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Chicago has long been the unofficial capital of modern architecture in the U.S. But the Twin Cities certainly have opportunities to compete in the noblest art. With high-profile expansions and demolitions underway (the hammer always comes with a claw), there’s been a small parade of internationally known architects arriving here with plans tubed underarm. It’s a fine thing to live in a city where there is sufficient vanity and money to indulge in an ambitious new Guthrie Theater, an expanded Walker Art Center, a face-lift for the Children’s Theater, an augmentation for the M.I.A., and a reconceived public library.

Unfortunately for these kinds of projects in this part of the world, it’s often an exercise in dilettantism. When steering committees propose new buildings, the same short list of trendy architects ends up on the back of the envelope. For a while there, it seemed as if Frank Gehry was the golden goose, to the point where his grocery lists were winning local admiration. Let’s remember I.M. Pei too, who essentially pasted a “kick me” sign on an entire city’s rear-end with that cheap tiara atop the U.S. Bank building. (One can only hope that the same people who removed the original Guthrie’s pretentious façade are looking up in the sky with wrecking balls in their eyes. If we’ve learned anything here it’s that architecture is emphatically not a permanent art form. Architecture in the Twin Cities is slightly less archival than a typical black and white photograph.) Now, of course, Michael Graves is in fashion. Ephemeral times call for finite artists. There is nothing inherently wrong with an architect who spends much of his time designing can openers and toilet plungers.

Even when they reach for real historical continuity and solidity, city planners manage to make decisions that are as predictable as they are dubious. Consider the bloated and precious “Frank Lloyd Wright” bridge, recently finished on Third Avenue over I-94. Given the Twin Cities’ tradition of vainglorious bridge-building, it came as no surprise that city guardians wanted to build something special for the “Avenue of the Arts” initiative. (If the lakes of Minneapolis ever revert to swampland, we could justly change our epithet to “the City of Bridges.”) But lots of eyebrows went up when Minneapolis announced that it was commissioning the first Frank Lloyd Wright bridge ever to be built. Eye brows twisted further when Minneapolis revealed that this would actually be a Wright-inspired bridge. Now that it’s done, Minneapolis realizes that no Wright bridge has ever been built for the simple reason that Wright’s bridge designs are, by and large, some of the ugliest, uninspired drawings the man ever put on paper.

Our impulse to make inspired buildings and bridges is admirable. But we are plagued by our own limitations. When it comes to public building projects, no one seems capable of thinking past a few one-syllable surnames. Most of the public is well aware of Frank Lloyd Wright, and vaguely conscious of his importance in the canon of middle-American architecture. Some have actually made the effort to seek out what remains of his overrated portfolio—such as the wholly unremarkable gas station in Cloquet, which is unique in the same way as the new Third Avenue Bridge; its unsightliness is rare indeed.

It’s one thing to commission a world-class architect, and quite another to commission a world-class building. But to reanimate the dead is the most unnatural and unnecessary trick of all.

Tyler Ellwood is a sales executive for WorldCom. He works at the company’s Golden Valley offices. A few weeks ago, he was ready to go on a fishing trip to the Boundary Waters with his father and a couple friends. As they drove up to Ely in a white minivan, he frequently checked his voice mail messages. “A big truck just pulled up in front of headquarters,” he said. “It’s full of empty boxes.” The company had just announced its intention to layoff 17,000 employees. Since he is in sales, he felt confident that his position would be spared. But he was prepared for the worst.

In any case, Ellwood wouldn’t know whether he had a job until he returned from the Boundary Waters. He was concerned—but not so concerned that he couldn’t tolerate the spotty cell-phone coverage he was getting as they made their way through Cloquet. He said his goodbyes to his wife and his 1-year-old daughter, looking forward to four days in the wilderness. “I’m going to turn off now, Sweetie, and save my battery,” he said.

When they got to Lake One at the end of Highway 169 (“If you go the wrong way, the other end is in Texas,” said the outfitter dryly), Ellwood was disheartened by the flies. As it turned out, it was a terrible year for tent caterpillars—also known as army worms—and, ecosystems being what they are, that meant it was a terrible year for “friendly flies,” big black insects that don’t bite. But they swarm all exposed flesh.

The lakes out of Ely were doing a brisk business in humans too. Ellwood spent most of the first two days looking for campsites that weren’t already occupied, and it became clear that most parties were settled in for indefinite stays. His group grew disgusted with the situation, and they were forced to camp illegally on an island with no latrine or fire grate. Although Ellwood caught a nice Northern the first morning, he released it. It was the only fish he caught that might have made a meal. And there was no relief from the flies.

One might have escaped them in a good tent. Ellwood brought along a nifty one-man tent with good walls and reliable netting. “Nothing personal,” he told his dad, who’d brought a two-man tent. “This is new and I haven’t slept in it yet.” But the unusual heat, reaching high into the 90s, made it unbearable to be inside a tent of any size. Soon it became clear that the campers’ only real option was to jump in the lake, and spend most of the day floating in their life preservers where the heat and the flies were kept at bay. “This kinda sucks,” said Ellwood. Out of the water, it was unpleasant. Even so, no one was eager to throw in the towel and cut the trip short. Aside from the ready availability of cold beer and cheeseburgers, the prospect of going back to civilization still didn’t seem very appetizing.

Alas: the pitter-pat of shuffling feet on the stair that Martha Stewart hears each day when she awakes is not the stirring of guests invited for a festive country weekend; it’s the SEC closing in. Last month ImClone boss and “family friend” Sam Waksal (her daughter’s boyfriend, later her own) took his perp walk for the cameras on insider trading charges. A few days later the Wall Street Journal reported that the Feds had turned one of Stewart’s own pals, a woman who flew to Mexico with Martha on Stewart’s private jet the day her ImClone sale was executed.

Delicious, isn’t it? Martha summed up better than anyone the consumption side of the long 90s boom. And despite economically polarized times she figured out how to play both ends of the street. To the masses who bought up her branded Kmart merchandise, she peddled a vain and costly domestic fantasy; to the moneyed would-be gentry she offered a practical primer on the good life. It proved so lucrative in part because it tapped a market-driven article of faith rigorously foisted on fortunates and unfortunates alike in the 80s and 90s: There really is nothing you can’t buy if you’ve got the money—style, grace, dignity, domestic tranquility, you name it. At bottom, like all timeless hucksters, she was selling a sense of personal completeness and substance.

Turns out it was all pretend, right down to the paper fortune Stewart amassed during her day in the sun. So far her stock in her own company has dropped over $300 million in value, and she may be facing time in one of those minimum-security facilities whose décor she could do so much to enliven. All this over a smarmy little insider transaction that saved her about $200,000 in stock losses. If you aren’t gratified by what’s become of Martha Stewart, you just aren’t paying attention.

Don’t bet she’ll scrape by on the strength of her money and clout. If the order of the day is a few show trials to quiet public outrage, what prosecution could possibly be showier than Martha’s? One can already imagine the indictment, the subsequent death-plunge of MSO stock, even the eventual plea agreement, filed on the finest linen stationery with inlaid flowers pressed by Martha herself.

AFTER LAST MONTH’S column on Paul Wellstone’s silence concerning the business scandals, I got a testy email from a Wellstone staffer, larded with press release attachments that demonstrated the senator’s fierce and fearless leadership. Wellstone has spoken against corporate abuses on the Senate floor, I was informed, not once but twice—and, more impressive still, he spoke forcefully each time.

Naturally I felt mortified at my own hubris. Who was I to criticize Wellstone’s leadership just because I hadn’t heard a peep about it myself? Had I scoured the full menu of his press releases? Had I pored over member comments on the Senate floor? No. But in my own paltry way I did try. I looked at various news archives and Wellstone’s own Senate website. Before its content was frozen by election rules round about early July, it contained no word about corporate accountability that I could find, not even one of the press releases—each surely more forceful than the last!—that are the sine qua non of his leadership. All I can say is that I’m sorry, Paul, and in the future I’ll bear in mind that the mere fact of being invisible doesn’t make you any less a leader.

Now, in mid-August, Wellstone’s campaign website is screaming boardroom larceny front and center. Lovely. Better late than never, and better a little than nothing at all: That’s the central refrain of Wellstone’s Senate career and the only credible slogan on behalf of his re-election campaign. I’ll still vote for him if I vote at all, but I won’t venture out just to pull the lever for Paul. And in that I doubt I’m alone.

The other day I spoke with Bill Hillsman, the political ad consultant who played a vital role in electing Wellstone the first time. “I was thinking about some of the ads we just murdered Boschwitz with in 1990,” Hillsman smiled ruefully, “the print ads where we talked about his being in the Senate for 12 years and never getting anything done. And I thought to myself, good Lord, what would happen if someone did that same ad now with respect to Wellstone’s record? It would probably be no better, maybe in some cases worse.”

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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We are just outside Willmar when Mark begins to explain how he and his family eat and sleep for free at Indian casinos. “Hey, we look like Indians. I tell the manager we’re Sioux, and if he doesn’t ask questions, we’ll probably get suites and buffet coupons.” Mark’s skin is the color of a very well-tanned Caucasian, and his hair is ink black. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that he is, in fact, a Native American.

But Mark is an American Roma. Better known around the world as a Gypsy—a term which offends many Roma, but not Mark. He is one of nearly a million American Gypsies descended from Eastern European and Turkish clans. Though assimilation has become common, many Gypsies still live in a highly secretive, mobile world where false identities are standard, cash is preferred, and photographs are strictly taboo. Mark’s real name—in particular, his clan name—is a well-guarded secret.

Today I am riding in Mark’s white Chevy Suburban. In the back seat is his American Gypsy wife, and surrounding her are three of their seven children, ages 6, 9, and 11. The mood is warm and welcoming. Though allowing outsiders (much less writers) into this world is considered a serious cultural breach, Mark is proud to show off a small part of his unique lifestyle. Mark says he married his wife when he was 14 and she was 16—about average for an arranged Gypsy marriage. The negotiated dowry was $20,000—paid by the bride’s father. “I’m hoping my kids work out a little cheaper,” Mark says. He has three daughters.

We are on our way to a machine shop where Mark will buy nearly a ton of scrap aluminum. Once the metal is loaded into the Suburban’s trailer, Mark drives it to a Minneapolis scrap yard. For nearly half the year—two to three months of which are spent in Minnesota—this is how Mark supports his family. He’s not alone. According to Mark, there are probably 5,000 “scrap Gypsies” roaming America during the summer months.

Countless machine shops across Minnesota deal with these nomads on a regular basis, though often they don’t know it. “They wouldn’t look at us if they knew we were Gypsies. So around here we tell them we’re Indians. Down south we’re Mexicans.” Mark spends his winters outside Wichita, Kansas, where he owns a house. Nevertheless, the road is Mark’s workplace, and even during the winter months he spends weeks driving through Texas and Oklahoma in search of scrap metal. More often than not, his children accompany him, learning the intricacies of the scrap business along the way. It’s important to Mark because like most Gypsy children they won’t complete more than a few years of school. And like most American Gypsies—including Mark and his wife—they cannot read or write. It’s a serious problem in the Gypsy community, but one that is rarely addressed for fear that further assimilation will devastate the private Gypsy culture. Nevertheless what’s lacking in literacy is often balanced by an uncanny ability with numbers—particularly when those numbers are attached to dollars.

We arrive at the machine shop and Mark asks me to stay in the truck. He and one of his kids approach the loading dock where an official-looking man in a blue denim jumpsuit leads them into the building. After 10 minutes a forklift arrives with several pallets of aluminum. A moment later Mark reemerges, and he’s in a hurry to leave. “We got too good a price.”

Mark tells me that Minnesota and the Dakotas are good territory for Gypsies. “People don’t give us too much trouble. If it weren’t for the winters, we might even move up here.” He also assures me that Minneapolis scrap yards understand the peculiar needs of a mobile, anonymous businessman with no forwarding address.

When he drops me at my car, Nick gives me a bolo tie with a turquoise clip. He tells me that it’s the same tie he gives to machine-shop foremen who need convincing that he’s an Indian. “Just make sure you write how we’re all good Indians.” He hands me the address of the long-term residence motel he and his family are using as a base while they work Minnesota. I’m invited for dinner. It’s in the outer ring suburbs. “That’s where all the nice Minnesota families live, right?”

We battled it out for 17 hours at a teardrop-shaped table in a dimly lit conference room in Eagan. The three day seminar was called “Wings,” the hosts were employees of Northwest Airlines, the goal was to help students overcome their fear of flying. They came from all over—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and a few coastal states. Every one of the 10 participants had flown before, and some flew all the time. One woman had even boarded a plane in Tacoma, Washington, to come to the class. Yet each of the six women and four men (standard for this bimonthly class, whose female-to-male ratio is usually about 60:40, facilitator and retired captain Tom Roberts informed me) experiences panic attacks, stress, and anxiety prior to air travel and often throughout the flight.

This is not an uncommon fear, according to resident psychologist Ruth Markowitz. At the Friday evening meet-and-greet, Markowitz said that 1 in 6 people feels anxious when flying. These are bright, creative people who let their imaginations get the better of them and thus spend their time at 35,000 feet expecting the worst, hands clenched to the armrests instead of cocking their heads into the aisle hoping to get a glimpse of the meal cart.

Of course, it’s an irrational fear, since flying is—statistically speaking—safer than driving, dancing outside in a thunderstorm, and eating fast food. Yet on Saturday afternoon, after Roberts’ two hour presentation detailing the meticulous safety measures, flight techniques, and crew training airlines use to ensure the utmost quality, and after inspecting both the cockpit and the exterior of a DC-9 grounded in the airline’s hangar, the class was still collectively showing the tight face of stress. Even my usually composed mind was beginning to wonder if, ridiculous as it seems, these people know something I don’t.

By the time Sunday morning arrived, the class had been through hours of deep breathing, visualization, and the safety briefing. We’d sat on an airplane and in a flight simulator. It was now time to face the fear.

Our flight to Chicago’s O’Hare airport left at 9 a.m. One man, a quiet Iowan who hadn’t flown in 15 years and was hoping to take his wife on the honeymoon she’d never had, called it quits before the security check. He promised to return in September and take advantage of the second-time free policy (a nice option on a $495 tuition). We met the captain at the gate and pre-boarded. Normally, of course, pre-boarding is for those challenged by infirmity or infant, but in our case it was to get everyone on the plane with plenty of time to get comfortable. Ours was a regularly scheduled flight, but it was empty—a 110-passenger DC-9 with 45 seats booked. Half the seats were reserved for the class. No general announcements were made, so the dignity of the students was spared in case there were any jaded, professional travelers present on the flight. While Markowitz calmed one man, an airline mechanic who begged to disembark, Roberts talked the tense but outwardly calm group through the pre-flight noises and offered reassurances and kind words. Seated a row ahead, smiling what I hoped was a compassionate smile, I couldn’t help thinking about that absolutely miniscule, not-gonna-happen risk and the horrible ironic potential of this flight. Fifty minutes and one beverage service later, when NWA Flight 126 touched down smoothly and safely and nine fearful flyers celebrated, I too was relieved.

In the terminal, the flyers checked in with each other. Not everyone thought it had gone as well as they hoped, but everyone had successfully utilized some or all of the half-dozen techniques Markowitz had recommended for a more relaxed experience. The flight back to the Twin Cities, with the same plane and its familiar noises, was relatively uneventful. Victory, in this case a broad and sweeping term, was declared.

Fill a public swimming pool with kids on any of the scorching days to come, and sooner or later someone’s going to shout, “Marco!” Several others will shout, “Polo!” and in the summer heat, this vexing water game is reborn.

The person shouting “Marco” is “it,” and must tag one of the “Polos.” It’s tricky because the “Marco” has to perform this task in water, without the benefit of eyesight. While they are usually trusted to keep their eyes shut, “Marcos” have been known to cheat.

Like building meth labs and bonsai gardening, instructions for this simple activity have proliferated online. Since the game consists mostly of delivering misleading information over a distance to the uninformed, it can easily be taken for a grim parable of the world wide web. Like everything else on the net, it now spreads unchecked across the heartland. At the St. Louis Park Aquatic Park some of the game’s admitted participants are also pool employees.

“I liked that game,” admitted ticket-taker Katie Johnson one recent afternoon. She stressed the past tense. Her companion, Jessie Lee, added that at their age (around 15) priorities have shifted too far guyward to get into the spirit. Even so, kids old enough to drive have owned up to The Rake that they still get a kick out of blind water tag.

Lifeguards have also taken notice of the game, though they say it is easier to hear it than to see it. While none would consent to playing the game while on duty—indeed, they preferred not even to talk about it while working—they have one thing in common with those who do: They have no idea what the game has to do with the 13th century explorer from Venice for whom the game is named. Venice is, of course, full of water. And Marco Polo sought the unknown. But to a number, both players and observers of the game find no connection to the father of the Eurasian spice trade. “I have no idea,” is the mantra on this topic, though a few are willing to ruminate on the matter.

“He was a guy who went to China,” said Jessie Lee, betting on historical fact. During the five o’clock safety break during which the pool is emptied of swimmers and checked for victims, one lifeguard warmed to the topic. “Maybe,” she said, “he was blind.”

Coming down the water, with a wide-open mouth of vibrating teeth, the milfoil harvester is a light blue paddle-wheeled contraption worthy of a Dr. Seuss rhyme. Or maybe it’s something Jules Verne would have moored at his lake cabin.

The combine-like machine is a common sight on Twin Cities lakes, ever since the early 1990s when the Eurasian water milfoil infestation really took off. The weed crowds out native plants, which in turn hurts the fish populations that feed on those plants. Mostly, though, it was the outcry from a repelled public that spurred local anti-milfoil efforts. Milfoil is a nuisance to boaters and anglers, and a possible hazard to swimmers, who get tangled up in its creepy tendrils. And it grows like crazy—up to a foot a week. This year seems particularly bad, and there are several theories why. For example, the lack of snow last winter may have allowed more light to reach the plants beneath the lake ice, extending the growing season.

In Minneapolis, between Memorial Day and Labor Day a crew with two harvesters and two trucks rotate between city lakes. They remove 20 tons of weeds each day, focusing on priority sites like swimming areas. Where does it all end up? At a compost site at Fort Snelling State Park. The machines, which are made in Wisconsin, are on the lakes for 6-10 hours each day, six days a week. They make multiple passes over the same areas because the paddle wheels blow down the weeds as the harvester approaches, but then the weeds straighten back up. “It’s like trying to mow your lawn blindfolded,” one driver told me.

On a sunny morning a few days later, crewmember Tom Tollefson took The Rake for a ride on Cedar Lake. Tom allowed me to sit briefly at the controls, and I couldn’t resist gunning it. The harvesters are surprisingly fast. Tollefson took over and dropped the front shovel into the water. The blades on the business end of the shovel are like a giant hair clipper, and they cut the weeds off 3 to 4 feet below the surface. Then a series of conveyor belts ratchet the weeds up the shovel and to the back of the boat. The milfoil comes out of the water in tangled mats, and it smells faintly of fish and chlorine. No one has found a good use for harvested milfoil. Several years ago, a curious park employee tried to get a neighbor—a farmer—to feed the weed to his cows. But the man showed him a watering pond that had already been infested with milfoil. Even with their wide-ranging herbivorous appetite and two stomachs, the cows fastidiously avoided it.

In some hip nightclubs on the East and West Coasts, customers line up to pay $12 for a shot of flavored, 99.9 percent-pure oxygen. If the designer-air fad ever catches on here, Ed Berger might be the hippest guy in town. Berger brings his own air supply. Tucked under his chair on the Artist’s Quarter bandstand is a Puritan Bennett portable liquid oxygen unit. It’s small enough to fit in a saxophone case. Clear plastic tubes carry the supplementary oxygen to his nostrils. Berger relies on it 24 hours a day. There’s a six-hour supply in the tank, more than enough to carry him through a night’s gig.

Over the course of his five-decade career as a musician, Berger has sparred with and survived two of the trade’s occupational hazards—booze (he got sober back in the late 70s) and tobacco (he quit smoking about 15 years ago, but not before some damage had been done). He survived colon cancer in 1991. After a heart attack about four years ago, he underwent triple coronary bypass surgery and was fitted with a cardiac pacemaker. Doctors also discovered he was suffering from bronchitis and emphysema. Hence his current reliance on oxygen. There’s no cure for emphysema, but the stamina Berger developed blowing sax helps him cope.

The long, flowing phrases that marked Berger as a master improviser don’t come as easily, or as often as they used to. He still has a ready flow of musical ideas, but putting them through the horn is another matter. He’d play out more often except for the hassles of getting to the gig and back. “I can only walk about 15 steps and I’m out of breath,” he said the other day. “And the mental preparation it takes to put on a show for the people, with all this other stuff happening, makes it five times as hard to play a concert.”

A recent Artist’s Quarter gig marked Berger’s first time out in months. It also happened to be his 70th birthday. Helping him celebrate was a quintet led by Minneapolis trombonist Brad Bellows, and a roomful of friends and fans. The AQ is a stereotypical jazz club—a dark and cozy basement space as seen in a zillion clichéd movies and TV shows. Except one thing was missing: the smoky haze. Berger’s gig was a non-smoking event in honor of the birthday guy. Plus, lighting up around pure oxygen isn’t generally advised.

For several decades, Berger has been acknowledged as the dean of Twin Cities beboppers. In the late 40s, when Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell ruled 52nd Street, Berger was a kid playing society gigs in his native Philadelphia, where he heard talk of the new music in New York City. Berger first saw the Midwest at 18, playing ballrooms with an obscure polka band, Fats Carlson and His Cats. When that job fizzled after 70 stands, Berger took a detour into radio announcing classes at Brown Institute, and spent a fish-out-of-water year as a DJ in rural Hutchinson. Then he heard about steady playing jobs in Hennepin Avenue strip clubs.

From the 40s well into the 60s, some of the best jazzmen in town could be heard nightly on the strip, backing the dancers in clubs like Augies and the Roaring 20s. The players knew that if you wanted to work on your chops, the strip clubs weren’t a bad place to do it. After all, nobody was going to walk out if the solos got too long or complicated. While the customers were focusing on undulating flesh, Berger was thinking about Charlie Parker, Johnny Hodges, and the 2-5-1 change—most of the time.

Today, there’s a decent scene in reputable joints like the AQ, the Dakota, and Arnellia’s. Berger has survived to what look like pretty good times, but is there enough of him left to enjoy it? At his birthday show, he didn’t waste much time before taking the audience on a wild ride through the hairpin turns of Charlie Parker’s bop burner “Steeplechase.” The question that had been hanging in the air was answered. Yes, Berger still has his familiar, well-rounded alto tone, betraying no sign of physical debility. Smiles of recognition replaced his band-mates’ usual poker faces. Eddie can still play. Next, Berger eased into the ballad “I Can’t Get Started.” He’s always been a masterful ballad player, and his recent travails seem to have added a certain bluesy gravitas. Berger said he’s playing better than ever—“more defined, more musical”—than in his speed-burner days. After three sets at the Artist’s Quarter, and the better part of a portable bottle of oxygen, the audience enthusiastically agreed.

With the grand opening of Hormel’s $8 million Spam Museum, there’s not much mystery left in the story of the world’s strangest can of food. The Rake dives in—only to learn the “Spam Gelatin Jump” has been canceled.

Now it’s just a savory memory. Marion Ross, Barb Billingsley, Tom Brokaw, and other dubious TV superstars were there. Southern Minnesotans bit into free Spamburgers. Teenie boppers bounced to the sounds of former Gear Daddy Martin Zellar, Austin’s hippest native son. Kids scrambled around a pork-themed amusement park. Tourists hauled around bags loaded down with cans of Spam extracted from a stack that spelled “SPAM” in six-foot high letters. “A lot of people come to stock up on it for the whole year, since it only costs a buck a can,” said a salesman who had already bagged his own year’s supply. Meanwhile, the line grew longer to buy Spam boxer shorts, Spam key chains, Spam license plate holders, and anything else that could conceivably be emblazoned with this four-letter word.

This was Spam Jam 2002 in Austin, Minnesota, and an occasion to celebrate the long-awaited inauguration of the $8 million Spam Museum and a new era of nostalgia. Even this all-American Spam (short for “spiced ham,” you know) suffered from the attacks of the pork-abstaining terrorists; the museum’s opening was postponed from mid-September 2001 until this summer.

The museum represents Hormel’s struggle to keep Spam a relevant pop cultural icon—like Coca-Cola, say, or Hershey bars—as opposed to shelved as a kitchsy reminder of a bygone era, outdated and mediocre American cuisine synonymous with unwanted email.

To clean up Spam’s image for the annual festival, some long-standing games have been nixed. There was a time when Spam Jam featured such events as the ever-unpopular Spam Gelatin Jump. “It’s basically all the white stuff around Spam in a big vat. You stick your arms in and pull out a golf ball for a prize,” said an attendant a few years ago when I last visited.

Even the beautiful blue and yellow Spambelle has been warehoused. The mini paddleboat, dating from 1956, used to give little rides to big eaters on Austin’s East Side Lake. But then the little steamboat sunk in 1999—on live TV. “They had to pull it out with a crane,” one eyewitness explained to me. “I guess the captain ate too much Spam!”

The Fringe Festival arrives again, this year with more corporate sponsors than ever, and I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation and obligation. So many options, so much creativity, so many challenging theatrical experiences to seek out. As always, it’s the seeking that intimidates. Must I really drag my sporadically employed butt out of the house in all this heat and humidity to sit in some barely ventilated venue fanning myself with the program like a fat woman at a gospel meeting on the out chance that I will see something that’ll change my life? The answer’s yes, of course. But the question’s “why?” Why, just because something calls itself the Fringe should I believe it’s any more fresh and original than all the dazzling assertions of individuality I can find on the Internet? A whole world of original thought can be mine—from skate-chick rants to entire web rings devoted to a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. All I have to do is get out my credit card and pay Qwest (A WorldCom Subsidiary) $52.95 a month. Certainly, those pop-up adverts for car insurance and software security that litter my screen with all the graphic subtlety of fast-food wrappers are suspiciously slow to click off, but it’s a small price to pay for the world at my fingertips. Besides, there’s no real Fringe anymore, no alternative, just a bunch of various phenomena waiting to be absorbed and distributed at a reasonable price.

I use cynicism to disguise my laziness. The truth is that the Fringe is worth leaving the house for. In the first place, it’s live theater, and live theater, almost by definition, resists repackaging. Once it’s on video, DVD, CD-ROM, or cable TV, it’s no longer live. More important, however, is the question of whether there is still a fringe at all, and if so, will I find it at the Fringe Festival?

Of course the first Fringe Festival wasn’t called that. It happened in Scotland 56 years ago and might just as easily have been called “Eight Disgruntled Theatre Groups Get Turned Away From The Edinburgh Theatre Festival and Decide To Put on Their Own Damn Show.” By the next year the practice of staging dramas in unofficial venues began to attract attention and the term Fringe was coined by (who else?) a cultural critic. It’s no surprise that half a century later the phenomenon has grown up and solidified into a world-wide theatrical happening, taking place in cities all over the western hemisphere. Coca-Cola and Target banners flutter gaily in the press releases, and on all these flags, it’s the artists and performers who are the fringe.

Lest you think I’m one of those bitter, unsuccessful artistes who cry sell-out at any event not staged behind a grain silo at 2 a.m. in February, let me assure you I am an entirely different type of bitter, unsuccessful artiste. I think creativity should sell. I happen to think it should be fetching a much better price. If we artists are not going to get paid in dollars and sense, then we should be collecting the wages of fear. Being alternative, avant-garde, or simply on the Fringe, should carry with it the license to disturb and even enrage, not just the “mainstream” but your very own peer group. Alternative art of any kind ought to be scary, like rejection or death, especially when it’s funny. It should be something no one would dare turn into a beer commercial.

But speaking more broadly, what is Fringe anymore? I’m not sure, but I know it looks something like a guy I’ll call Capricorn the Poet. In 1982, when slamming was just something poets did with shots of whiskey, the open mike scene in the East Village was already churning it’s rusty gears into action. This was years before MTV showed up, before the phrase “spoken word” was coined, and before the poets themselves got suspiciously good-looking. Like verbal karaoke, everybody, lousy or excellent, got famous for exactly three and a half minutes before the proprietor’s egg-timer started buzzing and you were out of there. Naturally this democratic forum attracted a lot of furloughed mental patients of whom Capricorn the Poet was the most notable. For one thing he actually wrote metered verse. With his furious black-socketed eyes, a mop of dreaded-out unruly hair, and a precise Eastern European accent, he seemed to come from another century when poets thought they had the right to demand respect. He bellowed out his poems, giving each line the biblical weight he knew it deserved, his English antiquated and ornate, as if learned solely from books. His words themselves are unprintable in a non-fanzine context, consisting of violent, graphic smut that would make William Burroughs squeamish. His oratorical brio made it impossible to tune out. Feminists would leave the room in confusion, since you couldn’t really take a lunatic to task for commodifying women’s bodies. Even the young guys would get uncomfortable, all their bohemian posturing diminished before this literal onslaught. Capricorn, oblivious to audience response, would simply continue his philippic diatribe against aristocratic women who dared to tell their Lord and Master, Capricorn, that they were too good to have sex with donkeys for the purpose of increasing his onanistic delight, and I’m really giving you the lite version here. Finally some people wanted to 86 Capricorn from the open mike, but there were no grounds—he would always dismount the stage in a fit of verbal abuse when his time was called. “Sycophant, may you choke on a hemorrhoid!” was one of his tamer exclamations—but he would dismount. Capricorn stayed.

There are still open mikes in the East Village, though now everyone takes the subway, since the rents are too high for anyone who can even pronounce the word poetry. Miraculously, Capricorn is still there, arrogant, pompous, obscene, and insane as ever. Twenty years of what had to be hard times have not affected his confidence in the least, even though Russell Simmons is never going to put him on HBO.

It’s incredibly foolish to romanticize mental illness, which is no more an alternative to homogeny than pancreatic cancer. But when I think Fringe, when I think Alternative, I think of Capricorn’s enviable inability, or refusal, to understand his position. I am the choice, he seems to shout. It is you who are the Alternative! I am the flag, it’s you who are my fringe!

The Minnesota Fringe Festival takes place August 2-11 at various locations. See www.fringefestival.org.

Emily Carter is a Minneapolis author. Her collection of short stories, Glory Goes and Gets Some, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 2000.