The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Secret of the Day is that you should avoid parking in the Guthrie Theater's new parking ramp, once it opens next week. After a "press screening" on Friday, I tried paying my fee in the fully automated ramp with my credit card, only to have it get rejected. Nothing out of the ordinary there. I tried the next one. Then the next. No dice. At this point, I press a button and ask for help. I wait five minutes. I get impatient. I pull back and then pull into the automated exit thingamajig one over, only to suffer another string of credit card rejections. Then the darn autotron ate my ticket, and whaddya know, when the security guard finally arrived, I was asked to pay the "lost ticket fee."

This was a bad experience, made worse by the fact that I drank three cups of coffee and had had no breakfast. But it doesn't quite over-shadow all the fun I had tromping about the interior of that new building that morning, prior to this breakdown. It's darn beautiful inside there--even if the exterior does strongly resemble an IKEA store. Particularly gorgeous are the new proscenium theater (i.e., Guthrie Lab space), which is decorated love dungeon-style in opulent reds, and the deck of the "bridge to nowhere," which offers what is possibly the best view in the city. Also, the new Guthrie has eleven bars! How neat!