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This is your last chance, actually, to catch a highly popular series at the Jungle pairing the theater’s talented players and artists with great children’s stories. Well, your last chance for now. Linden Hills’ cornerstone Wild Rumpus has established itself as the Ruminator of children’s books, so it’s appropriate that they’re co-sponsoring and curating this “performance” of books such as Garrison Keillor’s Cat, You Better Come Home and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman. It’s a series, held on Saturday afternoons, because the program is somewhat loosey-goosey. Different performers may pop in to introduce or read the stories, and the schedule is kid-friendly. A new group of books will be selected for the next run, sometime later in the summer. But if you want to catch the delightful Wendy Lehr as the primary reader, this is your date, and it’s a great way to introduce your kids to the sometimes scary interior of the playhouse. Jungle Theater, (612) 822-7063

From TV ads with roving cursor arrows to horror films about chat-room predators, our so-called entertainment elite is deeply fixated on the culture and symbolism of the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the burgeoning vogue of vaudeville theater and moving pictures that blew the American zeitgeist wide open, and painters of the day were no less fascinated by its new-school guiles. In both cases, the acceleration of mass culture and exploding modes of entertainment provided working artists with a wealth of inspiration—visual and contextual—and it doesn’t take a student of meta-anything to appreciate the significance. Among the artifacts on display at this compelling Weisman exhibition (headed for other U.S. museums after this summer) is a Howard Thain painting of New York City’s Times Square circa 1925. Even then, electrified signage and beckoning searchlights signaled the arrival of a bigger, more spectacle-hungry viewing public. Could Thain have actually foreseen the coming of MTV’s TRL? Probably not (although Carson Daly does appear in certain translations of Nostradamus). But his work here, along with vintage posters, photographs, and paintings by the likes of Edward Hopper and Walt Kuhn, demonstrate a keen awareness that popular culture is as much a mirror as it is a screen. An accompanying series of free lectures and film events delve deeper into select topics. Weisman Museum, (612) 626-474

Summer augurs the arrival of the high season for movies of all varieties. Looking for art-house titles? Why not go to the biggest, baddest art house around? The Walker’s healthy film and video commitments come into full flower in June, and this year is no different. As if to both elucidate and erase the line between “time arts”(i.e. video and filmic images) and “moviemaking” (more traditional narrative cinema), our clever friends on Vineland Place are turning three galleries into six screening rooms, where the works of Shirin Neshat will be installed. This Iranian-born artist explores the tensions between her Islamic past and her American present on numerous simultaneous screenings and sound recordings. If this nonlinear, artsy approach to “moving pictures” bugs, stay tuned. The Walker’s film department is also launching a brief documentary series from three French filmmakers. “Vignettes of Life” is a nice slice of contemporary verite, three films each set in a microcosmic community—a Yiddish neighborhood in Paris, family farms in rural France, and schoolchildren on recess at a prep school. (Beware that, in this case, film is the more fleeting medium: “Vignettes’” three films will screen once each on June 5, 6, and 7). Both the exhibit and the series offer refreshing evidence that not every rule has yet been broken, and not every boundary has yet been pushed, when it comes to the cinematic arts. Walker Art Center, (612) 375-7622

A few years ago, when Minnesota author Faith Sullivan’s novel The Empress of One (for which she won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize) had just been released, a friend of ours mentioned that Sullivan had recently accepted an invitation to attend her diddly little neighborhood book group as a guest author. How cool is that? So Minnesotan. Anyway, our friend could not speak highly enough of Sullivan, how stunning it was to hear her read from her work, how approachable she was, how intelligent, articulate, and just plain friendly. All of this makes the thought of attending a reading of Sullivan’s latest work, What a Woman Must Do, that much more alluring. Set in the fictional town of Harvester, Minnesota in 1952, What a Woman Must Do traces the connections of three women: Bess, 17, Harriet, 39, and Kate, 59, all of whom have been affected by the car accident that killed Bess’s parents. The novel pulls readers through the twists of destiny—death, love, and dreams of the future—that threaten to come between the three women. Sullivan, who grew up in Minnesota towns herself, applies her deft talents as a writer with believable authenticity to the rhythms of small-town life, while she concurrently addresses the eternal themes of love, loyalty, and family. Sullivan reads at Ruminator Books in Minneapolis on June 3, (651) 699-0587

Like all great artists and authors, Jules Feiffer was not a fully formed world-class creator until he’d composed a children’s book. Remember that E.B. White, his brilliant colleague and contemporary at The New Yorker, didn’t really gild his impeccable reputation until he’d composed Charlotte’s Web. This rite of passage separating the great from the legendary is now a truism. Everyone from Garrison Keillor to Maya Angelou has put pen to paper on behalf of the pre-school set. And while this is often an exercise in pretension and self-congratulation, Feiffer has been creating award-winning children’s books since 1993. His new book, By the Side of the Road, explores the cliché of the classic family road trip in which an irate dad asks the kids to behave or he’ll leave them on the shoulder. One of them takes Dad up on the threat, and spends the rest of his life right there where Dad left him, growing up by the side of the road. We sense this one’s bound for immortality like Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Barnes & Noble, Edina (952) 920-1060

We descended on Hell’s Kitchen on a Monday, the four of us, expecting the hellfire and brimstone and everlasting chaos of a kitchen under siege. Or, at least, we envisioned the antipode to the white tablecloth, fresh-flower breakfast place. Why do we expect Hell to be so over-populated? Perhaps Salvation Sundays, with brunch from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., attract a bigger, noisier crowd, confident the gospel music will perfume the multitude of sins right out of the air. This quiet Monday noon we could see right down to the paint-it-black-you-devil floor and the blood-red doors and the fiery licks around the edges. So we ate. We almost made a meal of great bread with salted butter—to hell with special diets—and sweet marmalade and jam and the freshest sort of peanut butter ever. Then we remembered we hadn’t yet become complete gluttons, so we continued with crab cakes and walleye and B.L.T.’s, ham and pears grilled with Swiss cheese, fries and fruit and the biggest, blackest, yes, blackberries you’ve ever seen. We could have made a meal of the side dishes and been no less sinful. So many forms of comfort food, so deceptively simple and tempting, we’ll undoubtedly return to sample more. If the scene is vaguely familiar, remember your last journey to Hell—your previous Night (there is a pungent Bloody Beer Mary to cure what ails you), or your secret tryst in the old Du Jour’s Casual Café. Same place, a couple of familiar faces (they always said that would happen down below), but an entirely new and rakish breakfast/lunch joint on the scene. Check out the art on the walls. It’s no sin to look. Hell’s Kitchen, (612) 332-4700

Going out for breakfast on a rainy Saturday morning, lingering over those third and fourth cups of regular old coffee, chatting with the pretty young waitress about the smell of the rain in spring and the striking beauty of her just-dyed hair—what could be nicer? Key’s Cafe on Raymond Avenue in St. Paul (at the University Avenue intersection) feels like a lucky find, something you can use as filler in conversation later with casual friends or to impress potential dates (“Well, actually, there’s this fabulous little one-of-a-kind breakfast spot I know if you don’t mind a short drive…”). But, alas, it’s just one franchise of nine metro cafes that your potential date probably already knows about. Oh well. But you can have a terrific plate of French toast, crispy hashbrowns, a variety of specialty omelettes, and pretty much every other necessary element of a tried-and-true breakfast diner, including a distinctly Minnesotan egg creation called the Loon Omelet, replete with wild rice, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and provolone, under a cream sauce graced with onions, garlic, white wine, and mushrooms. Last time we went, we hung out for two full hours and no one batted an eye, even though the place was packed and we ate lightly. But maybe that’s because we dared to ask the waitress just what it was she had done to her hair to make it so spectacular. What we didn’t bother to ask was why the women’s bathroom included a toothbrush and toothpaste on the soap counter. After all, a little mystery is a good thing. Key’s Cafe (651) 646-5756

Tucked away in downtown St. Paul (but then again, what isn’t invariably tucked away down there?), Babani’s is rumored to be the only Kurdish restaurant in the United States. (Quick geography lesson: Kurdistan is a mountainous region occupying 74,000 square miles in southeast Turkey, northwest Iran, northeast Iraq, and northeast Syria—with a population of 25 million people!) Fleeing a Kurdish refugee camp in Turkey, owners Tanya Fuad and Rodwan Nakshabandi arrived in Minnesota and worked at separate jobs until the opportunity to open Babani’s arrived. Meat lovers can enjoy exquisite fare, such as the tawa, featuring chicken sauteed in lemon and spices, baked potato, green pepper, and onion. Vegans will delight in the variety of meatless dishes, including dolmas, biryani, and the Sheik Babani. Forgo your dinner beverage of choice and order the Kurdish lemonade, a sweet thirst-quenching concoction. Perfect, if the weather ever warms up again. Babani’s (651) 602-9964

This morning I sat around watching it rain outside and trying to cull some signal moment from the many hours I spent with my friend Nellie Stone Johnson, the labor/civil rights legend who died April 2 at the age of 96—some little story that might sum her up for purposes of a remembrance like this. But there isn’t any. She was too thoroughly a force of nature for that. According to the terms of an old Jewish parable, the student travels from afar not to hear the great rabbi interpret the Talmud but to watch him tie his shoes. So it was with Nellie. She wore who she was and where she had been in her every aspect: the sharp, graceful lines of her face, the easy dignity with which she carried herself, the burning clarity and urgency in her voice. If you had any sense, you simply drank it in whenever the chance presented itself.

I first met Nellie in 1990. She phoned me at City Pages one day out of the blue to say that she liked the things I had been writing and we ought to meet. The truth is I’d never heard of Nellie Stone Johnson. I had no idea this woman had made more history than anyone else still alive and kicking round here. Nonetheless, something in her manner precluded my saying no. We met for lunch, and after talking for an hour or so she gave me my second directive: “I think you might want to interview me for a story in your paper.” I did as I was told.

During those years at City Pages, she became a mentor to several of us on staff—Monika Bauerlein, Jennifer Vogel, me. And in having her way with us she could be as dogged and as demanding as she ever was in confronting foes. Many was the time the phone rang at 2:00 on Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours from press deadline, to disgorge Nellie from the other end, primed for her one of her pack-a-lunch lectures on some piece of skullduggery she was trying to bring to light. It didn’t matter that you had heard this one before and had more pressing things to do; you listened, and it was always worth as much time as it required.

Within a couple of days of her passing, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers published long, glowing tributes. I read them with faint distaste. It’s in the nature of obituaries to domesticate whatever they seek to memorialize; saint and scoundrel alike turn cuddly in death’s embrace. So let us say it one last time, with emphasis: Nellie Stone Johnson did not like to be called a lady or a liberal. Despite her extensive involvement in practical politics—she visited the Capitol more than some legislators—Nellie remained a radical, as the Pioneer Press correctly noted, a former member of the Young Communists League, the Young Socialists, the Socialist Workers Party, and several other hard-line labor groups. She was a fighter from first to last. But she was never content to be a marginal character. Nellie helped midwife the merger of the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties in 1944. Much later, at an age when most people are retired, she served a stint on the Democratic National Committee. Her radicalism ensured that she always had far more enemies than friends; these included the establishment civil rights organizations, a sizable number of liberal middle class feminists, and anyone else from either party who would neglect or subvert the hard-won gains in labor and civil rights she had given her life to.

After she died everyone took pains to say that even her enemies respected her, as if that meant a damn thing. I can tell you for the record that she had no use for their reverence; she saw it for the patronizing flip-off it was. All her life she was wise enough to stay clear of the clutches of anyone who might disarm her. That is why she passed up the countless political jobs and other bits of patronage that could have been hers across the years. She sacrificed enormously and without complaint, continuing to operate her seamstress shop on Nicollet Mall well past the age of 85, until finally she could not walk up the stairs anymore.

But then again it hardly amounted to sacrifice in her eyes. She was exactly where she wanted to be. As Walter Mondale put it, with affection and perhaps a little discomfiture, she was a tough old bird. Unlike so many leaders of the civil rights movement, Nellie had no real use for the church. She respected its political contributions but harbored no affinity for musings about God. “I just figured it was real simple,” she told me once. “You do what you can for people and you don’t worry about God.” I doubt she’d have called herself an atheist; that would imply too much attention to the question. She was an Enlightenment rationalist to her core. Her whole ideology could be nailed down with two planks—the value of education and the dignity of a decent job.

“She was so incredibly generous,” Jennifer Vogel wrote me a couple of days later, “but she wouldn’t have seen it that way. She fought because that was the only thing a decent, seeing person could do. I also liked how she gathered soldiers along the way. She saw the best in those who were trying to do good. She was forgiving of weakness, though I’m not sure she truly understood it. She looked past whatever your particular fears were and tried to nurture your strengths.”

Nellie’s public life was everything to her, and that is where she sought and found her friends. She eventually abandoned any pretense to traditional domesticity after her second failed marriage and toiled on by herself for another 50 years, a life odyssey that surely befitted one so indefatigable and so fiercely unsentimental. If she were reading this I imagine she’d say about now, That’s all very well; you wrote some nice things. But if I was your teacher, then what is it I taught you? All right then. Call this the short list.

Do the legwork.
Know your history.
Concern yourself with others, always.
Stay busy and you will stay as close to selfless as possible.
Keep your own counsel; be beholden to no one.
Be proud of what you do.
Let good faith be its own reward.
Remember that regret wastes time.
Keep on.

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

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Few people remember that beatnik legend Jack Kerouac spent part of his wayward youth perched literally in the clouds, employed by the federal government—he was a lookout for forest fires in the High Cascades. From high atop what he called Mt. Desolation, he could survey most of what is now known as Glacier National Park. We don’t doubt that this experience was no less enlightening than it’s ever been throughout history. (Moses, Jesus, and Buddha—to name just a few great spirits—went “up to the mountain” for a better view, both literally and spiritually.) Denizens of Northern Minnesota know, too, that there are dozens of fire towers scattered across our wilder sections. And with the advent of GPS systems, high-flying heat-seeking satellites, most fire towers have fallen into public hands. So much the better, since now you don’t have to be wearing a badge and a uniform to shimmy up many of these glorious perches. Don Scheese offers his own memoir, Mountains of Memory, after more than a decade as a lookout. A thoughtful book that provokes us into action—pulling out the old-fashioned topo maps and scanning for our own vertiginous adventures. Ruminator Books in St. Paul, (651) 699-0587