Maybe the father of Minnesota Timberwolves swingman Shabazz Muhammad had a crystal ball when he consistently claimed his son was a year younger than he actually was.

At the time of the embarrassing disclosure — after Muhammad’s lone season at UCLA and shortly before the 2013 NBA draft — the theme was that playing against supposed peers who were actually a year younger than he was falsely elevated Bazzy’s basketball prowess and fed the hype that made him “Mr. Basketball USA” and the “Naismith Prep Player of the Year” coming out of high school.

But now, enmeshed in his third NBA season with the Wolves, Bazzy has consistently been underrated and shuffled to the fringes of the team’s future core of contributors because he is not as ridiculously precocious as some of his teammates.

The best word to describe Muhammad’s tenure with the Wolves is “star-crossed.”

The late Flip Saunders sounded rueful and apologetic the night he drafted Bazzy, saying his first three choices had been scuttled by the prior picks of other teams, and acknowledging that Muhammad neither fit a specific need for the Wolves nor was likely to be a popular acquisition with the fan base.

A year later, the Wolves unveiled their notorious “Eyes on the Rise” marketing campaign, showcasing the acquisition of top overall picks Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett from Cleveland, along with Minnesota’s own first-round choice, Zach LaVine, and even Thad Young, coming over from Philadelphia. The phrase was meant to convey that the Wolves as a team were prepared to ascend in the standings, even as their athletic young roster would be rising above the rim for a boatload of crowd-pleasing slam dunks.

Anyone who has seen Bazzy perform for the Wolves now knows that it was preposterous to leave him out of that campaign, and to regard him as an afterthought heading into the 2014-15 season.

This year, the Wolves added a third straight top overall pick — their own, this time — in wunderkind center Karl-Anthony Towns. And now the marketing machinery is overheating on the notion of three spectacular 20-year old teammates —Towns, Wiggins and LaVine (replacing Bennett, who flamed out and was quickly discarded).

Muhammad, not yet 23 when the 2015-16 season began, was too old to fit the narrative.

A basket of wings

One of the more fascinating and yet rarely mentioned aspects of the Wolves auspicious rebuilding plan is the closet competition for minutes between LaVine and Muhammad and the domino effect it will have on the roster moving forward.

There are many who believe that LaVine is best suited to play the shooting guard position. Among those was Saunders, who before he died expressed a preference for sliding LaVine over from point guard, where the player spent much of his rookie season. It also includes current coach Sam Mitchell, who thrust LaVine into the starting lineup as a shooting guard during the preseason and benched veteran Kevin Martin for a while this season in order to open up more there for the willowy second-year pro.

It is a hallmark of the Wolves dysfunction that LaVine has instead logged 84 percent of his career NBA minutes at the point, according to the stats at Basketball-reference.com. Yes, playing LaVine out of position 94 percent of his minutes last season was a sneaky way to tank the season and broaden his skill set. But why is he getting fully two-thirds, 67 percent, of his playing time at the point this season as well?

The most sensible answer is that the shooting guard spot belongs to Wiggins, who at 6-8 but just 199 pounds has a height advantage over opposing two-guards and avoids the pounding inevitably administered by burlier opposing small forwards. The development of Wiggins and Towns is absolutely the top priority for this season, because they are the cornerstones of the franchise.

MinnPost photo by Craig Lassig

The best word to describe Shabazz Muhammad’s tenure with the Wolves is “star-crossed.”

But there are two more worrisome rationales. One, espoused by Mitchell, is that the 6-5, 189-pound LaVine is as physically overmatched at shooting guard as Wiggins is at small forward.

The other is the sense among some members of the Wolves organization that incumbent point guard Ricky Rubio will never be able to shoot well enough to take the Wolves deep into the postseason, when every flaw is magnified and exploited.

Given Rubio’s currently enormous value in choreographing the team’s sets at both ends of the court, not to mention his hefty five-year contract that doesn’t expire until 2019, no one is going to publicly verbalize this concern. But suffice to say that Rubio’s long-term value is a divisive topic among those in and out of the organization, with some beguiled by LaVine’s astounding athleticism and the notion of him maturing alongside Wiggins and Towns. Remember, when Rubio’s deal expires, that trio will still only be 23 (Towns) and 24 (Wiggins, Towns) years old.

Muhammad also has had difficulty finding a regular niche that suits his overall skill set. At 6-6 and 223 pounds, he has a build that is tailor-made to swing between the small forward and shooting guard positions, and yet possesses the sheer physical strength enough to post up and rebound like a power forward, while adding in more three-pointers to his shot selection this season. He played 70 percent of his rookie minutes at shooting guard, bumped up to 80 percent his second season, although his playing time with Wiggins last year probably misidentified him as a guard, when he was frequently the de facto small forward. This season, he has split time almost 50-50 at the swing slots.

A pair of teases

Here is the rub that is so maddening to the die-hards who still doggedly follow the chronically wretched Wolves franchise: The NBA has become a league that increasingly relies on and features athletic wing players. With Wiggins, Muhammad and LaVine, the Wolves possess three young and extremely gifted players in that mold, along with arguably the best-passing point guard in the NBA and a young center who shows every indication of becoming a future Hall of Famer. And yet the team can’t seem to get out of its own way, and currently sports one of the five-worst won-lost records in the 30-team association.

There is blame to be shared by Mitchell and whoever is advising him on the sidelines and in the front office. But it doesn’t absolve Muhammad and LaVine, who are two of the worst defenders in the entire NBA. Both are prone to lapses in concentration and stupid decisions at either end of the court, but which are most injurious on defense with respect to floor balance (guarding the leak-out opponent in transition), pick-and-roll coverage and timing on rotations.

A major reason neither Muhammad nor LaVine has settled into a reliable niche is because they don’t defend well at any position. Not coincidentally, the Wolves generally suffer when they are on the court.

Net rating is a statistic that measure how many points per possession your team scores when you are on the court and subtracts it from how many points your opponent scores when you play. Muhammad’s net rating this season is -7.0 points per 100 possessions. LaVine’s net rating is -7.1 points per 100 possessions. Aside from physically overwhelmed rookie point guard Tyus Jones and rusty, injury-prone center Nikola Pekovic (both rarely used thus far this season), Muhammad and LaVine have the two worst net ratings on this 14-32 team.

Ah, but what magnificent highlights both players can produce! Stylistically LaVine is a quicksilver flash in contrast to Bazzy’s relentless brute, but both deliver spectacular leaps culminating in thrilling dunks. Both give you that breath-catching shiver when they are just a long stride or two from the hoop with no one—or, better yet, just a hapless foil — in front of them.

It’s a delicious tease. But it is high time that these two players and the people in charge of mentoring them refine their performances enough to remove the bitter aftertaste they too often leave behind.

Prescription for a solution: Bazzy

It is time to hasten the decision-making process by putting both Muhammad and LaVine into positions where they are most likely to succeed.

First, treat Bazzy as an asset who is potentially as valuable as LaVine. Mitchell has already begun to do this to some extent, rewarding Muhammad’s greater inclination to share the ball and hone his shot selection. Thus far in January, Bazzy has played 362 minutes compared to LaVine’s 261 minutes, the first full month he has logged more time since LaVine entered the NBA.

In fact, LaVine has logged more career minutes in two seasons than Bazzy has in three, a fact that should be noted as we chart developmental progress.

More minutes is encouraging, but now is the time to start generating moments of truth on the real upside to Bazzy’s career. Put simply, if he can learn to defend small forwards well enough to form a potent wing tandem at both ends of the court alongside Wiggins at shooting guard, it will be a huge boon to the Wolves future status as a playoff contender. If not, he’s a not a great fit for this franchise.

Tayshaun Prince has been a godsend for this team as a starting small forward, a player who provides more defensive ballast than anyone on the roster. (The limited minutes Kevin Garnett can play disqualifies him from this honor.) But the Wolves are mired in the dregs of the standings and it is time to transition from veteran example to young crucible. Start Muhammad at small forward and see what happens.

This will give Bazzy a chance to play with Rubio at the point. The two have a net rating of +1.8 per 100 possessions in 205 minutes together on the court. In 150 minutes with Andre Miller and Bazzy, the net rating is + 3.2 points. In 666 devilish minutes alongside LaVine, most of them with Zach at the point, Muhammad’s net rating is -8.6 points.

Time in the starting lineup will also give Muhammad a chance to learn from KG more directly. They have shared the court for all of 25 minutes thus far this season, barely more than a normal half of basketball. The Wolves have outscored their opponents by 22 points in that span.

But most important, the starter minutes will provide a wider sample of how Muhammad meshes with the cornerstones, Wiggins and Towns. I have long trumpeted what seemed to be the obvious synergy of a Wiggins-Muhammad wing platter, including their ability to space the floor and drive to the hoop from either wing or in transition.

The reality of this vision is less rosy. The Wigs-Bazz due have a net rating of -8.5 in 348 minutes together, a carryover from last season when they were -8.6 in 441 minutes as a tandem. That’s becoming a significant sample size and it is worth finding out why they haven’t clicked. (Muhammad and Towns is likewise problematical, albeit in many fewer minutes.)

Maybe it is too much time with teammates from the second unit. Maybe the fact that neither one has been an especially accurate three-point shooter (although Bazzy shows promise from the corner) enables opposing defenses to pack the paint and wall off penetrating. Maybe their defensive inexperience and shortcomings are exacerbated together. Heading into the dog (dogsled?) days of a noncompetitive season is the right time to get forensic on the cause. 

Prescription for a solution: Zach

Stop pretending Zach LaVine can somehow take this franchise further than Rubio at point guard. Even if we grant that Rubio can’t shoot (and his true shooting percentage is not that much worse than LaVine’s), Zach can’t facilitate. What skills are more likely to be mastered through experience and repetition — the mechanics of shooting or the court vision and timing of NBA-caliber facilitation?

At halftime of Monday’s game in Cleveland, LaVine told sideline reporter Marney Gelner that “the last four games I was trying to be a point guard, and not being aggressive.” It revealed something long suspected: LaVine becomes overwhelmed and thus stymied trying to absorb all the point guard duties that are not a natural part of his style and flow.

LaVine is a confidence player, best when his extraordinary athleticism and giddy impulses are mostly unchecked. When he is fettered, it should be by just a few simple rules that pertain to shooting guards, such as, catch and shoot that three-pointer rather than dribbling into defenders and launching a long, fadeaway two-pointer.  

Yes, under the current circumstances, LaVine still needs to log some minutes at point guard. But he should probably enter the game as a shooting guard, sending either Muhammad or Wiggins to the bench to play alongside Rubio. Then, when Rubio rests and LaVine does play the point, he should still be primarily a scoring combo guard who facilitates by instinct more than design. The eye test indicates that he actually runs an offense with more pace and effectiveness that way, with more proactive passing that gets his teammates involved.

The rest of the time, bump up Andre Miller’s minutes and give him some time with LaVine. It will be an unmitigated disaster on defense, but a gas to watch the way Miller’s ingenuity gets LaVine quality shots — or uses the threat of LaVine to get others open looks. Again, these are dog days and lessons can be learned.

In general, be harsh with LaVine’s awful shot selection. He has better form on his jumper than most anyone on the team, but he also has no idea when to deploy it. Benching him for bad defense or poor ball-distribution won’t be taken to heart as much as benching him for bad shots, because the antidote is still shooting rather than onerous tasks that sap his confidence.

The other day, LaVine made the comment that Mitchell’s treatment of him was at times “unfair.” When it comes to way his position has been yo-yo-ing back and forth between point guard and shooting guard, he has cause to gripe. But if he is told he is being groomed to be a shooting guard and a dynamic scorer — which is his future in this league — he’ll accept tough love with more equanimity.

Last but not least is the crapshoot with the highest risk-reward factor — a wing-heavy small-ball lineup.

In my last column I mentioned how other teams were torturing the Wolves with lineups that used a wing player like Chandler Parsons of Dallas at power forward. As anyone who regularly watches the NBA knows, these quirky small-ball configurations are becoming more common and effective for some teams. At the very least, if you are going to become a credible contender, you need to devise a counter lineup.

This is a golden opportunity for the Wolves to strut their future and see what happens. When opponents go small-ball, answer back with Rubio at the point, LaVine at shooting guard, Wiggins at small forward, Muhammad at power forward and Towns at center.

Yes, it is a dreadful quintet defensively. In 14 total minutes spread over the course of five games this season, this unit has ceded 36 points, a sieve-like showing that telescopes out to 123 points allowed in a normal 48-minute game.

But over that same 14-minute span, that unit of Wiggins and the Wolves’ last four first-round draft picks, with Rubio the oldest at age 25, scored 37 points.

That kind of rise is a sight for sore eyes. 

Are tip-free restaurants a full-blown trend at this point?At City Pages, Mary Jo Rasmussen notes the latest Twin Cities restaurant giving it a shot, this time in St. Paul: “ ‘I'm taking a big-ass risk,’ says chef Wyatt Evans, owner of Heirloom Kitchen & Bar in St. Paul. Evans thinks about this a lot. On a bright but frigid Minnesota morning, he's driving toward Merriam Park to start prepping for dinner service and musing on his decision to make Heirloom, which opened in December, a tip-free restaurant. Opening a restaurant is always a risky proposition. Introducing the concept of a service charge in lieu of tipping doubles down on that risk. … ‘It would have been a hell of a lot easier to do what everyone else is doing,’ he says. ‘I'm sticking my neck out to say, “Can this be done?”’ ”

Iron Range’s problems are totally going to work themselves out.MPR’s Dan Kraker has a cheery view from the CEO of Cliffs Natural Resources:“Northshore Mining and United Taconite will stay idled through March, but an improving steel market should have those mines back running this year, Cliffs Natural Resources CEO Lourenco Goncalves said Wednesday in a surprisingly positive analysis. … ‘The so-called competitive threats that were present in this market have all but faded away,’ Goncalves told stock analysts during a conference call, adding that he saw an ‘opportunity to solidify our market leading position’ and improve profitability.” OK, then.

Today in trains.In the Rochester Post Bulletin, John Weiss writes about a derailment near Brownsville: “At least six cars of a Canadian Pacific train derailed overnight near Brownsville, and two fell into the Mississippi River, breaking through the ice. … ‘At approximately 10 p.m. yesterday evening, a southbound CP mixed freight train derailed 15 cars approximately 3 miles south of Brownsville,’ CP spokesman Jeremy Berry said. ‘There were no injuries and no public safety issues.’” And in the Twin Cities, MPR notes that Green Line light rail service is back in operationafter being disrupted by a fire this morning.

Remember food trucks? A lot of you do, apparently — WCCO reports on a new top-10 list:“The food truck scene is still relatively new in the Twin Cities, but that didn’t stop one survey from ranking our trucks among the nation’s finest curbside eats. … The survey from Merchant Cash USA ranked Minneapolis as the seventh-best city in the U.S. for food trucks, just behind San Francisco. They surveyed customers and foodies across the country to find out their favorite spots.”

In other news…

Groundhog Day snowstormcoming our way? [Accuweather]

Given the way Uber can dictate to big cities like New York City,Moorhead never had a chance. [KFGO]

Bankruptcy for Verso Paper, which has a mill in Duluth. [Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal]

Your Twins Winter Caravan update: Sioux Falls edition [Argus Leader]

Congrats to new Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce interim chief John Stanoch [Star Tribune]

Interesting idea:change Minneapolis’ Hiawatha Golf Course into an ecological park/food forest [NationBuilder]

Glenn Thrush of Politico scored a long and interesting interview with President Obama, the full audio of which is posted online. It's 40 minutes long, but if you have the time and like Obama, I recommend it. If you intensely dislike him, that's a long time to listen to him and you should take your blood pressure medication in advance.

I've read, seen and heard many Obama interviews over the past eight years, but I don't believe I've ever heard him this relaxed and reflective. The current news has made him nostalgic for the months he spent as an upstart underdog candidate in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and he seems to be enjoying those memories.

Obama also comes across as sincere, although you never know what kind of filter a guy like him is able to apply and still seem to be expressing his true thoughts and feelings. A lot of the discussion is about the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders race for the Dem presidential nomination. Obama seems to be determined not to put his thumb too heavily on the scale in that one, so he's probably being cautious.

On balance, if you weighed every syllable, he seems to be complimentary about Clinton (who was, after all, a member of his administration) and he suggests that Sanders' singular focus on issues of economic inequality neglect the complexity of the job of president. (I would note that Sanders talks plenty about foreign and military policy, but usually only when he's asked.)

Thrush does a good job drawing Obama into the nostalgia of Iowa/2008. (Thrush covered those caucuses, but was assigned to the Hillary Clinton campaign.)

It’s not even summer and we have to worry about mosquitoes.Daniel White at TIME magazine reports, “A case of the Zika virus has been confirmed Wednesday in a Minnesota woman who traveled to Central America, health officials said. The Minnesota Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the woman began showing symptoms Jan. 1, after she traveled to Honduras. The woman was not hospitalized and officials say they expect her to make a full recovery. This is the first Zika virus infection in Minnesota since 2014 and state health officials advised travelers not to panic but to be weary when going to regions where infections are common.”

At USA Today Liz Szabo says, “About a dozen Americans in a handful of states have been diagnosed with Zika after visiting outbreak zones, but there is no evidence the virus, which is linked to an outbreak of birth defects in Brazil, is spreading in the USA. The virus doesn't spread from person to person, like the flu. It's spread by mosquitoes, like malaria and West Nile Virus. The mosquito species that is known to spread Zika, the Aedes, doesn't live in Minnesota, making it unlikely the disease will spread in that state.”

Hey Kessler, you might think about having someone else start your car. WCCO-TV’s Pat Kessler reports on “back door pay hikes” for our hard-working legislators. “Members of the Minnesota House and Senate racked up almost $2 million dollars in extra pay last year — over and above their legislative salaries. It came in the form of daily expense payments called ‘per diem,’ totalling $1,925,621 in public funds during 2015. Minnesota lawmakers haven’t had a pay hike since 1999 — they haven’t voted to give themselves a raise because of the political controversy it generates. But per diem payments can significantly boost a lawmaker’s salary — as much as 50 percent.”

The new guy at the zoo is talking conservation. Beatrice DuPuy of the Strib says, “The Minnesota Zoo’s new director says conservation programs and reaching out into the community are his top priorities for the Apple Valley zoo. He also faces the challenge of persuading the Legislature to authorize the money to help shore up the nearly 40-year-old zoo’s infrastructure. The zoo’s board of directors Wednesday approved the hiring of John Frawley, CEO of a nonprofit San Francisco conservation coalition, as the new director and president.”

Today’s app for stressed-out teens.Jonathan Choe at KMSP-TV says, “A small town school in southern Minnesota is using technology to solve some big time problems facing many teens. Their smart phone app helps students reach out for help if they're overwhelmed with the challenges of life like anxiety and bullying. This idea recently won a statewide competition. Now these Cleveland High School students are taking on other innovators from across the country who are trying to make a difference.”

Says David Peterson in the Strib, “Rapid growth in Minnesota’s black population may well explain what appeared at first to be a sudden drop in that group’s prosperity. The number of black residents increased by nearly 40,000 in just the past four years, a bigger increase than occurred in the state’s white population. The number of people who reported difficulty speaking English also jumped sharply in a single year, providing one of the clearest indicators of why median black household income slumped between 2013 and 2014.”

Now, $23 billion is a lot of dough. Says Lorna Benson at MPR, “New research from the state Health Department finds that chronic diseases are surprisingly expensive in Minnesota. Few would be surprised to hear that chronic conditions account for a large share of health spending. But for the first time, the state has been able to place a dollar figure on the cost of long-running health problems: nearly $23 billion. And that number probably understates the true cost, because certain demographic groups weren't included in the tally. … Almost half of all medical spending for the insured in 2012 went to care for high blood pressure patients.” I was going to bet diabetes.

If not the Zika virus, how about fretting over water, like Flint? A story at WCCO-TV says, “The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) says testing has shown no lead in municipal water systems. However, it says anyone with a home built before 1986 is at risk for having lead in their water. While the use of lead pipes was phased out in 1927, lead was widely used in soldering and other pipe components through 1986. On Wednesday, the state of Minnesota updated their website with more information on lead safety.”

Attorney Dean Strang of “Making a Murder” notoriety made a couple stops in town yesterday. The Strib’s Maya Rao reports, “Strang stopped at the Minnesota Capitol on Wednesday … . The attorney was asked whether the public needed another perspective from prosecutor Ken Kratz, who has said that the series left out important facts about Avery and that he plans to write a book about the case. Strang said the more perspectives on the trial, the better, but he stressed the importance of not becoming ‘lost playing second-string jurors and after-the-fact armchair sleuths.' He added: ‘The value to me of the documentary or any book about the case ought to be asking bigger questions about the system and the reality of the outcomes we achieve in our criminal justice system.'”

Speaking of lawyers,Paul Walsh of the Strib says, “A northwestern Minnesota woman is suing her employer, Essentia Health, and her medical insurance provider, HealthPartners, alleging that her 17-year-old was denied coverage for medication and surgery to help him transition from a female to a male. The suit filed in federal court in St. Paul by Brittany Tovar, who works as a family nurse practitioner for Essentia’s hospital in Ada, said her teen was found in November 2014 to have gender dysphoria, meaning his gender identity was different from what was assigned at birth.”

Here’s another place that’d never let me in.Stribber Natalie Daher writes, “Volstead’s Emporium opened late last year in Minneapolis with no promotion, website or social media listing of its Lyn-Lake area address. Emblematic of the Prohibition era, guests must navigate a dark alley until they stumble upon a door with an eye-level slot, leading to the subterranean sanctuary of red velvet and chandeliers. The entrance to Volstead's Emporium, a nondescript steel door with a peep slot, is known only by word of mouth.” But does it have free popcorn and pulltabs?

On a school trip to New York in 1996, 7-year-old Julian Bliss bought an unusual souvenir for a young boy: a CD of Benny Goodman’s Greatest Hits.

Or maybe not so unusual for a child prodigy clarinetist who started playing at age 4, made his first television appearance at 5 and performed for Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace when he was 6. Julian liked the image of Goodman on the cover, “reeling back, clarinet in the air, grin on his face, breaking all the rules.” He started listening to the CD and couldn’t stop. “There’s a huge amount of freedom and excitement in the music,” he said. “I’d never heard anything like it.”

Fourteen years later, by now an internationally acclaimed solo clarinetist and chamber musician, Bliss looked into recording some of the classical pieces commissioned by the King of Swing, including Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. “That got me listening to his music again. And then I thought – this might be quite fun, to try and really get into jazz.” Bliss contacted pianist Neal Thornton, who put a band together. In 2012, they released a recording, “A Tribute to Benny Goodman.” JazzTimes said this about that: “Unlike many classical musicians, Bliss is capable of swinging mightily and adapting his formidable technique to the task at hand.”

On Saturday, Jan. 30, the Julian Bliss Septet plays Orchestra Hall, the second stop in an eight-city tour of the States. We spoke by phone on Tuesday. Bliss, who also designs clarinets, was in Los Angeles for the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show.

MinnPost: Until your early 20s, you were a classical musician. What was it like to start playing jazz?

Julian Bliss: It was a huge challenge and still is in some ways. Music always is challenging. If there’s ever a day when you don’t feel challenged or wanting to push yourself to the next level, I think the audience can pick up on that.

What I started doing, and would urge anybody to do, is to just listen to as much as you possibly can. I found recordings of Benny Goodman that I never knew existed, and I would listen very in-depth to them and try to understand exactly what he was playing. That was the first step. And then it was trying to emulate what he was playing. From there your own creative spark comes out of it, and you start to put your own little twist on that sound, and you start to create your own things.

There are a lot of different ways to approach jazz improvisation. Some people simply play and just use their ear, and others are very much immersed in the whole music theory side of it. A lot of musicians do both. I’m sort of doing both. I like to listen and play whatever ideas I have in my head, but I think there is a certain amount of merit to studying the theoretical side of it as well.

MP: For many jazz musicians who were once classical musicians, improvisation was the siren song.

JB: There’s a freeness on stage, a different sort of feeling. But I don’t see [jazz and classical] as being too separated. A lot of people think they are very different, but I’ve found a lot of similarities between the two.

You’re still improvising when you’re playing classical music. You’re playing a predefined melody, but you’re improvising the emotion, the dynamics and the inflection. To me, the only difference in jazz is that you’re creating a melody as well.

Classical music will always be what I predominantly do, but jazz is a huge amount of fun to play on stage – to play anywhere, really.

MP: Not all classical musicians can swing. How did you figure that out?

JB: It is a very difficult thing, and it’s something that you can’t quite describe. It’s an extra little 10 percent, sort of the magic dust on the end. I think a lot of it comes by experience. A lot of it comes by confidence. By being confident, you’re also relaxed, and you have to be relaxed in order to let the music swing. And a lot of it comes by the type of musicians you surround yourself with.

It is a feel thing, and it is something you can only get, in my experience, by doing it. Play as much as you possibly can, and eventually it’ll start to happen. And like anything, the more you experience it, the better you’ll get at it.

MP: Do you perform often with your septet?

JB: We play fairly regularly in the U.K., and we’ve played some fantastic venues across Europe. It’s interesting for me now to listen to the CD that we made quite soon into the project. Even though we’re playing some of the same arrangements, it sounds different now. [Our playing] has matured in some ways. We’ve all settled into the role, and we all know each other so much better as well, and that makes a big difference.

Part of jazz is the unspoken. There’s a lot of communication happening on stage, but you never actually speak to anyone. It’s this really interesting, funny dynamic, and the more you know somebody – their personality – and the more you spend time with them, the easier that whole thing gets, and the sound changes.

MP: Do you plan to record more jazz CDs?

JB: We would like to do, because not all of the tunes [we arranged] are on that first CD. I think my plan would be to record a live album. You capture something in a live performance that you just cannot get in a studio recording, especially in jazz.

MP: I see from your Facebook band page that you spent part of Monday hanging out with Wayne Shorter. Is it true that he’s writing something for you?

JB: He’s writing a concerto for me, which is … amazing doesn’t come close. There’s a concert scheduled in England, and hopefully it’s something we can bring to the U.S. afterwards. Hopefully he can come along for a couple of the concerts. [Note: The concerto was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.]

MP: Will Saturday be your first time playing Orchestra Hall?

JB: It will be, and hopefully not the last. Everyone has told me that it’s a phenomenal concert hall. I’m really looking forward to playing in it. It’ll be interesting to play jazz in there, and hopefully one day I’ll be back to play some classical.

Concert information: “A Tribute to Benny Goodman: The Julian Bliss Septet.” 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30 at Orchestra Hall. FMI and tickets ($30-$50).

This interview has been edited and condensed. Go here for more about Julian Bliss’ visit with Wayne Shorter.

The picks

Tonight (Thursday, Jan. 28) at Magers & Quinn: Lisa Simons discusses her book “Faribault Woolen Mill: Loomed in the Land of Lakes” with Paul Mooty. Like lutefisk, skyways and grape salad (not), a Faribault blanket is a Minnesota thing. We find it kind of fascinating that the old mill (est. 1865) is still producing textiles from raw wool on historic machinery. Mooty is the company’s partner and CFO. 7 p.m. Free.

Tonight at the George Latimer Central Library: “Loud at the Library.” Check out the newly renovated library (or parts of it; the whole place won’t be open to the public until Jan. 30) and enjoy the music of Reina del Cid and the Ericksons. Doors at 7, music at 7:30. FMI and tickets ($10). Show your library card and valid ID (21+) for a free beer.

Tonight at the Alexander Ramsey House: History Happy Hour: Minnesota Breweries. Have a beer and learn the history of Minnesota breweries at a local treasure: the Victorian-era home built by Minnesota’s first territorial governor, filled with thousands of original family items and furnishings. For ages 21+. 8:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($25/$20 MNHS members). Ticket price includes two drinks, snacks, and time to mingle in the mansion.

Courtesy of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery

“Singing Our History: People and Places of the Red Lake Nation”

Now at the U’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery: “Singing Our History: People and Places of the Red Lake Nation.” A collaboration between the Red Lake Ojibwe and the U’s Department of American Study, this exhibition of art and photography explores the many ways the Red Lake Nation has been and continues to be portrayed by artists and members of its communities. It includes rare portraits of Red Lake people taken by Jerome Liebling in the 1950s, dozens of familiar images by photojournalist Charles Brill and paintings by Patrick Desjarlait. Gallery hours 11 a.m. 7 – p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. FMI. Free.

Saturday and Sunday at the Howard Conn Theater in Plymouth Congregational Church: “Just Before Sleep.” Wilder Research estimates that more than 14,000 Minnesotans are homeless on a given night, including many children and teens. Take a kid or two to see the Ivey-winning Youth Performance Company’s production of Jennifer Fell Hayes’ play about a down-on-their-luck family. You’ll have a lot to talk about after. For fourth graders and up. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. FMI and tickets ($15/$12). Ends Feb. 14. 

John Barham wears no shoes in his office; he practices law in his socks. On a recent Wednesday evening, his socks were dark gray wool, soft-looking. Beneath his desk one foot occasionally rubbed the other, two cats playing. He said the areas of law he specializes in — criminal defense and immigration — are designed, it sometimes seems, to be especially confusing and pernicious, instruments that disempower as much as they protect. “It’s more like magic than anything else,” he said. “There’s all these tricks you need to know.” And so, as best he can, and often for no money, Barham helps protect his clients from (misapplications of) the law. When he is not working as an attorney he is volunteering as an attorney — for the Black Lives Matter movement, for The Advocates for Human Rights.

Max Ross

This week, in his volunteer work with The Advocates, Barham won asylum for a 13-year-old who fled to the U.S. alone to escape violence in Central America. And on Friday he and his punk band, Murrieta, will take part in a benefit he organized; proceeds will go to The Advocates' Refuge and Immigrant Program.

Barham is in his late 30s, bald, bespectacled, friendly, and, at least at the end of the day, a touch tired. He speaks quickly and with the trace of a southern accent (politics becomes pawlitics.) The clutter of his office, at the intersection of Lake Street and Lyndale Avenue, is a homey clutter. The law in this office is not so intimidating as in other law offices, not quite so infallible-seeming, not quite so buttoned-up. It follows that there are no buttons on Barham’s shirt. In addition to his socks, he does his lawyering in a T-shirt. It is red and bears the Sriracha hot sauce logo — a rooster — and covers his belly, just.

'A music of resistance'

And then, in the evenings, when he is performing with Murrieta, Barham wears no shirt at all. Videos on YouTube show him plodding on stages in dark rooms, bare-chested, a microphone in hand. The music is guitar-heavy, drum-heavy, and loud — but it is also inviting. The music is loud because, in part, the music is a cry, a cri de coeur— it is political. Punk, says Barham, “is a music of resistance, a subversive music, analogous to hip-hop … the scene does well where there are lots of immigrants. It tends to flourish in places where immigrants are dealing with abuse or hostility. … Even just in the punk scene here [in Minneapolis] there are a lot of Latino immigrants, as well as immigrants from other parts of the world. And to a large extent that’s who we’re playing for.”

His involvement in the punk scene stems, Barham says, from the same roots that led him to practice socially productive law; in some respects when he is practicing law he is practicing punk, and vice versa; when playing punk, he is performing social outreach. (The group takes its name from Joaquin Murrieta, a sort of Latino-American Robin Hood, who during the gold rush looted rich and unscrupulous prospectors and then distributed the purloined funds among the poor.) 

Barham grew up in South Carolina in the late ‘70s. Half his family was Vietnamese. This entailed violence. “Racism as an issue was very clear to me before I was in kindergarten,” he says. “My childhood was fist-fighting most of my neighborhood over them wanting to kill my cousins and brothers and sisters because of where they were from. That remained a troubling thing for really the rest of my life.” After graduating from college he spent more than a decade living in South America. In Argentina he spent two years as a social worker for a human rights group, providing aid to children who lived in train stations. In Chile, in addition to working as an English teacher and translator, he and his crew provided de-facto security to the country’s gay rights movement.

While in South America, he met the woman who would become his wife (and, later, his ex-wife). She had a son, and they decided to raise him in the States. Barham enrolled in law school in eastern Tennessee. “Law school was the worst part of my life, by far,” he says. “The racism and xenophobia faced by my ex-wife and son there were just tremendous. And it was the first environment I’d been in where greed was explicitly OK. We left the first day we could, and drove right here.” 

Minnesota: a kind of oasis

Minnesota, he says, “and the Twin Cities in particular, is kind of an oasis in the United States in terms of tolerance and acceptance and diversity.” He notes the imperfections — “I feel like every time I pick up the newspaper or see the news there’s something new about a Somalian person being insulted or injured,” he said; he began volunteering for Black Lives Matter after several of their supporters were shot. But he maintains that, in his experience, it ranks among the most inclusive of American cities that he has lived in.

On Friday (Jan. 29) at The Hexagon Bar in Minneapolis, Murrieta will play a concert to raise funds for those in need of legal representation but who cannot afford it; proceeds from the show, which Barham organized and which features a multitude local punk, hip-hop, and reggae acts, will be donated to The Advocates for Human Rights’ Refugee & Immigrant Program — a program that offers free counsel to low-income immigrants and refugees who face persecution in their home countries. It can with justification be said that Murrieta will be carrying on the legacy of its namesake.

Max Ross is a volunteer with The Advocates for Human Rights.

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If you're interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, email Susan Albright at salbright@minnpost.com.)

Though it relies on credible data and has a lot of expert number-crunching behind it, you could call it more of an elegant thought experiment than engineering plan.

Still, a paper published this week in Nature Climate Change reaches some striking and encouraging – even compelling – conclusions about finding our way painlessly to an affordable energy future within the next 15 years.

Here’s how researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a research institute at the University of Colorado think it could work (my emphasis added):

Our results show that when using future anticipated costs for wind and solar, carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. electricity sector can be reduced by up to 80% relative to 1990 levels, without an increase in the levelized cost of electricity.

The reductions are possible with current technologies and without electrical storage. Wind and solar power increase their share of electricity production as the system grows to encompass large-scale weather patterns.

This reduction in carbon emissions is achieved by moving away from a regionally divided electricity sector to a national system enabled by high-voltage direct-current transmission.

As the utilities never tire of telling us, The Whole Problem with wind power (or solar) is that – repeat after me, class – it’s only useful when the wind is blowing (or the sun is shining).

Even then its usefulness is further limited, at least in theory, by demand. Because large-scale storage has proved to be such a vexing problem, it is assumed that any wind or solar power that can’t be consumed immediately must be discarded.

The new paper grew from a different assumption: Across an area as large as the United States, shouldn’t the wind be blowing somewhere (and/or the sun shining) at pretty much any given moment?

A research team led by Alexander MacDonald of NOAA’s Earth Systems Laboratory in Boulder, and Christopher T.M. Clack of the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES), gathered weather data and mapped it to very fine scales of space (13 kilometers) and time (hourly variation).

58% renewables without cost increase

They found that, indeed, wind or sunshine or both are blessing some portion of the country all the time, and in sufficient quantity to provide potentially 58 percent of national demand by 2030 without raising costs, under the likeliest market conditions.

MacDonald and Clack argue that the limiting factor for renewables’ contribution to U.S. energy needs isn’t how much wind and sunshine we have, or whether there’s enough demand for the volts the moment they’re made, or whether the excess can be stowed as compressed air, pumped water, hot sand, etc.

Rather, they say, it’s a problem of distributing renewable power from all of the places it could be made to all of the places it could be used.

Correcting that problem could instantly change the U.S. power system from its present shape, where utility-scale wind and solar essentially displace conventional power, to its exact opposite, in which boilers fired with coal, natural gas or nuclear fission could be used to buttress and balance a system driven mostly by the sun and wind. Which means a lot of conventional plants could be retired, and many of the rest dialed down dramatically.

And to put the greenhouse gas impact in perspective, an infrastructure change that delivered a 78 percent reduction in CO2 output from the electric power sector by 2030 would exceed by almost two and a half times the 32 percent reduction sought by President Obama’s Clean Power Plan – without raising the cost of electricity.

Or,  to be more precise, without raising the levelized cost of electricity, which is the best way to  look at these things, and the only fair way to compare the costs of electric power from different sources.

And you don’t need to be an economist or energy geek to get it.

Renewables' cost advantage

Levelized cost is the number you get, typically in cents per kilowatt hour, if you add up all the costs to make electricity at, say, a coal-fired power plant – construction, coal purchases, payroll, maintenance, fines for violating air-quality standards, etc. – and then divide that total by the plant’s lifetime output.

When you consider the low construction and operating costs, and zero fuel costs, for wind and solar  installations, you can see how renewables gain their cost advantage over fossil-fuel plants that have much larger generating capacities  – and also why the falling prices for solar photovoltaic cells in particular are so transformational right now.

For this study, the researchers used the International Energy Agency’s assumption that the levelized cost of electricity to U.S. consumers in 2030 will be about 11.5 cents per kWh (in 2013 dollars), or about the same as it is right now.

To be sure, the upgraded grid would be a major project, likened by the authors to building of the Interstate Highway System, with a new network of high-voltage, direct-current distribution lines at its core.

I couldn’t find a clear figure in the paper for what the DC project would cost; these guys like to break it down into percentages, rates per gigawatt of generating capacity and so on.

However – and here’s the figure that really matters – they estimate that the improved grid would add a mere 4 percent to the total production and distribution costs.

Apart from avoiding the need to build a storage component that nobody can quite envision yet, the new grid would also provide major gains in efficiency and resilience over the current system of regional grids (think of the blackouts after Hurricane Sandy, or another 9/11 attack).

Water savings, too

And the shift to greater reliance on renewables would pay dividends beyond greenhouse-gas emissions. For example, it would reduce cooling-water consumption in the electric power sector by a startling 65 percent.  

It would take up some land, of course: perhaps seven-hundredths of 1 percent, they calculate, most of it well away from currently developed areas.

The paper has not yet attracted a lot of attention outside the trade and professional press, but Nature did publish a commentary by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, who wasn’t involved with the work but found it both novel and important.

In fact, he thought there were additional upsides:

One limitation of the study, which could be addressed with future research, is that it considers the electric power sector before the electrification of other energy sectors (transportation, heating/cooling and industry). Electrification of other sectors has already started, and may occur even more in the future.

Further, it assumes the excess electricity generated by wind and solar is discarded rather than used for some other purpose (for example, hydrogen production or district heating), thereby increasing overall costs slightly.

Which, if other electricity-consuming sectors continue to grow, need not be  the case.

* * *

I really wish Nature were making these papers available without charge, given their policy significance. If you’re willing to pay for access, however, you can find the MacDonald/Clack paper here, and the Jacobson commentary here. You can also see the authors explain their work in this short video.

***

MinnPost event: On Monday, Feb. 22, MinnPost’s Earth Journal Circle will present its fourth annual event focusing on substantive discussion of critical issues in the environment. This year’s topic is “Land of 10,000 Lakes: Can We Achieve Water Sustainability?” The speaker is Deborah Swackhamer, former director of the University of Minnesota’s Water Resources Center, who will discuss issues threatening regional water quality and quantity. Earth Journal writer Ron Meador will moderate the Q&A session.

Taking a vacation — even if it involves a lot of walking — is likely to lead to a small but significant weight gain that will persist even after you return back home, according to a study published earlier this month.

Researchers found that people who go on vacation for one to three weeks gain an average of a third of a pound while they’re away — added weight that tends to remain on their bodies at least six weeks after they return.

The extra weight may sound inconsequential, but it probably contributes, say the study’s authors, to the slow but steady gain in weight — an average of 0.9 to 2.2 pounds per year — that so many Americans accumulate over their lifetime, starting in early adulthood.

As the study’s authors also point out, 70 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese.

Study details

The current study was led by Jamie Cooper, an associate professor of food and nutrition at the University of Georgia, and published earlier this month in the journal Physiology & Behavior. 

For the study, Cooper recruited 122 adults (43 men and 79 women) aged 18 to 65 who were about to take a short vacation (seven to 21 days) in a location away from home. Participants met with researchers three times: right before the vacation, right afterward, and then six weeks later.  Various measurements, including weight, body mass (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio, were taken at each meeting. Blood pressure was also measured, and the participants answered questions about health-related habits, such as exercise.

Forty-six of the participants (37.7 percent) were overweight at the start of the study, while 19 (15.6 percent) were obese. The average BMI of the participants before they went on vacation was 25.8, which falls into the “overweight” category (although not by much).

When the participants returned from their vacations, 75 of them (61 percent) had gained weight — an average of 0.32 pounds each. Six weeks after the vacation, the total average weight gain had increased a bit more, to .41 pounds.

Those people who had been away from home the longest tended to have put on the most weight.

‘Creeping obesity’

Importantly, at their six-week post-vacation meeting with the researchers, only 39 of the 75 participants who had gained weight said they were trying to lose it.

“This highlights the importance of ‘creeping obesity’ and how it can be problematic for individuals to prevent weight gain,” writes Cooper. “The amount of weight gain that occurred on the vacations was small; possibly too small for most participants to feel like it was necessary to try to lose the weight they had gained. Yet the fact that this weight gain persisted indicates that the vacation weight gain could contribute greatly to yearly weight gain.”

“In fact,” she adds, “one vacation alone could theoretically make up all of a person’s yearly weight gain.”

Cooper also points out that, on a daily basis, the vacation-related added weight observed in this study is more than twice the average amount that previous research has found people gain over the two- to three-month annual holiday season of pre-Thanksgiving to post-New Year’s Day. 

More calories

What might have caused people to gain weight while on holiday?

Interestingly, the weight gain didn’t seem to be associated with a decrease in physical activity. The study’s participants actually tended to report increases in their total daily physical activity during their vacations, particularly an increase in the time they spent walking.

That finding suggests that the weight gain came primarily from eating more, not from exercising less, says Cooper. Unfortunately, the study collected only limited data on the vacationers’ dietary habits, although 107 of the participants (88 percent) did acknowledge consuming more food while they were away.

They also reported a huge increase in their alcohol consumption — from an average of eight drinks per week before they left on their trips to an average of 16 drinks per weeks while vacationing.

Given the amount of calories in alcohol, those drinks could alone explain up to 30 percent of the weight gain observed in the study, says Cooper.

Caveats

The study has some important limitations. It included a relatively small number of participants, for example, and had no control group. It also followed people for only six weeks, a time frame that may not have been long enough to capture the participants shedding the pounds they had gained.

Still, writes Cooper, “it is important for adults to understand how small weight gain on a vacation can be meaningful, and that this weight gain should be lost to help prevent yearly weight gain and creeping obesity.”

One final finding from the study: Cooper reports that the participants tended to experience a “significant” reduction in their systolic blood pressure and in their self-perceptions of stress while on vacation — and that both these benefits were still apparent six weeks after the vacation had ended. 

But, she warns, “whether or not these positive changes in [blood pressure] and stress can overcome the negative health implications of gaining weight on vacation are yet to be determined.”

FMI: You’ll find an abstract of the study on the Physiology & Behavior website. The full study is behind a paywall. Physiology & Behavior is the official journal of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society.

MinnPost is hiring for a full-time administrative assistant to join our growing business staff. Qualified applicants will be detail-oriented and able to skillfully multi-task, deliver excellent customer service to clients and readers, work both independently and with others, and embrace change.

This position provides administrative support to the business team, reporting to the Director of Advertising and working closely with the Director of Development.

Primary responsibilities include:

• Translating verbal agreements into written advertising contracts
• Entering contract information into our CRM and accounting systems
• Preparing client presentations
• Tracking trade agreements
• Updating sales and marketing materials to support individual advertising sales calls
• Responding to advertising client contract and billing questions
• Supporting our membership program by preparing acknowledgement letters and mailing thank-you gifts to qualifying donors

Ancillary duties include scheduling post-sales call follow-up tasks, maintaining client data in our CRM, occasional prospecting to identify sales leads, and assisting with live events.

Strong candidates will have a history of success in administrative support roles, extensive knowledge of office software – including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Docs – and experience working with CRM software (such as Salesforce). Familiarity with digital advertising terminology and systems is ideal, but not required. At a minimum, applicants should be adept with technology and able to learn new programs and systems as needed.

This position offers health benefits. 

For consideration, please send a cover letter and resume to adjobs@minnpost.com. No phone calls, please. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis, and accepted until the position is filled.

CC/Flickr/puppethead

Winter bicycling is not as crazy as it sounds.

There are not many things you can do in Minneapolis that seem crazier than riding your bicycle in a Minnesota winter. It conjures up images of beards covered in ice, a lonely bundled figure mounted on a thin metal machine sloshing through snow and over ice on the margins of the road, not a trace of bare skin, and only puffs of warm breath emerging from between the goggles and jacket. From the perspective of most car drivers, crouched over their dashboard heaters, the very idea is unimaginable.

But winter bicycling is not as crazy as it sounds, and might be a litmus test for sustainable cities and active living. Next week (Feb. 2-4), Minneapolis and St. Paul will host the fourth Winter Cycling Congress, an annual conference devoted to promoting and educating decision-makers about the unique challenges of winter bicycling. It’s the first time the conference has been held in the United States; Minneapolis and St. Paul will soon become case studies for how to make progress toward increasing winter cycling. (See schedule of events here; same-day registration is allowed.)

Winter Bicycling 101

For an American city, Minneapolis has a decent bicycling mode share (defined as the percentage of people who make their transportation trips by bicycle). At least, it does during the summer. But bicycling generally tracks fairly closely to weather.

Courtesy of Michael Altman

This chart compares Nice Ride bikeshare ridership to the high temperature on a given day; higher temperatures are clearly associated with higher bike ridership, at least as Nice Ride users are concerned.

“You get used to it,” JJ Kahle, who rides 6 miles each way to teach at a Minneapolis high school all winter long, told me. “It’s a routine. Everyone has the things that work for them, and for me, I carry my work clothing to school. Every day involves me dressing after the ride, changing into school clothes, sometimes commuting to another campus 10 miles away and then riding home. I use a pretty big backpack.”

The challenges of winter bicycling depend on whom you talk to. For Kahle, good quality lights are crucial, because of the extra darkness and wintertime visibility issues. The other advice was to “really watch the weather,” and make sure to know about upcoming precipitation or temperature changes. 

“Basically there are two different variables, what you’re wearing into work vs. what you carry into work,” Holly Santiago, who commutes about 4 miles to work in a business professional environment, told me. “Getting there with enough time to get changed and freshen up is important. In my work environment, I don’t have a big space to change or store things, so I try and wear [flexible] clothes, like a couple pairs of long johns over my tights, and then put on a business outfit that’s easy to change.” 

Santiago also changes her commuting routes from summer to winter; because of the packed snow, side streets become places for “slow, cautious riding.” And in winter, reliably cleared-off trails like the Midtown Greenway or the Cedar Lake Trail become even more important. 

MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke

The Midtown Greenway in the wintertime, a reliable route for winter riders.

(Both Kahle and Santiago are members of Grease Rag, a Minneapolis-based bicycle group that focuses on women/trans/femme cyclists, with the goal of changing bicycling assumptions and conversations that too often focus on male cisgender riders.)

The story of the WCC

The Winter Cycling Conference got its start in Finland, where the small city of Oulu had become something of a winter bicycling mecca. Compared to most cold weather cities, in Oulu the winter mode share remained quite high, almost 25 percent.

“The first [conference] was held was three years ago in Oulu, the world capital of winter biking,” Tony Desnick, a bike advocate and one of the conference's main organizers, told me. “The purpose is for designers, policy-makers, planners, and advocates to come together and share best practices about how to normalize winter biking.”

After the conference moved to Winnipeg, Canada, in 2014, Desnick and a group of other advocates put together a bid for a Minneapolis conference. The bid included support from both Twin Cities’ mayors, local businesses, bike groups like the Bike Alliance of Minnesota, and some crucial funding support.

According to Janelle Waldock, the vice president of community health and health equity for BlueCross and BlueShield of Minnesota, the conference lined up perfectly with their mission.

“One of our goals is to make bicycling more inclusive for everyone, and we recognize that our climate plays a role in that. We know there are creative strategies to enable people to be able to still bike in the more snowy months,” Waldock told me. 

Why do we need a separate conference for winter?

There are already a bunch of bicycling conferences all over the country focusing on bike planning, bike infrastructure, bike sales and bike advocacy. So why do we need a special conference focused on bikes in the wintertime? 

“Weather is a major barrier for people biking,” Annie Van Cleve explained to me. Van Cleve, along with Desnick, is one of the two advocates who’s been organizing next week’s three-day event.

“It’s something we do for fun for half the year, but that makes it much harder to legitimize bicycling as a form of transportation. So this conference has a strong focus on transportation. At same time it acknowledges that recreation is a really strong part of our tradition here and reason people still ride bikes,” Van Cleve explained.

Photo by Aaron Thomas Smith

Fat bikes have become a hot recreational activity in the wintertime.

She points to fat biking as an example of the growing recreational winter biking trend, but maintains that the key is focusing on the bicycle’s transportation potential.

There are other variables, too: how maintenance and equipment considerations change relative to snow and less predictable cars. A good general rule of thumb: If you design bike infrastructure that works well in winter, it’ll work even better during the rest of the year.

“If you need protection, it becomes more important in winter,” Van Cleve told me. “Safety has to be at a higher level; if we plan for the winter, it means we also benefit for the summer.”

Maintenance vs. construction

One of the big challenges for winter bicycling is maintenance. Just as with snow plowing for cars, trying to figure out ways to deal with accumulating snow and ice is a huge challenge.

Van Cleve and Desnick both told me about how maintenance — plowing, de-icing, communication — are going to be a special emphasis of the conference.

“We need a priority clearance network,” Van Cleve told me, “certain routes that people can depend on. We should design infrastructure so there’s room for snow storage. And for the actual practice of maintenance itself, people from Scandinavian countries are going to be here talking about techniques.”

MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke

Summit Avenue bike lanes remain icy and dangerous all winter long, despite the city's plowing efforts.

Desnick points to research he has done via his bicycling website Minneapolize, suggesting that maintenance is a huge problem for accessibility.

Courtesy of Minneapolize

Maintenance is a huge problem for bicycling accessibility.

The cure for winter ennui

For many Minnesotans, winter is a depressing slog. The skyways, malls and domed stadiums for which the Twin Cities are justifiably famous reflect a collective desire to escape its grasp, to stroll unencumbered by the trappings of down jackets and warm woolen mittens. But winter bicycling represents a 180-degree departure from that technological transcendence. Instead of retreating from the cold climate, you tackle it head-on, and the reward seems almost magical.

“It’s completely part of my mental health,” JJ Kahle told me, describing the joys of winter bicycling. “To be outside, even though I’m not in sunshine very much, it’s just so beautiful and so quiet. I really think it’s a huge part of staying healthy and happy during this time of year.”

And just as Inuit people (allegedly) have many words for snow, winter bicyclists develop a new appreciation for the infinite varieties of wintry mix and winter sunlight that create our seasonal northern landscape.

“In winter, there’s no standard that anyone is judging you by,” Holly Santiago told me. “You can bicycle in December on clear roads or you can bicycle in 6 inches of snow in March. The best thing is that you don’t look at winter as ‘just cold.’ You observe and appreciate its variances, when it warms up by 10 degrees, or you’re out in a snowfall and it’s beautiful. Or in the morning, you start to hear different bird calls, and realize that the seasons’ are changing. Winter biking: Every day is different.”

If there was one message that Angela Glover Blackwell and several local leaders wanted to stress Wednesday at a forum on race and equity in the Twin Cities, it was this: The need “to get the equity agenda right.” 

Speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, Blackwell, a renowned social justice advocate, chronicled the era of legalized segregation in the United States, current challenges facing minority communities and barriers that prevent them from the traditional paths to economic prosperity.

“We’re at a different moment in this nation,” said Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink. “The challenge has never been greater.”

The challenges she highlighted include the recent episodes of police violence as well as widening economic and education disparities — calling for state leaders and influential individuals to act quickly. 

Blackwell noted that as the population of communities of color continue to increase at a much higher rate than that of their white counterparts, America will soon depend on minorities to sustain its economic security and world dominance. 

“There is an urgency about getting the equity agenda right,” she said, “And it’s not just for the people who have been left behind; it’s for the entire nation.”

She added: “The fate of the nation is dependent on what happens to people of color. There will be no democracy, there will be no middle class, there will be nothing to be proud of if the people who are going to be the future are not prepared to be the future that we want.”

In the search for answers to the dire educational and economic disparities among Minnesota’s communities of color, Blackwell — who’s based in California — praised leaders in the state for their efforts to look for those answer wherever they can.

“So many of you have been to the equity summits,” she said. “Your state always has the largest delegation at our summits and I’m always so thrilled the way that people have picked it up.”

Creating opportunities

Glover Blackwell, who was the event’s keynote speaker, explained that equity has been talked about in the United States for a long time, though it hasn’t been achieved. She pointed out the signature note of many job applications that say, “We’re an equal opportunity employer.”

Angela Glover Blackwell

She added: “What that often means is, ‘You know, you can get here and if you can be competitive, we’ll give you an interview.’ What it doesn’t pay enough attention to is what does it take on the educational front to even be competitive for what’s happening here.”

Many in communities of color, Blackwell said, don’t have the educational qualifications to compete for good jobs. And those who have the proper degrees don’t have the right networks that would help them land their first jobs.

“Equity requires that we’re looking at all of that because we’re not creating the conditions if we’re not thinking about it that way,” she said. “So, equity makes us really have to dig deep. And when we think about the equity agenda, we think about digging deep.”

She added: “It makes all of us have to develop strategies that we have not developed before, strategies that are going to lead all on the path.” 

‘Listen much harder’ 

Sarah Caruso, president and CEO of the Greater Twin Cities United Way— which organized the forum — suggested that creating equality might require inventing new systems or re-writing the current laws to reflect every U.S. citizen, including those of color.

She added: “Maybe we need to take on really hard issues, like what’s going on at the school board and why is North Minneapolis continuing to be so isolated.       

“We need to listen much harder. We need to listen to younger people. We need to listen to Black Lives Matter. We need to listen to people who are experiencing this every day and make sure we’re as close to it as possible.” 

'We know what the problem is'

The forum also featured six panelists representing governmental and nonprofit organizations in Minnesota.

Panelist Shawntera Hardy, who serves as the deputy chief of staff for the Office of Governor Mark Dayton, noted that America has normalized the practices of racial inequality, allowing barriers to paralyze communities of color.

Ron Harris, of the Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, added that real investments in the communities of color are indispensable in order to defeat inequality. “We need to stop studying and admiring the problem. We know what the problem is.” 

Like some of the leaders on the panel, Harris blamed the disparity and inequality issues on the current systems, which he argued had been set up in the first place to serve white people.

“The reason why we have these gaps … and disparity outcomes in the first place is that it has been an enormous amount of extraction from people of color,” Harris said. “This nation was built with the genocide of one race and the slavery of another.”

Ilhan Omar, director of policy and initiatives for the Women Organizing Women Network who is also running for a seat in the Minnesota House, said she believes that the answer to inequality and racial disparities is partly capacity building and providing resources to the affected communities. 

“I think we need to start investing in leadership and investing in human capacity,” Omar said. “If given the resources and if capacity was built in these community, they have the solutions to solve the problems that are affecting them.” 

Ibrahim Hirsi can be reached at ihirsi@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IHirsi.

In 2011, Mary Wingfield suddenly acquired a large sum of money in a way no one wants to: Her father died.

He left her around $138,000, which she tucked away in a savings account in Capital One Bank. Three years went by, but Wingfield never touched the money. Then the bank sent her a letter asking if her address changed, but she didn’t think anything of it. She had lived in the same place since 1999, so she figured the bank’s information was still accurate.

A few weeks later, though, she got word of a website called MissingMoney.com, where individuals could search their name and see if they had property or money that went dormant and was seized by the state of Minnesota. She punched her name in on a whim and it popped up: The website said the state had more than $100 of her money, and she filled out a form with her personal information and a notarized letter to get it back. When she didn’t hear anything for weeks, Wingfield thought she’d fallen for a scam.

She called the state and was relieved to find out they did receive her request. She also found out they had well over $100 of her money: The state took custody of her $138,000 savings account with Capital One, which they could legally do after three years of inactivity.

Wingfield is now part of a class action lawsuit against the state arguing its unclaimed property program is unconstitutional. The program authorizes the Minnesota Department of Commerce to take hold of things like bank accounts, pay checks from old jobs, safe deposit boxes, insurance claims or even coin collections and other family heirlooms from insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions if they are left dormant for a certain period of time. About 1 in 20 Minnesotans have unclaimed property with the state, according to estimates from the Department of Commerce.

The lawsuit argues that the state has increased its efforts to collect unclaimed property in recent years while lessening efforts to return that property to its rightful owners. At the same time, because assets like Wingfield’s money don’t collect interest in the hands of the state, that equates to an unconstitutional taking of private property and violates due process, according to the lawsuit. 

“I’m still cringing at the thought: What if I hadn’t connected the dots?” Wingfield said. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, here is the state, legalizing theft. They took it from my bank and they don't take a single step to return money to the proper owner.” 

Collecting more, but making it harder to claim

First established in 1969, Minnesota’s unclaimed property program was set up to safeguard abandoned money and property from financial institutions. Not all property is abandoned because of neglect — some people move, leave jobs or are unaware of the property left behind by deceased family members. And instead of banks or other companies keeping the cash, the law made the state the custodian for the property until the individual was ready to reclaim it.

But in the decades since the program was first established, state legislators have shortened the dormancy periods required before properties can be seized, in some cases reducing the period of inactivity from 20 to three years. Previously, state law also required that individuals receive a written notice when their property was seized and that the seizure be publicized in a local newspaper. In 2005, lawmakers removed both of those requirements.

Meanwhile, lawmakers stepped up efforts to collect the money from financial institutions. As of December 2015, the state held $706 million in unclaimed property, a number that has been steadily climbing over the last decade. In the 2006 fiscal year, the state had $318 million in unclaimed property. The money sits in the state’s general fund, where it can be used for anything.

Legal battle similar to other states' 

Dan Hedlund, an attorney with the firm Gustafson Gluek PLLC in Minneapolis, first heard about the program through an article in the newspaper. He was astonished by how easy it was to find names he recognized on MissingMoney.com. “People are not hard to find,” he said. “I was thinking, there’s all this unclaimed property out there that the state has and there doesn’t seem to be much done to return it.”

Unlike most cases, where the client finds a lawyer, Hedlund went out and found clients by asking people to search for their name. His first client found his son, Timothy Hall Jr., on the site when he didn't get final paycheck after he left a retail job. Hall said he never got notice it was available. From there, the number of clients in the lawsuit grew. 

“The money is being taken,” Hedlund said. “We don’t think this is their property. There should be more of an effort made to reunite it to the true owner of the money or the items.”

Dan Hedlund

Hedlund filed the suit in April of 2015, and Ramsey County Judge Shawn Bartsh recently denied a motion from the state to dismiss the case. The state is now appealing that ruling, while also trying to take the case directly to the Court of Appeals.

Other states have gone through similar legal battles: The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a case claiming the state of California needs to do more to return more than $8 billion in unclaimed property held by the state to its rightful owners.

In defending the program, the state of Minnesota has pointed to a previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Indiana in 1982 over the Mineral Lapse Act, which put an end to interests on minerals that had not been used in 20 years. A lower court found that violated due process, but the highest court overturned that ruling. “It’s is the owner’s failure to make any use of the property — and no the action of the state — that causes the lapse of the property right,” the ruling read. “There is no ‘taking’ that requires compensation.”

The state also argues that legislators gave the Commissioner of the Department of Commerce “broad authority” to determine the manner and frequency of notifying the public about unclaimed property. The state has established the MissingMoney website, and also does public events at the Minnesota State Fair, the Mall of America and grocery stores to help people reconnect to their cash or property. According to the department, the state has already returned 18,518 claims in the current fiscal year, which started in July, for a total of $27.4 million. That’s on pace to more than double the number of claims returned last year. 

“It would be our expectation that, like in other courts, Minnesota’s [unclaimed property law] would withstand constitutional scrutiny. The state does not take property when it has been effectively abandoned,” Department of Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said. 

“From our perspective, unclaimed property is really a consumer protection and service and priority for the Department of Commerce,” he added. “We work hard on it.”

Legislature looking at changes

Unclaimed property is also a target at the state Legislature, where support is building for a proposal to step up the Department of Commerce’s efforts to reunite people with their money. Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights, and Sen. James Metzen, DFL-South Saint Paul, introduced a bill last session that would:

• Require the Department of Commerce to include a complete list of names of people with property posted on its website and update it three times a year.
• Require at least least two full-time equivalent positions to return property to residents.
• Reinstate a requirement to publish all property valued at $500 or more in the largest newspaper in every county at least once per year.
• Require the department to provide legislators with a list of constituents in their district who have property held by the state.

In the months since the 2015 session adjourned, Atkins and Metzen have been doing their own work to find constituents who are missing money. They updated the addresses in the department’s files, and called individuals to let them know if they had unclaimed property. So far, Atkins’ estimates they’ve helped people in their district reclaim a total of nearly $550,000.

State Rep. Joe Atkins

“The response has been stunning,” said Atkins, who is retiring from the House after this year. “One woman said I was like Ed McMahon coming to her door with a big cardboard check.” Atkins believes the bill will have broad support from legislators in the 2016 legislative session. “I guarantee it will pass,” he said. 

Rothman said he supports Atkin’s proposal, but he doesn’t think it goes far enough. He’s asking state lawmakers to give the department $1.2 million to boost its efforts to return property to citizens. Currently, the unclaimed property department has a budget of $800,000 and employs 9 full-time staffers. The money would be used for more staff and technology upgrades, Rothman said.

“That means not just tweaking things here and there, but that actually means giving us the financial support we need to continue to upgrade our technology system and to get the staffing we need to make sure we are finding and returning property,” Rothman said. “We are doing that now with the resources that we have, but supplementing that effort would effectively double and quadruple our abilities.”

Whatever happens in the Capitol and the courts, Wingfield said she wanted to increase public awareness so other people don’t have the same experience as she did. “It’s kind of embarrassing, and the only reason I’m exposing myself to that is because nobody should have to go through that,” she said. “There are going to be people who will really need that money that the state is hanging on to.” 

To the Strib’s credit, the mystery of “Who Really is Olive Allen?” didn’t linger very long.

Avid op-ed page readers may have caught the correction at the bottom of Thursday’s letters column. On­line it reads essentially the same:

Because of incorrect information provided by the author to the Star Tribune, this commentary was originally published under a pseudonym. It is the policy of the opinion pages to attribute commentaries and letters to the editor to authors’ real names, with exceptions possible in rare cases — when pre-approved by editors — to provide anonymity in extremely sensitive situations.

The commentary was a surprisingly lavish defense of prominent restaurateur Jason McLean, (the Loring Pasta Bar, Varsity Theater), currently embroiled in serious allegations of sexual abuse during his years with the Children’s Theater Company back in the '80s. The piece was so praiseful of McLean’s various contributions to the Twin Cities arts and dining scene you might have thought it was a “placed commentary” whipped by some PR firm, if not written by McLean himself. And some did think that, with fair reason.

Kate-Madonna Hindes herself owns a small PR shop, “Girl meets Geek,” and also writes a blog with the same title. A rape survivor, she was infuriated by the commentary (and the Strib for running it) and set out to find the author, Olive Allen, “a writer in Minneapolis,” according to the Strib credit line.

The problem was that no such person turned up after hunts through Google and the usual social media venues. She says she and her friends even scanned census data looking for the now mysterious Ms. Allen. (The closest I could find was a young woman named “Olivia Allen,” whom I suspect was baffled by my Twitter query asking if she had written something for the Star Tribune.)

On her blog, Hindes wrote: “I want to believe the Star Tribune published the piece as a ploy for readership — nothing more. But now, I believe it’s the work of a lazy editorial staff who never bothered to fact-­check the named penned on the Jason McLean piece. Could it have been done to sway public opinion by a legal team or public relations before his trial begins? After multiple searches, I couldn’t find an Olive Allen who was a writer in Minneapolis — that’s when I knew, something strange was going on. I just didn’t realize the extent of it all.”

The commentary now features Hansen's byline.

As it turns out, Hindes was mostly right. Her suspicion that the “Olive” in question could be McLean’s daughter and Loring Pasta Bar employee, Olive McLean, didn’t pan out. But she was dead­-on about someone using a pseudonym and getting it past the Strib’s op-ed boffins.

My antenna began twitching when the Strib’s commentary editor, Doug Tice, didn’t return calls asking simply if he had vetted Olive Allen and was confident she was who she claimed she was. As it turns out, Tice and Scott Gillespie, editor of the editorial pages, were busy a big chunk of Wednesday trying to ferret out the reality of who wrote “In defense of Jason McLean’s artistic vision.”

Late Wednesday, Gillespie called with the tale. No, Olive Allen was not the author’s real name, he said. And, if you’re wondering: No, he was not pleased that someone had gamed his commentary system.

“The writer’s real name is Kay L. Hansen,” said Gillespie, and because of her use of a pseudonym, which the Strib allows for commenters but not for freelance pieces like an op­-ed column, changes were going to be made. 

Gillespie says the plan is to have revised standards for commentaries, clearly prohibiting the use of pseudonyms, in the paper and up on the website "sometime next week, I hope."

Thursday morning, Hansen e­mailed me, (Gillespie having told her I was asking questions):

First of all, I don’t have a relationship, per se, with Jason Mclean. I’ve been a big fan of his work since the old Loring Bar and Café days and, as such, a loyal customer. In 20 years I’ve had a handful of conversations with him and always in the context of customer to proprietor. Regarding my nom de plume: I’ve used ‘Olive’ or ‘Olive Allen’ for years. ‘Olive’ is for my great aunt and ‘Allen’ is for my grandmother’s maiden name. It has nothing to do with anyone in the Mclean family. I’m not, as some have suggested, an agent of the McLeans, the Loring Pasta Bar or the Varsity Theater.

The reason I decided to invoke Olive for the Star Tribune is the same reason I decided to write the counterpoint in the first place: When the internet attacks, it goes for the jugular and I already knew this story was getting people worked up. I was merely trying to protect myself. After reading the initial story about the accusations against Jason McLean, I stepped back and watched as social media moved in and started picking at it. After awhile, it seemed to me that social media circles weren’t interested in justice so much as they were interested in total annihilation.

After my op­-ed was published, I watched one particular Facebook thread tear it, and Olive, to shreds. Each indignant comment grew the thread ­­ and it’s level of fury ­­ exponentially. Commenters on the thread all but accused Olive of being pro rape (for the record, I’m not) and set about trying to track her down.

I asked her about the interaction with the Strib when they contacted her about “Olive Allen.”

After the social media sleuths discovered Olive had no internet footprint, the Strib called me and asked me if Olive was a pseudonym. I said 'yes.' Though understanding and kind, they were not happy with me, told me it violated the paper's policy and that they would mull over ideas on how to correct the situation. I then offered a written correction of my own:

‘A few days ago, moved by, what seemed to me, a rush to punitive action regarding the Jason Mclean issue, I sat down and penned a letter to the editor. The letter was meant to point out the positive and lasting impact of Mclean's artistic vision and to caution against 'cutting off our nose to spite our face.'

Emotions run high on issues of sexual misconduct and abuse. The court of public opinion, fueled by social media, can be brutal and, sometimes, scary. Which is why I chose to sign my letter using my nom de plume, "Olive Allen."'

The blowback was immediate. Indignant readers quickly deduced that ‘Olive Allen’ was a pen name and that put the Star Tribune on the spot. I apologize and I take full responsibility for the deception.

The most interesting takeaways from the episode are these:

1. In an age of hyper­connectivity and instant reaction, anonymity isn’t a possibility, for all intents and purposes. If you infuriate enough people, or the right people, you will be found out. The moral being: You might as well start with full transparency and your real name and choose your subject matter and choice of words accordingly.
   
   

2. Large public platforms like the Star Tribune receive literally hundreds (thousands?) of guest commentaries letters and reader comments every week. Vetting every one of them for accuracy is impossible. For the troll­-saturated world of commenters, the Strib and PiPress continue to permit pseudonyms, rationalizing the value of an unfiltered vox populi. That’s entirely debatable. But everything above commenting absolutely requires not only basic factual accuracy — within the accepted parameters of debate ­— but also common civility and the author’s real name. That is fundamental professional journalism, even when you’re publishing a guest commentary.
   
   

3. As infuriated as some were by the praise for McLean in a media outlet with the Strib’s regional heft, the paper was well within good judgment running the piece. Op­-ed pages are not about massaging conventional wisdom. Lord knows there’s plenty of that. A vital op-ed page publishes commentary likely to provoke reaction, preferably of the intelligent variety.
   
   

4. The Strib took the incident seriously and appears to have wasted little time tracking Ms. Hansen down and resolving the mystery. My guess is they had a long list of other matters they could have filled their day with. But they recognized a problem that required immediate correction. Good on them for that.

More good economic news for the North Star state. Gallup’s “Job Creation Index” has Minnesota at the top: “Minnesota led the 50 states on Gallup's Job Creation Index with an average score in 2015 of +38, based on workers' reports of hiring activity at their place of employment. Georgia and Utah were next at +36. North Dakota, which had been the top overall state each of the last six years, remains in the top 10.”

If a team eliminates scalpers, but nobody wants to see its games anyway, does it even matter? MPR’s Bob Collins how the Timberwolves took total control of their ticket sales: “Although they’re the least supported major sports team in the Twin Cities, the Minnesota Timberwolves are quietly revolutionizing how you’ll buy tickets to sporting events, and, in the process, increasing the price you’ll pay. … The team, and its partner, the Minnesota Lynx, are the first franchises to successfully manipulate the ‘secondary’ ticket market, eliminating competition from scalpers and services such as StubHub and Ticket King.”

For all the complaining about health insurance prices, it looks like some people were getting a good deal.The Star Tribune’s Christopher Snowbeck writes up the Legislative Auditor’s report on MNsure: “During a five-month period last year, Minnesota spent an estimated $115 million or more in overpayments to cover people who got incorrect eligibility determinations from the MNsure system, according to a new state audit. … Many of those who received state benefits either were placed in the wrong public health insurance program, or didn't qualify for either Medical Assitance or MinnesotaCare, according to a new report from Legislative Auditor James Nobles.”

Cool projectfrom MPR’s Doualy Xaykaothao and Mukhtar Ibrahim: “They are students, activists, welders and artists. They've grown up in Egypt and Yemen and north Minneapolis. They are daughters and brothers and fathers and mothers. … They are members of the world's fastest-growing religion. … By 2050, they are projected to make up 2 percent of the U.S. population. … In Minnesota, followers of Islam are establishing their place within the state's communities — as leaders and entrepreneurs and innovators — even amid growing tensions from neighbors struggling to adjust to a state whose demographics continue to evolve.… Hear their voices.”

In other news…

Not so much ice caves, this year: “Warm winter may sink Apostle Islands ice cave treks” [MPR]

Festivus celebrants rejoice:“St. Paul school kisses Valentine's Day, other 'dominant holidays,' goodbye” [Star Tribune]

The Southwest Light Rail station names are not final. [streets.mn]

It’s sad to see East Coast news outlets put Minnesotans up to this kind of thing: “Dear Washington, this is ridiculous. Go back to school. Love, a Minnesotan.” [Washington Post]

A lot cheaper than building safe roads, South Dakota:“Bill could require bicyclists to yield road” [Argus Leader]

Not the good kind of “shot in the arm”:“Oakdale Police Officer Shot in Arm” [KSTP]

Thanks to Gov. Mark Dayton, water quality has been a focal point of discourse in Minnesota for a while now. After passing a buffer rule through the Legislature last year, Dayton this year proposed borrowing $220 million to improve water quality and will convene Minnesota’s first-ever water quality summit at the end of February. While these are welcome advances in Minnesota’s quest to secure clean water for all, Dayton must confront the power of corporate agriculture if he intends to address the problem of water pollution at its source.

Research shows that one of the biggest threats to our water is how corporate agribusinesses are running – and ruining – Minnesota’s farms. Their factory farms crowd too many animals into too little space with no place to put all their waste. The state's livestock produces enough manure to be equivalent to that of a population of 45 million humans.

Whereas humans have built sewage systems to deal with their waste, factory farms lack any such system, instead spreading the manure on already overfertilized fields and storing it in leaky waste lagoons. The algal blooms in Lake Erie and in the Gulf of Mexico are glaring examples of the end result of these practices.

There are many things that corporate agribusinesses can do to keep their pollution out of our waterways, from only applying as much fertilizer as their crops need to creating buffer zones to minimize runoff pollution and using cover crops. It’s high time corporate polluters put these solutions to work for all of our waterways.

Peter Suechting is a clean water organizer at Environment Minnesota.

MinnPost welcomes original letters from readers on current topics of general interest. Interested in joining the conversation? Submit your letter to the editor.

The choice of letters for publication is at the discretion of MinnPost editors; they will not be able to respond to individual inquiries about letters.

“Butch was shot. He's dead.”

Sondra Samuels

When I was a 14-year-old growing up in New Jersey, these five words caused an emotional tsunami that has altered my life forever. These simple words violently upended my innocence, my sense of safety and trust of adults. 

Butch was just 13 years old. He was my ‘Frenemy.’ Always clowning around, Butch was known for slapping girls on our tender budding breasts and then running fast to escape our wrath. I remember he had light skin, sorta wavy hair and was shorter than most of the other boys in his grade. He was popular. As the son of a respected police officer in town, he stayed out of trouble. Though he sometimes hung around some of the rougher boys in school, he never really was one of them. He was their jokester. On the day he was killed by a bullet intended for another African-American young man, no one was laughing.

I had so many questions. Why Butch? Why couldn't his father protect him like he did so many others? Which one of us would be next? Why didn't the world stop — Butch was dead!! Why didn't the adults stop everything to make Butch's life the most important thing?

There are throngs of children like Butch who are killed each year by gun violence in our state. Young kids like Charez Jones (14 years old), Anthony Titus (16 years old), Alicia Neeley (17 years old) and Terrell Mayes (3 years old), to name a few, all gunned down in my North Minneapolis neighborhood.

Almost 10 children a year

And there are many more across the state. According to a May 2015 Star Tribune article, in the last 12 years, 116 Minnesota youths under 18 years of age died from shootings — that's almost 10 children a year. A few were killed by accident, most by murder. All had their lives inhumanely shortened because we, the adults, tragically failed to protect them from gun violence.

I am convinced that one of the key solutions to our country's deepening killing crisis is for all of us to have the moral courage and conviction to demand more sensible gun laws of our elected officials — now!

We must demand that they pass laws to make high-powered assault weapons used for war illegal on our streets. We must close the loophole at gun shows and make it mandatory that ALL people selling guns conduct background checks. And we must make it illegal to sell large-capacity magazine clips that kill and injure far more victims in mass shootings.

Finally, I urge everyone who cares about the safety of our children to lock arms with those of us fighting for sensible gun laws. We are the majority. And while I think we must also defend the freedom of responsible Americans to own guns, it must be with the understanding that our freedoms as citizens have to be balanced by our responsibilities toward one another.

In the end, our only means to a safe and healthy society is by ensuring that my individual right to own a gun is balanced by my responsibility toward you, my neighbor, and your right to live.

'Freedom is only part of the story'

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and renowned psychiatrist, believed that since there is a Statue of Liberty on the East Coast there should be a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. He also stated something that I, too, believe: "Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness."

May our last words to our children be: "We loved you enough to keep you safe from gun violence."

Sondra Samuels is the president and CEO of The Northside Achievement Zone. This commentary was originally published by the Minnesota Women's Press and is republished with permission.

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If you're interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, email Susan Albright at salbright@minnpost.com.)

Talk about setting it up high on the tee. At MPR Mark Zdechlik reports, “State officials got worse last year assessing Minnesotans' eligibility for public health plans, and the problems cost the state an estimated $115 million to $271 million from January through May, Minnesota's legislative auditor said Thursday. Auditors took MNsure and the Minnesota Department of Human Services to task for not ensuring that all those who enrolled in the state's Medical Assistance or MinnesotaCare through MNsure met the federal and state eligibility requirements to get those subsidized health benefits, which was a repeat finding from a prior audit.”

Says David Montgomery in the Pioneer Press, “The nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor took a random sample of 103 people enrolled in Medicaid and 54 people in MinnesotaCare between January and March of 2015. Auditors then used state employment data and tax returns to verify whether those individuals had actually qualified for the programs they enrolled in. The sample was limited to people who enrolled using the MNsure software and to people who allegedly qualified for programs because of low income. That means the sample represented a population of about 270,000 people, out of more than 1 million receiving public assistance. Of those 157 people, the audit found 38 percent weren’t eligible for their public program. Three-quarters of those people actually didn’t qualify for any program, while the remainder qualified for a different public program.”

And this after The Donald’s big fund-raiser last night in Iowa. Says Mark Brunswick in the Strib, “One of the largest Minnesota contributors to the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project says he will continue to support the charity despite news reports suggesting it spends its money lavishly. … Over the years, more than 80 individuals and organizations across Minnesota have donated to the Wounded Warrior Project, its website said. … One of the largest contributors has been Team Minnesota WWP, which has raised more than $600,000 for the organization since it was started in 2008.”

The kids have stopped feuding, for the moment. Says Rochelle Olson in the Strib, “Wells Fargo can keep the elevated signs on top of two 17-story towers near the new U.S. Bank Stadium — for now. U.S. District Court Judge Donovan Frank, who issued the ruling Thursday, tempered the bank's victory, however, by saying the Vikings have a ‘fair’ chance at eventually prevailing and requiring that the signs be flush with the rooftop, not elevated 18 inches as they are now. The Vikings wanted Frank to order the bank to cover the signs immediately, saying the signs violate a vigorously negotiated contract and amount to ‘ambush advertising.’" Is this how we put the “petty” in petty cash?

This from Paul Shockley in the Grand Junction [Colorado] Daily Sentinel, “A Minnesota hunter was handcuffed and remanded into the custody of the Mesa County Jail on Wednesday after pleading guilty to all charges in the death of 14-year-old Justin Burns on Grand Mesa last fall. Guy Pohto, 59, of Cook, Minnesota, acknowledged he ‘recklessly’ caused the death of the Palisade High School freshman in pleading guilty to manslaughter, a Class 4 felony, as well as a misdemeanor count of hunting in a careless manner. … Justin was bow hunting Sept. 13, 2015, with his father near Big Creek Campground on Grand Mesa when he was shot once in the chest and died. It was archery and muzzleloader season for various big game in many areas across Colorado at the time of the shooting.”

Amusing piece from Nathan Bowe in the Grand Forks Herald on various critters and things nominated as state symbols. “... here is a list of symbols, unofficial, proposed, or facetious, compiled by the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, that were at one time or another proposed to represent Minnesota on the illustrious list of state symbols:

Amusement Ride
The Tilt-A-Whirl was proposed in the Legislature as the State Amusement Ride in 2007. A State Fair poll question at the House booth in 2007 asked, ‘Invented in Faribault in 1926, should the Tilt-A-Whirl be designated the State Amusement Ride?’ A total of 47 percent said yes, 22 responded no, and 31 percent were boldly undecided.

Beer 
Believe it or not, a wholesome glass of milk is not the only beverage Minnesotans love. Competing bills proposed the designation of a state beer in 1987. One proposed Schell’s Deer Brand beer, while another suggested Cold Spring beer. Both bills went flat.

Insect
Clippings suggest a variety of insects as the state insect; however, no legislation has been introduced. Among the suggestions are the mosquito, the wood tick, the no-see-um and the corn borer.”

No doubt a scheduling error by his staff. Riham Feshir of MPR says, “A state legislator is taking heat for attending a private Shariah law event in St. Cloud that critics are calling anti-Islam. Sen. David Brown, R-Becker, said the backlash he's getting for speaking at the event, billed as ‘Shariah 101,’ is unfounded. ‘It wasn't [a] hyped-up, Islam-is-terrible type of thing,’ he said. ‘It wasn't any of that.’ The controversy surrounds the event's main presenter, Jeffrey Baumann. The Coon Rapids man talked for an hour about growing up in Saudi Arabia and the practices of Islam. Critics say that doesn't give him the right to speak as an expert, especially because he's made anti-Islam comments in the past.”

Can you fry Asian Carp in this stuff?The AP reports, “The Canadian Pacific Railroad says around 850 gallons of soybean oil leaked when six tanker cars derailed into the Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota. CP spokesman Andy Cummins says three of the six cars were successfully unloaded Thursday and are expected to be safely removed from the river Friday. The other three will be emptied Friday. Fifteen cars on the Canadian Pacific train derailed Tuesday night south of Brownsville. The six cars that landed in the river all carried soybean oil, and two of them leaked.”

A factor in the bird flu epidemic? Farming. An MPR story says, “Farmers who actively tilled fields near turkey barns in the early days of Minnesota's avian influenza outbreak last year may have unwittingly helped spread the virus, a new University of Minnesota study says. Soil in those fields may have been contaminated with droppings from migrating birds believed to be a source of the highly pathogenic H5N2 avian influenza. The virus can survive cold temperatures in soil and the tilling may have created ‘airborne particles that could carry the virus,’ the university's Center for Animal Health and Food Safety said in the report posted Thursday.”

Not sure, but this could socialism. Ricardo Lopez of the Strib says, “Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union, is renewing its push for universal access to preschool, releasing a report Thursday making the case for expanded early-learning programs offered through public schools. The report, authored by a recently-created think tank, argued that Minnesota should offer universal preschool on a voluntary basis, ensuring that all families have access to early-learning programs.”

Uh yeah, some careful re-branding might be in order here. For the Forum News Service Phil Pfuehler writes, “‘Roger T. White Pride Fitness Room’ doesn’t roll off the tongue? The River Falls, Wis., school district doesn’t want it called the ‘White Pride’ room either. Naming rights for Meyer Middle School’s refurbished fitness room has sparked a backlash on social media. … Chuck Eaton, a principal at Rocky Branch Elementary School and head of the fitness room’s fundraising group, was interviewed for a recent story. Near the end, he said the name would likely be informally shortened to ‘White Pride Fitness Room.’ Negative social media comments begin appearing on the River Falls Journal Facebook page … .”

Manhattan, Malibu, London and … St. Paul. Says Frederick Melo in the PiPress, “The St. Paul City Council will consider asking two key city departments to study Airbnb and similar short-term home-rental companies to see ‘how their operations align with current city ordinances.’ The resolution, proposed by Council Member Chris Tolbert, will go before the city council on Wednesday. Founded in August 2008, Airbnb allows users to rent out their personal residences to vacationers through an online exchange. The company claims to list 1.5 million apartment, condo and home rentals in more than 190 countries.”

The guys at Power Line, noted climate experts and film critics, are not happy with the way one of their favorite movies of the season has been treated. Says John Hinderaker, “Paul and Scott have both seen the movie '13 Hours' and wrote about it here and here. Scott noted that at the theater he attended, the large room was reserved for 'Carol.''13 Hours' got the smaller venue and was sparsely attended. Scott linked to a Hill story headlined‘Benghazi film flops at the box office.’ This was a pretty common theme on the left; to cite just one instance, Amanda Marcotte at Salon was triumphant. Her headline: ‘Audiences reject 13 Hours: Big blow for the right’s desperate quest for Clinton’s Benghazi smoking gun — it’s just not there.’ Seriously. That’s the headline. I won’t waste time on Marcotte’s ‘review,’ which is hampered a bit by the fact that she hadn’t seen the film. I have read very little of her work, but I take it she is mostly a joke.” So John’s read very little of the woman who hasn’t seen the movie. Hmm. Please tell me more.

For a big part of Tyler Skluzacek’s childhood, his dad, Patrick, couldn’t sleep. A veteran who had served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, Patrick was awakened most nights by night terrors, intense, violent dreams that are a common symptom of PTSD.

At first, Skluzacek didn’t know his dad couldn’t sleep. But the truth eventually became impossible to ignore.

“I was a kid, and our house was just big enough for me not to hear it,” Skluzacek recalled. “But as high school turned into college I noticed that my dad was really sluggish, tired, irritable, cranky. He eventually told me that he was having a hard time sleeping at night due to flashbacks of things that happened in Iraq.”

The whole family felt the impact of the elder Skluzacek’s sleep deprivation.

“Straight up, my dad was insufferable,” Skluzacek said. “He tried every pill in the book. He tried the VA-sanctioned therapies. They didn’t seem to work very well for him. He was frustrated and exhausted, and it took a pretty heavy toll on all of us. He wasn’t sleeping —and we all had to deal with a man that wasn’t sleeping.”

Skluzacek, who left his hometown of New Prague to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, assumed that his father would likely have a hard time sleeping for the rest of his life. But a little part of him always held out hope that some day he would be able to help his dad get the rest he needed.

Putting coding skills to use

It wasn’t clear how Skluzacek, a computer science, applied math and statistics triple major, would ever be able to help his dad. But then he was given an opportunity to focus his impressive coding skills on the problem.

In September 2015, Skluzacek heard about Hackathon for Health, an event held by the nonprofit HackDC in which coders, developers and medical professionals were invited to come together in the nation’s capital to develop ways that mobile technology could be used to help veterans cope with PTSD.

The event’s theme immediately appealed to Skluzacek.  “I thought, ‘I’ll show up and see what I can do.’ ”

When he arrived at the event, Skluzacek quickly realized that if he wanted to create something that would actually help veterans like his dad, he needed to jump in and learn everything he could about PTSD research in order to create the most useful technology.

David Turner/Macalester College

Tyler Skluzacek

The 36-hour event was held “in a giant gymnasium,” Skluzacek recalled, “with tables set up in the middle. On the outside there were booths with technology companies, veterans’ associations, psychiatrists from the VA. If you wanted to go to the next level, you had to get your booty out of your chair and talk to these psychiatrists. A lot of people at the hackathon would not go talk to the psychiatrists, but my team spent a lot of time talking to the them and reading research papers about stress indicators that we could use in our project.”

The team learned that it’s not the night terrors themselves that take a toll on veterans; it’s the fragmented sleep the terrors create. After talking with researchers, Skluzacek and his team landed on the idea of inventing a smartwatch app that could detect and interrupt the terror without fully waking the sleeper.

“These watches have just enough technology on them to track when a night terror is happening,” Skluzacek said. “We can do heart rate, body temp, sounds, movements — and out of all of these we can get a pretty good idea of when a night terror is happening. Then the watch steps in and sends a stimulus to interrupt the night terror, but not fully wake the user.”

myBivy is born

The hacathon was intense — “Over the 36 hours, I got a total of one hour of sleep each night,” Skluzacek recalled, “but by the end, we were actually able to create a semi-functional glue-and-paperclips prototype.” 

Skluzacek’s team, dubbed “The Cure,” won the event’s “Best Mobile Application for Clinicians” category. Their prototype, now known as myBivy, (for bivouac, or the light-weight, portable shelter used by soldiers), took home a $1,500 prize, or $300 each when divided by the five members of the team.

“That’s not that much,” Skluzacek said, “but it’s a lot for a college student who doesn’t have much money.” 

Still, $300 isn’t enough to go from prototype to reality. The team knew it needed more money if they wanted to make their idea fly. They calculated the amount needed to get started and landed on $1,200 to $1,500. “We needed to buy one of every smartwatch,” Skluzacek explained.

So they launched a Kickstarter campaign. Skluzacek’s pitch was very DIY: “I set up a camera stand and talked for five minutes about why our watch was cool, and how we needed money to develop it, and lo and behold, KARE 11 covered us.”  

The local TV news report was picked up around the world. “All of the sudden there was a media flood,” Skluzacek said. Stories were written about myBivy in “USA Today,” “Huffingon Post” and “Gizmodo,” among others.

All the attention worked wonders for the fundraising campaign. “The $1,200 turned into $26,000,” Skluzacek said, and with the infusion of funds, work has begun on the app in earnest. "We still don’t have the money to do a lot of things, but there is a lot of expectation about this app now. Before, it was just about my dad and his Army buddies. Now it needs a mass release or,” he laughs quietly, “there will be mass outrage.” 

Next step: clinical testing and development

The outrage will come from sleep-deprived veterans eager to try out myBivy, which Skluzacek is testing on his father.

The device works like this: “It is tethered to a smartphone,” Skluzacek said. Over several days and nights of wear, “The watch collects a whole bunch of data images. It does calculations and determines if and when the user is having a night terror.”

The technology will run on just about any smartwatch, including the Apple watch or the Samsung watch. “It will run on a Fitbit as well,” Skluzacek said.

“If myBivy detects that the wearer is having a night terror, at first it is going to intervene very softly,” Skluzacek said. “That may not be enough to take you out of your terror, but over time the app will determine the level of interruption that is needed and then adjust to that.”

Skluzacek’s father is a heavy-sleeping mechanic who’s often unaware of loud noises, so his watch had to be adjusted to the point where “he is almost jackhammered on his wrist in the middle of the night,” Skluzacek said. “But it takes him out of a night terror.”

In November, Skluzacek and his team participated in an event in Minneapolis called Mobcon, where inventors and developers bring in their ideas and pitch them to an audience of potential investors.

“There were CEOs, developers of massive apps,” Skluzacek said. “They all got to vote on the ideas. I presented my idea to 500 people. They voted and said that myBivy was the best app here. I won $20,000 in developer credits and $5,000 in legal credits.”

Skluzacek still has to finish up his senior year, but now myBivy’s development is moving quickly. “By March, we want to be in clinical testing,” he said. “We are looking at an overall release in May or June.” 

While he stresses that myBivy is really more of a “cheater hack” or a band-aid than a cure — and that veterans with PTSD should continue to seek other therapies for the disorder while using his app — Skluzacek said that the myBivy prototype has been “wildly helpful,” for his own father: “He’s used it for three months now. His buddies are already outraged. They are seeing my dad healthy and full of energy. They want one, too. But I just can’t give it out to everyone. I have to make sure it is tested first.” 

“Wicked” returns. So do Roundabout Theatre’s Tony-winning “Cabaret” revival, and “Motown the Musical,” “Rent” and “Mama Mia!” But the 2016-17 Broadway on Hennepin season isn’t just about old favorites. Announced earlier this week by Hennepin Theatre Trust, it also includes five Minnesota premieres.

New to Minneapolis and the Orpheum stage will be “Fun Home,” winner of five 2015 Tony awards including Best Musical; “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” the 2015 Tony-winning Best Play; and “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I,” the 2015 Tony winner for Best Revival of a Musical. The 2013 Tony winner “Matilda the Musical,” based on the book by Roald Dahl, will touch down, and “The Bodyguard,” based on the hit film starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, filled with great songs (“I Will Always Love You”), will launch its North American tour here.

And – we are super excited about this – Theater Latté Da’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” which was just about everybody’s favorite musical last year, will make an encore presentation at the Pantages as part of Broadway Re-Imagined, the fruitful collaboration between the Trust and Latté Da. (Up next: “Gypsy” at the Pantages in February.) Mark Benninghofen, Sally Wingert and Tyler Michaels will reprise their roles as the demon barber, the pie maker and the apprentice.

The season begins with “Cabaret” in October and ends with “Motown” in July 2017. Season packages are on sale now. Single tickets will be available at a later date.

As you stroll to the theater from the Green Line or wherever you park, take in our “urban walking gallery” – the once-vacant windows filled with art by local artists for “Made Here,” a project of Hennepin Theatre Trust that will continue for at least two more years. Last week Andersen Windows, the presenting sponsor since the project began in 2014, renewed its commitment, as did the McKnight Foundation (for artist support) and Best Buy (for a second Young Artists Edition).

***

We had hoped to see the brilliant young Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst on stage with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in February and March. Sadly, it’s not to be. After canceling his debut as a new SPCO artistic partner last November due to Meniere’s Disease – a disorder of the inner ear that causes severe vertigo, sickness and tinnitus – Fröst has withdrawn from all upcoming engagements through the 2015-16 season.

The Feb. 26-28 and March 4-6 programs have been changed and new guest artists engaged. French pianist David Fray will make his Minnesota debut with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor in February. In March, violinist and SPCO audience favorite Gil Shaham will play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. The SPCO’s website has been updated with all the details.

Fröst remains committed to his artistic partnership and looks forward to returning next season in good health.

In November, SPCO artistic partner Patricia Kopatchinskaja had to withdraw from a performance at the last minute due to an arm injury. She has since returned to the concert stage with tours throughout Europe this month, so we can expect her in April and June as planned.

***

One thing (of many) we like about “MN Original” is its wide-angle view of our local arts scene. This week’s episode journeys from murder most foul at the History Theatre to a painter’s studio, from MAD Magazine to a piano étude on the Ordway Concert Hall stage.

Get a good look at “Glensheen,” the hit musical by Jeffrey Hatcher and Chan Poling that sold out the History Theatre last October. Comments from Hatcher, Poling, director Ron Peluso and stars Jennifer Maren and Dane Stauffer, performance footage, and behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage will make you wish you’d seen it when you could. Good news: it returns in July for 16 more performances.

Courtesy of MN Original

Tom Richmond is an illustrator and caricaturist who literally wrote the book on drawing caricatures.

Greta Claire and Tom Richmond are both visual artists, but they couldn’t be more different. Claire creates contemporary abstract paintings, squirting or splattering vivid colors onto canvas, moving them with her hands, layering and texturing. Richmond is an illustrator and caricaturist who literally wrote the book on drawing caricatures; it’s called “The Mad Art of Caricature.” He works regularly for MAD magazine, drawing the movie and TV parodies – things like “Orange is the New BLECCH” and “The Slobbit.”

It’s a bit jarring to move straight from Richmond’s Stanley Tucci caricature to the Ordway Concert Hall, but that’s where “MN Original” takes us next, where Eagan high school student Zhen Tu sits alone at the Steinway. A finalist in last year’s Schubert Club Bruce P. Carlson Student Scholarship Competition, she plays Liszt’s Etude No. 3, “Un sospiro,” in its entirety.

“MN Original” airs Sunday at 6 and 10 p.m. on TPT 2. It goes live on the website today (Friday).

The picks

On now: Saint Paul Winter Carnival. Eons ago – in the 1880s, to be precise – our ancestors realized that the only way to make it through a Minnesota winter was by celebrating the darned thing. This weekend looks pretty good, weather-wise, so get out there and see the ice sculptures in Rice Park, view the (mini) Ice Castle, check out the display of carnival memorabilia in the Landmark Center, hear live music and watch a parade. Head over to the Fairgrounds for fun at the Vulcans Snow Park and Slide, and/or see the orchid show at the Como Park Conservatory. And more. It’s a big deal and it runs through Sunday, Feb. 7. Here’s the calendar. Go here for a free Metro Transit pass.

Tonight (Friday, Jan. 29) at Heart of the Beast: Puppet Cabaret. Puppets big and small, hairy and smooth, bitter and sweet, intelligent and stupid, warlike and peaceful, crude and cruder, in shows performed by the Twin Cities puppet community. Plus popcorn, beverages and live music. 9 p.m. FMI and tickets ($10 suggested donation).

Tonight at Vieux Carré: Peter Kogan’s Monsterful Wonderband. Kogan recently retired as principal timpani for the Minnesota Orchestra, freeing him to play as much jazz as he wants. With his band of ace players — Adam Meckler on trumpet, Pete Whitman on sax, Scott Agster on trombone, Sean Turner on piano, Chris Olson on guitar and Jeff Bailey on bass — he’ll play tunes from his first two CDs of original compositions, “Cornucopia” (2013) and “Some Monsterful Wonderthing” (2015). 9 p.m. $10 cash at the door.

Photo by Todd Rosenberg

Hubbard Street Dance

Saturday at Northrop: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Last time they were here, in 2013, they performed at the State Theatre; Northrop was still under construction. They’re returning with an entirely different program: choreographer Crystal Pite’s “Solo Echo,” based on a poem by Mark Strand about a man coming to the end of his life; William Forsythe’s “N.N.N.N.,” soundscape by Dutch composer Thom Willems; excerpts from Alejandro Cerrudo’s “Second to Last,” set to Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel;”  and Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s “Gnawa,” with North African drumming, Spanish guitar and Sufi music. Sounds fascinating. 8 p.m. FMI and tickets ($44-$64). Arrive early for a performance preview with the company’s artistic director Glenn Edgerton; 6:45 p.m. in the Best Buy Theater.

Saturday and Sunday at Century College in White Bear Lake: 27th Annual Jazz Festival. Jazz trumpeter and composer Randy Brecker will perform twice with the Century College Jazz Ensemble: Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Arrive an hour early for a reception featuring guitarist Joel Shapira and singer Charmin Michelle and complimentary beverages, cheese and dessert. $20 adults, $10 students at the door.

Monday and Tuesday (Feb. 1 and 2) at the Playwrights’ Center: Susan Soon He Stanton’s “SEEK.” In 1926, British mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days. Where she went remains an unsolved mystery. Stanton’s fictional retelling imagines Christie as the uninvited houseguest of a single dad on Hawaii’s Big Island, where her life begins to resemble her own dark stories. Patricia McGregor directs a public reading by five actors including terry Hempleman and Remy Auberjonois. Part of the Center’s Ruth Easton New Play Series. 7 p.m. both nights. Free, but RSVP; space is limited.

Hot tickets

On sale today at 10 a.m.: Lisa Fischer at the Dakota on March 7. The “20 Feet from Stardom” star and Rolling Stones backup singer is a must-see live music experience. No words can describe what it’s really like to be in the room when she sings. 7 and 9 p.m. $40-$60. 612-332-5299.