On Dec. 4 I heard a reading of Suzannah Weiss‘s The Gay Agenda on the UMD campus.
The work is intended as a web series. When I was a student, creative writing students held ambitions to be seen by a dozen people in a one-act play on campus. Today, new media gives everyone with a talent for words an opportunity to be seen by thousands. As a result, talented young people can be alive with an ambition that I never saw as a student.
I left Duluth for Bluefin Bay in the late afternoon, after dropping off my mail at the UMD post office (where the lines are shorter than the Mount Royal office by a lot).
Over the course of a week, I celebrated my birthday, Duluth-style. In sharing the story with you, I celebrate the things about Duluth I like.
[Editor’s note: Duluth’s NorShor Theatre has been closed for more than seven years. It will reopen in February when the new operator, the Duluth Playhouse, launches its production of “Mama Mia.”
The NorShor, of course, has a long and storied history, including a stretch from 2006 to 2010 when it operated as a strip club called the NorShor Experience.
For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Ten years ago he paid a visit to the NorShor and published this bawdy report for Duluth’s weekly Transistor.]
Big Lips has the method down.
Every 10 minutes or so, he rises from where he’s been sitting alone at a table in the corner. Then, with his hands casually in the pockets of his camouflage jacket, he simply takes a little stroll, puckering his big fat lips and whistling as he looks to the left and to the right and behind him, making sure that no one is videotaping him or that his wife isn’t standing behind him ready to clobber him with a frying pan. Eventually, he makes it the 10 or 15 feet to the stage where some naked chick is grinding her life away. “Well,” he appears to suggest, “as long as I’m on my stroll, I might as well tip this stripper.”
Last week, my ex-wife and I planned to get rid of her old car, still stored in my garage for the four years since she moved out. She bought a new car, I bought a new car, her 2002 Hyundai Accent still remained there.
The goal was to donate it to Community Action Duluth to let her get the tax deduction. But because it’s a donation, it needed to go when the towing company could fit the pickup in its schedule. Eventually it arrived.
It’s that time of year again: the lights are twinkling, the tourists are flocking, and “Christmas City” plays on a seemingly endless loop. How well do you know your Twin Ports holiday traditions? Whip yourself up a Tom & Jerry and settle in for the quiz!
The next PDD Quiz, reviewing the events of 2017, will be published on Dec. 31. Please send question ideas to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Dec. 28.
I have never worked a fine-dining kitchen but was a short-order fry cook for many years and absolutely loved the work. It’s the closest I have ever been to becoming a star athlete: the physical challenge, mental focus, and team effort of the average brunch service was a rush no matter how many times I got through it. I would sit eagerly after the line was clean, watching the waitress tally her tickets so I could go home with my head full of fresh stats: 200 covers, 8 hours, no walk-outs, no comps = perfect game.
And I was good. I have no idea why. I walked into the diner of my future as a 21-year-old anthropology student and applied for a part-time job I (falsely) assumed would be as low-accountability as my former pizza kitchen work, where as the only woman in the back of the house I was treated with all the novelty I deserved and none of the (usual) hostility. Like a kitten in a nursing home, my male co-workers gave me just enough to play with in that kitchen so I didn’t run away, all the while relieved to have a distraction from their own tired dynamics.
The Christmas holiday is a joyous celebration commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed through gift giving, wreath hanging, carol singing, tree decorating, card exchanging, egg nog drinking, fruitcake chewing, chestnut roasting and other questionable behavior. Not everyone believes in Jesus Christ, or fruitcake for that matter, but all decent human beings are expected to be just a little nicer than usual in December and tolerate all the crackpots.
For those who are unsure how to comply with society’s expectations, I’ve put together a few quick answers to some frequently asked Christmas questions.
Should my family put together a holiday photo card or just do the general Hallmark greeting card thing?
No matter how crappy a photo card is, a majority of recipients will save it their entire lives. Hallmark cards are completely pointless and will be in the recycling bin on Dec. 26 by noon.
I’m sad about Al Franken. I’ve been reading some heartfelt responses to the situation, varying in timbre from sad and resolute to forgiving and freshly devoted to the new and improved Al Franken, the one who will likely emerge from a self-imposed ethics investigation much the way he entered it: somewhat marred, but essentially a good man in the eyes of those who always thought he was a good man, and a liberal blowhard to those who always thought he was a liberal blowhard. His reputation in the court of public opinion is bent, but not really broken. He can still look most of America in the eye. Compared to Louis C.K. and the rest of them — Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore — those roiling pots of sexual dysfunction and predation, Franken is a tepid pool.
I’ll be honest — I was sadder and more surprised by the allegations against the men in my own camp: the liberals and artists, the progressive advocates who had been using their bully pulpits and mordant wits to shame and denounce the current administration and all of its gorked trappings as archaic and hateful, relics of a time before we knew that all people are people, and that other religions are equally inexplicable and sacred to the people who they are inexplicable and sacred to. So shame on me for believing that my men would be different.
The Nov. 18 episode of Travel with Rick Steves has a brief and not terribly flattering mention of Duluth … though it’s not all that insulting either. The episode is titled “Gili Islands; All-Season Australia; Open Phones: Memorable Travels.”
During the open phone segment, Steves chats with “Brad” from Portland, Ore., who has done ten “home exchanges.” That means Brad and his family have traded houses with other families while traveling. The discussion quickly turns to the notion of convincing someone from Paris to exchange a home with someone who lives in … “no offense … Duluth.”
When I let the brown-leather Wilson basketball fly — when I ended a slow three-or-four-step run-up more elegantly than you might expect from an oafish 6’2”, 210-lb., 21-year-old boy-man by lightly springing off my left foot, driving my right knee up and out, and launching the ball into its arc with two hands — I wasn’t sure it was going to go in.
I’d taken a lot of half-court shots since my teens: before and after 10th-grade practice at Rochester John Marshall High; while skipping class to play noon ball in Romano Gym with my UMD football buddies; alone, ill-equipped for identifying anything better to do, just shooting around on various playground or gym courts. Sometimes you know, from the moment it leaves your hand, what’s going to happen. Muscle and brain memory and senses I don’t know how to name tell you everything from how you planted your foot to how your fingertips were in relationship with the ball’s seams to which snippet of which song was looping through your head add up to a swish, brick, or something else.
But in that moment in November 1993, in the College of St. Scholastica gym at halftime of a Saints’ women’s game against an opponent I can’t remember, when I sprung off my left foot from just behind the royal-blue half-court stripe laid on blonde hardwood, I didn’t know what the ball was going to do. At least I don’t think I knew. Honestly, I never know what I know or knew. I’ve been admonished a few times recently (with both warmth and contempt) for wantonly admitting what and when I don’t know. For expressing uncertainty and self-doubt and regret instead of [long pause] whatever other state of mind it would be more attractive and credible — and more comfortable to other people — for me to claim. For asking annoying questions about obvious and hypocritical contradictions.
How does Perfect Duluth Day publish 800 events per month in its online events calendar? Through the hard work of Tony Bennett, Jessica Morgan and the occasional intern, that’s how. Sadly, Jessica will be leaving Duluth soon, and if someone new isn’t quickly found to help Tony he’ll collapse on his laptop and weep uncontrollably.
So here’s another rare opportunity to get inside the PDD media empire and earn slightly above minimum wage with no benefits while working in pajamas. Read the full job description on the PDD employment page.
November is a treacherous time on the Great Lakes. This past month, the “gales of November came early,” devastating the Lake Superior shoreline. This quiz looks back at Lake Superior storms and shipwrecks (as well as some marginally-related local singers and songwriters).
The next PDD Quiz, reviewing stuff that happened in November, will be published on Sunday, Nov. 26. Send question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Nov. 23.
For the 14th time (by Perfect Duluth Day’s count) The Onion has published a story with a Duluth dateline.
The headline reads: Weak-willed coward changes opinion after learning he was wrong
According to the story, “33-year-old coward Benjamin Dyer gave in and changed his opinion … instead of doubling down on his previously held belief like a real man.”
It seems most ship traffic going onto the lake from Duluth-Superior goes through the canal under the Aerial Lift Bridge. How much ship traffic uses the Superior Entry, which is between Minnesota Point and Wisconsin Point? Only the ships going to and from Allouez?
