The Twin Cities Chesterton Society meets the last Tuesday of every month at 7:00 pm at the University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul, Minnesota. We gather in the Club's library, the only place in the building where cigar smoking is permitted. The paneled, book-lined room overlooks downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi River. We tried meeting in public places, like pubs, but there are no pubs in America. There are instead bars, which usually have loud music, or even worse, loud televisions, never conducive to discussion, or anything else. We also tried meeting in libraries, but alas, they do not allow cigar smoking and beer drinking, also not conducive to discussion. We had the same lack of completeness meeting in bookstores. But now we have found the perfect home. Meetings are planned and presided over by "Acting Czar," Dale Ahlquist, and minutes are taken by the prevaricating Secretary, Greg Holupchinski.

At every meeting, some amazing fact about Chesterton is revealed by John Pink, who has been a book collector and Chestertonian for most of his 83 years. We have between 10 and 20 members at each meeting. Membership is immediately bestowed on anyone who attends. Currently over 50 people have been made members, whether they like it or not. But we haven't found any who don't like it, only some who can't make it to the meetings. In our first two years of our existence, we have committed the following and other faultless felonies, all of which we would recommend to local Chesterton Socities getting started around the country.

We . . .

• Listened to a tape of Orson Welles' radio rendition of The Man Who Was Thursday (originally aired within weeks of his infamous "War of the Worlds" broadcast)
• Hosted "An Evening With G.K. Chesterton" a one-man show by John "Chuck" Chalberg, a perfect introduction to Chesterton; a delightful time for everyone
• Devoted a session to Chesterton's humor
• Held a "favorite Chesterton quotation" night
• Watched the video of The Dectective starring Alec Guiness as Father Brown in a film loosely based on "The Blue Cross."
• Discussed The Napoleon of Notting Hill in light of Michael Collins, Oscar Wilde, and Batman.
• Rolled up our sleeves and dealt with the thorny issue of anti-Semitism by listening to and discussing the tape of a talk given at the Midwest Chesterton Conference in Milwaukee in June, 1997. The speaker was Rabbi Mayer Schiller. We highly recommend this tape to anyone interested in this topic. It is the most honest and refreshing and constructive approach to this question we have ever encountered.
• Even had a meeting devoted to Distributism, at which everyone not only stayed awake, but agreed that there should be a meeting every year about Distributism.

We were planning on having an examination of Chesterton's revealing criticism of freemasonry, but one of our members was mysteriously dismembered, and we thought it best to indefinitely postpone this discussion.

There are hundreds of topics yet to cover, and future meetings will be devoted to Father Brown (and more detective fiction), Charles Dickens, Feminism, Education, the Ballad of the White Horse, the Everlasting Man, the missing essays, the found essays, the number you first thought of. . .

©1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 The American Chesterton Society, all rights reserved

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