(Dutton Books for Young Readers)
Cory McCarthy (Courtesy of Penguin Random House)

It’s Read Brave St. Paul week, with events celebrating the young adult novel “Man O’ War” by Cory McCarthy, this year’s community book club title. Presented by the St. Paul Public Library, Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and the city of St. Paul, Read Brave is hosted by Mayor Melvin Carter. The program invites residents to read and talk across generations about an issue critical to St. Paul and its future.

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter (Scott Takushi / Pioneer Press)

The highlight of the week is a panel discussion with Carter and McCarthy, who will use “Man O” War” as a starting point for looking at this year’s Read Brave topic of identity and belonging.

“I am excited to be ‘Celebrating Identities’ as we emphasize our city’s commitment to inclusivity and provide a platform for meaningful dialogue around our values of diversity and understanding,” Carter writes on the St. Paul Public Library website.

Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Book Honor award, “Man o” War” follows the journey of River, an Irish Lebanese American trans teen navigating the challenges and joys of self-discovery and love in the confines of a small Midwestern town. A high school student and competitive swimmer who works at the local aquarium, River seems to find more in common with the captive sharks and isolated man o’ wars than with peers at school. Told over a period of years, the story explores layers and complexities of coming out and transitioning, grappling with dysphoria, internalized transphobia and racism, bias and rejection and, ultimately, acceptance, self-love, true love and joy.

The panel discussion begins at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at Arlington Hills Library, 1200 Payne Ave., St. Paul. Like all Read Brave events, it is free and open to the public.

Other Read Brave events this week: story time with Carter, 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Rondo Community Library, 461 N. Dale St.; volunteer event with volunteers packing book kits for community members, 10:30 a.m. Saturday, George Latimer Central Library, 90 W. Fourth St.; family story time with Carter reading the picture book “Alma and How She Got Her Name” by Juana Martinez-Neal, 11 a.m. Saturday, George Latimer Central Library.

Kao Kalia Yang must be one of the busiest people in the literary community. Earlier this month this popular author launched her new children’s book “The Rock in My Throat,” about a Hmong girl who stopped talking in school because she saw her parents shamed when they tried to speak English and how she regained her voice. Now Yang, who lives in St. Paul, introduces her adult memoir of survival, “Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life.”

Yang, born in a refugee camp in Thailand after her family fled war in Laos, came to America when she was 6. In “Where Rivers Part” she recalls what her mother and the Hmong people lived through and what they eventually overcame through their experiences with leaving everything they knew to start new lives. It is about the strength of the bond between mother and daughter and the lengths we go to ensure the safety and happiness of those we love.

(Courtesy of the publisher)

Other adult books by Yang include “The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir” and “The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father,” both winners of Minnesota Book Awards. “The Song Poet” also inspired a Minnesota Opera production. Among her children’s books are “From the Tops of the Trees,” winner of an American Library Association award and “Yang Warriors,” based on her memories of playing with her friends in the refugee camp. She co-edited “What God Is Honored Here?” and wrote a collective memoir about refugee lives, “Somewhere in the Unknown World.”

Yang will celebrate publication of “Where Rivers Part” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, at Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Ave., Mpls., presented by Valley Booksellers of Stillwater and Literature Lovers’ Night Out. $25 advance general admission. For ticket information go to the Literature Lovers’ Night Out web page.

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For your reading pleasure today, a twisty domestic suspense novel and a strange/wonderful journey through a damaged brain seeking healing through art.

(Courtesy of Lake Union Publishing)

“Fortune”: by Ellen Won Steil (Lake Union Publishing, $16.99)

Ellen Won Steil (Courtesy of the author)

It was as though they were the Witches of Rosemary Hills. A trio of outcasts at this point, assembled around the table to determine their next move. It didn’t matter what choices they had made since that night eighteen years ago to catapult them away from it. It was a game of chess they could never win, carrying them back together, no matter what. This was their bond. This was the inevitable cost of what they’d done. — from “Fortune”

It was prom night 2004 when good friends Alex, Cleo and Jemma were covered in blood as they did what needed to be done. It was their secret and they couldn’t know it was the same night the body of a baby the town called Baby Ava was found. The child was buried and the mystery surrounding her death was never solved.

As “Fortune” begins it’s 2022 and Cleo Song, Alexandra Collins and Jemma Slater haven’t seen one another for years. Now they are all back in Rosemary Hills. Cleo is a Korean American (as is the author) who has moved in with her mother along with her young son. Jemma is a controversial state senator who has a son and a teen daughter who has secrets, and Alex is a top divorce lawyer whose own marriage is crumbling. She sees her dominating mother although Maud tormented her when she was a child.

When the town’s richest man dies, his widow Edie discovers in a deposit box she didn’t know existed the names of the three women on top of a yellowed picture of a baby. Why did her beloved husband leave this strange memento?

To unlock the secret, Edie announces a $43 million lottery open to everyone in the town. All they need to do is donate a drop of their blood. This is just her ruse to find a DNA match — and there is one.

But if readers who think they know where this twist-and-turn story is going, think again. At least half the book is taken up with the three women’s childhoods and current family lives, planting clues. Now the trio is being threatened by Edie, who insists if they don’t donate their blood she will go to the authorities.

And there are mysteries within mysteries. For instance, who is the silent and unseen patient Cleo is hired to read to?

If you want stories about women at a critical time of their lives, this one is for you.

The author, who lives in Minnesota, grew up in Iowa and holds a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law. She says she believes most good stories have at least a hint of darkness in them. But she offsets that belief with tender writing about the women’s love for their children.

(Wisdom Editions)

“In the Cobwebs of My Mind”: by Megan Bacigalupo (Wisdom Editions, $18.99)

Nabu then tossed letters and numbers into my subarachnoid space. Spider used all eight of her legs and spread many alphabets in different directions and languages… some were primordial, some pictographs. Spider then said, ‘Nabu is the keeper of these letters. I am associated with magic. In the web so are you. We exist in the cobwebs of your mind. This is your reality.’ — from “In the Cobwebs of My Mind”

Megan Bacigalupo (Courtesy of the author)

Subtitled  “A Vivid and Magical Recollection of Surviving a Brain Hemorrhage,” this unusual book is a window into the author’s artistic, imaginative mind as she grapples with the effects of a brain aneurysm in 2017. She knows how lucky she is to have survived an ordeal that kills people or leaves them disfigured and with other physical problems.

Bacigalupo has an artistic brain, and her memories of those two weeks in the ICU and months after are interesting because they are sometimes supernatural. For instance, in the hospital she felt surrounded by those living and dead, including her grandmother with her beehive hairdo. She has always felt a dual relationship with a horse who led her through the hospital halls and appeared when she needed help. Throughout her story she is accompanied by her muses Spider and Nabu, a Babylonian god of writing.

The author’s need to tell her story led her down many paths. She wrote essays and short stories and used other forms but it wasn’t until she was mentored by Bain Boehlke, former Jungle Theater artistic director, that her imagination took a leap. At her mentor’s urging, she began to envision her experience as a play or one-woman show, and much of the book is made up of her efforts to write a script and sketch out stage settings using her own artwork ranging from the abstract (spider webs like filaments in the brain) to her spirit guides.

This is not a linear book; brain trauma doesn’t work that way. It meanders through the author’s research on how the brain works, her hospital records, memories of how she felt just before the crisis as she rode a bike, and the exhaustion and confusion after her surgery. The best way to read it is to just go along on her journey, which Bacigalupo dedicated to all survivors of brain hemorrhage.

The author holds a degree in human services and has worked in the Minneapolis restaurant business for decades. Since her stroke she has had articles published in national publications. Her parents, Charleen and Ronald, are well-known in the Twin Cities. Ronald, who died in 2003, was publisher for a few years of the Highland Villager newspaper. The couple co-founded the Downtowner community newspaper in the 1970s. After their divorce, Charleen founded Charleen Bacigalupo Productions. In the book Megan thanks her mother for her support.

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All around us there are signs of spring. Already, daylight saving time has kicked back in. If you’re a frequent reader of Skywatch, you know I’m not a big fan of it because it means I have to wait until later in the evening to start my star-watching because of the later sunsets.

The official start of spring, otherwise known as the Vernal Equinox, takes place this Tuesday, March 19, at 10:07 p.m. That’s when the sun starts rising and setting above an imaginary line in the sky called the celestial equator, a projection in Earth’s terrestrial equator. From now until June 20, the sun will arc higher and higher in the sky.

(Mike Lynch)

One fallacy about the Vernal Equinox is that that’s the day that we have equal amounts of daylight and darkness, 12 hours and 12 hours. That’s not true because of something called astronomical refraction. The shell of the atmosphere surrounding our Earth bends the light coming from the sun or any other celestial object. The maximum effect of the bending of light is along the horizon, where the atmosphere is the thickest from the observer’s perspective. When the sun appears right at the horizon, it’s below it. So when the sun is setting, it has actually been below the horizon for about five minutes. Conversely, in the morning, the sun may appear just above the horizon when it’s still below the horizon. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what happens! If you check the sunrise and sunset times for this Tuesday, you’ll discover that the days are well over 10 minutes longer than the nights on that day.

So when do the days become equal to nights this time of year? The answer is this weekend when we’re celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Yet another reason to celebrate one of the greatest feast days in the year, in my book.

In the night sky, this time of year, one of my favorite signs is the appearance of the bright star Arcturus. It’s the second-brightest nighttime star, and when you start to see it rising in the northeast by around 9:30 to 10 p.m., spring is right around the corner. Arcturus is also the brightest star in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, which looks much more like a kite rising its side in the east than a shepherd.

Beehive cluster (Mike Lynch)

Another celestial sign of spring is the Beehive star cluster, located in the faint constellation Cancer the Crab. Don’t bother trying to find this constellation, though. It’s one the faintest of over 65 constellations available in Minnesota and western Wisconsin annually. The Beehive cluster is actually brighter than most of the stars in the constellation. Instead, look in the high southeastern sky about halfway between the brighter constellations Leo the Lion and Gemini the Twins.

If it’s dark enough where you are, the Beehive cluster, known astronomically as Messier object or M-44, looks like a faint patchy cloud. When ancient Greek astronomers like Hipparchus observed it around 130 B.C., he registered it in his star catalog as a “cloudy star.” The Romans saw it as a manger and called it Praesepe, Latin for manger.

In the early 1600s when Galileo poked his telescope toward the Praesepe and saw it as a cluster of stars it eventually became known as the Beehive cluster.  You can easily see how it got that moniker with your not-so-crude telescope or even a decent pair of binoculars.

Astronomically, the Beehive is considered an open star cluster, a group of young stars that emerged out of the same hydrogen gas nebula. Astronomers believe the stars in this cluster to be about 600 million years old, and while that’s considered a young age for a star, it is rather old for a cluster of young stars. Many of these same kinds of clusters are gravitationally broken up before the time the stars are that old, but the Beehive is hanging in there. That “teenage mob” of at least 200 stars is over 3400 trillion miles away and over 130 trillion miles wide.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

Starwatch programs

Tuesday, March 19, 7:30-9:30 p.m. at Afton Elementary School, in Afton, through Stillwater Community Education. For more information and reservations, call 651-351-8300 or visit stillwaterschools.org/community-education.

Saturday, March 23, 7:45-9:45 p.m. through the City of Ramsey Parks and Recreation. For more information, location, and reservations call 763-443-9883 or visit www.ci.ramsey.mn.us/269/Parks-and-Recreation.

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When Jim Audette first started cutting hair, prices were $5.75 for men’s hairstyling, every barber’s booth had a phone to make appointments and he would see some clients every two weeks.

Audette is still surrounded by the familiar sounds of electric razors and the barber pole twirling in the corner of the room, but haircuts often now cost $30 or more, most people make appointments online and he sometimes doesn’t see clients for two or three months.

Jim Audette with his awards from a barber competition in 1967, after winning first place in the men’s hairstyling contest, when he had only been cutting hair for four years. Pictured in the St. Paul Life newspaper, he was declared the “hottest of the bunch” among the Barbers group in the article. (Courtesy of Jim Audette)

Now working at Good Neighbor Barber Shop on Randolph Avenue in St. Paul these days, Audette is in his sixth decade clipping hair. On Feb. 2, he turned 80.

“It’s a hard thing to get out of,” Audette said. “They say that barbers are the only occupation that stay in the same business for their whole life. That’s true, because I know a few pretty old ones.”

The apprentice

Growing up in northwestern Minnesota, Audette noted that the town’s barber seemed to know everybody around. Originally planning on attending the University of Minnesota, the 18-year-old Audette met barber Joe Francis in 1962 when he came into a barber school. Francis took Audette under his wing as an apprentice after Audette gave him a haircut.

Francis founded the Barbers, one of the first barbershop franchises in the country, which had humble beginnings in the Highland Village Shopping Center with a single shop. Francis taught Audette new techniques such as European razor cutting, a trend in the early 1960s, that allowed the shop to raise their prices and bring in new, curious clientele. It involved running a sharp razor along the hairline to make precise cuts.

Audette began competing in barber competitions, some of which took place right in St. Paul as their popularity spread around the country. One Saturday at the St. Paul Hotel, as Audette recalls, he won one of his first competitions, a hairstyling contest.

Barber Jim Audette, who turned 80 last month, gives long-time customer Rick Cunningham a trim at the Good Neighbor Barber Shop on Randolph Ave. in St. Paul on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“They didn’t want to give me the trophy, because I was an apprentice, and it was for master barbers,” Audette said. “Joe Francis made a big deal out of it … (so) they gave it to me anyway, finally.”

Competitions took Audette from St. Paul to Chicago, Texas, New York and Canada. He even became a judge after a while. Some competitions had more than 100 participants, so even placing in the top 50% felt like an accomplishment.

The Handlebar

Audette left the Barbers after nine years to open his own shop, called the Handlebar, at Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue in St. Paul. Eventually he moved out of that location due to construction, and Audette’s final shop before semi-retirement in 2020 was right where he started — just a few doors down from the old Barbers location in Highland Village.

Audette now works alongside Mike Haeg and Nick Hoshor, the owner of Good Neighbor, using space in his shop after it opened in 2021. Now limiting his schedule to three days a week and no more than four customers a day, Audette no longer is the owner of a shop, but has maintained many of his clients.

“What I’ve always liked is you get people from all walks of life,” Audette said. “That’s what makes this business really interesting — because they’re all interesting.”

Barber Jim Audette, who turned 80 last month, gives long-time customer Rick Cunningham a trim at the Good Neighbor Barber Shop on Randolph Ave. in St. Paul on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Building a reputation via connections and word of mouth, Audette used to tell the barbers he hired that if they could retain one customer that day, they would have a business clientele built in a year. Having been a barber for politicians, university faculty and players on the Minnesota Vikings and Twins, Audette maintained a higher-profile clientele alongside his committed base of some clients who, in some cases, came to him for more than 40 years.

Haircuts over the generations

Some families have sent three or four generations for haircuts by Audette. These connections come with some small perks — cutting hair for car salesmen and restaurant staff have provided fast and friendly service at places sporting loyal customers.

“I did (their hair) no matter where they were, till the day they died,” Audette said. “I think that was probably one of my biggest accomplishments.”

Audette said starting out as a barber isn’t solely about hair cutting skills. A good 15% of the job is social — and barbers have to have the whole package. Audette has worked with some people who are great at cutting hair but not connecting with customers — and some who crack jokes at the barber chair all day but weren’t as skilled with the scissors.

Over the span of his career, the look and feel of the barber shop and trends in hairstyles people ask for have changed from the days when the Handlebar shop boasted individual booths, shoe shiners and manicurists.

Although Audette has clients come in with pictures of what they want, he said picking a haircut is all about collaboration.

“I’ve learned the most from Jim about how to interact with clients,” Hoshor said. “He’s a veteran, and has been doing it longer than anybody that I know.”

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