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  • Ain't She Sweet?

    By Oliver Nicholson

    Things seem to be getting serious. She’s convinced her parents to ask you to dinner and you’re scared stiff. It’s not that the grub will be bad. Her mother has a great reputation as a cook. But how will you ever convince them you’re good enough for their little girl?

    First impressions count, and only a clod would show up empty-handed. So, what will it be? Chocolates? Too impersonal. Flowers? Ditto, unless you grew them yourself. Hot dish? Hardly, when she’s such a good cook. Wine? Her father is one of those meek little men who mows the lawn and does the dishes in rubber gloves. He undoubtedly knows the perfect wines to go with the perfect cook’s perfect grub. He probably has the wine all mapped out: a nifty little Mersault for the truite meuniere, Aloxe-Corton for the Beef Wellington.

    Wait, though, what about wine for after dinner? A fine idea. You go to the wine shop and look down the shelves. Port? Too complicated. Besides, the really good ones need to be kept for years, filtered into decanters and left to settle, hardly the sort of thing you can hand over after you’ve hung up your coat with “I thought you might like to try this.” Madeira? Where is Madeira? And then there are all those yellowish wines, said to be sweet. Might do for drinking with the Perfect Pudding or with fruit and nuts afterwards.

    OK, which? My advice is to go for the one called Beaumes de Venise. Why? For a start, it tastes good. Not just good but interesting. Odd things happen to the roof of your mouth when you drink it slowly. For another thing, it comes from an interesting place; it may get her father talking about their holiday in the south of France, which will cheer him up, whatever it may do to you. Best of all, it’s not expensive. A half-bottle, which is all you’ll need, costs around $12. Can’t be bad.

    All the Beaumes de Venise in the world comes from one pretty village in southern France. Provence was the first area of Gaul to be annexed by the Roman Empire, more than a century before Christ. The small Muscat grapes from which the wine is made grow on sandy terraces laid out along the hot hillsides northeast of Avignon. These grapes probably came to Provence even before the Romans. Ancient writers tell how the people of Iron Age Gaul were so keen on wine imported from the Greek and Roman world that they would sell their own daughters into slavery simply to get their hands on a bottle of it– though of course it might be tactless to relate this at dinner with your future in-laws. Anyway, when the good people of Gaul began to grow grapes for themselves it was likely the Muscat grape they planted.

    The Greeks have a saying that you should enjoy your wine with all five senses. I’m not sure how touch or hearing come into it, but Beaumes de Venise held up to the light, even on a grey March evening in Minnesota, has a pleasing smell and a pale gold glint. The tastes are delicate, reminiscent of several sorts of fruit. Maybe that’s why I’ve seen it commended for use in recipes for fruit salad with mangoes, strawberries, and pineapple. But frankly, that’s a waste. The flavors of its own fruit are too complicated to mask with such strong alien tastes.

    If you like Beuames de Venise, you’ll be in godly company: The Popes enjoyed it when they lived at Avignon in the 14th century. I’m not sure if this fact will make you seem more virtuous in her parents’ eyes, but it certainly can’t hurt your reputation–nor that of this excellent wine.

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

  • Free The Jackson Five!

    Before dreadlocks and cornrows, there was the Afro. The Afro was 15 percent hairstyle and 85 percent political statement. Armed with my Afro, I was a true “brother.” I grew my first ’fro in 1971. I was a bad–ass 13 year-old Denver kid just itching to help free the oppressed—Angela Davis, the Chicago Seven, even the Jackson Five. When I got into Harvard College in 1977, my dad made it clear—there would be no second mortgages to fund my eastern pilgrimage. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam offered to provide m-o-n-e-y if only I would join Air Force R-O-T-C. I was torn. How could I be a true brother in a military uniform, shorn of my Ultra Sheened crown? For a week, my stomach went through moves that would put the brothers on Soul Train to shame. However, the allure of Ivy League chic was too seductive to resist. Two days before I left for Boston, I went to Ray’s House of Hair and ordered the military cut.

    Stripped of my ’fro, I was sure I was marked for excommunication from the brotherhood. I truly believed that everything in America was about race. Therefore, all my decisions—where to go to school, who to date, what profession to enter—rested, on some level, on race stuff.

    I shudder to think how often I let “race stuff” skew my decision-making process. While I was in college, I supported Edward Brooke, a black Republican senator from Massachusetts. I liked his politics and I liked his style. Yet I worried. Could a true brother be a Republican? According to one wag, a black man voting Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. Could a brother be “down” and have a white wife? Many folks, especially African-American women, will privately (and some, not so privately) say hell no. I am ashamed to admit that I have almost let such narrow thinking about skin color trump my heart’s desire.

    Today, I have no ’fro (not that I could grow one if wanted I to), I have voted for Republicans, and I have a terrific, thoughtful wife, who just happens to have blond hair and blue eyes. If that means my “brother card” gets revoked, so be it. Over the years, I have learned that being a real brother is not as important as being a real man. Real men think for themselves and live with the consequences of their decisions.
    American politics is like a big engine that runs on the fuel of self-interest. Race, gender, party labels are important additives to the fuel mix. The political engine actually runs smoother, the richer the mix. However, the political engine will not run at all without a strong base of self-interest. Failing to acknowledge that group identity is a critical component of self-interest is naive. But believing it to be the basis of self-interest is downright stupid.
    Consider the recent ouster of Denny Green from the Minnesota Vikings. Some think Green got canned for being an “uppity nigger”—confident, talented, and unwilling to kowtow to certain sports columnists.

    A more likely explanation is this: Green forgot the first rule of American politics. Self-interest trumps racial loyalties. I think even Ray Charles could see that star receiver Randy Moss was out of control. For whatever reason, Green would not or could not take him to the woodshed. Vikings owner Red McCombs (a.k.a. “the Man”) apparently did not believe Green could look past the politics of race and focus on the politics of self-interest. Green’s fate was sealed.

    Sounds cynical, doesn’t it? Perhaps. Self-interest drives most of us more than we might care to admit. Ten years ago, I chaired the Minnesota Minority Lawyer Association’s annual scholarship dinner. I wanted a military color guard to open the show. Some of the “brothers” threatened to boycott the event because they weren’t comfortable with the “military baggage.” The color guard got canned. In 1998, some of the same lawyers wanted to lure the primarily black National Bar Association convention to Minneapolis. The NBA wanted a military presence. Suddenly, waving the military colors became a very cool thing to do. The NBA got the color guard and Minneapolis got the convention. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. But I like to think it was the brothers getting hip to self-interest.

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

  • Motley Krüse

    The problem with being a mother is that the definition of success is too damned narrow. You’re either a good mother, or a bad mother. No in-betweens, no wiggle room. If we can accept gray areas in politics and potlucks, why not parenting? I say this, of course, as I bury another body in the backyard. Under cover of darkness, before my daughter gets home from the weekend away at her dad’s house. I don’t know what I’ll say when she gets here, I don’t know what would make a difference. As soon as she climbs the stairs to her room, she’ll know. Her screams will fill the house. She’ll run down to me, stupid in her grief, tears in her eyes. She’ll desperately cry, “Where is he? What did you do to Pongo?” She’ll collapse and she’ll moan and repeat these questions over and over again, even though she knows the answer. I, her mother, have killed again.

    I didn’t mean to! It was an accident! How many times can something happen before accident turns into “on purpose”? Three times? Four? Under my watch, no less than six beloved creatures—animal companions, I guess you call them—have died needlessly. This time, the bird in question, Pongo, waited in vain for his water dish to be filled. I missed one day, and his beak dried shut. I swabbed it with a Q-tip dipped in olive oil, whispering prayers to St. Martin. Pongo seemed resigned to his fate, lying on his side, eyes blinking, until they closed for good.

    In my defense, I’d like to note here that we have both a dog and a cat, which are thriving. I just can’t be responsible for pets that live in cages, bowls, or tanks. That’s where I get into trouble. If I forget to put water in the dog dish, he’ll belly up to the toilet like it’s happy hour at T.G.I. Fridays. If I forget to change the cat litter, she’ll poop in my shoes. Sometimes, she does this anyway to let me know who’s boss.

    There were fish once, I remember, that were purchased for a child recovering from strep throat. Bright and soothing, they floated, dipped, and swirled through their underwater jungle gym of glow-in-the-dark skulls and treasure chests, surfacing for just a pinch of protein flakes, measured out by the child who loved them. Their water dimmed, until a cleaning couldn’t be put off. As the child slept, I carried the tank into the kitchen, scooped out the fish, and put them into a large mixing bowl full of treated water. I emptied the dirty tank, scrubbed it, and carefully replaced the skulls and treasure chests. I put the drops in the tank. Then I refilled it using water from the hot tap rather than the cold, realizing my mistake seconds after I tossed the fish back in. It was after midnight, when a lot of those crappy household tasks get underway in the home of a single mother. I sat on the counter, patting myself on the back for a dirty job well done, watching them swim furiously for a couple of moments. Until I saw the steam rising from the tank. I plunged my hands into the tank, but it was too late. I flushed their tiny bodies down the pipes and made up a half-baked story the next day. But everybody knew.

    There was a time when I thought digital pets might be the answer, but it’s not the same. When my daughter gets home tonight, my only recourse is to tell her the truth, and hope to God the Buddhists are wrong.

    Colleen Kruse is a Twin Cities actress and comedian who knows how to deal with stalkers, so don’t even try.

  • Kieran's Irish Pub Letter of the Month

    Thanks for Steve Perry’s honest assessment of the post 9/11 prettification. If the experience is edited down to the fiery explosions, a few brave men raising a flag, and a sweetly stoic wife, you’ve got a Bruce Willis movie. The horror that is the reality is, I suppose, depressing and therefore un-American. I worked across the street from the WTC and after we evacuated our building I looked up from the street and saw people plunging from the towers, some of them flailing arms and legs wildly as if something, someone could stop their fall. My colleague looked away and asked, “How can you watch?” But how could I not? I think I said something like, “This is what is happening.” I was thinking, this is it. This is the truth, and it’s terrible. Of course, my colleague and I eventually did turn our backs, literally, to flee up the West Side Highway. But it sometimes seems to me that as a country we want to turn our backs to everything that doesn’t suit our group psyche.

    Wendy Brandes
    New York City

  • Dear New Friends:

    I want to describe where we are trying to go with The Rake, and to beg your patience while we inevitably stumble on our way. Basically, we want to be storytellers. All the other stuff we’ll do will be to make room for more stories.

    I always envied my father’s ability to make up stories while he was driving the family from Iowa to Colorado on vacation. Our two favorites were “Art Bartel: The One-Man Division” about his exploits in World War II, and “El Diablo” about when he was a cowboy by day and righter-of-wrongs and wooer-of-senoritas at night. We didn’t know it then, but that story about how he held off an entire Panzer division with “nothing but a .45” wasn’t complete bullshit.

    He was a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion. He was at Bastogne. He was at the Huertgen Forest. He won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with a cluster, several unit citations, and three Purple Hearts. After he was shot the third time, he spent a year in a hospital. But he wouldn’t talk about that, so he spun out comic book stories. The truth, my brothers and I realized later, was that he couldn’t tell us what he really had done, because that would mean he’d have to tell us about how a ricochet from his gun hit his friend in the throat, or how his best friend from the high school class of 1941 had drowned when his ship was torpedoed in the English Channel, or how he had killed 23 Germans with their own machine gun because he was too scared to get up and run after seeing two other guys shot in the back.

    So, we got the story of blowing up a tank with one bullet from the .45, instead of the one about how he lay wounded in a drainage ditch and shot morphine into his leg until the survivors of his squad could knock out the machine gun at the end of the street. Instead of talking about the life expectancy of replacements, he’d only tell us of the advice he lived by: “Try to look unimportant, the Germans may be low on ammo,” and “Never share a foxhole with someone braver than you.”

    Based on that scant testimony, I didn’t understand why he tried so hard to keep me out of Vietnam, or why he never joined the VFW, or why he wouldn’t go back to France. All he would say is that anyone who glorified war had never seen one, or he’d make some crack about the guys in the “mess kit repair battalion.”

    My father has still left all the details unspoken. I’ve got them from my mother, my aunts, some old letters, and a Silver Star citation I found in a box. This year, he wrote his memoirs, but mostly left out the war. We pry at family dinners, but when he starts to remember, he gets sad and makes up a story about something else-like when he was a cowboy. There’s no bullshit there. He can really ride a horse.

    Until I can get him to tell the real El Diablo story, we hope to fill The Rake with stories as good. In the meantime, please write us and tell us how we’re doing. Next month, this space is yours.

     

  • Getting Your Fixe

  • Family Arrangements

  • Stars of the North

  • Suicide Squeeze