickers were fifty-percent off that day, making these boots, which once cost someone hundreds of dollars, $6.49.

The Chinese have been using acupuncture for cosmetic purposes for centuries; while here, in the medically advanced West, we like to suffer for our beauty by winching away the years or injecting our faces with bovine toxin. But these methods give some people pause, especially when they can no longer even furrow their brows to think about it. Combine hesitancy about such invasive methods with simultaneous acceptance of acupuncture and holistic medicine and, bing-bang, constitutional facial acupuncture renewal is now offered at spas and acupuncturists throughout the Twin Cities.

The key word is “constitutional.” “Beauty is about health,” said Peggy Miller, a St. Paul acupuncturist, massage therapist, and herbal-medicine specialist. “I would take a complete history, look at your tongue and feel your pulse, and treat the whole person, not just your wrinkles. If we can improve circulation, reduce stress or pain, and generally improve your health as we stimulate the muscles and lines on your face, you’ll look better. People won’t think, ‘Wow, surgery.’ They’ll think you look rested and healthy.” Acupuncture clients are also encouraged to actively enhance the process by making dietary or lifestyle changes.

I was on the table in Miller’s office with a bolster under my knees, nature sounds on the boom box, a fountain trickling in the background, and a warm towel over my face. I’d decided to check this acupuncture thing out. Miller had put a few skinny needles in my wrists and ankles to give my qi (the Chinese term for energy, life force, mojo) a heads-up. She replaced the towel with a paper mask that had been steeped in herbal tea and anchored with a heated gel mask. Since this was the Reader’s Digest version of the process, I relaxed for five minutes before getting down to it.

Miller explained that different points on the face respond differently when stimulated—motor points can stimulate a muscle to contract (lifting jowls, for example) or they can sedate the muscle and thereby relax lines, which is the idea behind Botox. There are points that stimulate qi, bringing moisture and blood circulation to the face. Inserting needles in deep lines causes micro-trauma that the body attempts to address by pumping blood to the scene, plumping it up, and filling out the line. Some acupuncture facials involve up to eighty tiny needles, but I was happy to get by on only eight, since they stung a little at first. Peggy turned down the lights and went away for fifteen minutes, during which time I meditated about what to make for dinner and my qi visited some places it hadn’t seen for a while. Miller, who is old enough to call herself a hippie, yet has lineless, glowing skin, returned to remove the needles and paint my face with a mixture of egg whites, herbs, and flowers. This she removed with a warm towel, afterward massaging in some face food—a moisturizing herbal concoction of food-grade purity.

Technically, the two jade face rollers (like a mini paint roller, but with cool jade stones where the fluffy roller would be) massage and calm all that heat and qi that have percolated up to your face. I just liked the way they felt and the soft, clicking sound they made. Miller then spritzed me with rose water and sandalwood and said I could lie there until I was ready to leave, or until they locked the building.

Miller recommends between ten and twelve treatments, as does Bonnie West, the acupuncturist at Fusion LifeSpa in Deephaven. You may require occasional tweaks after that to perk up your liver and brighten your complexion. Miller charges fifty to sixty dollars for what is usually a ninety-minute appointment. West gets more than a hundred dollars, and word has it that New Yorkers will pay as much as three hundred dollars to galvanize their qi. But compare these prices with the three to five thousand dollars it costs to get an average facelift, or the eight hundred dollars for Botox, and acupuncture starts to seem like such a bargain that your frown lines will disappear like magic.

Daughter could not discern outright wrinkle reduction at dinner that night, but noted that the pasta seemed to have been prepared by a person with the soul and spleen of a twenty-two-year-old.

It has come to my attention that I’m a messy eater, which wouldn’t be such a problem were I not so often clothed at the scene of the crime. Properly seated at a dining table, kitted out with a shroud-sized napkin, seltzer water, and an array of absorbent paper products, I can confidently churn through the most watery pho with greased shrimp; a steaming heap of soba noodles studded in lively vegetables and oozing garlicky black-bean sauce; piping-hot Thai coffee served in a wide-rimmed cup; and peeled peaches with floorward ambitions. Unfortunately, most eating—and subsequent food-related incidents—do not take place in such a controlled environment.

Typically, I dine at my desk. By around 8:30 a.m., I’m ready for lunch. I have set up a pastiche of coleslaw, a green salad with pears and potentially explosive blue cheese in a balsamic vinaigrette, a couple of cheese-and-spinach cannelloni floating in marinara, and a ragged, shingle-sized piece of focaccia topped with a snake pit of grilled shallots and onion—all spread out on the five-inch-by-five-inch piece of desktop real estate between my printer and keyboard. The task at hand is undertaken with a plastic demitasse spoon. Pepped up by the repast, I peck at the keyboard, tug at the mouse cord and, against all odds, work is produced. But at a hideous cost.

According to the immutable laws of physics, only three pieces of cabbage can be transported on a plastic spoon, and yet the coleslaw, in its dressed form, travels in wet glops composed of at least eighteen shreds. It will not abide dividing, like the atom. And I very nearly manage it, but, millimeters from my lips, the glop topples, landing with a heartbreaking splat on my knees. Only upon being raked up does the slaw forego group formation and start acting as eighteen incorrigible free agents. Then an inopportune phone call sets off a phone-cord-to-spoon chain reaction, which catapults the blue cheese with startling force. Fly little cheese, fly. The diaspora extends to the very edges of my office universe and several lost tribes are not discovered until I stand up.

My final ode to Jackson Pollock is accomplished via intense downward pressure on the titanium-enriched cannelloni, which takes wing and flies like a marinara-soaked arrow to my heart. But first it hits the jacket over my heart, wetly.

It is, I don’t know, humbling—to view, at the end of each day, such graphic evidence of what a fresser I am. The sheer amount of food, the reckless speed at which it’s consumed, the shocking lack of hand-eye coordination; it’s all there in the darkening splotches that spread, like melanoma, throughout my wardrobe. In fact, this is damn humiliating, but it’s not the end of the world, thanks to my twenty-four-ounce bottle of Shout Ultra Gel with the plastic-brush-applicator top.

I could go on at length by listing stuff I’ve banished with Shout, but here are some of the highlights: 10W40 sauce from Huong Sen, blackberry jam, neck grease, Seven Seas salad dressing, road dirt, and black rubber tire marks on some beloved lilac peau de soie pumps (don’t ask). Once—and here’s a testimonial that should be featured on Shout bottles—I purchased a white, perfectly filthy, one-hundred-percent cashmere coat for just $7.99 at Savers. I suspected some of the stains were bodily in origin, but what I feared even more was the synergy between such bodily fluids and mysterious commercial dry-cleaning toxins. With so little to lose, I applied Shout liberally, per the directions, loaded the whole unstable mass into the washing machine on cold/delicate, and am now rocking a Jackie O. look that is out of this world.

When we were all younger and firmer, my husband was a competitive runner and our daughters were Dad groupies. Upon returning from the crusades, battle scarred and sweaty, the girls would surround him, hopping around with Barbies in their fists and shrieking, “Did you win Dad, did you win?” The situation was such that sometimes he could truthfully say yes and a cheer went up, yeah, and all was happiness. But sometimes when he was being silly and honest, he said, “No, I was tenth.” Not only was he tenth, he was colder than yesterday’s starlet. The daughters were of the Linda Evangelista don’t-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-ten-thousand-dollars school of thought. Why race if you weren’t going to win?

Of course that’s immature thinking. Judging from the streams of competitors transitioning from swim to bike to run in the Lifetime Fitness Triathlon later this month, not to mention the ten thousand runners who’ll be making their way down Summit Avenue in the Twin Cities Marathon in October, there must be lots of reasons to race that don’t include a prize worth $500,000. The Road Running Information Center reports that while numbers of participants in marathons have steadily climbed in each of the past ten years, median finishing times are significantly slower—from 3:54 to 4:23 for men and from 4:15 to 4:51 for women. This suggests the athletes swelling the ranks are definitely not racing to win.

Missy Fee, thirty-eight, race director for the Heart of the Lakes Triathlon in Annandale, first became involved in the event as a competitor in the early 1990s. There were perhaps one hundred other racers that year, including her husband who signed up on race day. This year, the short course reached its five-hundred-entrant limit in just two days, four months prior to race day. Between short and long courses and relay teams, the Heart of the Lakes Triathlon drew one thousand entrants who each paid sixty dollars to participate. “It’s hard to say what’s motivating people to enter triathlons,” she said. “I can only speak for myself. I was a competitive athlete in high school and college, and I had run several marathons. This is a local event, and when I saw what the distances were, I thought, I can do that.”

Suzannah Mork, a doctoral candidate in the school of kinesiology at the University of Minnesota, has interviewed twenty ironman-distance triathletes and discovered several characteristics unique to participants of this extreme event that comprises a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike, and a 26.2-mile run. “In most events, racers compete against each other. Ironmans are so challenging that there is a strong sense of cooperation and camaraderie among racers, and every finisher really is a winner.” The triathletes she interviewed listed many reasons for racing, among them, curiosity, motivation to exercise, an enormous sense of accomplishment, and even social opportunities. “There’s a lot of time to talk on a fifty-mile bike ride. Triathletes appreciate the chance to meet and socialize with other like-minded people. They commented, ‘We used to meet for coffee. Now we meet for a run.’ ”

Overwhelmingly, the reason proffered for racing is to challenge oneself, to discover something about oneself by finding limits and then pushing beyond, to see what’s on the other side. So says Jan Kahring, age fifty-three of Maple Grove, who, when interviewed, was in the thick of training for Grandma’s Marathon, her first. “I like to push myself but I need a race to motivate me to get out and do the training.” She recalled a cold, rainy weekend when she did an eighteen-mile run—something that would not have occurred had she not been training.

Any intuition that training more often and more intensively increases one’s susceptibility to injury was debunked by Liz Schorn, a physical therapist in Minneapolis. “I think people who race are more attuned to proper training techniques, hydration, diet, and stretching and therefore are less likely to get injured,” she said. “Racers are also more likely to have invested in better-quality gear which helps prevent injury. The noncompetitive athlete may take a more casual view of these factors and, even though they are logging fewer miles, may be just as likely to sustain injury.” She notes that while participation in races has increased over the past ten years, the number and types of injuries she sees has remained steady.

Of course, race participants don’t sign waivers of responsibility for nothing. Two entrants died during the 2006 Los Angeles Marathon, and a third was hospitalized. Race officials ran out of water during last year’s Life Time Fitness Triathlon, held in ninety-degree heat. At least three competitors ended up in Hennepin County Medical Center’s intensive care unit. This year both the Mad City Marathon in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Med City Marathon in Rochester took place over the unseasonably hot Memorial Day weekend; both events were called off after five and three hours, respectively. In Madison, some five hundred runners who were still on the course were encouraged to accept a ride to the finish area or to walk the remaining miles at their own risk.

“I don’t really get it,” says Diane Wiese-Bjornstal, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Minnesota, speaking of the flood of people entering races these days. “Racing does motivate people to be active, and as a kinesiologist, this is important to me. But my cynical side has observed that races serve as a notch on the belt, an observable accomplishment that seems increasingly important in our society,” she said. Beyond health, Wiese-Bjornstal suspects that at least part of the motivation for neo-racers is our society’s obsession with the tangible evidence of success; acquiring a souvenir race T-shirt serves as a marker of success, much like driving a Hummer or buying a mini-mansion. Anyone can jog or go for a swim or a bike ride, Wiese-Bjornstal points out, but “racing has become increasingly attractive in part because it raises the status of the participant. The intrinsic value of physical activity has shifted to extrinsic—‘Look, I completed a triathlon’ rather than ‘I am a disciplined person’ or ‘I love being outside on my bike.’ ”

Many of the registrants filling triathlons and marathons are young professionals trying to make their mark on the world. Wiese-Bjornstal observed that this generation was one of the first to have had a highly scheduled childhood, with organized sports starting as early as three years old. If a child enjoys whacking around a can with a stick, the inclination for many parents is to channel that activity into a peewee hockey program, where he quickly learns there is more glory in competing than there is in merely whacking around a can with a stick. It’s not surprising that children who grew up connecting physical activity with competition and external rewards would, as adults, choose to race, Wiese-Bjornstal explained.

“That may be true,” said Charlie Peterson, a runner and triathlete from St. Paul. “I saw a lot of people wearing their T-shirts and finisher’s medals around after the Boston Marathon. The T-shirt is really important to some people.” Although a young professional himself, Peterson says his motivations for racing involve travel and socializing. “It’s a fun thing to do with friends and a great way to see another city.”

The opportunities to socialize and belong to a community played an important role in Janet Robertz’s decision to race. The forty-four-year-old Bloomington resident had been running every day for seven years before she ever entered a race. Even though she was the first woman finisher in that event, she was sorry she’d entered. “It was a horrible experience—stressful, competitive, crowded, and I felt just terrible. This was the exact opposite of everything running had been for me. After that first race, I wanted no part of it.”

But being both intrinsically motivated and talented as a runner, Robertz eventually transitioned from being vehemently noncompetitive to becoming one of the country’s top masters (age forty and older) runners. “I still love running by myself on trails through the woods, but racing has opened a whole world to me. I’ve gotten to travel and I’ve met the most wonderful people. It’s been fantastic. Back before I was racing, I knew nothing of the running community. I thought I was kind of weird. A few years ago, I was at the Avon marathon and my sister said, ‘Oh my gosh, all these people look just like you.’ It’s true. They’re my people.”

I’m missing something. Not like glasses or dignity, things easily mislaid. No, it’s something essential, like a helix of DNA that should have come matched with my two X chromosomes. It’s the handbag gene.

I exhibit other double-X-linked traits. For example, I’m exquisitely literate in clothing and shoes. I can identify a handmade buttonhole on the fly at twenty paces. The Tod’s wearer is telegraphing a house in the Hamptons and a loveless marriage to a real-estate developer. The correct pronunciation of “Sorbonne student” is loose, transparent florals worn over a black bra, with emphasis on the eyeliner. See? It’s easy.

But when it comes to handbags, I’m deaf and dumb. Not only am I unable to make a personal statement, I can’t read what others are saying via their reticules. Like intuition, bag-speak is the lingua franca of women. Freud or some other guy with a bit too much time on his hands postulated that women’s wombs are the original tote bag from whence comes our fascination with more visible variations on the theme. Remember Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint, the very definition of femininity, solving perplexing mysteries via the immutable laws of handbag rotation to which no woman was immune? Would they have been caught dead carrying their compacts and tiny, pearl-handled micro-revolvers in a stained tri-color backpack purchased at Cub for four dollars? Unlikely.

Now more than ever, handbags, which often come accessorized with women, loom large in terms of square footage and their imprint on the sartorial landscape. Ergo, my purse disability has become painfully evident and unacceptable. I thereby devised a plan to trigger a handbag sensitivity, like an allergy, through wanton over-exposure.

I started with two-dimensional magazine images of the whole genre—shoulder bags, handbags, totes, clutches, satchels, reticules, what have you. This went surprisingly well. Through intense scrutiny, I was able to discern minute differences between a dispirited briefcase by Chloé for $1,275 and quite a lot of fortified Naugahyde by Target for thirty-nine dollars (clue: the Chloé bag has a leather zipper loop that resembles the key fob of a Hummer; the Target species has a zipper pull that also works as a room key at Motel 6). Repeated exposure made me aware of the importance of hardware—washers, gaskets, buckles—and the recurring bondage theme. For example, Kenneth Cole used Godzilla-weight hardware to wrap, zip, strap, and buckle a purse the size of a Twinkie that would secure a tube of lipstick against nuclear disaster. Irony. I get it. Or I might have, if I had $785. More enigmatic are the many organ-inspired catch-alls. The very shape and color of a healthy kidney, liver, or spleen—what can a bag of this sort possibly say about its woman? Introvert? Cannibal with a credit card?

Obsessive attention to the patterns and rhythms of bags has indeed nurtured a basic facility in understanding the language spoken by handbags. Wicker in the shape of a rural mailbox: Williams College English major does a yoga retreat once a year; bronze paillettes over crocheted hobo: Stops for tanning salons; tank of a handbag, buttressed and buckled: My people will be contacting you. I was encouraged recently when a handbag spoke to me for the very first time. It said, Your Cub-bought backpack has a hole in it and you have left a trail of lip balm and pennies from here to New Jersey.

Death begins in the colon. I had incorrectly placed its origins in algebra class; nevertheless, I have it on good authority (Dr. Natura, as seen on TV, creator of the Colonix Program) that death begins in the colon. On this happy note, we enter into spring, a time of rebirth, renewal, refunds, and spring cleaning. Imaginative people who don’t get out much have extrapolated spring cleaning well past the edge of reason, to that Pat Robertson for the intestines, the bulldozer of the digestive tract: the detox diet.

By taking a vacation from ladling in “toxic” foods at one end and by vigorously flushing them out at the other, you can clear out stuff that’s been plugging up the works and allow your systems to do their jobs with a merry whistle. Proponents list colorful and various ills a detox diet can alleviate: fatigue, bloating, bad breath, allergies, acne, malaise, ague, ennui, you name it.

As heartily as they are endorsed by the colonically pure, science doesn’t have much to say about the benefits of detoxing. “Everyone wants to feel lighter and cleaner. They’re so appealing because no one wants to be dirty,” says registered, licensed nutritionist, Rasa Troup. “I don’t recommend detox diets because they don’t teach people how to eat healthy as a lifestyle.” Common sense and exercise, though, cannot hold a candle to the image of a pink and glistening colon.

Many versions of the detox regimen exist. Generally speaking, these diets encourage fruits, vegetables, rice, grains you don’t know what the hell to do with, steamed fish, olive oil, beans and legumes, nuts (except for peanuts), and Niagara-like quantities of water. Foods non grata include meat, sugar in all of its delicious forms, dairy products, wheat, caffeine, alcohol, artificial colors and flavors, and fried or excessively fatty foods. If there is any doubt, ask yourself whether life would have any meaning without this food. If the answer is no, out she goes.

My first exposure to organ cleaning was at Mississippi Market Co-op, where many of my co-owners relish all opportunity for frank discussion about bodily functions. One of the worst things about devout detoxers, following from their obsession with their colons, is all the vivid descriptions they offer of bowel movements, analogies that help the unwilling share in the moments—or the movements, as it were. “Remember that prom dress you wore junior year? That color!” I was served this unsolicited report: “Black and lumpy for three days.”

OK, of the big four—coffee, chocolate, wine, and wheat—which was the hardest to forego? It was wheat, the bread of … of bread. Instead, I drank green tea. It tasted like Como Lake, heated. I had fruit for dessert. It was like me in a low-cut dress—not that satisfying. I made this quinoa pilaf for dinner and Daughter commented that it tasted “like ass.” My old toxic self would never have stood for that kind of sass but the toxin-free me lacked the energy to refute such a charge. Besides, it was so awfully true.

I gave up after six days, not because I couldn’t handle the cravings but because I didn’t have any cravings. Black coffee with the hair still on it? A steaming bowl of pasta swimming in butter and sticky with parmesan? Didn’t care. A friend offers a chunk of seventy-seven-percent cacao chocolate the size of a paver brick? No thanks; I’ll have this celery. And even beyond the realm of food, I experienced a marked apathy toward such life-affirming activities as peering into people’s windows at night, nurturing petty jealousies, and dressing vulgarly. Now if that isn’t an early symptom of death, I don’t know what is.

While I appreciate Troup’s common-sense approach to dieting, an acquaintance who knows a thing or two about detox offered some earthy advice that also resonates: “Don’t mess with your addictions, man.” —Sarah Barker

Gardening trends come and go. Vegetable gardens were big (literally) when families had great hordes of kids. English gardens had their day—along with Laura Ashley. “Naturalizing,” in the nineties, reflected a permissive era, but proved a natural habitat for neighbor complaints. Without coming right out and saying I wanted to school the scarecrow next door, I sought the horticultural wisdom of Joan Westby, a master gardener at Leitner’s Garden Center in St. Paul. She has a degree in horticulture. She is a professional. She indulged me with the newest and nowest things yet to come this spring and summer.

These days, “people are looking to create a personal retreat, an oasis,” Westby replied, obviously on familiar ground. “But at the same time, they are very busy and don’t have time for a lot of maintenance. So instead of reworking the entire yard, they’ll extend their indoor living space with a small, restful outdoor space like a patio.” So that four-level deck you built with the kids’ college fund? So last year. Container gardening is red hot. Custom-planted pots, with all your favorite colors and smells wafting around your personal oasis, are the penultimate. (By the way, Leitner’s has been providing this custom potting service for twenty years.)

And if your patio space truly is an extension of your living room, it’s going to be cluttered. (Wait, I said that, not Westby.) Sure there’ll be the Weber, but there also should be comfy furniture. (Hint: You can tell if the furniture is right by providing your children with some dry paper and a magnifying glass. If the furniture burns up, as natural materials tend to do, it was right. If it just melts and creates hazardous waste, it was wrong.) Further trappings of the outdoor oasis, said Westby, include a birdfeeder, wind chimes, statuary, a fountain, and definitely one of those rococo outdoor candelabras. This being Minnesota, she also recommended a beautiful copper fire pit as the sensible source of warmth.

Of course, you’ll want to arrange all this stuff in a pleasing and ergonomic manner, which brings us to patio feng shui. The gargoyles and barbed wire should stay in the rec room, where they belong, and keep planters out of direct-energy force fields. (The easy thing about this brand of gardening is that there aren’t many plants.) Anyway, you get the picture—it’s like a living room, but smells better.

Plagued by déjà vu, I combed my mind for where I’d already spotted the sort of alfresco bliss Westby described. Not in Provence, nor in Sonoma County. It was in Southeast Minneapolis, near the University of Minnesota, in fact. Some trendsetting undergraduates had created a soothing oasis from the ravages of syllabi and Chlamydia right in their front yard with a comfy davenport (circa 1985), several tattered barcaloungers, some tiki torches, and, in a space-saving coup, bongs that doubled as statuary and aromatherapy dispensers.

Container gardening was definitely going on, though in an important fallow stage—beer cans and plastic cups were growing a life-sustaining agar-like substance rumored to be more effective than Miracle Gro. These visionaries had moved a giant TV/wailing wall to their outdoor retreat, too—which not only provided mesmerizing, low-res images and womb-like sound but also blocked sun, wind, and drive-by artillery. It all came into place a full semester before it showed up on Westby’s radar. Isn’t that the way? Trends, like viruses, germinate, not in the minds of professionals and academics, but rather in the fecund soil of the Undecided.—Sarah Barker

Karl Commers was first up. The earnest mail carrier went through a door behind the stage and came out a few minutes later in a comprehensively sparkly shirt, the spitting image of … James Taylor. He gets that a lot, he said, but has no immediate plans to impersonate James Taylor. Firing up the fog machine and an expression of modest greatness, he hopped up onto the stage and let loose the voice of a sixty-four-year-old megastar in less-than-perfect acoustical circumstances. About sixty people were trying to reconcile James Taylor’s face with Neil Diamond’s voice. “Kentucky Woman” turned the trick.

Commers, a local Neil Diamond impersonator, took the stage at the Withrow Ballroom, over in Hugo, just north of Stillwater, as one half of a double Diamond extravaganza. The other Diamond was Theron Denson, from West Virginia, who is known in the business as “Black Diamond.”

“He starts right on time. He’s got the mannerisms down. He’s good,” Denson observed. A natural raconteur, the Black Diamond interspersed his back-story with gracious comments about his co-Diamond, as Commers lit up the stage with the big-star arm sweep and foot stomp that white people recognize as dancing.

Since he was eleven years old and singing in his church choir, ladies who knew were telling Denson he sounded just like Neil Diamond. “Eventually I started wondering who this Neil Diamond guy was. I thought he must be someone in our church,” said Denson. “I felt pretty bad when I found out he was a forty-five-year-old white guy. My mom tried to make me feel better. She said, ‘Honey, don’t worry, you don’t sound like him.’ A few years ago she admitted, ‘You really did sound like him.’ God has a sense of humor, you know.” A churchgoing boy, Denson accepted the gift and went out and bought The Jazz Singer. It was no Donna Summer (his favorite artist), but he came to appreciate the way the lyrics touched people.

In 2000, Denson was fired from his job at the Marriott for singing to the guests—the guests loved it, the management did not. “As I walked out to my car, I thought, This is between God, Neil Diamond, and me.” Since then, he’s made the Black Diamond Show his full-time gig, making calls, pounding the pavement, and memorizing the lyrics to at least ninety songs during the day, and cracklin’ rosie at night. “I didn’t work much on mannerisms because I’m probably never going to fool anyone with looks. It’s all about the voice. In fact, in my shows, I sing other songs—Beatles, Elton John. People don’t think I’m impersonating John Lennon. They come up and say, ‘Oh, that’s what the Beatles would sound like if Neil Diamond sang it.’”

The Black Diamond Show debuted at a birthday party and is now a national act with eight to ten performances per month. His resume includes a fundraiser for John Kerry, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Show, an opening slot for the Village People and, oddly, an Elvis impersonation contest with three hundred Elvises. And one Neil. Denson was recently contacted by Oprah’s O magazine and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

When he played Hugo, Denson was hoping to at last meet the real Neil—both were scheduled to play St. Louis at the same time the following month. “He”—the real Neil Diamond—“has a really gracious attitude toward impersonators,” according to Denson. “He thinks it’s kind of weird that people want to imitate him, but it’s flattering, and he acknowledges that it helps keep his music alive.”

Both Denson and Commers admit that meeting their muse would be huge, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Vegas is. “Ultimately I’d like to bring my show to Las Vegas or Branson, Missouri, or Atlantic City,” said Denson. Commers totally agreed. According to Denson, Vegas’ current resident Neil Diamond impersonator draws nightly crowds at fifty to sixty dollars per ticket.

As Commers wound up his first set, Denson slipped backstage to get into character—that is, into a purple shirt that seemed to be made of tinsel. With hardly a missed beat, the white Diamond exited stage left, and the Black Diamond fought his way past a fog machine to lay down “Holly Holy.” Being a relative newcomer to the world of cubic zirconia, Commers kept one eye on the Black Diamond as he told me about his mail route (Brooklyn Park), his initial success doing Diamond (at karaoke bars), and his first Neil Diamond tribute show (a little over a year ago, at Arizona’s in Shakopee). “It was three hours long with forty songs. It nearly killed me,” Commers recalled.

He hopes to be able to quit mail carrying within two years and, like anyone contemplating a career change, he’s gone back to school—“I’ve been to the College of Neil Diamond. Study, study, study.” Not only does Commers listen to Diamond’s music, he studies videos of the Solitary Man and other impersonators. Noting how Denson jumped off the stage and worked the crowd, pointing, reaching out and touching, Commers added, “I get out into the audience more in my second set.” He figures he studies the facets of Diamond at least an hour per day, sometimes while he’s walking his route.

Vocals are his ticket, but sartorial styling also helps. Diamondwear is not readily available off the rack. Commers bought two Calvin Klein shirts and painstakingly glued sparkles on them, one bling at a time. “It took two hours per shirt.” He figures if he’s going to do Diamond, he’s going to do it right—“I’m putting everything into this.”

Commers and Denson found each other on a website dedicated to Neil Diamond, www.soultones.com. They arranged this Diamond doubleheader after a year of long-distance correspondence, but met in person only a few hours before the show. Denson took the Greyhound from Charleston, West Virginia, to St. Paul, a twenty-four-hour trip on a good day. But it was not a good day—the bus broke down twice en route.

The consummate professional, the Black Diamond left the dust of the road backstage. He was in his element. (“I came all the way from West Virginia to party with you tonight!”) The audience was warmed up; some were dancing. Denson started in low and gravelly, but by the refrain, at least fifty-nine off-key voices joined in at top volume—Sweeeeet Car-o-line, bah bah bah. Good times never seemed so good (so good so good so good).

The Mother-Goose-does-Vegas tone of the TCF Holidazzle Parade seemed at odds with my method acting background. With more than two hundred and fifty lighted characters brought to life by a different group of volunteer actors each of the twenty-one evenings the parade marches between November 25 and December 23, a cohort of dressers, lighting technicians, and radio-equipped pacers is assigned to line up the characters and move them out, and with utmost efficiency: The cast goes from its minivans to Liberace-esque splendor in a mere forty-five minutes.

The lure of revealing my inner gingerbread boy via twenty-four volts of colored lights proved too much. I recruited a friend and her neighbor, too—like me, they are both highly artistic individuals committed to a brave and honest representation of whatever characters we were assigned. Most roles are filled by employees of the corporations that sponsor of the parade, but every night extra costumes are assigned to standby actors like ourselves.

As everyone knows, relaxation is the foundation of “The Method.” Without this foundation, the technique sinks into the quicksand of chaotic convention. It was hard to relax as the best roles were claimed—Cinderella, the suit of cards, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and my favorite, Bo Peep. Adding to the tension, many of the characters seemed to come in pairs—Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, the King and Queen of Hearts—but there were three of us. Giddy groups of amateurs swarmed the mezzanine level of the Minneapolis Hyatt and joined the fray in a conference room-cum-staging area. As check-in time came and went, the anxiety became insupportable. Recalling my training—“the actor is encouraged to release tension in the neck and throat with a long, sustained aaaaaahhhhhh or a short, staccato HAH!”—I executed the latter just as I leaned over the registrar’s shoulder to glimpse what roles remained on the list. She apparently was not accustomed to working with professional actors.

“You three, sign here, get your costumes. The parade starts in fifteen minutes,” she said with an edge of peevishness. We signed next to the Three Little Pigs and went wee wee wee all the way to the costume room, where we each were fitted with sixty pounds of uncomfortable and inescapable pigwear.

The premise behind method acting is to avoid acting. Rather, you inhabit the character. You find the truth and own it, as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and James Dean did. I didn’t know which truth to own (straw, sticks, or bricks) but quickly discovered there was more to this modern interpretation of the pigs than a healthy appetite and rounded hocks, and it started with a twelve-pound battery pack.

Let me give credit for our stunning performance to our personal dresser, without whose succinct, if terse, directions there would have been no Three Little Pigs. She literally took us by the hand through the cacophony—the scampering blind mice, costume racks, coat stacks, cables, tables, techies, and yards of fake fur—to the battery station. With the incredibly heavy batteries strapped on suicide-bomber-style, I felt a great hazard to myself and others, not only for the danger of electrocution but also because once in motion, I was powerless to stop the momentum. It would not do to bowl over innocent merrymakers in my debut performance.

A proper pig has a pink fur pajama body with built-in hoop belly, a light-encrusted chest plate in the shape of a bow, trotter shoe covers, three-fingered hoof/gloves, and a head like a vintage deep-sea diving helmet. I obediently put feet in holes, held arms out, stood still, and tried not to panic as I lost touch with the boundaries of my body one extremity at a time. With the placement of the gloves and, finally, the cavernous head, I couldn’t hear, see, or scratch. A bit of light came through a four-inch circular screen in the pig’s mouth. It opened downward, but by bending back, a slightly more forward view was possible. The one-size-fits-most head was supposed to rest on the shoulders, but, mine being narrow, it fell all the way down, pinioning my arms and completing the vertebrae compaction initiated by the battery pack. Three blind pigs, we were led to the back door of the Hyatt where we had our picture taken with a police officer.

The dresser handed us off to a pacer, a harried stage manager of sorts, who steered us down six scary steps and a curb onto Nicollet Mall. Rousing band music and a general hubbub of cheering and whistles indicated we were onstage and the show had indeed started for those at the front of the parade. It struck us at once—the lights were on, the crowd was shiny-faced and delirious, expecting action. I sensed this was the time for bold strokes of pigdom. We three pigs had just touched noses for a shouted collaboration when the pacer broke in with this artless direction: “Just keep moving, high-five the kids, and wiggle your tails every once in a while. They love that.” Consummate (though non-union) professionals, we withheld the abuse this rube deserved. At any rate, a combined modality of high-fives, wiggling (we saw this as an enlightened pig truth), and sassy circle dancing was formulated. And well received. Eight blocks fully wired and attired is but child’s play to the trained actor, though I hereby report that pigs do sweat.

While the critics cast aspersions about the validity of burlesque and pointed out that the audience was stoned on hot chocolate, the Three Pigs were alight with the love of our craft, of life and fake fur, and of our adoring audience as we rode the bus back to the Hyatt. It’s all about the work.—Sarah Barker