June 3, 2005 -
June 7, 2005 - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a 1982 play - one of the ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle by August Wilson. This archive recording is a dub of a commercial recording onto reel to reel tape.
June 9, 2005 - What would you do if you woke up one morning, and didn't recognize where you were? Not only that, you didn't know WHO you were? A new Lee Blessing play at the Guthrie Lab in Minneapolis explores the fluid nature of memory.
June 13, 2005 - MPR’s Bianca Vazquez Toness profiles La Loma, a commercial kitchen in Minneapolis that makes about 13,000 tamales a week. Toness interviews the owners about how they started and there goals for the future.
June 14, 2005 - Baseball fans who attend games at the Metrodome in Minneapolis have a choice of programs. In addition to the official program, published by the Twins, there is another independently-produced option with a very different editorial perspective. Despite a distinct marketing disadvantage, the publishers of Gameday have cultivated a loyal customer base. MPR’s Jim Bickal takes a look…and a read.
June 14, 2005 - Michael Cunningham's new novel has just been released. It's called "Specimen Days." Tonight Cunningham shares a stage with a woman he calls "an ideal reader", his friend, the poet Marie Howe, as part of the Literary Friendships series at Saint Paul's Fitzgerald Theater. His frist novel -- "The Hours" was a surprising success and it put Cunningham's work in the spotlight like never before. "The Hours" won the Pulitzer Prize, and inspired the 2002 film of the same name. The movie garnered 9 Academy Award nominations. Michael Cunningham says he truly enjoyed the big-screen version of his book "The Hours" despite the fact that the movie couldn't possibly contain all the details of the novel.
June 14, 2005 - Michael Cunningham is the author of four novels, including "The Hours," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and was made into a film starring Meryl Streep. His upcoming novel, "Specimen Days," is a journey into the past and future that centers around the American poet Walt Whitman. Howe is a Guggenheim-award-winning poet whose first book, "The Good Thief," was selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the National Poetry Series. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She is author most recently of "What the Living Do" and was co-editor of "In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic." Cunningham and Howe met through a mutual friend in Provincetown when both were just starting out in their careers. Together, they cared for that friend, who was diagnosed with and later died of AIDS. Cunningham and Howe consider one another "ideal readers;" they live in New York City and show each other everything they write.
June 16, 2005 - Alex Kotlowitz is an author and journalist. He wrote the book "There are No Children Here :The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America." He recently spoke in the Twin Cities at the Family and Children's Services Annual Meeting. He spoke about children's lives in a Chicago housing project.
June 17, 2005 - MPR’s Chris Roberts reports on the second annual Heliotrope Festival, a local underground music event. Roberts interviews co-founders Eric Wivinus and Rich Barlow about the festival creation and the unique acts that perform.
June 23, 2005 - It's hot and muggy in the Twin Cities, the kind of day when many people long for air conditioning…and that got us thinking. MPR went to one of the largest air-conditioned buildings in the state, the Metrodome, to see what Twins fans thought about the idea of an outdoor stadium on a very steamy Minnesota day.