Category: Article

As I was standing recently in front of MinneNAPolis PowerNap Suites, a dimly lit store in the Mall of America, a herd of teenagers in hooded sweatshirts and sagging, crack-revealing jeans sauntered by and collectively stated the obvious: “Dude! Check it out. No way. This place is, like, for napping. Who would do that?”

In fact, according to owner Steev RamsDell, the suites have hosted just over 1,250 soporific souls since they opened in November. He showed me the “Deep Space” room, which could also aptly be titled the “Teenage Star Trek Geek Suite.” Deep black and speckled with glow-in-the-dark paint, the room has a bunk bed with a desk, small TV, a constellation lamp, a lava lamp, and a handful of plastic spacemen who seemed to be descending an electrical cord. Lying in the bunk bed, one can stare at the starry ceiling and imagine any number of alien invasions.

Which begs a few questions.

“We do a lot of cleaning here,” said RamsDell, who explains that fresh linens and robes are brought in after each use. “We’re always cleaning.”

“About sixty percent of our traffic is from out-of-towners,” he said, listing tired flight crews and pooped shoppers from Wisconsin among his customers. “Some people want to take a nap before they do the two- or three-hour drive home.” And not everyone naps. The suites, he claimed, have helped at least one person garner employment, a man who got a call for an interview while he was at the mall, “so he came in here and booked an hour to talk on the phone.” Could he get reception in the “Deep Space” room? Replied RamsDell, “I’ve called China from in there.”

Though paying up to a dollar per minute for a short snooze may seem like a nutty idea, RamsDell envisions an America where, “in three to five years, places to nap will be everywhere, like ATMs.” Places to nap, in fact, are already everywhere—heating grates on any number of city sidewalks, for example, or bus-stop shelters, or at the mall, on any number of benches—but it’s a matter of comfort. Take the massage chairs in the mall. “You close your eyes and try to relax,” noted RamsDell in his lullaby voice, “but who’s watching your bags? How can you relax when people are walking by and staring at you?” He’s banking that America’s insomniac millions might just be ready to shell out for some quality Z’s. Popular MetroNap, for example, offers the poor, tired, and hungry—well, just the tired—of New York quality napping in one of its partially enclosed pods, but even that leaves the fatigued open for public viewing. The powernap suites are locked. “Take Starbucks,” says RamsDell, who conducts business in bedroom slippers. “No one believed people would pay five dollars for coffee.”

The Mall of America has been a test location of sorts for PowerNap Suites and the company is currently in negotiations to open at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the nation’s sixth-busiest hub. The hardest part about opening at the airport, said RamsDell, are issues related to insurance and liability. How do you figure out, as he put it, “the risk of resting and relaxing?” For insurance purposes and for the public’s information, there have been a few misconceptions to clear up. Only one person is allowed in the napping room at a time, with some exceptions—nursing mothers, for example. But RamsDell said that there really is no downside to this gentle enterprise in our sleep-deprived culture. “It’s one hundred percent beneficial,” he asserted.

All of the rooms had a kitschy, homemade quality. The “12 Fathoms” suite had a leather massaging chair and a flat-screen television screening a scene of roaring surf, but it was also decorated with what appear to be rummage-sale finds—shower curtains with underwater scenes, a stuffed shark, and, tacked to the wall, a toilet seat with a fish design.

When it was time for my nap, the “Asian Mist” room was taken, so I chose the “Mesa Plateau,” with a cattle skull on the wall that would make Georgia O’Keeffe feel right at home. A staff member settled me in, placing my feet in the Chi machine, adjusting the support pillows, spritzing an eye pillow with aromatherapy spray, placing the body-warming panels over me, putting the music on a “rain and thunder,” setting, then, finally, closing the door. There’s no way I’ll fall asleep here, I thought as the thunder gently rumbled the table (it’s connected to the audio system). A rainforest monkey screeched in my headphones, and I made a mental list of things I’d like to buy at Williams-Sonoma.

The next thing I knew, a girl in a staff T-shirt was handing me a glass of water. “Take your time,” she said, “waking up.” —Shannon Olson

One Saturday morning about six weeks before April 15, our national day of fiscal confession and atonement, an Orthodox Jewish man and his son walked along Highland Parkway. The two passed a nondescript side-by-side duplex, where a half-dozen tax preparers were knee-deep in paperwork—the kind of work, the onerous old stereotype goes, usually handled by the dark-suited men now walking to temple on the Sabbath. Across the street, the Lubavitch Day Care Center and Day School sat in darkness while clients continued to stream in and out of the duplex, which houses Mohs Tax Service, until 9:00 in the evening.

Through the last thirty years, Linda Mohs has turned her one-woman shop into a virtual empire by working with artists, musicians, actors, and other margin-dwelling, small-business taxpayers. She has ten thousand clients. Her full-time, year-round staff of twelve mans the calculators twelve hours a day, six days a week during the tax season. Mohs herself finds an almost unholy joy in doing taxes. She says it’s “superfun.” She may be working on another man’s Sabbath, but her principles are one reason so many people are drawn to Mohs.

Among the business cards in her waiting room and the names listed on her website are caterers, geriatric care specialists, freehand faux finishers, early-childhood Spanish teachers, and doulas. There are a sprinkling of listings in other languages. Mohs said that half of her job consists of counseling people through crises like divorce or severe financial loss. “My clients are sane and insane, rich and poor, nice and naughty. I love the variety.”

When you walk in the front door of Mohs’ office a computerized voice announces, “Front door, open.” That’s where the formalities end. The wild style of the interior makes one wonder if the rooms are just as noisy when they’re empty. The waiting room is a museum of coffee mugs. Elsewhere, shelves are bowed with paperweights, glassware, and souvenirs. The “South of the border room” is filled with fishing nets and plush toy parrots. The walls are thick with lurid-hued paintings, printed slogans, postcards, one-liners, and family portraits. Employees and their clients sit in ersatz cubicles made from turquoise Naugahyde restaurant booths. Even the kitchen is operational: During tax time, a cook serves homemade lunches and dinners.

Mohs is diminutive and sports a short cap of brown hair and a dazzling array of rings. She has a wide open face and darts from room to room like a squirrel in a giant oak tree as she fields questions about esoteric tax laws, or chirps requests for copies or files over the din. She buys coffee and toilet paper by the vanload and is notorious for her thriftiness, no doubt the result of her childhood among eight siblings on a farm with no electricity or plumbing in Ogilvie, Minnesota. Her family was miserably poor, she said. Her mother worked and her father’s income was negligible. “If we could shoot it or grow it, we ate.” Many times, they went hungry.

Mohs’ relationships with her own children are as distinctive as her business. She can’t tell you how many children she and her husband Tom have raised. They made three of their own, but informally fostered, adopted, and cared for so many other kids, they’ve lost count. She estimates that she has shepherded a dozen kids to their high school graduations. She took in her ninety-year-old great aunt and adopted a three-month-old girl simultaneously. “They were the best of buddies. The little one would hitch a ride on the wheelchair and they had lots of tea parties together.”

In the seventies, Mohs had been doing taxes for her friends in exchange for pizza and beer when she realized she’d lost her appetite for the compensation, but not the work. She did the books for two photographers, Boyd Hagen and Joe Giannetti. When they dissolved their partnership, their employee, Ann Marsden, started her own business and Mohs followed.

Susan Thompson, who has worked with Mohs for ten years, had to leave work early on Saturday for a family emergency but made a point of pausing on her way out to testify about Mohs’ charitable nature. “She’s amazing.”

“She’s more than amazing,” said another employee, Desiree, jumping in when she overheard Thompson.

In addition to her open-door policy to those needing a home or a meal, Mohs and her husband cook and prepare forty turkeys in their kitchen each Thanksgiving and serve dinner at their church. She’s been known to encourage altruistic pricing among her staff.

Despite her advocacy on behalf of her artistic and often beleaguered client base, Mohs believes that the current Republican-controlled legislature has given more breaks to taxpayers than any other administration. She adheres to the commandment that government mind its own business—that may be why so many people return to her for their annual reckoning, and leave uplifted. —Sari Gordon

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

The Historian

Dan Prozinski feels history creaking through the old floorboards of his storefront-turned-home. In fact, a few years back, a renovation project sent him and his wife, Sue Park, wriggling through a crawl space they had previously been avoiding, for fear of it being a gross-out. But that dust cell ended up being a time capsule. From it, Park unearthed two portraits belonging to Charles and Annie, the Swedish immigrants who opened a cigar and candy store there in 1887. She also found the couple’s wedding certificate, a gorgeous, pastel-colored document dated 1889, which is now prominently displayed on the stairway alongside Prozinski’s and Park’s own relics.

Also in their possession: a 1918 receipt for the original soda fountain, which cost $1,800 and remains in place today. “You have to sell a lot of five-cent soda pops to pay for that,” said Prozinski, who speculates that the soda fountain set the family back a ways, as the old photos indicate they didn’t fork over for barstools for several years to come.

Charles and Annie’s daughters, Mabel and Hilda, later inherited the business; and they managed to keep the soda flowing until 1969, with the help of sales of Swedish-language magazines, newspapers, and greeting cards, as well as snuff. (These days the greeting-card rack, replete with a nifty, lighted display, holds Prozinski’s record collection.) Mabel died in 1979, Hilda in 1991. Prozinski bought the building from Hilda’s estate in 1995 and has since taken great pains to dig up newspaper clippings and Minnesota Historical Society archives about the sisters and their business. “We feel it’s so sweet that the two sisters were raised here and now we’ve got two girls of our own living here,” he said. —Christy DeSmith

***

The Watchman

Guy Savage isn’t hiding from anyone. It would be hard, in fact, for someone to live any more exposed. The living room of Savage’s apartment, in a duplex along a busy Minneapolis thoroughfare, is the front of a former paint store, and its display windows offer an almost panoramic view of the world rushing past outside. And, because he has no curtains or drapes, passersby—many of whom find themselves idling at the stoplight out front—are afforded a glimpse into Savage’s domestic life, such as it is.

At night Savage’s living room, where his dog usually keeps a vigil at the window, is lit up like a restaurant aquarium. Some people gawk; some wave (“I usually just wave back,” Savage said), and still others pause to consider Savage’s eccentric décor. The walls are hung with old music posters (Gang of Four, the Cramps, the Melvins, Hendrix) and maps (the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi). Arranged around the worn leather couch are random plants and curiosities: a parking meter, a cobbler’s bench, the head of a mannequin, a globe, and other assorted knickknacks.

Just through the kitchen is what was once the mixing room of the old shop, its wood floors splattered with thick layers of multi-colored paint. It looks like someone spent years trying to knock off a Jackson Pollock canvas and then tried to obliterate it with his or her feet.

From the outside, Savage’s home—which he has rented for four years—looks like it could be an artist’s studio or a second-hand store. There’s the giant “Irony” mural painted on the north side of the house, for starters, and there’s the street address rendered in vivid graffiti next to the door.

“I once had a guy walk right in the door and ask me what I sold here,” Savage said, standing in his living room and gazing out at the traffic whizzing by on the avenue. “I love the view, love seeing the looks on people’s faces. I call this my TV room.” He paused and gestured at the windows. “That’s my big screen right there, and I see a little bit ofeverything.” —Brad Zellar 

***

The Aesthete

“It was really ugly.” That was Mike Bethke’s first impression of the South Minneapolis storefront in which he lives. “It still is really ugly.”

It used to be a corner store called Johnson’s, with living quarters out back. But after the store closed in 1983, the building became a cramped, seedy tenement for a series of dubious characters. After nearly a decade, it fell into abandonment—a place the neighbors campaigned to have condemned.

Then Bethke and his wife Monica stepped in. They bought the building in 1995 with the intention of remodeling. The radiators and pipes had burst. Three inches of mud covered the basement’s dirt floor. But Bethke tackled the project with gusto, filling six dumpsters in the process. The work even inspired him to start a construction business.

The building was “crying out for personality,” said Bethke, referring to its indistinct design. He started with the exterior, which rather unintentionally evolved into something of an homage to New Orleans; it even has a French Quarter-style balcony and vines. To make the place look more inviting, he added windows along the backyard privacy wall.

He then turned his attention to the interior, where double doors salvaged from an old speakeasy lead into the living room (Bethke likes the idea that Dillinger or Capone might have passed through them). The sunken reading room is a dramatic innovation inspired by the hip apartment The Beatles shared in the 1965 movie Help!—something Bethke always admired. Even more nostalgic is the glowing, Spider-Man-themed hideout beneath the front stairwell.

After more than a decade, the house remains very much a work in progress, albeit a charming one. The stairway is still just raw lumber, with bungee cords holding a rudimentary banister in place. But tacked on the wall is a vision of things to come: a magazine photo of a grand staircase whose dark glossy wood is accented by an elegant runner. It looks like something out of Tara. And eventually Bethke plans to replace all the house’s warped floorboards—including a huge dent in what was once the storefront, where a crushingly large industrial refrigerator used to stand. —Molly Butterfoss

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

Clothing designers aren’t yet as numerous as guitar players, but sometimes we wonder if the fashion-show circuit isn’t starting to look a lot like the indie-rock scene. Despite what seems like a near-weekly occurrence of runway events, DIVA Minnesota’s annual affair is among the few absolute must-sees. For its 2006 fund-raiser, which took place last month, some twenty local designers worked a “femme fatale” theme, concocting killer gowns, cat suits, and 007-inspired jackets; we saw shades of Medusa, Cleopatra, and Glenn Close’s character from Fatal Attraction slinking and strutting around. But what really stood out, given the preponderance of bias-cut fabric and plunging necklines, were all the hip bones and clavicles. Sharper than any spike heel in the room.

—Christy DeSmith

If you’re thinking of buying a car anytime soon you ought to test drive the BMW 330i. Hell, even if you aren’t thinking of buying a car, you should do it just for the rush.

Because this is the car that all other sedans have to measure up to. You shouldn’t get to have this car just because you can afford it. You should have to pass a driver-appreciation exam. There should be scholarships, because this car is like Harvard for the driving literati.

The “Road Rake” and I had the pleasure of being given free rein by the nice folks at Motorwerks BMW to take this car for a day, sans supervision. In other words, Steve Rydberg, the sales manager there, trusted us. He probably shouldn’t have, but he did. (We lied and told him we were actual journalists—as opposed to guys who like fast cars and happen to write about them occasionally.) We put the car to the test. Not all the way to the making-it-skid-backward test, but almost. Now that I think of it, Steve is probably glad he wasn’t with us. He just didn’t know it.

The last time I test drove a BMW, it was with a friend who wanted me to advise her on whether to buy one. The test drive was short and uneventful—the usual one-stop up the freeway and back. I drove, my friend was on my right, and the salesman was in the back. As we were returning to the dealership on the frontage road, I decided we needed a little more information about the vehicle. So I accelerated to 60 … 70 … 80 … 90. As the dealership approached, the salesman kept pointing out the turn to me. He repeated himself because he noticed I wasn’t slowing. I took it after a hard brake and downshift. He whimpered a little bit as my friend and I said “Whee.” He managed a “Whew,” as he realized he hadn’t been killed. And he was about to spit out something more descriptive when my friend turned around in her seat and said, “That was fun. I’ll take it.” The salesman felt much better.

That car was a BMW 645i, not the 330i, but you get the picture. If anything, the 330i is even quicker. Not as much weight to haul around, you see. The Road Rake and I took turns driving it one sunny Saturday last month. We zoomed around the back roads of Bloomington and shot up Highway 100, using the 330i’s effortless acceleration, ultra-responsive steering, and lovely Steptronic automatic transmission to pretend we were on the Autobahn and could pass whomever we liked. We could and we did.

We made some very hard turns at high speed to test the vaunted stability control system. As far as I can tell, the engineers at BMW seem to have found a way to eliminate centrifugal force from the precepts of Newtonian physics. In other words, the car turned precisely as asked, didn’t lean at all, even at the point when the tires were losing adhesion, and made the Road Rake and me grin at each other as if we’d just got off the big rollercoaster at Valleyfair and said “Let’s go again.”

The Road Rake and I are both confirmed standard-transmission guys, but it bears mention that we agreed we’d happily give up the left knee pain engendered by the stiff racing clutch pedals in our fun cars for the BMW’s Steptronic transmission. Unlike some of the earlier versions of the concept, like the Audi’s Tiptronic, which once displayed a slight reluctance to change gears when ordered, the manual shift auto transmission in the BMW was instantaneous and imperceptibly smooth. There was no “clunk” even at numerous high-rev downshifts. The car responded with instant acceleration without complaint. On the upshift, it shot ahead as if we were all of a sudden pedaling downhill while everyone behind us was stuck on the wrong side of a mountain on the Tour de France.

On top of all this physical sensation is the sound. Not the audio system (which we really didn’t have time to notice, but I’m sure is fine if you’re not that into hip-hop). I’m talking about the sound we noticed after we turned off the radio. The tuned exhaust system was a perfect accompaniment to the performance. This car even sounds fast.

The version we drove lists for $41,820 and includes the premium package, with auto dimming mirrors, a garage door opener, BMW Assist (OnStar with a German accent), and the Bluetooth connection, in case you feel like you have to talk on your cell and drive at the same time. (There’s also an all-wheel-drive model—the 330xi, for a couple grand more.) Drive one. Use the phone only to call your banker to arrange for the loan. —Tom Bartel

The Road Rakes Tom Bartel and Chris Birt are now online at www.rakemag.com/today/roadrake/.

Despite Daunte Culpepper’s departure for Miami, he’ll be making a few non-voluntary return trips. That’s because the Vikings Sex Boat scandal continues to play itself out in the legal system. We trust our courts of law, of course, but it was never clear to us what laws precisely were broken in that unseemly episode. Last time we checked, casual, consensual sex between adults was discouraged but not illegal. Lap dances, on the other hand, are perfectly legitimate and generally considered protected by the First Amendment as a sort of artistic expression. (To be sure, lap dances are supposed to take place in a licensed establishment, with the other trimmings of public performance—you know, stage names, soft-lighting gels, costumes of sorts, those sorts of things.) We’re not saying that makes lap dancing good; we’d rather not have to adjudicate that subject. It is easier to say that people ought to be able to express themselves, than to dictate how they should do it (or what they should wear while they’re doing it). Incidentally, the word is that the post-Culpepper era will begin with a bold move on the franchise’s part. The team is redesigning its uniform, including the risky sartorial proposition of purple pants. If they could also eliminate that faux-military script Vikings logo that has long polluted end zone and sweatshirt, we’d be grateful.

 

As it turns out, the Twins will be tweaking their uniforms, as well. In honoring the late Kirby Puckett, the players will wear number 34 patches on their sleeves this season. It was ennobling to see Puckett’s send-off in March, and we felt bad that he’d retreated so far from the public eye in the years after his retirement. Of course, it didn’t help when, three years ago, his private life was blown wide open in a Sports Illustrated cover story, and the self-righteous colloquy that proclaimed his good-guy image a “sham.” Sometimes public figures remember these injuries much longer than the public does. No one wishes to excuse the man’s flaws, but it was nice to have so many reminders of the joy Puckett brought to doing his life’s main work—or, really, to playing a game. What Puckett’s story underlines is how much media have changed in the past fifty years. There was once an assumption that pro athletes were role models for our youth, and the media helped prop up this felicitous myth in part by leaving alone the private unpleasantries that are, in some degree, visited on every life. In later years, plenty of pro athletes kicked back by getting tattooed and dying their hair and getting in fistfights at nightclubs. If their private lives were to be scrutinized and publicized by the press, then they would stop pretending to be ambassadors for their corporate owners, stop dropping into elementary schools and pediatric wards and tousling the hair of towheaded young fans. By those standards in his public life, Kirby Puckett was a throwback. He loved being a baseball idol and representing the honorable values of hard work, mutual respect, self-sufficiency, loyalty, and generosity. Whether these values carried over into his private life is probably a question we should all turn on ourselves.

 

The other day, another franchise player expressed his loyalties to our fair cities. Columnist Nick Coleman pleaded with his bosses at McClatchy, the overlords of the Star Tribune, to do right by his old employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. At first we were a little startled to hear Coleman explain that loyalty is one of several values that supersede money-making, because we recall Coleman’s surprising jump from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune in 2003, after seventeen years at the former paper. (At the time, it seemed odd that the Star Tribune wanted to add yet another reasonable and articulate fellow to its stable of … well, middle-aged, white-male columnists; the paper has since achieved a sort of corrective balance by hiring a shrewish neo-conservative think-tanker.) But this would be unfair. Coleman, after all, spent his first decade as a newspaperman at the Star Tribune. There is a difference between being a company man and being a community man.

Tom Letness could cease his never-ending renovation of the Heights Theatre, in Columbia Heights, and it would remain the finest movie house in the Twin Cities, bar none. Yet he keeps fiddling with it. He knows its history inside and out—from a bombing back in the late twenties at the hands of a disgruntled former projectionist, to its dark days as an ugly second-run theater. As the theater’s current owner, operator, and sometimes beleaguered caretaker, he’s also familiar with all its quirks and charms in its present-day incarnation. Letness didn’t have to dig out the orchestra pit or hire an organist, but he did. He didn’t have to put 152 hand-painted reproduction Edison Mazda bulbs in the chandeliers, but he did. Bringing in the Wurlitzer organ and finding someone to play the thing wasn’t easy, but he did it.

Letness, who bears a striking resemblance to a young John Malkovich, is often fused to his cell phone, trying to set up appointments with inspectors or scheduling future events, sometimes involving vintage films and even, on occasion, an appearance by an aging star. Letness speaks of the Heights with the weary pride of someone who loves what he’s doing but has long since lost his naiveté. “This is a lot easier to talk about now that most of the renovation’s done and we’re headed in the right direction,” he said with a sigh. He shook his head. “Strangers often come up to me and say they have this dream to open a movie theater and what advice can I give them. I tell them the truth. And the truth is, it’s not easy.”

Letness typically works twelve-hour days, seven days a week. He lives in a tasteful, relatively sound-proof apartment above the theater that gives him a bird’s-eye view of his renovated Dairy Queen next door. He begins each morning with a quick walk with the dog, then coffee at a local café, often in the company of a publicist, a journalist, or someone else vital to spreading the gospel of the theater. Around 10:00 a.m., he’ll meet with Chuck Merrell, a maintenance man, to go over projects—the old theater requires a tremendous amount of upkeep. Letness also tinkers around the theater himself, climbing scaffolds for ceiling repairs, cleaning up from the previous night’s screenings, in addition to conducting all of the business work—and also scurrying next door to handle the occasional ice cream crisis. He also consolidates the multiple reels of a new film into one giant reel and threads it into the projector, which he maintains. “I handle the pictures with kid gloves, unlike other places,” he scoffed. “You get a quality print at the Heights.” Around 3:00 p.m., he’ll prep for the first show of the night, throw open the doors, sell tickets, and personally start the picture about 5:00 p.m.

“My employee,” Letness said, stressing the singular as if to drive home his lonely venture, “arrives around 6:00, and I help him get ready for the next show.”

At times, he can become irritable about some patrons. “Oh, I’ve thrown people out. I look at it like you’re in my house. Don’t talk during the movie. Turn your cell phone off. Pick up your garbage. We have this lovely little announcement beforehand, with a mother telling her kids to be polite, and yet people still are rude. Do I have to go up there myself and ask them to be quiet during the show?”

For the most part, though, Letness loves his audience and it loves him. “For me, it’s the little things—like when that curtain rises before a film, there’s a wonderful feeling. And I remember one kid before a Harry Potter film seeing those curtains and asking me, ‘Is this the play or the movie?’” Letness rolled his eyes, and despite his obvious pleasure at pleasing the kiddies, the skeptic momentarily displaced the romantic. “Yeah, kid,” he growled sarcastically, “it’s the play.”

The Heights could screen the typical Cineplex garbage, but instead, Letness insists on bringing in what he believes is quality Hollywood fare and, every now and then, classics like Oklahoma! or White Christmas (this year he has already lined up Bing Crosby’s widow to croon beforehand). And sometimes he’ll indulge his taste for films like It Started With Eve, an old and virtually forgotten Deanna Durbin flick from 1941. “One of my favorites,” he admitted. “That’s one of the joys of the Heights—I know that if I didn’t show that film, no one else would.” —Peter Schilling

Tri Mai is a bachelor, though not of the beer-and-babe-poster variety. He keeps his South Minneapolis foursquare house immaculate. Precision and aesthetics rule the roost in equal measure, and this balance is everywhere. It’s in the play of light through three stained-glass panels suspended in his front windows. It’s in the careful arrangement of living room chairs, all nine of them, into intimate groupings.

At thirty-five, Mai runs his own business building high-end audio equipment in his basement and selling it worldwide. He’s also an accomplished culinary artist, creating savory delights with little more exertion than other guys might put into heating a can of chili. Still, he hands me chicken wings and cheese bread in the lid of a to-go carton before we settle in to spin some records.

Mai’s stereo occupies as much space as a grand piano or the couch a future girlfriend might want to move in. Two speakers masquerading as bookcases anchor the room. Each is driven by a power amplifier the size of a steamer trunk. A rack of brushed steel components, topped with a granite slab, provides a solid foundation for the turntable.

Watching the needle descend onto the first record of the evening, I am hypnotized by the tonearm silently tracing the groove. I’m conjuring images from under the hood of a sports car as the dulcet voice of Annie Lennox drifts out into the room. Every nuance is audible: the soft intake of breath, even the creak of shoes on the floor.

“Women have all sorts of ways to be flashy: shoes, jewelry, hairstyles, clothes,” Mai muses. “But what do men have? Cars, watches, gadgets—that’s it. Strength is no longer the essential trait, so either our brain, wallet, or dick is bigger.” He gestures at his stereo and says, “I guess these are my beautiful peacock feathers.”

The amplifiers he built for himself glow with electrostatic tubes like a peacock’s iridescent courtship display. But the prime feather in Mai’s fan, the flagship product of his business, is the Tri-Planar Mark VII Precision Tonearm, or simply, the Tri-Planar Ultimate. Among audiophiles it is considered one of the best in the world. One reviewer for the Absolute Sound magazine complained in jest, “Hell hath no fury like a reviewer scorned by a component that refuses to let him down in at least one or two areas.” You can purchase your own Tri-Planar Ultimate from Mai’s website (www.triplanar.com), but at four thousand dollars, turntable not included, it’s not exactly for the average listener.

Mai, however, would love to see that change. “Too many people waste their money on crap,” he says, lowering the arm onto another LP. “Why not spend a little more on something well made, take care of it, and have it last the rest of your life? Everything I make will last a hundred years.”

When Mai was ten years old, he boarded a boat and left his family and his native Vietnam behind. Faced with little opportunity besides mandatory military conscription at fifteen, he set out in search of a better life. After spending more than a year at a refugee camp in the Philippines, he was finally welcomed into a foster family in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

“Myron and Thelma Nash showed me the good life,” he says. “They showed me unconditional love. If I ever get to heaven, it will surely be because of them.”

While he had some exposure to music from the Nashes—mostly in church—Mai admits he wasn’t really captivated until his freshman year at St. Olaf College. There he dated a German classical violist named Katrine who played him the first vinyl record he’d ever heard.

“It was Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins,” he laughs. “The sound was different from anything I’d heard before. It was fuller but incredibly subtle. It showed me that music could have a body. I was hooked.”

Over the next decade, vinyl addiction would take him into the Twin Cities’ burgeoning rave scene and through a two-year stint building amplifiers for Atma-Sphere Audio. Mai eventually earned a graduate degree in sculpture from MCAD, and ultimately ended up building tonearms with the inventor of the Tri-Planar, a watch-maker named Herbert Papier. When Papier retired in 1999, after a two-decade quest to perfect the Ultimate Tonearm, he handpicked Mai to be his successor.

“I’m privileged Herb had the confidence in me to pass on his business, that I’ve been able to make something out of it, something successful.” He pauses to set the needle on the last record of the evening. “I’ve set up a pretty nice life for myself. I’m surrounded by beauty.” He glances round the room. “Though I’ve been thinking I should get rid of one of these chairs and get a loveseat.”

—Sam Ridenour