The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • The Clean House

    This is the first time a Sarah Ruhl play has been produced in the Twin Cities since the thirty-something hotshot’s Eurydice became the hit of Off-Broadway this summer. The Clean House is an earlier product of Ruhl’s fantastical imagination, and one with an important distinction from Eurydice: Even though it was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005, it drew divided criticism.

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    The New York Times raved raved, but The New Yorker’s theater critic smelled a stereotype in the play’s heroine, Matilde, a depressive Brazilian maid who loves wisecracking but doesn’t particularly relish housework. What follows, no matter what your thoughts on the Latina character, is a robust satire on labor relations: Matilde’s employer, a successful American doctor named Lane, goes so far as to feed her servant antidepressants. But Matilde despairs whenever distracted from her quest to form the perfect joke.

    Mixed Blood Theater, 1501 S. Fourth St., Minneapolis; 612-338-6131.

  • Ugly

    Contemporary dance seems an unlikely vehicle for exploring our culture’s obsession with physical perfection, what with all the buff beauties prancing about. But that didn’t stop local choreographer Matthew Janczewski from assembling an impressive cast of collaborators to help realize his heartfelt, movement-based rebuke of superficiality—in fact, it’s his most ambitious project to date. The evening is set to the dissonant sounds of pioneering electronic music composer Morton Subotnick.

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    Direction is by Peter Rothstein, founder of Theatre Latte Da and director of the Guthrie’s recent production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. The result is a dance in three acts. The first is a baroque, very formal piece about keeping up appearances. The second, a dystopian vision called “Disco Technology,” deals in the false identities created for romantic pursuits (playwright Kira Obolensky lends a bogus online dating profile). And in the deconstructionist third act, the façade comes tumbling down.

    Walker Art Center, 612-375-7600.

  • Alan Weisman

    Now, here’s fodder for daydreams and late-night speculation: What would happen to the earth—and, more pointedly, to our massive infrastructure of buildings, bridges, subways, and sculptures—if the human race were to disappear? Author and University of Arizona journalism professor Alan Weisman has asked the question of everyone from geologists and paleontologists to art conservators and the Dalai Lama, and the answers are utterly fascinating.

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    This month he discusses the well-researched thesis put forth in his new book, The World Without Us. Come prepared for an ecology lesson, as well as some delightful trivia. For example: Without us, mosquitoes would thrive, domesticated cattle would die out (of course), and a plastic bottle cap would likely outlive your house.

  • William Trevor, Cheating at Canasta: Stories

    Cheating at Canasta is a marvelous, enviable title, and William Trevor is an astonishing, and astonishingly reliable, writer. Along with Alice Munro, he is also one of the living masters of the short story. That sort of thing usually sounds like so much hogwash, but in this instance it’s nothing but the plain truth. Even as he approaches eighty, Trevor continues to produce carefully crafted marvels that often whipsaw between deviance and devotion, or dereliction and disappointment, from one story to the next. His best tales are compact and powerful moral symphonies, and are so full of startling and often catastrophic disruptions and moments of exhausted grace that they seem as utterly believable as life.

  • Jeffrey Harrison

    It’s always a good thing when poetry offers surprises (it’s rarer than you might think—if in fact you think about poetry at all). It’s also a good thing when poetry offers lucidity, music, and mystery in something like equal measure (also rarer than you might think). Jeffrey Harrison’s poetry offers all of those things with impressive regularity. The Singing Underneath was selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series in 1987. And since then, Harrison has had a very nice career, at least as far as careers in poetry go, with scads of prizes, fellowships, and teaching gigs, and the publication of his poems in such esteemed periodicals as The New Yorker and The Paris Review. His fourth book, The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, was released last year, and we’re assuming that, like many poets of his stature, Harrison has a small but ardent cult of admirers. We’ll also assume that the rest of you have never heard of the fellow, which seems like a shame.

    Walter Library.

  • Taming the Lunch Line

    Decreasing student enrollment in Minneapolis, and the subsequent shuttering of some nine of its public schools, has been big news in the last couple of years. Less known, perhaps, are the pressures that have resulted at remaining schools—especially in the cafeteria. 

    For example, Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis is a popular selection in the state’s school-choice lottery system and thus has seen enrollment go from 350 students in 2005 to nearly 500 in 2007. With this population surge, about a hundred kids are shuffling through the cafeteria every thirty minutes—for five consecutive lunch periods. Needless to say, things can get a little wild in what is already, by tradition, one of the more lawless realms at any K-12 institution. Seeking to impose some order, Whittier officials did a very au courant thing: They outsourced the problem to a consultant.


    Nancy Burns     is a certified classroom management trainer who has coached over ten-thousand teachers in her nine-year career. But in 2001, she began scrutinizing school lunchrooms. “I would do a classroom management conference and so many questions would come up about improving the cafeteria. Obviously, there was a need to make lunchtime work better,” she said. Since developing a training curriculum called “Cafeteria 101: Setting up for Success,” Burns has fully made over three school lunchrooms and consulted on several others. As far as she knows, this petite forty-year-old is the only person in Minnesota who specializes in this area.

    “Truly, I’m passionate about cafeterias,” said Burns, even as she admits how goofy that sounds. Her zeal stems from the idea that a relatively calm, well-run lunch period has benefits that reach beyond the cafeteria. “It affects the atmosphere of an entire school,” she pointed out. “Teachers can pick up kids and dive right into learning without wasting time recovering from a madhouse feeding frenzy.”

    How does Burns keep a busy cafeteria from devolving into a scene worthy of Animal House? She takes her cues from the biggest people-moving industry on earth. “A successful lunch program is like a well-run airport,” she said. “It has clear momentum and destinations, which are provided by signage, traffic flow, and zones.” She uses the typical flight experience as an example. “A plane is a place where you expect people—the flight attendant, maybe even the pilot—to be standing in a certain place wearing a uniform. Now the cafeteria staff and student helpers wear colorful aprons with handy pockets. They know exactly where to stand within their zones and children will always know where to find them.”

    Another strategy involves colored tape. “We literally marked out the line on the floor to help children and adults know where to queue up. It’s an enormous stress reducer when there are clear guideposts to the next transition,” said Burns. “Transitions, even small ones, are difficult for young children.”

    To adults, these “transitions” are merely a list of things one does in a cafeteria—get in line, pay for your food, grab some napkins, find a table, and so on. But to young children they can be sizable hurdles, especially when you factor in the stresses from hunger (the last lunch period at Whittier is at 1:40 p.m.) and the decibel levels in a typical elementary school lunchroom. According to Burns, the trickiest of these transitions involves condiments. Just try watching a hungry third-grader as she struggles to open a mustard packet—tears might not be common but frustration will be plentiful. Or worse: “Picture the kindergarten student who navigates the line and gets her hamburger,” Burns said. “But she doesn’t realize that it doesn’t have ketchup until she sits down. Now how do your procedures accommodate her?”

    To avoid students swimming upstream against the prevailing cafeteria current like ketchup-seeking salmon, Burns emphasizes prevention—a kind of “leave no condiment behind” approach. “The system that the lunch staff liked best involved foam-board signs,” said Burns. Emphasizing that the staff, who are there every day, have the last word, she made vertical signs that each pictured one of the day’s meals at the top, along with examples of recommended condiments. “I literally Velcroed ketchup and relish packets to the signs as a visual cue,” she says. And when that plan fails? “That’s when the colored aprons with their fabulous pockets come in.” All lunch room staff and helpers carry condiments with them.

    Establishing procedures is just one part of Burns’s job; she also trains lunchroom monitors on addressing throngs of young diners and managing the various tables: a peanut-free table for those with nut allergies and a “loss of privilege” table where students are consigned for poor behavior. And finally there is a “food sharing” table for unwanted items; if a kid wants something from this table, a helper brings it to her. It sounds odd, but this set-up was established to prevent bullying. “Food cannot travel from child to child because it can lead to intimidation,” explains Burns. “We don’t want ‘gimme your cookie or else’ to ever be confused with sharing; this is just another safeguard we’ve put in to make lunch better.”

  • Storage

    Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses, etc.—and then other crews come in for the interior and surface work.

    Today’s my last day off work. I took the week off for arrangements—ordering the box, funeral logistics, church reception, nodding at lawyers. Today’s my last day to get shit done around the house before going back to work, so I open the kitchen cabinet next to the dishwasher and extract all the food storage containers and pile them on the counter. I open another drawer and pull out all of the lids and pile them next to containers of various sizes from small transparent cubes to large oblong orange ones with vacuum-sealable lids for foods like brownies and nachos. Some of the containers seal in moisture while others preserve crispness.

    “Where are all the goddamn lids?” my wife always yells. “I can’t find a lid to match a container.” That’s why I’m taking care of this problem.

    I match lids to containers, and of 37 lids and 43 containers, I find only twelve matches of containers to lids, which makes my armpits suddenly burn like a gas grill and itch like mad. Just before I’m about to crash my fist into the refrigerator, my son Danny screams and I hear falling objects pound his closet floor upstairs.

    “Hey, Dad,” says my other son Alan, walking into the kitchen. “I’m going over to Kimmy’s to play XBox.”

    “Who’s Kimmy?” I say.

    “Jimmy,” he says.

    “I swear to God you said Kimmy.”

     

    Last Friday when I got to the hospital after work, I knew Dad was dying because he had scared little-child eyes, except they weren’t white and clear like kids’ eyes. They were yellowed, almost brown, because his kidney was shutting down and shit was filling his blood, and I said, “You want the baseball game on? Santana’s pitching tonight.”

    Dad mumbled through the mask that cupped his mouth and nose and pushed in and pulled out air. I couldn’t find the right TV station. Even the ICU, where terminal people went to die, had the deluxe cable package. The biggest lesson I learned from the deathbed scene: people about to die still care about what’s on TV.

    “Norty tree,” Dad said, voice limp like a wrist through the incoming and outgoing air. At his house on the lake, he got the games on channel 43. The nurse came in and said, “Lift the back of his head. I’ll take this thing off so you two can talk. You’re his son?”

    “Norty tree,” Dad said again, this time closing his eyes because of the effort.

    I reached behind his head and lifted. The back of his neck felt like fish skin hardened by sun. Dad was a roofing contractor who had half the sun’s energy stored in his neck flesh. His skin still released heat. The nurse pulled off the mask. I let his head fall back. He panted for air.

    “Santana’s pitching tonight,” I said.

    “Get ice cream,” he said. “I got chocolate and vanilla. Where’s the kids?”

    “They have chores tonight,” I said, lying. Bringing them to a deathbed scene was just too much work. I’d have to pay attention to Dad and watch the kids at the same time, make sure they didn’t start screwing with sensitive medical equipment. Also, my wife promised to watch some neighborhood kids because the parents were going to a church function and I’d worked sixty hours through Friday and was lucky to get off by five so I could see Dad, who’d been in the hospital since Wednesday. Long story short, I was tired and couldn’t deal with the kids.

    I sat on a little metal chair in the corner off the foot of Dad’s bed. He was way up high and I could just barely see his head angling down at me, his cheek flesh scrunched up as he tried to make out my shape, and I laughed at a quick thought about the Hallmark Hall of Fame ending where a sensitive son would hold his dad’s hand and whisper, “What’s it like, Dad?” And then pause. “Dying, I mean? What it’s like?” And the dad would look his son in the eyes and say, “It just feels right, son. No more pain.”

    But instead I said, as I fiddled with the remote for the TV, “You can’t get sick on me now. I have to finish that tile work behind the stove.”

    “I got the glue and grout over there,” Dad said. He pointed limply at a wall of white cabinets full of medical supplies. He thought he was at home.

    I didn’t hold his hand the way my sisters did when they came into the room later, one standing on each side of the bed and squeezing his leathery mitts over the bedrails. If I held his hand, he’d know he was dead.

    I figured out the remote control and got the game, the Twins against Tampa Bay. I wanted a more historic rival like the White Sox or the Tigers for Dad’s last game, but we got the fucking Devil Rays. Life is bullshit, and so is death. That’s also a thing I learned.

     

    Now that things have slowed—we’re done with the paperwork—I can get to projects. Before I organized the food storage containers, I’d been on the toilet reading an article in Better Homes and Gardens on how to build a backyard Japanese garden. I always read BHG, which my wife subscribes to, when I’m taking a dump. Though my next project is to wrap our two-tiered deck around the side of the house and install a recessed hot tub, I’m vacillating on putting a meditation garden there instead.

  • NEWS: Breaking Bread


    Click here for Breaking Bread, the FOOD NEWS blog by Jeremy Iggers and Ann Bauer.

  • Beyond the Cask


    Click here for Beyond the Cask, Ann Bauer’s WINE blog.

  • Consider the Egg


    Click here for Consider the Egg, Stephanie March’s FOOD blog.