Is A Part Of
A version of this was originally published, and is incredibly still accessible at epinions.com. Thanks to a link at the perpetually popular “Belgium Doesn’t Exist!” page, I will be required to keep this in a prominent location at every version of my blog until the Internet burns itself out (which should be in the next six months or so – but that’s ANOTHER story). I just did a long-overdue rewrite, so I’ll put it here up front instead of back in the archive.
For those of you who are considering to include Minneapolis, Minnesota in your future “See America” plans, there is something you need to know. But let me first explain how I came to learn it.
It started when I attended a 1998 event at Hollywood’s Museum of Broadcasting saluting “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. The emcee, Gavin McLeod, announced that all of the show’s original writers were present “except for Allen Burns, who, as you probably know, is so busy with the Minneapolis Project.” There was a scattering of applause, and I, puzzled, asked the sunglasses-wearing-indoors person next to me what the writer/producer was doing in Minneapolis.
“No, man, he’s not doing anything IN Minneapolis, he is DOING Minneapolis.”
And he went on to explain that the metropolitan area of Minneapolis/St. Paul was the totally fictional creation of Hollywood writers, devised to provide a location for the popular ’70s sitcom.
Is that all? Of course that’s not all! Click Here.
