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  • Getting Away to It All

    Jim Stowell will literally go halfway around the world just to get a good story. A prominent force in the local theater community for thirty-five years, the actor and playwright has developed a specialty in the last decade and a half as a master monologuist. His deeply personal tales—funny, angry, politically aware, and wry—draw from his experiences in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Amazon. His current project, Family Values, was originally produced at Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in 1999. (You may also have seen him that year in the Jungle’s Macbeth.) Family Values depicts Stowell’s experiences growing up in a small Texas town on the Mexican border, and his late-nineties trip to war-torn Northern Ireland. The play explores why people hate each other, and why anger in the blood so often leads to the spilling of blood. Like many of us, Stowell found his perspective on that subject irrevocably altered in September 2001, and he decided to completely overhaul the play in light of the way we live and feel now.

    The RAKE: The original version of Family Values was, to some extent, about the Cold War. You begin with boys throwing rocks at each other, and end with Americans and Soviets threatening to shoot rockets at each other.

    STOWELL: That was the original concept, that direction. Guys in jets doing exactly the same thing as those boys. But we got to talking about that ending, and Richard Cook, the director, said, “Because of the changes in the world, I’m already way ahead of that business with the atomic stuff. We’ve just zoooomed past all those things.” And I agreed with him. We’ve completely redone the ending.

    So where does the play go now?

    What we’re looking at now is the connection between what I learned in Belfast and how that connects to 9/11, and us. There’s a story in the play about a woman named Maggie who’s caught on the bus in Belfast with a bomb strapped to her. That story was told to me in Belfast, but it was never explained that she was going to the airport and putting the bomb there and then getting in a car and driving away. It was assumed that I knew that. When I told the story in 1999, I never had to explain.

    And after September 11th?

    I sent the script off to some people, and they asked about the “suicide bomber.” The unspoken assumption had changed: not “bomber”; “suicide bomber.” Willing to live versus willing to die. A life and death difference. The world’s fundamental assumptions have changed. In the play, I say to an Irish woman, “You’re taking a bomb out to the airport, you’re going to blow up all these people like me. I’m an innocent civilian. What the hell is that? What’s the strategic value in killing somebody like me?” When I was in Belfast, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. Everywhere I went in the world, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. And that’s just not true now. None of it necessarily was true even then.

    What is true now?

    The world is not Belfast anymore. The world is Tel Aviv. It used to be Belfast, where the bombers try to make a getaway. Now they don’t even try to. And that fundamental change in consciousness we’re now bringing to the script.

    You’re also changing the structure of the story around, breaking up the narrative from the original three solid chapters.

    In the past, I’ve always written things integrated like a movie. There will be flashbacks. I’ll go back to Texas, and then come back up to the present. For this play, initially, I thought, “Gee, I’d like to do something different. I’ve been doing this for a long time.” And I got to thinking about it, and I realized that everyone who’s going to come see this play, ninety-nine percent of them have never seen any of my other work. 1998 was my last big show. Five, six years, that’s a generation of theatergoers. So I changed it back to the way I like to be doing it.

    You’ve been doing monologues like Family Values since the eighties. How did you become interested in the form?

    This was at the end of fourteen years as a playwright, so I was ready to evolve to the next step. I had a great working relationship with Patty Lynch of the Brass Tacks Theater; we did three or four monologues together. The first one we did, we didn’t know what we were doing—nobody had ever done it! We didn’t know what the hell to do. We showed up at rehearsals at night and said, “Jeez, what are we doing tonight?” We put our heads together and figured stuff out.

    This was before Spaulding Gray?

    This is what happened: Spaulding Gray came to the Illusion and filled their house twice. Two or three nights in a row. So the producer looks at that and says, “Ah, hm… Full houses. One person. No set. This really looks good.” Then she brings Kevin Kling and I, we do a show, and there are so many people every night they had to move the set back to put in more seats. The producer didn’t have to be a genius to go, “Oh, big hit, no expenses. Good idea, let’s do this again.”

    It’s hard to strip it down any more than that.

    It is. That’s just about as far as you can go with one person. Almost no set, and no costumes, and almost no music.

    If only we could get rid of the actor, we’d really have something.

    Yeah! They’re a pain anyway.

    Jim Stowell’s Family Values
    October 30-November 16
    Park Square Theatre
    20 W. Seventh Pl., St. Paul
    (651) 291-7005
    www.parksquaretheatre.org

  • C’mon, Just a Few Details?

    I like it that Stuart Greene is unabashedly a fan of his wife’s front and back porch [“More Than a Mouthful,” October], but there’s one thing he’s missing, summed up in the ancient adage “It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have.” It’s not trivial for two reasons: 1) gravity and age take their toll on both sexes and especially on women after childbirth; and 2) no matter how perfectly proportioned your spouse might be in your mind, a male’s propensity for variety lurks in any marriage. What’s needed is more attention on how us marrieds can keep the sparks flying with the assets we each have. I’ve got ideas and some experience, but I can’t go into details without stirring things up in a bad way on the home front. So Stuart, let’s have more.
    Griff Wigley
    Northfield

  • Subtract to Fore

    Frank Jossi’s golf article, “The Missing Links” [September], is on target. Golf and cigars were here before they got trendy and will survive. Golf is not for everyone. But it is time to cut back on the overbuilding and let laws of supply and demand take over.
    Jim Bohn
    St. Paul

  • Go Gophers

    Craig Cox [“The Long Bomb,” October] states that the Gophers generate “less revenue in a season that the University of Michigan rakes in during a couple of home games.” This would seem to imply that Michigan has several times the revenue that the Gophers have. Later, he states that Michigan generates twice what the Gophers generate. It is true this is a disparity, but it’s not as great as he initially makes it appear. The author admits that the football program makes money, and these revenues fund the other sports programs. That seems to stand in contrast to other parts of the article, which seems to imply that the football is somehow stealing revenues from other sports. Perhaps he is familiar with the story of the goose that laid the golden egg? Is there evidence that revenues from football, hockey and basketball benefit the entire athletic department? Yes. The money the athletic department has comes from the sports that generate more than they spend. If these revenue-generating sports were canceled, there would be less money available for the whole athletic department.
    If people want to donate their own money to build an on-campus stadium, I don’t see the problem with it. The Gophers have a terrible lease at the Metrodome. A new stadium would certainly bring in more revenue. If he is going to call supporters of an on-campus stadium deluded, at least he could have the courtesy of saying why he thinks it is a deluded idea. Much of his argument centers on the Gophers’ lack of success. However, the Gophers have been to bowl games three out of the last four years, and will go to another bowl game this year. It has not been such a long time since just getting to a bowl game—any bowl game—was a mere dream. It is a sign of success that expectations have been raised so much. He also suggests that college football could reduce the number of scholarships. He may not have noticed, but the NCAA has already done this, with the result of increased parity in Division I football.

    Robert Lent
    Minneapolis

    Congratulations to Craig Cox for his article about what the esteemed writer-broadcaster Frank Deford once called “the cesspool of college athletics.” Along with “military intelligence,” “business ethics,” and “President Bush,” the term “student-athlete” is one of the great oxymorons of our time (emphasis on “morons”). Instead of wasting valuable resources on athletics, the university should concentrate on trying to educate our young people and prepare them to take their places in society. Instead of building stadiums, we should be building more classrooms. Instead of vastly overpaid coaches, we should be spending money to hire and retain the best possible faculty and making tuition as student-accessible as possible. I wouldn’t care if the U won every game in every sport; Minnesota no longer can afford bigtime college athletics. If it’s unrealistic to expect total abandonment of the intercollegiate program, the U at the very least should downgrade from the Big Ten to a much less demanding and costly conference or a modest independent schedule. The Metrodome may not be an ideal facility for the Gophers, the Twins, or the Vikings, but I believe it’s financially stable. For Gopher football fans who yearn for those long-gone golden autumn Saturday afternoons on campus, paint a mural on the ceiling. The Rake would be doing its readers a great service by corroborating Cox’s article with a reprint of Deford’s historic and quite accurate appraisal of college athletics. We know for sure the booster-minded Star Tribune and Pioneer Press never will.
    Willard B. Shapira
    Minneapolis

    One element of downsizing college football that might enable smaller rosters would be a rule change that mirrors college football in the 1950s. For a period of some years, only one substitution was allowed per down. While this provided for a small measure of specialization (e.g., a punter on fourth down, a fragile quarterback who shouldn’t play defense), it basically required most players to line up on both offense and defense. The net result would be a need for smaller rosters and some interesting coaching challenges when you don’t have the luxury of shuttling in well-rested specialists. But frankly, anything that eliminates jobs and roster spots will be resisted by the coaching and athletic department fraternity.
    Jeff Peterson
    Minneapolis

  • Custody: Are the Kids Alright?

    If we want to blame someone for divorce, let’s blame the instigator and his or her attorney. I have a word of warning: The more you fight, the bigger the chance that the winner will be the attorney, who ultimately gets the money. The sad part about my recent divorce is that because of this ridiculous and long fight in court, we wasted a lot of money that could have been better spent on our kid’s needs. Money that could have been used for the kid’s education, or medical emergencies, or even to help the ex-spouse (especially if a stay-at-home parent) go back to school or rebuild a career, because that is what really makes sense. A divorce doesn’t have to be ugly and cut-throat on top of being a source of pain for everyone. Because this way everybody wins, especially the kids. The goal should be the well-being of the child, even if that means giving up on fighting for child custody. Your children know who loves them, and if you stay involved and keep on being a good parent, no court paper can take away your child’s love.
    Name withheld by request

    As an attorney who has practiced family law for twenty years, I agreed with the majority of Jeannine Ouellette’s article describing the marriage dissolution process in Minnesota [“Dealing From the Bottom,” September]. If our legislature had intentionally set out to create a system producing inequitable, shortsighted results inflicting the maximum degree of harm on children, it succeeded. Ouellette correctly noted that many dissolution statutes are the result of efforts by gender-based advocacy groups to advance their agenda with little thought to the children whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation. However, she perpetuated a troublesome stereotype by reprinting the claim of an unidentified attorney that while many fathers ask for joint physical custody of their children “only ten percent really want it” and, for most fathers, joint physical custody is simply a ploy to reduce child support. My experience is precisely the opposite. What most fathers object to is a legal system that ignores and devalues a father’s relationship with his children. The litigation system in our country uses an adversarial model—each side fights to “win.” This makes little sense when the custody of children is at stake. Assuming one parent should have “primary” custody of the children means the noncustodial parent’s status is diminished and rendered less meaningful. When a father sees his children on alternating weekends, he cannot function as a parent—he is more akin to an uncle. It is children who suffer as the result of this diminished role.
    The Minnesota guidelines effectively assume the custodial parent has no economic responsibility for the child. This may be plausible for an unwed mother receiving public assistance but is dubious when a marriage ends. As a practical matter there is little difference in actual childcare costs between a custodial mother and noncustodial father. In this context the child support guidelines are simply a naked transfer of funds from one parent to another and have no relationship to the child’s actual needs.
    Glenn P. Bruder
    Edina

  • Frankenly Speaking

    Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh are two sides to the same coin. I remember these wacky feuds from my childhood. My brother and I would accuse each other of lies, deceit, and manipulation. Like most parents, mine were wise to our claims. We never could sway parental opinion, and gave up trying at about age 10. What childish notion is it that makes Franken think he has discovered something significant about the evil opposition? Just like Limbaugh, Franken is not swaying my opinion. They can continue bleating to their own herds of sheep.
    Peter Kind
    St. Paul

    I liked the Franken interview, despite myself. As a spokesman for the Squishy Left wing of the Democratic Party, Franken’s awfully good, and always entertaining, and he’s best when he’s debunking factual inaccuracies of right-wingers. Of course, to Franken, a right-wing commentator or politician can’t be simply wrong on a matter of fact; they’re lying liars telling lying lies—Franken uses the word “lie” more often than Paul Simon does in the chorus of “The Boxer.” And, sure enough, Franken himself doesn’t lie. His claims about the overreaching of some critics of the Paul Wellstone memorial/campaign rally are utterly true, if incomplete. Sarah Janecek did misunderstand the “applause” captions on the Jumbotron as a deliberate, scripted incitement to the crowd, rather than the accidental one it was. Rush Limbaugh did devote his next day’s show to the rally. It’s what he leaves out and minimizes that misleads. Franken suggests that the outrage only started when it was hyped up by right-wingers. No, it started immediately, during the rally. Wellstone’s campaign manager almost immediately—apparently without needing to get his instructions from Rush Limbaugh—apologized for the turn that the memorial took. Didn’t Franken notice that? He does have a point, though. Given the nature of Wellstone’s politics, it was almost inevitable that there would be elements of a rally in what was billed as a memorial service. Which made it even more important that those who wanted to have this remain a memorial take steps to do so. They didn’t.
    Joel Rosenberg
    Minneapolis

  • Dude, Where’s my Trail?

    Your piece about the Paul Bunyan Trail [Good Intentions, October] overlooked something. Perhaps the State of Minnesota ignored the fact that railroad rights-of-way fit into many different categories ranging from outright ownership to easements for railroad use. Perhaps it wasn’t overlooked, and the decision was to take a chance. If the latter, it was bound to blow up some time. I’ve been a licensed attorney, specializing in real estate law, for fifty years. Since retirement, I’ve lectured to lawyers and surveyors on the ins and outs of the law relating to railroad rights-of-way and public streets. One element I’ve always stressed is that everything depends on how they were created. You’ve got to know the facts. The results of the state trail case have been widely quoted, but not the underlying facts. I’m waiting to read the court of Appeals decision. There is a decision relating to a similar trail in Washington County in which it was decided that the right-of-way was really for “transportation purposes.” I’m sure the state must have argued this decision, but the Court of Appeals decided that it didn’t apply. I suspect that the evidence may have shown that the right-of-way had been abandoned for some time before it was incorporated into the trail system. If so, both the U.S. Constitution and Minnesota’s Constitution require that the underlying owners must be compensated.
    Charles L. Horn
    Bloomington

  • Letter of the Month

    I have been won over by Al Franken a little bit lately because of an interview he did on Michael Medved’s conservative talk-radio show and the Rake interview [“Al Franken Is a Big Fat Genius,” October]. Nevertheless, I think the Democratic Party is a lot like the Rake’s article: confusing and broken up! It’s heartening to see that Al has taken a more moderate tone by saying that there are good people on the other side. I believe this is a new approach for Democrats, to try to be more inclusive. Within that context I’m glad there’s a Rush Limbaugh in the world to put an integrity check on Democrats. It’s ironic that Al pointed to “conservative” media in a medium that makes no bones about being liberal. I think this is because liberals honestly believe that they are objective and don’t recognize their own bias. Also, it was humorous to see Al try to spin the Wellstone memorial in the same way that Limbaugh did by taking the best-case scenario for their particular agenda. I don’t think I was alone when I was heartbroken after Wellstone’s death and was listening to MPR and got sick to my stomach by all the propaganda being propagated at that ceremony. I had to shut the damn radio off. No one can try to tell me that that was only because of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that I felt that way!
    P.S. Al, I would love to listen to you on the radio when you get there!
    Bradley Nesseth
    Minneapolis

  • It’s Liver, Lover!

    It’s a child’s privilege—and punishment—to help with the Thanksgiving turkey. The responsibility of assisting in the preparation of the main dish is heady, indeed. Turkey is pretty much the definition of Thanksgiving for many kids, and they may dream of the moment when that golden bird is brought out to the big table and all the hungry eyes turn away from the bird for a momentary glance of appreciation toward the tot who is beaming with pride. It may be this kind of dream that would fuel a blond child of seven to throw her hand up and volunteer for the job.

    But when she gets to the kitchen in the morning, forgoing the traditional hot chocolate and parade-watching done by the non-chefs of the house, she discovers a pinkish, pebbly-fleshed monster with a gaping hole. What’s worse, the poor girl learns that it is her job to remove, with her small hands, the creature’s internal organs (cutely nicknamed “giblets” to make her feel better). Her duty is great, and she suffers through, pulling out the neck and dealing with the gizzard, but the reddish, gooshy liver is too much to handle. So she runs screaming from the kitchen. And she is thankful in later years that no one told her then that it was those items that made the gravy taste so good. It would already be a long time until liver would come back into her life.

    Livers are appreciated in most cultures and cuisines throughout the world, but consumption is low in North America. Is that because in our quest for ultimate information we know that the liver is the clearinghouse for a body’s toxins? That it secretes bile? Maybe it was the preparation by a million moms who bought beef liver, fried it up with onions, and slapped its stinkiness on a plate in the McCarthy era. For some, liver might just be part of the food-oddities column—classified creepily as “organ meat,” or tucked between the cow tongue and headcheese. The tradeoff is that we are missing out on a global delicacy rich in iron, protein, and vitamin A.

    If you want to give liver a chance, get thee to a local butcher. If you haven’t found one in your neighborhood, you can use Clancy’s Meat & Fish (formerly Lippka’s Linden Hills Meat) in Minneapolis. It’s a great little shop. When we’re talking straight liver, the kind that can be successfully fried up with some mushrooms and onions, your best bet is calf’s liver. The younger liver will have a smoother texture and more delicate flavor. Calf’s liver is pinkish, compared to beef liver’s reddish-brown hue, and is much more tender than the elder. Besides beef and calf, the most popular livers are lamb, pork, chicken, and goose. But the true beauty of this organ is how it performs in the hands of an artisan.

    OK, maybe chopped liver isn’t necessarily artisanal, but it has been unfairly maligned. (“What am I, chopped livah?!”) Served on Jewish holiday tables for eons, the dish that may contain onions, hard-boiled eggs, and chicken livers is a cultural icon for the laborings and celebrations of life. Spread on a thick piece of rye bread, maybe with a little corned beef, the simple is transformed into the inspired.

    Chopping liver is only the beginning. The Germans not only make liverwurst sausage; they also indulge in leberknödel, or liver dumplings. Cod liver oil has been used since at least the eighteenth century as a cure for rheumatism and wasting diseases. It makes you wonder who was the brave soul who first squeezed a fish liver and drank it. Livers are prepared in terrines, pastes, mousse, stuffing, and, of course, pâtés. But of these remarkable preparations, the most delectable has to be that of foie gras.

    The original and classic foie gras (fwah grah) is made from goose liver with techniques that date back to the Egyptian dynasties. Now a specialty of the southwestern region of France, foie gras is the liver from a goose that has been force-fed, fattened on grains on an accelerated schedule for four or five months. This mimics their natural behavior and physiology before a long flight. These special geese gain an enlarged liver, which after harvesting is soaked overnight in milk, water, or port. The resulting flavor is extraordinary and the texture velvety smooth.

    The fact that this culinary luxury is the darling of many five-star chefs’ menus has put it in the spotlight. But with fame comes scandal. A San Francisco chef’s home was recently attacked by animal-rights extremists who spray-painted his house, wrecked his car, and threatened the lives of his wife and child—all because of his association with Sonoma Foie Gras. Never mind that Sonoma Foie Gras is not a factory farm, but a small, local producer that cares for their birds in accordance with the highest standards. Why let the truth get in the way of your headlines?

    To sample some of the local talent’s foie gras, the sophisticate heads to La Belle Vie in Stillwater. The ever-clever chefs have wrapped a diver scallop and French Rougie foie gras in serrano ham. With the accompanying Black Mission fig sauce, each bite has a mingling of nutty, salty, and sweet flavors. If that’s too fancy for your pants, Figlio has just debuted a killer burger with porcini mushrooms and caramelized onions, topped with foie gras. It’s a little bit of heaven in each mouthful.

    Still can’t get your brain around the internal organ thing? What are you, chopped liver? You should be so lucky.

  • Hack the Vote

    It’s not hard to get away with rigging an electronic voting machine. No matter how thoroughly the machine is tested, you could always hack it to, say, give every tenth vote for Candidate A to Candidate B, but only if it’s November 4. Anyone testing the machine on November 3 or 5 would find everything functioning properly.

    Electronic rigging is irrelevant if people can verify questionable results by hand-counting the ballots. The problem is, a lot of new touch-screen technology doesn’t create anything hand-countable. You touch the screen, the machine asks you, “Are you sure you want to vote for X?” and at the end of the day, it announces a winner. The correlation between the voters’ intentions and the recorded results is purely a matter of faith.

    Although touch-screen voting machines are becoming more common in elections nationwide, there are no federal laws requiring that a paper ballot be kept and stored. “We have much more control over cement trucks in this country than over voting machines,” says Rebecca Mercuri, who wrote her doctoral thesis on electronic voting technology. She spends much time testifying before various government bodies and officials, and they largely ignore her.

    Our fair state has not. Minnesota statutes require that paper ballots be kept after every election. Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer personally contacted Mercuri to discuss security issues, and told voting-machine companies that Minnesota will only consider machines that meet certain requirements, including voter-verifiable paper ballots.

    Minnesota is looking at new technology in order to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Unfortunately, our statutes only detail the certification process for optical scanners, which read and tabulate results from paper voting cards. We will have to come up with new statutes to certify touch-screen technology—and some voting-machine companies will certainly try to persuade us that the paper ballot is obsolete.

    During last year’s election, three companies provided machines for free demonstrations in St. Cloud, Minneapolis, and Elk River. After casting their real ballots, voters could try out the new machines, choosing between candidates such as Abraham Lincoln and Mickey Mouse. This November, Minnesota voters will be testing machines provided by Diebold, ES&S, and Avante.

    Avante machines have always printed out a paper ballot (“only because I yelled at them,” insists Mercuri, who lives down the street from the company’s headquarters). Both Diebold and ES&S, however, are fighting hard against voter-verifiable paper trails, and there may be some doubt as to whether either of them will fulfill the requirements laid out by the Minnesota Secretary of State. Becky Vollmer, a spokesperson for ES&S, told The Rake that their machine prints out a paper audit when the election is over and stores ballot images in the computer’s memory. But voters have no way to verify that the image stored actually matches their vote.

    Diebold brags on their website that their technology has managed to “eliminate the need for paper ballots” — this despite a recent study by Johns Hopkins saying Diebold’s machines are rife with security flaws. And more than a few eyebrows went up when Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, wrote in a fundraising letter for the GOP that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

    ES&S has had its own share of scandals, especially when it was learned that Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel was a former chairman of the company that became ES&S. Eighty percent of the election results in Nebraska last year were calculated on ES&S machines, and Hagel won by a landslide. According to the electronic vote, he was the clear choice of every demographic group in the state and won in communities that decided to vote Republican for the first time in history.

    No one yet knows what Minnesota will use in future elections. With any luck, we’ll keep our paper ballots and use frequent hand recounts to keep our computers in line. It is discouraging, though, that no one seems to know who is responsible for testing the accuracy and security of the machines. They are certified at the state level, but who monitors last-minute patches and upgrades and vulnerabilities? Well, according to Kent Kaiser at the Secretary of State’s Office, “County by county, they test the machines before elections.” But Ramona Doebler, auditor treasurer for Sherburne County, has other ideas. “Security? That’s all handled through the Secretary of State.”—Katherine Glover