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Contrary to recent media reports, local artist and performer Faith Farrell is not the self-proclaimed Spam Queen. “I don’t know where that came from,” Farrell told me. “My friends were the ones who started calling me the Spam Queen. I would never be presumptuous enough to proclaim myself the queen of anything.”

Farrell is technically the 2006 Great American Spam Champion, a title earned in the aftermath of her first-place prize in the Spam cooking competition at last year’s Minnesota Sate Fair. Since then, there have been articles, interviews, a parade appearance as Miss Spamerica, and even an invitation, a few weeks back, to appear on David Letterman (alas, she got bumped at the last minute, but hopes to return). “So I’m the grand champ, I guess,” she said. “And I do a lot of performing things, but really I’m more of a visual artist. I don’t know what I am. I’m still trying to figure that out.”

Ostensibly, Farrell is a forty-year-old artist living in Northeast Minneapolis, with an informal specialty in meats, mostly processed. Every Saturday night, Farrell performs in “Meat Raffle” at the downtown Grumpy’s, “a meat raffle and game show and variety show all in one,” where she does crafts demonstrations using meat. “Last week I did a ring-bologna tiara, also using some hot dogs. Tubular Meat Tiara is what I should call it, now that I think about it.” She also plays in local bars as part of a two-woman band called Lady Hard-On. “The majority of our songs are meat-related,” she noted, regarding the name. “We sing about all different types of sausages and meat products. I don’t know when it started, this meat thing of mine. It could be that my first high school job, working at a deli, provided those formative building blocks of my meat love.”

Spam entered the picture four years ago, when Farrell and friends toured Hormel Foods’s Spam Museum. That was where she discovered the State Fair cooking contests. “Every year, I enter the crop art contest at the State Fair, and I always try to get something into the Fine Arts building. But I had never done a recipe.”

Her first creation, “a Mediterranean pizza thing with apricot jam, feta cheese, kalamata olives, and, of course, Spam” did not impress the contest judges. “Flavors don’t go together,” they wrote. “Unappealing.”

The next year, she concocted Spamadillo, a recipe based on the Spanish picadillo, a stew in a base of tomato and hot peppers with cinnamon, onions, and dried cherries, served with rice and fresh cilantro. Friends sampled different versions and recorded their impressions on scorecards that Farrell recreated from those she’d received from Fair judges the year before. She lost again, but her overall score was better, especially for appearance. The judges said it was a beautiful arrangement. But they thought the flavors were too overpowering. “I realized that I may have inadvertently hidden the flavor of Spam,” Farrell admitted.

The light switched on: Winning recipes offered comfort and simplicity. “A lot of elbow macaroni and mayonnaise,” Farrell said. “Exotic ingredients would be, like, soy sauce. This made me consider what the contest was really about.” She imagined the most comforting food she knew, and then figured out how to create Thanksgiving leftovers in one dish. A little cranberry sauce, some Turkey Spam, a handful of sage, a dollop of mashed potatoes, Durkee fried onions, and cream cheese. Wrap it up in a Pillsbury Crescent Roll and bake: You’ve got yourself some Spamsgiving Day Delight. (The complete recipe can be found at Spam.com.)

“One of the appeals of Spam is that it’s so easy. I think I was getting a little too fancy,” Farrell said. Her instincts were spot-on: her Spamsgiving Day Delight took first place at the 2006 State Fair. She was thrilled, initially — and then bowled over when she got a call the following February saying she had won the national contest. “I thought it was a prank. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, shut up.’”

“We really enjoy Faith’s enthusiasm,” said Cyndi Harles of the Blue Ribbon Group, which has handled the Spam contest since 1990. And Faith is the first Minnesotan to win the national grand prize in the Spam contest, which, Harles pointed out, is Blue Ribbon’s longest running and most popular contest at state fairs all over the country, with upwards of a thousand entries each year. Farrell won a $3,000 cash prize for her recipe, which was judged by cooks in the Hormel Foods test kitchens on its taste, originality, and presentation.

The only downside to being Spam’s grand champ is that Farrell is banned from competing in the Spam contest at this year’s State Fair. But, she says, “I saw this new competition, ‘Frying With Canola Oil,’ where you deep-fry something on a stick. And I thought, hey, I can enter that and still sneak in the Spam.” She’ll also continue her tradition of entering the crop art competition with an image of a vintage Spam can. “It’s very time consuming doing this, bean by bean.”

Possibly most thrilling, though, is having earned the privilege to be an official judge for this year’s Spam contest. As last year’s first-place winner, she’ll now fill out scorecards on other people’s processed-meat dream dishes. “It’s a huge honor,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll have palate cleansers between each course.”

Lips can spit. Eyes can blink. The nose can sneeze. But the ear—that delicate wormhole into the skull—is defenseless. Perhaps this vulnerability explains our horror of earwigs.

The earwig is a damp-loving, creepy-crawly creature that looks like a cockroach with a lobster claw on its rear end. If you think you’ve seen more of them around in recent years, you’re right. Originally from Europe, the bug made its way across the Atlantic at some distant point in the checkered history of this nation, and has been conquering us inch by inch ever since. The insect launched its invasion of Minnesota relatively recently, after breaching the Wisconsin state line a decade ago, according to Jeffrey Hahn, an Extension entomologist with the University of Minnesota. “Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t here,” he says. “It is expanding its range, but why or how isn’t clear.”

Across the border in the wilds of Wisconsin, we’ve had a damp summer. As a result, we’ve encountered a larger number of earwigs than is pleasing: on the porch, in the laundry room, perched on the rim of a drinking glass. An earwig dropped out of my pants cuffs the other morning as I dressed. Another, I flicked off a plate of broccoli and pasta seconds before I plopped it in front of my eight-year-old daughter, narrowly averting disaster. Irene, not an insect lover, has been particularly worried about earwigs after she learned from neighborhood kids that the bugs got their name because they crawl into your ears and proceed to eat your brains.

Not true, says Hahn. By his lights, earwigs are largely harmless little beasts who enjoy snacking on decomposing plant matter and the occasional smaller bug. But doesn’t that lobster claw pose a danger? “If you were a small bug, that’d be one thing, but they’re just not strong predators,” Hahn says. And on the subject of ears, the entomologist is adamant: “I’ve never heard of a case where an earwig has gone in someone’s ear. If that happened, it would be by the purest of accidents.”

Yet the earwig has had its reputation for at least two thousand years.

“They like to crawl into all kinds of cracks and crevices,” explains Phil Pellitteri, an entomologist with the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “But there’s nothing in particular about an ear to attract them. In the old days, though, when people would sleep in barns, you know … ” More recently, in 1972 to be exact, Rod Serling explored the ear from the viewpoint of an earwig in an episode of Night Gallery, his less-remembered follow-up series to The Twilight Zone. In the episode, an earwig does chew through the protagonist’s brain, leaving behind a trail of eggs.

At Snopes.com, the urban legend website run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, the earwig story is classified as false. The entry, however, includes a reference to the Victorian-era explorer of Africa, John Hanning Speke, who recorded his experience when a small black beetle crawled deep into his ear. There it “began with exceeding vigour like a rabbit in a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum. The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is past description.” Speke tried to dig the insect out with a knife, but only killed it. That caused an infection that, wrote Speke, “ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.”

Speke might have deprived his traveling companions of their little joke had he paid better attention to his grammar-school Latin—for one of the earliest mentions of the boring habits of earwigs comes in one of the world’s first encyclopedias: Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, circa 77 AD.

Pliny was an accountant who shuttled from province to province in the early years of the Roman Empire, according to Trevor Murphy, a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. “He was intensely curious,” says Murphy. “In all his spare time, he had slaves reading to him. One slave on his right would read to him, and another slave on his left would take down notes that Pliny dictated.”

His goal, according to Murphy: “To describe the world.” Naturalis Historia begins with comets, stars, and weather, then narrows in to plants and minerals. Along the way, he has this to say of earwigs (in Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation): “If an earwig … be gotten into the eare … spit into the same, and it will come forth anon.”

Good advice from the ancients to bear in mind during these final hazy weeks of summer. Just don’t tell Irene.

A version of this story first appeared in Viroqua, Wisconsin’s Kickapoo Free Press (www.kickapoofreepress.com), where the writer serves as managing editor.

Inside a booth at the recent Back to the ’50s classic car show at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, Sven Lynch labored in the sweltering heat over a slim stripe on the side of a black ’36 Ford coupe. Various gawkers had gathered, including a pair of corpulent, bearded twins clad in matching Twins shirts, a pock-marked kid wearing religious slogans, and a parade of purists dismayed that Lynch would dare to gild the lily of a classic auto. Lynch steadied one hand with the other, drawing a flawless canary-yellow line. His panache, not surprisingly, prompted one spectator to inquire about a custom job. “Sorry,” Lynch told the man without glancing up from his work. “By then I’ll be back in Stockholm.”

The Twin Cities boasts not a few pinstripers, but none are as highly regarded as Mr. Lynch—or “Von Sven” as he’s known when behind the brush—who has become the reigning pinstripe king of Sweden. Unlike most of today’s custom painters, Von Sven, a Twin Cities native, is decidedly old-school. He eschews stencils, choosing instead to eyeball a particular hot rod before creating a complex and utterly wicked design on the fly. Each of his pinstripes is unique.

Lynch looks very much like he stumbled out of a ’50s B-movie. He sports a haircut he describes as a “flat-top with fenders,” baggy jeans rolled up at the cuffs, and a black T-shirt that begs to have a pack of cigarettes tucked in the sleeve. The stepson of McKnight Fellow and acclaimed local painter Mike Lynch, Sven has always been drawn to painting, though he was discouraged at a young age from entering the competitive world of gallery artists. “So I got into lowrider bikes,” he said with a shrug. Exploring this second love, Lynch spent time between the old Missing Link bike shop and the Grease Pit, fixing lowriders, customizing banana seats with found upholstery, and creating mutant bikes with fellow members of the outlaw Black Label Bike Club.

Then one day in 1995, Lynch was sipping coffee at Bob’s Java Hut in Minneapolis when he noticed a pattern of elaborate pinstriping on the café walls. Instantly, he was hooked. “I was lucky—a friend gave me some brushes, and other people let me practice on their bicycles,” he said. Over the years, he perfected his technique, and by 2003 he had found work at Classic Limo, a renter and restorer of custom automobiles. His first paying job involved applying a hard stripe to a Rolls-Royce. “God, that was nerve-racking,” he admitted. “I thought I was working on one of their restoration jobs, something that cost an individual tons of money. But it turns out it was just one of their rentals, so I could make mistakes.”

It was obvious that Sven was a genius at pinstriping. He sized up each car like a sculptor inspecting a piece of granite, eyeing its shape and structure, moving with almost excruciating patience. He is taciturn, to say the least, and talking with him requires a tilted head to catch every quiet phrase. Yet Sven’s art spoke volumes and word spread throughout the classic car community, placing his skills in high demand. He took a job at Yesterday’s Auto in Minneapolis, which brought him an even more exacting clientele.

Despite his celebrity, work in the Twin Cities didn’t earn him enough money to live on. So, like many artists before him, he set out for Europe, where less typical lifestyles are sometimes easier to sustain. At the urging of a friend in 2004 he hopped a plane to Sweden, where the citizenry has a legendary appetite for classic American cars. The Power Big Meet, which claims to be the world’s largest antique car show, is held in Västerås, a suburb of Stockholm.

Sweden wasn’t entirely foreign to Sven, whose biological father owns an apartment there, and whose brother runs a vegetarian restaurant in the city. And Stockholm welcomed him with open arms. Lynch found an artistic home at a “rockabilly mall” called Sivletto, the ad for which features Marlon Brando in leather, leaning against his bike in The Wild One. To get there, patrons must trek to a side street and descend a flight of rickety spiral stairs. Then they enter a warehouse full of old cars, motorcycles, lowrider bicycles, Brando-esque clothing (for the guy, gal, or child), haircuts and pomade, and, of course, malts and Cokes.

According to Sven, the customers are mostly rural Swedes, called raggare, and are typically more blue-collar and a bit more conservative than their countrymen. Perhaps that accounts for their American car lust. Some of the biggest draws for the raggare are the classes that Sven teaches out of his paint shop, which is called Von Sven Kustom DeLuxe. Students learn the time-consuming techniques of striping and lettering, and many of them return to their rural homes to complete their own work.

As it stands, Sven is happy in Sweden. “Yeah, the winters are long—it gets dark around three in the afternoon, and the summer light’s pretty much on all day.” He returns to the states each June to “maintain connections,” working at the car shows and Yesterday’s Auto, before returning to Stockholm. At the Back to the ’50s booth, Lynch used the butt of his brush to apply a dot of yellow—the crowning touch to the ’36 Ford. The car’s owner beamed at Lynch and whistled. “Perfect,” the man sighed.

“Edifice complex.” That’s the diagnosis playwright Edward Albee gave to American arts organizations—more specifically, it seemed, to nonprofit regional theaters—when he spoke at the Westminster Town Hall forum in 2005. Though the pun drew laughs, Albee followed with a hard, damning statistic. “Ninety-five percent of the money we give as a country does not go to creative artists; it goes into buildings and organizations,” he pointed out. “But great music, great art, great theater can be performed on the streets. It does not need a fancy theater to occur.”

At the time of Albee’s talk, lovely new facilities for a number of local arts organizations were in the works, with designs by pedigreed architects (Guthrie Theater, Walker Art Center, MacPhail Center for the Arts), or plans to rehabilitate historic quarters (Ritz Theater Foundation, Minnesota Shubert Performing Arts & Education Center). Other historic theaters renovated in earlier years include a “building preservation fee” in the price of most tickets (Southern Theater, Theatre de la Jeune Lune).

For many theater artists (or almost anyone lacking a development staff, really), the costs of renting one of these facilities are prohibitive. One way around that, though, is to get creative about where and how to stage work—to find a site that’s not devoted exclusively to performance. The origins of site-specific theater are often traced to the now-disbanded New York troupe En Garde Arts. For a time during the mid-’80s and through the ’90s, this company was staging work in such unconventional settings as the Chelsea Hotel and a pier on the Hudson River. Other companies followed suit, expanding on the Shakespeare-in-the-park tradition and looking to public spaces, cultural landmarks, and art galleries as performance venues—places that are far less expensive than theaters, and sometimes free.

An upcoming site-specific production is Cityceased, a theatrical walking tour of South Minneapolis’s Lakewood Cemetery that opens September 1. Four actors and a musician will enact an ethereal piece of fiction that considers the histories of both the cemetery and the people buried there (which includes many notable figures, although this play won’t call attention to any particular graves). It’s a novel idea, but Kristopher Lencowski, the show’s director, acknowledges that economics had much to do with spawning his unusual show. “I’ll be totally honest—the cemetery isn’t charging us anything,” said Lencowski, an approachable twenty-seven-year-old with wide, fiery blue eyes. “I’m a young director, and it’s expensive to get a theater. As a point of comparison, my friend rented the Ritz [the rehabbed theater that reopened in Northeast Minneapolis last year] and it cost her $3,500 for one weekend. I’m running four weekends and it cost me nothing.”

At the same time, from the perspective of Lakewood Cemetery, Cityceased might add up to something of a public relations opportunity. Not only is it good form to support the arts, but hosting this show could also serve to demystify the cemetery for the public, and even enhance appreciation for its acreage. In fact, the press release for Cityceased includes an enthusiastic quote from Lakewood’s president, Ron Gjerde, Jr.: “It is our hope that these performances encourage thinking and conversations about the significance of remembering those we’ve lost. We think the beauty and peacefulness of Lakewood will provide the perfect backdrop for such a conversation.”

The regional premiere of The Pillowman, a recent hit on Broadway, is shaping up as one of most highly anticipated productions of the Twin Cities fall theater season. A psychological thriller about a mystery writer whose stories uncannily resemble real-life horrors, the play—like so many other productions by Frank Theatre—takes place in a totalitarian state.

Frank Theatre founder Wendy Knox is an unpretentious St. Cloud native who has spent nearly two decades producing work by some of the twentieth century’s more provocative playwrights. Frank has also been noted for creating theater in such rough-hewn venues as the abandoned Pillsbury A Mill. Perhaps it’s a measure of Pillowman’s popularity, but this time out the onstage action will unfold at the Guthrie’s sparkling Dowling Studio (September 20– October 14).

You founded Frank Theatre almost twenty years ago now, in 1989. Is the name a reference to being frank, or upfront?
A lot of people seem to think so. But, no. … I started the theater with Bernadette Sullivan, an actress. We had had way too much coffee, and I had seen a film that day … there were sixteen characters and they were all named Frank.

How would you describe your company to someone who knows nothing about theater?
Politically and artistically edgy.

Does that explain your affinity for dark, political playwrights such as Brecht?
Oh, I’m a big ol’ Brecht fan. And as I get older I try to use him a little more. I also love Caryl Churchill and Suzan-Lori Parks—love her! And no one else will touch Parks’s work. I’m interested in plays that tackle tough issues, and do it in a really smart way. I’m also interested in plays that have language you have to wrestle with.

What does The Pillowman playwright Martin McDonagh have in common with these more established scribes?
Again, he’s got great language, great storytelling … there’s this whole thing about rewriting and revising the story. Suzan-Lori Parks does that, too—the repeating and revising also leads to the idea of the power of the narrative, and how whoever tells the story shapes the experience.

You must have seen The Pillowman in London or New York. What drew you in?
The play itself was such a delight. You think you’ve figured it out and then something new happens; and so right up until the end there are these constant surprises. And, it’s also just raw; it’s black humor. I saw it at a matinée with a bunch of blue-hairs and I’m in the second row howling at all the wrong things in the play.

But the plot involves the murders of children. Isn’t that going to be touchy?
When I Googled the press on this play I just howled because it’s in keeping with Frank’s reputation. Most often with paired adjectives, [critics] say this is the most disturbing yet funniest play they’ve seen in a long time.

So with regard to your own work: Why do some audience members say they feel like they’re getting yelled at during Frank performances?
I don’t want to feel that we lecture or yell at people but also I don’t shy away from the fact that our work scratches around and raises questions … we do that while realizing fully that we’re preaching to the choir. Most people who come to Frank shows are going to be sympathetic. But even those in the choir like to go to church.

Since your company is Frank, tell us what you think is wrong with the local theater scene.
I’m not cynical about theater, but I think good theater is hard to find. My friends say I don’t like anything. But it’s not that; it’s just that I think there’s a greater potential. And it’s important to talk about what you don’t like in a play or a production and why you don’t like it. I think it’s important for the theater community to have that discussion because that’s how you get better.

So is the Twin Cities theater community perhaps too supportive of each other?
Yeah. You don’t get to talk with the reviewers back and forth, and also within the theater community.

Do the Twin Cities deserve a reputation as a theater hotbed?
Yes, I do think there’s a lot going on here, a lot at all levels. … Right now we’re at a really interesting moment: What is the impact of the Guthrie—and also all the big Broadway shows—going to be on the rest of the community? It seems like the mega stars here are getting more mega, whereas on the smaller end it’s always scrappy; you have to be scrappy to survive.

In recent years, several mid-sized local companies have complained about shrinking audiences. Are you feeling that?
There is a battle. There are so many theaters! I’m kind of a hag for saying that, but do we really need this many theaters? Twenty years ago in grad school Lee Breuer [founder of the New York avant-garde company Mabou Mines] came and talked to us and he was smoking his Camel straights and he said: “What ya gotta do is ya gotta find a theater that you sort of believe in. And you just hang around and hang around. And then you hang around some more. And you hang around, and pretty soon you’re working and making yourself indispensable so they’ve got to hire you.” That’s the sort of sane advice I pass along.

But how sane? Obviously, few in town are getting rich by working in theater. How do you fare?
I feel really lucky, as cynical as I am. I get to work with really good people. I have a house. I drive a twenty-year-old Volvo, but I get to do work that I really believe in, and that’s something that a lot of people—and a lot of artists—don’t have.

Which local theater-makers excite you?
It’s funny as you get older, you slow down. I used to go out a lot, but I still try to keep tabs on what is going on. I would hope I see thirty-five, forty shows a year. Michael Sommers [of Open Eye Figure Theatre], who is also a good friend of mine; we’ve been collaborators for twenty years. I also like seeing what’s going on with Bedlam, at Mixed Blood, Jeune Lune. Joel Sass, who’s designing Pillowman—he’s got a very distinct aesthetic and he’s really smart about theater. A lot of directors in town don’t have a distinctive mark, don’t have an aesthetic; they don’t have a point of view.

Which recent productions stick out in your memory?
I Am My Own Wife at the Jungle Theater [summer 2006]—loved that! I was so proud of Bradley [Greenwald, the solo performer], so proud of Joel [Sass, the director]. That was the year that I also saw Pillowman and Knock! After a long, dry period I was just tickled to see three shows within a couple of months that thrilled me.

Do you have any guilty pleasures?
Law & Order, I confess to you. My dad in the nursing home called the other night and I said: “Dad, I’m watching Law & Order!”

Who’s the funniest performer in town?
That’s tough. Jim Lichtscheidl and Luverne Seifert are both so goddammed funny. They’re really wrestling for the crown of comedy whore.

The sexiest?
Bradley Greenwald has done some very sexy things in his funny little goofy way. Luverne can be totally sexy onstage. He hasn’t done it for a while, but when he played Macbeth fifteen years ago, it was something; everyone thought he was totally hot. Oh, here! Michael Sommers in his fur pants for The Holiday Pageant