Liz Phair -- "Help Me Mary" (1993)

They egg me on

And keep me mad

They play me like a pit bull in a basement

St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, MN, was founded in 1889 by the Sisters of Saint Francis. 

The leader of that religious community was Mother Alfred Moes, who was born Josephine Moes in Luxembourg in 1828.  (Excuse my sacrilegiosity, but what is it with all these Catholic nuns that use guys' names?  I don't get that.)

The Sisters of St. Francis focused their efforts on education, but Mother Alfred was inspired to build a hospital after a tornado devastated Rochester in 1883.  She went to the Mayo Clinic's founder, Dr. W. W. Mayo, and got him to agree that he and his sons would staff the new hospital with physicians.

Early-day operating room at St. Mary's

Today, St. Mary's is owned and operated by the Mayo Clinic.  It is the largest privately operated hospital in the United States, with 1265 beds, 55 operating rooms, and the largest ICU in the country.  

The oldest surviving part of St. Mary's is the Joseph Building, which was built in 1922.  It has a handsome stained glass window that depicts St. Francis of Assisi and the wolf he famously tamed:

This photo shows a portion of another stained-glass window that presents the hospital's motto: Et sanavit omnes (meaning "And he healed them all"):

St. Mary's has just about everything, including a patient library (open seven days a week) that provides not only books and audiobooks but also CDs, and DVDs, CD and DVD players, laptop computers, video games, board games, and a host of other things -- all provided at no charge.

Here's one page from the booklet that lists the available CDs.  (I'm not sure what Sister Alfred would have thought of Warrant, Whitesnake, and ZZ Top.)

And here's a page from the DVD catalog:

(Ghost to Ghostbusters to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to Gladiator -- something for any taste.)

My mother went to St. Mary's last month to have a hemiarthroplasty -- which is a partial shoulder replacement.

In a full shoulder replacement both ball and socket of the shoulder joint are replaced with metal and plastic components.  In my mother's case, only the ball of the joint needed to be replaced.

She couldn't have had a better experience -- the surgeon did a flawless job, and the nurses and others she came in contact with were skilled and caring.  (This is my second trip to Mayo's with my parents this year, and I can't exaggerate how impressed I am by the place.  You'll never hear me say anything negative about our experiences there.)

The family waiting areas were equipped with TV screens that displayed the color-coded status of each surgical patient:

My father took a nap in my mother's room as we waited for her to come out of surgery.  I wandered through the hospital's halls.

In one wing, I saw a number of posters that presented abstracts of different Mayo research projects.  Here's a typical one:

In case you can't read it, the title of that one is "Simultaneous Deep Brain Stimulation of Ventralis Oralis Anterior and Ventralis Intermedius for Complex Unilateral Tremors."  (I know the text is too small to read, but trust me: even if you could read it, you wouldn't understand a single word.)

There were also some historical displays.  Here's a commemorative St. Mary's plate:

Most of St. Mary's surgical patients are treated and cared for in the Mary Brigh Building, which was opened in 1980.  Like each of the hospital's five buildings, it was named for one of the nuns who served as St. Mary's administrators from its founding until 1985, when the first lay administrator was appointed.  

The Mary Brigh Building at St. Mary's

Sister Mary Brigh Cassidy, who was the hospital's administrator from 1949 until 1971, was a native of Eyota, a small town just east of Rochester.  After attending nursing school, she got an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and was renowned for her business acumen and what one writer called her "charming Irish chutzpah."  But she was a reflective women who wrote hundreds of poems.

Sister Mary Brigh Cassidy

After her death, two sisters who worked closely with her typed the handwritten poems and selected 57 to publish in a book they titled "Gifts of Her Spirit":

This quote from Sister Mary Brigh is prominently displayed on the ground floor of the hospital:  "May you always see in your patient not an interesting or uninteresting 'case,' but a human being, a Child of God, whom you are privileged to serve."  (Amen to that.)

I've only recently discovered Liz Phair's 1993 debut album, Exile in Guyville.

I'm not sure what Sister Mary Brigh would have made of Liz Phair.  Based on her online photos, I don't think Liz ever seriously considered becoming a nun:

Nope -- Liz never wanted to be a nun:

I'm thinking maybe Miley Cyrus learned a thing or two from Liz Phair:

Her songs are often R-rated, if not X-rated.  (One of the tracks on Exile in Guyville is titled "F*ck and Run.")

I'm about 20 years late to the Exile in Guyville party, but it's an outstanding album.  I'll be featuring other songs from it in future 2 or 3 lines posts.

Here's "Help Me Mary":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Tom Petty -- "You Wreck Me" (1994)

Tonight we ride

Right or wrong

Tonight we sail

On a radio song

"You Wreck Me" was released on Tom Petty's 1994 album, Wildflowers.  This post will feature pictures of some of the wildflowers I saw on the walks I took on a recent sojourn in Rochester, Minnesota.  (I was there because my mother was having a shoulder replacement done at the Mayo Clinic.)

That's a pretty thin connection between the subject matter of this post and our featured song, but it will have to do.

In fact, the pictures that appear in this post are all of one wildflower – the Maximilian sunflower, or Helianthus maximiliani, which is a perennial wildflower that is native to the plains states.

Maximilian sunflowers at Silver Lake
(Rochester, MN)

The plant's single stems are three to ten feet high.  Here's a plant that was considerably taller than I am.  (The building in the background to the left is the main Mayo Clinic building, which is about two miles away.)

Rochester has an extensive system of paved hiking-biking trails.  One of the trails nearest our hotel skirted Cascade Lake, and there were plenty of Maximilian plants along that lake.

The Maximilian sunflower is named after Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, a German explorer and naturalist who encountered it when he travelled up the Missouri River in 1833.

Prince Maximilian

Maximilian was accompanied by Karl Bodmer, a Swiss artist.  The drawings and paintings Bodmer created during his time on the Upper Missouri has been called "one of the most perceptive and compelling visual accounts" of the American West.

Especially remarkable are his portraits of native Americans, which were probably the first truly accurate portrayal of plains Indians in their native environment.  Here are Bodmer's portraits of two chiefs:

I like and respect Tom Petty, but I've never bought one of his albums, and I've never bought a ticket to one of his live shows.  

He's just not a guy who really excites me.  I don't think of him as a superstar, even though nine of his singles reached #1 on the Billboard "Mainstream Rock" singles chart, and he's sold roughly 60 million albums.

Tom Petty

Petty is the tortoise, not the hare.  He's like a baseball player who never broke any significant records, and never won the MVP award, but who played at a high level for a long, long time.

Think Roy White, who was one of my favorite Yankees of the post-Mickey Mantle era.  White played 15 years – his entire career – for the Yankees.  He never finished in the top ten in MVP voting, and appeared in just one All-Star game.  (He batted only once, as a pinch hitter.) 

His "Triple Crown" numbers – batting average, home runs, and RBIs – were not impressive.  And he was 5' 10" and weighed 160 pounds – not exactly someone whose physical presence struck fear in the hearts of opposing pitchers.

Roy White

But White was a solid, competent professional you could rely on.  He led the league in games played and plate appearances twice.  He walked a lot – he led the league in walks once, and finished in the top ten six other times – and almost always had fewer strikeouts than walks, which is an uncommon accomplishment.  He finished in the top ten in singles, doubles, triples, hits, total bases, and stolen bases a number of times, but was never #1 in any of those categories.

He was also a very good left fielder.  He got to more fly balls than any other LFer eight of the nine seasons from 1969 to 1977, had the best fielding percentage among LFers five different seasons, and led all AL LFers in assists twice.  But hitting gets a lot more attention than fielding, and LF is not a very glamorous defensive position.

To sum up, White showed up and did a very good job every day.  He rarely missed games, and rarely made a mistake on defense.  He was a patient hitter with an excellent batting eye, who focused on getting on base, not swinging for the fences.

He was arguably the best position player on what were admittedly some bad Yankee teams of the late sixties and early seventies – and a solid contributor to the teams that went to the World Series in three consecutive seasons (1975-77) near the end of his career.  (Oh, yes – his postseason stats were even better than his regular-season numbers.)

Roy White was no Reggie Jackson, George Brett, or Rickey Henderson.  And Tom Petty was no Mick Jagger, Elton John, or Michael Jackson.  But Roy White won a lot of games for the Yankees, and Tom Petty made a lot of very good records.  Their accomplishments should not be lightly dismissed.

Here's the official video for "You Wreck Me":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Dandy Warhols -- "Minnesoter" (1997)

I could own her, the crazy loner

If I found my way to Minnesoter

This is the third post in a series about my recent visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, with my parents.  Click here if you'd like to read the first post in the series (which featured a song by the young rapper, Mayo).  Click here if you'd like to read the second post in the series (which featured a song by the British group, Clinic).

(Did the penny just drop?)

While driving my parents from our hotel to the Mayo Clinic, I saw this highway sign:

I wonder if Winona Ryder's father saw the same sign 42 years ago, when his wife was great with child.  You see, Winona's parents -- her real last name is Horowitz -- were living in Olmstead County (which includes Rochester) when she was born.  They named her after Winona, which is a town of some 28,000 souls located on the Mississippi River less than an hour's drive east of Rochester.

Winona Laura Horowitz had an interesting family.  She was given her middle name in honor of the wife of Aldous Huxley, who wrote the famous dystopian novel, Brave New World.  Winona's younger brother, Uri, was named for Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel into outer space.  

Christian Slater and Winona Ryder in Heathers

Her father once worked as an archivist for the guru of LSD, Dr. Timothy Leary, who was Winona's godfather.  The family was also friendly with "beat" poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.  (Winona later starred in A Scanner Darkly, a movie based on the Dick novel of the same name.)

When Winona was seven years old, her family relocated to a commune in Mendocino County, California, where they lived with seven other families without electricity or television.

She read a lot -- Catcher in the Rye was her favorite book -- watched movies on a screen that her mother set up in the commune s barn, and began to take acting lessons in San Francisco when she was 12.

A very young Winona Ryder

Winona adapted the stage name of Ryder because her father was listening to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels when her agent called to ask how she wanted to be identified in the credits of her first movie, Lucas, which was filmed when she was only 14.

Ryder has appeared in just about every kind of movie you can think of.  When I hear her name, I immediately think of oddball characters in oddball movies -- like Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, and Reality Bites -- but she has also appeared in movies based on famous literary works (The Age of Innocence, Little Women, The Crucible), chick flicks (How to Make an American Quilt, Autumn in New York), and science-fiction and horror movies (Dracula, Alien Resurrection, Lost Souls).

One of Ryder's best performances came in the 1999 drama about life in a mental institution, Girl, Interrupted.  That's not surprising because it seems like like Ryder is pretty crazy in real life -- not surprising  given her rather eccentric upbringing.  

That craziness really came to the forefront in 2001, when Ryder was arrested in Beverly Hills after shoplifting $5500 worth of merchandise at a Saks Fifth Avenue store.  (Saks is an expensive store, but $5500 worth of stuff is a lot of stuff -- I'm a little surprised she could carry it all by herself.)  Ryder was also accused of possessing Valium and a couple of pain medications (oxycodone and Vicodin) without valid prescriptions.  

It's possible that Winona's erratic behavior was the result of her recent breakup with Matt Damon.  Or it might go back to her somewhat less recent breakup with Johnny Depp, who ranks just as high on the crazy scale as Winona does.  (Depp got a tattoo reading "Winona Forever" on his arm when they were dating.  After they broke up, he altered it to "Wino Forever.")

Winona Ryder didn't live in Minnesota that long, but I like to think that her years in the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" had some influence of her craziness.  

I've written before about the cheery, polite, and utterly clueless residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul.  I still remember taking a walk on a trail that went around one of the numerous small lakes in the Twin Cities on a visit there a couple of years ago.  I noticed that the locals were sunbathing on what appeared to be beaches bordering that lake, but which turned out on closer examination to be 100% unadulterated dirt.  Apparently they didn't know that beaches consist of sand, not dirt.

I saw other evidence of this cluelessness on my more recent visit.  Here's a water fountain I saw in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.  It is specially designed so you can fill up a water bottle.  The water fountain actually counts how many times people use it -- there's a small meter built into the upper right-hand corner of the water fountain that indicates this fountain has filled up 4090 water bottles.  

It makes a big deal about how many plastic water bottles it is keeping out of the local landfills, but I've never had much of a problem filling up a water bottle from a regular water fountain.

Here's a thought -- why not just drink directly from the water fountain until you're not thirsty?  When you get thirsty again, just get up and walk over to the water fountain for another drink.  (I've never taken a water bottle to the airport, and I don't recall it being that inconvenient to stay sufficiently hydrated.)

One more thing -- this water fountain was outside the security checkpoint.  Have you ever tried to take a filled bottle of water through airport security?  (You have?  Care to tell the class what happened when you did?)

Before flying back home at the end of my Mayo Clinic visit, I took a hike through the Minnesota River National Wildlife Refuge in Minneapolis.  I'm sorry, but it was the most unattractive outdoor area I've ever taken a hike in.  

I saw absolutely zero wildlife that morning -- except for this very tame hawk in the visitor center:

Maybe that's because the wildlife refuge is only a few minutes away from the Mall of America (the largest shopping mall in the United States) and the airport.  Planes took off over the refuge every couple of minutes -- if you look closely, you can see one in this photo, which also shows some of the many suburban office buildings and airport hotels visible from the refuge trails:

No wonder there were no birds or other wild critters around.

The entire Danish army appeared to be checking in at a Delta gate in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport that afternoon:

(I can just hear the disappointment in the soldiers' voices when they return to dear ol' Denmark and are asked by their friends and neighbors where they went.  California?  New York?  Florida?  "No," they reply sadly. "Minnesoter.")

I saw some puzzling sights in Rochester as well.  For example, there's a 50,000-gallon water tower that was built to resemble a very large ear of corn just a block east of that Winona highway sign at the beginning of this post:

I'm not sure what use the Snappy Stop burger carryout (which feature "California-style" burgers, whatever those are) puts these critters to:

I dropped into the 63 Club to wet my whistle with good ol' Grain Belt lager a couple of times.  Apparently, dogs are just as welcome as people at this friendly establishment.

I'm not sure why there were hundreds of dollar bills with handwritten messages on the walls and ceiling of the 63 Club.  But I was glad to see that they had a strict dress code:

(It you can't read that sign, it's just as well.  It would probably offend you.)

"Minnesoter" is from the Dandy Warhols' second studio album, The Dandy Warhols Come Down.  Another Dandy Warhols song was the 7th song featured on 2 or 3 lines -- we're now well over 500 songs.

Here's "Minnesoter":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Clinic -- "Walking With Thee" (2002)

A million joys, a million joys here

You could set your watch

How untamed it was!

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you a little about the Mayo Clinic, which is a truly remarkable institution. 

While I was at Mayo's last month with my parents, I had time to take a look at the Plummer Building, which is the oldest Mayo Clinic building still in use.

Dr. Henry Plummer

The Plummer Building is named for Dr. Henry Plummer, who became a partner of the Mayo brothers in 1901, when he was only 27 years old.  Plummer created the first modern medical record system, was a pioneer in the use of X-ray diagnosis, and pushed to have sophisticated research labs at the Mayo Clinic.  He is perhaps more responsible for the development of the integrated group medical practice that the Mayo Clinic embodies than any other single individual.

Dr. Plummer oversaw the design and construction of the building that was later namer after him, which was the tallest building in the state of Minnesota when it was completed in 1926, and remained the tallest building in Rochester until 2002.

Here's a black-and-white photo showing the Plummer Building shortly after it was completed:

Here's an old postcard showing a view of downtown Rochester that is dominated by the Plummer Building.  The smaller building immediately to the left is the original Mayo Clinic building, which was demolished many years ago.  

The large white building further to the left is the Kahler Hotel, which is still operating.  I took this picture of the Kahler from the 15th floor of another Mayo Clinic building:

Here's a depiction of Dr. Plummer on the exterior of the Plummer Building:

Here's another depiction of him:

Here's a shot of the top of the Plummer Building.

Here's a closer look:

Here's a closeup of one of the gargoyles:

A carillonneur performs three concerts weekly on the Plummer Building's 56-bell carillon:

The lobby of the Plummer Building is so richly detailed that it almost overwhelms the eye:

The bronze elevator doors have panels depicting Greek gods and goddesses.  Here's Demeter, the goddess of the harvest:

Here's Hermes with a microscope:

Here's a photo of the lobby ceiling:

Here's a door handle.  (Virtually every part of the Plummer Building -- no matter how small or insignificant -- is a thing of beauty.)

Clinic is a group from Liverpool that released its first record in 1999.  I had never heard of Clinic before I discovered them when I looking for music that I could feature in a series of posts about the Mayo Clinic.

To say that Clinic is a little off-center would be an understatement.  The group routinely performs wearing surgical masks: 

Clinic once toured with Radiohead, and some people compare their music to Radiohead's.  That's not a ridiculous comparison, but Clinic's music isn't really like anyone else's.  The group relies heavily on unusual chord progressions and vintage electronic keyboards.

If Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek of the Doors had been born 40 years later, the Doors might have sounded something like Clinic.  Or maybe not.

Here's the title track from Clinic's 2002 album, Walking With Thee:

That's a fabulous song, n'est-ce pas?  Here's the group performing it live on Late Show with David Letterman:

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: