Sage Ftacek: "Sweethearts" Short Brigade hunk from Anoka, with a BFA, some Tiktok videos, and some selfies

 

Link to the selfies

 I was interested in Sage Ftacek, because he plays a gay character in the Thanksgiving romcom Sweethearts (2024).  Newly out Palmer (Caleb Hearon) is looking for social contacts at a pre-Thanksgiving party.  He is standing in the kitchen.

A blond guy, maybe Kellan (Jake Bongiovi), yells: "Let's roast this s*cker!"

Kurt: "Yeah, babe! I'll be right there."  He takes a turkey from the refrigerator, and stops to ask Palmer "Do you know anything about cooking?

Palmer "Not really."  

He starts to walk away, but realizing that he could be a gay social contact, Palmer stops him: "Wait, Kurt.  I'm gay."

Kurt responds with a blank expression: "I'm Kurt."

"I know. We've gone to school together since kindergarten."

"I'm gonna try to cook this turkey on the bonfire."

Later Palmer and Lukas, a gay guy who's interested in him, watch Kurt and his boyfriend rip off their shirts and try to set the turkey on fire. 

That's all, just four lines, but look at him.  Extraordinary cute. 

And at 5'8", a a member of the Short Guy Brigade.

He has a very unusual name -- it's Czech, originally meanng "little bird" -- so he should be easy to track down.

First his Instagram.  It says "golf cart dealership," which may be a joke.

Lots of joke pics, like this one of Sage dismantling a mannekin.

A clever way to see three guys at once.

And a backside, which may be his or a friend's.

According to Facebook, Sage grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, where his Dad works at CostCo. He has a younger brother, and a relative who got a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University, specializing in transgender literary texts of the 18th century.  

Sage graduated from the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists in 2018.

The Rutgers Actors Showcase says that he grew up in Minnesota, "sledding and throwing snowballs,"  fell into the "skateboarding and graffiti" scene when not taking the bus into Minneapolis for acting lessons,  and ended up at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where he received a BFA in acting. in 2022.

More after the break. 

The Kensington Runestone

Every summer from kindergarten to college (when I decided to stay home), my parents dragged me on a week's camping trip somewhere up north, to Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Canada.  It was usually pretty dismal, with no tv, no museums, no historic sites, nothing to do but hunt, fish, swim, and mess around in boats.

But during the summer after eighth grade, we went camping in Alexandria, Minnesota, site of the Kensington Runestone.

Young Swedish immigrant Olof Ohlman discovered the 200-pound slab of sandstone covered with Medieval runes in 1898.  It tells about a group of 30 Vikings who left Vinland "on an exploration journy" in 1362, and somehow made it to Minnesota.  One day some of them went fishing, and returned to find the men they left behind "red with blood and death," probably attacked by Skraelings (Indians).

Historians at the time -- and my junior high history textbook 70 years later -- stated categorically that no Europeans made it to the New World before Columbus, so this was a startling discovery, and immediately controversial.  The academic establishment decreed the runestone to be a fake, carved by Ohlman for financial gain.

In 1907, a historian named Hjalmar Holand bought the runestone, and spent the rest of his life trying to prove it genuine, describing how Vikings could well have made it to Minnesota in books like Westward from Vinland (1940) and A Pre-Columbian Crusade to America (1962). 

Most historians today contend that Holand was wrong: the runestone is indeed a forgery. But Alexandria loves its claim to fame.  There's a runestone museum and gift shop, and a 28-foot statue of a Viking, Big Ole.

Today, regardless of whether they believe that the Vikings got as far as Minnesota, all historians recognize that they reached the New World before Columbus, and established a permanent settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

What's the gay connection?

1. The Vikings who explored Minnesota were all male.

2. Olof Ohlmann was rather cute.

3. My junior high history textbook was wrong.  The adults either didn't know about the Viking exploration of America, or they were lying about it.  What else were they hiding? Maybe the upcoming "discovery of girls" that everyone at Washington Junior HIgh was always evoking was a lie, too.