The Blog: West Coast Road Trip

On the way up to Portland, Liz and I stopped in Eugene for an evening to visit my friend Sarah. She and her boyfriend took us out to dinner at Sizzle Pie, a pizza place with grungy decor and surprisingly delicious and creative pizzas. We sat at the picnic tables outside to eat our food, across the street from a pile of hippies on a public bench who serenaded all of downtown Eugene with numerous songs played on the same two chords over and over again, including the angriest version of "You Are My Sunshine" that I've ever heard. (After a while the police came over, along with a couple of grumpy old men, and the impromptu hippie band was disbanded).

DESTINATION #4

Portland was surprising--and not in the ways that I expected. Anyone who's ever seen Portlandia has images of a hippie-hipster (hippiester) Mecca that's all about green living, radically ridiculous ideas about art and life, and people with weird hair cuts. But Portland had a surprisingly industrial look. We were couchsurfing at someone's apartment in the downtown area (right by the river), and we were surrounded on all sides by Steampunk-esque metal bridges, elevated highways, construction projects, and not-quite-sky-scrapers. You can hear the trains booming and blaring all night.

Our first day there was quite lazy. We didn't sleep very well (...trains...), so we didn't get up till noon-ish, and, after a little internet research, decided to get brunch at a place called Mother's Bistro and Bar. Doesn't sound like anything special, right? Imagine Sherlock-style wallpaper (and furniture upholstered to match), glass chandeliers, mirrors, sleek black cabinets, and waiters who sing along with the music while they dash around taking everyone's orders by memory. On second thought, I'll spare you the imagining--here are some pictures.

After that, we wandered around the Pearl District/Downtown area, and went to Powell's Books (listed as one of the top 10 things to do in Portland by TIME magazine). The bookstore was nice enough, but I personally didn't see anything that special about it. Though I did find these little gems:

Feeling relatively unenthused by the real Portland, we decided to just get a whole Sizzle Pie pizza, bring it back to the apartment, and watch an episode of Portlandia. :-P

Later in the evening we went back out to Mother's Bistro for drinks and dessert. It was a pretty sweet place to be at night too--classy and not too loud. We sat at the bar and had long conversations about nationalism, self-affirming symbols that people chose for themselves, and snobs.

The next morning I got up early to go wait in the crazy line at Voodoo Doughnut. Voodoo is a Portland staple, right across the street from the "Keep Portland Weird" wall, and even though it's open 24-hours, you'll be lucky if you get to wait in line for less than 20 minutes at any hour of the day. The donuts are super yum though!

Yes, that is a maple and bacon donut on the left.

After our super-healthy donut breakfast, we went to Portland's Saturday Market, which was excellent! It's huge, with tons of creative, artsy vendors selling clothes, jewelry, knick-knacks, and food. Also, these:

Wall art with living plants!

Including a Cthulu...

I think that cat's expression says all that needs to be said about this invention

I got a couple nice things too.

However, the highlight of out time in Portland was easily the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival. This Festival's philosophy is described on their website as follows:

We know that, in Shakespeare's day, plays were not performed for weeks at a time. Shakespeare's actors performed ten to twelve different plays in any fortnight, and never performed the same play on two consecutive days. If a play was a hit it might return three times within a month; but meanwhile, to fill the theater, there had to be a different play performed every day. A modern company might produce five to eight plays in a season; Shakespeare's actors exceeded that by a factor of ten or twenty. When in the world could they have rehearsed all these plays?

The answer, we think, is that they did not. They prepared their "roles" (rolled cue scripts) on their own time, met together on the morning of a show, choreographed fights and music and dance, and performed that afternoon.

And that is how the Original Practice Shakespeare players perform. Minimal rehearsal, minimal costumes, props, and sets, and an "onstage prompter." When Liz stumbled across this online, her eyes got huge and she said, "Now this is a true Portlandia-style experience." So of course we went. They were performing Twelfth Night and MacBeth that weekend. Figuring that watching a tragedy get slaughtered is funnier than watching a comedy get slaughtered, we opted for MacBeth.

The performance took place at 10pm in a public park. The "onstage prompter" turned out to be a girl dressed like a soccer ref (complete with whistle), who sat off to the side with the complete script in front of her, and blew her whistle and called out cues if someone missed an entrance or messed up their lines. The actors all performed with their rolled cue scripts in hand.

That being said, even with a literal soccer ref, occasional missed entrances and fumbled lines, you know they're doing something right when they get to the climactic battle between MacBeth and MacDuff, and the whole audience is chanting "MACDUFF! MACDUFF! MACDUFF!" while pumping their fists in the air. It was really fun. And, in all fairness, these were professional actors and for the most part they read their lines well. It might not have been "up to snuff" for a typical Shakespearean theater company; but then again, there were also all these wonderful little moments that you could never have in a typical theater setting: like when MacBeth walked out to do a soliloquy after killing Duncan, and a guy in the audience yelled "BOO!"--and MacBeth was like, "I haven't even said anything yet!" Or after defeating MacBeth, when MacDuff came out with a cigarette, got a light off someone in the audience and casually said, "I earned this."

Not to mention that it's free Shakespeare in a public place, and it's the kind of performance that people can really get into, whether you're a literary type or not. I'm all in favor of that. Original Practice Shakespeare is a good reminder that great art doesn't have to be perfect in order to be great. If you're ever in Portland, I sincerely recommend seeing these guys.

P.S.

I almost forgot! Liz and I also stopped by the Lan Su Chinese Garden. That comes in as a close second behind the Shakespeare company as the best part of our trip. The whole place was so beautifully laid out...but I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.