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The week before last, my wife and I served food and washed dishes in the Scandi Kitchen at the Norsk Høstfest. You have almost undoubtedly heard of the Norsk Høstfest and thought of it every time Minot, North Dakota has crossed your mind. In the off chance that you are the one person in North America who has never heard of it, here is the Høstfest website’s description of the event:
“Norsk Høstfest, North America’s largest Scandinavian festival, is an annual celebration of the rich cultural heritage of the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.”
I had considered volunteering as emcee for a few shifts at the Oslo stage. I mean, who could be more perfect for a job than a guy named Trygve working at the Oslo stage? I’ll tell you who: A guy named Trygve Hammer emceeing at the Oslo stage. He’s got the Norwegian ancestry and first name, and the MC Hammer jokes write themselves. I will sign up for that gig next year.
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This year, though, I was mostly washing dishes. In high school, I washed dishes at a local restaurant, so I thought volunteering at the Scandi Kitchen would be loads of fun and make me feel like a teenager again. That wasn’t quite the experience I had, but I did wash dishes with a friendly and unassuming volunteer named Dorothy. She goes by Dot.
You might be more familiar with Dot than you are with Minot, North Dakota or the world-famous Norsk Høstfest. To understand how that could be, you have to remember—or learn for the first time—that my hometown of Velva, North Dakota is also the home of the first commercial facility to produce Dot’s Pretzels, which are the most famous thing to come out of Velva since Eric Sevareid [ [link removed] ].
It took me a little while to figure out that Dot was the Dot because she wasn’t putting out captain-of-industry or even princess-of-pretzels vibes. She wasn’t wearing a top hat or pince-nez glasses like Scrooge McDuck or a coat made from the hides of Dalmatian puppies like Cruella de Vil. It was warm that day, so I can’t say with one-hundred-percent certainty that Dot didn’t leave a puppy-fur coat at home or have one on order from Kristi Noem’s puppy mill and coat factory in South Dakota, but it would seem quite out of character to me. Dot is no Leona Helmsley. She is more like your favorite playground supervisor from elementary school.
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This past weekend, I attended a meeting of a different kind of dots, blue dots in a red state. It was a gathering of people who believe in public schools and democracy and decency, a gathering of people who believe that we are all in this together and that I am my brother’s keeper and that we prove ourselves to be good neighbors when we show mercy to others. It was the North Dakota Democratic-NPL’s annual Burdick dinner, and Jess Piper [ [link removed] ] was the keynote speaker. Jess is a bright blue dot in the red state of Missouri.
There are a few folks I wouldn’t invite to dinner who claim Missouri as their political home. Edward R. Martin Jr., for instance. He is the Department of Justice weaponization czar bent on prosecuting all of Donald Trump’s political foes. Trump nominated Martin to be the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, but he was a bridge too far for some Republican senators, which is saying a lot. Of course, like Matt Gaetz, Edward R. Martin Jr. would have been confirmed if Trump had pressed on in the face of opposition. Those Republican senators would have folded; just like yours, just like mine. But the fact that a few Republican senators found the spine to say they would oppose Martin’s confirmation puts him in a very exclusive and unseemly club.
Jess Piper’s speech was a barnburner. She talked about “running everywhere, contesting every race” in our red-state Laboratories of Autocracy [ [link removed] ]. She talked about her own experience [ [link removed] ] running for the state legislature in Missouri, where public school teachers are not allowed to run for the state legislature. If the dinner hadn’t ended at such a late hour, I think the audience would have demanded a list of doors to knock as soon as we left the room.
Jess has quite a large following on TikTok, which is where I found her in between videos of farm animals and owls and the kinds of cute little rodents that owls might eat. (Those videos were serious research, I may need to take up falconry now that the rodents in our neighborhood are blatantly disrespecting my wife’s cats.) She has that following because she speaks the truth and speaks it plainly.
Like Dot’s Pretzels, blue dots are popping up everywhere. I’m one. You might be one if you care about checks and balances and think we need to be a good nation before we can think about being a great one.
I would continue, but I have a banned-books event to attend. I hear they are serving donut holes and Dot’s Pretzels.

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