Thank you for the coffee …
To the angel who prepaid several people’s coffee at a mall-area coffee shop on Sunday — thank you. I appreciate the kindness.
To the angel who prepaid several people’s coffee at a mall-area coffee shop on Sunday — thank you. I appreciate the kindness.
“Keep it high, like this!” Michelle said, transmitting party wisdom over her shoulder with a cheerleader smile, holding a Marb red and a Schmidt can in one hand up near brunette Aqua Net bangs as she inched us through someone’s mom’s apartment packed with mostly white teenagers. I followed close in the crush, trying to protect my beer and not bump into her. She was a tiny junior glowing with charisma and cool. I was a six-foot sophomore with a spiked mullet and a forehead full of zits. So skinny. Still 15. Only 15. Not good at parties but wanting to be. It was a Saturday night in January 1987. Maybe early February.
In October a couple cops had taken me to detox after busting an outdoor party. The guys I was with ditched me because I was unconscious and ill and Steve, who I barely knew, thought I might mess up his immaculate brown Camaro. At the party, juniors and seniors I looked up to had laughed at me and pissed on me and tied my Reeboks to my Levi’s 501 belt loops while I laid in weeds on the edge of woods next to a nature center parking lot. I don’t know what else they did. They could have done much worse. I don’t know if anyone tried to help me. I’m not mad at anyone who didn’t. I wish more people would help, but I understand why they don’t. I can still smell the combination of vomit and Adidas cologne on my black and purple shaker-knit Oak Tree sweater.
As we ease in and out of mask mandates and public health challenges, the world of arts, athletics and leisure carry on. And the PDD Calendar has all the details as usual. Each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar events. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
The fake internet court podcast Judge John Hodgman, where pressing issues are decided by Famous Minor Television Personality John Hodgman, Certified Judge, once again mentioned Duluth, this time at length in the concluding segment of its Great Lakes Beach report.
I push through the door — it’s late, but the massive cowboy hat on the roof glows red — and step into something more like a nightclub than an Arby’s. Steady, throbbing beats pulse across the rafters of the dim dining room, threading through stacks of waxed cups, snapping plastic straws with reverb.
This roast beef hashery is my kind of joint.
Eyes float to the menu board; simultaneously, my chin begins to bob. Anticipating the imminent rush of potato cake puissance, my body ticks with the vocals.
Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me,
Callin’ me, all the time like Blondie
“OH MY GOD!” the blondie behind the counter shrieks as she looks up from tying a trash bag. My presence has startled her.
Her first reaction is to hunch low, bending torso toward linoleum, hiding her body behind the cash register. Her second reaction is to screech, barely audible over the racy lyrics shaking the dining room, “JOE. TURN IT DOWN. TURN IT OFF. TURN IT DOWN. OH MY GOD. TURN IT OFF NOW!”
“The right amount of elbow grease” is what the narrator recommends during this video tour of the former Finland Air Force Base, located about 50 miles northeast of Duluth, which is listed for $800,000.
The catch? It’s a superfund site.
Messaged this to FedEx’s Facebook page even though I was off the clock (I am not speaking for my unnamed place of business in any capacity but only as a private concerned citizen): “Hello – I work for a Duluth MN business that is having consistent problems with your drivers being unmasked in violation of our store policy, FedEx policy, and a citywide masking ordinance.
The Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards have a new organizing body, Lake Superior Writers. As a fan of NEMBA, the University of Minnesota Duluth and LSW, I think this is good news for all.
Deep-sea explorer Ecclesia Hummingbird, August 23, 2001 on PBS: “I live and work here in SuperiorLab, a hyperbaric underwater habitat 950 feet deep, by a drowned petrified forest. Welcome to science’s first permanent presence at the bottom of Lake Superior, with our partners: the University of Minnesota, NASA, and our corporate sponsors. We are offshore between Two Harbors and Silver Bay, in a quarter-mile-wide underwater canyon whose sides slope hundreds of feet down. This scar cuts for thirty miles getting deeper and deeper. The lake’s canyons divide the bedrock like cracking skin, and this crack is one of its deepest, Bible black like space.
“SuperiorLab is manned by a rotating crew of divers and astronauts-in-training who live here for months at a time. Because of budget cuts, that is currently a crew of two. There’s myself, and there’s my half-sister Persephone Marrow, a geologist developing protocols for future Mars missions. We are the so-called ‘genius daughters’ of the university’s Professor Joseph Marrow.
I recently bought an older home in Congdon. Nothing special, but I like it. The previous owner made many changes to the interior in a misguided attempt to modernize the home. I am thinking about restoring it to its former layout, but I’m not finding much historic information about the home. Does anyone have any ideas on where I might get some information? The home is likely an American Foursquare that had some arts and crafts touches. Thanks for any help!
[Editor’s note: 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. Pizza Lucé opened its Duluth location in 2001 and quickly caught the attention of the Sultan of Sot, who penned his review for the Jan. 9, 2002 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper. The restaurant has undergone several renovations in the past two decades, so we note here that the U-shaped semi-unisex restroom is no longer as it was. Also, the early morning openings are no longer a thing.]
As an old-fashioned Duluth rum hound, I want to dislike Pizza Lucé. When a Twin Cites enterprise expands to Duluth and sets up in a nice, clean new building, I pretty much go into auto-hate mode. But not this time. Pizza Lucé is a friend of the drinking class.
First off, there’s a decent happy hour seven days a week. Plus, there’s the extended hours — you can go there and get drunk at 7 a.m. (they actually have a list of morning-time cocktails for people who want to do just that), you can check out some live music in the evenings or you can go there for booze-soaking victuals after bar close.
We urge everyone to proceed with caution while the Omicron variant works to spoil the parties, but events go on and the PDD Calendar has all the details as usual. Each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar events. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
Typically the “select gems” feature on the last Saturday of the year has nothing to do with Google Analytics popularity contests, and instead is more of an “editor’s choice.” But 2021 wasn’t an ordinary year for Perfect Duluth Day’s “Saturday Essay” series. As reported last week, a single author swept our annual list of the five most-read essays.
So this year’s “select gems” are the five most-read essays of the year that weren’t authored by Jim Richardson. Because the rest of us aren’t exactly chopped liver.
In the past six years PDD has published 263 essays showcasing the work of 43 different writers, and we’re always looking to expand that roster. Anyone who has an original piece of literary excellence that seems to fit (or appropriately defy) the established format should email paul @ perfectduluthday.com to get involved.
And now, links to a few select gems from season six …
It looks like (from the Online Computer Library Center records and the books I found at Gabriel’s) Duluth Benedictine Books was a brief experiment in recording the lives and institutions of sisters who live at St. Scholastica. (I just finished a jar of strawberry rhubarb jam I purchased at their most recent jam sale — so yummy.)
I wonder whether this was a project fueled by one of the sisters? By someone determined to write down history or by someone who recognized that telling these stories could also help recruit for the sisterhood (whose numbers are dwindling)?
So, this is the last batch of records purchased at a $5 bag sale at Gabriel’s Books in Lakeside.
