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Duluth has a polo club left over from the days when it was one of the richest cities in America. Old Italian men still play bocce ball in the city’s West End. The Coney Island hot dog stand is the same one my dad went to in 1922, and the menu boards are still up from those days. If you walk in the woods you find, in the middle of the wild, a lilac bush that once stood by someone’s front door, and sometimes the stones of that doorsill, too—an archaeology of the mundane. There used to be more people here, not less. The green is sprawling back over the built land (which is the opposite of what happens farther south, where stone and asphalt spread in a ceaseless glaciation).

Skyline Parkway is part of this—Duluth’s future receding into the past. It’s an almost-continuous route that lies along the crest of the basalt hills like a stone boa, running parallel to the lakeshore through the entire city. The views from almost anywhere along its length are spectacular, except when it disappears into the scruffy forest that replaced the original white pines. The road has a long and interesting history, tied up with the abortive dream of Duluth becoming the “largest city in the nation.”

The parkway was built piecemeal from 1889 on, initially pushed forward by William Rogers, the first head of Duluth’s parks board. Rogers had been President Rutherford B. Hayes’s private secretary, and later, as a real estate developer, acted as the agent for property Hayes owned in Duluth.

Rogers seems to have been pathologically optimistic. His estimate for building the first five miles of the parkway was five thousand dollars; it cost three hundred thousand. In a letter to Hayes, his statement regarding the future of the city was equally wide of the mark: “It is easy to read its future now, standing on the upper terrace of the bluff overlooking the City … [no one can] doubt that one of the great cities of the world is here in the making—one of the largest if not the largest on the continent.”

In those early days, tallyho parties in horse-drawn coaches rode the Parkway, which was to have served as the spine for an elaborate system of greenways and parks that would lace the hill to the shores of Lake Superior. These, sadly, were never built.

The Parkway, though, eventually extended east to Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve, and on to Seven Bridges Road, named for the stone bridges that were Mayor Snively’s legacy (this stretch of road was his gift to the city, and in the 1920s, Snively used to show up there in overalls to put in time with the work crews before heading to City Hall). To the southwest, it pushed on all the way to Jay Cooke State Park, though this segment is now in ruins.

Now, you can pick up Skyline Parkway at Beck’s Road, just west of the city. Intermittently graveled and paved, it runs up Spirit Mountain and along the ridge above the city, passing Enger Tower above and the old industrial landscape of Gary and West Duluth below, ’til it finally starts snaking into the city streets. It takes some persistence to follow the Parkway through this stretch, as it appears and disappears into the city grid, occasionally adopting other names in its circuitous route through the neighborhoods. But if you make it to Hawk Ridge, you’re back on Skyline proper. From there, the parkway goes unplowed in the winter and can be pretty rough any time of year, but its ridge offers the best place for watching migrating birds and thunderstorms.

From Seven Bridges Road, the parkway winds down through boreal forest and crosses Amity Creek, with its little rapids and waterfalls, seven times until it emerges onto Superior Street just past Sixtieth Avenue East, some thirty miles from where it began.

Walking north along Second Street through Northeast Minneapolis, one eventually happens upon the most unusual variant of a white picket fence: Based roughly on piano keys, it has the occasional cutout or half-missing panel that allows passersby a peek into a thriving vegetable garden. This artsy parapet belongs to David Salmela, a musician, software designer, and, most visibly, the owner and co-curator of Creative Electric Studios, the gallery and performing arts space adjacent to the gardens, which seems to collect rock musicians and all their tangential art projects. Although the fence was built to look more welcoming than forbidding, Salmela said that neighbors subscribe to varying opinions about it. As one old-timer strolling by recently asked him, “Did you make that fence? Were you drunk when you did it?”

With uncombed blond hair, saucer-shaped blue eyes, and a wardrobe of rumpled T-shirts and jeans, the thirty-five-year-old Salmela exudes the sort of youthful exuberance that might be mistaken, by cynics, for naiveté. Certainly, there’s a pipedream quality about his plans for the old storefront. But that impression would overlook the considerable amount of muscle and thought he’s already put into improving the place, which was essentially a floor-to-ceiling trash heap when he bought it in 2001. Today, the building and its grounds serve not only as an art gallery, performance space, and community gathering spot; the upper-level apartment is also home to Salmela, Jenny Adams (his girlfriend and Creative Electric co-curator), and pal Kurt Froehlich (also a curator at the space).

The fence came about when Salmela contacted the renowned, Duluth-based architect with whom he shares both a first and last name (but to whom he is not related). “I asked him if he would like to do a project with me and he said ‘Yes, but I have a waiting list of two years,’ ” the non-architect Salmela recalled. “‘But I have this son-in-law in the Twin Cities … ’” And that’s how Salmela hooked up with another architect, Souliyahn Keobounpheng.

Keobounpheng designed the fence, and drew up the plans for an ultra-modern shed that juts off the back of the building like a caboose and is made of various found materials, mostly wavy corrugated sheet metal. The architect’s plans for a third-floor addition and renovation of the garage into art studios are yet to be realized. Salmela is still chewing over the presumably steep price tag for those projects; but, he insisted cheerfully, where there’s a will there’s a way. “I’ll figure out a way to do it. I want to do it,” he said.

Salmela’s gumption is not dependent on Keobounpheng’s involvement. Inside the building, he and friends have hammered out a loft that doubles as a guestroom for visiting artists and storage space. Upstairs, he installed a handsome tin ceiling as well as an eco-friendly (and newly trendy) corn-burning stove, which he and Adams discovered at the Living Green Expo. Another ecological feature: To minimize storm-water runoff (and the associated tax the city slaps on “impermeable surfaces”), Salmela designed and built a rain catcher. The contraption collects water from the building’s rooftop and deposits it, via a large pipeline, into a two-hundred-gallon tin tub, where it stands ready to water the beets, peas, and squash.

The Chinese have been using acupuncture for cosmetic purposes for centuries; while here, in the medically advanced West, we like to suffer for our beauty by winching away the years or injecting our faces with bovine toxin. But these methods give some people pause, especially when they can no longer even furrow their brows to think about it. Combine hesitancy about such invasive methods with simultaneous acceptance of acupuncture and holistic medicine and, bing-bang, constitutional facial acupuncture renewal is now offered at spas and acupuncturists throughout the Twin Cities.

The key word is “constitutional.” “Beauty is about health,” said Peggy Miller, a St. Paul acupuncturist, massage therapist, and herbal-medicine specialist. “I would take a complete history, look at your tongue and feel your pulse, and treat the whole person, not just your wrinkles. If we can improve circulation, reduce stress or pain, and generally improve your health as we stimulate the muscles and lines on your face, you’ll look better. People won’t think, ‘Wow, surgery.’ They’ll think you look rested and healthy.” Acupuncture clients are also encouraged to actively enhance the process by making dietary or lifestyle changes.

I was on the table in Miller’s office with a bolster under my knees, nature sounds on the boom box, a fountain trickling in the background, and a warm towel over my face. I’d decided to check this acupuncture thing out. Miller had put a few skinny needles in my wrists and ankles to give my qi (the Chinese term for energy, life force, mojo) a heads-up. She replaced the towel with a paper mask that had been steeped in herbal tea and anchored with a heated gel mask. Since this was the Reader’s Digest version of the process, I relaxed for five minutes before getting down to it.

Miller explained that different points on the face respond differently when stimulated—motor points can stimulate a muscle to contract (lifting jowls, for example) or they can sedate the muscle and thereby relax lines, which is the idea behind Botox. There are points that stimulate qi, bringing moisture and blood circulation to the face. Inserting needles in deep lines causes micro-trauma that the body attempts to address by pumping blood to the scene, plumping it up, and filling out the line. Some acupuncture facials involve up to eighty tiny needles, but I was happy to get by on only eight, since they stung a little at first. Peggy turned down the lights and went away for fifteen minutes, during which time I meditated about what to make for dinner and my qi visited some places it hadn’t seen for a while. Miller, who is old enough to call herself a hippie, yet has lineless, glowing skin, returned to remove the needles and paint my face with a mixture of egg whites, herbs, and flowers. This she removed with a warm towel, afterward massaging in some face food—a moisturizing herbal concoction of food-grade purity.

Technically, the two jade face rollers (like a mini paint roller, but with cool jade stones where the fluffy roller would be) massage and calm all that heat and qi that have percolated up to your face. I just liked the way they felt and the soft, clicking sound they made. Miller then spritzed me with rose water and sandalwood and said I could lie there until I was ready to leave, or until they locked the building.

Miller recommends between ten and twelve treatments, as does Bonnie West, the acupuncturist at Fusion LifeSpa in Deephaven. You may require occasional tweaks after that to perk up your liver and brighten your complexion. Miller charges fifty to sixty dollars for what is usually a ninety-minute appointment. West gets more than a hundred dollars, and word has it that New Yorkers will pay as much as three hundred dollars to galvanize their qi. But compare these prices with the three to five thousand dollars it costs to get an average facelift, or the eight hundred dollars for Botox, and acupuncture starts to seem like such a bargain that your frown lines will disappear like magic.

Daughter could not discern outright wrinkle reduction at dinner that night, but noted that the pasta seemed to have been prepared by a person with the soul and spleen of a twenty-two-year-old.

This is “sort of a mini Fringe,” according to the organizational brains behind this endeavor, although this particular festival does bear the modest touch of a curator. Hundreds of scripts for ten-minute plays, mostly by local writers, were submitted to the Bedlam company. They plucked the finest of the bunch—which, in most cases, meant the funniest—assigning them a director and cast of Bedlam regulars as well as non-actors from the streets of Cedar-Riverside. The resulting program of sixteen bite-sized playlets leans heavily upon stilt-walkers and other lo-fi antics that are the signature of Bedlam’s punk-rock gypsy aesthetic. 514 1/2 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-341-1038; www.bedlamtheatre.org

Done in the style of an old-fashioned radio play, this production comes replete with the sound effects that go beyond approaching footsteps and door slamming. The zinger part of Kid-Simple’s plot is that its protagonist, a high school science-fair champ named Moll, has invented a hypersensitive listening device that amplifies the world around us. Minneapolis-based playwright Jordan Harrison has written in all sorts of crazy effects that set up the show’s sound artist, another local named Mike Hallenbeck, with quite the challenge. How to realize the racket of batting eyelashes, or create the sound of a field mouse’s growing toenails? Tom Keith, the Prairie Home Companion sound-effects maestro, might have some competition waiting in the wings. 1501 4th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-6131; www.emigranttheater.org

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is notoriously thorny where film and stage adaptations, even the recent premiere that inaugurated the Guthrie’s new theater, are concerned. Leave it to a group of avant-garde New Yorkers to set aside the adaptation imperative and take on the whole enchilada: Basically, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz is an unabridged audio version of The Great Gatsby performed, word for word, onstage. The conceit is that an ordinary office worker has cracked open the book and, as he gets drawn in, prevails upon coworkers to play out the scenes; the goal is to have certain Gatsby images spring to life onstage as they do, so indelibly, in the minds of readers. And apparently these Service folks have hit on something, receiving wondrous reviews in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Zurich (this is Gatz’s American premiere). While the onstage antics do add some humor that F. Scott never intended, be aware that this undertaking goes for six and a half hours—no joke. View it on consecutive evenings or take it all in during one marathon performance. 612-375-7600; www.performingarts.walkerart.org

This show was initially set to wrap in July. But after critics laid it on thick with praise and audiences started lining up for their sultry Tennessee Williams fix, the Torch Theater cleared the way for a run into September. No doubt one of the production’s biggest attractions is Stacia Rice, who wowed audiences a couple of years ago with her portrayal of Blanche DuBois (and is also at the helm of this new-ish company). Apparently she knows her strengths, now sinking her teeth into Maggie, the desirable but ultimately sex-starved and childless—and thus, of course, hysterical—woman at the heart of this classic. 711 Franklin Ave. W., Minneapolis; 952-929-9097; www.torchtheater.com

Coming up from the rambunctious Hijackers: a duet exploring the “unique gender” of male figure skaters, and a ballet set to tunes from a polka songstress called Lady Hard On. By boldly approaching modern dance with a certain irreverence, the veteran duo of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder have become widely known, and quite respected for their oddball tastes (they’ve been at it for a dozen years now, so they’re obviously winning people over). For example, they’re fond of presenting pop-video-style miniatures to dance audiences accustomed to longer and more ponderous fare. For this program they’ve divided their powers, each choreographing in isolation to create pieces for the other to perform. 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

All The King’s Men provokes more questions than interest: Why another version of Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning 1949 film? To show that Sean Penn can outdo Broderick Crawford’s iconic Willie Stark? To introduce Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to modern audiences, and perhaps draw likenesses to the stumblebum currently in the White House? If so, that’s a stretch—Willie Stark is nothing if not Huey Long, governor of Depression-era Louisiana and probable failed presidential candidate. With apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, George W. is no Kingfish. The remake boasts an all-star cast trolling for golden statuettes and looks like a pleasant diversion for folks who enjoy big-budget costume and set design, but something tells us you’re better off renting the original.

Showing as part of the Heights Theater’s eightieth-anniversary celebration, Vincente Minnelli’s masterpiece is not to be missed on the big screen. For all its nostalgic kitsch, this musical—one of the golden era’s finest—is surprisingly powerful. The gossamer plot, involving nothing more than Father Smith landing a job in New York, thus forcing his family to leave beloved St. Louie behind, meshes perfectly with the music and spot-on performances. Most notably, of course, Judy Garland plays one of the Smith daughters, falling in love, growing up, and singing all the way. Margaret O’Brien, who played younger sister “Tootie,” will introduce the film.