Item-World: The state of Steve

The state of Steve For its January edition, Esquire magazine asked 50 celebrities -- one from each state -- to share "What They've Learned" over the years. California got cover boy Clint Eastwood. Indiana, Larry Bird. Nevada, Wayne Newton. So who is representing I.W. and our fellow Minnesotans? Steve Zahn. Fine actor, good guy, but was Bob Dylan unavailable? To Zahn's credit, he does share some important thoughts on bourbon, hardware stores and "Sahara" co-star Matthew McConaughey. ("He's the guy who lived down the hall in the dorm, who was better than you at everything.") And he offers some very Minnesotan advice: "Every kid should learn how to swim and how to shoot a .22." Hey, it could have been worse. Pennsylvania is repped by Dwight Schrute of "The Office," aka former Guthrie star Rainn Wilson.

NEAL JUSTIN

Rhymes with 'star' Sure, former Twin Cities journalist David Carr gets plum assignments from the New York Times and recently published a well-reviewed memoir of his druggie years, "Night of the Gun." But he hadn't really made it until last week, when his name appeared in editor Roger Angell's year-end poem in the New Yorker -- especially covetous because it's the first installment of the traditional name-dropping verse that the 88-year-old Angell has penned in 10 years. The couplet -- " ... With gladsome tunes for Teri Garr,/Zaha Hadid and David Carr" -- demonstrates the impressive range of notables Angell manages to cover. Also keeping the former Hopkins lad company in the 100-line poem are J. Lo, Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, Suri Cruise, Bobby Jindal and so on. What next, Carr, a cameo on "Gossip Girl"?

KRISTIN TILLOTSON

Farm kid makes good Actor Joel Hatch didn't stick around the Twin Cities long enough to etch his name and memory into I.W.'s library file. In fact, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune (rightly) described him as a longtime Chicago actor when noting Hatch's presence in "Billy Elliot" on Broadway. But word has finally crackled over the wireless to our I.W. headquarters that Hatch grew up outside Trimont, a southern Minnesota farm town, graduated from Concordia-Moorhead and got a master's degree in theater at the University of Minnesota. Hatch worked briefly in our town, circa 1990, before heading off to a distinguished Chicago career. He got to New York with "Adding Machine," an off-Broadway hit for which he won an Obie Award, and stayed on to originate the role of George in "Billy Elliot," the season's hot new musical. His mother, Jean, reports she saw her son in the show on Christmas night. "He's looking to stay in New York; that seems to be his future," Jean said from the family farmstead.

Graydon Royce

Row, row, row your boat Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell is known for his sharp claws, but he positively purred about a new boathouse designed by Minnesota-born architect Nick Winton and his business partner, Alex Anmahian of Cambridge, Mass. Instead of a faux Victorian boathouse like the others along the Charles River, Winton's team produced two modern glass-and-wood structures inspired by, of all things, tobacco barns. As Campbell noted approvingly, both boathouses and tobacco barns shelter things "to be stored and dried out." Heated and cooled by energy-efficient geothermal wells, the buildings have walls that open like huge Venetian blinds. While rowing is often an elitist sport learned at boarding school, the Community Rowing Boathouse is an egalitarian place that runs programs for Boston schoolkids and wheelchair rowers. Its new building is "such a joy," Campbell wrote, adding that it's "happy to look fresh, new, democratic, and up-to-date, not like an attempt to remind you of the good old days when rowing was a 'gentleman's sport.'"

MARY ABBE