Bluebird

preamble to dinner

Early Sunday morning, she found herself inexplicably awake at six am. Too early for anything, she thought as she lay there listening to the steady breathing of her husband. She thought about the day ahead, making dinner for her cousin in town from the East Coast. He was a priest. A curious career path for the 21^st century, even though she knew her cousin would say it wasn’t a career but a vocation. He would be getting ready to say mass. She tried to remember when she was last even in a church, more than a year ago.

She carried her Catholicism around with her like some people carried the latest handbag—possessively although not ostentatiously. Although she had other identifying tribal affiliations like being an English/Polish pseudo-aristocratic bourgeois with a lineage that stretched back to the 1400’s, a prep-schooler with a naïve pretension of nihilistic intellectualism (probably a result of too much theatre as a child, combined with her older pseudo-intellectual siblings being a main influence,) and, today, a forty-something fashion snob with a decided bent for all things Belgian—she mostly thought of herself as a re-lapsed, Vatican-hating, feministic, veil-loving Catolica who felt perpetually sheepish (read guiltified) about the way she ultimately lost that long ago virginity (both physical and spiritual). Shallow and proud of it, she bragged about how Catholicism meant the most to her when all the females in her family got new hats for Easter Sunday mass. And she was nostalgic for the veils, those lace dribbles pinned to every female’s head in the sixties, even if she was too young to remember wearing one. (If truth be told, she never wore one, since they were worn by adult women and she was stuck in hats, being so young, not that hats were bad.) It was only when she fully grew up did she realize that the church thought the female head unclean, hence the headwear. Then there were the nuns. Modern vestal virgins, they could never hope to rise to the status of priests. Sexist for sure, but only after it had all been pointed out as such. When something is as familiar as that, you don’t necessarily question it or resent it. It was rote role-playing more than anything else. Like genuflecting before getting into the pew.

It was a quandary—this mix of repulsion/obsession. She truly believed that Vatican II killed organized religion as she never knew it, what with its gradual relaxation of standards that eventually resulted in the horror of bland guitar masses and made-up face-to-face confessions. And even if she could’ve been an altar girl, unlike her older sisters, she had no interest. She pined for the mix of exoticism and mystery and (perhaps most of all) the sense of ritual, (after all, she had minored in Anthropology) that seemed to add authenticity. No matter that she couldn’t remember the Latin mass when last practiced, she hated that most of all. It seemed a sign of being not only a lapsed Catholic, but belonging to a lapsed religion. She felt the whole religious revision had deprived her of experiencing the genuine, historical ritual, when going to mass was an event, dramatic pageantry—hence supportive of her revulsion/fascination. She was, after all, nothing if not melodramatic in her analyzing, rationalizing, conclusion-izing.

Being Catholic somewhat redeemed itself with its perpetual identifying factor/curse. She knew who she was—always. This possessive trait of her religion stamped her, tainted her throughout her day, affecting everything from turning the right cheek to crossing her legs properly like a lady in a pew. Then there were all the sacraments of her childhood, a way to get money from relatives and also a nice party with a cake.  She, unfortunately, had never been confirmed but that never kept her from being a Catholic.  It wasn’t her fault, anyway. They kept pushing the confirmation age further up in grade school. Her older siblings had all been confirmed (with parties and gifts) by sixth grade. Thanks to the new, modern take on things, everything changed in the seventies and confirmation was moved to the eighth grade. When she arrived at that final chapter of Catholic schoolgirlness, it was moved to the high school level. Well, she was not about to attend special classes on Saturdays simply to be confirmed, even if it did mean a cake (and she so loved cake). And she was most certainly not going to attend St. Ann’s girl’s high school for the convenience of confirmation. Rife with rumors of girl-on-girl action, she much preferred boys. But if they wanted her to publicly state her baptismal intent, they could have made the whole thing easier, like keeping it back in the sixth grade as it had been for all her siblings. Easy peasy. So she became a sort of in-between. No one seemed to mind it either, even when she was married in her family’s church. Unconfirmed but still not a heathen. It wasn’t like the Mormons where they excised the soul or some such trashy bible nonsense. (She only knew this sketchy information from visiting other parishes in eighth grade with the then-considered-liberal Sister Agnes Mary. Sister Agnes believed in opening up her student’s eyes (but she kept close tabs on their souls) and minds to the whole wide world of religion beyond the doors of St. Stephen’s grade school. Along with the Mormons, they’d visited Armenian, Episcopalian and Baptist churches, as well as a temple. Heresy before 1976—most assuredly.

The problem was, she still believed that the whole possessive/identifying thing enslaved her. She used to say (jokingly) how she was Catholic whether she wanted to be or not. It was like she had no say or choice in the identity that burdened/gladdened her through the years. A smallish weight to carry through life compared to being Jewish. But being Jewish seemed so much more than mere religion. It was a much more glamorous cultural stamp, they even had their own cuisine. On the opposite side of the coin, the Episcopalians she knew had no such identifying problem. It was just one small part of their lives, not their character. Still, there were no Episcopalian foods.

Then she remembered the fish fries of her childhood. Meatless Fridays during Lent meant dinner out at a church hall, supper club or even a tavern. Why even the Episcopalians ate perch on Fridays, it was so delicious. Maybe that was her religious culture food—perch from Lake Michigan. Pan-fried with potato pancakes and a lavishing of creamy coleslaw. Suddenly feeling better about it all, she knew what she'd make for her cousin's dinner and dressed for her own ritual—her Sunday morning jog.

 

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Beer-Battered-Haddock

http://www.food52.com/recipes/7968_golden_panko_latkes_with_sour_cream_and_chives

http://www.saveur.com/article/Wine-and-Drink/Brandy-Old-Fashioned

Wisco Transport

My sister and I have been biking around our old hood each day this week. She had the bike shop fix up my parent's vintage pair of Schwinns. We ride up thru the cemetery and look at ancestral graves before looping back along Grant Park, the golf course and pedal hard up Miller Hill. It's a good cardio burst on gear-less bikes and I enjoy it more than running in this Midwest humidity.

 Big storms raged 100 miles north along the lake last night and we watched the lightening from the patio. Better than fireworks as the fireflies faded in and out above the garden,

To sleep, perchance thru the night

Maui is three hours behind Cali time. Each day we were there, we awoke around five thirty because of the time difference, as well as the cacophany of birds in the open air hotel atrium. But by the very last day, we had acclimated and slept until 8:00 am.

Now that we're back home for a week, my circadian rhythms are once again out of whack. It wouldn't be a problem if we weren't traveling again in two days-the girls and I head to Wisconsin. The time there? Two hours ahead. Eventually, I hope my clock will be adjusted, maybe in August.

What $75 a pound Cheese looks like...

Unbelievably delicious.

Wisco moves beyond niceness

Petition drive launched to recall Wisconsin governor

Republican Scott Walker has been a lightning rod since taking office early this year. The success of a union-friendly referendum in Ohio gives new momentum to the push to remove him from office.

Carla Koykkari, right, signs a petition with the help of Sue Breckenridge, aiming to force a recall election against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. (Scott Bauer, Associated Press / November 15, 2011)

By Bob Secter, Chicago Tribune

November 16, 2011

Reporting from Madison, Wis.—

The partisan trench war that has transformed Wisconsin into a proxy for polarization nationwide opened a new front Tuesday with the formal launch of a petition drive to force a recall vote on freshman Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

The move was long expected but was given fresh impetus by the success of a recent union-friendly referendum in Ohio. It also raises the possibility that voters in this swing state will be casting a test vote on the nation's political mood just months before next year's presidential balloting.

Walker has been a lightning rod since taking office early this year. He moved quickly with the help of a Republican-dominated Legislature to curb collective bargaining rights and benefits for public employees and trim state school spending. Walker said the actions were needed to resolve a budget crisis, but critics accused him of trying to break unions and carry water for wealthy conservative ideologues.

His actions last winter sparked huge and frequent protests and prompted minority Democrats in the Senate to temporarily flee to Illinois in an ultimately futile attempt to block a vote on the labor measures. That was followed by a legal battle and contentious election fights for control of Wisconsin's high court and the Senate, where recall votes on several members left the GOP with a slimmer majority.

Walker's campaign has launched an advertising blitz against the recall, with the first 30-second spot airing during a Monday night football telecast of the undefeated Green Bay Packers' game against the Minnesota Vikings, must-see TV in Wisconsin.

"Wisconsin's best days are yet to come," Walker said in the ad. "It won't happen overnight. But we are on our way."

Recall supporters began gathering petitions at the stroke of midnight Tuesday with signing parties at dozens of bars and homes across the state. Organizers even plan to collect signatures at deer reporting stations over the weekend, as the nine-day gun hunting season begins.

It is in many ways a remarkable turn of events in a part of the Midwest long noted for personal and political comity.

"We're the nice people," said Mordecai Lee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "We don't litter on highways. We say 'excuse me' when we bump into each other. Wisconsin culture had resisted the nationalization of politics for just so long. But it's like the wall suddenly collapsed a year ago."

A Walker spokesman declined to comment on the recall effort, deferring to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state GOP, released a statement Monday praising Walker for keeping a lid on taxes while balancing the budget and cutting costs for schools and local governments.

A different take came from Michael Brown, founder of United Wisconsin, the umbrella group leading recall efforts with strong support from Democrats and organized labor.

"Our way of life here in Wisconsin is under attack from corporate interests," said Brown, who owns a marketing firm in Appleton. "Walker is not hearing us, so we have to remove him."

Simply getting the question to a vote could prove daunting. To qualify the recall for a ballot, supporters must gather a minimum of 540,000 valid petition signatures in 60 days.

In California, opponents of then-Gov. Gray Davis were required to gather just shy of 900,000 valid signatures to trigger the 2003 recall that led to his replacement by Arnold Schwarzenegger. But California is more than six times the size of Wisconsin, and the petitioning period was 160 days.

Wisco rallies

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fights back as recall effort begins

 

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speaks to voters in a new television ad released just before the start of an effort to recall him from office. (YouTube)

By Michael A. Memoli Washington Bureau

November 15, 2011, 10:58 a.m.

Democrats and liberal activists officially launched a campaign Tuesday to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, an effort rooted in the Republican's successful effort to pass legislation stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights.

And wasting no time ahead of what may be a lengthy and expensive campaign, Walker is already responding with a new television ad (see video below) defending his record after less than a year in office.

The main effort to recall Walker is sponsored by a group called United Wisconsin, which filed paperwork with the state's Government Accountability Board so it can begin gathering the necessary petition signatures.

"Walker has lied to the people of Wisconsin and is destroying our state," wrote Julie Wells, an employee at a manufacturing plant in Fort Atkinson who submitted the document. "Walker has taken away the rights of workers, is destroying our education system, and is selling our state to the big corporations that put him in office."

The committee has until Jan. 17 to submit the 540,208 signatures required to spur the recall election. Elections officials would then have at least a month to review those signatures, and Walker would also have the opportunity to challenge them.

Once a petition is considered valid, an election would be called for six weeks. Democrats would have to put forward a candidate to challenge Walker in that election; if a primary is required, the general election would be held four weeks later.

Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Government Accountability Board, estimated that the elections could be held as early as May or June.

Walker, elected in 2010, introduced his anti-union law in February of this year, sparking heated protests from Democrats and labor unions. Democratic lawmakers even fled the state in hopes of preventing its passage, but the law took effect in June.

Opponents of the law first initiated recall efforts against Republican state senators who'd backed the legislation. Two of six were successfully recalled, leaving Democrats just shy of regaining a majority in the chamber.

The effort to recall Walker comes one week after Ohio voters rejected a similar law pushed by Republican Gov. John Kasich, a result seen as a victory for the labor movement.

Anticipating today's action, Walker launched a television ad that aired during Monday night's Packers-Vikings football game. It included a school board member who said the new law helped her district put money in the classroom.

"Wisconsin's best days are yet to come. It won't happen overnight. But we are on our way," Walker says in the 30-second spot.

Walker told the Associated Press on Monday that he'd launch more ads soon showing "real people" talking about his initiatives.

Wisconsin Democrats planned a series of events Tuesday to promote the "Recall Walker Kickout Kickoff."

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who chairs the Democratic Governors Assn., would not say Monday how active his group might be in the effort.

"If we have an opportunity to replace a narrow-minded, ideological and ineffective governor with a Democratic governor that gets things done, we'll be in there with both feet," he said.

Any costs for a recall election would incurred by local cities and towns. The 17 separate recall elections held in targeted state Senate districts this year cost an estimated $2.1 million.

 

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Small slice of Packers

In Green Bay, Shares of Stock Are More Than a Financial Investment

 

Morry Gash/Associated Press

There is pride in ownership among Packers stock holders, who tailgate before their annual meeting. "They don't do that at I.B.M.," a team executive said.

By KEN BELSON

Published: November 15, 2011

GREEN BAY, Wis. — In any other place, they would be called souvenirs, documents suitable for framing, or even a sham. But here in the heart of Packers country, they are stock certificates that confer to the owner a microscopically thin and perhaps meaningless slice of the hometown team.

Enlarge This Image

Mike Roemer for The New York Times

Richard Oliver has his stock certificate displayed in his home. “The only people buying them now are the people that want to be boastful," he said.

The Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned team in the N.F.L., the rarest of rarities in a sport dominated by billionaires and the nation’s largest corporations. The team’s fans are fiercely proud of this status, which dates to 1923 when Curly Lambeau and four local businessmen incorporated and sold 1,000 shares of the team at $5 each to keep it afloat.

It is that pride that is about to be appealed to yet again. According to a filing with securities regulators in Utah, the Packers planned to issue new shares “on or around” Tuesday for about $250 each. The team hopes to raise at least $22 million after fees, about what was generated in 1997, the last time it employed the tactic.

The money raised this time will help offset some of the $143 million needed to add up to 7,000 seats and replace the scoreboard and sound system at Lambeau Field.

The question is, will fans who have closets full of Brett Favre jerseys and foam cheeseheads, as well as stock certificates hanging on the wall, shell out hundreds of dollars for more shares? The short answer is yes, if only because they cannot resist the chance to support their team and indoctrinate the next generation, too.

“We live and breathe the Packers,” said Chuck Olsen, the owner of Olsen’s Piggly Wiggly, which does a big business selling bratwursts to tailgaters on game days. “Everyone wants to be part of this, so I’ll buy a share for my grandson, who is now 1 year old.”

In an era when teams routinely beg, threaten and cajole their host cities into helping them build new stadiums, the Packers’ approach of asking their fans to contribute is refreshingly quaint.

Unlike the growing number of teams that require fans to pay tens of thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses before they can get season tickets, the Packers do not obligate anyone to buy their shares, which cost not much more than a nice jersey sold in the gift shop. (The Packers do charge ticket holders a one-time user fee to help pay for renovations, but the prices are relatively modest and the fees are refunded if they give up their tickets.)

The ability to tap their fans’ seemingly bottomless good will has helped the Packers avoid some of the civic showdowns that have raged in other N.F.L. cities. In neighboring Minnesota, for instance, the Vikings have been negotiating for years with lawmakers, who are split on whether to help the team build a new stadium and how much the public should contribute.

In Green Bay, the Packers issued stock not just in 1997, but also in 1935 and 1950 to bolster their sagging finances, and fans snapped up the shares even though they were little more than a gift to the team. They offer none of the privileges, or risks, of normal shares: they do not appreciate, are not traded on an exchange and produce no dividends. Owners get no discounts on tickets, although some merchandise is available only to shareholders. They can also attend the annual shareholders’ meeting, where they can vote on new board members and pepper management with questions.

With the economy flirting with recession and more than 4.75 million shares outstanding, the Packers are confident that their fans will line up by the thousands to buy shares again. The team currently has 112,264 shareholders.

The shareholders helped keep the team afloat for many years. But the championships of the 1960s and the N.F.L.’s decision to split its national television contracts evenly among all of its teams helped stabilize the Packers and keep them from leaving Green Bay, the smallest city in the league.

Unlike teams in New York, Chicago and other big cities, the Packers have fewer well-heeled fans and companies that will spend money on naming rights deals, multimillion-dollar sponsorships and corporate suites. In 2000, just three years after the Packers won the Super Bowl, the team was the 23rd most valuable franchise in the N.F.L., according to Forbes magazine.

So the team used all the proceeds from its 1997 share sale and the revenue from a half-penny local sales tax increase in Brown County to pay for the expansion of Lambeau Field in 2003. With more seats, restaurants and a new team Hall of Fame, the Packers’ revenue and profits grew.

This year, after winning the Super Bowl again, the Packers are the ninth most valuable franchise in the league, worth $1.089 billion, according to Forbes.

With the wind at their backs, the Packers do not have to ask taxpayers for help this time. In addition to the share sale, the team expects to tap a capital improvement fund dedicated to upgrading the stadium, user fees from the newly added seats and loans from local banks and potentially the N.F.L.

“The Packers have gone to the public in the past when we were in trouble,” said Jason Wied, vice president and general counsel of the team, who oversees stadium development. “So to maintain our credibility, we are not going to the taxpayer. Our very survival is not at stake, and we can take on this capital project ourselves.”

This is a big relief to public officials. With consumers struggling to get by, and local governments slashing services, the last thing lawmakers want to do is debate whether to raise taxes to benefit a sports team, even one as beloved as the Packers.

“If it’s a priority, people find the money,” said Jim Schmitt, the mayor of Green Bay, who bought shares for his three daughters in 1997 and was vice chairman of the Lambeau Field Stadium Board when the county raised taxes last time. “You’re not going to see these at Target.”

In a town so devoted to one team, it is not surprising that fans like to brag about going to games, say, during the Vince Lombardi era, or rubbing shoulders with players like Bart Starr and Max McGee. There is also an informal pecking order of fans who own shares from earlier years.

In 1974, Richard Oliver acquired four shares issued in 1950 for $25 each from his wife’s aunt. The shares have since split 1,000 to one, so Oliver technically has 4,000 shares. But the original certificate hangs handsomely in his home office, where he sniffs at the notion of buying newer shares.

“The only people buying them now are the people that want to be boastful and say to their boys at the tavern, ‘I’ve got a share of Packers,’ ” Oliver said. “There’s a certain amount of pride having the certificate.”

For Oliver, who ran a title business for many years, his shares were a calling card. When he spoke at out-of-town conferences, he never failed to meet other Packers fans. He loved to attend annual meetings, which years ago were held in a room below a bowling alley across from the courthouse. Oliver recalls meeting players from the 1960s teams and legends like Tony Canadeo and Buckets Goldenberg.

“It was a good old boys club,” he said. “We knew if we ever lost the Packers, it would be the death knell of the city of Green Bay.”

Annual meetings these days draw about 12,000 shareholders and guests at Lambeau Field at the end of July, and many of them tailgate beforehand. “They’re not doing that at I.B.M.,” Wied said, joking. Some wear foam cheeseheads, including one fan who writes the word “owner” on the side of his.

Unlike a meeting at I.B.M., the annual Packers meeting elicits few questions about the team’s balance sheet. Instead, most concern the team and, this year, the league’s newly signed collective bargaining agreement. Some fans suggest ways to improve the stadium. Shareholders vote on a slate of about 15 board members, who are almost always elected with 99 percent of the vote.

All in all, it is a pretty tame affair, which is not unexpected for a team that has 92,000 names on its waiting list for tickets, or fans rabid enough to buy a piece of paper that calls them an owner. Perhaps, though, if fans hang on to their shares long enough, they will be able to resell them for a handsome profit.

Mike Worachek, who runs a collectibles shop not far from Lambeau Field, said a share issued in 1950 could fetch as much as $2,000, while one from 1935 could bring in five times that amount. Their price will only rise when the new shares are issued, he said.

Still, fans are so smitten with their shares that few change hands, Worachek said. And even fans who have shares are likely to buy new ones as well.

“There are a lot out there already, but Packers fans are funny,” he said.

Wisco Crime History

Hiding out in Wisconsin

Gary Porter

The upstairs rooms at Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters are riddled with bullet holes from hours of machine gun fire by the FBI.

Badger State was a popular refuge from law in the '20s and '30s

Story And Photos By Gary Porter

Members of the U.S. temperance movement believed that eliminating the demon alcohol would cure society of many ills. It would solidify family life, get people back to work, and make society more respectable. Little did they suspect that Prohibition would create effects quite the opposite.

Banning the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol from 1920 to 1933 did not cure Americans' thirst for it. In effect, Prohibition forced the supply chain underground. With liquor no longer legally available, gangsters stepped in to fulfill the public's craving.

Chicago was well-known as a gangster city, with mob figures such as Al Capone, Baby Face Nelson, "Polack Joe" Saltis and others. When pressure from the law got hot in Chicago, some gangsters found remote, wooded northern Wisconsin the perfect place to hide out.

Scattered throughout the North Woods are the old haunts of the Capone brothers Al and Ralph, Saltis, Nelson and John Dillinger.

A recent road trip took me back to the remnants of that time when the Roaring '20s, followed by the Great Depression, accentuated the "sin" in Wisconsin. A tour of these historical places is a great way to see the state and learn about an era that affected the development of many small towns of the North Woods.

Among the most well-known stops along the way:

Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters: Once a resort where the FBI botched a shootout with John Dillinger's gang and Baby Face Nelson, and recently immortalized by the movie "Public Enemies" with Johnny Depp, it's now a restaurant still called Little Bohemia. The rooms where Dillinger stayed have been turned into a little museum and left mainly as they were, with bullet holes intact.

Dillman's Bay Resort in Lac du Flambeau: Cabin No. 5 is where Baby Face Nelson holed up after the shootout at Little Bohemia, holding an Ojibwe couple hostage for three days.

Minocqua still has several places once allegedly frequented by gangsters, including Norwood Pines Supper Club, which had gambling and a brothel upstairs. BJ's Sportshop on U.S. Highway 51 used to house "Trixies," the most famous whorehouse in the North Woods. The Belle Isle Sports Bar and Grill had a direct line to Arlington Race Track near Chicago. Bosacki's Boat House restaurant also was a popular hangout for the Chicago mob.

Couderay : Al Capone's home on Cranberry Lake was privately operated and open to the public but closed in 2009. Capone used to fly alcohol in from Canada and unload it at his dock. Not far away at Barker's Lake Lodge near Winter, Saltis built a log lodge with cabins for his friends and fellow gangsters. Saltis was a mob boss from Chicago who operated speakeasies. The resort is still open for business and has a nine-hole golf course built by Saltis.

Garmisch USA near Cable: Was built as a lodge by wealthy Chicago businessman Jacob Loeb, who hired the famous attorney Clarence Darrow to represent his teenage nephew after the youth killed another young boy for the thrill. Garmisch still has the beautiful old lodge and now has many cabins as well.

Hurley, Hayward and hell made up what locals called the Devil's Triangle: They were rough logging towns that became notorious for their speakeasies and brothels during Prohibition and were often frequented by the likes of Capone and his cronies. Brothels and bars lined Silver St. in Hurley, where many establishments had tunnels connecting each other, and one allegedly ran under the Montreal River into Michigan. One block of Silver St. still houses strip clubs.

What is now Dawn's Never Inn has the rooms of an old brothel upstairs where Al Capone used to stay.

Mercer : Located on Highway 51 between Hurley and Minocqua, Mercer was the longtime home of Al Capone's older brother Ralph, who ran a couple of taverns. Mitch Babic, now in his 90s, was a fishing and hunting guide for the rich and famous and chronicled Mercer's history over his lifetime with photographs. He knew Ralph well and claims to have been at Little Bohemia on the night of the shootout with Dillinger as a teenager.

Wisco Wright

Cultured Traveler

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

Frank Lloyd Wright's influence is seen everywhere in his native Wisconsin. Above, the Monona Center, which was not finished until 1997.

By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: October 28, 2011

WHEN I told my friends that I was planning a family vacation in Wisconsin, I received either blank stares or teasing comments about the admittedly unsexy specialties for which the state is known. There was mention of cows and cornfields and cheese curds. Yet Wisconsin is also Frank Lloyd Wright country, the place where he was born and reared and to which he kept returning. To travel there is to marvel at the contrast between the calm landscape and the delirious inventiveness of his work.

Unlike books or paintings, the objects created by an architect are not always easily encountered. Most of Wright’s 400-plus buildings are private homes scattered around the country and closed to the public. But Wisconsin has at least three Wright sites that are welcoming: Taliesin, his former home and studio in rural Spring Green; Monona Terrace, a convention center in bustling Madison; and the Johnson Wax building in industrial Racine. As my family and I set out to visit them, we realized we had previously been inside only one Wright building, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a dreamy if arrogant masterpiece whose curving white walls seem designed to outshine the paintings.

Wright, who died in 1959 at age 91, just six months before the Guggenheim opened, was an elegant and imperious figure. He wore a black cape and could seem indifferent when clients complained about the water dripping onto their heads from roofs he had designed.

His own origins were modest. Descended from Welsh immigrants, he was born in Richland Center, a farm town. After dropping out of college, he moved to Chicago and eventually settled in suburban Oak Park, Ill., where he presided over a family of six children and was courted by affluent neighbors who longed to live in one of his fashionably low-slung Prairie houses.

Everything changed in 1911, after he fell in love with a married neighbor, Martha Borthwick Cheney, or Mamah. They left Chicago and moved to a hideout he built for them in the remote hills of his Wisconsin childhood. This is the house known as Taliesin, in Spring Green, about 40 miles west of Madison.

Getting there is a bit of a trek, especially if you start in New York and stop along the way to see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, as my husband and I and two college-age sons did last summer. We flew to Chicago, took an excellent tour of Oak Park’s Wright houses and then drove off for a week in Wisconsin.

Avant-garde art movements generally take root in major cities. It helps to have a dense population of young artists competing for greatness. Perhaps that’s why it feels so surprising to stumble on Wright’s jolting modernism in the quiet countryside. Here, amid the emerald green fields, is Cubism (evoked in the jutting planes of his houses). Here is Surrealism (note his habit of turning a homely edge into a thing of curve and whimsy). Here are buildings whose forms must have once seemed as alien in this terrain as flying saucers.

Taliesin began life as a wood-and-stone bungalow tucked into a grassy slope. Over the years, it grew into a rambling compound that is often compared to an Italian hill town. It is, all at once, a house, a laboratory and a manifesto of Prairie-style architecture. The key idea is horizontality. At a time when Americans were enthralled by ever taller skyscrapers whose silhouettes pulled away from the ground as if to escape coarseness itself, Wright wanted his buildings to look as if they had grown out of the earth.

Taliesin is also a haunted house whose history is inseparable from tragedy. Wright’s affair with Mamah Cheney escalated from a local scandal into a national one, inciting a barrage of moral condemnation from gossipy store clerks in Spring Green as well as from headline writers at major newspapers. One August day in 1914, when Wright was away, Mamah and her two children were murdered by a household worker who came after them with an ax.

The incident, in which four men helping out at the house were also murdered, recently resurfaced with aching clarity in two novels. Nancy Horan’s “Loving Frank” (2008) offers a memorable portrait of Mamah, a serious-minded woman who translated feminist tracts from Swedish into English. T. C. Boyle’s eloquent “The Women” (2009) follows Wright through three complicated marriages and makes Wisconsin feel akin to the storm-lashed moors of Wuthering Heights.

Which is not to suggest that impulse and instinct reign at Taliesin today. The place imposes nearly militaristic demands on visitors. Granted, I did not mind donning plastic shoe covers to shuffle through the living room or surrendering my purse to minimize the possibility of grazing a wall. Such are the imperatives of vulnerable houses and historic preservation.

The only way to see the house is by guided tour. The Taliesin tours, besides being costly (two-hour house tours are $47), require constant group adherence, beginning at an off-site visitors’ center, where you board a bus. It all began to seem a bit mirthless when, after leaving Wright’s monkish bedroom, we were herded back onto the bus, unable to linger on the green hillside that stretched out in every direction. The brisk pace is antithetical to Wright’s wise dictum: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

A few days later, I was savoring the warmth of the sun outside a convention center in Madison. Wright attended high school and college there and eventually designed a masterpiece for the city. The Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, despite its clunky name, is an unutterably lovely building, an all-white semicircle perched on the edge of Lake Monona. The rooftop terrace juts over the water and functions as a gargantuan public plaza, complete with a cafe. Suspended between views of the Wisconsin State Capitol and the level blue stretch of the lake, the building offers a stark choice between the power of the state and the escapism of nature.

As I took in the terrace’s perimeter walls, which swoop through space as if in a practice run for the dazzling curvilinearity of the Guggenheim Museum, I found myself thinking about Wright’s suspected learning disabilities. According to Ada Louise Huxtable and his other biographers, he was a poor to middling student who probably never graduated from high school. He wangled his way into the University of Wisconsin, where he lasted for fewer than three semesters.

Perhaps the insistent horizontality of Wright’s work was rooted in a desire to overcome the indignity of his early academic struggles — one “reads” his buildings from left to right, as opposed to up and down. If his school assignments saddled him with persistent frustration, he turned his limitations into a strength of his art, imprinting the American landscape with bravura forms that at times seem to echo the flow of sentences across paper.

A tour of Monona Terrace costs only $3 and is offered daily at 1 p.m. The history of the building is a fascinating narrative of on-again-off-again city planning. Wright initially proposed his design in 1938. But the denizens of Madison were bitterly divided over whether to lavish taxpayer money on the work of an adulterer and a scoundrel, and the building was not completed until 1997. For this reason, some scholars characterize it as “Wright-inspired” rather than 100 percent undiluted Frank.

The last stop on our Wright tour was Racine, a factory town that has seen better times. Guidebooks tend to talk you out of visiting, perhaps because the city suffers from high unemployment; empty storefronts abound. Yet there remains one incredible draw. The Johnson Wax Administration Building went up in 1939 and continues to serve as the headquarters for the company that started out making parquet flooring in the 19th century. Free tours are offered on Fridays, and nothing about the red-brick building can prepare you for the breathtaking eccentricity of the space known as the “great workroom,” a half-acre windowless, high-ceilinged space furnished with dozens of Art Deco desks. Wright designed furniture, too, and the desks are nifty affairs with wooden tops and curvy metal frames painted Cherokee red.

The grounds include a research library that is open to the public, a handsome room where biographies of Wright, scholarly tomes and historical black-and-white photographs share shelf space with displays of home-cleaning products, including antique cans of J-wax, Beautiflor (“cleans as it waxes”) and Glade air freshener.

Perhaps cleaning products, as much as Wright’s radical architecture, are part of the story of Utopian longing in America. The desire to live in a serene space, to make the floorboards glow and purge one’s world of darkness: who wouldn’t want that?

When you leave the Johnson Wax building, you exit through an indoor parking lot that amounts to an adventure of its own. The white-painted ceiling and red floor continue the color scheme of the building’s interior. Blue reflecting pools amplify the sense of light. Stunning white columns flare at the top into inverted ziggurats, each a mini-Guggenheim Museum.

I paused to take photographs and e-mailed them to friends back home, thinking they would be amused to see the ethereal forms of the Guggenheim echoed in a humble garage in Racine. It was then that I realized what the famous ramps of the museum most resemble. The Guggenheim is oddly similar to a multistory parking garage.

Mad Town highlights from the NYTimes

My Trip to Madison: Bikes, Brews, Burgers and a B&B

By SETH KUGEL

 

What a great idea — if only I had thought of it: take a trip to Madison, Wis.; stay in a cozy bed- and-breakfast; get around by bike; test out burgers, brats, cheese curds and microbrews; and look for some booze to bring back home.

Two weeks ago, I left my travel plans up to a reader vote that just as easily could have had me staying at a chain motel in Nashville and touring city parks by public bus. But Madison and food and drink and bikes won, and I spent last weekend reveling in a cyclist-friendly city of 230,000 with a restaurant and bar scene that punches well above its demographic weight.

Because I was planning this trip at the last minute, there were a couple of hitches: the cheapest flight to Madison from New York was $800, more than twice as much as I’ve ever spent on a domestic flight in this job. And the lowest-priced bed-and-breakfast with available rooms in Madison was $150 a night, way above my budget.

So I scrambled for alternatives, booking a US Airways flight to Milwaukee via Charlotte on Thursday ($149.90) and a direct Frontier Airlines flight back from Milwaukee on Sunday ($186.20). Milwaukee to Madison would be by Badger Bus, for $41 round trip.

The only bed-and-breakfast I could find in my price range was the Parsonage in McFarland, a suburb about 10 miles out of town that had a small room for a single traveler for $74 a night. That meant adding 20 extra miles to my daily bike routine. Good for burning cheese curd calories, but could I ride safely at night? And what if it rained?

Seth Kugel for The New York TimesFree samples of cheese curds at the Dane County Farmers’ Market.

Turned out I could, and it didn’t (much).

Madison is the only gold-certified Bicycle Friendly Community east of the Mississippi, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been amazed that almost my entire route to and from the Parsonage was on bike trails or roads with separate cycling lanes. The friendly sales staff at Machinery Row Bicycles rented me a solid hybrid from Wisconsin-based Trek for $20 a day and sold me a nifty, two-sided red and white flashing light to attach to my helmet for night riding. And though my commute took me past some dreary commercial real estate, I got a chuckle every time I passed the unmanned, self-service pumpkin sale along Marsh Road in McFarland where the sign read “PUT MONEY IN COFFIN.” (A small coffin was available for deposits.) Getting around the city itself was really easy: half the time I was on beautiful bike paths (like the Capital City Trail), and there were bike lanes and bike racks everywhere.

My days started and ended at the Parsonage, an 111-year-old house that for decades was a home to ministers of the nearby Lutheran church. It’s not chic : I don’t know what the thread count was on my sheets and I’m betting the owners, Craig and Cathy Wrobel, don’t either. But rooms are cozy, the dogs are friendly, and Craig puts together a homemade, never-the-same-twice breakfast, from soufflés with white Cheddar to a pumpkin and cream cheese kringle (a filled pastry of Scandinavian origin).

Despite filling breakfasts, my mission was to get out and eat and drink, and then eat and drink some more. Armed with an impossibly long list of restaurants and bars to try, I crisscrossed Madison from the University of Wisconsin campus on the west side (which is also home to the Babcock Hall Dairy, makers of my first Madison “meal,” an excellent cone of orange custard chocolate chip), across the isthmus splitting Lakes Mendota and Monona that serves as the center (and location of the State Capitol, home to a fantastic farmers’ market on Saturdays) and as far east as the Ale Asylum, a brewery that serves up a generously portioned sampler of 10 beers for $20.

The drinking options alone were staggering. It’s almost impossible to find a beer on tap that’s not made in Wisconsin. The bustling Old-Fashioned, a popular bar and restaurant across from the Capitol, serves more than 50 beers on tap, all from Wisconsin, and more than 100 in cans or bottles, with just one that is not: Grainbelt from Minnesota, which is pointedly listed under “Imports.” And people here know beer. I’m usually happy to argue that New York City is the height of sophistication, but I could only cringe as I compared Wisconsin’s vast beer choices with the Amstel Lights and Stellas at many New York bars.

I quickly gained a soft spot for New Glarus beers, for two reasons. One, its Moon Man pale ale is crisp and clean and redolent of grapefruit; it even tasted to me as if it had a refreshing splash of gin in it. (It didn’t.) Two, New Glarus prohibits sales anywhere outside the state. It seemed the obvious choice to fulfill the readers’ mandate that I bring home an alcoholic beverage as a memento, but then I realized: whatever I bought, I’d have to lug around on my bike.

   

So I decided to go counterintuitive: in an amazing beer city, I’d bring home liquor from the Old Sugar Factory, a new distillery named after the decaying factory on Madison’s east side that processed local sugar beets in the early 20th century. The distillery runs an on-site bar, where bartenders mix beautiful cocktails ($6-$7) like a sazerac made from the company’s sorghum whiskey and dole out tastes of unsweetened rum, ouzo and dry honey liqueur. I bought a bottle of that liqueur, a perfect (and perfectly transportable) way to fulfill my take-home booze obligation.

There was a lot of eating with all that drinking, of course. Though I had imagined myself eating bratwurst, Cheddar and cheese curds the whole weekend, Madison turned to be as much a burger town as anything else. I tried the famed Plaza burger, staple of campus post-boozing life, and found it excellent in a greasy spoon kind of a way. And the cheeseburger at the Laurel Tavern on the west side was a $5 masterpiece. But my favorite was the black and blue burger (with bacon and hot sauce), $7.29 at Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry. Stand-out sharp flavors, and not so much burger to fit in your mouth, important if you’re trying not to stuff yourself before a bike ride.

The one ballyhooed burger I didn’t much care for was Bob’s Bad Breath Burger at the Weary Traveler Freehouse (fantastic organic meat, perfectly medium rare, but loaded with cream cheese, not my thing), but I did love the place: old-fashioned phones on the tables, Lao Tzu quotes on the wall, and bathrooms wallpapered with old maps. (Botswana used to be called Bechuanaland? Who knew?) The late-afternoon company was friendly too in a let’s-dress-hipsterish-and-talk-about-our-kids’- kindergarten-teachers way. And I perked up when someone handed Pepper, the bartender, a bag of raw chicken hearts. To me, chicken hearts are Brazilian barbecue food, and I said as much to Pepper. Turns out he lived for more than a decade in the Amazon and married a Brazilian. I wondered how she tolerated the harsh Madison winters. “Every inch of snow,” he said, “I’m a little closer to being divorced.”

My best meal was not a burger at all, but a Laotian dinner at Lao Laan-Xang, near the Weary Traveler at 1146 Willy Street. I hadn’t given much thought to local immigrant cuisine, but after seeing several Laotian spots around, I called an audible. And though it was packed on the night I was there, the blond (i.e., non-Laotian) waitress sat down with me to explain the menu. If I liked kimchi (the spicy fermented Korean cabbage dish), she said, I should get the fried chicken with thum som, an unripe papaya salad. Weirdly, she was right: savory, spicy shreds of fruit somehow gave off a kimchi vibe.

I have a very forgiving stomach but even so, I had to stop eating occasionally and visit a few Madison cultural attractions. Every single one was free, unless you count the 25 cents I dropped on a map of the grounds of the Olbrich Botanical Gardens. The gardens were shockingly lovely, a colorful, calm escape from a city that there’s not much need to escape from. I also took a nice walk out to Picnic Point around Lake Mendota (which included a stop by a Friday afternoon campfire for a complimentary swig of whiskey from a guy named Jay), did the requisite tour of the State Capitol with a peppy guide named Catie, strolled through the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and watched mesmerized as Cosmo-Joe, a street artist outside the museum, created art using spray paints and all kinds of quirky doodads. I also happened to be in town for the opening of a brand new wing of the university’s impressive Chazen Museum of Art.

This is more a football town than an art town, though, and the big event of the weekend was the Wisconsin Badgers game at Michigan State. I settled into State Street Brats (packed with students and families clad in Badger red) to have a $4.50 sausage, drink a pint of Leinenkugel beer (from Wisconsin, obviously) and watch the first half, and then biked back downtown to catch the rest of the game (and close out my weekend of drinking) at the Great Dane, yet another brew pub. I ordered one of the cask ales, called Bold and Old Mild, and settled in: Wisconsin lost a heart-breaking, headline-making game via instant-replay in the very last second.

Somehow, the next day, the town was back up on its feet, serving me more beers and burgers and cheese curds before I dropped my bike off and left town. But I guess it’s easier to take a tough loss when you have so much good food to do it with. And plus, the Packers game was starting soon.