The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I’ve been thinking about spaghetti sauce a lot lately. I grew up in a very busy household with parents who didn’t have a lot of time to cook, so the sauce on our noodles was always of the canned variety. Not knowing the different between canned and fresh, we kids slurped it right up—the soggy vegetables, the sugared tomato sauce. It wasn’t until I went to college and started cooking for myself that I discovered how good fresh, homemade spaghetti sauce can be. I avoided the misexperience of canned sauce again until a few weeks ago, when my roommate offered to share some of his lunch with me. I had to push it away after one bite, so unwilling was I to waste taste buds and calories on such slop. It made me wonder: Why have Americans allowed themselves to become so busy that they traded in Mom’s delicious, homemade sauce for something that is judged solely on how thick it is on TV? Isn’t that aiming a little bit low? I mean, I understand economies of scale, agribusiness, convenience, and all that. But really, there is no substitute for homemade quality, and no excuse for its demise.

Our economy thrives on the masses: mass markets of mass-produced goods changing hands in mass purchases. This is necessary, of course, and not altogether evil. It’s hard to make it as an artisan these days, and those who are making it are working their tails off just to belong to an entry-level tax bracket. Have we gotten so sensitive to price, and so insensitive to quality, that true artisans are an endangered species? Maybe. But I always look for the exceptions that prove the rule.

Next: A real tailor...The Tradition of the Moment: What’s the difference between modish and chic? Ask a real tailor…

John Meegan knows the clothes make the man (or woman). Meegan makes the clothes that make the man. Visit him at Top Shelf, his twenty-nine-year-old custom-made suit and shirt shop, and Meegan will make the clothes that make you. Well, he won’t literally make the clothes; almost no tailor nowadays actually designs, cuts, and sews suits from scratch. But his solicitude is reminiscent of a time when a tailor might actually do such a thing.

He’s no miracle worker. But for some, he comes close. Many of his customers are people who simply cannot buy suits in a department store because of their irregular body types. Meegan and his colleagues offer an attractive alternative to nakedness; they create and alter clothes to fit every client perfectly. In the process, they teach their customers how to dress. A little knowledge is a powerful thing: Meegan is a font of wisdom about technique and style. Mention a particular body type, and he can reel off endlessly flattering stratagems.

One should not underestimate the power of the perfect cut; some of Meegan’s clients can testify to the fact that confidence in appearance is sometimes all it takes to seal a million-dollar deal. For others, Meegan creates ensembles worthy of an audience with the Queen of England, which is precisely what he did recently for a customer on his way to Buckingham Palace. Meegan dresses Paul Magers (whose perfectly oval face, by the way, lends itself to all styles of collars), Randy Shaver, numerous pro athletes, and most of the CEOs in this town. He even has a few clients who don’t regularly appear in CJ’s column.

Inside the Top Shelf shop, a cozy house on Lyndale Avenue, an erstwhile living room, dining room, and front den are filled with books of fabric swatches, brightly colored ties, sample collars, shoes, and sweaters. Meegan, his wife and co-business owner, Pat, and his original partner, Suzanne Murphy, moved to this spot five years ago after inhabiting a storefront at Hennepin and Lake for twenty-three years. Back then, during the first years, the fresh-from-vocational-school partners created made-to-order everything and anything, by hand, by themselves. Over the years they tightened up the focus of the business to include only suits and shirts, with a small percentage of business from retail alterations completed in the small sewing shop in the basement. Today, the partners commission the labor needed for their suits and shirts, from the patternmaking to the cutting to the sewing, from companies located in Canada, Italy, and Asia. It is simply impossible for an American tailor to spend twenty-four hours (the bare minimum) on a custom-made suit and still turn a profit, Meegan explains; it is also rare to find a tailor so skilled at the creation of each part of the suit that the end product would consistently be of the highest quality. So the suits and shirts are created by people who specialize in particular parts of the production, in countries where labor is cheaper and yet of a higher quality than most American tailors are capable of today.

It’s a dying art form in this country, says Meegan, who was drawn to the craft one day in college when he considered altering a bow tie he had purchased. Most Americans wear cheap clothes mass-produced in a factory and purchased at a mall; most U.S. cities do not have enough work to offer a decent living to graduates of a vocational school’s tailoring program, he says. Meegan got lucky and found a way to do what he loves and make a living; the future is not so bright for others.

Many of his six thousand active customers have been coming to him for twenty-five years, he says. His challenge is to appeal to a younger crowd, to new graduates and young professionals. In this jobless recovery, Meegan’s is a service you can’t afford to not afford, he figures; how awful to blow a precious job opportunity because you weren’t dressed like the one they were looking for.

Next: Great guitar maker...Lex Luthier: When it comes to building electric guitars, he’s Superman.

Kurt Nelson is a luthier—a guy who makes stringed instruments. He also fixes all kinds of instruments, mostly for artists on Twin Town Records. But from scratch, he builds electric guitars. “I figure I’ll try conquering acoustic before I’m old,” the fifty-year-old Nelson says. He’s been repairing guitars on and off for thirty years, but he began building about six years ago. His very first commission was for another Nelson—Prince Rogers Nelson. Or rather, it was for Prince’s people. They wanted twelve guitars just like the one Prince plays in Purple Rain to give away to fans on tour. Nelson made two, the very first two he’d ever built, and no more. Prince’s people bailed on the deal. In the end, Nelson received five hundred dollars for two custom-made guitars.

It was a lousy way to begin, but Nelson is the sort of person who doesn’t get too worked up about things like that. A high-school dropout who ran away when he was fourteen, he’s spent most of his life playing rock and roll, working odd jobs, and living on the fringe. He got his start in guitar repair in 1974, when a friend called him from California to tell him about a job opening at Hohner’s, the famous harmonica and guitar maker. His know-how and experience came from the College of Real Life at Rock U; as someone who rocked hard but earned little, Nelson had to repair the results of the previous night’s aggression on a regular basis. “Smashing guitars is fun,” he says, joking that he keeps some of his twenty-odd guitars around in case he ever has a need for spontaneous therapy. Today Nelson still occasionally destroys the merchandise while onstage with several local bands.

Nelson makes his custom guitars in a filthy, cluttered shop connected to a house in Prior Lake. Other than work, he has nothing but the television and his cigarettes for distraction. “I’ve got radio Kurt on all the time,” he says, gesturing to his temple. “The stuff I do hear on the radio, well, it makes me want to turn it off—either because it’s so good and then I wonder why I’m bothering to make music, or because it’s so awful.”

If it’s a style of guitar he’s made before, Nelson places a plexiglass pattern on a block of maple, grabs the router and begins to cut. For new styles, Nelson must first cut a pattern, which means he essentially eyeballs a design and lets her loose. He makes either semi-hollow or solid bodies and sandwiches the semi-hollow ones inside masonite panels. Then he cuts the neck, nice and straight, sands it down, inserts the frets and screws it onto the body. The part he hates the most is the painting and finishing, and he doesn’t do the wiring because, he says, “I don’t have a head for electronics.”

Nelson estimates he’s made about twenty-five guitars, keeping some and selling others for anywhere between nine hundred and twelve hundred dollars. He’s currently working on a five-string guitar like the one Keith Richards plays. An audience member approached Nelson to make him one after he saw Nelson play his five-string at a show. It’s specialty items such as this that keep Nelson interested. There are a lot of guitar builders around the country, he says, but there aren’t many doing anything new or innovative. Nelson recently finished what he calls an “in-betweenie,” a guitar that has some qualities of a bass guitar. He’s also lined up a potential buyer for a twelve-string guitar that can be easily converted, at the touch of a button, into a sitar.

Next: Dresses for Success...Dressed for Success: Her wedding dresses are the finest in the state.


Kristin Olsen’s tiny dressmaker’s shop is nestled at the end of a sensibly carpeted hallway, above the busy, congested hustle at the intersection of 50th and France. Here, Olsen, a refined, reserved seamstress, has made custom wedding dresses for Minnesota brides for sixteen years. The shop is quiet now, having reached the end of the year’s wedding season when October drew to a close. Yet Olsen still has plenty to do; she does make a few dresses during the winter, but mostly begins meeting with future brides whose special day arrives in the summer of 2004. There are designs to be created, fabrics to be selected, and fittings to be completed. When summer does roll around again, Olsen will be working on no fewer than thirty dresses at any given time, and most likely more, given that she was just named the best custom wedding-dress maker in the state by Minnesota Bride magazine. That honor—and that workload—seem to make her almost sleepy, she’s so calm.

With such a peaceful demeanor, I don’t doubt another detail Olsen quietly passes along: the satisfaction rate of her clients. She says she often hears back from brides who say the dressmaking experience was the most relaxing and enjoyable part of planning their weddings. Leaving the dress in Olsen’s capable hands makes for brides who can cross one major worry off their lengthy list of “things that could go horribly wrong.” Many women come in with ideas or pictures of dresses they like; Olsen creates the dress. “I have the ability to figure out how something is made,” she said. “That’s my expertise.”

At this stage in the game, Olsen is an expert on weddings and wedding gown trends. While she does stay abreast of the latest in bridal fashions, she is more interested in the creating than in the creation. “I don’t go all gaga over weddings,” she says. “I’m not a frilly, romantic person. I like the process of making and creating things. The fabric is just the medium.” Olsen began sewing when she was about seven years old. She credits her background in costume design, including a yearlong internship at the Guthrie Theater, for much of her dressmaking ability. Back then, nearly everything the actors wore on stage was created from scratch. “Their thought was, you never wanted to have something onstage that was the same, or made from the same material, as someone in the audience was wearing,” she recalls. So Olsen and other costume designers worked with fabrics ordered from all around the world, the better to outfit the actors in looks unfamiliar to Minneapolis audiences.

Olsen still does a tiny bit of special-order costume design, but today it’s mostly the wedding dresses. She has made pink, red, and green wedding dresses, in all fabrics and sizes. For most brides today, the look is much cleaner and simpler than it has been historically; gone (at least for now) are the days of enormous puffed sleeves and intricate beadwork. Olsen will do alterations on old wedding dresses, though, for women who want to wear their mother’s dress, and these present a challenge that Olsen welcomes as she does any other. It keeps things interesting too. When Olsen opened her store in the 1980s, she saw lots of dresses from the 1950s. Today, it’s dresses from the late 1960s and 1970s that are being dropped off.

Next: Glass casting versus blowing...Heart of Glass: He’s The Rake’s next-door neighbor, and he totally blows—in a good way!

Peter Zelle is torn. He doesn’t want to say he enjoys creating his beautiful but utilitarian glassware, and he refuses to think of the goblets, vases, and bowls as art. Yet if he were to retire that part of his business, shifting from glassblower to cast-glass artist on a full-time basis, he’d really miss it. “That’s how I connect with the outside world,” he says. “I’m not just this isolated artist. People use my goods everyday.”

Watching him blow glass into goblets in his Warehouse District studio recently, we quickly became entranced with the repetitive process of creating stemware. While the end result may not be fine art, the process certainly appears to be: The creation of such functional glass pieces resembles a choreographed dance, each glassblower moving gracefully with each other, and with the glass. Perpetually whirling a blow tube of hot glass between his fingers, Zelle glides between the 2,000-degree oven and the 2,400-degree glory hole, a smaller oven with an open end where the blow tube can be inserted for easy reheating. After a few puffs, Zelle presses the clear glass against colorful shards, melting them into the hot plastic surface. Then he shapes and stretches the glass with an enormous set of tweezers. An assistant, Angela Burtness, moves widely around Zelle. She glides from her position tidying the leftover glass shards into her role as rim and base smoother.

As Burtness uses a blowtorch to create a curve in the underside of the base, Zelle moves perfectly into position, ready to transfer the completed goblet carefully to a kiln to cool. There, it slowly releases the heat that could otherwise cause cracking.

Zelle and Burtness return to the oven to collect more glass and repeat this work, following the same flawless movements every time. They make an average of six goblets an hour. Throughout it all they converse; Zelle produces two hundred goblets a year, as well as tumblers, lowballs, vases, glasses, bowls, and corporate awards. Regardless of what the glassblower thinks of his more mundane work, Zelle knows how he feels about glass itself: inspired. He spends about half of his time creating cast-glass sculptures, which are large, themed pieces that find their way into galleries, museums, and permanent collections. The versatility of glass allows him to create pieces that are mysterious and seemingly not glass at all, but may instead be opaque, with a subdued finish. The question of form versus function is ultimately moot. “There’s just something about glass that’s seductive,” he says.

Next: The man behind the bar, with a knife...Behind Bars

Did this man carve the woodwork in your favorite public house?

Nathan Stanley is very much the bohemian artist one likes to imagine hanging out in the cafés of Paris. Disheveled and emotional, the woodcarver flits from topic to topic in conversation, has plans with friends to begin skipping around Powderhorn Park, and occasionally drinks beer before noon, even on a Monday. His eccentricities don’t always charm some of his customers, but his work certainly does: An instinctively great artist, Stanley has outfitted barrooms, law firms, and suburban studies with his work, taking risks to create designs he says he infuses with music and emotion. A cross between Robin Williams and Richard Simmons, Stanley is often childlike, with a high-pitched giggle reminiscent of Sesame Street’s Elmo. His own wine cellar, tucked into a closet in his tiny basement, is nothing more than a few unfinished shelves and a dozen bottles of wine; Stanley shows the modest space with pride, and with a genuinely happy exclamation of “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Stanley is the son of a carpenter. He grew up hoping to escape his wood-working genes and become a pianist, but his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing forced him to refuse a college music scholarship. After floundering for a bit, he finally gave in to a craft he had been doing since he was twelve. At first, he worked as a stock-in-trade carpenter, hanging doors and making furniture (“boring, soulless work”) in Great Britain and New York. Back in Minneapolis, Stanley says he’s been able to do the work he enjoys—creating without boundaries or guidelines—almost exclusively for about a decade. “I only have to prostitute myself about ten percent of the time now,” he says, referring to the traditional furniture he occasionally makes.

The money he earns from such work gives him the freedom to work on more interesting but uncommissioned works, such as the piece “Of Man’s First Disobedience.” Also known as “the snake bed,” the mahogany “three-poster” bed has three angry snakes climbing and writhing up the posts before extending their fanged mouths outward. It’s an incredible, if challenging, piece of furniture, one that makes its creator proud. When I ask why no one has bought the two-year-old piece, he lightheartedly scoffs. “Who would want a snake bed?” Later, I find out that he was offered $23,000 for the piece a year ago. Today, the bed sits in a spare bedroom in Stanley’s Powderhorn Park home.

More readily salable are the creations Stanley has made for Kieran Folliard, owner of Kieran’s Irish Pub, the Local, and the Liffey. His first piece for Folliard was the clock that graces the entrance of Kieran’s, and he later built the back bar of the Local, adorning it with gargoyles, chameleons, and a girl on a swing. Through Folliard, Stanley met Henry Cousineau and Damian Topousis, for whom he created a study and a barroom, respectively, in their suburban homes. One of the first questions he asks of those who allow him to create unfettered is if the customer is more Rolling Stones or more Beatles, so as to get a feel for their tastes. For Cousineau, a bit edgier and more “Rolling Stones,” Stanley created a rich and inviting room adorned with carved bats, cherubs, and a female figurine lying gracefully above the fireplace; Topousis’s “Beatlesesque” barroom, plush and dark, is adorned with more traditional carvings.

Stanley’s next project will be for Folliard’s home, a bookshelf for the study. He enjoys working for the Irishman, although he was not pleased when the barkeep chose to import a mass-produced bar from Ireland for his first St. Paul offering, the Liffey. “Which [pub] would Edgar Allan Poe or Oscar Wilde have chosen to drink in?” Stanley asked Folliard in a letter rebuking the decision. Stanley has yet to call at the Liffey. When Paris isn’t an option, it seems artists prefer the Local.

Next: Little pictures, big heart...The Little Picture
Her hand-painted greeting cards support women with humor and style.

Photographer Kelly Povo is looking for a publisher for her new book. But despite the success of her previous books, which all sell at gift shops, no one has given Povo a contract for Gladys On Her Own just yet. Featuring images she shot of her stylized friend in Mexico, the book shares words of support for the newly divorced. It’s been well received by women and also editorial departments, Povo says, and everything goes great until it gets to the marketing department. “It’s all men in the marketing departments,” she says. “They don’t have a clue as to the way women support each other.”

Povo, on the other hand, has built a livelihood by understanding the social safety net women offer to one another. For the past nine years, Povo has been making a successful line of greeting cards. Women, of course, are the main consumers of greeting cards, so Povo is doubly tapped in; she photographs herself and her friends in vintage clothing, accessorized with retro white plastic cat-eye sunglasses and posed in parodies of the high-heeled, stay-at-home wives and moms of the mythic 1950s. With some help from her friend Phyllis Root, a children’s-book author, Povo also composes the greetings. Povo’s postcards convey messages that are sassy and humorous, and often express pride in the power of women.

The “Girls” cards have been so successful that the forty-three-year-old mother of two estimates there are now about 150 different images in the line. Povo has photographed her friends cooking, smoking, drinking, gossiping, driving, and swimming—all while dressed in those wacky clothes and sunglasses. Previously a commercial photographer, she got the idea for the cards after a friend photographed Povo’s own flashback-to the-fifties-style wedding in 1992. In one shot, she had her bridesmaids smoking and reclining atop the back seat of a convertible, while she was a sneering “bad girl” at the driver’s side door, arms akimbo. Povo liked the black-and-white images so much that she meticulously hand-colored the originals with transparent oil paints, made prints, mocked up about twenty as greeting cards, and took them out to a card show in New York. They were a hit.

Since then, Povo has taken her fifties obsession all the way to the Smithsonian Institution, where she’s pored over archival photos in order to keep her accessorizing honest. Povo has used wigs, rooms full of vintage toasters, and even an aquatic car to create the shots she wants. The line has expanded to include a handful of books, licensing deals, and cards for every occasion, including a series for teenagers and, most recently, the divorce series.

Inventing the cards as self-therapy during her recent and difficult divorce, Povo has found both success and humor in a tough situation. The series presents Povo’s girls as empowered by their divorces. One shows a joyous woman seated on a scooter; the greeting inside says, “Heard you found something more exciting to ride.” “It felt good to make money from my divorce,” Povo said recently over a cup of coffee in a bookstore café. “And to help pay for my lawyer!”

With that behind her, Povo is moving on to other things. She’s taking classes in women’s studies, shooting fine-art photographs, and has plans to head to Europe to photograph some of the black Madonnas tucked away in the basements of Catholic churches. But she still stands by her girls. “As an artist, you do what’s in your life,” she says. “I have always felt supportive of women and women’s work and women’s issues.”


Povo hosts her annual Holiday Show Friday, December 5th and Saturday, December 6th at her home, featuring new photos as well as The Girls and other series favorites. More info at www.kellypovo.com, via e-mail at kelly@kellypovo.com, or call 952-898-5608.