Author Archives: Mary Turck

Giant puppets and dancing children could steal anybody’s show. They didn’t have to steal a show or a scene during La Natividad, because this show belonged to them, and to all of the actors and to us in the audience, too. Like In the Heart of the Beast’s MayDay parades, La Natividad is part of the community it has taken place in these past three years. As much as its Christmas story belongs to the ages, La Natividad belongs to today and here and now, rooted in Minneapolis and in the experience of immigrants and carpenters and angels and babies and mothers.

Angels lead Mary out of Mercado Central

La Natividad, a not-to-be-missed theater experience, closes on Sunday night with no scheduled return. While it is sold out, rush tickets are likely to be available at the box office, starting at 5:30 each night through December 21. And five days after La Natividad closes, so does In the Heart of the Beast Theater—a response to the economic downturn, a closure planned as a temporary measure. The press release announcing the closing says HOTB plans to re-open in February, and that Saturday morning children’s puppet shows will continue during the closure.

A child with a “ferocious” wolf betokens the peaceful world of a promised future.

From the press release announcing HOBT temporary closing
This difficult decision is a response to the economic downturn, and is intended to shore up the long-term health and vitality of the theatre. The souring economy is having an immediate and significant impact on current and future funding for arts organizations across the nation, including HOBT. Government, corporate and non-profit funding agencies are finding their ability to give dramatically reduced in this economic climate resulting in a reduction in number and size of grants.

La Natividad begins with angels telling Mary that she is about to become a mother, following quickly with her encounter with a god-like giant puppet. Joseph’s astonished disbelief gives way to solid support. The journey to Bethlehem occasions analogies and parables of the immigrants’ plight today. The audience is drawn in as participants in the journey from Mercado Central to Plaza Verde and the theater and then down 15th Avenue. In an echo of the Mexican custom of Las Posadas, Mary and Joseph knock on doors and are turned away. Finally, passing a forbidding border guard and fence, they come to St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, where the birth of the baby is greeted with dancing and followed by a shared meal.

Words cannot convey the warmth of community feeling or the charm of giant puppets, shaggy animals, and winsome children. Much of the audience lives in the neighborhood, but no one feels like an outsider while that old In the Heart of the Beast magic warms the freezing night.

In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre has been part of Minneapolis since 1973. In addition to the annual MayDay Parade and Pageant in Powderhorn Park, HOBT creates and produces plays, teaches workshops, offers Saturday morning children’s puppet shows, and works with students and teachers and communities.

Cold weather, family plans, and inertia made me put off seeing La Natividad last year and the year before. I’m glad I had the opportunity to see and walk with the play this year. La Natividad is more than theater, as HOTB is more than a theater company. By helping people to cross boundaries and meet one another, they strengthen the fabric of our community. In these tough economic times, we need the magic of theater and the warmth of community more than ever.

Mary Turck (editor@tcdailyplanet.net) is editor of the Daily Planet.

Best Buy offers 4000 buyouts
Twin Cities health groups cut 613 jobs
3M to cut jobs to weather storm
Office Depot to close Woodbury store in nationwide downsizing
Downturn hits Hutchinson Tech hard
Ford Plant layoffs during December

“I don’t know anyone who’s actually lost a job,” the business owner told me. “I think a lot of it is just media hype.” That was two weeks ago. He probably wouldn’t say the same today.

Today the Daily Planet publishes two articles with personal stories about the recession’s impact. I believe that putting faces on the “economic crisis” helps increase our will to do something about it, both personally (contributing to your local foodshelf) and politically. Do you have a story to tell? A job lost? A home foreclosed? Hours cut? Benefits gone? Maybe you have a story of hope–someone reaching out to help in hard times–or a strategy for coping. Send your stories to me at editor@tcdailyplanet.net, or hit the comment button and tell us right now.

With almost every news outlet and politician in the state commenting on Minnesota’s budget deficit, what’s left to say? The numbers are bad: a $426 million deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009, plus a projected $4.8 billion deficit for the 2010-2011 biennium add up to $5.273 billion dollar total. State economist Tom Stinson said this could be the worst recession since World War II. (Excuse me, wouldn’t that make it the worst since the Great Depression?) He said today’s budget forecast was not a worst-case scenario, and that the situation “could be noticeably worse between now and the end of the biennium.” The next budget forecast will come in February.

Finance and Commerce notes that “neither GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty nor the DFL leaders of the Legislature offered any specific ideas for how they might even come close to erasing that huge hole in the state’s general fund.” In a related article, Finance and Commerce says that, in an effort to “jump-start a dismal economy with steam shovels and bulldozers, state lawmakers expect to propose a bigger-than-expected package of public works projects during the upcoming legislative session.”

Predictably, Pawlenty repeats his tired no-new-taxes mantra. He says cops and vets programs are exempt from budget-cutting, but that health care is costing the state too much, and could take some cuts. That’s just a few days after rejecting federal assistance possibilities because they might prevent health care cuts.

Over at Growth & Justice, Dane Smith lays out three important facts to keep in mind when considering the deficit and responses. From the Minnesota House, Session Daily reports reactions and links to the actual forecast document.

While promising a more detailed analysis in the near future, Minnesota 2020 points out:

The mushrooming of the state deficit from the May projections to the November forecast is almost entirely the result of declining state revenue. In short, Minnesota has a revenue problem, not a spending problem.

The terrorists win when they make us become more like them.

They win when we imprison Uighurs at Guantanamo for years and then, finally admitting they are not guilty of any conceivable charges, keep them in prison because they now have no place to go. (And, of course, it’s unthinkable to make amends by admitting them to the United States and providing counseling and rehabilitation to make up for what they have endured.)

They win when a whistle-blowing MP is arrested and his computer and Blackberry and papers are searched and seized.

They win when national political conventions become an automatic occasions for beefing up security forces and crying “the communists are coming and they are going to destroy our country!” Oops — showing my age. Today’s security motto is “the anarchists are coming and they are going to destroy our city!”

The War on Terror followed the War on Drugs followed the Cold War. War rhetoric provides excuses for super-patriotism, denunciation of enemies foreign and domestic, and a host of “war powers” enshrined in the Smith Act, the Patriot Act and presidential, above-the-law directives on surveillance.

Time for a change.

Tis the season to shop, which I have never considered a great pleasure. MOA is my idea of torture, and I’m a conscientious objector to Walmart.

Walmart and McDonalds are among the few businesses not struggling as we head deeper into the recession. As people tighten their belts and cut spending, they “down-scale” their expenditures, and these two giants both profit from their down-scale images.

I do like giving gifts, and not everyone needs another loaf of cranberry bread. Luckily, local options abound. Black Dog Cafe hosts a local craft sale for artists and near-artists today (November 29). Ginkgo Coffeehouse has a similar event on December 13. Ten Thousand Villages offers fair-traded gifts from around the world, with Mennonite values supporting local artisans and benefit nights supporting Minnesota non-profits.

Turck’s Trees, my brother and sister-in-law’s tree farm offers a gift shop in addition to trees, wreaths, hayrides and reindeer. Steve and Joan have been raising trees on the family farm for decades, and the shop features lots of locally-made consignment crafts.

Supporting locally-owned business and local craftspeople and artists and bakers and coffee-makers keeps my dollars circulating in the local economy. I feel neither an obligation nor a desire to contribute to Walmart — or Wall Street.

Koko lives at Turck’s Trees.

I know that a cappuccino costs more at Blue Moon or A Fine Grind than it does at McDonalds. But that’s not the point. I save money by brewing my own coffee or tea most of the time. When I go out for coffee, I want to see local art instead of plastic clowns. I want to chat with a barista who lives in my neighborhood, not a drive-through squawk box. I want to sit down in a comfortable chair, and see who else comes through the door.

As Minnesota 2020 reports:

Each $1 spent with a local, independent business keeps 68 cents at home and circulating in the Minnesota economy. About 43 cents of the $1 spent at national chains that do not have headquarters in the state stays behind to boost the local economy. …

[I]f Minnesotans spent 25 percent of their holiday shopping budget on Minnesota made products, the impact would ripple through the economy like a tidal wave and have small and local business people hiring more employees. That would make more than a $2 billion infusion into the state economy. Even a 10 percent increase in purchases of local products would stimulate employment and increase entrepreneurs’ purchases from local suppliers.

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Geoffrey Canada wants to save all the children. In the Harlem Children’s Zone, a “97-block-laboratory in Central Harlem,” the Harlem Children’s Zone programs run from Baby College through high school, providing effective (and expensive) support to parents and children with the goal of changing the lives of poor children. Canada’s vision goes beyond the Harlem Children’s Zone, to the hope of creating a model that can be replicated in other neighborhoods, other cities, other places where class and race conspire to defeat families and destroy the hopes of children.

Paul Tough covered the Harlem Children’s Zone for the New York Times. this book provides an admiring — but not hagiographic — portrait of Canada and a clear-eyed look at the successes and the failures of his project.

But Tough goes beyond the Harlem Children’s Zone to summarize the national debate on race, poverty and education, with particular attention to competing views published since the 1960s. He identifies two competing explanations:

One explanation blames powerful social and economic forces beyond the control of any individual. This belief holds that it is the very structure of the American economy that denies poor people sufficient income, and so the appropriate and just solution is to counter those economic forces by providing the poor with what they lack: food, housing, and money. The opposing explanation for American poverty is that it is caused by the bad decisions of poor people themselves and often perpetuated by the very programs designed to help relieve its effects. I fthis theory is correct, what the poor need is not handouts but moral guidance and strict rules.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James S. Coleman, Charles Murray, William Julius Wilson … Tough reviews the reports, and then asks the right questions.

In some ways, the verdict is still out on the Harlem Children’s Zone and whether it can truly transform the culture of poverty in a community. Even if it does, larger questions about cost and replication remain. The questions take on new significance in view of the campaign statements that Barack Obama made in 2007:

If he were elected president, Obama went on to say, “the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in twenty cities across the country.”

View all my reviews.

Growing Up White: A Veteran Teacher Reflects on Racism by Julie Landsman

rating: 4 of 5 stars
In her newest book, Julie Landsman looks unflinchingly at her life, from childhood through college, marriage, teaching and retirement. She recounts early experiences of race and racism, growing up in Connecticut, Massachusetts and, for a few years, in Texas. In college during the sixties, she began to engage issues of race — and gender and class. Activism “lit a fire under me,” she writes, and it is clear that the fire continues to burn.

Landsman’s stories illuminate today’s continuing racism. While acknowledging the progress made over the decades, she clearly describes the continuing significance of racism today. Her students feel the racism in their daily lives and in their classrooms. Adult friends, too, experience it.

“What all this makes clear, as when black friends are stopped for no reason walking to church in a ‘good’ neighborhood, when Latino friends’ children are automatically placed in lower track classrooms, when brown skinned kids are followed in stores, while their white friend are left alone, was this: my black friends continue to experience this country differently.”

After decades of teaching, Julie Landsman distills her life experience and her teaching experience into lessons for other teachers. In Growing Up White, she re-tells some stories from A White Teacher Talks About Race (2002, Rowman & Littlefield), and adds many more stories, all drawn from her life experience.

While Landsman writes about racism, and encourages white readers to identify and acknowledge their own racism, she does not want her readers to wallow in guilt.

Guilt is a way to center the problem in ourselves, to claim attention for our sense of shame. We can get so caught up in this shame that we cease to focus on the world around us. We can miss reasons for whole families’ homelessness, or the effects of the closing of public spaces, libraries, parks and what this might mean for our students and their families. In guilt, we get to turn inward and stay there.

Her aim is clarity and understanding, followed by action. Each of the short stories, framed as 45 lessons, end with reflection questions and suggestions for in-school applications. Those reflection questions and suggestions are also collected in one place in an appendix.

While I liked the smoother narrative structure of her earlier book better, this lesson-reflection-suggestion structure may work well for the classroom teachers who are the intended audience of this book.

One quibble: the book deserves better editing. When I read that what students read can have a “radical affect” on them, or see a reference to “Laura Ingles Wilder,” (p. 41) I am momentarily derailed. A decent job of editing would have caught such errors and corrected them. I’ve been on both sides of books, as an editor and as an author, and I know how much good editing can do for a book.

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A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The wanted man at the center of LeCarre’s latest becomes a deeper mystery, even as more is revealed at every turn of the plot. Set in Germany, the book pulls in Russia, Chechnya and Turkey in its opening chapters. The storyline moves from international banking to Islamist intrigue. As the multi-national cast of characters struggle to make sense of the political twists and turns, none gets a full story of what is happening, and the key characters’ motivations are a complex blend of each one’s individual psychology and political commitments. Refugees, a human rights lawyer, a banker, master spies of the old school and their post-9/11 politicized masters struggle to survive, to preserve integrity, to win the game, as they tumble toward an all-too-believable conclusion.

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As the economy tanks, it’s tough to know where to start covering it. Today’s announcement that Intermedia Arts is closing its gallery and laying off all full-time staff is one example of the human consequences of the recession, and the impact on our community. Last week Neighborhood House announced a 18 percent budget cut, which might play out in various ways. One way: 18 percent of their 75-person staff would be 10-15 people. At Teatro del Pueblo, the doors are staying open but all staff are taking cuts in hours. The Home of the Good Shepherd is closing, due to lack of funds to support its mission of sheltering homeless women. That means another 11 people without jobs. These are just a few examples of the impact of the recession on local non-profits.

Then there is the drumbeat of media news–most recently the Star Tribune’s offer of more “voluntary” buyout packages. Sure, the individual buyouts are voluntary, but the threat of bankruptcy looms over everyone, and the Strib has specified positions where it would welcome volunteers, including metro columnists (think Nick Coleman, Kathy Kersten, James Lileks and CJ) and editorial cartoonists. The buyout memo comes after last week’s cuts at KSTP-TV and continuing media lay-offs across the country.

Nationally, more than half a million jobs disappeared in November, with official unemployment rising to 6.7 percent. Minnesota’s November unemployment figures will be out later this week.

We are working on a story about St. Paul Ford plant workers, laid off until January without pay. We will be telling other stories of local people, companies and organizations hit hard by the recession. If you have a story to share, contact me at editor@tcdailyplanet.net.

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Virgil Flowers is back, and a more interesting character with each new book. The premise of this book seems a little far-fetched, but the action is fast-paced as ever. Virgil gets to chase the murderers while Lucas Davenport frets over the upcoming arrival of the RNC in MN. The characters are well-drawn, complex and sympathetic (including the bad guys). As usual, even the minor characters have interesting voices.

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