beautiful, funny, sad and true

Every once in a while, there are days that are really great, and yesterday was certainly one of them.

I woke up at ten and met GuitaristDavid and FlutistSusan, so they could take me out to breakfast in exchange for the impromptu photo shoot I did for them yesterday afternoon (which was also fun, by the way) to promote the holiday-music group they’re forming.  And boy, did they choose an amazing place.  I think yesterday was quite possibly the best breakfast of my entire life.  If I had known what was in store for me, I would’ve brought my camera, for sure.

They took me to Roux, which is a French-by-way-of-New-Orleans style restaurant.  I had a sort of scramble, which consisted of smoked trout, potatoes, onions, creme fraiche, with poached eggs and dill leaves on top.  It was unbelievably good.  Susan had oyster and bacon benedict, and David had a chicken-and-biscuits with gravy.  We all exchanged samples, and each dish was amazing.  After we got home, I think we all collapsed in food coma for a while.

After coming out of said food coma, I was ready to go on a little day trip, so I called J to see if she was up for a trip.  She was, so I picked her up and we drove to Astoria for a few hours.  We went to the top of the hill that overlooks the entire peninsula, to check out the views and to see the Astoria Column.  Here are some pics:

We walked around for a long time, admiring the views and trying to pick some of the blackberries that were growing along the edge of the hill.  The good berries within reach had already been taken, so we stumbled down to try and pick some others, but it was to no avail; not to mention that the ones we found were bitter and unripened.  So we gave that up pretty quickly.  We left the Column behind and drove around in the hills, exploring the pretty little town.  Every turn brought a new exclamation of ‘oh my god. . .look at that!’ from at least one of us.  The views are breathtaking, and some of the houses are too.

By that time, we were ready for dinner, so we drove downtown to the waterfront to find something to eat.  One of the businesses had some murals painted on the back.  I love the way they’ve incorporated the actual windows and hinges into the murals.  It adds a nice touch of realism.

The first few places we tried to go were either closed for business or were too expensive, so we ended up at the Wet Dog brewery.  Not the greatest place in town, but it was decent enough, and the grilled albacore salad was really good.

We got in the car and went back to the hills to explore more of the town.  We came to a road that had a perfect view of the bridge, just in time to see a barge motoring underneath, presumably on its way out to sea.

We continued along the high road, and came to a wooded area with no houses, and saw a deer feasting on the leaves that were growing the side of the road.  We drove as slowly and quietly as we could, considering that we were in my noisy Honda, and he didn’t seem particularly fazed by our presence, so we were able to get a few pictures.

My right foot slipped just then, and I accidentally pushed the accelerator and revved the engine a little bit, which startled the deer and made him decide to slowly disappear into the bushes.  I apologized to him for startling him (I’m pretty sure he understood English) and we drove away.  We wanted to get back to Portland at a decent hour, so we wound our way back down the steep, curvy roads of Astoria and made our way back to the highway for the rest of the uneventful trip home.  We made really good time, too, and were home by 8:30.

It was just a great day.  Days like that are so fun and relaxing.  Susan and David are so great and so inspiring.  Roux is so amazing and delicious.  Astoria is so fun and so picturesque.  J is so fun and hilarious, in her low-key way.  And me?  I’m so looking forward to having many more days like that in the future.

On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth.  I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.

The event was divided up into multiple stations.  There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place.  For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations.  There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project.  There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.

It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one.  The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way.  I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly.  I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half.  The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied.  At a certain point, I decided to give up.  I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately.  This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience.  I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in.  What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.

If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it.  Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time.  Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.

I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event.  I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.

Last week was super busy, so now I finally have a spare moment to sit, and process, and also to get you up to speed.

Wednesday night was the first play-reading group we’ve had since Tossed In tossed in the towel on leading the group. A handful of us have been persistent about keeping the group going, and after about two months, we finally managed to make it happen. We read the script for the movie My Dinner With Andre.

It was an amazing evening. A few of us were die-hard fans of the movie, and knew our favorite parts almost by heart, and a few of us had never seen or heard of the movie, so it made for a particularly interesting discussion. I really should say ‘discussions’, because we stopped many times along the way to switch to different readers, and to discuss the section that we’d just finished reading.

A couple of us had our favorite sections that we really wanted to read. I read Andre’s section about the Little Prince and about how New York is the new model for concentration camps, and Matt read Wally’s introduction, his argument near the end, and his ending monologue. We all discussed different ideas for staging this work as a play, and the various ways we could bring the various scenes to life, while still retaining the feel of a dinner. It was an amazing evening, and a passionate discussion all the way around.

Afterwards, Matt, Lindsay and I went to Squeez for a drink. I really should say ‘another drink’, because we’d already had plenty at the reading. We shared some quesadillas and continued the discussion about the play and about various other things.

Matt was too shy to want his picture taken that night. I tried to surreptitiously snap a picture of him and Lindsay while they were at the bar ordering, but the picture didn’t come out. Not that these did especially well, but the other ones are even worse, I promise you. I love the colors inside Squeez. It’s just a really cool, comfortable place to meet with your friends.

Oh, and for the record, I’m lucky enough to have found a very special copy of the script for MDWA. . .it was autographed in 1982, by both Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, AND it’s inscribed to someone here in Portland. A bunch of years ago, I went looking for the script, and finally found it at HugestBookseller. I decided to wait, however, and felt that another one would turn up, despite the fact that I had already been fruitlessly searching for it for years. No matter, I had a hunch.

The next day I went to Powell’s (even though I’d checked there countless times before) and sure enough, I was rewarded with this:

Talk about synchronicity. . .which fits in perfectly with the themes of the script, too. The autograph picture I left at higher resolution, so you can read what they wrote. I love it.

I first saw the movie when I lived in Yakima, at the age of twenty-four, and was mesmerized by it. I instantly went and tried to find out as much as I could about both of the guys, and all of the references they made to actors, directors, books, plays. . .everything. Jerzy Grotowski, The Master and Maragarita, The Little Prince, I couldn’t wait to understand what they were talking about. For the record, not one of my friends shared my enthusiasm for this movie. I raved about it, and even made a few people watch it, but they got bored and gave up after a few minutes. (I think this has something to do with the adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’)

Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorites, and it also introduced me to the Little Prince, which to this day I re-read every year or two, and I’ve probably had to buy ten or twelve copies of it over the years, because I’ve loaned so many out and never gotten them back. That’s okay, in this instance, because the story is so beautiful that I want everyone to read it, and I hope that they get as much out of it as I have.

And I have my friends Wally and Andre to thank for it.

I woke up yesterday to find that my phone had been shut off. Yesterday I took the day off from work to play a noontime gig with Breanna and the band down in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

I decided to take the MAX commuter train downtown, because Pioneer Square is one of its stops, and parking downtown can be tricky and expensive. So I drove to the stop and carried the cello and accordion on board the train. Two stops later, we all had to exit the train and cram onto a waiting bus, because the bridge over which the train travels is closed this month for repairs. It wasn’t fun trying to get two large instruments onto an already crowded bus, let me tell you. Not to mention the screaming kids and obnoxious people. When we arrived across the river, we all exited the bus and got back on a MAX train to follow its regular route. The exhausting trip took forty-five minutes, and it normally takes fifteen.

So then we played our gig, which was great. It was well-attended, and we sold a whole bunch of CD’s.

Came home afterwards via the exhausting and circuitous train-bus-train route. By this time, it was about ninety degrees outside. I finally got home, drenched in sweat. I had an e-mail waiting for me from J saying that PhoneCompany’s service was down for a while yesterday, so it wasn’t my phone after all. What a relief!

I took a nap and then went to meet J for sushi. She came over afterwards, and we watched an episode of Planet Earth; it was the episode about how the climate is changing drastically and rapidly, and how we are losing species (sometimes in as little as ten or fifteen years) and completely destroying the natural environment. It was very informative and influential, and it was good to be reminded about many of those things, which we tend to forget about in our daily lives.

Incidentally. . .for the record. . .I try to do my part by living near enough to where I work that I don’t need to drive, and where I can easily ride my bike, walk, or take public transportation to the places that I need to go. There have been many years where I didn’t own a car. I’ve always owned economical cars, including the one I have now. I don’t eat very much meat. I choose to live in a small apartment in the city, as opposed to a sprawling suburb. I don’t intend to have children. I try not to use disposable things when I have permanent options. These are all choices that I feel make a big difference in both the quality of life, and minimize the effects of my existence on this planet, but I still have a long way to go, and there are plenty of things that I can still do to make a difference for this little and unique planet.

So. After that, I got a call from JBJ saying that Jaime and Becky (whose CD I played on) were playing an impromptu show, so I texted Becky to say that I was going to be there, and it would be very easy for me to bring my cello with me. She thought that sounded great, so I ended up going down to join them at eight o’clock. The show was awesome, and the two other performers, Galveston and Justin Power, were amazing as well. I recommend that you check all of them out

I have another daytime gig with Breanna today, actually, so I’m going downtown again in an hour to load our equipment onto the Portland Spirit cruise ship. This is going to be a really fun gig; I’ve played it once before, last summer. It’s a lot of work, and it’s an all-day affair, but it’s just. . .totally great. I’m really honored to have such good opportunities to play with such good people.

Tonight the plan is for more J time, and then I need to do laundry and pack for the annual trip to Cannon Beach with Mom, Stepdad, and Brother and his family tomorrow morning. I’ll be staying for the weekend, until Sunday afternoon, when I’m driving back and then going to see a play at night.

SoOoOoO, it’s all a bit of a blur, but at least now you know why things have been a little quieter than usual around here lately. I’ll have my computer with me at the beach, so I should be able to check in from there too.

But now, it’s time to take a shower and get downtown to the boat.

OneYearAgo

Yesterday after work, my friend Blaine came to meet me at my place, where we switched to my car and drove to Seaside to meet Chris and Nicole, who live in GoldenGateCity. You remember them, they got married this last spring. Anyway, they were up in Seaside (Oregon, that is; there’s a Seaside in GoldenState also) for the entire week. They stopped in to see me at my place on their way up, and I recruited Blaine to join me when I went over to visit them last night. We had a blast listening to a funny CD we made about a million years ago, and laughing like hyenas the entire way.

It was sunny and ninety degrees when we left Portland, but when we arrived at the coast it was cold and fairly crappy. This is the norm on the Oregon coast, and I’ve learned to be prepared with a hoodie or something, no matter what time of year it is.

The terrible picture is from my phone, by the way. There’s a huge amateur volleyball tournament happening this weekend (Sarah in NYC? You gonna be there?), so there are nets everywhere on the beach, as well as a smallish stage. We met Chris and Nicole and went to sushi at a pretty decent Japanese restaurant called Tora. After that, we headed back to their time-share, which is the same one that Chris’s parents and siblings (and siblings’ kids) were staying in, so we went to their parents’ place to say hello to everyone.

We all talked and laughed, and at around 10:00, Blaine and I drove the hour and a half back to Portland. Again, we had a great time talking and laughing, but the drive was more difficult this time. It was foggy through the mountains, and we saw a coyote or something in the road at one point. Once we were in the city limits, around 11:45, there was a huge wreck in the opposite direction of the highway, which looked like a motorcycle was involved. There were lots of police cars, and at least one ambulance, and traffic was completely stopped.

We got home and I went in and went to bed, but Blaine still had to drive himself back to his house, which is about half an hour’s drive, in Vancouver’s NorthernSuburb. Incidentally, I’d like to give a ’shout out’ to Blaine, who said that he reads my blog in the morning on his PDA, while sitting on the toilet. No doubt some would say that’s the only appropriate place to be while reading blogs, but as far as I’m concerned, wherever you want to read from is fine by me.

OneYearAgo