May 21, 1996 - MPR film critic Debra Alexander comments on Joel and Ethan films and the adoration they receive at Cannes Film Festival. The Coen brothers are at French film for their film Fargo.
May 22, 1996 - MPR’s Chris Roberts profiles Red Wing poet and teacher Robert Hedin, whose assembled a literary history of the train titled "The Great Machines: Poems and Songs of the American Railroad."
May 22, 1996 - Dr. Michael Maddaus, a participant in local Father to Father program, describes it’s importance. Vice President Al Gore visits the Twin Cities to support the mentoring program.
May 23, 1996 - Rick McCormick, associate professor with Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch Studies at University of Minnesota's Rick McCormick comments on German-U.S. relations.
May 25, 1996 -
May 28, 1996 - Midday’s Gary Eichten talks with Ann McBride, president and CEO of Common Cause, a non-partisan citizens' lobby organization dealing with issues of money in politics, government ethics, and government responsibility. The organization's current focus is campaign finance reform and special interest influence. McBride also answers listeners questions.
May 28, 1996 -
May 28, 1996 - The eldest member of the Shakopee Mdwakanton Dakota tribe, Louise Bluestone Smith, died recently at the age of 85. In the last few years of her life, Smith received some half a million dollars a year in profits from the Mystic Lake casino -- along with the other 150 or so members of the Shakopee tribe. But until the end, Smith lived in the modest trailer in which she'd spent most of her life in poverty. She spent her last years in a tireless and unsuccessful legal effort to stop tribal chairman Stanley Crooks from enrolling new tribe members. Smith said many of the new members did not meet the tribe's requirement of one-quarter Shakopee Mdwakanton blood. Smith insisted that her fight with the tribal leadership was not about money, but about the integrity of the tribe. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 1994, Louise Bluestone Smith said the casino business has brought her people dramatic wealth, but also introduced greed -- a concept that she says was foreign to the Dakota people when she was a child.
May 29, 1996 -
May 30, 1996 - MPR’s Dan Olson profiles playwright Rebecca Rice and her play Everlasting Arms, which is being performed at The Penumbra Theatre.