Author: Shannon Olson

If you didn’t see ABC’s Wife Swap! on March 2, here’s what you missed: Powderhorn Park peacenik Mina Leierwood gingerly examines the contents of “Fort Patrick,” the Louisville, Kentucky, home she’s to live in for two weeks with a family of strangers. Cheri Patrick, the usual lady of the house, is a retired Air Force…

I’d just been dumped by a guy when I first heard about the Bakken Museum’s vibrator collection. Minneapolis’s Bakken, for the record, bills itself as “The Museum of Electricity in Life,” and since my bulb had just gone out, I thought looking into the long history of self-satisfaction might be a pleasant diversion. I learned…

The other day about eighty thousand Christians gathered at the State Capitol for Luis Palau’s Twin Cities Festival. Just a mile away, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, a smaller but no less devoted crowd convened at the Midwest Scrapbook Association Convention, the better to observe the objects of its own faith—designer paper and vellum and bottle…

Somewhere in the middle of the nation’s heated debate about gay marriage, a new billboard popped up on one of my usual routes. The ad, for Cub Foods, features two women positioned in friendly proximity to each other and to a bag of groceries. The tag line says, “Real People. Real Values.” Wow, I thought.…

On a sunny June afternoon, Mark Vogt and Azure Marlowe have been given the enviable job of replacing bowling pins on hole number three of the mini-golf course-cum-art exhibit installed for the summer at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Hole three, titled Bolfing for Gowlers, is designed to look like a tiny bowling lane, and after…