The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Gay Marriage? Get Used to the Idea

    Until the late sixties, in much of the country, the pigmentation differences between my wife and I would have made us felons had we tried to get married. According to one Virginia judge in 1959, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents.…The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.” When the Supreme Court finally declared the “antimiscegenation” laws unconstitutional in 1967, almost one in three states still had them on the books.

    Today, all but the most hardened bigots accept that banning unions based on skin color is unconstitutional and just plain wrong. And yet many of the same people, such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty, use the same tired, illogical argument—that it is morally wrong—to rail against legally sanctioned same-sex unions. The fact that Minnesota already bans same-sex unions is not enough for this governor. He wants to amend the state constitution to make sure that ban remains beyond the reach of Minnesota’s traditionally civil-rights-minded judiciary. Progressive, fair-minded people need to band together to stop him. All Minnesotans should be able to get the legal and social benefits of a legally sanctioned union.

    Despite the all the jokes, the married life does have a lot of real advantages. Married people get better insurance rates, preferred income-tax treatment, and a host of other legal benefits. Those who doubt the legal perks of marriage should talk to someone who has ended, either through a breakup or death, a less formal (i.e., living together) arrangement. The surviving half of the nonlegally recognized couple does not have the right to inherit that person’s property, can be legally excluded from participating in the funeral arrangements—the list goes on.

    Not surprisingly, many of those who oppose same-sex unions rely heavily on the Bible. Now, I am not anti-Bible—I just believe that using the Bible to justify state-sanctioned discrimination can place one on a very slippery slope. Yes, Leviticus 18:22 states that man “should not lie with mankind, as with womankind: It is abomination.” However, Leviticus also states that a man should not have any contact with a woman while she is “in her period of menstrual uncleanliness”; permits slavery (provided the slaves come from neighboring nations); allows a father to sell his daughter into slavery; and directs believers to kill a neighbor who works on the Sabbath.

    Our Founding Fathers wisely relieved us of the burden of deciding whether to kill our neighbors for cutting the grass on Sunday by creating a Constitution that expressly forbids our government from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion.” And that same Constitution also makes it very clear that we are all entitled to equal protection under the law. Now, when one views these two concepts in the context of same-sex unions, then the efforts to ban them become exposed for what they really are—discrimination based on homophobia-fueled religious dogma. Our current Constitution does not tolerate using religious beliefs as a battering ram for bigotry—which is why Tim Pawlenty wants a constitutional amendment to do his dirty work for him.

    To paraphrase a bumper sticker, Pawlenty and the religious right need to keep their religion out of our laws. Recent court decisions in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii have held that there is nothing unconstitutional about permitting two human beings of the same sex to join together in a civil union. Whether it is “immoral” is perhaps a religious and personal decision, but it’s not one that should trigger statutory legal prohibitions. Beyond that, one would think that this supposedly “pro-family” governor would want to encourage all people, not just the heterosexual ones, to become part of a committed, monogamous relationship.

    Now, I could understand the virulent opposition if churches were being forced to perform gay marriage ceremonies within their own walls. They are not. If the Jerry Falwells of the world want to refuse to permit a gay couple to make a lifelong commitment to each other in their churches—let ’em. The beauty of the religious freedom mandated by the First Amendment is that it keeps government out of their pulpits. It also keeps the religious right from imposing their narrow views of who is worthy of constitutional protection on the rest of us.

  • Wine, wine, wine! Wild Horses on Bended Knee

    The saints of February are a rum lot. The larger their reputation, the less can be said for certain about their lives and activities—and vice versa. The blameless virgin Saint Scholastica, twin sister of Saint Benedict, is relatively well documented—for someone who lived fifteen hundred years ago. But she is remembered only for the name of a distinguished college in Duluth, and for the fact that on her feast day (February 10) in 1355 no fewer than sixty-three Oxford scholars were killed in a riot, which began as a difference of opinion about the beer in the Swindlestock Tavern in the city center.

    By contrast, nothing is known for certain about the fourth century’s Saint Blasius (February 3), but in the Middle Ages he had a mighty reputation for curing sore throats and as the patron of workmen who combed raw wool—thanks to legend that the Roman authorities tortured him by scarifying his sides with metal combs. Similarly, Saint Agatha (February 5) is entirely legendary. But she was regularly invoked in medieval Sicily to prevent volcanic eruptions from Mount Etna, no doubt on account of the myth that her martyrdom involved double mastectomy.

    In such company it is scarcely surprising that there is not much that is true, or even likely, to tell about the best known of all the February saints, the patron of tacky Hallmark cards, unseasonable single red roses, and the midweek catering trade. We know for certain there was a shrine dedicated to a Saint Valentine just outside Rome as early as 352. The rest is legend—in fact, two legends: one revolving round Valentine of Rome, the other around Valentine of Terni, a hill-city many miles to the north. It was not until the time of Chaucer, a millennium after the construction of the Roman shrine, that we find people pairing off on February 14, and they seem to have been inspired not by the alleged deeds of either Valentine, but by noticing that this was the time when small birds found their mates. Fourteenth-century folk were as good at inventing traditions as the Victorians.

    In our gray world (and what is grayer than the slush churned by the buses in Uptown on a February evening?), it is a poor heart that never rejoices. There ought to be something that can warm and lubricate your Valentine’s Day (and, no doubt, your valentine). Everyone I ask about this suggests champagne. I disagree. For one thing, it’s cold, and what sensible person wants to add extra chill to a Minnesota winter? Second, even in small quantities it dries you out, causing particularly grim and enervating hangovers. But most important, the energy it imparts is evanescent; it lifts the spirits only to dump them good and hard afterward. Macbeth’s porter might well have been thinking of champagne when he said that much drink is an equivocator with lechery: “It provokes the desire, but it takes away from the performance.” Those who propose champagne are welcome to my share.

    I will choose something heart-warming, fruity, and red. Pinot noir is the grape from which the French make Burgundy. For a fraction of the cost of a bottle of good Burgundy (in fact, about twenty dollars—but your sweetheart’s worth it!), you can share Wild Horse pinot noir from the Central Coast of California, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The winery, founded little more than twenty years ago, gets its name from the local wild mustangs, descended from the horses brought by the Spaniards to the California missions. Wild Horse gathers grapes from vineyards spread widely across the region.

    Wild Horse pinot noir would be good on its own, with pâté or cheese, or with a wide variety of food. It is a wine that would look warm by firelight. I can imagine it well with roast wild duck, but you would need to cook a brace—they mate for life, not just for February. Good luck with your own valentine legend.

  • Orange Alert

    Orange Alert, everybody. Avoid crowds. But go shopping. Keep the economy strong. Have an emergency plan in place. A central location for you and your family to meet in the event of, oh, I don’t know…an explosion? The deadly release of a new Ben Affleck movie? Wash your hands, please, but masks are for the Jackson family.

    September 12, 2001, I went to the gym. I have a lifetime membership to Bally’s Total Fitness. As it turns out, a person can live a lifetime in just under five hours a year, three of those in the hot tub. But I digress.

    I had resolved that my life would forevermore be one long act of virtue. I hit the treadmill, then the weights. As I struggled to switch plates on the barbell, a rather studly man took pity on me and offered his assistance. He had flawless skin, the color of Ceylon tea, and his arms swelled in beautiful rounds out of his T-shirt. His back, held strong and straight, moved gracefully into powerful legs. His body was a temple, a sculpture, a shrine to decent living and strength.

    He set the bar and stayed to spot me. He talked a little bit about the use of free weights and I noticed that my friend had an accent. Now, I’ve never been off the continent, and I am not what you’d call a citizen of the world. I am, however, in the people business, and I like to hear of other places, even if I can’t go there.

    So I gave Handsome my best line. “Sounds like you got an accent there. Where are you from? North or South Dakota?”

    His eyes clouded over and he said, “Why? Are you afraid that I am a terrorist because I sound different? I am from here, same place as you.”

    I was horrified that I’d offended him and I tried to explain myself. “I was just curious about where your accent comes from. About where you come from and—”

    “I’ll tell you where I come from,” he said quietly, still angry. “I come from a place that has known true devastation, true terror. Look, what has happened, it is tragedy. But it is not devastation. If it were, you and I would not be here right now; we would be fighting to live, to eat. Let me tell you about where I come from.

    “Where I come from, people have the grace to starve to death. Here, if catastrophe reigned, the rich would eat the zoo animals, the middle class would eat their dogs, and the poor would eat each other.” And with that, he stalked off.

    I looked down at the fat pooling in my waist and thought, “I don’t have the grace to starve myself for two hours.” Then I thought: “Oh my God, he’s right!” And, like it or not, that man’s words haunted me as I feebly completed my workout, mind reeling, my eyes furtively darting round the room. Bally’s turned into Cub Foods.

    At first, I settled on the Costco-size person, and then I realized that my normal bulk shopping habits wouldn’t fly in the event of grid failure. Fun-size people would have to do—a more “European” shopping pattern, just buying enough for the day ahead. And suppose there were no market. Could I go “Ventura” and hunt the deadliest prey of all? Honey, I can’t stalk celery. And the only thing I’ve ever killed is time.

    Extreme situations force the strength or weakness of a person’s character out of the spider hole. One thing’s for sure: Disaster will come, be it up close and personal or worldwide and cataclysmic. Is it possible to duct-tape your heart to withstand suffering? Can you buy enough batteries to keep it beating until it heals? How do you go about your life while being prepared?

    This past holiday season under Orange Alert I thought about my gym buddy. Since then, I read the papers a little more carefully, and I still wonder where he comes from. Thing is, it could be a few different places, where grace lives.

  • Family’s Value

    Here we go again. A young, white, blond-haired blue-eyed woman is abducted, presumably by some dark-skinned nefarious person. The media play swells into hyper, almost orgiastic über-coverage. The military gets drafted to search for the damsel in distress, and, in the latest round, the governor calls for the death penalty and holds candlelight vigils.

    Excuse me if I sound just a little bit cynical about the overwhelming national outpouring of emotional stuff about Dru Sjodin. Yes, the abduction and presumed murder of Sjodin is tragic. However, I cannot shake this deep-seated resentment that wells up inside me whenever I read yet another story about her abduction.

    I want to shout in anguish: What about the nameless black women and American Indian women who have been and continue to be stolen, raped and murdered? Do we launch dramatic rescues to save them? Do we send the National Guard looking for them? Does the governor make an impassioned plea to bring back the death penalty because something bad happened to them?

    Are you kidding? This is America, where certain lives have a greater value than others.

    A good friend of mine told me to be careful about this column. After all, I have a blond-haired, blue-eyed wife. Yes, I do. And I also have a dark-haired, dark-skinned sister and mother. As much as I love my wife, it makes me mad as hell to realize that, in all probability, her abduction would rate more media attention than one of her dark-skinned sisters-in-law.

    With our nation’s sordid past of measuring one’s worth based on appearance and ethnicity, why should we expect anything different? The men who wrote our Constitution explicitly held that black people were worth three-fifths of a white person, placing into law what most white people accepted without much thought—that a black life was worth less than a white one.

    There is a collective memory that most black people share, at some deep level, of the day-to-day humiliations, of beatings, cross-burnings, and Jim Crow, that even bourgeois black folk cannot completely exorcise. And the goal of the beatings and burnings was to keep the races separate, lest white women be ruined. Ever since we have been in America, we have seen white women held up as a commodity to be protected at all costs, especially from the swarthy men who were most likely to do them harm. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas knew full well what he was doing when he called his confirmation confrontation a high-tech lynching. He knew that black people, regardless of political orientation, would instinctively circle the wagons to keep another brother from being lynched from the tree of sexual impropriety.

    Now, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., Sjodin’s alleged abductor, is not a “brother”; however, with his Latino surname and less-than-ivory skin tone, he is close enough for many Minnesotans. Governor Pawlenty has had a year’s worth of criminal mayhem to pick from as the launching pad for his death penalty crusade. Yet this so-called pro-life governor picked the snatching of an attractive Scandinavian princess, and not the murder and/or abduction of a dark-skinned Minnesotan, to bring back the state-sanctioned snuffing of a life. That speaks volumes about whose lives have the most value.

    I am sure that some of the more jaded readers are thinking, “There he goes again, playing the race card.” I am upset about Dru Sjodin because it was such a terrible crime. Race had nothing to do with it.

    Many readers probably believe that I am race-baiting. OK, name one abduction of a woman of color in Minnesota that led to any of the following—national media coverage, a National Guard search, a gubernatorial press conference complete with a vow to kill sexual predators that prey on the Dru Sjodins of this state.

    I am not advocating that we ignore things like the Dru Sjodin abduction. I readily admit that it is newsworthy and it is upsetting when these kinds of crime happen to people. I just want the people who look like Dru Sjodin to be just as concerned and outraged when the people who look like my sister have bad things happen to them. Why is it news only when the victim is white?

  • Sweet and French

    Who now reads Charles Morgan? Some years ago there was a revival of his novel The Gunroom, which proved to anyone who was interested that the middle one of Churchill’s three Traditions of the Royal Navy (Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash) was a living reality for young officers of the Edwardian Era.

    Morgan’s masterpiece is The Fountain, a thoughtful love story set during the First World War. The unkind complain that the characters talk more about doing less than any others in literature (even those of E.M. Forster, his older contemporary), but what could be more absorbing than serious reflection on serious sentiment, especially if it is presented in dignified English prose rather than modish modern psychobabble?

    It was not only inner lives Charles Morgan could delineate; he was expert at placing people in a landscape. The Voyage begins in 1883 among the green chalk combes of western France, north of Bordeaux just inland from the Atlantic, the land bisected by the river Charente, the land where Cognac comes from. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the vineyards of Europe were being laid waste by a tiny insect from the East Coast of the United States called Phylloxera vastatrix; the name means literally Dryleaf the Devastator, which sounds like something out of Tolkien. In its own land it lives by sucking sap from the hard roots of the American vine Vitis labrusca so when it came to France and found the soft rootstock of Vitis vinifera the European grapevine, it behaved like a mouse munching through a wheel of Brie. It took years to perfect the science of grafting French vines onto hard American root stock; it was during this hiatus in brandy production that Scotch whiskey really established itself as a popular alternative in the smoking rooms of London clubs. In the meantime Charles Morgan’s hero Barbet was having anxious discussions with the parish priest about the spread into neighboring vales of the vine pest, “the accursed green fly.”

    This is a novel full of food and drink. In the first scene, Barbet, an amiable man as unworldly as he is wise, takes a big pot of homemade stew to the six prisoners in the local jail, which he runs in his old farm buildings. Charente is a part of the world where eating and drinking are taken seriously. Even today, in a France where young folk are supposed to be knee-deep in McDonald’s wrappers, one may read in a Jarnac school newsletter that the children are to benefit from a program of éveil sensoriel (sensual awakening—it sounds better in French) based on discovering the pleasures of eating local produce. Lucky old them, I say.

    No doubt as part of their awakening they will meet (in suitably moderate quantities) the sweet local wine Pineau des Charentes. This appealing pudding wine is made in both white and rosé, though the white is much more easily found than the pink. It is of varying ages, from twelve months to twelve years—the older the better. And it owes its sweetness not to the grape varieties from which it is made (claret grapes for the pink, a whole range of varieties for the white) but to the local brandy used to arrest its fermentation as soon as the grapes have been pressed. One part spirit to three parts grape juice prevents the grape sugars from turning into alcohol.

    Pineau des Charentes was allegedly discovered when someone in the 16th century poured brandy into a barrel of freshly pressed grape juice. The legend seems set a little early for the development of brandewijn by the Dutch in the seventeenth century—though this was indeed one of the areas where canny Dutch merchants of the Rembrandt era got their grapes. Whether or not either legend is true, white Pineau des Charentes goes well with creamy things, custard, or Brie. And the rosé is that rare thing, a wine that goes well with chocolate. Lightly chilled, this is one of life’s simple pleasures. As innocent and as amiable, perhaps, as Charles Morgan’s Barbet.

  • Refugees at Home

    I swear to heaven that it sounded like a good idea at the time.

    Hypnotized by HGTV, we took a perfectly good kitchen (if not our aesthetic ideal), ripped it out by the seams, and have for the last four months given a painful, bloody Lamaze-style birth to the placement of each pantry cupboard, each major home appliance, each light fixture.

    We have weathered swirling Iraqi sandstorms of sawdust as new floors were placed and finished, fled clouds of toxic polyurethane gas as wooden surfaces were sealed, and watched the dumpster in our front yard fill up with the shattered remains of our once calm lives. My husband estimates that it’s also half full of hundred-dollar bills.

    Our entry in the brutally competitive South Minneapolis home-remodeling derby got out of control in a classic example of mission creep. The kitchen remodel begat the brainstorm of knocking down the living room walls and making everything flow. That led to the inspiration to replace the first floor’s retirement-age windows with modern ones. The great new light and sightlines made the old fireplace look frowsy, so we ordered a radical facelift. Each project dominoed into a half-dozen others.

    We can hold no one but ourselves responsible for this, our own personal Alamo. We cannot indulge in a soul-exfoliating self-pity party, and neither can we finger-point our way to blamelessness. Note to the contractors: Please send all future invoices and correspondence to Husband and Wife, Chumptown, USA.

    Our household consists of three teenagers, two adults, and a predictable stream of neighbor kids. That makes for one busy kitchen. Oh, I promised in the beginning of this unrest that I’d drink Slim Fast and Instant Breakfast every morning, and hand the kids piping hot toaster strudels on the way to school, then make it up to them nutritionally with crisp, sweet apples and a balanced, root-vegetable-laden slow-cooker meal in the evening. But no. Pizza it is, three times a week, and pizza it will be, until this is all said and done with.

    Not all the feathers in our humble nest are ruffled. The mini camp kitchen in our basement TV room is like a dream come true to our kids. Now, they need only slog five feet’s distance from the beanbag chair to the microwave oven, jab at the buttons blindly while keeping both eyes focused on the Cartoon Network, and in thirty seconds yank out a salty, yellow gravy-rich Santa Fe chicken pocket. The middle teen eats a diet that consists of Wonder Bread, peanut butter sandwiches, and microwaved bacon. While he remains Keith Richards-thin, we’re convinced that he’s on his way to total cholesterol collapse. We’re thinking of stirring a Flintstone vitamin/Lipitor drug cocktail into the Skippy. It’s chunky style; he’ll never notice.

    We actually bought the components of this dream kitchen last year. They sat out on our breezy sleeping porch during the warm months, ruining our summer. And now, rested by their vacation, they’re ruining our winter, disrupting the school year, business trips, and major holidays.

    Maybe that’s not a bad thing. On the last two holidays we’ve hosted, major snafus have gone down. Last Christmas, we forgot to turn the oven on and we served up a fully frozen ham for dinner. And the Thanksgiving before that, I set the turkey on fire. I was trying to save time, using one of those newfangled Reynolds Oven Bags. The fire department tracked the problem to me shoving a twenty-two-pound turkey into a fifteen-pound bag. Old habits die hard, I guess. That’s the same logic I apply to my wardrobe.

    Or maybe it’s just that our kitchen space is cursed. I should look at this project as an exorcism. A healing time to clear out the bad culinary juju and begin afresh. The next holiday we’re set to host is Easter, and if all goes well, we might have the countertops in by then. We’ll say a prayer of Thanksgiving. Jesus saves. And Domino’s delivers.

  • Who’s in Charge Here?

    Remember those low-budget horror films from the 1950s? Other-worldly music would play, and then a creepy creature would land its spaceship in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, slither out, and tell the first startled Earthling, “Take me to your leader.” Now, as then, we laugh at the idea that there could possibly be “one leader” of anything—unless you’re talking about black people. Sadly, most white people and even a few misguided black ones expect that there must be one, two, or maybe three individuals who speak for all black people. This is a stupid, racist, outmoded view of the world that must be discarded once and for all.

    During slavery, “Massa” would often appoint one or two trusted field hands as overseers of the other slaves. Instead of having to interact with many slaves, Massa would simply give the word to the “head nigger in charge,” who would take it from there. For slave owners, who viewed black people as simple-minded chattel, the system made perfect sense. Why deal with fifty to a hundred darkies when one could easily limit contact to a manageable one or two? Underpinning this system were two concepts—first, that the HNIC was selected, not elected. Second, and more important, the HNIC was merely a go-between for the white and black folks. The HNIC could never really serve as an advocate for fellow blacks and sure as hell could not tell the white folks what to do.

    Now, many people think things have changed. We have Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—African-Americans who have risen well above HNIC status. But when it comes to the bread and butter stuff that most of us care about, the impulse to find the HNIC is still pervasive, at least here in Minnesota.

    Consider one of the most recent examples—the fallout from the allegation by Stephen Porter that Minneapolis cops sodomized him with a toilet plunger during a drug raid. In the tense days that followed, a number of good ol’ white boys openly questioned who speaks for black folks (in other words, who’s the HNIC) in this town. Mayor R.T. Rybak got publicly sliced and diced at a North Side rally. Referring to Spike Moss and Rev. Randy Staten, he asked aloud, “Who do these people represent?” Rybak probably thought he was asking a legitimate question—who do you speak for? Why should I listen to you? He failed to grasp that, given our country’s shameful racial legacy, any white person asking that question in a racially tinged crisis about black community activists would hit a nerve of deep resentment and distrust. Once again, black folks made Massa mad for failing to have him anoint the next HNIC.

    Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow, picking up where Rybak left off, decided that by venturing into what he perceived as hood central, a North Minneapolis barbershop, he could talk with a few brothers and, working on the presumption that all black people think alike, verify who the real HNIC is.

    Think about that—imagine me going to an Edina barbershop and telling the locals there the equivalent of, “Hey, white people, take me to your leader.” Who would take me seriously?

    I am not trying to beat up—at least not too much—on the well-meaning Doug Grow or our politically challenged mayor. After all, there are those in the African-American community who do believe that we should march in political lockstep. But that doesn’t excuse Rybak. His blundering attempt to find an “authentic voice” of the African-American community is arrogant and unenlightened. I do not think that Spike Moss or Rev. Randy Staten speak for all black people in Minneapolis, any more than I believe Rep. Arlon Lindner (who seriously believed that gays were not persecuted during the Holocaust) speaks for all white Minnesotans.

    Hopefully, people like R.T. Rybak will come to understand that they cannot expect to act like Massa on the plantation and talk to one or two trusted HNICs to find out what the field hands are thinking. He, along with the Doug Grows of the world, must learn that African-Americans in this town do not think, talk, or act as one big monolithic block. Bottom line: Y’all ain’t Massa, and we ain’t slaves.

  • Gratification for the Patient

    I like starting novels in the middle. By skipping all those establishing shots, which exclude as much as they reveal, you’re able to catch the author and the characters off their guard. Also, once you have finished, you can start again at the beginning and have the paradoxical pleasure of reading the book for the first time twice.

    My father did the same. When I was about ten years old, he left on the chair next to the bath the ideal book for those who read like we do. It has color, and some of the most memorable comic characters in English fiction, but, as the author proudly proclaims, nothing much by way of a plot.

    Like many Victorian novels, Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross was issued originally as a serial in separate monthly parts. The hero is a relatively rough diamond, a prosperous London grocer called John Jorrocks. Oddly for a Londoner, his principal passion is foxhunting, though he is not above mixing business with pleasure. He was known to have cantered after a fresh acquaintance in the hunting field, calling out, “Did you say two chests of black tea and one of green?” The man leapt a fence to get away from him.

    Second only to Jorrocks’s passion for foxhunting was his passion for port. Claret he despised—“I can make you some, if you like,” he told a guest, “with water, vinegar, a lemon and a little drop of port.” Brandy and water was less a pleasure than a form of central heating. But port “wot leaves a mark on the side of the glass” gave ample opportunity to mull over (and magnify) the triumphs of a day’s sport.

    By Jorrocks’s time, port had been the favorite wine of Englishmen for over a hundred years. Jorrocks’s racier contemporary Jack Mytton drank eight bottles a day, the first while he was shaving in the morning. He died young—of trying to cure his hiccups by setting fire to his nightshirt.

    Port is in fact a by-product of the wars fought by Britain all through the eighteenth century—wars that prevented the France of Louis XIV and Napo-leon from dominating Europe. Fighting France meant less claret coming across the English Channel from Bordeaux and led to closer links between England and Portugal.

    The alliance encouraged the wine trade. Soon after the Methuen Treaty of 1703, merchants discovered that vintages from Portugal crossed the stormy Bay of Biscay better if they had first been spiked with brandy. The same methods they developed are used to make the wine we enjoy today. Early during fermentation, the process by which natural sugars would normally become alcohol is arrested by the addition of brandy. The result is both sweet and intoxicating, ideal for drinking slowly after dinner with apples, nuts, Stilton cheese, or a biscuit.

    Port comes in various styles: Ruby port is drunk young, having spent most of its life in cask; tawny port is generally older and sometimes has a dryish tinge to the taste. The greatest of all, vintage port, is the wine of a season considered sufficiently remarkable by an individual maker for him to risk his reputation by declaring it a vintage year. In some years only a few houses will declare a vintage. Vintage port spends only a couple of years in cask, so it grows old in bottle. This can be a lengthy process—the wines of 1963 and 1977 still have time on their side, and 1997 won’t be at its best for years yet. And maturing in bottle means that crud accumulates; if vintage port isn’t stored carefully the wine becomes clouded with sediment.

    Vintage port is the enemy of instant gratification (which might be why California has so far failed to produce a convincing port, though there is a pleasing drink made there, wittily called Starboard). Long years in bottle must end with sensitive decanting. But it is absolutely worth the effort. There is nothing like the slow, deep sweetness of vintage port. This is a pleasure for people with patience.

  • Alma Mater? Don’t Know Her.

    Aw, hell. You won’t believe what I got myself into. So I’ll just tell you. I’m going to be a guest speaker at my old high school for career day.

    Delicious irony #1: I never completed high school.
    Delicious irony #2: Either they never bothered to check this fact, or they don’t care.

    My dilemma came about innocently enough. Last week a favorite old teacher of mine (Home Economics—easy A) contacted me through the dark magic of the Internet and asked if I’d like to share the secret of my success. Hmm. Instantly, a cartoon devil and a cartoon angel appeared on my shoulders. The demon, as always, spoke first. “Righteous! That is soooo cool! You have to do it—just make it up as you go along—half of those snot rags won’t be listening. And you’ll get welcomed back to your old stomping grounds as a hero! You’ll probably even get to drink crappy coffee in the teachers’ lounge!”

    And the angel whispered: “No, Colleen. It would be wrong. The other half of the snot rags would be listening, and it would be unethical for you to pretend that your creative successes in life have had anything to do with basic education.”

    In the face of such brutal logic, the proud demon raged. He puffed out his little cinnamon-colored chest and scraped at the filthy sawdust floor of my brain with his cloven hoof, kicking up dirt and leaving all rational thought clouded in a sandstorm of bitter, congestive arrogance. “Don’t be lame!” He bellowed. “What are you, chicken?! BOK-BOK-BOK-BOK!”

    Reeling, I hit reply, typed in an affirmative, and hit send. The angel shook her head sadly and floated away in the turquoise mist of higher aspiration, to the place where DVDs are returned on time, and vegetables are eaten at every meal.

    “Wicked sweet, chica.” The demon paused and gave me the thumbs up before heading out the door. “I gotta go. Got to…uh, polish my horn—but when you get to school, tell the lunch lady I said hi. And tell her to keep playin’ that Powerball, ’cause ya never know!” Poof.

    Now I’m stuck. The only way to redeem this situation is to tell them the truth. So here it is, kids. I hate to puncture those rock-star daydreams with a sharp economic truth, but your teachers are right: No high school diploma + no secondary education = twenty-odd years of minimum wage. Folks like me in the non-graduating class are more likely to bear children outside of committed relationships, and those children are susceptible to a veritable Russian roulette wheel of bad fortune. Substandard health care. Dangerous neighborhoods. Neglect. And the longer you wait to go back to school, the less likely it is to make any sort of difference in your income. (Pretty tough luck in the job market to be a forty-five-year-old with a brand-new associate’s degree.)

    I can tell them about the regularly recurring intervals of social fear that I encounter in conversation with minds more educated than mine. How I pray the frozen smile and glassy stare will cover my ignorance until I can change the subject to something I’m well-versed in, like back issues of People. How I’ve made a spare living from tips, and from making comedic sport of every foolhardy choice I ever made. That when you make five bucks an hour, you can’t afford to be too proud—because wearing that neon dunce cap has paid the rent for me more than once.

    Would I be on a different career path if I had earned my diploma all those years ago? I suppose not. Would I be better off? I’m sure of it. That little piece of paper is a building block, a support beam. A place to plan, to nurture life passions that can sustain us through to the end of one goal, and then another. I’ll tell them that in life, rarely are things so beautifully cut and dried, so simple, as showing up between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. and working hard. Earning your marks. And if there’s one thing I learned to be, it’s a hard worker. It’s what makes me what I am. An unqualified success.

  • Take No Shorts

    You may shoot me with your words,
    But still, like air, I’ll rise.
    -Maya Angelou

    Ever since she toppled incumbent Jackie Cherryhomes in 2001, Minneapolis Fifth Ward council member Natalie Johnson Lee, the council’s lone African-American woman, has continued to rise. She has successfully deflected and deflated those wanting to blow her off-especially the North Side wannabes and has-beens who are bitter that Johnson Lee derailed the Cherryhomes gravy train, and the DFL potentates who mock her as an “Angela Davis with funky hair.”

    “These are the same people who said that I could not beat Jackie. They are mad because, through me, people who have been disrespected are getting access,” she told me recently.

    Johnson Lee got her “incredible fighting spirit,” as one council member called it, growing up scrappy, black, and working class in Oklahoma City. According to Johnson Lee, a single mother at seventeen, her family taught her that she had “every right to be who I was.” Their motto was “don’t give no shorts [Johnsonspeak for slighting someone] and don’t take no shorts.”

    After high school, she landed in Philadelphia and earned a two-year accounting degree. From there, she started working for General Mills, who eventually enticed her to Minnesota. After a stint in the corporate “big house,” as she puts it, Johnson Lee got into employment training jobs, first at the Urban League and then the Employers Association.

    When husband Travis failed to unseat DFLer Cherryhomes in 1997, Johnson Lee decided to take up the mantle in 2001 under the Green Party banner. She firmly believes that her husband, who managed her campaign, paved the way for her improbable seventy-six-vote victory margin against the allegedly unbeatable Cherryhomes.

    Johnson Lee, who won with little support or respect from old North Side guardians like the Urban League and the black clergy, suddenly had to play nice with people who had actively campaigned against her. She says of her relationships with them, “We’re cool now. We have conversations together.” But the tightness in her voice betrays her knowledge that many in the old guard would knock her off in a hot minute. “Jackie gave them a lot of goodies over the years. They were understandably reluctant to give them up.”

    Getting the proper respect is a recurring theme with Johnson Lee. Those who know her on the council say that she can be quick to turn a phrase or a look into a sign of disrespect. Says one of her closest allies, “Disrespecting Natalie is a very bad thing to do. If she senses that people are not taking her seriously, she will get in their face.”

    Some well-placed political veterans, such as former council member Lisa McDonald, say this in-your-face approach is just what Minneapolis politicos need. “Natalie is the only one at City Hall shaking it up and rattling cages. What has Don Samuels done besides sit in a tent and go hungry? She sure has [Mayor] R.T. Rybak’s shorts in a bundle.” Still, McDonald believes that Johnson Lee could use more political “savoir faire” instead of sometimes “needlessly pissing people off.”

    Some of Johnson Lee’s council colleagues agree with McDonald. One member flatly told me her “stuff is raggedy” and that she relies too heavily on others to do the heavy lifting on tough procedural battles. Johnson Lee counters that she refuses to use Robert’s Rules as a “manipulation tool.” “I can go head to head with the best of them when I need to.”

    Yet the criticism, despite Johnson Lee’s tough exterior, stings a little. “The learning curve here has been huge,” she admits. “I’ve had to get used to the backstabbing nature of Minneapolis politics. I’ve had to try to work with people like R.T. Rybak, who thinks he is a great teacher, but is not always very teachable, especially when it comes to black people.” After pausing for a moment, she says, “I make no apologies for who I am and how I serve the people who sent me here. R.T., the old DFL machine, the black preachers-they did not make me and will not define me. I have just as much right to advocate, negotiate, and yes, piss people off-as any other Minneapolis council member. This is my house, too.”