My five-year-old son, Peter, is standing in the middle of the practice rink at Parade Ice Garden in Minneapolis. The other children, coached for this moment by their parents, can push off their skate edges in a wobbly glide. Peter hasn’t made the connection that skating is an entirely different motion from walking. He marches … Read more
The letters on the sign above the bakery were as willful as inanimate objects could be. Hugo and Loretta kept an attentive eye out in case the force behind the mischief chose to make itself known. It never did. They had never had any trouble with the “E” until last week. The “G” was another … Read more
“I was a troublesome model,” said Karen Ilvedson, who is now mostly retired from the business. “There’d be shoots where I just said, ‘I have to go.’” She was, however, quietly gracious during our Rake Appeal shoot (see page 53), even as the photographer asked her to pose in increasingly complex, contorted positions; even as … Read more
It’s hard to tell for sure, but the trend may have started with bright tangerine five years ago. That’s the color that the then-newly arrived owners of Two 12 Pottery, a potters’ studio-cum-gift-shop, painted their building on Northeast’s Thirteenth Avenue. Since then, art and color have swept into Minneapolis’s old Polish quarter: storefronts along this … Read more
Ask anyone who has gone through a breakup—the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Need a testimonial? Just ask the Star Tribune editorial board. Once upon a time, the Strib’s endorsement meant something. It was a player in Minnesota politics, an institution crossed at one’s peril. Not anymore. Minnesotans have rejected the Strib’s … Read more
Sometimes I read my horoscope and wonder if my fellow Geminis in the Sunni Triangle are “dressing for success today” and “playing it coy around that special Scorpio.” When you think about it, dressing for success might just as well mean body armor as a pair of Lucky jeans. And “coy” could be a euphemism … Read more
Unless you grew up on a schooner, in Tokyo, or with extremely food-forward parents, your introduction to tuna was probably a shredded pink pile of the stuff from StarKist. And like me, I bet there was no way that you could connect those mayo-lovin’ shreds to anything that swam in the big blue ocean. Long … Read more
Real-life emergency rooms are nothing like television. For one thing, there’s the pace. If you filmed a one-hour real-time show in an actual emergency room, the scene might never change. Last month, while I was finally leaving the ER with a freshly diagnosed “honkin’ kidney infection on its way to the bloodstream,” I heard the … Read more
If you were looking for a young man with a great literary life in front of him in 1928, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a better candidate than 29-year-old Joseph Moncure March. His narrative in verse The Wild Party, a tale of Manhattan hedonism and the tragic hipsters who indulge in it, had been … Read more
My pal Steve used to travel a lot for work, and he found himself in Thailand a few years ago. He tells me that one night in Bangkok does, indeed, make a hard man humble. He says there are hundreds of beautiful women who literally throw themselves at you. You cannot make eye contact with … Read more