Category: Article

Seven years, sixteen cities, and up to a million theatergoers later, Triple Espresso’s caffeine high refuses to wear off. This three-man vaudevillian cabaret act, in fact, is among the most successful shows our town’s ever produced, still getting sellout crowds night after night for the laugh-a-minute antics of the has-been trio Maxwell, Butternut, and Bean. What’s the big deal? Simply put, it really is that funny. Oh, sure, it’s theatrical comfort food, occasionally naughty but never crossing the line into grandma-shocking. But if it doesn’t ask you to think, it does ask you to laugh—and you will laugh. The plot is a piffle, really, a mere skeleton for the complementing talents of Espresso’s three originators—the wry, Newhartesque Bill Arnold and his mock-incompetent magician’s tricks, Michael Pearce Donley’s smarmy lounge-lizard, and the goofy dumb-guy antics of Bob Stromberg, whose inspired gorilla imitation is one of the show’s highlights. Next on the Espresso agenda is a full-scale European invasion, starting with Hamlet’s turf—three Danish actors just finished rehearsing here in Minneapolis and are set to open the first-ever foreign-language version of the show later this summer in Copenhagen. Music Box, 1407 Nicollet Ave., 612-874-1100, tripleespresso.com

We noticed about a year ago that Jeune Lune just goes from strength to strength—and being, you know, attuned to classical tragedy, we wonder if hubris will bring them back to Earth anytime soon. It seems nothing is too ambitious for this brilliant company, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a Cirque du Soleil tribute to an honest-to-goodness knighthood bestowed by the French government a few weeks ago. Well, what else is there? Opera, of course—and why not go after the biggest and best known? (No, not Wagner. Please.) Can they pull it off? We’re not betting against them. Jeune Lune, 105 N. 1st St., (612) 333-6200, www.jeunelune.org

The menu at Bobino founder Chris Paddock’s latest eatery ranges widely over central and South America, but the central organizing concept comes from Brazil’s churrascaria steakhouses, slow-roasting beef on open-flame skewers. On our recent visit we sampled the picanha—one of Mojito’s signature fire-roasted meats rubbed with garlic—and the feijoada, a tasty stew of pork sausage, black beans, and orange. The wine list is replete with South American vintages, or you could quench your thirst with the restaurant’s namesake cocktail, the minty-sweet Cuban mojito. Price, while not unreasonable, are what you’d expect from a steakhouse, but those looking for a cheap date should try the specialty pizzas, which feed two for $9 to $10

New Mexican mystery novelist Tony Hillerman has been the unofficial cultural ambassador of the Navajo Nation for more than 30 years. His Indian detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, have introduced thousands of white readers to the rich culture of the tribes of the American Southwest in bestsellers like A Thief of Time and Skinwalkers. Hillerman turns 78 this month, just in time for the release of his 16th Leaphorn & Chee novel, The Sinister Pig, which revolves around an evil billionaire, a murdered CIA agent and the oil pipelines on the U.S.-Mexico border. He’s hard at work on the 17th, with no plans to retire anytime soon.

THE RAKE: So, just what the heck is a sinister pig?

HILLERMAN: You’re giving away my plot. (laughs) In the world of pipelines a pig is a device that is used to clean out pipelines. They’re hollow, and they used to look like a torpedo and they covered them with pigskin, with the bristles out, in the old days. Now they’re very modern and they have computer chips in them and they do all sorts of things. But one thing they could do is smuggle cocaine or diamonds or money you want laundered or whatever, across state lines or national lines. Another sinister pig is the boss pig in a sty full of pigs who doesn’t want any other pig to share in the food. … You’re always looking for a title, and the book kind of reflects my attitude. I think it was Enron and all these major, important companies going bankrupt and screwing their employees out of their retirement and their perks and everything while the CEOs sail off to their summer homes in the Antibes or whatever. That inspired me to get rough on ’em. Apparently nobody else is.

THE RAKE: How did you become a writer?

HILLERMAN: I was raised daydreaming, and my mother always said she wanted to be a poet but didn’t spell well. I don’t spell very well either.

THE RAKE: Do you think of yourself more as a mystery writer, or a writer about Indian culture?

HILLERMAN: I just consider myself a writer. You know how the youngest son—the big brother does the fixing and important stuff, and you go get the hammer and the screwdriver and all that. I grew up in a family that had an older brother and a younger brother, and so you go out into the world and there’s not many things you’re very good at except running after the hammer. I found out very early on that the only thing I could be happy doing was writing. So I just think of myself as a writer. But the problem is if you don’t develop other hobbies you can’t quit.

THE RAKE: You’ve had other careers before becoming a novelist, though.

HILLERMAN: No, I started out as a police reporter in a little town in Texas. Then I worked on four major newspapers in various roles. In the interim I worked for United Press. So I spent about 20 years as a—is the term ink-stained wretch still used? It applies to guys that want to do something interesting and aren’t all that tied into making a lot of money. Which we sure as hell didn’t. I don’t think pay scales have increased too much since then, but you really had to sort of take a vow of poverty to be a journalist in the old days.

THE RAKE: How important is it for a writer to have had other occupations in order to have the experience to write about?

HILLERMAN: I really think working at a newspaper as a reporter has two huge advantages for writers. One, you’re writing every day. You learn how to use the language, you learn how to get a paragraph to make sense if you’re doing it every day. And also it puts you where the action is, where you’re seeing the guy sitting in the defendant’s box sweating out the jury. You’re at the scene of the crime, you’re at the scene of the train wreck, you’re dealing with people that are under tension, and I just think you can get a whole head full of memories of people and things. I wonder sometimes how normal people come up with their good books.

THE RAKE: You’ve said before that you don’t usually have trouble coming up with ideas because you’ve seen so many things in real life.

HILLERMAN: Yeah. You’re trying to come up with a character, and you suddenly remember a fellow that was kind of like what you want. Or a situation that caused a guy to be the way he is. I rely on that, but I think a lot of writers do. They have a whole head full of stuff that would go well in a book or in a plot, and they can’t remember what they did with their glasses but they remember those things. Accumulate ’em.

THE RAKE: What do you want people to take from your novels?

HILLERMAN: Above all I would like them to be aware that the cultures of the people I like to write about, the Navajos and Hopis and so forth, are extremely complicated and extremely interesting—and in the case of the Navajos especially, are extremely valuable. You can learn a heck of a lot from Hopi and Navajo ways of life. For example, the negative value they put on greed, of having more than you need. In their mythology, that’s how you identify a witch, the ultimate of evil. They have more than one kind of what we call a witch, they don’t use that word. And the fellow who’s got money and stuff, and kinfolks who are hungry, it’s an almost certain sign the guy’s evil. We’ve sort of left that behind us. We think the homeless person is probably a crook, or dangerous.

THE RAKE: Although you’re not an Indian yourself, your affinity for Indian culture goes all the way back to your childhood.

HILLERMAN: I grew up in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma—population, oh, about 40. It was right in the middle of the allotment given to the Citizen Band Potawatomi tribe. In addition to the Potawatomi, we were surrounded by Seminoles and other Indian tribes. It was a really grungy part of Oklahoma. In fact they’re having a literary festival right now down there in my part of the world, and they call it the Red Dirt Festival. Anyway, to answer your question, growing up my friends were mostly Potawatomi Indians, and I went to an Indian school. When I went to high school, we were kind of scared of Seminoles, us Potawatomis. They had a warlike reputation. They were more athletic than we were. Our best football players were Potawatomis. And so you grow up, you know they’re just people like everybody else. The good ones and the bad ones, the ones you really like and the ones you cross the street when you see them coming. Then, when I got out to New Mexico—the Potawatomis and the Seminoles were pretty well assimilated. They’d been moved around so much that most of the kids I knew didn’t know their language anymore, or much about their culture. I got to New Mexico and I saw the Navajos and the Pueblo tribes, and these were cultures that were alive and well and vigorous. I was interested, and the more I saw the better I liked what I was seeing.

THE RAKE: What’s your writing process like?

HILLERMAN: I gave up outlining books in the middle of the third one [Listening Woman]. It dawned on me that it was a horrible waste of time. And it screws up the process for me. In Sinister Pig, there’s a very minor character in it, a guy named Budge, who’s a chauffeur and pilot for this mogul.

THE RAKE: And who also does his dirty work.

HILLERMAN: Yeah. And so as I was writing the book, early on I was thinking more and more about him and how did he get that way. And gradually he took over a big chunk of the book. I had no intention of that, but I think it made a better book. … A lot of things about this book I like. I kind of wondered if my editor was going to let me get away with that runaway Budge, coming from nowhere and becoming such a major character. But I liked it, and I sometimes thought I would start the book all over again and make it all about him.

THE RAKE: What kind of research do you do for the books?

HILLERMAN: Sinister Pig was a monster for research. I grew up near the oil patch and I knew something about pipelining, and people who worked on pipelines and everything, but I didn’t know nearly as much about them as I needed to know, an
d then I moved my Navajo policeman down into the Border Patrol, and I had to accumulate a mountain of stuff about the Border Patrol, their rules and regulations. And then I didn’t know that landscape as well. It’s right down on the border of Sonora. And I’ve been down there a time or two, but I couldn’t close my eyes and reconstruct which mountains you see from where. And that was a lot of work. Luckily my wife is one of these ladies who made Phi Beta Kappa and have straight A grades in college, and her field was actually bacteriology, but she’s very much into botany, so she joins me on what botany I’m involved with. But it was a lot of work and I think I’m an idiot to do it. … I don’t know if you get this way, You start a column, and it’s gonna be a dandy. And then you’re finished, and you’re glad you’re done but it didn’t come out as good as you’d wanted it and you feel bad about it, sort of. I’m that way about every book I’ve ever written.

THE RAKE: Have you ever had a plot become so complicated,
or require so many pages to get through, that you had trouble finishing it?

HILLERMAN: Most of my books I’ve had trouble finishing them. Making all the threads come together and making it all seem sensible. It’s not uncommon for me to have trouble finishing them. I also have trouble in the middle of them.

THE RAKE: Do you have a favorite among your novels?

HILLERMAN: Yeah, I’ve got two. The one I think people would expect me to prefer is A Thief of Time.

THE RAKE: Because that was your big breakout book.

HILLERMAN: Yeah. And the one that my publisher was dismayed that I insisted on writing is my real favorite, when I look on myself as a writer, and that is Finding Moon. It concerns a guy who’s just gotten a dishonorable discharge from the Army for drunk driving, and looks on himself as kind of a loser. … What I’d intended to do, years ago when I was working for United Press, and everything was going to hell in the Congo basin—Stanleyville, the Paris of Africa, was in flames, and about five different tribes were fighting over the gold mines and the diamond mines and the oil fields. I thought this would be an absolutely lawless situation, I would want to put a guy like [the main character], a kind of fella who settled down to be an accountant or something and his company transfers him over there—sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress takeoff, self-discovery, right? Anyway, that’s what I wanted to do with it, but by the time I got serious about doing it everyone had forgotten about the Belgian Congo. It didn’t even exist anymore and nobody wanted me to write it, so I didn’t I started a time or two. Then I watched the news coverage of the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon and I thought, hell, here’s the thing, going on right in front of your eyes. So I gave this guy a mother who was going to the Philippines and arranged to have her more promising son, who’d been an officer in a helicopter repair company and had been killed in an accident, to have the younger guy go over and bring back the older brother’s child with a Cambodian woman, going to get him in all this chaos. That’s what I wrote, and by golly I like what I got. Which isn’t always the case.

THE RAKE: I liked that one too.

HILLERMAN: Nobody’s ever read it. (laughs) I took for granted that you hadn’t read it or I wouldn’t be giving you all the plot. … I was pretty happy with The Wailing Wind too. I’d have to add it to the list of my favorites.

THE RAKE: How is your health these days?

HILLERMAN: Well, I think it’s pretty good. I get things wrong with me but they’re always pretty trivial stuff. I get horrible-sounding stuff, I’ve had two heart attacks, neither of which was any particular note, no damage done. And then I’ve had two bouts of cancer, long in the past, I should be clean too. One of them, I was getting my hair cut, and the barber I like—I’ve got a nine-dollar-a-haircut barber I like real well. He had a new employee just out of the Navy, and he was looking a the back of my head and said “what’s this thing back here?” I said I don’t know, I’ve had it for years. “Well, it looks bad to me. Why don’t you go and ask your doctor about that?” So I went and asked my doctor about it. He sent me to a skin man. Skin man said, oh, that looks bad, and he sent me to another guy who sliced off a sample of it, and he told me I had a tumor in a sweat gland. Doesn’t that sound exciting? So I had to go in and have that taken out, and when I got there they found that the guy who sliced off the sample had sliced off the tumor. There wasn’t any nefarious stuff left for them to work on. Anyway, that’s not what you consider a life-threatening problem. But I’m in good health, I think. I’ve got arthritis, which makes me hesitate to get into an airplane.

THE RAKE: You’ve stated before that you have no plans to retire from writing, that you can’t imagine what you’d do with your time. Is that still the case?

HILLERMAN: Yeah, it sure is. When I finish a book and don’t have all that stuff going on, I’m bored out of my skull. One of my characters, Joe Leaphorn, someone once asked him if he was playing golf, and he said “I got the ball I all nine holes and I can’t see why you’d do it again.” Well, that’s exactly what I did/. I went out and played nine holes of golf and said “What the hell am I doing?” And I’m too crippled up and clumsy to do the kind of fishing I always like to do. Trudging up and down these streams, hunting the fish. I never did like to fish out of a boat. Now I’m so awkward and everything that I just don’t do it much anymore. So I’m going to keep writing as long as I can.

THE RAKE: Would you want another writer to take over the Chee and Leaphorn books after you’re no longer doing them?

HILLERMAN: Boy, I never even thought of that. I can’t imagine a writer who’s very good wanting to do that. I’d think they’d want to do their own stuff.

There’s a cute little gift shop on 42nd Avenue in South Minneapolis called Wasteland. There isn’t much to the place, and the hours are erratic. It seems mostly to be a storefront reserved for the editorializing of its eccentric owner. In lieu of a strong geopolitical or psychosocial opinion one way or another, the window celebrates the season—festooned, for example, with valentines in a good February, or St. Patty’s shamrocks for a peacetime March. Needless to say, the past six months have given the shopkeep plenty of inspiration by which to arrange her display.

Early in the year, we walked by and noticed the window was filled with dolls, toy figurines, and action figures from every walk of fantasy-life: everything from farm animals to stormtroopers to kewpie dolls. They were staging a protest, each holding a little tooth-picket sign with an anti-war slogan. A mutant ninja turtle held the largest sign, which acted as a kind of caption for the whole mob. It said “Toys for Peace.” And we misunderstood the slogan, at first, as a kind of Food for Oil corollary. What if Iraq had been carpet-bombed, we thought, with toys instead of cruise missiles and bunker busters? After all, if we want them to forcibly accept democratic capitalism, why not cut to the chase and litter the whole Middle East with Nikes and Coca-Cola and Nintendo?

A month ago, our friend Kurt Andersen visited Vietnam, just as the first bombs fell in Baghdad. Writing in the New York Times magazine, he found his vacation instructive. Seeing the bright storefronts, the sidewalks in front of Hanoi convenience stores stacked with 12-packs of western soda, Andersen had an epiphany: We may have lost the battle in Vietnam, but we apparently won the war.

That is, if winning means opening new markets for capitalism. But that war, much like this one, hardly proved the veracity of our geopolitical paradigm. (Not a single WMD turned up yet. Hmm.) If terrorism is the visceral response to American imperialism and hegemony in Arab lands, and if this war was about stamping out terrorism, then there’s a pretty good chance that we’ve won this battle but may yet lose the war.

On the other hand, we pride ourselves these days in courageous thinking. And we think Wasteland is onto something. What would happen—really?—if instead of approaching global problems with a hammer, we came at it with grease? If, instead of marching into Baghdad with bayonets, we brought Barbies? Think of the money, the diplomacy, and the innocence that could have been saved if we’d spent $80 billion on toys, clothing, and food for the Iraqis.

Then again, we’re not entirely convinced that raising the standard of living and putting playthings in their hands will help at all. Look at how Gopher fans made Dinkytown look like Basra—after winning a hockey game.

Last year, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation designating May 1 as Loyalty Day. “Whether born on American soil or abroad, Americans appreciate patriotism and loyalty to our country,” he read from a prepared speech. “Americans affirmed this sense of loyalty for their homeland during and following the attacks of September 11, 2001.” As an example of our fealty, Bush’s speechwriters pointed out boldly that “Americans pledged to fight terrorism, both here and across the globe.”

But Loyalty Day already existed. In the 1930s, the Veterans of Foreign Wars started staging patriotic demonstrations on May 1. They were trying to upstage another holiday—Communist Labor Day, which dated from the Russian Revolution in 1917. That Labor Day had its origins in the United States, and the effort to establish the eight-hour workday. The cap on full-time labor was legally established after nationwide strikes on May 1, 1886. Students of American history will remember that violent clashes in Chicago led to a May 4 demonstration in Haymarket Square. Someone threw a bomb, and labor leaders were hanged for it, including several who were not present at the time. In 1889, Paris socialists proclaimed May 1 International Labor Day to commemorate these events.

May 1 is still celebrated as Labor Day in most countries, but not here. To thwart organized labor, Congress moved the holiday to an autumnal position between the patriotic holidays of July 4 and Thanksgiving, thus appeasing the working man while severing his ties to the international labor community. But unions continued to sponsor Labor Day parades in May, most notably in New York City, and governments were forced to find new strategies of co-option. In 1932, Pennsylvania created “Americanism Day,” which later combined with Loyalty Day and became federal law in 1958. Just to be sure, in 1961, May 1 was also codified as Law Day, to celebrate our laws and liberties (which President Bush also recognized in 2002, though in a separate proclamation, touting the few civil liberties our Attorney General had not yet abrogated.)

And none of these modern holidays acknowledge May 1 as Beltane, Floralia, or any of the other licentious spring fertility festivals dating back to pagan Europe. These holidays have all but disappeared, much as May Labor Day was phased out in the 1950s and Loyalty Day went out of fashion during the Vietnam War—though of course May baskets and May poles have persisted.

The spirit of all this conflicted tradition, however, is very much alive in Minneapolis. Sandy Spieler, Artistic Director at the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater, said the legendary Minneapolis May Day parade in Powderhorn is about “the twining of two different roots: the red root, the blood of the People’s struggles; and the green root, the ancient, ancient root of the change-bringing of the earth to springtime.” In other words, the pagan and the proletariat elements of May Day live on in the parade’s frolicking nymphs doing battle with soot-faced corporate demons and warmongers.

Meanwhile, the VFW will hold a parade and celebration at the Minnesota Veterans Home for the somewhat less historical Loyalty Day. In other cities, they are focusing on counteracting the anti-war sentiments they feel are over-represented in the media. But locally, Loyalty Day will be more a tribute of respect to elderly or disabled former soldiers—undoubtedly confusing those of us who already can’t keep Labor Day and Memorial Day straight.

Jim Lahay, who runs the VFW building on Lake and Lyndale, said there’s no conflict between their event and the May Day parade. “It’s not the same day,” he explained. Loyalty Day is celebrated the Saturday before May 1, while the May Day parade usually falls the Sunday after. As to ideological differences, Lahay shrugged and said, “They do their thing, and we do ours.” Perhaps that is the true spirit of May Day. And, more and more, every other day of the year, too.—Katherine Glover

Alan Ralston started collecting De Sotos in the mid-80s, including the white wagon with a 361 parked in the front of his shop, one of two street-worthy sleds he has so far restored from his fleet of nine or ten. In back, one of the Fireflites holds an intact Torsion-Aire suspension.

“I would have been eight years old in 1959, and when you’re a boy you’re always dreaming about driving a car. One of the most appealing things about a De Soto is that it has a push-button transmission. An eight-year-old doesn’t know how to shift gears, so we dreamed about driving cars like this and shifting the gears by pushing the push-buttons.”

Ralston’s collection is stored in a downtown Mendota building that once held a U.S. post office, Ernie’s Liquors, and finally a thriving indoor marijuana farm. After the farm was shut down, Ralston bought it from the feds in 1992. “I’ve put a home in the upstairs for my wife and me. I live here,” he said, when I found him at work in the shop the other day. The south end of the building is in various stages of restoration as the energetic man gradually builds a garage for his push-button 59s. He plans to restore all those cars after he retires from his job as a flight operations programmer at Northwest Airlines.

About a year and a half ago, someone started pushing Ralston’s buttons. It started on September 11, 2001. “I was so upset that I came home. What I was doing is, I had my American flag out and I was waving it on the sidewalk and saluting people and just trying to get support for the United States ’cause I was very saddened by what happened to us. And then I made a little poster that said ‘revenge,’ and I taped that up to the side of the wall in the front.”

The next day, a passerby was upset by this message. A woman driving a maroon Buick stopped her car. “She actually came in, and I was up on the scaffolding, and she said, ‘Did you put that sign up on the side of the building?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and she said, ‘You really shouldn’t feel that way. You shouldn’t think that way.’ And I said, ‘The last time I checked, it’s a free country and we can think and we can say what we want, including you.’

“I got up the next morning, and my flag had been stolen off the side of the building, along with my poster.” Admitting he has “nothing to prove it,” he nonetheless feels certain that the woman in the maroon Buick was behind this and other acts of vandalism that followed.

When the first flag was stolen, he put a reinforced flagpole bracket higher up on the building. A motivated vandal threw a rope over it to pull it down. Ralston responded with guy wires anchored into the masonry to support the pole. And, of course, he has famously exercised his First Amendment rights in paint on the front of the building:

To those who stole my flag and poster: You cannot silence my speech or diminish my love for the United States. With resolve and might we will defeat our enemies. Alan L. Ralston, citizen soldier 9/17/2001.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

This bracket was not bent by the wind! Those who continue to be intolerant of my First Amendment rights, please be advised that I exercise my Second Amendment rights with equal fervor. Alan L. Ralston 9/9/2002.

Since adding that second warning, the vandalism has stopped. But he thinks he knows why his messages disturb some people.

“I think there’s a lot of people who don’t support the United States. They feel America is always wrong no matter what we do. And they can’t stand anyone who loves the country and supports the country and demonstrates patriotism.

“I find it interesting that even a year and a half later, people drive by and they stop across the street and they read it. And you see people come out and take pictures of it. I think that’s nice.” Eventually, the messages will be painted over as Ralston restores the rest of the building. He thinks he might have a public ceremony when the time comes.—Joe Pastoor

Having seen all the news reports on the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, I sat down with two physician colleagues of mine who specialize in infectious diseases and asked them the obvious: Are we all going to die?

“Yes,” they answered in unison and without hesitation. “Of course everyone dies,” Dr. Dan Anderson explained helpfully. He and Dr. Jason Sanchez work in Abbott Northwestern’s Infection Control department. “We just don’t know when or what from.”

Maybe this SARS thing is becoming an epidemic of hysterical proportions? “There’s some of that,” said Dr. Sanchez. “A patient asked me if they should cancel their trip to Washington D.C., so people do take leaps. The lay public is afraid to travel here in the U.S., and I don’t think anybody has told them to be. People came to those conclusions on their own,” he added. “But it is a serious, front-page issue.”

Definitely serious. It’s an infection with lethal potential, after all. But not even the World Health Organization is giving us any sense of proportion. Right now, the talk is all numerator, not denominator, and you need both to calculate risk. “There have been 80 or 90 deaths now, out of almost 4,000 suspected cases. But that’s 4,000 people who got sick enough to come to somebody’s attention,” noted Dr. Anderson. “But maybe it’s 90 deaths out of 10 million this year; no one knows.”

Here’s what the experts do know: The SARS virus is a member of the coronavirus family, whose members generally cause only mild respiratory illnesses. So why is SARS acting more like a Gambino family virus? “Take influenza for example,” Dr. Sanchez said. “Some of the major pandemics in the past are not just from minor mutations in the virus, what we call antigenic drift, but from a major re-assortment of the virus’ DNA that the population will not have immunity to. That’s called antigenic shift.”

So a few weeks back, maybe a coronavirus somewhere in China slipped into a genetic Glamour Shots, got a complete make-over, and walked out the door nearly unrecognizable to our immune system. If that happened, it would give a virus like SARS the chance to really get going before our bodies’ defenses could react.

But antigenic drift—the reshuffling of the genetic deck—has been going on since the beginning of time. What’s really revolutionized the infection world is, of course, the travel industry. More people flying more often to more places. Viruses are hitchhikers, and hitching a ride—a really fast ride—has never been easier. A SARS offspring can catch a 5 p.m. flight out of Hong Kong and be touching down at Heathrow by day’s end. That beats a sneeze of just about any magnitude.

“Read The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston,” suggested Dr. Anderson. “Part of it reviews how people like D.A. Henderson eradicated small pox in the 1960s and 70s. When they identified a case, they would treat or isolate everyone who had had contact with that person in the last two weeks. In Pakistan, in the late 1960s, how far might that net be cast—15 miles, 50 miles? And how far might that be today?”

Until we develop more rapid ways to identify new viruses (or the airline industry tanks, and we all agree to travel on foot), global health alerts, travel restrictions, and a bit of fear and loathing are here to stay. If the SARS virus does end up getting to the Pandemic Hall of Fame, we’ll have antigenic drift, the Wright brothers, and your local travel agent to thank for it.—Craig Bowron

Two days after one of those giant statues of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, and had its head chopped off and dragged through the streets of Baghdad, artists at the University of Minnesota were participating in the art department’s 34th Annual Iron Pour, casting new and graven images for artistic fulfillment and academic credit. Dozens of artists in heavy protective clothing, safety glasses, and a hodgepodge of facemasks and respirators braved the acrid smoke from the coke-fired furnace, which stung the eyes and embedded in clothing. Manipulating heavy crucibles on pulleys and poles, teams of artists poured molten steel into sand molds. It was a delicate and carefully timed group performance, not something you see too often among go-it-alone artist-types.

Given the sweat and planning required to finish even the simplest of these metal sculptures, did anyone here experience a pang of sadness for the public art being pummeled in Iraq? Max Thomas, a University senior in red safety glasses, said that seeing a 40-foot statue come down was an amazing visual experience in itself. He said, “I wish all sculptors could have an armored M88 tank to do stuff with!” His eyes went wide with the possibilities.

First-time pourer Peter Schmidt, a student from Southwest State, had doubts. “It’s a shame to see all those statues being torn down. It’s like taking away history—like burning up pictures and paintings.” Although no fan of that particular subject or its execution, Schmidt hoped the statue’s remnants would one day end up in a museum rather than, say, the basement of a frat house at Baghdad U.

Jim Swartz, another visitor from Southwest State, considered the artistic possibilities of the fallen Saddam statuary. “I figured you have two choices with all those statues: Either put them in a museum for bad art from bad regimes, or cut them up and reassemble ’em in a really nice abstract way. That’d be the first thing I’d do,” he said.

Actually, the bad art museum is not all that far-fetched, said iron-pour organizer and U of M art professor Wayne Potratz. “I can certainly understand why people would want to destroy a symbol that’s been oppressive, but one of the things that’s happened in the former Soviet Union is that they’ve taken a lot of the sculptures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and put them in these very bizarre sculpture parks. Then they’re all together, representing an era.” Indeed, in Grutas, Lithuania, a local entrepreneur assembled more than 60 statues and busts of Lenin and Stalin in a park that locals dubbed “Stalin World.” The park, which its creator has boasted “combines the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet Gulag prison camp,” has not been without controversy among Stalin’s victims. But it has become a popular tourist attraction. Would a future Saddam Land be any less tasteful or popular among history buffs?

“The statue of Hussein does speak about a particular style and an idea of what art is,” Potratz said. “I thought it was pretty typical of what I call totalitarian art, which follows very closely the aesthetics of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It’s naturalistic work depicting heroic figures. It’s very much like a lot of the post-Civil War statuary you find here in the States.”

Structurally, the Firdos Square Saddam got low marks from Prof. Potratz. “My impression was it wasn’t made very well, because they had big steel pipes in the legs and it was broken up pretty easily by people with hammers. That leads me to believe it wasn’t such a great casting.” What would Potratz create if given the opportunity to build a 40-foot sculpture intended to weather the ages and sway the masses? He thought for a minute and then grinned. “Me, I’d make a giant turtle.”—Dan Gilchrist

Long before Scud missiles, Apache choppers, and Shock and Awe, warriors lived and died by the sword. That spirit survives — albeit tempered by civility and an official rulebook — in a former bowling alley on Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. Here, the Minnesota Sword Club has operated for 20 years. Just the other day, more than 40 young fencers, ages 8 to 19, filled the room. “The defender doesn’t lunge,” said a voice from the practice floor. “I didn’t lunge!” his opponent replied. “Yes you did!”

Fencing often appeals to young people who aren’t interested in other athletic pursuits. “It attracts smart kids because it’s a mental game, like chess,” said Sword Club owner Rich Jacobson. “It’s kind of like debate, but it’s a physical debate.”

Jacobson’s svelte physique, his wavy grey hair, and well-trimmed moustache give him the look of a dashing European villain in a swashbuckling film. But his East Coast accent, still with him three decades after moving to the Twin Cities, reveals less exotic roots. As a teen in New York, Jacobson took up fencing and competed using the foil and the saber. He moved to Minneapolis to coach several fencing groups before founding his own club in 1982.

Jacobson recalled when there were just 2,000 competitive fencers in the United States. Now, he said, the number is closer to 20,000. At the Minnesota Sword Club, there has been a particular surge of interest among girls. Alyssa Vongries is one of the most dedicated. She’s been fencing half her life. With her slight build, feathered hair, and dark eye shadow, she looks like an average 12-year-old. But armed with an épée, she’s ranked number one in the nation in her age group.

“I fence against people who are older, taller, and more experienced than me a lot,” Vongries said. Does she beat them? “Sometimes. Sometimes I lose to them. But it’s all in the game.” Alyssa’s mom, Lynne Vongries, likes those odds. She often watches her daughter and son, Alex, compete, and she values the losses as much as the victories. “Competition is something that schools tend to try to hide,” she said. “Everybody gets to win, and that’s not the way life is. Everybody doesn’t get to win. Everybody gets to lose a lot and sometimes you get to win. Our kids are learning how to win and lose on an individual basis. I think it’s helping them be better people.”

The appeal of fencing is pretty straightforward. “Kids just naturally hack at each other with two sticks,” noted Jacobson. Movies play a role as well; gunplay may be more common, but sword fights still make it to the silver screen. In the last two years, filmgoers have seen a Count of Monte Cristo remake, heartthrob Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale, Madonna teaching James Bond suggestively about swordplay, and a digitally enhanced Yoda kicking serious butt with a light saber. For Sword Club newcomers, reality sometimes suffers by comparison.

Two men bouting inside the club were secured by wires to a pulley system above their heads. The mechanism allowed back-and-forth movement and conducted electricity, triggering wall-mounted lights and buzzers each time one fencer’s sword touched his opponent’s metal lamé jacket. These sparring partners traded blows and chatted amiably about church activities. Elsewhere in the club, another group learned the en garde position and tried to maintain a slight crouch as they advanced on their rivals. The real beginners were getting a demonstration of how to put on a mesh fencing mask with one hand.

Wayne Hector was an unlikely musketeer, in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. He and his wife, Carolyn, picked their fencing course out of an Open U catalog. Others are more serious about the sport. Linda Merritt, who is 38, has gone from a 44- to a 36-inch waist since she discovered the Minnesota Sword Club. She believes fencing gives you “every bit as good a workout as you would get from taking an aerobics class, but you don’t have to dance around like a big fool.” Anna Leahy, 35, appreciates fencing’s therapeutic qualities. “I really like hitting people,” she said. “Without, you know, hurting them.”— Scott A. Briggs