Madison, WI – Twice a year, tens of thousands of people descend on Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center to gorge themselves on brats – high-fat pork sausage stuffed with spices inside an intestinal casing. Sconnies go bonkers for brats. So much so that over the course of the last four days, 209,376 of them were consumed on Willow Island alone, a new record.
Welcome to Bratfest, held eight days annually over Memorial and Labor Day Weekend.
Being from Wisconsin, I understand the love affair with brats. Boil them in beer, char them on the grill, then eat… Continue Reading Category Archives: Featured
Sconnies and Their Brats
Madison, WI – Twice a year, tens of thousands of people descend on Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center to gorge themselves on brats – high-fat pork sausage stuffed with spices inside an intestinal casing. Sconnies go bonkers for brats. So much so that over the course of the last four days, 209,376 of them were consumed on Willow Island alone, a new record.
Welcome to Bratfest, held eight days annually over Memorial and Labor Day Weekend.
Being from Wisconsin, I understand the love affair with brats. Boil them in beer, char them on the grill, then eat… Continue Reading Walking the Memorial Mile
Madison, WI – Along Atwood Ave., on Madison’s east side, 5,486 cardboard tombstones stretch for roughly a mile, each one representing a soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of these, 107 are adorned with Wisconsin’s state flag, indicating the native sons and daughters who’ve died in combat. The memorial, now in its fourth year, runs through next Saturday.
Watching over the memorial is Tom Krajewski and Jane Jensen, who I interviewed in 2006 for a long-feature I wrote on the struggles combat vets face when returning to civilian life. Both Jensen and Krajewski are volunteers with the Madison chapter… Continue Reading 24 Hours of ‘Rage’ in Indiana
Indianapolis, IN – Not long after stopping off in Indianapolis, I meet “Bonnie”, a 30-something jam band scenester, at a cafe on the city’s east side. Thirty-three hours into a 50-hour bender, Bonnie is mushy brained from the ecstasy she ate at a show the night before. At the show, she met some kids with a bunch of nitrous tanks and ended up at their hotel instead of her bed. One of the guys, she tells me between sips of her latte with a double espresso shot, is at her house. “We raged hard,” she explains. “Sorry if I’m not… Continue Reading Stood-Up by the Sasquatch Hunter
Overton County, TN – Earlier this year I spoke with Jeffrey Teagle, the self-proclaimed Chattahoochee Bigfoot researcher, about accompanying him on a bigfoot research expedition. He replied that in May, him, Janice Carter and Igor Burstev would be in Tennessee doing field research in Overton County and invited me to join them. They had reserved a cabin in Standing Stone State Park, where, Teagle said, is one of several areas in the south where clans of Sasquatches live.
He said they’d be there May 19 – 21. All good. See ya then. I began researching Janice Carter and Igor… Continue Reading Welcome to Gaw’s, the Best Bar in Overton County
Livingston, TN – I arrived in Livingston in the early evening. Being a puny town in north-central Tennessee, there isn’t much too it. Fast food joints. A gun shop. Cash store. Its salvation is Gaw’s, a divey little joint and pool hall. Driving, interviewing and writing doesn’t leave much time for drinking, but Gaw’s had $1 drafts, so what the hell, I thought. I needed to consolidate some notes, an activity that a cold one always makes a little pleasurable.
I had one. And then another. Before I knew it, I was chatting with Kat, an older lady who… Continue Reading Comp Time with Repo Man Ray Crocker
Nashville, TN – Ray Crocker is a voice of reason in the otherwise chaotic and largely unregulated repossession industry. The mafia failed in the 1950s to bring repos into their rackets, but Crocker has watched over the last 25 years as tow-truck companies and auto auctions have not only low-balled professional companies like Crocker’s, but have also caricaturized repo men as lawless renegades at the ready to strong-arm consumers. On the television show Operation Repo, situations based “on real life events” are re-enacted, depicting repo agents muscle-men wrestling property from owners using headlocks and mace.
Nonsense, says Crocker, 62,… Continue Reading Rebuilding Lives After the Flood
Nashville, TN – Carlo Zantucttiss, 57, lost everything two weeks ago after flood waters washed away his home, decimated his used car business and put out of business a restaurant he rented out. The businesses and properties, which Zantucttiss purchased six years ago, were an investment for retirement, something that now is unlikely.
“All of my money was here,” he says.
He still owes the bank $230,000 and says he’ll be lucky to receive $100,000 from insurance. He may get a loan from FEMA, he says, but even then, the city has told him that he cannot rebuild his properties,… Continue Reading The Perpetual Pit Stop
Well, I’ve officially been in Kentucky for a week and have a few more days to go. I arrived in Bowling Green to research an article on the meth problem for In These Times magazine, but the research slogs on. Today, after my ride along with an undercover drug agent here in Warren County, I intended on bouncing down to Nashville. But last night I received a call from another recovering addict who I’m interviewing Saturday morning. The agent I met with today is on meth-lab call this weekend and said he’d ring me to tag-a-long if he went… Continue Reading The Kentucky Tragedy
Bloomfield, KY – In this grave rests Jerebaum Beauchamp and Anne Cooke, who, since their deaths on July 7, 1826, have lain in an eternal embrace. Forlorn lovers, if you can call them that, Beauchamp and Cooke hatched one of the most diabolical assassination plots in Kentucky history, a revenge tale that has inspired countless works of fiction, including Edgar Allen Poe’s unfinished play Politian and Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time.
At the time, newspapers around the nation published stories about the sensational case, which today would no doubt be prime material for a Dateline exclusive. “It… Continue Reading 
Cigs, Texts and Heartbreak at the Mercury