Jay Wrote

  December 2024 Well, that’s a helluva note. A general comment applicable to the year, I think.  Shall I just sign off now?  Nope. I actually have something positive, lovely and hopeful to send along - see page three. How about I talk about the weather? In late 2023 I signed a contract for snow removal for most of the winter as Karen and I planned to travel to NZ to visit family there.  Was it $400 a month?  Something like that.  Snow total was maybe 4 inches in total, maybe 7 all winter. $$$!  We then had lots of spring and early summer rain and then drought returned in August and September. This year we have a young neighbor who will handle the snow with a $/# of inches/days formula. His eyes got big thinking about all the money he hopes to earn.  How about I talk about seed art? My former colleague and friend Laura Melnick and her husband, Mark Dahlager, have been getting blue ribbons at the MN State Fair for many years for their seed art....

Northrop Auditorium, March 2025 The audience sat on stage, surrounding a ropeless red boxing ring. As we moved to our seats, Pitts and Tushrik Fredericks, his dance partner and co-combatant, shadow-boxed and wrestled with fast movements, some smooth, some jerky, for a long stretch, never quite touching but so close as to be a sequence of abstracted ballet moves between the two men. Moving together, their legs, arms, abdomens, backs, chests, and hands intertwined but somehow always remained separated by an inch or two as they moved across the ring. This must have been more physically difficult than moves where a hand supported a partner’s leg, a back supported another’s torso.  Pitts is strong, rounded, muscled, - conventionally and undoubtedly handsome or yes, beautiful. Fredericks is skinnier, angular and his strength is more hidden.  They move with enchanted control. Ignorant of dance details, I was glad for the program’s reference to the Lindy Hop, the early 20th Cent...