Archive for October, 2022
Edee the Sweetie
By MARY ELLEN KALUZA Remember Jude the Dude from last month’s alley? This month meet Edee the Sweetie! Eden is Jude’s sister, also a very talented and smart youth artist. Apparently there are no bounds to the creativity in the Anikpo family! Eden Anikpo is almost 11 years old and in the 5th grade. She focuses on the performing arts: acting, dance, singing and piano, to name a few. She has performed in ballet, tap and modern dance, and just began a hip hop class. When asked which performing art moves her the most, Eden didn’t hesitate a second to say “Acting!” She loves portraying characters, and hopes that no matter what she decides to do in life, acting will be a part of it at least “two days a week.” Eden was inspired to take up acting by her mother, who “brings me to plays and musicals at the University of Northwestern,” adding that she gets inspiration from “Everything!” She also credits her teachers at Lundstrum Performing Arts in North Minneapolis: [...]
City songs for loving the Earth
Mushrooms growing in a potted plant on an East Phillips porch / photo: Ben Heath By Lindsey Fenner As a new master naturalist, I have started to study Minnesota’s major biomes or biological communities, especially the native grasslands that I love. But as I’ve studied, I’ve wondered when I would start reading about places like Phillips. I realized that the way Minnesota is divided up into the three major biomes: prairies, hardwood forests, and conifer forests, ignores one major distinct landscape: cities. Most people in Minnesota live in cities, in urban or suburban areas. This sprawling human development, after all, is why we are facing the painful loss of so many species. But people are a natural part of landscapes and ecosystems. And we have been living in cities for more than five thousand years. We have shaped our ecosystems, and have been shaped by them in return, whether we have lived close together in cities and villages or spread out in the prairies and [...]
Three Days of Respite at Chicago and Lake
Something I Said Three Days of Respite at Chicago and Lake By DWIGHT HOBBES Minnesota’s third annual Black Entrepreneur State Fair thankfully accomplished what the Minneapolis Police Department increasingly fails to do, safeguard the public from rampant drug dealing along with related violence and prostitution. To be sure, there’s no telling whether this was the aim. It may have simply been that the South Minneapolis locale, Chicago Ave and Lake Street, is about the most heavily trafficked intersection in town. Easily accessible by both mass transit and a main drag that amounts to a super highway with connecting streets instead of off rampants. A perfect place for the upwards of 50 vendors to make a killing, especially in this dead economy nobody wants to come right out and call another depression. For the sake of argument let’s say it killed the proverbial two birds with one stone. For three days, the Chicago-Lake hub was fenced off to buses, pedestrians and a [...]
