June 27, 2017

Excerpt of a letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, included in the book Minnesota Diaries:

What a day — the first in Duluth this year completely of the type known to meteorologists as a p.d., or “absolutely perfect day” — cool, the air sweet, sky ringing blue except for lovely lazy clouds, as idyllic and indolent as a Grecian glade, yet full of energy for people from Chicago … the lake a mirror of many kinds of blue and gray glass, some sleek, some delicately wrinkled … …

Last week I bicycled to Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood with a friend — to Amity Coffee and BEER?

Today is the one-year anniversary since the law was revised. The Duluth City Council repealed a more than 125-year-old Lakeside liquor ban on June 27, 2016. Amity Coffee became the neighborhood’s first seller of alcoholic beverages four months later. …

Perfect Duluth Day reported in early May that a new musical play written and directed by Conor McPherson with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan was scheduled to open at the Vic Theater in London in July. What wasn’t known at the time is the play is set in Duluth.

Audio clips of two tracks recorded as part of a workshop for Girl from the North Country can be heard in the PDD post from May. Three reports verifying the setting of the play are listed below.

From the BBC New story “Bob Dylan: Conor McPherson on writing the musical“:

Conor McPherson has set the play in a guesthouse in Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth in Minnesota. It is called Girl from the North Country, after a track Dylan wrote in 1963.

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