This was a very fun week. UST basketball is on a roll. After losing the MIAC crown to St. Olaf on our home court in our tournament, the Tommies continued on to the next round of playoffs be virtue of having won the conference outright. That’s a fancy way of saying “What? We didn’t need to win that game.”
Don’t be fooled. Not one Tommie wanted to watch Coach Coz and his guys cut down our nets.
But that’s all in the past.
Zack went on the road for the first time in years as he and Jay drove down to the quad cities early Friday morning. Jay had stayed behind when the team bus went down earlier so as to provide a Tommie presence at the State basketball tournament.
UST won both games in the semifinal round of the national tourney and next week it’s off to Virginia for the final four!
Tommie Nation!
Meanwhile on more important fronts, Kt and I went to a play at a small theater here in town. Minneapolis is a hotbed of artistic activity. It always has been. Food, theater, dance, sculpture, painting, singing…we’ve got it all. Forty years ago I was taking a painting class at the University of Minnesota from a professor who was a New York transplant. I remember him telling us that the Twin Cities had everything the bigger cities on either coasts have. Maybe not as much but everything and of equally high caliber.
In some disciplines, we’re actually ground zero for the best of the best.
So things like theaters, dance spaces and studios are constantly popping up around here; there are lots that I’ve never heard of.
The Open Eye Theater is a fun, funky space on the east side of 35, not too far from my neighborhood. Kt and I met at a restaurant nearby for a bite before the show. We hadn’t seen each other for a week or two so it was a good time to catch up on everything we’ve been up to.
The theater was small, between 70-80 seats but good sightlines to the small stage. We really liked the space itself; it showed great imagination without trying to impress by being uncomfortable.
The play was by Samuel Beckett and titled “Happy Days”.
Based on the beloved ‘70s TV show starring Ron Howard, it features Mrs. C stuck up to her waist in a pile of dirt. A commentary on depression or dementia, Mrs. C spends the entire play trying to recall what life was like before she got stuck in the wilderness of endless reruns. Her only companion is a creature crawling around behind her dirt pile. She thinks its her husband but I think it’s the Fonz, as all he ever says is “Aaayyyy.”
The actress in the dirt pile was pretty good. You have to be pretty good to avoid being upstaged by a pile of dirt. We were not tempted to grab our coats and run for the exit at half time.
The only time I’ve ever done that was at a production of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express. I was there on a summer evening with a bunch of my sisters, some of whom had been unable to keep from guffawing when the lead kept falling off her roller skates. When the curtain came down on the first act, Vi turned to the rest of us and said “IF you make me go back in there, I swear; someone’s career will end tonight.”
No one wanted to make her go back in there.
But Kt and I were intrigued by Mrs. C in her dirt pile.
The action ramped up considerably in the second act: when the curtain rose, the dirt pile had risen to Mrs. C’s neck! Then, with suspense so thick you could smell it, Mr. C (it wasn’t Fonzie after all) manages to crawl around to the front of the pile of dirt and almost gets his hands on the gun Mrs. C left there in the first act!
Believe me, he’s not the only one who wanted to get their hands on that gun.
Then it ended.
We weren’t sure it was over until the actors bowed.
Yep, over.
The pile of dirt got the biggest ovation.
The play isn’t terribly long. Curtain was at 7:30 and I was home before ten o’clock. So I watched several episodes of Frasier before bed.
I’d patronize a theater that mounted episodes of that show, in a heartbeat. They could call the place “Salad and Scrambled Eggs Theater”, do four episodes a show, one show a month and run for ten years.
They would have to offer really good wine and caviar at half time. Intermission. Whatever.
Saturday, I went up to Kt’s house and we spent the afternoon hanging the wallpaper mural of trees and sky in her bedroom. I hadn’t hung paper since we lived in Montana in the 80s, when wallpaper oiwas last fashionable. I papered the heck out of that house and got pretty good at it. The only paper in our house at the moment is in Josie’s bathroom (It’s really my bathroom. Josie lives at school ten months of the year and my office is up there so I’m the only one who uses it. It’s beautiful, all white with blue accent, a claw foot tub and toile wallpaper) and our friend Ron hung it for me. He was a professional paper hanger in his youth and he matched, cut and hung that complicated pattern in under three hours.
The paper we hung yesterday was a wall sized mural so the pattern came in nine foot lengths with top and bottom clearly marked. If we hadn’t been working in a fully furnished bedroom we could have done the whole job in about two hours. Working in the three feet we had at the foot of her bed, we still finished in right around three and a half. It helped that Kate and I have always understood each other so well; with the very first strip, we were handing off tools and switching places like a well-choreographed team. Surgeons wish their nurses were as on the spot with clamps, scalpels and sutures as we were with floats, straight edges and razors. Even better, I am right handed and Katie’s left so whichever worked the best angle wielded the razor. We soaked the paper in the bath, booked it, carried it into the bedroom and I went up the ladder, Kt handed it up to me, we matched it up to the plumb line and used a tiling float to smooth out any air bubbles. The paper had a lot of glue on it, which was nice for sticking and sliding but very messy. I’d use the float on the top half of the wall while Katie used a sponge to do the bottom half. We used a roll of paper towels to mop up the rivers of glue that slid down the wall after we’d squeezed it out of the paper. By the second strip, we had glue flying through the air and by the third strip, we were covered in the stuff. We tried to keep it out of each other’s hair with varying success. Neither of us is squeamish about getting messy during a job like that. The only time we got grossed out was when Katie looked up at the wrong moment and actually got a face full of glue. That was icky but really funny.
We had a little bit of trouble matching one panel but I’m talking five minutes instead of one minute sliding the paper up and down the wall.
It looked spectacular when we finished.
We mopped the floor, the ceiling, the baseboards and door jamb, the top of the dresser and everything else that was ever in range of flying glue.
“You want to go grab something to eat?” Kt asked as we finished up.
“Sure. But where can we go, looking like this?” I looked down at my glue covered jeans and filthy T shirt. I wear ugly old T shirts when working so I can use them as aprons and hand towels. I looked like Bill Murray at the end of Ghostbusters, slime-wise.
To give you a pretty good idea of how bad I looked: I’m a person who wears a fanny pack in public, yet I balked at going out to eat in my current state
.
“Anywhere.” Kt said.
That’s my girl. It’s her world and if we want to go out to dinner covered in glue, by George, I dare you to stop us.
We went to Moe’s. We ate out on the back deck and watched a gorgeous sunset. Even after dark, it was over 50 degrees, which for Minnesotans in March feels wonderfully warm.
Back home, I took a long, hot shower to ease out the wall paper kinks from my muscles and scrub out the wall paper paste from my hair and skin.
Then I got the jubilant call from the road: UST had crushed the team that had been ranked no. 1 all season and moved on to the finals.
As I said; a really good week.