Tag: Portland

Quixote Nuevo at Portland Center Stage

Matt and I took in PCS’s Quixote Nuevo, and had a great evening of theater. The story transports Don Quixote to La Plancha, Texas, where a retired English professor with dementia heads off on a journey for his long-lost love.

Among the great performances and great songs there was also great puppetry. The cast of nine was kept busy with multiple roles, and the story was compelling.

Also, this was a co-production and traveled from the South Cost Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California, to the Seattle Repertory Theater and then ended its run in Portland. The set was designed to fit all three stages, and the actors worked for longer because of it. In a time when arts organizations are struggling, this seems like a brilliant plan.

Ruth Carter at the Tomorrow Theater

Famous costume designer Ruth Carter was scheduled to come to Portland in January, and I neglected to get a ticket and was sad. But it turned out that her visit coincided with the ice storm and didn’t happen, so she was rescheduled to March, and I did buy a ticket.

After finding my assigned seat (instead of the random seat I grabbed because I didn’t pick up on the fact there were assigned seats, even though I had picked my seat hen ordering the ticket (the Disney trip really overloaded me, and I had trouble navigating spaces for a few days after our return)) Ruth Carter appeared and was interviewed.

It was a great interview, and I learned a lot about her many Oscar nominations (she said that Black Panther was the first time she was favored to win and that the interview requests scaled up to match that favored status, so much so that she was exhausted by the time of the ceremony. Also that when they were making Black Panther, no one knew it was going to be as successful as it was, so midway through she lost half of her team to a different movie (that was a flop).

She also talked about working with Spike Lee and their long collaboration.

For those of you not able to see Carter in person, you can check out her book, The Art of Ruth E. Carter.

Portland Winter Light Festival

I have been meaning to go to the Portland Winter Light Festival for many years. This year, Matt and I finally made it to a downtown location. The festival is spread throughout the city.

Here we are in Pioneer Square.

Pioneer Square had all the fire. You can see one example on the far left. The tentacles framing Matt’s head also opened and emitted fire. I hadn’t pictured fire as part of the celebration. But of course there would be fire. The original winter light.

Fire also came from these flowers intermittently.

Down by the World Trade Center we found a lot of different kinds of light. This demonstration let children play with the streamers. The adults did better at really making them flow, though.

A tesseract of light!

Another view of Pioneer Square with the strongman game showing the fire exploding.

I Escape to Downtown

I had movies I needed to see, so on Saturday, I got my hiking shoes and hiking poles out and walked to the Max stop. It was pretty slippery. The Max easily took me downtown where it was less slippery, and I hiked over to the Living Room Theater to catch up with All of Us Strangers.

On Sunday, I repeated the trip, but this time sans poles. I saw the Zone of Interest at Cinema 21. When I came back to the Max stop, someone had made this cute snow sculpture.

Beginning to Thaw

The path I scraped out on our sidewalk has enlarged, so it’s slowly warming up.

It really does help things to melt when sidewalks are shoveled. Something Portlanders don’t do because “the snow will be gone tomorrow.” Perhaps that feeling is ready for a climate change update.

The car is covered in ice, though it isn’t as thick as it was earlier in the week. Driving out of that ice slick is also keeping us from using the car.

And the Ice Continues to Storm

Rain and light freezing rain? That means more ice.

It was at this point in our multi-day storm that I felt trapped and went and shoveled the ice away from the sidewalk and the front step. I slipped and fell on that front step, so both that and cabin fever motivated me. Ice is still covering the car and the garbage can. We only have trash pickup every 4 weeks, so we were willing to wait for them to catch back up.

Meanwhile, in Southwest Portland…

My mom’s very tall oak tree quietly set itself down in the back yard.

Southwest Portland had a ton of trees go down, and this was one.

It did a pretty good job not hitting things, though. The gray shed took the brunt of it.

All family members living in Southwest Portland were without power for varying amounts of time. I felt very snug and warm in my North Portland home.

There Ain’t Nothing Like an Ice Storm…

Snow is one thing, but ice? Ice shuts everything DOWN.

If you look on the step, you can see we got a fairly substantial amount of ice and temperatures hovered near freezing.

It’s very pretty, but very hard to navigate the landscape when the ice covers everything.

This is why we sometimes shut down for a good week in the winter. You can see the road has been plowed and is passable. Not passable? Getting into the car, which was covered in ice.

Funny Redistricting Suggestions

Portland is getting a new form of government, and with it comes the task of splitting the city in four districts. FLO Analytics was charged with this task. Part of what FLO offers is a platform so the public can make their own suggestions by creating maps.

This comes in handy because it helps the public see what elements come with trying to make reasonable district boundaries. The app walks potential mapmakers through all the things they need to consider. But sometimes, people just want to be creative, like in these four maps.

I appreciated how all but one mapmaker kept the districts about even in number.

Here’s what the final map looks like. I’m District 2.