"My eyes are burning!!" or, local happenings

A few weeks ago, my mother and I were driving to the gym and we saw a car stalled out by the side of the freeway. Two men were working on it; rather, one man stood idly by while another was down on his haunches, fiddling with a tire iron, his ass crack hanging out a good six inches.

I was waiting at a red light on 5th Street, and for the entire light, I watched as a lone construction man gripped a jackhammer. He vibrated away on the concrete, his ass crack shucking and jiving out of the back of his jeans.

The other day, a coworker bent down to grab something, and she came frighteningly close to showing off a great deal of her ass crack to the line of public waiting behind the counter.

Just today, a salesgirl was helping a young guy at a shoe store, and as she bent over to remove the paper jammed up into the toe of a pair of Pumas, a good four inches of her butt hung out of her pants. The guy, I'm sure, wasn't going to be too sure about what shoes to buy for a good while.

Now, I know that butt cleavage has been talked about, over and over. With the massive popularity of the thong, it only makes sense that if a woman is willing to have a piece of fabric cutting into her buttcrack all day, she might be willing to show off the top of the thong (thank you, Ultra Low-Rise jeans!!). The next logical step is straight up showing off the crack, no underwear involved (or "low rise" bikinis involved, which lend themselves perfectly to this troubling phenomenon when the woman wearing them fails to hitch up her pants before getting down on her haunches).

But now, the trend has obviously come home to roost. We have ass cracks running all around Duluth, coming out of hiding, letting themselves be seen (and aired out), and not just by portly guys who forgot their belts, but also, more commonly, by young women. And now, the owner of the old Norshor Theatre, Eric Ringsred, wants to turn it into a strip club. The humanity!!

For those of you who are out of the loop, the Norshor is the historic theatre in downtown Duluth, and it's been abandoned, reclaimed, sort of fixed up, closed down due to fire code violations, opened up to show movies and have raves (and other random events), closed, opened, closed... it's obnoxious, really. And now, after the Norshor has been closed for a good while (fire code violations, natch), the Ringsred has come out with a new business plan: strip club or bust!! (No pun intended. Honest.)

Of course, people aren't pleased by this. They don't like strip clubs. Women get naked in them. Seedy people want to see the naked women. Seedy people drink and watch the naked women, and their testosterone gets all whipped up into a frenzy, and then drunken and disorderly behavior occurs out on the sidewalks, scaring the little old ladies who are leaving the Fond Du Luth casino after spending their monthly pension checks on bingo.

Thankfully, there's some sort of random state law that the city attorney or one of his lackeys digged up to squash any hopes Ringsred might have had for turning the Norshor into a bona fide bordello of bare body parts. Mostly, though, it reassures the pius Duluth citizens (ahem, their wives) that no man will be able to see naked boobies and have their testosterone whipped into a frenzy. They'll just have to go down to Canal Park's Club Saratoga, or head online to do a Google search for "Naked Boobies." Wait... they're already doing that? Noooo...

As for the ass cracks, we'll just have to wait for the trend to pass. Maybe those high-rise 80's jeans will come back in style... hello, stone-washed Gitanos!!