Chicken Bake Bonanza

During a recent trip to Costco, a customer walked past me with 25 cases of Diet Coke in their wagon. Even by Costco standards that seemed a wee bit gluttonous. But who was I to judge? I was there to buy a pork loin the size of an anaconda. At the end of my shopping … Read more

Dialogue

No pictures from the rehearsal yesterday. We forgot. Too many other things came up. Hopefully, we’ll get them tonight, and I’ll post them tomorrow — which will be my last post and where I’ll make a final pitch for you to pick up that phone and make a reservation. I suspect that hearing how the … Read more

Indoor Outdoor

BOOKS & AUTHORSCharles Baxter’s Soul Thief Those of us who have been to grad school know how difficult it can be, and how easy it can be to slip into breakdown mode. But best-selling author and U of M professor Charles Baxter takes this to a whole new level in his latest novel The Soul … Read more

The Wi-Fi Doofus

When it come to computers, I’m a full blown idiot. As a stay-at-home dad, my day usually involves hooting like an orangutan and tending to my son’s poopy pants—not exactly a George Clooney lifestyle. But when my ancient candy colored iMac recently barked and hissed at me when I tried to open a simple email, … Read more

The Play That Won't Go Away

This play, Everywhere Signs Fall, has been around my life in some form or another longer than any other play I’ve written. When I was 24 and still more of a person who said he was a writer than a person who wrote, I remember sitting at a bar somewhere with my girlfriend-at-the-time and the … Read more

The Next Best Thing to Breast

Back in the late 1980’s, when I was weaning my oldest child and attending meetings of the breastfeeding network La Leche League, I became convinced that pasteurized milk was the root of all evil. Hey, I was 22 years old. I’d fed my darling infant nothing but 100 percent pure breastmilk for the first 10 … Read more

New Books This Year

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No Foolin' Around

BOOKS, AUTHORS & PHOTOGRAPHYSuburban World: The Norling Photos "Where is Brad Zellar?" you might ask, as his hiatus from The Rake has created quite a void. Happily, he’s been busy promoting his new book, Suburban World: The Norling Photos, from Borealis Books. Zellar discovered Irwin Norling in 2002, when he unearthed Norling’s neglected negatives from … Read more

Opening Night: And So It Begins. Again.

AP photo by Tom Olmscheid Representatives of the local sporting press —of which I am a decidedly derelict member— were packed cheek to jowl in the Herb Carneal Memorial Press Box at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome Monday night. It was not, as you might imagine, a pretty picture. If somewhere there exists an International … Read more