The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Friends, theater, bike rides, sunshine, moonlight, food, shopping, Janis Joplin, and Madonna Vs Gaga: It's been a fantastic day!

After Zumba, I rode up to my sister's house, where her best friend, visiting for the weekend from Seattle, was out on the porch. "Oh. My. God!" the BFF practically shouted. "You look fabulous!" (She went on in this vein long enough to convince me that I really, really do look much different than when she last saw me, more than a year ago--which was gratifying and discomfiting in equal measure.)

My sis, her boyfriend, her friend and I all got on bikes and rode in the lovely cool sunshine the four miles to Portland Center Stage to see "Janis," a new play about Janis Joplin. It was an interesting and uneasy melding of rock concert and theater, in need of some serious rewriting before going to the big time, but rousing and musically satisfying enough that we all left the theater in a state of enthusiasm, which only began to dissipate as we sat over dinner an hour later and began to dissect it.

The city center had a carnival air, since the tired and dreary old Rose Festival reached its parade-y climax today and a whole lotta people were in the streets who don't really get how to be in the streets. (One is...persnickety about these things.) It was lively, though, and people on foot in the streets are a good thing, even neophyte pedestrians.

A bit later we took the good friend shopping--also by bike, since she was game to keep going--and wound up having another dinner, outdoors on the sidewalk at Pambiche: Cuban delicacies until the sun went down and the moon was bright.

On the way home we encountered a massive phalanx of bicycles on NE 18th--lit up in the dark, pinging their bells, playing music, and blocking the entire street. It's Pedalpalooza! And this was the Gaga Vs Madonna Mobile Dance Party. Participants, dressed as their favorite diva, were just voting as we squeezed past them. Madonna won, and they rode off to wherever they were taking their feathers and wigs and pointy bras and music.

I think the friend from Seattle was utterly charmed by the whole thing. What can I say, friend from Seattle? Portland is pretty awesome.

Storm Large's "Crazy Enough" is the funny, raw, raunchy musical one-woman tour de force autobiographical stage production that's been playing to sold-out houses at Portland Center Stage since April. I finally got to see it yesterday.

She's six feet tall, Storm is. And Storm Large is her real, given name. The story begins with her being told offhandedly by a doctor when she's nine years old that her mother's mental illness is hereditary and that she will go crazy in her early 20s.

She does. Her mother spends much of her life in hospitals, following various suicide attempts and other episodes, and little Stormy, doomed to the same fate, raises herself. Sexually active--she claims by choice--at the age of twelve, by 22 she's on heroin. She's 40 now. Somewhere between there and here, she...completely failed to find sanity. She's functionally crazy. As the title says, she's Crazy Enough to live in her larger-than-life life.

Storm alternates present-day (apparently casual and often hilarious) chatting with the audience with enactments of past scenes, flickering in and out of extreme emotional states (heroin withdrawal, abortion, visions of demons, her mother's death), and sometimes only the perfectly-timed launching into songs reminds you that you're watching a play.

( My Vagina is Eight Miles Wide )

I'm hoping that the presence of filmmakers at yesterday's performance means that this amazing play will be available in some form, someday, to the rest of the world outside of Portland. I wish everyone could see it.