Minneapolis, Part 3
I woke up with a sore throat and a continuing case of denial. “It’s just the dry air in the hotel,” I told myself. “Buck up, lady. We aren’t done yet.”
Maybe some time in the moist water park would help. The child was still asleep so I decided to check it out.
The door was locked. I finally thought to check the hours. The bloody place was only open on weekends.
I stomped back to the hotel room full of now-I-have-to-apologize-to-a-self-righteous-kid-for-breaking-a-promise rage. I dropped myself into chair a little to hard, waking up the husband.
“What’s wrong?”
“The stupid waterpark is stupid closed.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I made a promise,” I whined, ignoring his confusion.
“About what?”
That got the child up. “What’s the matter Mommy?”
I took a breath and apologized. The child smiled and said “That’s OK, Mommy. I know you didn’t mean to.”
Naturally I spent the rest of the day buying her all kinds of crap out of guilt.
The Guthrie Theater was as spectacular on the inside as it was on the outside. The husband noticed later that Guthrie makes extensive use of YouTube. Here’s a link to a 25-minute “tour” of the place from 2008 if you are interested, but I’ll summarize.
You go up a very tall, rather claustrophobic escalator since all of the action is on the 3rd and 4th floors. There are photos of actors projected on the walls all along. We learned later that the photos are actually embedded in walls all through the theater, by way of onionskin wallpaper. You can barely see them until the light catches them just so. The tour guide called them the “Guthrie Ghosts”.
It was interesting to me from an interior design perspective. The child thought it was weird and eyed them suspiciously for the rest of the tour.
She was just not into the tour. She pouted and dragged her feet and wouldn’t feign a bit of interest in it. I wasn’t sure if it was leftover pouting from the water park or if the tour was just over her head. The average age of the people we were touring with was about 70 years old. That might have had something to do with it.
Naturally, we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Between the child’s quiet whining and the fact that my sinuses were filling with mucus the consistency of wet concrete, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to.
Everything was just too… clean.
I know, I know. What’s wrong with clean? Nothing. I just wanted to be swept up in the excitement of live theater… which was probably a lot to ask of a Sunday morning backstage tour.
The husband (whose sinuses were perfectly, annoyingly clear) had a great time and discovered that there was a 2-for-1 ticket deal going on. He bought tickets for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore for last night we were in town.
We bought the child some “temporary tattoo” glitter pens at the Guthrie gift store to placate the child, then I announced I needed to find a drug store.
“I found a mall that has an Apple Store,” the husband announced brightly.
“Whatever,” I groaned.
We braved the highway and ended up in an unremarkable mall outside the city. I went one way and got my sinus medicine and the husband went the other way to bask in the cool white glow of the Apple Store.
Tired of the Apple stores that we find ourselves in with alarming frequency, the child went with me.
We passed a Godiva chocolate store and I was hit with a sudden impulse for expensive chocolate truffle. The child and I finally agreed on a chocolate-covered strawberry for her.
The strawberry is healthy, right?
“Can I have a whole bag of them?” the child asked sweetly. (Godiva was selling bags of 5 or 6 smaller strawberries.)
“No, sweetheart. That’s too much. Let’s stick with one.”
“But Mommy….”
I tried to ignore the sinus headache without much success.
“Let’s just get these and find, Daddy. OK?”
“The bags are actually a much better deal,” said the smiling lady behind the counter.
The child looked at me expectantly. My head throbbed.
“I mean really a much better deal,” she said.
I stared at the case of chocolate so as not to burn the cheerful woman with my sinus-headache-powered-child-chocolate-restricting laser eyes of death. When the impulse to kill subsided, I smiled. “Fine. Get the bag… but you have to share with Daddy.”
The child danced with glee. There was one, half-gnawed strawberry left when we met up with the husband.
“That’s OK,” he said, eying the thing suspiciously then handing it back to the child. “You can have it.”
We headed up the escalator and the child was pouting again. “Aren’t we going to go into any stores?”
“No,” I said.
“But why not?”
“We’ll go shopping but not in a suburban shopping mall,” I said. “We’ll go somewhere in the city where there’s something different from what we can get at home.”
She eyed the Apple Store bag in her father’s hand and smirked at me.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Just remember those strawberries and stop whining.” I pulled her toward the exit, but the Minnesota Gods of Serendipity weren’t done with us yet.
“How about that place?” she asked, pulling me over to a small, simple, glass-walled store at the top of the escalator.
At that moment, the skies opened and the angels sang. “Oh, my…” I said, tugging at the husband’s sleeve. “Is it the medication or do I see Kid Robot figurines?”
“It’s not the medicine…” he said, his eyes getting wide.
We walked into Tomodachi.
“Would you like to make something?” a young Japanese lady asked the child. “We are making little models.”
She made a tiny layer cake. While she made her tiny layer cake under the patient eye of the nice Japanese lady, the husband and I got to shop.
I love certain kinds of anime and, in particular, I love the stuff that brings that anime to 3-D life. There is a segment of anime toys that are high quality, and it seems largely to come directly out of Japan. The anime stuff we typically see at your average ToysRUs is such low quality that it often falls apart when you touch it.
The high quality stuff is very expensive so very few stores in the U.S. stock them. There’s a place in Baltimore and, of course, a place in New York.
I was really not expecting to find a place like this in a suburban mall outside of Minneapolis.
