Doldrums/Shmoldrums

First thing when I showed up in Portland eight years ago, I was informed that I would need to reverse my vacation habits. Plan on going somewhere dry during the winter months,” they advised me. “You’ll want to spend every minute of the summer right here in town.”

Fine, except for one thing. Every summer Portland coasts through a period of disquieting calm, starting just after the Drammy Awards and last till September, when there’s just not a lot to see. Blame it on the climate, everybody says; western Oregon enjoys about three months when it’s pleasant to be outside, and by god people want to be outdoors all the damn time. Traditionally there are a few moments of excitement, such as the annual JAW Festival, but basically…let's just say it’s pretty easy to stay current with everything that’s on.

So for years some of us having saying: what if we tested those assumptions, and put together something inside some nice cool venues to see what happens? Apparently the 100th theater monkey got wind of this idea, because suddenly the entire town is bucking the conventional weather wisdom.

Witness, for example the fabulous Wet Ink Festival of new plays, presented by Playwrights West. This is a wild reading series of plays that didn’t exist at all until a few weeks ago, which have been receiving their first public airings now at CoHo Theatre. Something about the sheer recklessness of the endeavor has paid off handsomely; all the plays have been fantastic. BTW, the concluding entry happens tomorrow, the third of July: Nick Zagone’s latest escapade, Lee Marvin Be Thine Name. I definitely plan to be there.

Nor does CoHo’s fun end there; the progressive, outside-the-black-box venue has a whole slate of summerfare in store for intrepid theatergoers. PCS is likewise making good use of what was once known (in the kinder, gentler 20th century) as “down time.” In addition to the annual ferment of JAW, the Ellen Bye Studio downstairs will cook with a summer cabaret created and performed by vocal powerhouses Susannah Mars and Gavin Gregory that is going to be hothothot.

Miracle Theatre Group simmers all summer long, too, and it’s off to a very good start with its current production, Songs for a New World, a veritable revelation of vocal fireworks written by Jason Robert Brown and co-produced by Staged!, the endlessly inventive musical theater company. TAKE NOTE: this powerful song cycle also concludes its run tomorrow night (Saturday, July 3), so if you prefer music theater to Wet Ink’s verbal hijinks, get your tickets right this minute. And if you’re missing out, not to worry; Staged! is mounting a virtual Jason Robert Brown festival, having presented a concert version of The Last Five Years just last night, continuing with its theater camp’s mounting Brown’s Parade, and concluding in August with a cabaret entitled JRB Songbook.

Upcoming too is an ambitious and literally far-reaching new exploration by Sojourn Theatre/ called On the Table — which needs its own blog entry, so stay tuned — and a great opportunity over at Third Rail to see the NT Live presentation of London Assurance, starring the legendary Fiona Shaw. And let us not forget what is fast becoming a summer tradition here, Third Eye’s latest installment of bloody, disgusting short plays in the tradition of Théâtre du Grand Guignol.

I haven’t mentioned the various Shakespeare assays (including a colorful Pericles), and even then this isn’t everything. But it’s a lot, when you’re used to pretty much…..nothing. For those of us who do fear the heat of the sun, it’s a summer we can suffer.

You are here

You know how in the past I’ve alluded to PlayGroup’s top secret, unassailable, never-to-be-scruted blog? Where we hang out our highest aspirations and most petty grievances out to dry, away from the jaundiced public eye?

Well, the post below (plus its photo above) is timely rrrrrrripped from that blog – with the poster’s permission, of course – one Steve Peterson. It’s too nice a thing not to share it on the intergalactic scale of my blog. [kidding] [blushing at my own cupidity] [anyway] Here it is:

I picked up the new issue of American Theatre, and I was pleased to see it contained four Portland theater references: a story on set design for Sometimes a Great Notion (with a beautiful photo by Owen Carey); a piece on ART's new resident ensemble, including pics of four Portland actors; a piece on Oregon Children’s Theatre's collaboration with a Milwaukee (WI) theater (the show--I forget the title--is going to play both there and here); and a JAW reference in the article on David Adjmi's play Stunning. Stuff on PCS, ART, and Milagro crops up now and then in American Theatre, but I was kind of thrown by so many references in one issue. Maybe some lobbying from those in the know could coax a story on Fertile Ground … It does have news peg in that the festival's kind of a unique cross between a fringe theatre festival and a music festival model (e.g., South by Southwest). Which would be tres cool. No?

But yes.

No Degrees of Separation

Something I love about life in a small town is that you get to enjoy small and frequent coincidences. Often you've heard all about someone prior to your actually encountering each other in person.


Case in point: my fabulous cousin, who is a frequent contributor to this blog, pointed out to me today that there's a cool web site created by artist Scott Wayne Indiana that documents a local phenomenom I described way, way back in the earliest day of this blog (which would be 11 months ago). Whilst trolling through 39 Forks, I discovered Scott is married to a terrific writer, Harvest Henderson, who I heard speak when she won an Oregon Literary Fellowship Award recently. Her acceptance was hilarious and effervescent and oddly moving, too. I'm always moved when someone says that recognition of their work validated who they already were anyway -- it always feels like a real "You've always had the power to go back to Kansas" moment.

You know......all those years I lived in Los Angeles, I don't think I ever once ran into someone I knew. Except when I went to theater, which doesn't count because the same 400 or so people always went to everything.

What Portland Oregon Doesn’t Want You To Know

Since two different colleagues have recently accused me of civic boosterism, it’s time I confessed that there is one thing about my adopted home town that drives me barking mad. And that is – well, driving. Portland has the worst drivers of any town I’ve ever lived in. And I developed motorist survival skills in Manhattan, Los Angeles and San Francisco (where I learned to drive a stick, can you imagine?). Three notorious snake pits of automobile dystopia. Driving L.A.’s freeways always reminded me of being tossed into a pinball machine. But you know what? People in those places all knew how to drive. They had to.

Not so in Portland, where you can tell from the plethora narrow streets that the town anticipated the town having heavy traffic. Many residential streets are barely wide enough for two lanes, and a ten-mile drive here is often considered too far to travel. This is part of Portland’s charm, I admit it; but its corollary is a gobsmackingly high percentage of motorists who can barely manage to keep their cars on the road.

The Evidences:

People just plain drive slower here – which wouldn’t be a bad thing, necessarily, except that the slowness pervades more than just driving speed. You see it frequently at stop lights, where some people go into a trance of sorts while waiting for green light to turn to red. Here is the sequence:

1. Realize that the light must have changed to green since the cross-traffic has ceased to move.
2. Look left to see if anyone’s coming.
3. Look right to see if anyone’s coming.
4. Make a decision to move forward and prepare to act on this.
5. Ease out into the intersection, blissfully unaware of how few people made it through that light because of your inattention.

Many Portlanders (not all, but I do mean many) have no concept of right of way. Perhaps Driver’s Ed isn’t taught in high schools here, I don’t know, but confusion reigns in just about any situation where a right-of-way protocol should exist. The most hilarious exemplar of this is the four-way stop. Here are a few reactions to it that I see every single day:

The person on the right has the right away if s/he’s anywhere in sight. Never mind that s/he’s nowhere near the intersection yet.
Opposing traffic is supposed to wait till you’re nearly across the intersection and then go, thus doubling the wait for the people on the left and right.
Every driver should examine the faces of the others to see if they feel strongly about going first.
Once you’ve determined that it’s your turn, look for oncoming traffic and wait till it has come to a full stop, just in case it doesn’t understand that it has a stop sign.

Things really go to hell when someone needs to turn left at a four-way stop. In L.A., the accepted custom was that if you’re turning left, you ease into the intersection while the opposing traffic goes by, then make your turn. Try that in Portland and panic ensues; people will think you intend to hit them.

In fact, stop signs in general flummox Portlanders. God help you in pedestrian-heavy districts like the Pearl, because – no exaggeration here – about a third of drivers there sail thoughtlessly through stop signs. Another third of them come to a dead stop at intersections where there is no stop sign; then they sit there blankly wondering why pedestrians are staring at them. Thankfully the remaining 1/3 of drivers actually look to see whether there’s a sign or not and act accordingly.

The comedy goes on and on. Many drivers here do not know they can right on a red light, and will sit blankly at a light with no other drivers in sight. And then, yes, as aforesaid, when the light finally changes these same people will usually look both ways and then consider making the turn before finally up and actually executing it.

Finally – this is not an irritation, more like a mere quirk. But apparently there’s an unwritten law in Portland that states you’re supposed to use your windshield wipers as seldom as possible. Here we are in a wet climate, but unless the rain is blindingly torrential, there’s this reluctance to use the wipers more than intermittently. How come? Maybe they’re afraid to wear them out? I don’t know.

And I’m just getting warmed up. I could go on and on and on….but I’ll spare you. Just remember if you come to visit and you’re renting a car, be prepared to take your time getting into town. I assure you everybody else is!

The Feast of All Hallows Eve

Certainly
The children have seen them
In quiet places where the moss grows green
Colored shells
Jangle together
The wind is cold, the year is old,
The trees whisper together

And bent in the wind they lean.

—“Witches Hat,” Robin Williamson

Got to love Portland, a town after my own heart. When I went to Kaua’i in early September, it was beastly hot, like it could never be anything again but the top o’th’summer. And when I returned eight days later, autumn was in full swing, with leaves turning color, the sky bruise-purple, and rainrainrain……ah, so good to come home.

More importantly for my pagan soul, the night I returned – and this was September 17, mind you – I passed a porch with a jack-o-lantern on its top step. Yes, I mean a carved pumpkin with a burning candle in it, leering at me madly. And all over the neighborhood were homes already festooned with Halloween regalia: strings of orange lights, spooky construction paper cut-outs taped to windows.

Leaving PCS this evening, it thrilled me to feel the excited atmosphere of the downtown – traffic conspicuously absent, people rushing around, some in costume, even. The sense of festivity in the air. And in Irvington, where I live, black-clad kids rushing from door to door, the smell of wood fires and candle wax and burning pumpkin in the air.

No trick or treat for me, though. Coming home to a dark house that we kept that way all evening, I proceeded to celebrate in my own way. Nothing too wild; my days as card-tearing, broomstick-riding, cauldron-stirring witch are dormant, for the time being. But I still observe that hour of meditation, when I visit with Those Who Must Be Remembered. My much-missed grandparents, Irene and Joe. My high school buddy Mike Prosek, who died of lymphatic cancer shortly after we graduated. Randy West, of Storefront fame, the first person I knew (of many to come) to die of AIDS.

The whole impetus for Hallowe’en, you know, is that it’s the night of the year when the veil between the spirit world and ours is the thinnest. If you’re ever going to make contact with someone who has passed on before, this is the time to attempt it. For years I performed a Dumb Supper on this night, an achingly beautiful ritual in which you prepare a meal – in complete silence – for you and the missed one, and you eat together in wordless communion. For me, sometimes this coming together is simply sensed; other times it is movingly palpable. And healing.

It makes exquisite sense to me that the ancient Irish considered Samhain (that’s Halloween to you) the end of the old year and the start of the new one.