Stella! and I had hit a rough patch recently. Quite frankly, she’d been putting on airs, acting more like Blanche than her namesake.
From A Streetcar Named Desire.
Blanche DuBois: I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
It started on a beautiful spring day. We were riding along the Minnehaha Creek toward Lake Nokomis.
Teenage angst. I’ve mentioned before that you could never pay me enough to be a teenager again. It seems, however, that I am willing to pay to watch someone else relive their teenager years.
Life never seems as dramatic as when we are teenagers. And some of us as teenagers put pen to paper. And saved those journals. Did you keep a diary or journal as a teenager? With the distance of years have you gone back to read it? Were you mortified?
Now imagine reading your diary in front of a crowd, friends and strangers.
A few months ago I went to “Get Mortified!” and I am going back for more. It is a live show where adults read from their teenage journals. They don’t get to change anything, except maybe names to protect the innocent. And it’s not people reading from someone else’s journal. (That would be just mean. Funny, but mean.) They are reading from their own journals, letters or poems. It makes for a milk-out-your-nose funny evening, a way to laugh at your teenage self through the safety of a proxy. Continue reading
I bought The Dill Pickle Club’s 10-volume set of comics on the history of Oregon earlier this spring. Short, little books, that I finished reading with the idea of visiting the sites mentioned in each volume. The fifth volume on Chinatown was easy because I walk through that neighborhood every day. The eighth volume was on the Vanport flood and my first visit there was by accident when I went to buy my first soccer ball. Volume one, devoted to the Lone Fir Cemetery, however, has been elusive for no reason other than I don’t turn left. Continue reading
To be believed in. That’s powerful. And yet I’m going to talk about rhubarb once again before I finish.
Earlier in the week, I went to a reading of a play the Portland Playhouse commissioned.
The playhouse is in a former church in a residential neighborhood that is in the midst of a transition. The play is about a town that was rebuilt without the black families that once lived there.
I’m not a critic nor do I attend the theater grudgingly, yet I have a tendency to approach works of art with my arms crossed and a sharp word at the ready. Continue reading
In the very beginning, I mentioned that I am a bit of a TV addict, but to write home every week with an update (as requested by my mom as a mother’s day present a few years ago) I had to come up with more than what I watched on TV that week. So, whereas I used to check the TV listings, I now read the local papers looking for events (I pretty much know the TV listings by heart so this isn’t really impressive). This is what led me to a former church in the King neighborhood of Portland. Continue reading