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Review: Parody, melody and blasphemy come together in ‘Dicks: The Musical’

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

If you like your “Parent Trap” riffs with heaping helpings of horny humor, insane musical numbers and a soupcon of monsters in diapers, then “Dicks: The Musical” may be your jam, especially if blasphemy is your bliss.To be clear, this film version of an off-Broadway musical comedy (the name of which this family newspaper will publish as “F—ing Identical Twins”) could turn into an actual parent trap if families confused it for kid-friendly fare. Your first clue this isn’t the Disney version is the opening title card, which proclaims the thing was “bravely written by two homosexuals,” helpfully adding that it’s the first thing ever written by homosexuals. Then Bowen Yang shows up as disco-fied God (“He/Him,” He asserts), and we’re off.Co-playwrights and stars Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson reprise their stage roles as alpha-male douchebags Craig and Trevor, respectively, businessmen in an “American Psych...

Minnesota Mystery Night celebrates successful first year

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

“We’re booked into the middle of 2025, bringing the best of our crime and mystery writers,” Rob Junghans says, describing Minnesota Mystery Night. “This event has found its pulse.”Marcie Rendon (Courtesy of Minnesota Mystery Night)A group of volunteers has a right to be proud of co-founding this monthly reading series for crime/mystery fans, hosted by Junghans, which celebrates its first anniversary Monday, Oct. 16, at Axel’s Restaurant in Mendota. Guest presenters are Marcie Rendon, author of the award-winning Cash Blackbear series, in conversation with Patrick Scully, dancer, choreographer, and art entrepreneur whose performing career spans more than 45 years across venues in the U.S., South America and Europe, and founder of Patrick’s Cabaret, Minneapolis art incubator for local performers.Junghans, who writes thrillers as Rob Jung, says Minnesota Mystery Night grew out of the Bookstube at the Bierstube series in Hastings that ended a 15-...

Skywatch: The great autumn galactic happening

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

Now that we’re well into early autumn and the bright light of the harvest moon is long gone, it’s a fabulous time to make a date to get out in the dark skies of the countryside, that is, if you’re not already living out there. I guarantee this will be a treat you’ll remember for a long time, whether by yourself or with family or friends. Bring blankets, binoculars, star charts, snacks, and beverages, and be prepared to sleep in the following day. Even better, turn this into an overnight campout if you don’t mind braving the October chill! It will be a great show. The clear autumn skies are more transparent because the air has much less humidity.For the heck of it, when you settle under the autumn evening heavens, attempt to estimate how many stars you can see with your naked eye. Traditional astronomy textbooks say you can see about 3,000 stars in the dark countryside with the naked eye, but I’m sure there’s much more. Don’t even try t...

Francis Wilkinson: Hamas’ terror also holds a warning for the U.S.

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

We become depraved by degrees.Germans did not become Jew killers in a day. It took years of conditioning, via propaganda, and then steady practice, via party and state brutality, to shed their humanity and become a nation of functional sociopaths.The Hamas terrorists who murdered babies in their cribs last week weren’t stamped with pathological hatred at birth. It was an acquired habit, the result of a process of moral dulling and rage sharpening. No doubt some foes of Hamas will now rejoice at the sight of Palestinian babies blown to smithereens in retaliation. It’s not a terribly long distance from eye for an eye to baby for a baby.If you look around American politics, you can see the early stages — and in select cases not so early — of the kind of moral, social and intellectual deterioration that first imagines, and later gleefully invites, atrocity.At New York magazine, Eric Levitz has an excellent survey of moral idiocy on the left. The terrorist attack ...

How a member of a hiring panel landed — and quickly lost — a job on the St. Paul City Council’s reparations commission

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

The first in-person meeting of the new St. Paul Recovery Act Reparations Commission opened like an office party. The Aug. 17 meet-and-greet was led by St. Paul City Council member Russel Balenger, who introduced a young City Hall employee as the future face of the council’s predominantly-Black commission. To the surprise of several of those assembled, their sole new staffer was Asian.Within less than a week, a Hmong woman who had been offered the only paid staff position on the council’s newest commission found herself facing a street protest led by the very people she was hired to represent.On the heels of unexpected pushback from several of the city’s most longstanding Black leaders, Jenny Lor declined or resigned the position the next day, even before it officially started, with questions swirling around how Lor — who had served on a hiring panel for the position — got the job and who else had applied.“It didn’t really have anything to do with her pe...

Nina Axelson’s Grid Catalyst helps launch new eco-firms like Carba and GetGreen in Minnesota

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

Imagine an app on your phone that challenges you to buy used clothing, or sets a goal of reducing your carbon footprint by walking to work a couple of times this week, or going meatless for the day.When GetGreen, a Seattle startup, went fishing for an established partner to help the environmentally-conscious mobile app make its debut, Nina Axelson got busy playing professional matchmaker. Axelson, a Minneapolis-based clean-energy advocate, introduced GetGreen to organizations large and small, including Ecolibrium3, a Duluth, Minn., nonprofit that jumped at the chance to work with the Duluth mayor’s office and roll out GetGreen citywide as part of the city’s climate action plan.In Burnsville, another startup company known as Carba is building a biomass facility with the intent of removing carbon from up to 15,000 tons annually of ash trees and other waste wood. With Axelson’s help, Carba founders hope to team with investors who will help them pioneer new ways of red...

Stillwater native is helping bring modern health care to Central African Republic

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

Thirteen percent of children in the Central African Republic die before they turn 5, and one out of every 100 women died during childbirth.Stillwater native Ted Hooley is working to change all that.Hooley is founder, president and CEO of Senitizo, a nonprofit organization that provides healthcare services at a clinic in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world.Senitizo, which focuses on primary care and community health, with an emphasis on maternal and child care, serves a population of more than 50,000 people “who previously didn’t have access to any health services,” Hooley said.The health indicators in the Central African Republic are “some of the worst in the world,” according to Hooley. “It’s hard for people to really grasp how horrible it is. Understandably, people just don’t want to think that that type of situation exists in the world. These people have been marginalized, basically, since French colonial times. They’ve never ...

Literary calendar for week of Oct. 15

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

DANIEL HORNSBY: Minnesotan presents his novel “Sucker” in conversation with Emma Torzs. 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.KLECKO AND FITZGERALD: Just in time for Halloween, baker/poet and audience-rouser host Danny Klecko leads a discussion of “A Short Trip Home,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s only short story with a supernatural theme. Published in 1927 in the Saturday Evening Post, it’s about young people partying during vacation from their elite East Coast colleges. In St. Paul, Eddie tries to save Ellen, who is under the spell of a sinister man. In conversation with Clarence White, of East Side Freedom Library, and Erica Christ, bartender at the Black Forest Inn. This is the fourth in Klecko’s Fitzgerald Story series in partnership with St. Paul Public Library. Free. 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, SubText Books, 6 W. Fifth St., St. Paul.LITERATURE LOVERS’ NIGHT OUT: Featuring Jean Kwok (“The Left...

Minnesota Black Authors Expo is back for first time since COVID shutdown

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

More than 40 Black authors will bring their books and storytelling talents to the Minnesota Black Authors Expo on Saturday, Oct. 21, at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis. The theme of this seventh annual expo, the first since the COVID shutdown, is “Dreaming in Color: Telling Our Stories to Save Our Lives.”Shayla Michelle (Courtesy of the author)“This powerful theme encapsulates the spirit of our Black people, our persistence, resistance, and resilience,” MBAE President Dorothy Nins wrote to the Pioneer Press. “Dreaming in Color reflects the vivid and diverse narratives of Black authors and artists, whose stories are not just words on a page but lifelines that connect communities, inspire change and ignite hope. Through the various shades of human experience, the Expo will bring together authors, readers, and literary enthusiasts for an exploration of the transformative power of storytelling and connecting people. In a world often plagued by division...

Ask Amy: Husband’s leavings make a yummy salad

Published Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:23 GMT

Dear Amy: I have a wonderful marriage of several decades with “Lance.”In many ways, Lance holds up his end of the roommate bargain that comes with long-term partnership. He cooks half the time, helps me in the garden (even though it’s my interest and not his), does his own laundry, etc.All that said, he’s a terrible slob in the kitchen, and in ways that cause problems.He chops fruit for his breakfast and leaves the peels and rinds on the juice-soaked cutting board, slices pieces from the loaf of bread then leaves it out on the counter amidst piles of crumbs, and leaves his meal leftovers in places piled in the sink.I have tried everything, from strongly reprimanding him to cleaning up after him like he’s a toddler and I’m his mother, to ignoring it hoping he’ll see how bad it gets.However I travel for work and am often gone for a few nights at a time — during which time the kitchen becomes a disaster.I can’t constantly stay on top of i...