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  • Road-Tripping Through the Dew

    Last year my friend Terry moved back to Nashville to take care of his ailing mother. Last month, when she passed away, I packed my kids, 11 and 14, in the car and drove an unplanned 820 miles in 15 hours to be with him. We left on a Thursday at 5 a.m. I worried about keeping two kids in the car like that, like veal, but we had to rocket if we wanted to make the memorial service. I had $100 in my pocket and no cash in my cash card until Friday. No fast food, no amusement parks.

    The kids got into the spirit of the trip—after all, three days off school is three days off school. We ate PBJ’s and hard-boiled eggs out of the cooler in the back like an America’s Most Wanted family. After a period of silence, somewhere before Kentucky, I heard from the backseat. “Mom, make Isaac stop touching me.” My spine froze. I looked in my rearview mirror to find two dust-covered faces with puffy, punch-drunk eyes and dry, angry mouths.

    I pulled off at the next station to fill up the tank. After paying, I had 60 bucks left. I looked at the kids, who were tussling by the diesel pump, whisper-fighting through clenched teeth. They’d hit the wall. Getting back in the car would be a big mistake. In the distance, just off the highway I saw a motel sign that read “Rooms $39.95. Cable, Indoor Pool.”

    The Budget Inn was two stucco buildings, the main two stories, the other a long strip of rooms facing a swampy field, a “they’ll never find your bones” field. We parked in the deserted lot, walked to the front desk, and rang the bell. A narrow-eyed old troll wearing a Peterbilt cap sprang forth and asked me what I wanted.

    “I’d like one of your $39.95 rooms, please.” I said. He sized us up. Single woman traveling with two homicidal kids. Easy pickings.

    “Don’t got no rooms for $39.95. That’s last month’s special. Ain’t changed the sign yet. Room for you plus two gonna run $45.” “Fine,” I lied. “I’ll take it. I’d like a room in the main building, by the pool.” I dug in my pocket. I’ve been a woman traveling alone before. You always have to stay in the main building. It’s where people can hear you scream. It’s also where the free “coffee” is in the morning. “That costs extra,” smiled the Troll. “You want budget rate, can’t be by the pool. Gonna have to be in the strip.”

    “How much for a room by the pool?”

    “$75.”

    I looked out the window into the empty parking lot and laid my money down.

    “I only have $60. We’ve been on the road all day and we’re tired.” The troll snatched up the small pile of bills on his counter. “S’okay,” he smiled magnanimously. “We getcha by the pool. You the only folks here tonight.”

    The kids swam. I took a tepid shower, and we tumbled into bed. I woke up at 3 a.m. to hear puking in the bathroom. My daughter had too many hard-boiled eggs. I stayed awake till 5 a.m., then roused the kids to get back on the road. I turned to my son, still snoring face down next to me, and nudged him.

    “Honey. We have to get moving. You can sleep in the car.” In response, he lifted his sweet, sleepy head, and spray-vomited all over the bed. The kid was set on mist. He sputtered an apology, and I cleaned him up. We got our stuff together to make a hasty retreat. I glanced around the room to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. I walked to the bed, and pulled the covers over the mess like covering a corpse at a crime scene. Our gift to Rumplestiltskin. Under normal circumstances, I’d have rinsed the sheets in the sink, but 60 bucks is 60 bucks, and you get what you pay for.

    Colleen Kruse is a Twin Cities actress and comedian, mscolleenkruse@hotmail.com

  • Affirmative Inaction

    Years ago, my father told me a little rhyme he learned growing up in Mississippi. “If you are white, you’re alright. If you’re brown, stick around. If you’re black, get back.” This little ditty seems to capture what happens when Minnesota publishers of white mainstream publications put black people on the cover of their magazines. They simply do not sell as well.

    In April 2002, The Rake put a Somali woman on the cover to highlight a top story about strained relations between blacks and Somalis. According to The Rake editor Hans Eisenbeis, the issue had nearly twice as many returns as the previous issue which had Bob Dylan on the cover. “That issue was one of our strongest issues editorially. The writing was great. But people just did not pick it up. Tom [Bartel, The Rake’s publisher] warned me that putting a black person on the cover could be a problem.”

    Bartel admits that when he owned City Pages, he found that putting dark faces on the cover torpedoed the pickup rates. “We tried it enough times to know that we were taking a risk.” According to Rebecca Sterner, a Minnesota-based publishing consultant, “magazine covers with black faces just don’t sell as well. This is not just a Minneapolis problem. It is a national problem.”

    Illustrating her point, Sterner spoke about a major national magazine that featured Cosby Show kid Raven-Symone on its cover. The photograph was “gorgeous.” Yet the issue bombed. “The magazine was very frustrated. They thought the issue would fly off the racks.”

    Sterner believes there are two explanations—one harsh and the other a bit more politically palatable. “One could simply say these things happen because we are a racist society. The more charitable view is that people are more comfortable buying a magazine when they can identify with the cover subject.”

    Brian Anderson, editor of Mpls-St.Paul magazine, insists that “it is the topic, not the person” that moves the magazine. However, he was not willing to categorically state that his staff did not talk about race when designing covers, conceding that the color of cover subjects is a “factor” in how well a particular magazine sells.

    One thing is certain. Local publishers are very skittish discussing race and magazine covers. Publisher Bartel says “it’s a dirty little secret” in the publishing business. Yet, no one other than Bartel was willing to say so on the record. “Publishers do not want to appear to be racist. And they do not want to appear to accuse their readers of being racist either.”

    I matched the covers of Mpls-St.Paul magazine and Minnesota Monthly with the actual newsstand sales numbers as verified by the Audit Bureau of Circulation for the past two and a half years to see if sales dropped when black people were on the cover. Most of the time they did, sometimes dramatically. For example, Mpls-St.Paul ran its annual “Top Docs” issue in January 2000, selling 19,165 newsstand issues. The next month’s cover featured African American Tonya Moten Brown, U president Mark Yudof’s right-hand person. Sales dropped 60 percent. According to Anderson, this drop was to be expected because the “Top Docs” issue is always such a big seller for them. Yet the next year, the issue following “Top Docs” actually did better than “Top Docs.” Hmmmm.

    Minnesota Monthly’s statistics tell the same story. In January 2001, the magazine put Paul Magers and his dog on the cover and sold 5,879 newsstand copies. When black Viking Robert Smith graced the next cover, newsstand sales nosedived nearly 40 percent.

    MSP editor Anderson still maintains that topics and notoriety are the deciding factors on who makes the cover cut. “If I have the opportunity to put Randy Moss or Kevin Garnett on the cover and it made sense, I would do it.” Unfortunately, Anderson misses the point. I certainly do not doubt that he will put a black person on the cover of his magazine again. But the numbers do not lie. The explanations and the rationalizations are endless as to why they do not sell as well. However, when it comes to selling magazines—as with nearly everything else in our society—race matters. Pretending otherwise does not make it so.

    Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis attorney and commentator.

  • Summer Pleasures

    According to Sir Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy has only three traditions, “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash.” It’s certainly true that until only a few years ago every enlisted man in Her Britannic Majesty’s fleet had the right to a substantial tot of rum every day at midday. It was powerful stuff. The custom went by the board when it was agreed that perhaps it was not a good idea for sailors in charge of Exocet missiles and other lethal modern ordnance to spend their afternoons in a condition that would make it illegal for them to drive a car.

    Things were different in the days of sail. The wooden walls of an 18th-century ship enclosed a community that was often cold and always wet. Sailors needed their comforts. The British warmed their men with rum made from sugar plantations in the West Indies; so did notorious pirates like Captain Henry Morgan (he of the “Old Bold Mate of Henry Morgan” song) and Long John Silver (“Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum”).

    But as far back as the early 1600s, the Dutch provided for their sodden sailors by giving them a spirit called brandywine (literally “burnt wine”). To make it they needed to buy substantial quantities of relatively bland wine to distill. Much of this they shipped in from France, particularly from the port of Nantes, at the head of an estuary where the lovely river Loire runs west toward the Atlantic.

    To provide for the Dutch trade, the area around Nantes was planted with a heavy fruiting grape called the Melon de Bourgogne, which was brought in from Burgundy. People suggest the name of the grape comes from the round leaves on the vines, but it might as well come from the fact that these grapes taste like melons—which is to say, they taste like nothing much at all. When the Dutch export market dried up, the farmers around Nantes found a way to turn the grapes they were growing into a very palatable white wine called Muscadet, ideal for summer drinking, pleasing with a Welsh Rarebit (sharp cheese grilled on buttered toast), wonderful with fish.

    I recently considered a bottle of Domaine de la Cognardiere “Bella Verte” Muscadet (substantially less than $15 on the Minneapolis side of the Edina-Minneapolis frontier). It had an initial taste that was pleasingly round, perhaps like the smell of a sun-filled cabin that has not been opened up for some months, slightly sharp, pleasantly musty. But the full benefit came on breathing out. This generated a taste like the fume of two flints clashed together. I can see this taste mingling with the smell of burning sparklers, now apparently legal in Minnesota, on July 4.

    The secret of the wine lies in the way it is allowed to ferment on its lees, “sur lie,” as it says on the labels. The liquid derived from the grapes picked each autumn is left over the winter in casks together with the solid dregs, and it is this which gives depth and complexity of flavor to what might otherwise be a rather dull drink. Sometimes the dregs impart a slight but refreshing fizz.

    Muscadet is like nothing else. Many other wines are made along the banks of the river Loire. They vary from the delightful vintages of Pouilly-Fume, with their heavenly smell of blackcurrants, redolent of country gardens in midsummer, to beverages which in wet cold years would be better employed as battery acid. But most of these are made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape, none from the Melon de Bourgogne.

    This is a wine to sip in a hammock. If you need summer reading to go with it, try Flying Colours by C.S. Forester, a novel in which Captain Horatio Hornblower of the Royal Navy escapes from Napoleon’s France by drifting in a rowboat down the Loire, past the chateaux, past the vineyards. Life could be worse.

    Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

  • Herbal Essence

    The first time I heard Martha Stewart say “herbs” with a pronounced H, I had to laugh thinking the übermom had a glitch in her matrix. Then I learned there was a whole H / no-H debate, and you had to pick your side with the courage of your convictions. Those who Proudly Pronounce feel as if they’re on the cutting edge, the smug in-the-know trendies looking forward and not back. The anti-H bunch feel like purists, traditionalists who won’t shy away from a pinch of French affectation.

    Herbs and spices have enchanted humans from the beginning. Sure their aromas have drawn us and their flavors have tantalized us, but we’ve discovered other uses such as healing our ailments, wooing our mates, telling our future, and cleansing our pasts. Herbs and spices have a rich role in the human history play, playing integral roles in creating and shaping cultures at points along the way.

    Officially the definition of an herb is a bit loose. An herb is classified as the fragrant leaf of any plant that grows in temperate zones and does not have a woody stem, which basically encompasses anything not a tree, bush, or shrub. Most people define an herb by use: Plants in the kitchen or medicine cabinet are herbs. Plants that are merely decorative are flowers—or just, well, plants.

    Historically “spices” referred only to tropical-zone aromatics, but the American Spice Trade Association defines spices as “any dried plant product used primarily for seasoning purposes” (my emphasis). Included are tropical aromatics (pepper, cinnamon, cloves), leafy herbs (basil, oregano, marjoram), spice seeds (sesame, poppy, mustard) and dehydrated vegetables (onions, garlic). So it seems that all herbs are spices, but not all spices are herbs. Whether you call it coriander or cilantro, the power comes not in the name but in the ability to bewitch.

    Some 5,000 years ago, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung compiled the first documentation on herbs. The Sumerians cataloged hundreds of plants on clay tablets around the same time. The ancient Egyptians were huge importers of Babylonian thyme and coriander and Chinese star anise, cumin, and saffron. The Egyptians were quite versed in the aromatic properties of herbs and spices. In fact they produced oils and essences specifically for the grave, hoping these treasured commodities would help ease the transition from this life to the afterlife.

    Maybe we should thank the Romans for kicking butt all over the world. As they conquered they spread their culture—and with it their herbal influences in the form of garlic, parsley, dill, mint, thyme, and sage. They further expanded local spice stores by creating a trade network throughout the far-reaching Empire, bringing cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and the like from the Orient.

    As new and exotic herbs and spices were being introduced through the Middle Ages, the secrets to their many properties were being unlocked. Fervent naturalists set out to compile exhaustive catalogues of information about herbs. These massive compendiums were like medieval Good Housekeeping mags, chock full of herbal gardening tips, a recipe or two, spiritual spells and witch repellent, medical advice, hair tonic ideas, and some general words of wisdom about life.

    Each herb became a story, symbolizing the needs of the people who used it, entangling their cultures in the roots of the plant. Rosemary is the herb of remembrance, stemming from the practice of medieval students who intertwined sprigs of rosemary in their hair to stimulate their brains during study. A presence at both beginnings and endings, rosemary was worn as a crown in Greek and Roman wedding ceremonies and placed in the hands of the dead during funeral rites. Mint has always been a bit “loose.” Named for a flirtatious water nymph, Minthe, who was changed into the plant by the underworld goddess Persephone, mint spreads promiscuously through Minnesota gardens. There are many different varieties of mint, but all were thought to be associated with lust and white magic. Except by the Victorians, who oddly decided that mint was the symbol of virtue. Garlic is practically as old as time. The Islamic tradition states that garlic sprouted in the devil’s footprints as he left Eden. If you are Buffy or Balkan, you believe garlic dispels vampires and can cure whooping cough, as long as you place a bulb between your toes.

    Herbal remedies and their healing properties have always existed hand in hand with an herb’s spiritual worth. Sage is from the salvia genus, from the Latin salvere—to save. Up to the 18th century sage was thought by doctors to be an efficacious fertility treatment, and if taken daily, would ensure a long life. Dill is named after an old Saxon word related to “lull,” and Southern Baptist mothers used to give the wrigglin’ chilluns bouquets of dill, fennel, and caraway to chew during church. Think it’s all ballyhoo and poppycock? Well, echinacea has been named the Herb of the Year 2002.

    Soothing the mind, body, and spirit has been the charge of herbs for centuries, but the majority of users today just want a sassier piece of chicken. The culinary advantage of herbs is forever exploited by young chefs who “discover” the varied uses of fennel or designate thyme as the It-flavor of the month. For those who wish to cultivate some ancient alchemy of their own, it’s as easy as popping down to Target and picking up an Herb Garden Kit.

    If you’re more inclined to large-scale herb gardening or heirloom varieties, there are many local resources to help you. The best and brightest on the scene is the Shady Acres Herb Farm, located in Chaska, with outposts at the Minneapolis and St. Paul farmers’ markets. They have unique varietals, crazy amounts of information, funky herbal dinners (on the farm), and you can order online. And they say “erb” not “herb,” but they probably won’t mock you.

    Shady Acres Herb Farm
    952-466-3391
    www.shadyacres.com

    Stephanie March is a Minneapolis writer.

  • Less Sex, More City

    These women have done it all. They’ve done threesomes, S&M, lesbianism, exhibitionism, shoe fetishism, tantric sex, phone sex, and Viagra. They’ve done younger men, older men, married men, gay men, uncircumcised men, small men, big men, too-big men, Catholics, baseball players, bartenders, millionaires, celebutantes, porn directors, personal trainers, drag queens, movie stars, sports fanatics, control freaks, alcoholics, politicians, firemen, doctors, bisexuals, underlings, liars, cheaters, thieves, and jazz musicians with ADHD.

    Thanks to the four vixens played by Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, and Sarah Jessica Parker, we know that sex with an ex can be depressing, that compromise can become compromising, that you can become impregnated by a man with one testicle, and that relationships and partial lobotomies go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

    We also know that it’s possible to afford a massive Manhattan apartment and a closet full of $300 stilettos on a writer’s salary, that a girl can feel perfectly comfortable hobbling down a crowded city sidewalk in the world’s raciest, most bizarre fashions, and that New York women pick and choose between available, attractive men the way the rest of us select liquid hand soap.

    For four years, Sex & The City has brought us dynamic caricatures of the sexually ravenous, urban, single woman in four flavors: sweet (Charlotte), sour (Miranda), spicy (Samantha), and bittersweet (Carrie). They’ve made us laugh, and they’ve consistently made unabashedly slutty behavior look like fun.

    Americans are not exactly known for their long history of fondly embracing promiscuous women. In fact, most of us can rail off the names of high-profile temptresses faster than state capitals: Monica Lewinsky, Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice, Gennifer Flowers, Anna Nicole Smith. While we’ve certainly had our fill of fictional male characters with strong sex drives—James Bond, Han Solo, Rhett Butler—when a strong female lead hits the sack, you know that either the hero’s about to fall, or a demon with a hatchet is about to bust out of the closet, his heart set on some messy Judeo-Christian vengeance.

    But as the show enters its fifth season, the only question left is this: What more can they possibly do? After jumping into bed with a steady flow of men (and women) from every walk of life, skin disease, and/or personality disorder, our casual sexperts must be exhausted. The show’s go-to formula certainly is. Instead of showering, shining those Manolo Blahniks, and slinking down to the theme bar du jour with the girls for the umpteenth time, we’d really rather crawl into bed with a box of Pop Tarts. Suddenly it’s easy to see why people get married. Because staying single for years on end is just way too much work.

    Over the course of Sex & The City’s last season, its writers seemed to sense that their one-trick pony had been beaten to death. Despite winning an Emmy and two Golden Globes, there’s only so long you can have all four of your leads hopping into bed with one special guest star after another, until each subplot features all the high-jinx and zaniness of your typical Love Boat story line. So instead, the girls got serious real quick-like.

    The writers seemed to toy with serious drama and depth the way a cat fiddles with a half-dead shrew before it loses interest and wanders off. The same dramatic turns that transfixed us last season—Carrie’s affair with a married Big, Miranda’s troubles with eminently likable bartender Steve—felt arbitrary and flat this season. Show after show, Charlotte is frustrated with Trey, despite the fact that the relationship was obviously destined to fail before they even got married. Show after show, Carrie is embroiled in some mundane drama with boyfriend Aidan, as played by John Corbett with all the feisty enthusiasm and unpredictability of dry wheat toast. And some of the dramatic turns weren’t just lacking in laughs, they were downright unfathomable: Fertility drugs that cause hormonal rage? Dogs with leaky diapers? Testicular cancer? These are dark twists best left in the hands of the masters of dramatic subtlety across the hall at Six Feet Under or The Sopranos.

    Which is not to say that the writers of Sex & The City don’t occasionally hint that they’re capable of a much greater range and depth. Strangely enough, the most satisfying episode of the season was the darkest. Miranda’s mother dies, and the way each woman responds to the event beautifully reflects her particular blend of coping strategies and dysfunctional tics: Charlotte kicks into neurotic preppy high gear, planning bouquets and fruit baskets and booking flights to the funeral, Carrie has a petite-sized nervous breakdown, and best of all, Samantha is utterly unfazed but suddenly can’t achieve orgasm, only to break down sobbing in the middle of the funeral like the class bully who weeps openly through the school production of Godspell. Denial wears many veils, indeed.

    Otherwise, it seems like the show’s creators have become so charmed by their own cleverness that they’re treading water, yet the show hovers around the level of cliche introspection (“Is a bird in the hand really worth two in the bush?” “Does love bite, and if so, will that bite become infected?”), instead of gracefully tackling complex subjects with humor as it’s done so well in seasons past.

    Will Carrie find a mate who’s appealing and multifaceted enough that we can stand him for more than two episodes in a row? Will Miranda’s experiences with a new baby fall into whining cliches? Will Charlotte transcend her prison of tedious yuppie desires? Will Samantha do anything but chase meaty boy toys? Most importantly, will it be funny?

    Lest we hold Sex & The City. up to HBO’s impossibly high standards, let’s appreciate what these women have done for us already. They’ve swilled and swaggered and squealed without a thought to their reputations or to whether oversized lapel flowers or bunny tails would ever really catch on with the wider population. Best of all, they’ve shown us that sluts’ dreams really do come true. Here’s hoping that our favorite sex fiends can mature gracefully, and continue to make us laugh while refusing to shy away from the complicated terrain of adult relationships.

    The fourth season of Sex & The City is now available on DVD. The fifth season premieres on HBO July 17.

    Heather Havrilesky eats Pop Tarts in bed in Los Angeles.

  • Hat Trick

    Once a year the Prospect Park neighborhood opens the doors of the Witch’s Hat Tower. This 1912 landmark is visible from many vantage points in the Twin Cities owing to the fact that it sits atop one of the highest points within city limits. It was built because the homes perched in the immediate vicinity lacked water pressure at the turn of the last century. Whatever else may go on there in the way of witches’ covens and warlock’s circles, the tower’s interior is occupied mostly by a 155,000-gallon water tank that is no longer in use.

    When it was decommissioned as a water tower in 1952, and struck by lightening a few years later, the city proposed tearing it down. By then, the community had come to view it as an irreplaceable icon that lent the neighborhood much of its charm. In a rare case of preservation defeating the urge to demolish, the city relented. The Tower was restored to its present state of glory. Before long, it bristled with radio antennae and cell-phone relays discretely positioned on, in, and under the hat.

    Of course the tower’s main attraction is to children and childish adults who view it as a castle garret for the witch who lives there. (Only the most pedantic parent will insist that the tower is, in fact, named for the witch’s hat.) And the opening of the tower—which is secured by three doors and six locks—is accompanied by an impressive street fair that draws Twin Citizens from as far as you can see. This year, revelers stood in long lines not only to file up the narrow spiral staircase inside the tower, but to buy brats and upscale focaccia sandwiches, to watch a startling belly-dancing exhibition, and to commission face-paintings.

    The Minneapolis Police dutifully manned a bike registration table. It was the only vacant attraction, and across the way, next to a moon-walk fully inflated in the middle of Malcolm Avenue, rowdy teenagers horsed around with an unregistered unicycle. Another small group of beltless boys tumbled head-over-heels through the steep underbrush below Tower Hill Park, screaming as if they were actually falling, or as if they were in a Jackass video. Heads turned.

    Not all the horror was an act. Inside the tower, on the dark and dank and not entirely safe approach to the viewing platform, small children clutched at their parents. The narrow stairway would not admit two large adults passing, and many were disheartened at how hard the climb turned out to be. One woman failed to heed warning signs about low clearance, and she burst a wall-mounted light bulb with her forehead. There was a loud pop, glass fell, and children screamed. The bouncer at the door, a kindly retiree representing Prospect Park’s neighborhood association, speculated that admitting the public once a year may be too frequent.

  • Flight Paths

    At the south end of Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport, adjacent to an east-west runway, there is a single row of parking spaces off Post Road. This provides a vantage point to watch planes landing and taking off. If the weather is nice, a few planespotters congregate here among the loitering limo drivers and couriers who wait here for their next pickup. While thousands of south metro residents have installed expensive, elaborate soundproofing in order to forget their proximity to the airport, there are those who want to be as close to the roar of jets as they can be.

    On a recent night, Phil from Richfield was one of several spotters—all guys in their 20s and 30s in need of a shave—who sat alone in their cars with aviation band radios. By switching between different frequencies for different runways and cross-referencing the chatter with a flight schedule, he figured out that the 727 landing just then was from Omaha. Beyond the raw appeal of watching these improbably huge vehicles get off the ground, the spotters said they find something reassuring in the buzz of commerce and recreation that plane traffic represents.

    Birdwatchers get heart palpitations at the sight of a flame-colored tanager or a red-throated pipit. Do planespotters have similar epiphanies? Phil got a distant look in his eye when he recalled how six Blue Angels jets took off in unison on one MSP runway a few years ago, and another time—five years ago in Miami—when he watched a Concorde jet throttle up over the beach on which he was sunbathing. “That was incredible!” he said. “Of course, I’ve always been a plane junkie. I used to ride my bike here to watch planes when I was seven or eight. I’m 34 now.”

    Phil’s interest in planes pervades his life. He was laid off as a baggage handler following the drop in air travel after September 11, but he was just recalled for duty. Any big plans after returning to work? “Maybe I’ll finally take some flying lessons,” he said with a wink from behind his aviator sunglasses.

    Several spots down, Bill, a burly man in a sleeveless T-shirt, and his wife Sharon brought their two sons. They watched the planes from folding chairs in the back of their pickup. Bill explained that the airplane noise drowns out the sound of their TV set in their South St. Paul home, especially in the early evening. “So we figure we might as well come down and watch them,” he said, without a trace of irritation. They come to watch planes two or three times each week. The visits have recently taken on a near–ecstatic quality for the kids, who are looking forward to their first plane ride—destination Disney World—in a few weeks. “We like the planes ’cause they’re loud!” hollered one of the boys.

  • Do Me!

    It’s not hard at all to kick back and get your nails done. And what you choose to have done to your nails conveys a message to the world around you. What will it be? Buff rimmed ovals just peeking over the edge of your fingertips? Vicious blood-red daggers? The Flojo? The Flojo is true nail art. Usually defined by nails of Guinness Book of World Records length, with long canoes curving down and forward, Flojo nails stop just short of describing a complete spiral. They can be any color. In fact to be a true Flojo, they should be many colors, perhaps even with good luck charms pierced through them. Women who wear the Flojo are sometimes regarded with horror or disbelief, as though they are crippling themselves by grooming their digits into uselessness. How can they type? How can they eat? How can they open car doors? What the supremely confident Flojo wearer says to the world is that she fully expects that you will peel her grapes and open her doors.

    You can’t get the Flojo at, say, the Red Door Salon. Like most cutting–edge fashion, nails like this are born in the street. Lake Street to be specific. Nail salons thrive on practically every block down Lake Street, from Nicollet Avenue to West River Road. There’s Nail It To Me, Nails For You, and my old haunt, Do Me Nails. I got my falsies done there almost every other Saturday night for two years. I thought the name was charming, and I wanted to support the businesses in my old neighborhood. I always pronounced it with a lilting Irish brogue, thereby creating a double entendre, softening the vulgarity. It may be the polish–remover fumes talking, but the first time I walked into the salon, it felt like home. Cheap wood paneling and rec-room carpet. Television and radio blaring at the same time. Kids running around bugging their moms for a treat. There were neat rows of manicure stations, and spice racks loaded with varnish of every imaginable color. I couldn’t wait to take my place at a bench and get my nails fussed over.

    Usually I preferred a short frosty blue tip. It’s an affordable luxury, running about 25 dollars every two weeks.

    On my last trip there, I patiently waited my turn—contemplating a palm tree-themed Flojo. The door burst open to a large white woman with tight, angry cornrows—apparently a difficult regular customer—with a Flojo emergency. She held a family-sized bag of Doritos, from which she extracted handful after handful of corn chips, working them into her mouth as she complained. “I got my nails done yesterday,” she griped bitterly. Holding her chip hand up to the light, she bellowed, “I gotta date tonight and one of the mofo nails came off! You gotta get me a new one right now—(munch)—’cause I don’t know where the other one is.” The technicians at the bench squirmed. I’m both a nail-biter and a chip-eater myself, and it occurred to me what might have happened to that false fingernail.

  • Oh Deer

    At least 10,000 whitetail deer will give their lives this year to auto-animal conflict, converting Minnesota’s roads into a 130,000-mile dinner table for a growing population of crows. Depending on when you count, Minnesota’s whitetail population rises to about 1.1 million (about 20 percent of the state’s human inhabitants) before the fall hunt. At a glance, roads are hardly a good deal for the whitetail, few of whom drive at all, but who suffer crash fatality rates at least 16 times that for Minnesota humans. So it makes sense that MnDOT is working to develop technology that might keep the critters off your hood in years to come. They’ve added an amber light to the top of existing “deer crossing” signs. Nearby motion sensors can activate the light via transmitters for about a minute at a time to warn drivers. If a two-year trial at three locations shows promise, the system could be deployed statewide.

    In the meantime, the car-animal death match continues, and someone has to get rid of the leftovers. The Rake recently met with several Minnesotans who have stepped up to the job in the years since the DNR relinquished the responsibility in 1987.

    Rick Johnson has contracted with counties (including Hennepin) and cities to dispose of whitetail road-kills for the past 12 years. “It’s really nothing special,” Johnson said modestly. “I have a winch and a truck and a board I put up to the back and throw the winch around the neck.” By lunchtime on the day we spoke, he had recovered six animals this way. Johnson strongly disapproves of local maintenance operations that simply stack the animals and mulch them with their woodchipping operations. It’s not unheard of for snowmobilers, for example, to collide with these above-ground graves, he said. “It’s disgusting.” MnDOT’s Kent Barnard states emphatically that MnDOT does not apply this disposal method to any road kill, but that it is approved by the Pollution Control Agency and may be practiced in some counties. MnDOT only uses landfills licensed to receive the animals, though in remote areas they can be dragged clear of the road and left for the benefit of scavengers. How does Rick Johnson honor the dead? He delivers about 1,000 deer each year to feed private collections of wolves, tigers, lions, and other predators, a route that puts 80,000 miles on his truck annually.

    At the top of the food chain, humans rarely miss an opportunity for free meat. Out of 10,000 deer confirmed dead in traffic by the DNR, about 4,000 will be claimed with “possession permits,” available at no cost to folks who like to eat what they run over. At least one MnDOT employee admits having fed the family this way, and Kent Barnard promotes this use of unintended harvests. “What you call road kill, some folks call food,” he quipped, cautioning that penalties including vehicle forfeiture await those who bypass the permit process.

    Closer to home, the victims are less likely to be supper than the family pussycat or pooch, which makes for a more delicate topic with Minneapolis Animal Control’s Bob Marotto. “We don’t refer to it as road kill,” Marotto recently said. “For us, we are dealing with ‘deceased animals.’ Obviously people have a close bond with their pets and we would absolutely never refer to them as road kill.” In Minneapolis, it’s Marotto’s sad task to impound 5,500 to 7,000 animals annually. In 2001, about 1,000 of them were pets killed in traffic. Marotto and his staff also undertake the job of owner notification, “One of the most difficult things we deal with.”

    But for a chosen few creatures, the end of the road in Minnesota is also the launch of a more distinguished career—in modeling, naturally. The University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum holds one of the DNR’s handful of salvage permits, which allows Jennifer Menken and other museum staff to resurrect any dead animal for educational purposes. Current road kills on display are the raccoon in the museum’s touch-and-see room, and the popular “wing table,” which makes use of the flight anatomy when “the rest of the animal was too badly damaged,” said Menken. She noted that a wolf recently retired from the exhibit was also a rare road kill trophy. Eventually, said Menken, the wolf was “loved to pieces” by the 700 kids a day hosted by the museum in springtime—a kinder death, no doubt, than its first.

  • 100,000-Watt Thunderbird

    It’s been a year and a half since the passing of Mahlon Nickence, the best-known voice of WOJB-FM 88.9 in Reserve, WI. Since then, former program manager Dave Kellar has resumed hosting the Saturday honky-tonk show that brought Mahlon his notoriety.

    On Saturday nights, the station’s switchboard still lights up an hour before the show goes on the air, with old-timers requesting songs by Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Wilma Lee, children asking for novelty tunes like “Funny Face,” and young lovers asking for the off-color John Prine-Iris DeMent duet “In Spite of Ourselves.”

    Nine years ago Mahlon, a Korean War veteran and a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwes, began bringing suitcases full of his personal record collection into WOJB’s modest studio. He was trained in as a volunteer DJ by Kellar, but his popularity was due in part to the fact that the training never quite stuck. He missed needle drops, talked over the records, and he was sometimes hard to understand. If you didn’t know Mahlon was a lifelong teetotaler, you might have thought he’d had a nip or two. According to those who knew him well, his somewhat garbled speech was due to his refusal to wear his partial dentures on the air. “You’d hear him on the air and he’d make these mistakes and people loved it, because they said it was real,” said station manager Camille Lacapa recently. “They could relate to him because he was just like them. He made mistakes, and he laughed at his mistakes.”

    Before taking over the honky-tonk show, Mahlon was well known on the reservation for his community work, including serving as its first fire chief. According to Bob Albee, a Minneapolis media professional who helped found WOJB 20 years ago, Mahlon’s broadcasts also helped “turn the hearts” of his fellow elders on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation. They were skeptical and suspicious of the reservation’s radio station until they heard one of their own on the air, playing the old country songs they’d grown up with. By the time of his death, Mahlon had amassed a large and dedicated listenership among locals, both Indian and non-Indian, and among the thousands of hunters, anglers, mountain bikers, and cross-county skiers who flock to northwest Wisconsin throughout the year. Evelyn Nickence, who served as call-screener for the honky-tonk, said she and Mahlon would often get calls from Twin Cities residents who had driven north and east until they could pick up WOJB’s signal, then they’d pulled off the road, parked, and listened to the show.