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Academy of the Holy Angels
http://www.ahastars.org
6600 Nicollet Ave S
Richfield, MN 55423
(612) 798-2600
Roman Catholic; Upper School, 800 students; 80% of applicants accepted; avg. class size 23; Tuition: $7200; Fees: registration $200, transportation $600; 25% students receive financial aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: Spanish, French, German; 8 AP offerings; 40% take SAT; 70% take ACT; 92% of grads admitted to college; top colleges enrolled class of 2002: U of MN, St. Thomas, Marquette, U of M Duluth, U of Wisconsin Madison.

The Blake School
http://www.blakeschool.org
Northrop Campus (Upper school)
511 Kenwood Parkway
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(952) 988-3700
No religious affiliation; Upper school, 432 students; 60% of applicants accepted; avg. class size 15; Tuition: $15,650; Fees: lunch $950, transportation $1145; approx. 18% students receive Fin. Aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: Spanish, French, German, Russian; 11 AP offerings; 100% of students take SAT/ACT; top colleges enrolled class of 2002: Dartmouth, UW-Madison, Washington U. (St. Louis), Harvard, Colorado College, Georgetown, Northwestern, Trinity.

Breck School
http://www.breckschool.org
123 Ottawa Ave N
Minneapolis, MN 55422
(763) 381-8100
Episcopalian; Upper school, 386 students; 19% applicants accepted; avg. class size 18; Tuition: $14,210; approx 15% students receive Fin. Aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: Spanish, French, German, Chinese; 13 AP offerings; 100% of students take SAT/ACT; top colleges enrolled class of 2002: Georgetown, Carleton, Skidmore, Union, Boston College, U of Denver, George Washington, U of Southern California.

Cretin-Derham Hall
http://www.cretin-derhamhall.pvt.k12.mn.us
550 South Albert Street
St. Paul, MN 55116
(651) 690-2443
Survey not completed; Roman Catholic; Upper school, 1290 students; avg. class size 20; 50% of students receive financial aid; Athletics are competitive; Languages: French, German, Spanish, Latin; 7 AP courses; 81% of students attend 4 year college.

Convent of the Visitation School
http://www.visitation.net
2455 Visitation Drive
Mendota Heights, MN 55120
(651) 683-1700
Roman Catholic; all girls; upper school, 284 students; avg. class size 16; Tuition: $11,700; Fees: lunch: $600, books: $50, transportation: $700-$1000; 23% of students receive financial aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: French, Spanish, Latin; 9 AP courses; above 90% of students take SAT/ACT; top colleges enrolled class of 2002: St. Thomas, Lewis & Clark, U of MN, Notre Dame, Boston U.

International School of Minnesota
http://www.ism-sabis.net
6385 Beach Road
Eden Prairie, MN 55344
(952) 918-1800
Upper School, 120 students; 65% applicants accepted; avg. class size 12; Tuition: $10,000; Fees: $500 books, $1800 transportation; 30% of students receive financial aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: French, Spanish; 20 AP offerings; 100% students take SAT; 90% take ACT; top colleges enrolled class of 2002: U of MN, Carleton, Cal Tech, Syracuse NY, Grinnell, Macalester.

Mounds Park Academy
http://www.moundsparkacademy.org
2051 East Larpenteur Ave
St. Paul, MN 55109
(651) 777-2555
Upper School, 250 students; avg. class size 17 (K-12); Tuition: $14,140; 8% of students receive financial aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: French, Spanish; 5 AP courses; 100% take SAT/ACT exam; 100% admitted to college.

Saint Paul Academy
http://www.spa.edu
1712 Randolph Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
(651) 698-2451
Survey not completed; Upper School, approx. 380 students; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; 100% of students admitted to college.

Saint Thomas Academy
http://www.cadets.com
949 Mendota Heights Rd.
Mendota Heights, MN 55120
(651) 454-4570
Roman Catholic, all boys; upper school, 530 students; 90% applicants accepted; Tuition: $11,000; Fees: ~$1725; 25% receive financial aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: French, Spanish, Latin; 11 AP courses; 75% take SAT; 95% take ACT; top colleges enrolled class of 2002: U of St. Thomas, UMD, Creighton, St. Norbert, UW Madison, St. Johns.

Totino-Grace High School
http://www.totinograce.org
1350 Gardena Ave. NE
Fridley MN, 55432
(763) 571-9116
Roman Catholic, 1100 students; 95% applicants accepted; avg. class size 22; Tuition: $7,350; Fees: transportation, $600-$700; 15-20% of students receive financial aid; Athletics balanced participatory/competitive; Languages: French, German, Spanish; 3 AP courses; 10% take SAT; 95% take ACT; 95% students admitted to college.

The great polar explorers Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen
go where they’ve never gone before—your backyard. So this
is the Next Frontier: the web, schoolkids, and Lake Superior

I’m shivering uncontrollably and I think I might puke. Gray waves roll and swell on Lake Superior, a stiff cold wind blows from the east, it looks like rain—or maybe snow. Even in late May, the North Shore doesn’t want to warm up.

I’m with Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, who are paddling along in sea kayaks, making their way from Grand Portage, which they left 10 days ago, down to the port of Duluth, which they’ll reach in about two hours. There is a heavy swell on the lake, it’s true. But with the wind at their backs, Bancroft and Arnesen are actually surfing the four-foot waves, their kayaks carving the crests and their paddles barely dipping for balance. They make it look fun and easy. Frankly, I’m having a hard time keeping up with them, even though I’m in a 30-foot fishing boat. I’ve asked the captain to stop talking about the various colorful episodes of seasickness he has witnessed.

Bancroft and Arnesen are toiling like this because they’re on a new expedition, hoping to kayak most of the way from Lake Superior to the St. Lawrence Seaway. I’m toiling like this because it’s a rare opportunity to accompany the world-famous explorers in action. For the first time in their professional careers, they’ve decided to undertake an adventure through well-known, well-charted, and fully settled territory. In fact, for the next six weeks, they’re going to have a hard time finding a place to camp that isn’t someone’s front yard, and one of the more serious dangers they’ll face is the possibility that too many people will approach them with coffee and donuts. How did two of the world’s most accomplished polar explorers end up in this absurd situation? There’s only one way to find out—ask them.

Later, I’m waiting in Duluth’s stunning Great Lakes Aquarium, under a 50-foot glass-encased waterfall. (We parted ways earlier; I found a cheap, warm place to have a little breakfast and settle my stomach. They paddled.) Ann and Liv have a scheduled appearance here, where they’ll meet a group of fans—eco-groupies, I guess you’d call them—who have gathered in the lobby in little huddles of polar fleece and hiking boots. When Bancroft and Arnesen stroll in, there’s a round of applause. In person, the great explorers strike me as precisely what they are: gym teachers who have given up coffee and gone on permanent sabbatical. Even at the age of 46, Ann Bancroft practically vibrates with nervous energy. She is short (around 5’5”) and solid and looks like she prefers her oatmeal straight. Undoubtedly when she was a young turk working the climbing counter at Midwest Mountaineering on the West Bank, she was perceived as an adrenaline junkie—someone not really happy until she’s logged a dozen miles on the trail, maybe put up a new line on the climbing walls of Taylor’s Falls. With age and experience, she has become a person with zen-like focus and unseen reservoirs of energy. Like the great cyclist Greg LeMond, she has used maturity to her advantage, recognizing the value of pacing yourself for the long haul. Patience is an acquired skill, and it’s one of Bancroft’s secret weapons that put her beyond the reach of most world-class endurance athletes. She’s incredibly centered, like a small, powerful catapault waiting to be triggered.

Liv Arnesen is the perfect professional complement to Bancroft. She’s a tall, slightly stooped, 48-year-old Norwegian, with weathered skin that betrays the fact that she’s spent far more time outside than in. She has long arms and fingers, and looks a bit trollish. Paradoxically she seems less high-strung than her American partner, but at the same time less patient. It suits her personality that she was the first woman to ski solo to the South Pole. She carries herself with stoic self-assurance, she has the air of a woman who would prefer not to talk but to do—and involving anyone else in the doing is an automatic liability.

If you’ve never felt safe going to one of those imposing stand-alone sushi shops downtown, here’s a place to finally try it with the training wheels of a mall surrounding you. Despite its location on Calhoun Square’s second floor, the Bermuda Triangle of Hennepin & Lake, Sushi Tango is constantly full of the kind of Uptown crowd who all look like they work in graphic design. It’s the sushi spot for the MTV generation, from the grinning manga mascot to the olive-toned interior geometry that cries out “death to boring 90-degree angles!” Experienced eaters head straight for the maki. Beginners try the sushi tango, which gets you 10 types of nigiri plus cucumber and tuna rolls. There’s a similar platter of sashimi, but you only get five varieties. The salmon and halibut were especially tasty. And be not afraid of the octopus, mild in both taste and texture. Sushi Tango, (612) 822-7787

We set out on our expedition to scale Everest in a rusty Toyota loaded with five famished explorers and a trunkful of climbing rope. I could not help but feel underequipped, since weeks of fruitless searching had turned up no Sherpa guides anywhere in the metro area, not even in the yellow pages. St. Paul can be harsh, unfamiliar terrain, and I think it unwise to travel there without experienced direction. My navigator suggested that I instead find Grand Avenue on a road map “like normal people do,” and after careful consideration, I complied. Our gamble paid off. Everest on Grand turned out to be a cozy Nepali and Tibetan eatery across from Kowalski’s Market. Though our servers were a bit slow, they were attentive, friendly, and willing to answer that most uncomfortable of menu-related questions—“and how do you pronounce this?” Half our party ordered momo, a meat-filled dumpling, but only one went for new gustatory territory and got the yak momo. It is perhaps the only exotic meat we’ve tasted that does not taste like chicken. It’s like beef, but sweeter, and well complemented (concealed?) by a spicy tomato-herb sauce. The rest of our team, a motley assemblage of architects and teenage vegetarians, found satisfaction in the many tasty no-meat dishes such as aaloo-dam (potatoes, onions and tomato in gravy) and jogi-tarkari, a vegetable curry. For desert, booniya and lal mohan—small, light confections so sugary sweet we could already feel the sting of the dentistry bills. Everest on Grand, (651) 696-1666, hotmomo.com

People sometimes say that if a meteor struck Uptown, the Twin Cities would lose half its artistic community. While we’re still waiting for NASA to get back to us on the scientific accuracy of that metaphor, it’s certainly true that Intermedia Arts’ annual celebration of the Hennepin & Lake ZIP code’s creative set has no shortage of participants. Curators Peter Haakon Thompson, Lisa Ganser, and Malichansouk Kouanchao have gathered more than 100 artists in disciplines from painting to web art to video. Thompson’s also giving out large scarlet letter A’s to folks who live in the area. They’re for hanging on your window to show your support for local art, but if you’re looking to spice up your reputation we suppose you could always flounce around Calhoun Square pretending you’re Hester Prynne. On July 5, the gallery’s Films First Fridays series will feature work by filmmakers from the area. After that, you can see those works in a video installation. Perhaps the best day to check out the exhibit, though, would be July 4, when you can honor your country’s independence at Intermedia’s always-groovy Art Car Parade. Opening reception June 30, 1 p.m., free. Intermedia Arts, (612) 871-4444, intermediaarts.org

It’s hard to compress Gary Hallman’s fruitful three-decade career into a single gallery show. Though he’s honored here with a one-person show spanning both floors—the sum of all the PARTs, as it were, and only the fourth time they’ve done this—we found ourselves wanting to see more. The show begins circa 1971, with Hallman’s outdoor shots focusing on interplay between light and shadow. In the 1980s, the U of M art professor moved away from pure photography into deliberately manipulated images like “Rayos de Luz y Calor,” a self-portrait shot through with hand drawn beams of light. Unlike most fine-art photogs we know, Hallman has embraced technology over the years. His 1990s experiments with computer-altered self-portraits obscured his face behind deep green and red fans. They’re perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most colorful in his portfolio. Hallman’s not afraid to reinvent his methods, nor to go back to classical photography when there’s still something to discover. Other work moves in a surreal direction: Pompeiian frescoes share space (and fate?) with bland suburban house-scapes, and a swarm of nudes streams between the heads of two men like a thought they share but can’t shake off. His most recent work changes course yet again, this time returning to formalism for a set of industrial still-lifes that coolly observe the sterile kitchens and computer rooms at Wells Fargo’s downtown operations center. PARTS, (612) 824-5500, partsphoto.org

This is the guy who wrote Fight Club, which of course made him an instant millionaire because it was made into a crap movie starring Brad Pitt. But don’t let a major motion picture stand between you and a delightful new author. Palahniuk is one of those hip celebrity writers who deserves the attention, if only because he manages to write serious and satiric hardcovers that are easier to read than a cereal box. Which of course doesn’t necessarily guarantee staying power. (Calling Mark Leyner? Hello? Dude, where are you?) Easy to read, sure, but also effortlessly capturing elements of the zeitgeist in which we live. Palahniuk specializes in misanthropic young men who come up with ingenious rip-off schemes and slacker strategies, eventually careening into surreal parallel realities. After Fight Club, he penned Survivor and Choke—essentially sequels with completely different characters and situations. A unified body of work or a one-trick pony? Longterm player or a passing fad? Prolific because dangerously forgettable? Decide for yourself at this local reading—that is if you can stop laughing with this expert black humorist who operates in the style of Vonnegut, Coupland, and Easton-Ellis. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

We have to confess we’re not familiar with Mosley’s signature series, the Easy Rawlins line of detective stories, but it’s been a sin of omission. Truth is, we’ve been putting off acquainting ourselves with those books because Mosley had ventured into more high-brow territory with a few intriguing side projects in the 90s. In 1996, he first set the mystery genre aside to focus on a cycle of stories, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned , involving Socrates Fortlow, a disheveled and aging but righteous tenant of inner-city L.A. Then he took on his most ambitious project to date, R.L.’s Dream, a fascinating and fictional account of Robert L. Johnson, the legendary Delta bluesman who allegedly sold his soul to the devil. Actually, it’s only incidentally about Robert Johnson. Rather, it’s a long and thoughtful meditation on what, exactly, the blues is all about, set in a gritty and mostly convincing narrative. We’re told that fans of Easy Rawlins have been biding their time (the last Easy Rawlins mystery came out in 95, a few years before we got hooked), because what Mosley lacks in the way of creating complex three-dimensional characters he makes up for in his expertly constructed mysteries. We can’t wait to sample him at his best, after these years of literary aspiration. What could be easier than sitting back and listening to the man read from Bad Boy Brawly Brown, which will be available July 2? Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

Kate DiCamillo has some writing habits that we truly envy. She writes every day at the same time, and produces at least a page or two of usable material. She continues to get together regularly with the same group of writers who’ve been meeting for years now to critique one another’s work. And she “hangs around” mentally with her characters until they tell their stories clearly enough for her to capture them faithfully on paper. These habits have paid off. DiCamillo’s first novel for young adults, Because of Winn-Dixie, was named a Newbery Honor Book, and won a handful of other awards too. DiCamillo’s latest, The Tiger Rising, is darker than her debut novel, tackling the tough stuff of death and divorce, pent-up sadness and open rage, and doing so literally and figuratively through the story’s characterization and its surprising plot. She meets her subject with clarity and resists the temptations of sentimentalism and melodrama. And she crafts characters that manage to be simultaneously quirky and colorful and engaging and believable. Rob, the protagonist who’s unable to express his grief over his mother’s death through any means other than an itchy rash on his legs, hovered about near DiCamillo’s writing life for years before finally materializing in The Tiger Rising. A word of warning, however: for kids who aren’t yet equipped with the emotional resilience to survive sad endings, it may be best to save this book for later. As one 12-year-old reader put it on Amazon.com, this book was “slow, dumb and hard to understand, it would have been a lot better if the tiger hadn’t been shot.”

Some of us have a love-hate relationship with the short story: We love it for the discipline and small miracle required to write a decent one, and for the simple, satisfying fact that we can read it in a single sitting. But we hate it for not pulling us in and keeping us there the way a good novel does, for whetting our appetite, as, say, the smell of microwave popcorn might, and then leaving us hungry for something else. Minnesota native Jean Harfenist has offered a compromise with her first book, A Brief History of the Flood. This collection of short stories builds chronologically from 1959 though 1970 on the life experiences of the same main character, Lillian Anderson of Acorn Lake, Minnesota. Lillian, whom we meet first as an 8-year-old, tells it like she sees it in a narrative voice that powerfully captures her chaotic, hard-edged family life, although she speaks from a safe distance rather than from the middle of the fray. As Lillian grows up, she continues to say it straight in this collection that is at once stark and hilarious. In the collection’s title story, Lillian’s mother pleads with the IRS by writing a multi-page tragi-comic letter: “I suffer allergies and high-grade headaches, as well as poor teeth. (Seems I’d be better off dead, but the children need me.) Also, Mr. Anderson needs frequent tranquillizing, and much Excedrin, all of which shows up on pharmacy bills scotch-taped to pages 9-36 of The Return.” Lillian at first points out the letter’s flaws, until her mother’s face goes blank like a “popped balloon,” and “one eye looks huge, like she’s had a concussion.” So Lillian backpedals with a compliment of her mother’s writing talent. “That’s a lie,” Lillian admits as an aside, “but the IRS won’t read past the first paragraph anyway.” We will, though.