Would you buy licorice from this animal?

 

THE MARTEN

“The marten lives in the woods of northern Canada.  It is unique in all the animal kingdom in that its gums are black.”

 

How would you rate the preceding as a headline?   Not a real headline, the advertising kind.  Would you slow down to read it on a billboard? Or would you drive by without giving it a second glance?

 

Secondarily, would it make you consider purchasing Panda Brand soft licorice?

 

“If I saw that on a billboard, Trey, I would definitely slow down. Maybe stop and take a picture.”

“Tuey,” the young person corrected me.  “My name’s Tuey. Did you think I was a guy?” 

 

I moved my finger across the top of the application in front of me. The name clearly said, “Trey Jordan III.”  I recalled our newly hired seating hostess, Lynda, telling me that a kid had filled out an application for bar boy/copywriter, but she didn’t think he was 21. You must be 21 to work where they serve liquor in Minnesota.

 

“Tuey.  My mistake, I was actually reading from another application; we’ve had so many.  Did you say you knew InDesign, Tuey?”

 

Asking people interviewing for positions as cooks, waitrons and bartenders to come up with ads on the spot may go under the header of “cruel and unusual hiring practices”, but it’s no more unorthodox than our business model. Besides, it isn’t like we’re expecting advertising greatness.

 

Of course, should greatness reveal itself…

 

“Tuey, can I show you something?”

 

“Um, sure.  I guess.”

 

“Follow me, please.”

 

I led our young applicant out of the dining room, past the big six-tops, empty now, around which our employees had gathered for so many a late-night brainstorming session.  At these tables, a rag-tag group of part-time restaurant workers and full-time screw-ups had transformed themselves into savvy marketing men and women, capable of creating category-bending work for amusement parks and funeral parlors and everything in between.

 

OK, the campaign for Lempke-McKray, your Family Funeral Partners was ultimately dreamed up at the Hoffbrau down the street, but we’d started the process here.

 

When we entered the kitchen, Tuey asked me about a framed picture and I explained that it was a portrait of our mad genius, Pongo, who despite struggling with English, was able to distill every marketing problem into a single word.  Or three.

 

“I thought he was an orangutan in a white uniform.”

 

“He may have been that, too.  Hey, guys!”

 

Tuey was introduced to our cook, Jorge, and Jorge Junior, Jorge’s nephew and officially the Smugglers’ Inn landscaper.  Both men were scrubbing a stainless-steel broiler hood that had been allowed to grow dull during the pandemic.

 

The two young people, I noted, smiled at each other.

 

Past Jorge’s white-tile performance space and the smell of cleanser, we arrived at the food prep area and the Hobart 88. 

 

“What does it do?”

 

“It’s a chain driven auto-ride commercial dishwasher, sprayer and disposal.

 

“It looks, like, super old.”

 

“This one was made in 1973, but it looks like every Hobart dishwasher since the 1960’s.  Would you like to try it out?”

 

And that, folks, is how you hire a dishwasher.  I’ll ask Lynda to get that Trey kid back in; he can’t be any worse than what’s-her-T-name. Can you imagine trying to sell licorice based on the fact it turned your mouth into something out of Walking Dead?

 

I didn’t tell hostess Lynda that the two Jorge’s have green cards that look like they were rendered in colored pencil or that there is a bottle of Thai whiskey spiked with wasp venom under the bar for patrons who wish to get more screwed-up than they can with a five-shot rum punch. We are scrupulous about protecting our customer from food-born illnesses, bad service, bar violence or marketing campaigns that fail to move the needle, but we aren’t the police.  Or the mall cops.

 

Of course, Smugglers’ Inn will be a different place going forward.  New people.  New seating capacity limits.  And new debt.  Even now, I feel the creditors closing in.

 

Has Smuggler’s Inn survived the plague only to be pecked to death by ducks?  Oh, hell no. We were under threat of bankruptcy when we became a restaurant/ad agency a decade ago. Our employees then, true madmen and women, had nearly laughed themselves sober coming up with ads and posters hawking the physical assets of a theme restaurant that hadn’t redecorated since the 1970’s.  The president of the popular industry rag, Restaurant News, keeps a framed, 900-line ad from that campaign in his office.  It offers a seven-foot disco ball for sale with the come on, “Gay?  Thinking about it?”

 

That was one of the tamer ones.

 

It must have been a slow news week, because the story of a group of employees who all seemed to be frustrated comedians stepping up to sell-off the restaurant where they worked warranted a one-minute bit on the local ABC affiliate.  In it, bartender Scotty (in reality, an Irishman) badgers the junior reporter into buying a meat cleaver for $20 rather than witness Scotty cut off his big toe with the scary-looking utensil.  The footage of Scotty propping his bare foot on a cutting board and taking a couple of practice swipes while the reporter frantically fumbles for his wallet went viral.  And Smugglers’ Inn was famous.

 

OK, so everything went viral ten years ago.  Give us a break, will you?  The point is, the Smugglers’s Inn pirate ship may have foundered on the pandemic sandbar, but she did not sink and now the tide is coming in. 

 

So, good citizens, hide your sheep and lock up your accounts, because a new crew of Smugglers’ Inn misfits is preparing an assault on all that is safe and predictable. As our logo, Cap’n Saltee is fond of saying, “Arr! Arr! Arrrrrrrrrr!”

 

Moose's Law

 

 

Well, now I can say that I’ve done it: Turned a chickadee into a canary. 

 

I mean, the hard thing was catching the chickadee.  For two days, Jorge, Jorge Jr. and myself had chased the bird from rafter to rafter in this cavernous space, trying to knock the little bastard out of the air with hand towels.  We clobbered it a couple of times, good.

 

Sadly, we could never locate where it fell before the chickadee, Michael Meyers-like, would rise up and escape to some high perch where it was out of range of our flying linen.

 

Forgive me, I haven’t explained why we needed the chickadee.  It has to do with a dog.  Moose the dog.

 

Before we embark on another twisty-turny adventure centered around America’s best-loved restaurant cum marketing agency, let me take this opportunity to thank you, the readers of this blog, for your continued interest.

 

You know what a hot mess this blog is.  And, if you don’t, here’s a quick fill-in:

 

Smugglers’ Inn is a restaurant and sometimes advertising agency located in a stand-alone building in the Northtown Shopping Center complex, which straddles the communities of Blaine and Spring Lake Park, Minnesota.  Since shortly after the term “Chinese virus” began trending, our restaurant has been shuttered.  I, Smug’s night manager, along with head chef, Jorge and Jorge’s nephew, Jorge Jr., our (cough) “landscaper” have been living on site, seeing to it that the premises remain

secure.  And no perishable food goes to waste.

 

With me so far?  I hope so because this next part is embarrassing enough without having to repeat it.  

 

As Smug’s night manager, it falls on me to see that bills are paid and that a good relationship with our vendors is maintained.  Functions I have diligently performed when I’ve had money coming in from the restaurant or on those (admittedly infrequent) times when we’ve had a paying ad project in the house.

 

With the restaurant closed and our multi-tasking staff disbanded, I decided to do what so many other small businesses were doing when faced with a similar dilemma.

 

I stopped paying bills.

 

Then, I said goodbye to my damage deposit and moved in with Father Smugglers and Mother Inn.  Jorge and Jorge Jr. had been living in Jorge’s RV, so I invited them to move in, too.  Did I mention Jorge is an exceptional cook?

 

Things went well until they didn’t, which seems to be a pattern in our universe.  It was the chickadee that got us busted.

 

During the warmer months, birds are forever flying in through our oversized double doors.  After a few minutes, they leave the way they came, either on their own or because a bunch of available Smuggies form a line and shoo them towards freedom.  

 

The chickadee had come in through a side door, which Jorge had propped open to let in some fresh air since the temperature that day had been a near-tropical 34F.  Because were absolutely NOT supposed to be occupying our building, we didn’t want to swing open those front doors and announce to the world that there were squatters in Smugglers’ Inn. 

 

Instead, we let the thing flap around, making several half-assed attempts to chase it back to the side door which is at the end of a wheelchair ramp that is mostly obscured by a hedge.

 

Did I mention that, in addition to being an exceptional cook, Jorge Senior has the calm, even temper of a South American drug lord?  When a chickadee dropping landed on Jorge’s pomaded hair and Jorge had responded by hurling a one-pound pewter plate straight up like some lethal frisbee, I decided that the risk of being discovered was less than the risk of being decapitated.

 

So, there we were, banging on pots, trying to herd the chickadee out through those big, wide-open front doors when a Mall security guard sticks his bullet-shaped head in and said, “Who’s there?”

 

Jorge, whose blood was still up, said some not-very nice things about the security guard’s mother.  I tried my best to smooth things over, but I knew that there was no way Mr. Mall Cop wasn’t going to tell his bosses that there were people living in an officially closed Smugglers Inn.  The security company would pass this news to the shopping center, technically our landlords.  Who weren’t getting their rent.

 

I acted quickly.  The first thing I did was shut the front doors, trapping the chickadee inside.  I wasn’t worried about getting evicted.  Any eviction notice would have to be served by an officer of the Coon Rapids Sheriff’s Department and they, like sheriff’s departments around the state, had declared a moratorium on serving eviction notices. 

 

I was worried about the power company.  People’s Gas and Electric had been pretty good about accepting my excuses instead of payments on our unpaid balance.  If the landlord told them that the Smugglers’ Inn was an unoccupied commercial building, we’d be in the dark with no heat. 

 

Did I mention this is Minnesota?  It snows in April.

 

Things looked bleak, but Smug’s skeleton crew had one ace up our collective, puffed sleeve: Moose’s Law.

 

You thought I would never get back to that, did you?  Well, sorry to disappoint you, because here is the rest of that story.

 

The name, “Moose’s Law” comes from a beagle, great Dane mix that froze to death when his elderly owner neglected to pay her bill and found her heat shut off in the middle of a sub-zero cold snap.  Moose, in a show of canine fidelity, froze standing in place as if guarding his mistress.

 

In truth, the dog had been posed in this position by one Brian Ingalls, 13, whose parents thought that shoveling the stoop and sidewalk for the doughty lady next door would build character.

 

When young Master Brian didn’t hear Moose’s familiar barking, he entered the unlocked home and found the animal on its side, frozen solid against the front door.  He called 911 and had time to take many pics of Moose propped up on all fours and post one online before the police and paramedics arrived.  Our seating hostess’s stepbrother had received one of the pics, which is why I know the facts.

 

The dog-sicle pic went viral.  It was too graphic for Minneapolis Star or the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, but it made the cover of the Anoka County Shopper, the Coon Rapids Advertiser, the Blaine Water Tower News and even Autotrader.

 

The Blaine City Council hastily passed an ordinance stating that from now on, the power company could not, under any circumstances, shut off the power to a residence if that action might endanger the life of a pet.

 

Dubbed “Moose’s Law” it had all the legal gravitas of a stick of gum, but it was a public relations disaster for the power company who had, to their credit, sent agents to the residence in question on three occasions in an effort to sign the old lady up for a federal assistance program that would have paid her heating bill and most, if not all of her outstanding balance as well.

 

Moose’s owner, it should be pointed out, died also.  Of course, no one cares a fig about human casualties; genuine sympathy is reserved for animals. Our Smugglers’ Inn advertising division exploited this very fact in a series of ads and posters, visible on this site, for The Uptown Clinic.  The ads suck you in with pictures of abused animals.  It’s only when you read the copy that you learn you are being asked to report incidents of child abuse as readily if you had seen someone throttle a pet.

 

We did not have a pet.  So, we would have to make one.  

 

Catching the chickadee was accomplished by using a cardboard box propped up with a cocktail stirrer over a dish of water and some chopped filbert nuts.  Sitting on the bar, the trap looked like something from a Roadrunner cartoon, but the chickadee was either so hungry or so thirsty that it quickly landed and continued eating and drinking even when we pulled the string that pulled the stirrer away and the box dropped, trapping the animal inside.

 

You likely have a little pot of saffron sitting on your spice rack.  We have two-quart containers of the stuff.  It is a key ingredient in our rice pilaf.  And anything else that looks better bright yellow.

 

Like a chickadee. 

 

The clever among you have figured out where this is going.  For everyone else, we are making ourselves a get-out-of-gas bill card.  A canary, in other words.

 

We debated what adhesive to use with the saffron.  Jorge and I voted for the 3M spray adhesive, but when the can that had been sitting on a shelf in the pantry proved to be empty, we let Jorge Jr. have his way and make a liquid paste out of corn starch and water that, to Jorge’s and my surprise, worked gangbusters for sticking the bright yellow spice to the previously grey and black chickadee. The head was all wrong for a canary, but if anyone got that close to our creation, the ruse would be exposed. 

 

Jorge Jr. has been practicing canary warbles and Jorge Senior has shown a talent I didn’t know he possessed and woven a passable wicker bird cage from actual grape vines used in the silk flower trellises that flank our coatroom and the seating hostess’s stand.  For my part, I have improvised a butterfly net from a metal coat hanger and a laundry bag duct-taped to a mop handle.  When they come, I will be chasing a bright yellow blur around the restaurant, calling its name.

 

“Tweety!  Tweety!”

 

Wait, is that…?  Yes!  Another knock at the door.  Junior has begun his warbling.  Wish us luck.  If this works, I swear I’ll put the next of these long entries into an audio file.

 

“Tweety!”

 

 

 

"It looks grim, folks."

 

It's only shaped like a pork chop.

 

We ran out of ground sirloin today. 

We’re down to our last aged New York strip steak.  If we can agree on how to cook it, we will cut it into thirds and eat it for dinner tonight, accompanied with a non-vintage pinot grigio or prosecco because there is no red wine.

 

We are not starving. Yet. We still have a freezer full of frozen mahi-mahi and scallops.  The pantry shelves store, among other things, three and a half 50-lb bags of long grain rice and one-gallon cans of concentrated chicken broth, dried mushrooms and saffron.  In theory, enough fill two standard sized bathtubs with rice pilaf.  But Smuggler’s Inn is not a vegetarian restaurant and we who labor under its slanted awnings crave flesh. And flesh there is none.

 

Hi. It’s me, your normally upbeat voice of

Smugglers’ Inn, America’s favorite ad agency/theme dining experience.  We’ve been hanging out at shuttered location in Coon Rapids, Minnesota for, oh, 93 days now and I’m afraid we’re getting a bit daft.  ARRRRR-rrrr!  Sorry, pirate talking. Can’t help it.

 

“We” would be myself, Juan and Juan’s nephew, Juan Junior.  Or, Cap’n, First Mate, Mr. Sunny Acapulco and Cabin Boy.  You may know the two Juans from previous blog entries devoted to the activities of Smugglers’ Inn, the restaurant.

 

While Sunny’s —- sorry, Juan Senior’s English is -- ARRR, Matey!-- excellent, he has zero desire to learn the marketing side of our business.  Which is fine, because Juan is a quality cook.  

 

Cabin Boy -- I mean Juan Junior, would probably not be on Smug’s payroll had our day manager, Carol, not consented to let the handsome 18-year-old handle landscaping duties on the patch of turf and bushes that makes Smugglers’ Inn an island of green in the parking lot of the Northtown Shopping Center—sorry, the Northtown Shopping Experience.  

 

Juan, Sr. keeps trying to move his nephew – Arrr! Avast ye landlubber! – into the dishwasher-slash-salad prep position, but Junior has proven himself a total klutz who breaks as many plates as he cleans.  I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t lost a finger to our lawn mower yet.

 

Not that there is any landscaping happening now.  Smugglers’ Inn, along with every bar and restaurant that doesn’t have outdoor seating---Arrrr! Scurvy dog!  Has been shut down. 

 

Did we try and do a curbside business?  No. Believe it or not, people come to Smugglers’ Inn for the atmosphere.  Also, everything on the menu with the exception of beer cheese soup needs to be served within a five-minute window of when it was prepared.  The lobster tail on your plate may be room temperature when you finish it, but if it isn’t steaming when it arrives at your table, you’re going to send it back and you’re going to cross our restaurant off your “approved” list.

 

So, we’re hiding out.  Playing pirate-go-seek amongst the artificial palms and nautical décor and ARRRRRRRRRR! Going crazy.

 

Avast! Shew yerselves, ye unholy spawn of Neptune and a slow-moving manatee! Step out o’yer hidey-holes by me eight count, or I will skewer yer giblets on the point-o-me cutlass sure as my name’s Cap’n Crunch McNuggets, scourge ‘o the seven seas! And Lake Minnetonka.

 

Where was I?

 

Yes, the pandemic.  We’ll get through it. When I had to end payroll, I let Juan and Juan Junior, who are as legal as depleted uranium whaling harpoons, park the small RV they had been living out of in front of our dumpsters that aren’t getting emptied anymore and move into the restaurant.  With me.  Carol had several standing job offers, (EVERYONE likes Carol), but I am hopeful she’ll be back along with the rest of our core employees when life gets back to normal

 

Life WILL get back to normal.

 

In the meantime, there is no sense in letting all this perishable food go to waste.  To say nothing of four tapped kegs of beer.  Arrrrr!

 

 

 

What we made in 2019 (that wasn't a Mojito).

Nine months?  It’s really been nine months since this blog has been updated?  I guess we’re like your relatives in Florida.  When you don’t hear from us, it means we’ve found work.

Not that America’s favorite restaurant/ad agency couldn’t use more work, but our 14 month-long dry spell ended spectacularly with a mobile and out-of-home campaign that re-defined a category and got our client his fifteen minutes of fame.  Even if he was only famous among undertakers.

When we blogged way back in June, it was to share-—OK, brag about--our recently completed work for the Lempke-McKray family of cemeteries and funerial homes.  You’ll recall the ads.  Each showed the point-of view of someone about to engage in a seriously dangerous activity along with the line, “Like, go for it,” paid off by the funerial company’s logo. The versions for the client also included the line, “The First Family of cemeteries and funeral parlors”.  We dropped that the first family crap for our reprints.  Not needed.

 

Owing to the fact every modern daredevil has some type of helmet with a Go-pro Camera permanently affixed to it, securing video for the campaign translated to about an hour of online research.  We found stellar footage of a parkour athlete pausing before a 10-foot gap between rooftops, a BMXer with the front tire of his bike cresting over the lip of a ski jump and the feet of an Acapulco cliff diver peering over the void, all of which were so unsettling they induced nervous laughter in just about everyone who saw them.  The posters were actually more work.  Kat, our seating hostess and design student, had moved on, forcing us to hire someone who knew Photoshop and to cobble together some pictures found online with photographs we took of the tip of a skateboard and someone running with the bulls in Paloma.

 

All in all, our out-of-pocket was around $250, plus another $100 for pitchers and brats from our brainstorming session at the Hofbrau.  As any marketing professional will tell you, if you can keep your costs for doing an integrated marketing campaign under $500, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.

“Almost.”  Uncle Jer proved to be one of those clients you really like at the beginning of a project and then, nine-tenths of the way through it, turns to you and says, “You guys are too expensive,” and “Brittany and I can take it from here.”

Which was news to Brittany, whose skill set included showing people to their tables, having red hair and being Uncle Jer’s niece.  Our newest seating hostess was, by her own admission, ill prepared to take over the implementation of an integrated campaign or hiring a web designer and coder.  “Hey, I’m just the introducer,” she said, coining a term George W. Bush would have approved of. 

 

What does it mean when your first real advertising assignment in a year makes you wish you wistful for the simplicity of slinging mojitos and serving up plates of surf ‘n turf to teachers and cops?  I think it just means that Smugglers’ Inn, the marketing concern, is ready for a fresh challenge.  One that will wash away the bitter taste of seeing what could have been a campaign that defined advertising in the late two thousand teens sealed in a lead-lined box and thrown into a volcano.  With extreme prejudice.

The day after Uncle Jer was on WCCO, the local CBS affiliate, talking about his “wacky” ad campaign, (which he forgot to say he hadn’t created), he received a call from an investment bank interested in acquiring the First Family of Cemeteries and Funeral Parlors to go with the other 25 unrelated businesses they had bought at fire sale prices.  It turns out that the whole time that we were frantically preparing to roll out the Washburn-McKay campaign, Uncle Jer and his lawyer (the same lawyer who had recommended against hiring Smugglers’ Inn) were negotiating the terms of a sale to Caswell Capital of Colorado Springs. Caswell Capital had no intention of sponsoring X-game athletes or seeing ads for the death industry break the one million views tally on YouTube.  They bought up companies and either sold off the pieces or restructured them so that they could function (barely) with half the people.  Uncle Jer might have told us, if only so we could rush ahead and run all the work once so it would be eligible for awards shows.  

 

Not that we can afford to enter award shows now.  The Northtown Shopping Center is simultaneously dying and raising rents on its remaining businesses.  Like Smugglers’ Inn.  Life is hard and then you get free health care, as the saying goes.  Looking back on what our prospects were a year ago, we at Smugglers’ Inn can’t help but feel optimism looking forward to this shiny new decade. 

Mixed with fear because in two days, Smug’s will be hosting its 47^rd New Year’s Eve and all the drunkenness, atrocious music, fisticuffs, returned steaks, vomit and broken stemware that the end of December always entails. Happy New Year, dear readers.  Drive safely and avoid the Coon Rapids-Anoka corridor at all costs.  I promise it won’t be another six months before I blog again. When I do, there will be big, BIG news to report.  Stay alive for it.

Back in the saddle, part 2.

“The first thing we do, we’ll give all the lawyers wedgies.”  I think Shakespeare said that.  Fie, and fo fum on the pencil-necked lot of them.   After having done the best ad campaign in the category, EVER, Our client, the Lempke-McKray family of funeral parlors and cemeteries was having second thoughts.   All because of some (cough, spit) lawyer.

"So what, exactly, did the attorney say?”  Carol, our day manager/senior art director asked Arpil, whose familial connection to the McKray in Lempke-McKray was the reason that Smug’s ad division had come out of hibernation to sell funeral plots to millennials.   April, if you haven’t been reading this blog, was Smugglers’ Inn’s new seating hostess, except she had been given a promotion to server for her role in landing the restaurant its first genuine branding assignment in over a year.  

“He said he was 50/50,” said April, twirling a ginger lock around a manicured finger.  “He wouldn’t stop Uncle Jer from running the stuff you did, but he pointed out that there was, like, risk.”

“Well,  Uncle Jer has a risk of me kicking his dimpled, entrepreneurial ass if he thinks that we did all that for free.”

 I put my hand on Carol’s shoulder and led her away from the hostess’ lectern where the three of us had congregated.   There were only six people having dinner at 5:45, but I thought it best we didn’t brawl in front of them, early-dining cheapskates though they may be.   Carol made one of those corny, “my eyes are on you” gestures over her shoulder at April, who stuck out her tongue.  Did I mention I work in a playground?

“She hates me,” said April, twirling a new lock . “I’m nice to HER.”

“She’s just frustrated.  I think we all are.  What can we do to convince your uncle and this lawyer that he should just trust us and go with this campaign?”

“My mom always called him her brother in law, the adding machine.  Uncle Jer always has a reason for doing what he does.  And the reason is always money.”

  “Then he should be all over this.   We have everything figured out, social media, SEO, events, out of home advertising, targeted partnerships.   I wouldn’t be surprised that this campaign would increase their name recognition by 50-70% and traffic to the website by several fold.”

“You mean, it would win an award.”

“Awards are nice.”

Before you criticize me for being just another ad man who places winning some brass statuette or Lucite globule over the needs and wishes of his client, let me tell you some things about this campaign.  The first thing is, I didn’t do it.  Well, I was the creative director.  Which means I could attach my name to it, I suppose—but the real authors were Scotty and Erin, our bartender and relief seating hostess, respectively.  If anyone should be credited with “Like, go for it,” it would be those two.  

  

Of course, I helped.  I started the brainstorming session by asking, “what’s the very opposite of funerals and death?”   This approach exploits something called “cognitive dissonance” which happens when you have to consider two  mutually exclusive things at the same time.   I found it in a marketing book.  Well, an online course.  OK, it was a YouTube video.  The point is, I FOUND IT.

“Skydiving!” said Erin.

“Punching a cop!” said Scotty.

“Punching a meter maid!” said Erin.

“Punching a shark!” 

“Punching the Little Mermaid!  Or Santa.  Or  that bitch,  Mother Theresa!”

“She’s dead.”

“Punching dead Mother Theresa!”

“Go for it! Arrr!”

“Arrr!” said Erin.

“Arrrrrrrrr!” said all of us, pounding our faux pewter beer steins on the Hofbrau’s faux Medieval banquet table.

And there you have it.   A first-round knockout that Mike Tyson would be proud of.  “Go for it!”, when combined with the visual of an absurdly  dangerous activity,  made you smile.  When you kiss it off with the logo of Lempke-McKray  cemetaries and funeral services,  the immediate reaction is instantaneous giggling.  Well, that would be a human being’s reaction.   A lawyer…

”April, where does this lawyer live?  I mean, where’s his office?”

“I think his name is Steinholtz.  It’s Stienholtz and another name. ”

“I’ll look it up in the yellow pages.”

“The…?”

“Nevermind.  Before your time.”  I pulled out my iPhone and Googled “Stienholtz  lawyer, Minnesota and found “Steinholtz and Schwantz,  attorneys at law.  Workers compensation and accident/injury a specialty.”

“An ambulance chaser!”

April had stopped twirling her hair and her expression was something that might pass for concern.

“What are you going to do?”

There are time when people ask, “What are you going to do?” and sincerely want you to tell them your intentions.  This was not one of those times.

“Nothing,”  I lied.  “Nothing at all.”