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Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper is grounded, indefinitely. The St. Paul native and 1980 Derham Hall grad was scheduled to take her first trip into space on May 23, as a crew member aboard the shuttle Endeavour. But following the February 1 Columbia disaster, NASA put all its shuttle missions on hold.

Stefanyshyn-Piper was slated for STS-115, a 10-day mission to carry power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The mission specialist had been assigned two space walks to help separate pieces of the payload. “Things are bolted together so that they don’t jiggle apart or fall off or get damaged in the launch,” she explained. “The only way to remove all the launch locks is to have the astronauts go out there and actually physically remove them.”

To prepare for this zero-gravity activity, Stefanyshyn-Piper flew in the infamous “vomit comet” — a high-altitude jet that climbs to 35,000 feet before dropping into a nose dive and generating 20 seconds of weightlessness inside the aircraft. However, “For a six-hour space walk, it’s really impossible to train in 20-second chunks,” she explained. That’s why NASA also uses a neutral buoyancy lab, a 40-foot-deep pool that holds two submerged scale mockups of the space station exterior.

That facility felt pretty familiar to Stefanyshyn-Piper. A member of the U.S. Navy since 1985, she spent the mid-90s as an Underwater Ship Husbandry Operations Officer. In civilian terms, that means she repaired waterborne ships and conducted underwater salvage efforts. The experience led her to wonder if she should point her career in a new direction.

“I’d see astronauts doing space walks,” she said. “To me, that looked more like diving than flying. I figured, if I could fix ships underwater, I could build a space station in space.”

If Stefanyshyn-Piper gets to test that theory in 2003, she’ll be doing it 20 years after Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. It’s no longer unusual for a shuttle crew to include female astronauts, but women are still very much in the minority. “Before you can get more women into the astronaut office, you have to get more women into science fields like engineering and physics and chemistry,” she said. A “Women of NASA” web site is designed to encourage girls in these subjects—although one wonders if the rose and pink color scheme might generate a counterproductive “Barbie goes to space” vibe.

Stefanyshyn-Piper’s route to celestial exploration began with two mechanical engineering degrees from M.I.T. (she rowed for the crew team there too), and her Navy career. “I never did any of that because I was looking to blaze some new trail,” she said. “It was just something I was interested in, and I found I was good at it.”

Whether she’ll find out if she’s a good astronaut is still up in the air. Before the Columbia disaster, when all systems were go, Stefanyshyn-Piper considered future cosmic travel inevitable. “Right now, we’re really in the infancy of space exploration,” she said. “If you look at human nature and you look back at history, first it was, ‘What’s over the next hill? What’s down the road? What’s across the ocean?’ We’ve pretty much looked at all that. The only natural progression from here is to go out there.”

Stefanyshyn-Piper didn’t feel particularly nervous about undertaking that prospect herself—after all, the Challenger tragedy was 16 years in the past. “We’ve launched more than 100 shuttle flights,” she said. “There is the danger of strapping yourself into a rocket and going up into space, but being here at NASA, and seeing the controls that NASA has, and how meticulous they are about every detail, you know that safety is a major concern. That’s very evident in the way things work around here. That helps to alleviate some of the fears.” —Scott A. Briggs

One of the gratifying—and maddening—things about publishing this magazine is that we get to start over each month. Roughly every four weeks, we wipe the slate clean and get another chance to shine (and yes, of course, to suck), to correct ourselves when we are wrong, to refine the rough spots, find new ways to frame the same old punch lines, and try to sneak dirty words in (or, failing that, maybe some Latin).

Our publishing calendar is both a promise and a threat. We’re not nearly as important or permanent as a hardcover book, say, but we hang around a bit longer than the typical daily headline or the weekly political harangue. With this issue, we celebrate the self-appointed privilege of repeating ourselves for one full year, which is about six months longer than some of us expected to be repeating ourselves.

Redundancy is the new black. We’re back in the hot-box with Iraq, 12 years after we should have finished the job right the first time. Indeed, many people feel like one Bush should have been enough, but there you are—history repeating itself, and not exactly a surfeit of wisdom won from hard experience.

On the other hand, we welcome other kinds of eternal return. Many Minnesotans are secretly pleased that winter finally arrived a few weeks ago, a little behind schedule to be sure, but with all the windchill and accumulation of a less apocalyptic time. The return of our most beloved season is reassuring. We wanted to write about global warming this month, but besides the fact that there wasn’t room for us to park our lips on Paul Douglas’, uh, barometer, we decided to do the American thing, and let our world views be dictated by nothing more than what we can see out our window.

Let’s hope the view keeps improving. Interesting, isn’t it, that someone had the temerity to send back the architectural plans of Jean Nouvel and Michael Graves, some uppity Minnesotan had the balls to ask for another draft? Interesting, too, that the masters seem to have been strong-armed by stoic rubes who might otherwise have been convinced that the tossed-off, million-dollar, second-stringer designs were manna from heaven. Nouvel was made to realize, apparently, that there was considerable cognitive dissonance between his “context-sensitive” design of the Guthrie as riverfront factory, and its function as a space fundamentally about transcendence. Graves had the opposite problem: His overly literal remake of the Children’s Theater smacked not so much of laziness as a genuine fear of children, expressed in cloying babytalk—the architectural equivalent of “goo-goo-ga-ga.” For the record, both architects were able to salvage the most important element of each project: the ego of the architect. Nouvel claimed last year’s design was only “50 percent” finished, and Graves said, “the first iteration is never the one you go with.” In other words, folks, don’t fool yourself: Your worries fell on the deaf ears of genius.

We’re beginning to think that learning from history is still no hedge against repetition. After all, the poet wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Then he changed his mind and scribbled, “Vanity. All is vanity.”

This is why we go to the theater—a skilled cast in a marvelous production of a great play. Chekhov’s tale of love, jealousy, the nature of art and theater deserves the title masterpiece, and the Jeune Lune company does its usual imaginative job of interpreting the classic. As the characters weave among the birch trees of Dominique Serrand’s striking set, they knit and then unravel the relationships among them. Barbra Berlovitz, as the aging actress Irina, is the center of the work both philosophically and physically. Her magnificently nuanced performance—particularly as she demonstrates the art of acting by her reading of the same line over and over—is both the comic and artistic highlight. Add the luminous Sarah Agnew as the young actress Nina and Natalie Moore’s boisterous Masha, both of whose hopes of love are dashed by Irina’s machinations, and you have an evening far more full of genuine humanity than you’ll ever find on reality TV.

Thursdays-Sundays through April 27. www.jeunelune.com. 612.332.3968

After the black cloud of hell that is known as the holidays in my family, I came down with the “cruise ship flu,” a name which doesn’t begin to paint this evil in the proper light. Never in my adult life have I been this sick. As god is my witness, I shan’t be kneeling in front of the toilet again, lest I accidentally drop Richard Ashcroft’s 14-carat engagement ring in, and even then.

Cry for help? Probably. It’s the first time in 10 years I’ve looked for a job that doesn’t involve kissing some coke-whore program director’s payola-padded, modern-rock white ass. Pride? You betcha. Mail-order plans for kitchen meth lab looking good? Check. Meds? Plenty. Side effects? Does having evening chats with the Care Bears and losing all interest in food, sex, and the outside world qualify as a side effect?

The yardstick I use to gauge my depression has always been what I refer to as the “summer of the penny.” Several years ago, I noticed one red cent laying on the floor in my apartment and each day I saw it, I told myself I should pick it up. Three months later, it was still there, only now it rested gently on a fluffy bed of cat hair. That was as bad as it got.

Well, there WAS the evening I spent on the phone with a nurse from Medformation. One night, after I had dropped a birth control pill under my desk, I was on hands and knees searching. I popped the first small white object I saw into my mouth. Then I sinkingly remembered that for the last week I’d been administering antibiotics to my sick cat, which he would promptly spit out. Stupid human. Was I being paranoid, or did I really have an urge to lie in the clothes basket and paddle a twist-tie around the floor for 45 minutes? God knows, I DO mean to make light of depression, but I will take a hostage if I hear another smug moron say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Wrong, Larry. I think what doesn’t kill you now sloooowly eats away at you, emotionally crippling you, and even more disturbing, makes the Style Network seem important.

Finally someone (besides us) has noticed that the expansive area north of the old warehouse district, recently filled with new condos and townhouses, offices and studios, is ready for a restaurant and club appropriate for the crowd that works and lives nearby. Babalu is that, and a certain draw for heat-seeking souls from the entire metro area. It’s new, it’s unique, it’s a hot retreat in an old warehouse up wide Washington Avenue, where the wind used to blow tumbleweeds over wagon-wheel ruts, but will now blow you into a Latin-Caribbean-Spanish glow. Barely open as we speak, Babalu already has character, from original art by Galician artist Xurxo, to live Latin jazz sounds, comfortable bar, and fine cuisine—the combined creation of Spanish and Latin American chefs. (You chef groupies can trace the kitchen’s lineage through various popular restaurants in town. They know what they’re doing, and we hear co-owner Terrence Large can throw a good party, too.) Brush up on your Spanish, order paella in advance, or try any number of great dishes that are rarely seen around these parts. We love the cazuela de mariscos, the red snapper served on a banana leaf, or the mango jicama sea bass on pumpkin-seed sauce. Valet parking for those of you who don’t live or work nearby. Or consider moving. Babalu, (612) 746-3158

Martha Clarke has seldom pursued the linear in her storytelling. Like many of the artists she’s interpreted—Franz Kafka and Hieronymus Bosch, for instance—Clarke has a taste for collaging imagery with such a ravenous appetite that the final product invariably takes on the taste of a three-day acid trip. Vienna Lusthaus (Revisited) is no exception. Capturing the tumult of pre-World War I Vienna requires from Clarke a Herculean effort, not of weaving but juggling. But Clarke pulls it off with the colhelp of some able collaborators—composer Richard Peaslee and playwright Charles Mee. Thirty-two vignettes, including music, dance, poetry, and performance, fly in a seamless flow of recurring symbol and gesture. The intensity of the swirl, a distillation of one of history’s most remarkable bursts of energy, threatens to boil over into chaos, but Clarke manages the operation by enveloping the whole in a dry haze of unmovable estrangement. This is dance for brave—and mature—audiences. Northrop, 84 Church St. S.E., (612) 624-2345, www.northrop.umn.edu

Cool colors and sparse compositions link the two artists exhibiting together at this year-old artists’ collective tucked away in a corner of the quickly gentrifying Old St. Anthony section of northeast Minneapolis. John-Mark Schlink’s work is based around his interest in architectural forms, most obviously in his studies of Minneapolis’ downtown buildings, which reduce the skyline to geometric shapes and smears of color. But the majority of his paintings here are indoor studies of a peacefully Hopperesque vibe—anonymous vacant apartments, bare walls and floors empty of people and furniture. Daniel Buettner, meanwhile, is inspired by his schoolteaching job, embracing the uncontrived simplicity of the elementary school student. Fractured spaces filled with mathematical symbols and formulae are dotted here and there with childlike drawings of globes, giraffes and racecars. Rosalux, 628 Central Ave. N.E., (612) 252-0124, rosaluxgallery.com

This year’s Northern Clay exhibit and forum with an acknowledged master of ceramic art is a twofer, as both the 2002 and 2003 invitees will be here simultaneously, dropping science and throwing pots like there’s no tomorrow. Now in her 80s, Gütte Eriksen has earned her place as one of Denmark’s most important potters, combining ancient European traditions with Japanese forms. Her innovative approach garnered high praise from no less than Sir David Attenborough, who applauded “the delectable way her subtly varied glazes poured and dripped over their bulges and gathered in creamy pools in their gutters.” (Recently we praised the guy at the donut shop the same way for his innovative glazes, and he called us names and told me us to get the hell out of his store.) Australia’s Janet Mansfield is known for her editorship of two international magazines on the art and science of ceramics, and also works to strengthen ties among the world’s pottery community, exactly what the Regis Masters series aims to do as well. NCC, 2424 E. Franklin Ave., (612) 339-8007, www.northernclaycenter.org

Though Disney might sue us for using their copyrighted phrase, it’s a small world, after all. And getting smaller. This three-month, cross-disciplinary exhibit directs your attention to the growing effect of globalization on art, bringing together 27 visual, new media, film, and performance artists from China, Brazil, South Africa, India and that foreign land called New York. There’s a school of thought that all great innovation in art comes from the collision of cultural modes—the way early jazz mixed Western orchestral music with African styles. Culture shock as a mode of progress has been around since the dawn of civilization, but our modern age has pumped it up in both scope and speed. With so many cultures meeting each other head-on and intermingling ideas, does the word “culture” have the same meaning anymore? Should a nondominant culture try to block outside influence for fear of losing that which makes it unique? And what new genres will eventually be spawned from this brave new world? Latitudes surely won’t have all the answers, but it will certainly help formulate the right questions.
Walker, (612) 375-7622, latitudes.walkerart.org

Originally a recording produced in 1999, Caravan is one of the Kronos Quartet’s recent world explorations, this time through the imagery of the Gypsy Diaspora. Pannonia, a name once given to the stretch of eastern Europe where the Mediterranean and European worlds cross paths with the Orient, is the setting and inspiration for an evening that promises a myriad of flavors and spices. Kronos has a knack for creating soundscapes that are as cohesive as its influences are disparate. Caravan is an exceptional example, blending compositions from India, Lebanon, Hungary, Mexico and a half dozen other exotic wellsprings, including Dick Dale, King of the Surf Guitar. Many of the works have been arranged for Kronos by the deft Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, who the New York Times calls a “musical alchemist.” Kronos enthusiasts will remember several collaborations with Golijov in recent years. They share the same bright-eyed curiosity and enthusiasm for contemporary music. Now in its 30th year, the Kronos Quartet has achieved institutional status. Pop stars, so to speak. Yet their virtuosity has never allowed the quartet’s trademark quirkiness to become a cliché. Walker, (612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org