You may shoot me with your words,But still, like air, I’ll rise.-Maya Angelou Ever since she toppled incumbent Jackie Cherryhomes in 2001, Minneapolis Fifth Ward council member Natalie Johnson Lee, the council’s lone African-American woman, has continued to rise. She has successfully deflected and deflated those wanting to blow her off-especially the North Side wannabes … Read more
How many shopping days left until Christmas? Well, whatever it is, it’s not enough. Cry all you want during your next trip to Target about the Bleeding Skull Halloween costumes hanging next to the icicle lights and the faux-fir tree display. Do you hear what I hear? It’s the rat-a-tat-tat of mass merchants gunning for … Read more
The thing I miss most about living in the country is the very thing I eventually came to hate about it: the long snake of black tar between one place and another, the empty distances, the endless driving. Oh, my God, how I miss the driving. I miss going for days and days without leaving … Read more
When you’re married, a funny thing happens. You lose your alone time. My pal Brad, proud daddy of two, says it’s much worse when you have kids. He says it’s been months since he had the house to himself. Why would he want the house to himself, you ask? Well, this is going to be … Read more
It started with letters in the mail. Then there were the spies. Then one day at an unglamorous neighborhood coffee shop in South Minneapolis, the phone rang. “I’ve been to your café. I know you have a CD player,” said the voice on the phone. Paul knew he was in trouble. It was true; there … Read more
The other day, we strolled down Hennepin Avenue and ducked into the city’s oldest bar. In a paneled backroom where we might have expected a billiard table, a small group of mystery writers had assembled to tipple and talk shop. Writers are normally solo artists, not given to fraternizing with the enemy. But mystery writers … Read more
Lawyers are the ultimate insiders. Just ask anyone foolhardy enough to represent him- or herself in court. So just how does a lawyer get to be an outsider? Rob Lowe’s stunning 1985 haircut for his new TV series, Lyon’s Den, seems to be doing the trick for him. But around here, nonfictional lawyers do it … Read more
Never take a self-defense class with your sisters. Especially if the class is called Training for Life, in which you learn techniques that, unlike traditional martial arts, are designed not to inflict permanent or even semi-permanent harm upon an attacker, but instead rely on a series of intensely painful, twisted pinches. Three sisters, six hands, … Read more
“So you’re telling me,” I ask the Pope of Witches, “that Hubert Humphrey was a vampire?” “Yes, he actually was. Hubert was a very interesting person.” So says Carl Llewellyn Weschcke. We are sitting in his spacious office at the St. Paul headquarters of Llewellyn Worldwide, the largest independent occult publishing house in America. At … Read more
“Wilbert! Wilbert!” his wife yelled at the top of her lungs toward the makeshift house behind the llama cage at Behn’s Game Farm in the tiny town of Aniwa, in northern Wisconsin. “He’s hard of hearing,” she explained. With a slight limp, Wilbert slowly emerged from the plywood building, looking as though he’d just awakened … Read more