Author: Sarah Sawyer

Jim Gaulke sat down for a quick chat at the Bryn Mawr Coffee Shop. Brian Hazlett, the shop owner, put a lid on a to-go cup and followed suit. Both wore button-down shirts and jeans. Hazlett wore a baseball cap. Sipping coffee at the window table, they looked like decent, responsible citizens, family men even. But they are superstars, of a kind. For starters, Hazlett’s resume lists Prince and Carole King as references; Gaulke played the ill-fated state trooper who had his head blown off in the Coen brothers’ film Fargo.

These two longtime friends write songs under the name All Around Sound. And if you’ve lived in the Twin Cities (or any number of other major metropolitan areas), then it’s likely you’ll recognize their latest hit tune in ten notes or less. Ready?

Well played, reader! That’s “One Day, One Night, Saturday’s Alright,” the commercial jingle for National American University. NAU is a private community college with campuses in a number of cities, including Denver, Kansas City, Dallas, and Albuquerque. There are local campuses in Roseville, Brooklyn Center, and at the Mall of America. The jingle that Hazlett and Gaulke composed for NAU has had a shelf life now of three years and counting. It is frequently identified as a most insidious “ear worm”—a tune that gets into your head and will not get out. WCCO’s “Song Stuck” project lists it, and the folks at TC Punk, an angry online bulletin board of local hipsters, have suggested that only a gun to the head can eradicate the song.

As with most love-hate relationships, it started innocently enough. NAU wanted to advertise its offerings on television and hired the local duo to help out. “They gave us information on the program,” Gaulke said. “The magic of the whole thing is that you can be a student going only one night a week. So we started working on the lyrics and playing around with it. We found that our lyrics didn’t fit the meter that we were working in, so we hit a bunch of snags. But one morning I woke up at two A.M. and I had this little line. It came to me in the middle of the night.” Satisfied with the germ of the melody, they settled in for hours of fine tuning. Hazlett said, “It was so much damn work for a thirty-second song, because we did about seventeen different spots for it. We inserted different words. Like, ‘Get your degree/Massage ther-a-py,’ and so on.” Eventually they settled on a set of lyrics, hired KARE 11’s Minnesota Idol, Harmony LaBeff, to sing, and holed up in the studio to lay down the whole thing in wax.

Since that day, the song has spread like the flu and become more than a successful jingle. It’s become a piece of local color. Gaulke said, “My twelve-year-old daughter called me up from school and said, ‘Dad, you’re not going to believe it, but the kids are linking arms and skipping up and down the halls singing your song.” Similarly, Hazlett has a friend who, while working as a camp counselor last summer called to tell him that on the last day of camp, the only song that all three hundred of his teenage campers had in common was “One Day, One Night.”

“It’s thirty seconds that you actually hear it, but it’s stuck in your head the rest of the day,” said Gaulke. Hazlett said, “One of the best compliments we got was from a friend, a professional singer, who told us, ‘I know people complain because the song won’t get out of your head, but when it comes on the radio, I don’t turn the channel.’”

Aside from the dashboard drummers and shower stall sopranos, the song is receiving little appreciation. It seems the music community is not certain how to reward commercial songwriters. In fact, it appears they torment them a little, possibly because a particular strain of the arts community considers commercial art a “sellout.” On the brink of a cringe, Gaulke admitted that “certain personalities will just needle you when they find out you wrote that song.” But then he smiled devilishly. “We’ve got jingles that have never hit the airwaves that are still stuck in my head.” He broke into a rousing chorus: “You love to gorge on Papa George’s pure pork sausage!”—Sarah Sawyer

Annie Neeley is a former Rochester courtroom sketcher and police composite artist now living in Florida. She’s been working on this one guy for quite some time. When she met him, he was attractive enough, but hardly dream man material… more of a fixer-upper, really. At first sight, Annie knew she was up to the task. A few short months later, he’s romantic, sexy, and almost the spitting image of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. And now that she’s got him just as she wants him, she’ll do the same thing she did to all her dream men before: Auction him off on eBay for around $1,500.

“Jack the Pirate” is fifteen glorious inches of fashion-doll makeover, and Annie Neeley is one of a growing number of doll artists making a healthy income selling One of a Kind (OOAK) repainted dolls.

OOAK repaints are commercially purchased dolls—Barbie, Bratz, Gene, and so on—that get stripped of their original paint and costuming and completely made over. While she was working in the Rochester transit system, Neeley was a collector of regular dolls when she stumbled into the world of artful reconstruction. “I saw the repaints for sale on eBay and I thought ‘I can do this, and I can do it better,’” she told me.

It’s something like cosmetic surgery for dolls. The procedure may include erasing the doll’s facial features with nail-polish remover and repainting her face; taking her head off and removing her hair in order to re-root a different ’do; straightening bent arms or bending straight ones by making an incision in the arm with a razor blade, boiling the arm in water to soften the plastic, arranging the limb to the desired position, and then filling in the cut with putty; or using putty to augment facial features. Perhaps the most disturbing of the makeover processes is the “boil perm,” in which a doll’s hair is set by boiling her head.

DIY plastic surgeons find help and solace in the work of Jim Faraone. He is the co-chair of the International Fashion Doll Convention, an organization that sponsors a contest and maintains an email list dedicated to repainting techniques. Do you need to know how to rethread Barbie’s hair? Detach her head, and use a piece of wire as a needle. If the wire gets lost in there, you can use a crochet hook to retrieve it. “The wire held up well and it only took me about three Star Trek episodes to reroot the whole head,” wrote Laurie Samford. Several books have also been published that compile this wealth of information.

There is a brisk market for remade dolls. “I’d venture to say there are twenty-five to thirty repaint artists on eBay who do this,” Neeley explained. “And there are probably ten of us that do the best and have the top sales. There’s a little niche of very wealthy ladies who collect these dolls, and they will fight each other tooth-and-nail for them. Sometimes I think it’s a gambling thing.”

In other words, this can be not only a spendy habit, but a highly addictive one. Neeley slyly confides that she has one repeat client who has sixty of her dolls stashed in her bedroom closet, while a special doll showroom is being added on to her house.—Sarah Sawyer

For decades now, cigarettes and hospitals have not mixed. Long before any clean-air act or tobacco settlement, there were islands of exiles—many of them standing sheepishly in scrubs—outside the whispering doors of the ER. Paradoxically, smoking persists in one place inside the hospital: the psych ward. There are reasons. When smoking is banned in psychiatric units, there frequently are outbursts of violence, anger, and resentment.

John Gray is the nursing supervisor for inpatient psychiatry at Hennepin County Medical Center. His unit provides patients with a smoking room, which is more or less a well-ventilated closet. Gray is old enough to remember a time not too long ago when it was common for a doctor to light up with a patient during a psychiatric interview. He also remembers the dark days when his unit adopted a strict nonsmoking policy, in 1994. The results were nerve-racking, to say the least. “During that year, the doctors were all for the non-smoking policy,” Gray said. “And the same doctors decided it wasn’t a good idea after dealing with the patients.” An exemption was granted.

On the whole, people are comfortable with the current policy, which allows smoking in designated areas during restricted times. It is a singular liberty and a comfort to troubled souls. Gray has received only one complaint from the family of a patient, but has received quite a bit of appreciative feedback. In fact, one family whose son was a patient shows its appreciation by donating cartons of cigarettes a few times a year. Not a smoker himself, Gray is careful to clarify that the unit does not endorse smoking. It’s a hospital, after all, and alternatives are available. “We have offered tobacco cessation. But it’s a rare patient that has any interest.”

From her comfortable office over on Nicollet Mall, Dr. Maureen Hackett disagreed. She is a forensic psychiatrist in private practice, who specializes in legal issues in psychiatry. She teaches classes at William Mitchell College of Law. Hackett believes that most people who smoke want to quit and that it’s medically irresponsible to allow smoking in any health care facility. As a result of her convictions, she launched what she called a “one-person campaign” seeking legislation that would explicitly require all health-care facilities, including psychiatric units, to be smoke-free. With the support of the Minnesota Medical Association, her efforts were successful. “A bill was signed and is going into action in 2004 that will eliminate smoking on hospital grounds,” she said. According to Hackett, this will include the HCMC psychiatric unit. She anticipates grumbling from both the staff and the patients, but feels education will change the minds of many health-care workers. “These nurses are clueless,” said Dr. Hackett. “And I’m not being disrespectful, because I was clueless too. There is a perception on the part of the staff that hostility is going to grow, and really it lessens.” There are plenty of studies, she said, where this has been shown. “I think the unit needs to offer other options. The smoking room could be turned into a place that offers time out, maybe with running water, a fountain, or mood music.” Perhaps they’ll also consider punching bags.—Sarah Sawyer

You cannot get a Mikael the Mime Happy Meal at your local drive-thru window. There are no Mikael the Mime pacifiers or chewable vitamins on sale at Target, and there are no Mikael the Mime video games that teach your pipsqueaks to blow up extra-terrestrials with a Mikael the Mime machine gun.

Mikael Rudolph simply doesn’t work that way. The North Minneapolis-based mime artist works in the tradition of vaudeville and European clowning. He harkens back to a time when entertainment was simpler, and more closely linked to play than to the cult of personality. His most precious prop is a healthy imagination, not a fog machine. He can hold a thousand small children and their Headline News-addicted parents in awe and on the edge of their seats with nothing more than a little slapstick comedy, magic, puppetry, hat juggling, dance, and pantomime. He does all this, and he gets fan mail for doing it.

When mimes get fan mail, it’s really something. Some of it comes laboriously wrought in crayon by little hands expressing big sentiments, like “From Joey—I ENJOEY D YOR SHOE.” Rudolph, who after 15 years of gigs at churches, schools, and libraries, speaks “small child” fluently, translated the note as follows: “It’s great, you see, ’cause this kid thought it out himself. His name is Joey. He knows how to spell that. You can just hear him saying, ‘enjoyed’ and spelling it with JOEY in the middle.” An equally thoughtful, if slightly less appreciative young fan wrote, “Dear Mr. Mime, I’m sorry I threw stones at you. I didn’t know it was wrong.” One letter from a mother of two boys informed Rudolph that her sons enjoyed his work so much that they now play “mime” around the house. They occasionally ask, for purposes of gratuitous discipline, to be put in a “mime out”—meaning they must remain silent in an invisible box for a minute or two. They came to see his show two Saturdays in a row.

It could be that children are drawn to Rudolph because, as a mime and street clown, one of his main assets is what looks like a complete lack of impulse control. The nature of the work requires razor-sharp observation skills, impeccable comic timing, and a damned fine working knowledge of the line between good clean fun and trouble. Children are a little wobbly on all those subjects, and admire his physical and social deftness. His fans aren’t all kids. “I love this guy. He’s angry, lecherous, and mean to children.” I once heard these words uttered by a 30-something hipster, attending one of Rudolph’s shows, which leads me to believe that adults are drawn to him for essentially the same reasons.

Most folks think they don’t like mime. Rudolph is quite familiar with the widespread phenomenon of “mime-aversion.” This is an understandable by-product of the great mime influx of the 1970s, in which American birthday parties, street corners, and Christian youth rallies were overrun by a legion of mute hacks in clown-white sniffing away at invisible buttercups, or wiping away crocodile tears as their beautiful balloons flew up, up and away. Rudolph recently explained to me, “This is one of the challenges of working in an art form that is deeply respected in Europe and in most other cultures—but in our sound-bite culture, is the exception. I can’t compete with television for special effects or perfect execution. I am live theater, and I pride myself on being able to perform for any audience, of any age, anywhere.”

That facility didn’t happen overnight. Rudolph, 44, has been pursuing a career as a mime since his teens. When he was a child, he and his father went to see Marcel Marceau perform. As they were leaving the theater, he said, “Dad, I think I’d like to do that.” His father replied, “No one makes a living that way.” To which he sensibly replied, “That guy does.” Within five years, Rudolph had enrolled in his first mime class. He went on to study with Marc Bauman of the Marcel Marceau School in Paris, the Seattle Mime Theater, Ringling Brothers’ Pepper Kaminoff, and many others—basically he’s worked with everyone who’s anyone in this silly business. On two separate occasions he had the opportunity to perform his signature “floating rock” piece in a workshop presided over by his idol, Marcel Marceau. The first time he performed, Rudolph was so intimidated by Marceau that he spent the entire performance staring at the floor. Marceau said that for the comedy to work Rudolph needed to become a victim of the circumstances, share his face—and his emotions—with the audience. Two years later, Rudolph performed the same piece for Marceau. The legendary artist noticed a difference. “In this style,” he said, “he is a master. Absolutely. It could not have been done any better.”

Rudolph is especially excited that his upcoming performances precede Marceau’s Minneapolis dates. His new show features at least two new mimo-dramas crafted especially for the stage, with Marceau’s explicit advice in mind. Marceau impressed upon Rudolph several salient truths. According to Rudolph, it has long been Marceau’s belief that mime was intended for the stage and not for the street. In a street performance, for example, Rudolph’s floating suitcase is a remarkable party trick and a mind-boggling illusion. On stage, however, it blossoms into a piece of physical theater in which the artist explores the way a character might wrestle the forces—both seen and unseen—that frustrate him. Standard fare for a mime, perhaps. But under the lights, the simplest of stories somehow becomes a poignant display of human nature and a commentary on the fragility of joy. Rudolph creates a cathartic experience in which he takes on typical, everyday fears and frustrations, and seems to run them out of town on a rail. And all of this—believe it or not—where the silence is punctuated only by the kids, who are laughing like hyenas.

Mikael Rudolph performs at Intermedia Arts, March 19, 20, 21. Tickets $10 at the door. In the grand tradition of street mime, no one will be turned away for inability to pay. Call (612) 302-9252.