Willamette Week, July 5, 2023 - Volume 49, Issue 34 - "Pride Under Pressure"

BEARRACUDA, PAGE 20

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 49, ISSUE 34

Damian Lillard wants to play for the Miami Heat 6

Firefighters won’t venture into the Going Street bluffs without a police escort. 7

Republican senators scrambled to find votes for Gov. Tina Kotek’s housing bill. 8

A massive party in the former Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center set off the sprinklers 9

Carolyn Ward got a job at Krispy Kreme to afford a move from Kentucky to Portland. 12

St. Andrew parishioners dropped a petition on the doorstep of the Portland Archdiocese. 15

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are on a boat. 16

ON THE COVER:

Sister Shiso Panda of the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; photo by Jordan Hundelt

The big screen is back at Rooster Rock State Park this summer. 23

The Sports Bra’s baby back ribs are peak bar snack. 24

You can find rare west-of-theCascades ponderosas at the Tualatin Hills Nature Park. 25

R. Crumb created album cover art for Portland old-time trio Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few. 26

Anacortes, Wash. , is a surprising nexus for indie rock. 26

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is staging an unhoused Romeo & Juliet 27

Tonya Harding tried on former Portland Monthly editor Eden

Dawn’s prom dress. 28

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK: Killer Burger has closed its Northwest 23rd Avenue restaurant.

DAVID FRAZIER

ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE

It will be news when a week passes without a dust-up at Portland Street Response, the city initiative to send mental health clinicians to people in distress. Last week saw two. First, WW reported that a visiting delegation from Detroit received advice from a Portland bureaucrat to meet with former Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who championed the program, rather than Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, who now oversees it (“Not in Front of the Guests,” June 28). Hours later, we broke the news at wweek.com that PSR program manager Robyn Burek was departing for another job in city government. Portland Street Response has become the locus of a civic poverty debate increasingly centered on whether helping people who live on the streets is enabling them to keep sleeping rough. Here’s what our readers had to say:

JUST DOING THE MATH, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Why not visit Eugene and learn from the CAHOOTS program that has been successfully operating for 31 years? Why does Detroit insist on talking with Hardesty who is no longer in office and then devote their time ‘learning’ about a failing program in Portland?”

GENDERLESS RODENT, QUEERIN’ IT UP!, VIA TWITTER: “This makes Portland looks like fucking dinguses.”

ROCCO, VIA TWITTER: “Rene Gonazlez has dismembered this program. Unconscionable.”

CIRCINATUM, VIA REDDIT: “I didn’t realize they can’t give out food and clothing anymore. That’s a bummer. Those are two great ways to deescalate a situation for people who don’t have those two things.”

JAVIER SODO, VIA WWEEK. COM: “All the PSR has done is enable homeless by passing out free tents, granola bars and cigarettes while criticizing housed residents as lacking compassion.

Homelessness has only gotten worse since we have spent millions on these ineffective enablers.”

ECONOLINE, VIA WWEEK.

COM: “I will say one thing about PSR; they didn’t murder James Chasse. Honestly, the PSR probably saves more money in police settlements than it costs to run.”

RIVERCITYWRITER, VIA TWITTER: “One of the things I’ve learned of Puddleton’s establishment is that any model of service that is viewed as effective to render aid to an overburdened commons is obstructed, vilified and ultimately swept from sight to preserve a mindless money-making mass. A sad age as I see it.”

WESTERN_MESS_2188, VIA

REDDIT: “Once in bitterly cold winter, I found a half-naked woman lying face down on the sidewalk by my house. She had no shoes or socks on and had clearly been there in the cold for hours. I ran to her, and once I determined she wasn’t dead, I asked her if I could call her an ambulance. Despite the fact

Dr. Know

BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx

According to news reports, the part of the Oregon state budget devoted to education has not declined in recent years. So why is declining enrollment in local public schools a financial problem? Doesn’t this mean that the amount of money per pupil should go up? —Educurious

Declining enrollment presents financial problems for pretty much any school system. However, the sting is particularly keen in Oregon now due to what some liberal policy wonks (is there another kind?) might characterize as our state’s original budgetary sin.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the effects of declining enrollment in general. The core problem is that if you lose 10% of your students, you can’t make it up by shrinking all your facilities by 10%—your utility bills, maintenance costs, etc., will still be pretty close to what they always were.

In theory, personnel expenses are scalable, and you could respond to the downturn by laying off 10% of your teachers and staff. In real life, there are contracts and tenure and figuring out how

that she was bleeding from the eye, she refused. She was tiny, and I actually thought she was a teenager, but she insisted she was 20. I called PSR and waited 45 minutes with the lady. I called them back after 45 minutes, and they said no van had even been dispatched to us yet. I told PSR just forget it; I canceled the call and called 911. An ambulance arrived within five minutes, and the lady agreed to go to the hospital. What would PSR have done anyway? Given her socks, hand sanitizer and a granola bar?”

POUPOU221, VIA REDDIT: “I am thinking there might be a misunderstanding about the purpose of the visit by Detroit officials. I am thinking they might be on a fact-finding mission as part of their yet-tobe-announced ‘At least we aren’t Portland!’ campaign.”

CORRECTION

A June 21 item in Murmurs asserted incorrectly that the Portland Police Bureau’s declining certification rate was due to the assignment of a new reviewer, Lt. David Jackson. In fact, Lt. Jackson made corrections to the bureau’s prior process and reviewed the cases after they were flagged by the ombudsman’s report. The report does not name the reviewers, instead citing “high turnover” as one of the causes for the declining certification rate. WW regrets the error.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author's street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words.

Submit to: P.O. Box 10770, Portland, OR 97296

Email: mzusman@wweek.com

you’re going to get those teachers back in two years when you need them again.

I get your math, Educurious: On paper it seems like our kids should be swimming in solid gold whiteboards and Gucci pencil sharpeners. But “more money to spend on each pupil” turns out to be just another way of saying “each pupil now costs more money.” If somebody quits your carpool, the rest of you have to pay more money, but the ride doesn’t get any nicer (unless the person who quit was Todd; fuck that guy).

Such economies of scale (or lack thereof) apply everywhere. It’s worse in Oregon, though, and that’s because of a middle-class tax revolt that began in 1978 with California’s Proposition 13 and rode the wave of Ronald Reagan’s hair throughout the 1980s, finally coming to rest in Oregon with a 1990 ballot initiative called Measure 5.

Measure 5 capped what some feared were becoming out-of-control property taxes, upending the long-standing system of local funding for K-12 education. This effectively shifted the burden of school funding to the state’s general fund. Today, for example, the state provides 70% of Portland Public Schools’ budget, up from 30% before Measure 5.

Crucially, that funding is allocated to each district largely on a per-pupil basis. The fewer pupils, the less state funding. Where’s Jerri Blank when you need her?

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.

PORTLAND PODCASTER TEAMS UP WITH

RFK JR.: Bret Weinstein, Portland’s best-known COVID vaccine skeptic, released a podcast with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on June 29, spending almost three hours talking to the scion of the Kennedy dynasty, who says childhood vaccines cause autism, Sirhan B. Sirhan didn’t kill his father, 5G cell towers are being built to control our behavior, and Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates conspired with Big Pharma to profit from COVID vaccines. (None of these claims is true.) Weinstein, a former professor at The Evergreen State College, became a right-wing celebrity during the pandemic after going on Joe Rogan’s podcast and touting a livestock medicine called ivermectin as a cure for COVID, a claim that has been disproven by multiple studies (“Drug & Pony Show,” WW, Sept. 15, 2021). Weinstein interviewed Kennedy on his DarkHorse Podcast in November 2021 but didn’t release the episode until last week. Weinstein didn’t say why, and he didn’t return a call or email seeking comment. On Twitter, though, he said he’s “enjoying the conspiracy theorizing that has ensued.” The episode was a lovefest. “I simply appreciate your commitment to doing what is necessary in spite of the costs,” Weinstein told Kennedy. “I regard you as a patriot, I know that I’m a patriot, and as one patriot to another I appreciate what you’ve done for us.”

COUNTY

SETTLES

PROSECUTOR’S GENDER

into Harris’ complaints determined they were unfounded. Harris is the second prosecutor to threaten the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office with a gender discrimination lawsuit in the past year. Former prosecutor Amber Kinney filed a tort claim notice with the office last July, saying she was repeatedly passed over for promotion and retaliated against when she spoke out about the office’s failure to promote women. Harris’ 39-page draft legal complaint makes similar accusations, although in much more detail. In a statement to WW, Harris said, “I am proud of my lengthy career in the DA’s office and I hope that the fact that I and others have raised these issues will make the path to leadership easier for younger women who want to be career DA’s.”

BRAIN INJURY BILL PASSES: Among the many pieces of legislation that breathed new life when Senate Republicans returned to work June 15 was Senate Bill 420, which will create a new brain injury resource navigation center within the Oregon Department of Human Services. Prior to the bill’s last-minute passage June 22, Oregon was one of just 11 states that did not provide residents with a central coordinating agency for the many services that people suffering from brain injuries and their families may need. As WW reported earlier this year, Oregon also lags behind nearly every state in providing specialized rehabilitation services for brain injuries—and big health care providers want to keep it that way (“Free Fall,” Jan. 18). David Kracke, Oregon’s brain injury advocate coordinator, implored lawmakers to create such assistance within DHS. SB 420 overwhelmingly passed both chambers after Republicans returned and will get startup funding of about $2.3 million in the next biennium. “It’s really great news,” Kracke says.

DEQ FINES OWNERS OF FLAMING TIRE PILE:

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality fined the owners of a defunct grain terminal on the Willamette River $13,600 for storing tons of shredded tires in open-air piles without a permit. DEQ’s action comes a month after the pile burst into flames, spewing acrid smoke in the middle of Portland. The pile reignited at least three more times as hot spots in the pile flared anew. The owners of the pile, Beau Blixseth and Chandos Mahon, load the tire shreds onto ships bound for Asia, where they are burned for fuel.

Blixseth is the son of Tim Blixseth, a Roseburg timber baron who pivoted to hospitality and started the ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club near Bozeman, Mont. In a letter to Blixseth and Mahon, DEQ compliance manager Kieran O’Donnell said the agency had erred by not requiring a waste-tire storage permit for the site before the fires. “DEQ recognizes that it previously communicated that a waste tire storage site permit was not required for storage of chipped tires at this facility,” O’Donnell wrote. “Those communications were in error as applicable rules do require a permit for the storage of 200 or more cubic yards of chipped waste tires.” Neither Blixseth nor Mahon returned messages seeking comment.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS

ALBUM

SATURDAY

PORTLAND-BASED

THURSDAY JULY 20TH AT 6PM

AUG

‘THE BALLAD OF BUTTERY CAKE ASS’

AUTHOR TALK & SIGNING

“Like being taken on a rock n roll road trip by Holden Caulfield with a head injury in the best of ways.” – Dave Hill, comedian

COMPLAINT:

DISCRIMINATION

Nicole Harris, a veteran Multnomah County prosecutor with 20 years experience, accused District Attorney Mike Schmidt of gender discrimination in a draft legal complaint sent to his office in March and recently obtained by WW. She demanded a $550,000 settlement to drop the accusations. In recent weeks, she received $125,000, half from the county and half from Schmidt’s employer, the state. A spokeswoman for the office, Liz Merah, says settling was the most financially responsible option. “Settling this case provides closure and allows us to move on as an agency,” she tells WW. Harris’ last day with the office was June 1. A law firm commissioned by the county to look

SELF-PROMOTION: WW reporter Sophie Peel was named 2021 Rookie of the Year by the Oregon chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The award honors the reporter who excelled in their first full-time journalism job. (The chapter fell behind in bestowing awards during the pandemic, and in June announced its 2021 winners.) Peel was recognized for her work covering Portland’s heat islands, the failure to keep impoverished seniors housed, and the rocky launches of venture capital-backed startups. SPJ also noted her later work from this year: the exposure of Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s moonlighting for a troubled cannabis company, which caused Fagan to resign.

DAVID KRACKE

TIM SAPUTO

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAME

A few memories of what it felt like to watch Damian Lillard play basketball for Portland.

BY AARON MESH amesh@wweek.com

In the end, it was fitting that Damian Lillard waited until the last possible moment to demand a trade out of Portland.

He always specialized in the buzzer-beater, the heartbreaking dagger; this one was delivered to the Trail Blazers themselves, mere hours after the front office handed a $160 million contract to one of Lillard’s pals. The timing was probably not the result of malice but indecision. Lillard and Blazers general manager Joe Cronin spent much of the past year hesitating like Portland drivers at an intersection, neither wanting to be the first to hit the gas. Additionally, Lillard had built his brand on uxoriousness—somewhere on social media right now, he is insisting that he is a good person. But the man’s two primary desires proved incompatible: He wanted Portland and greatness. He would like to be traded to Miami, which in return can offer the Blazers the NBA equivalent of a Publix sub and some real estate in the Everglades. The divorce proceedings could turn acrimonious.

But as the saying goes, don’t cry because it’s over; smile because we clowned Russell Westbrook in the playoffs. Dame’s legacy in this city can be measured in numbers instantly recognized by even a cursory fan. 71 points. 37 feet.

0.9 seconds.

It’s harder to gauge the happiness he brought people. We were embraced by someone who was good at everything he tried. He was a rapper who walked with swagger on behalf of an insecure city, a global icon whose affection for Oregon seemed to absolve us of so many years of racism and provincialism. There’s no benefit to pretending we didn’t feel that love, watch those miracles, fall to the ground and run around the house screaming when the ball fell through the net.

We did. This is what it felt like.

POP, POP, FIZZLE

After fireworks touched off a July 4, 2021, fire that killed three people and destroyed two apartment buildings along Northeast Broadway, the Portland City Council in March 2022 banned all but the professional use of pyrotechnics.

At the time, the bureau acknowledged fireworks were a popular tradition but said the cost was simply too great: “Independence Day also includes tragic events and injuries resulting

May 3, 2014: Lillard catches an inbound pass with 0.9 seconds on the game clock and drains a 3-pointer to win a playoff series over the Houston Rockets.

Matthew Korfhage wrote: “I wasn’t watching the game; I was walking down the street. First there was a tense guttural sound from six different houses, and then six different houses erupted in wild cheers. They couldn’t hear each other in the different houses—they didn’t even know the other people existed—but from where I stood they were all cheering together. It was terrific. But if I didn’t already know what was happening, it would have scared the hell out of me.”

April 23, 2019: Lillard hits a 37-foot buzzer-beating jumper over Paul George to win a playoff series over the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Casey Jarman wrote: “Basketball, like life, is meaningless. Damian Lillard’s series-winning shot didn’t teach us a valuable lesson.

“But basketball, like life, takes on whatever meaning you assign to it. That shot seemed to change the spirits of this whole city in a tangible way. Left us elated, even elevated. Changed the way we felt about ourselves and the place we live. It was a perfect moment, for those of us who wanted it—or maybe needed it.

“I was there, again, up in the rafters. In the final seconds, before Dame let it fly, I ran down the stairs of my section and held on to a railing and squatted down like a little kid peeking over a fence. I knew it was going in. We all knew it was going in. We all knew it didn’t really mean anything. We all knew it meant everything. We all knew we’d talk about it for the rest of our lives.”

Aug. 13, 2020: Lillard scores 154 points in three nights to propel the Blazers into the Orlando bubble playoffs in the first pandemic summer.

I wrote: “Damian Lillard isn’t a hero. He’s just one public figure who didn’t let Portland down.

“This year has seen a series of leaders outmatched by their circumstances. Gov. Kate Brown often proved indecisive in the face of a pandemic. Mayor Ted Wheeler can’t decide where he stands when police square off with protesters. No champion has risen to guide this city through its grief and fear.

“So it matters that Lillard is trying—and triumphing—even in his own small arena. It matters that he identifies with us—that the ‘O’ on his back stands as much for Oregon as it does for Oakland, his birthplace, or Ogden, Utah, where he went to college. We can see ourselves in him,

Portland nixed amateur fireworks last year. It seems to be working.

from illegal fireworks use and is both traumatizing and harmful to children, animals, and a growing number of war veterans who deserve our loyalty the most.”

or at least who we’d like to be if we were a little stronger.”

July 1, 2023: Lillard asks to be traded to the Miami Heat.

Corbin Smith writes: “Neil Olshey, the team’s previous GM, did a really bad job building a decent team around Dame, and the consequence of building a bad team around a star is the star asking out, eventually. The sick parasocial nature of this whole thing, Dame’s need for a loving public that resided outside of winning and losing, and his feeding off of the Portland metro’s kind of pathetic desire to have a player who gave them a percentage of the affection they gave to him probably made the partnership last two years longer than it should have. CJ McCollum getting shipped out was the sign that this thing was over, but the sort of affection that makes novelty Toyota dealerships possible kept it going for two miserable years after that. Maybe next time, try to remember that he’s just a man.”

Aug. 5, 1978: Bill Walton asks to be traded out of Portland.

John Bassett, Walton’s agent, tells WW: “Someone once said that God gave us a memory so we could have roses in December. I think we should all remember the very special sports competition we saw in Bill Walton and that we should be thankful to have seen such a great athlete perform on a regular basis, rather than sell ‘Bill Who?’ bumper stickers, thought of by a creative, but obviously insecure, individual who certainly wasn’t there on June 5, 1977. If that person doesn’t know who Bill Who? is, then he missed the greatest sports experience, by far, that Portland and the state of Oregon has ever experienced. And that’s coming from somebody who has lived in Oregon all his life.”

Based on a small sample size, the move seems to have worked.

Here are the numbers for blazes caused by fireworks from June 23 through July 6 for the previous four years. NIGEL JAQUISS.

HE CALLED GAME: Damian Lillard in action.

Going Up

Camps perched on bluffs along North Going Street alarm firefighters more than any others in Portland.

SUBJECT: Houseless Camp-Related Fire and Public Public Safety Issues on the N. Going St. Corridor

FROM: Capt. Brian Cummings, Fire Station 24

TO: Street Services Coordination Center

DATE: Feb. 28, 2023

In a memo penned last winter but not previously reported, a Portland fire captain pleaded with city officials to ban camping in the wooded hillsides along a notorious stretch of a North Portland street. In the Feb. 28 memo, Fire Station 24 Capt. Brian Cummings warned that sprawling encampments, hidden on the bluffs along North Going Street, had become so dangerous that firefighters could not enter without a police escort—which, due to short staffing, was often unavailable.

Fires at homeless encampments have consumed the workload of Portland’s firefighters during the pandemic. As WW has previously reported, they accounted for nearly half of the calls to Portland Fire & Rescue last year (“Camp Fires Everywhere,” Nov. 2, 2022). The memo is another indication of the intensity of frustration that firefighters feel about the growth of outdoor encampments, and their dissatisfaction with the city’s response.

Cummings wrote that firefighters had been called to North Going Street and Interstate Avenue 744 times in the past two years. On 22 of those occasions, firefighters considered the camp dangerous enough to request that the city sweep it, “the highest for any camp citywide,” the memo notes.

The situation along Going Street, Cummings says, is not only dangerous to the encampments’ residents, but also the entire neighborhood. “This high number of dispatches to these locations due to these camps undoubtedly affects Station 24’s response reliability,” he noted.

Making the site more troublesome is its geography. On the south edge of Going, campers had “terraced” into the forested hillside, Cummings wrote. By that, a recent visit to the site by WW suggests, he meant digging into the hill and using wooden pallets to construct cantilevered dwellings amid the trees.

What happened in the woods was ugly. Among the outrages witnessed by firefighters and itemized by Cummings: unhoused campers killed by drugs, heat and speeding cars; attack dogs sicced on firefighters by campers; a series of shootings at an “obvious chop shop”; a string of arsons at Madrona Park on the western end of the corridor; and campers openly smoking fentanyl along a route that children walk to reach nearby Beech Elementary.

“This camp offers a front-row seat to the fentanyl and methamphetamine crisis,” Cummings writes. “While we are sensitive to the needs of our houseless community, this area has been extremely challenging from a public safety standpoint and has proven time and again to be an unsafe and inappropriate area for folks to live.”

Fires at homeless encampments have already shaped city policy. In February, a few weeks before Cummings sent his memo, newly elected City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez banned the distribution of tents by the Portland Fire Bureau and its mental health unit, Portland Street Response. Last month, the Portland City Council passed an ordinance that makes daytime camping, and fires and gas stoves at night, punishable with jail time.

Although Cummings’ request to ban camping along North Going Street has not been granted, his memo illustrates the public safety issues policymakers are attempting to address.

A spokesperson for the Street Services Coordination Center, which manages camp sweeps, tells WW the city was already aware of problems in the corridor before receiving the memo and had “cleaned the area on a regular basis.” It is continuing to do so.

On a recent visit to Going Street, a patrol officer told WW, “There’s people all through there up and down the street.” A woman walking her dog and collecting cans, however, said she was unaware of anyone living in the hills. “That would be pretty cool, though,” she added.

LUCAS MANFIELD.

Ground Down

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

As the final hours of Oregon’s 2023 legislative session careened to a conclusion, Bob Sallinger was driving a rental car in Rhode Island. His daughter pressed his cellphone to his ear so he could hear the audio from the Oregon Senate as it voted on Gov. Tina Kotek’s top remaining bill.

The votes trickled in slowly June 25. But the bill, which Kotek considered a key tool to increase housing supply, failed by a single vote.

“ Wow, fuck yeah!” Sallinger, the conservation director for Willamette Riverkeeper, recalls exclaiming.

To Sallinger, the stakes could not have been higher. “This was the most significant assault on the land use planning system I’ve seen in 30 years,” he says. He and other environmentalists went to mattresses in the final week of session, imploring their supporters to pressure Democrats to vote no.

That set the stage for unlikely alliances: Kotek, who won election last year with record contributions from environmental groups, nonetheless teamed up with the Oregon Home Builders and Oregon Property Owners associations—and Senate Republicans, whose 43day walkout had hamstrung the session. And ironically, the biggest loss in her governorship so far came at the hands of fellow Democrats.

Three days after the bill failed, Kotek still seemed stunned by her loss. “I thought I had a commitment to get the votes we needed,” she said last week. “I upheld my side of the bargain.”

Although Kotek and legislative Democrats passed much of their agenda this year, the failure of House Bill 3414 illustrates the learning curve facing her and Senate Democratic leaders, all new to their positions. It also shows the escalating conflict between the need to build more housing faster and Oregon’s land use planning system, now in its 50th year of

sharply dividing city from farm and forest.

On a more encouraging note, it shows partisan adversaries can still work together despite the public rancor in Salem, even if they don’t succeed.

Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp (R-Bend) earned infamy when he led his caucus on the longest walkout in Oregon history to block the passage of Democratic bills. But in the days before and after the June 25 vote, Knopp and Kotek communicated constantly about HB 3414—at least six calls by his count.

“She’s committed to passing the bill,” Knopp says. “And she hasn’t given up.”

In the final three days of the session, Kotek came to the Capitol to lobby lawmakers herself. As she knew from 15 years in the House, including nearly a decade as speaker, a personal touch can make a difference.

House Bill 3414 was part of Kotek’s effort to crank up housing production to 36,000 units a year—about twice the current rate. (Oregon is currently 140,000 housing units short of what the population requires—a key contributor to the unsheltered homelessness spiraling across the state.) Earlier in the session, the governor got lawmakers to allocate $200 million in emergency housing funding and multiples of that for bonds for affordable housing. But HB 3414 proved trickier.

Initially, the bill would have allowed developers to get fast-track approval of virtually any new housing project and created a housing production office to make sure homes got built.

After environmentalists gained protections for sensitive areas through amendments, they shifted from opposition to neutrality.

Then in mid-June, as part of the negotiations to get Republicans back to work, Kotek and legislative leaders agreed to make HB 3414 a priority.

When Republicans returned, a new amendment supported by Kotek offered a prize homebuilders and property rights advocates long sought: a one-time, fast-track expansion of urban growth boundaries around the state to add more developable land.

“ We were on record repeatedly saying we need to address land supply,” says Dave Hunnicutt, a lawyer and lobbyist for the Property Owners Association who has worked on the issue for nearly 30 years. “For us, it’s not a policy issue, it’s a math problem.”

Kotek agreed: It wasn’t enough to slice through the permitting, zoning and other red tape. Lawmakers also needed to free up more land. (Environmentalists disagree: They say there is ample land for development; there’s just insufficient infrastructure to support it.)

That new amendment galvanized the Oregon Conservation Network, which includes 42 environmental groups, led by organizations such as the Oregon League of Conservation Voters and 1000 Friends of Oregon. The OCN labeled the bill a “major threat.” (The amendment also generated stiff opposition from cities in the metro area as it would wipe out a hard-fought standstill on the Stafford district, a part of Clackamas County highly desirable for development.)

On June 24, the bill passed the House. Then, on June 25, by law the last day of session, it came up for a vote at about 1:30 pm on the Senate floor.

Hunnicutt and Home Builders Association

CEO Jodi Hack nervously watched the vote on closed-circuit television. “The pressure that I felt on this bill exceeds any of the others I’ve worked on before,” says Hunnicutt, who has lobbied for greater development since 1996. “We put in so much time and effort and energy.”

And this time, he and the homebuilders had an unusual ally: a Democratic governor. “To her credit, the governor knew that the private

developers are going to have to build almost all the units to meet her ambitious plans,” Hunnicutt says. “The fact that we have a governor who cares about the issue and understands it is fantastic.”

Normally, a presiding officer—in this case, Senate President Rob Wagner (D-Lake Oswego)—brings a bill to the floor for a vote only if he knows lawmakers have the votes to pass it.

But as the clerk counted the votes June 25, it became clear something had gone awry. Five Republican senators skipped the vote. That left 25 members. The bill needed three-fifths plus one, or 16, to pass.

“Republicans were able to muster eight votes,” Kotek said later. “I thought we could get eight votes from the Senate Democratic caucus to pass the bill.”

But two of the Democrats Kotek counted on—Sens. Chris Gorsek (D-Troutdale) and Deb Patterson (D-Salem)—voted no after an onslaught of opposition to the amended bill.

“Gorsek and Patterson said they were going to vote for it,” Knopp says. “Kotek said Patterson would be her 16th vote.” (Gorsek and Patterson declined to comment.)

With the tally standing at 14-10, only one vote remained before the bill would be killed—Sen. Daniel Bonham (R-The Dalles). It would have been difficult to imagine a less likely ally for Kotek than Bonham, the fiery conservative from the Columbia Gorge who has personally clashed with the governor.

“Sen. Bonham, how do you vote?” Wagner called from the dais. Bonham conferred with Knopp. The problem: By voting yes, Bonham would be completing the count—one vote shy of passage.

“I went to Tim and said, ‘What do you want me to do?’” Bonham recalls. “If I vote, this thing is done.”

Nearly five minutes passed with excruciating slowness as Bonham circumnavigated the floor seeking a way to flip a “no” to a “yes.”

He consulted with Sen. Kayse Jama (D-Portland), chair of the Senate Committee on Housing and Development and a supporter of the bill; he conferred with Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber (D-Portland). All the while, Wagner continued to call on Bonham to vote—half a dozen times in all.

Finally, Bonham approached Wagner, who placed the session into recess. Their brief conversation went nowhere.

“He was just in no mood,” Bonham says. “He said, ‘We just need you to vote.’”

Bonham voted yes but the bill failed 15-10.

Up on the third floor of the Senate building, Hunnicutt slumped in dejection. “It was a gut punch,” he says.

Kotek didn’t accept the result.

She cajoled Gorsek to change his vote. Her legislative director, Bob Livingston, texted Knopp, urging him to keep his members close in the event of a revote.

“My job was to try to seek reconsideration,” Kotek says.

No dice. About an hour after HB 3414 failed— eight hours short of the deadline—Wagner gaveled the session closed. Sallinger and his allies had won.

Kotek says Sallinger’s victory will be shortlived. She hopes to find common ground—and an agreement for more ground—before next year’s session.

“The topic is not going away,” Kotek says. “Housing is a crisis.”

Even after she teamed up with Senate Republicans, Gov. Tina Kotek suffered her biggest loss of the legislative session.

AISLE-CROSSER: Gov. Tina Kotek worked with Republicans to try to free up more land for development.

BLAKE BENARD

Sin City

A former Christian Science church suffers from sprinkler damage and flaming cars—but a Las Vegas development company promises to turn it around.

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

A former Christian Science church on the National Register of Historic Places is without an occupant—save for the occasional houseless person who manages to circumvent the fence surrounding it and finds respite on the front steps.

A Las Vegas development company has pledged to purchase the 25,000-square-foot building in Northwest Portland’s Alphabet District from the six neighborhood associations that collectively own it. But the developers face

CHASING GHOSTS

ADDRESS: 1819 NW Everett St.

YEAR BUILT: 1909

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 25,436

MARKET VALUE: $101,940

OWNER: Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center

HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY:

Since September

WHY IT’S EMPTY: Vegas, baby, Vegas.

mounting costs and lenders with cold feet; the sales agreement was recently extended for a third time in a year. The new closing date: Jan. 31, 2024.

Meanwhile, the 114-year-old building is getting battered.

For over a week, workers with a restoration company have lugged damp carpet, wooden boards and siding out the back door of the building. Two of the workers, smoking cigarettes under a tree last week, said a massive party in the building set off the sprinkler system. “Must have been one heck of a party,” one of them said. (City officials said they’re not aware of a party.)

The damaged building is testament to what happens when a well-meaning group of people purchase a property they can’t afford to maintain—and the resulting difficulty of financing the preservation of aging infrastructure in Portland before it’s too far gone.

“This was done by idealists that didn’t know what they were getting into,” says Dan Anderson, a former two-time chair of the board for the current neighborhood owners group. “Warren Buffett said, ‘When the tide goes out, you find out who’s swimming naked.’”

The building now known as the Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center, at Northwest 18th Avenue and Everett Street, was built by Chicago architect Solon Beman in 1909. For decades, it was a Christian Science church. It was registered as a historic building in 1978. The applicant wrote that the church’s “exterior details and interior finish work convey a simplicity and restraint consistent with church doctrine.”

By that time, Christian Scientists had shrunk in number and the church’s members had scattered. So six Northwest neighborhood associations decided in 1977 to form a legal entity—the Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center— and buy the church to operate as a community center of sorts.

Nonprofit organizations and social services moved into the building in the 1970s after the neighborhoods purchased it, aided by a burst of federal funding for public sector jobs. Meals on Wheels, for example, operated a commercial kitchen in the basement of the church.

But Anderson says Reagan-era government spending cuts sent the nonprofits packing. “The board had an unrealistic business model and unrealistic expectations. For better or for worse, owning and managing a piece of real property is a task,” Anderson says. “There’s a few right ways to do it, and there are many more wrong ways to do it.”

The Northwest Children’s Theater moved into the building in 1993 and moved out in September 2022. In the 30 years it occupied the building, the theater nonprofit made at least two attempts to buy the building, in increasingly hostile negotiations. The theater tried to buy the building in 2006, and the NNCC board narrowly rejected the offer. Again, in 2017, the theater offered to buy the building, Anderson says, this time for just $1. The board again declined.

The NNCC doesn’t pay property taxes because it’s a nonprofit organization. But if the building isn’t home to a charitable purpose soon, the nonprofit loses that protection.

Because the building is listed on the Historic Register, whoever takes it on must take painstaking measures to preserve particular parts of it. “The dirt has significant value. The building on it arguably has negative value,” Anderson says. “Monetizing that is difficult.”

Las Vegas-based Founders Developments came along in the summer of 2021. The private investment group is led by Tanya Toby, 53, and Max Sass, 27. Both live in Vegas, but for more than five years Sass has purchased and revamped apartments and condos in Portland and has lived here part time.

The NNCC is Founders’ only current project, Toby says—and the first it’s done that involves a historic building.

Toby and Sass envision an 80-room luxury hotel built on the existing parking lot, with all amenities, including a library, a wellness center and a speakeasy lounge, housed in the church.

Sass says Founders seeks to fill a void in Portland for luxury hotels with attractive amenities: “To me, Portland is lacking a hotel that actually attracts locals and gives the renter the overnight stay and actual amenities.” The price for an overnight stay, he says, will be “well under The Nines and the Ritz-Carlton, and in between Hotel deLuxe and Hotel Lucia.”

In one of the firm’s PowerPoint presentations to the building’s board this spring, the firm said the twin hotels would remediate the “lack of high-end hospitality product in the city with

an exceptional experience” and asserted that “Portland has high demand and low supply of rooms.” (In fact, the hotel occupancy rate for the first six months of this year was 58.6%.)

The sale has been pushed back three times since Founders first entered into a sales agreement in the spring of 2022. Meanwhile, Founders deposits $50,000 each month into the board’s bank account, like micro-down payments. That makes it difficult for Founders to back out of the project.

In a January email to then-board chair Anderson, Toby wrote that securing lenders was difficult. “We have been through two rounds with lenders at this point, and after spending months of completing the loan approval process and outrageous expenses associated, the lenders back out after understanding the building condition, of the seismic upgrade necessary and little or no tenants suitable.”

Anderson wrote to his fellow board members that month, encouraging the sale extension but proposing the board add language to the agreement to make it harder for Founders to back out of the deal if the NNCC were to suffer a similar fate as the downtown Portland Korean Church that burned down in an arson fire just days before, an incident that Anderson wrote “weighs on my thinking.”

Now, Toby tells WW that Founders has secured the financing for the construction loan, and permits from the city are moving forward. The building, however, is in dismal shape.

Because the NNCC is one of 1,650 Portland buildings with unreinforced masonry, seismic upgrades are likely to cost north of $5 million. It’s filled with asbestos. The external siding is flaking off. Portland Fire & Rescue has responded to nine calls at the building within the past year; in recent weeks, the fire bureau responded to a Molotov cocktail thrown at the building, multiple homeless-related fires, and a sprinkler system that current NNCC board chair Ginger Burke says drenched the building’s hallways.

A car burned up in the parking lot in the wee hours of June 15. Shortly thereafter, Founders erected a chain-link fence around the property, eliminating what had become an all-hours hangout and occasional chop shop in the parking lot.

Once the building sells, the money will flow into a grant fund controlled by a new advisory committee appointed by the six neighborhoods that own the building. “If this sale falls apart, we could then again be subject to paying taxes, which are very expensive,” Burke says. “But I think we’re all very comfortable now with Founders’ ability to complete this project.”

Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.

NO ENTRY: The neighborhood-owned former Christian Science church is in limbo.

JORDAN HUNDELT

“There’s a few right ways to do it, and there are many more wrong ways to do it.”

PRIDE UNDER PRESSURE

Pride is famously a season of love, but it should also be a season of peace.

The LGBTQ+ community rarely feels at peace, even within the world’s most welcoming cities. If we aren’t surviving religious or legislative bigotry—or the real world physical violence inspired by them—we are surviving the wars in our minds.

We have been, and still are, kept from expressing ourselves as we as really are. We rarely get socialized with other openly queer people during formative years. We’re not typically taught our places among the greatest in history, art, science and sports. We rarely bother anyone but are attacked and ostracized for showing people around us that there’s a different way to exist from what’s always been accepted.

That conflict feels especially intense this year, as states from Florida to Idaho try to outlaw our health care, our education and our artwork. The aspects of Pride that until recently felt corny—the rainbow beer cans and corporate floats—are now targets for bigots. Every drag queen story hour risks protesters or worse. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that it’s free speech for shopkeepers to refuse us service.

We hope Portland and the rest of the Pacific Northwest remain strongholds for civil rights. But how do the people fighting hardest for queer peace find it for themselves?

Willamette Week looked for signs of hope in the struggle. We

interviewed families who moved Oregon to escape homophobic and transphobic laws across the country (page 11). We spoke to Catholic parents defying the Archdiocese of Portland, which is trying to prevent their teachers from using students’ chosen pronouns (page 14). We met with the prioress of the local Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence house about how they boost morale (page 16), and with the new director of Cascades AIDS Project, who talked about how two-spirit people long predate Christianity in this state (page 18). And we found the best places to unwind and let loose during Pride weekend (page 19).

Better times are still ahead. It might seem hard to believe when you watch videos of violent fights at parent-teacher association meetings in California or Nazi sightings at Pride in rural Washington. But these misguided people and their kind of hate have existed since before the late and great Darcelle. More people love us than don’t, even if they don’t always use the best words and actions to express it.

The LGBTQ+ community has long known that the best response to pressure is unity. The peace, love and sense of belonging we create for ourselves and one another travels beyond our social bubbles. All kinds of people can feel it.

Things might be the wrong kind of weird for a while. Lean into it. May you find peace with yourself, and support among those around you.

—Andrew Jankowski

In a difficult time, we stand together.

CIVIL RITES: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s Order of Benevolent Bliss.

They Arrived

Portland is becoming a haven for gender refugees.

BY ANTHONY EFFINGER aeffinger@wweek.com

John Welsh, a 46-year-old father of two, moved to Portland a year ago, and he has a message for the thousands of people fleeing because crime and blight make the city feel unsafe: Try raising a transgender teenage daughter in Texas.

Welsh and his wife began to see that Portland was a better place for them when they came on a house-hunting trip in June 2021. They were out looking at properties, and their daughter, Ess, then 15, used her bus pass to go to the Japanese Garden from their Airbnb in Irvington.

“My wife said, ‘You know, that’s the first time in as long as I can remember that I’ve felt safe with her just going out and about somewhere,’” Welsh recalls.

That feeling helped seal the deal. Welsh and his family joined thousands of others leaving Texas, Florida and other states that are waging a culture war on LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are transgender. Many of these gender refugees are moving to Oregon because of its tolerant laws and lifestyle.

The influx is welcome, especially in Portland, where well-documented factors (crime, taxes, remote work) have resulted in population declines for the first time in a generation. Multnomah County lost population in the three years ending in July 2022, according to Portland State University’s Population Research Center.

But tolerance—along with Mount Hood and great beer—could be the thing that keeps Portland vibrant.

A June poll by left-wing think tank Data for Progress showed that 43% of transgender adults and 41% of young adults ages 18-24 have considered moving to escape anti-trans legislation. Some 8% of both groups have already moved, the poll says.

Transgender people account for 0.6% of the adult population, according to a recent Gallup poll. Combining the figures from Gallup and Data for Progress, Erin Reed, a queer-rights researcher who writes the influential Substack Erin in the Morning, estimates that as many as 260,000 trans people have already fled red states for blue ones and that another 1 million are considering it.

“Should this trend persist,” Reed writes on her Substack, “we may witness the largest domestic migration crisis since the Dust Bowl.”

Cue the Welsh family. They came to Stumptown from Round Rock, just outside of Austin, one of the fastest-growing cities in America. It may be Valhalla for guys like Elon Musk, but it’s hell if you’re trans, John Welsh says. When his daughter told the school she wanted to use the women’s bathroom, the anti-queer, book banning group Moms for Liberty started protesting at school board meetings.

“They didn’t call her out by name because they are not allowed to do that,” Welsh says. “But it was very clear that it was about her.”

Around the same time last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate for child abuse parents who approve gender-affirming care for their transgender children, including puberty-blocking drugs.

Welsh, his wife, Kristen, and Ess had seen enough. They packed up their car and left for Portland, leaving family and friends behind.

During the past month, WW spoke with families and individuals who made the same journey. If Portland is seeing an exodus of wealthy residents who are tired of high taxes that don’t seem to fix anything, it may soon become a haven for people who have seen what else government can do to its citizens: oppress them.

Here are their stories.

The Rodriguez Family Fort Worth, Texas

Tiffany Rodriguez, 41, grew up in Texas and moved back to Fort Worth with her wife, Dana Ferrara Rodriguez, to be close to her extended family when she added a new member: Penelope, now age 6. CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

2023 wweek.com

But after six years in San Diego, her home state felt dangerous for a lesbian couple. “In Texas, we couldn’t hold hands because you didn’t know what would happen,” Rodriguez says.

When her daughter was born, she and her wife worried that the clerk would go rogue and refuse to put them both on her birth certificate, even though it’s been required by law since 2015. Being surrounded by Trump flags didn’t exactly put her family at ease, either. “You knew that a majority of your neighbors voted against the safety of your family,” Rodriguez says.

Anti-trans legislation, combined with book bans (Texas topped the nation in the second half of 2022 with 438) and laws that allow most adults to carry guns without a permit, convinced Rodriguez it was time to shop for a new home.

She was working remotely for the American College of Healthcare Sciences in Portland, so Stumptown made sense. They visited, fell in love with Sellwood, and bought a house in May.

She and her family couldn’t be happier, Rodriquez says. Most stores in Sellwood have Pride signs, making them feel safe on walks. Another plus: the Portland Thorns.

“In my 40 years of life, I had never seen both men and women root for a women’s sports team,” Rodriguez says. “We went from feeling tolerated in Texas to feeling welcomed.”

Even a move to paradise has downsides, though. Rodriguez misses her parents, her brother, and her four nephews. Penelope films a YouTube diary for them every day to stay in touch.

The Krajcer Family Austin, Texas

Before Karen Krajcer left Texas, she raised a little hell for trans rights and for her daughter Jessie, 11. She chanted at rallies. She testified before the Texas Legislature in Austin, where she lived.

It’s not hyperbolic to describe Texas as a dystopia for trans people, Krajcer, 44, says. Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order to investigate parents for approving gender-affirming care meant she and her husband could be charged with child abuse for getting Jessie hormone treatments that, according to scientific studies, alleviate suicidal ideation in trans adolescents.

“Child Protective Services could throw me and my husband in jail,” Krajcer says. “Every time I say it, I hear how ludicrous it sounds. But this is the reality that is happening in our time. What would you do if your state was depriving your children of best-practice, lifesaving health care, and the penalty is that the state can put you in jail?”

The hypocrisy was unbearable for Krajcer. Hormones have been used for decades to block precocious puberty in cisgendered people, including her own sister.

In an article for The Nation, Krajcer described creating a “safe folder” for CPS investigators that contained, among other things, a letter from Jessie’s pediatrician confirming her gender identity and proof of annual wellness checks, and another letter from her pediatric neurologist describing how gender dysphoria had harmed her mental health.

Abbott went further in June, signing a bill to ban hormone treatments and surgeries for transgender minors, but the Krajcer family was already gone—to Portland.

“ We’re gender refugees,” Krajcer says.

The move was hard and costly, she adds, but it was worth it. Krajcer even got to testify before the Oregon Legislature in favor of House Bill 2002, which, among other good things, requires Medicaid and private insurers to cover some gender-affirming surgeries.

“I knew we would feel safer in Portland,” Krajcer says, “but I didn’t know we would be this happy.”

Carolyn Ward Lexington, Kentucky

For trans people, there are many cities in Kentucky worse than Lexington. It’s a college town, home to the University of Kentucky, so folks there are more tolerant.

But state laws apply to all cities, and Carolyn Ward didn’t want to wait around to see what would come once Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was no longer in office in an overwhelmingly Republican state.

Ward, 28, had a lot to lose. She came out as trans in December 2019 and started hormone replacement therapy the following April. The treatment rescued her from debilitating depression. She and a friend (like a sister to her) heard good things about health care for trans people in Oregon, and they began plotting a move.

Ward got a job at Krispy Kreme and saved $5,000 by living with her parents—a privilege, she says, many trans people don’t have. They wanted to move to Portland, but it was too expensive, so they opted for another college town: Eugene. They arrived in November 2021, stayed in a Motel 6 for a month, then hopped from an RV rental to a studio apartment to a one-bedroom.

Despite all the moves, the odyssey has been worth it, Ward says. A doctor here doubled her dosage of estrogen and progesterone, and she feels much safer, to boot.

“In Kentucky, there was a risk that I would be clocked,”

Ward says, meaning she’d be identified as trans when she didn’t want to be. “In Eugene, trans people are much more normalized.”

Ward’s move was prescient. In March, the Kentucky Legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Beshear to pass one of the most punitive anti-trans bills in the country. It prohibits conversations about gender identity in schools, forbids trans students from using the bathroom that matches their gender, and bans all gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.

“I left a bit preemptively,” Ward says. “Rather than leave when the flames were consuming the room, I left when I smelled smoke.”

Some good news: Late last month, a federal judge in Kentucky temporarily blocked the law from taking effect while other courts hear challenges.

Jesse C. Neosho, Missouri

As a trans person, Jesse C. had a lot to leave behind in Neosho (pop. 12,700).

The state is among the most conservative in the nation, and his divorced mother belonged to an evangelical sect founded by Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster who proclaimed the world would end in fire and brimstone in 1994 (later amended to 2011).

CAROLYN WARD

OREGON TRAIL: Tiffany Rodriguez, Dana Ferrara Rodriguez, and their daughter Penelope fled Fort Worth for Sellwood.

Jesse, 27, lived under the specter of Apocalypse for years and thought Camping might be right when a milewide tornado ripped through nearby Joplin—in 2011, no less—and killed 158 people. After 2011 came and went (and Camping died in 2013 with the world still turning), Jesse had decisions to make.

“I grew up believing I wouldn’t make it to adulthood because the world was going to end,” says Jesse, who goes by he/she and her/him pronouns interchangeably.

He had always felt some gender dysphoria, and it became acute when he began menstruating. He wiggled his way into some “not quite trans-specific care” in Missouri and got birth control that eliminated his period. But that wasn’t enough. He finished college, and when he didn’t get into graduate schools that he wanted, he began eyeing Portland.

“I grew up viscerally aware that my existence would’ve been illegal if I had been born a decade earlier,” Jesse says. “In communities like that, the Portland area is one of the places you go.”

The economy was better here, too, he says. In Missouri, he made $8.16 an hour working in a youth

shelter, a little more than half of Portland’s $13.25 minimum wage at the time.

Budget conscious, Jesse got his name changed in Missouri, where it was cheaper. Then, in August 2020, Jesse and his partner at the time loaded up a U-Haul, hitched his Volvo sedan to the back, and headed west for a “long and harrowing” trip across the country. Their rig drank gas in the Rockies. They ran out of money in the Cascades and had to call a friend.

COVID was raging when they arrived, but Jesse managed to get a job at a youth shelter in Vancouver, Wash. He got transferred to a queer-specific shelter in Portland and now lives in unincorporated Clackamas County.

“I’m still way more comfortable with country life than city life,” Jesse says.

The Portland area is the refuge he expected, he says. He’s got a gender therapist and health insurance, things he lacked back in Missouri.

“All the cool things I had been reading about in Portland for forever are just things that my friends and I can do,” Jesse says. “The feeling is, holy shit, this is real.”

The Outsiders

Portland is unprepared for the wave of transgender kids arriving without housing.

BY LEE VANKIPURAM lee@wweek.com

Portland is a refuge for transgender people fleeing the storm of anti-LGBTQ laws that is striking red states—but, for many, getting here is just half the battle.

One in every five transgender people has been homeless at some point because of family rejection, discrimination and violence, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. Of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America, up to 40% might be transgender, the NCTE says.

Some transgender kids come to Portland with stable families who buy houses in places like Irvington (see “They Arrived,” page 11). Others, young adults included, come to the city with little more than a backpack. For them, Portland may not be the haven they had imagined, because resources are constrained.

Portland’s Queer Affinity Village has an estimated waiting list of at least six months. Multnomah County has just one day shelter—Rose Haven—that serves women, children and gender diverse people, offering meals, clothes and diapers for infants. Rose Haven encourages people to arrive early for first-come, first-served showers because the schedule fills up quickly every day.

I definitely don’t think we’re the utopia we make ourselves out to be,” says Erin Waters, director of equitable programs and services at the Black & Beyond the Binary Collective, a nonprofit that trains LGTBQIA2S+ Black leaders in combating white supremacy and anti-Blackness, in addition to hosting community dialogues. (Its BC3 Housing Safety Fund, an emergency rent assistance program, is “temporarily closed” and set to reopen “sometime in the Summer of 2023,” according to the collective’s website.)

Katie Cox, executive director of the Equi Institute, a group that provides first aid and safety net services at the Queer Affinity Village, says it is serving more people than ever. In the past two months alone, the Equi Institute has helped 40 new people who are homeless.

For a perspective, the annual point-in-time count of homeless people in Multnomah County reported 80 transgender people unsheltered during one week in 2022, the latest year available. That’s almost double the 42 counted in 2019.

“ In that context, 40 in two months is a big spike,” Cox says. The Equi Institute has worked with people from Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico and even Russia.

The transgender people most in need in Portland might be adults over 24, Cox says, because they’ve aged out of services for youth, but they aren’t elderly. Traditional emergency shelters, though inclusive of transgender people, are often dangerous, Cox says, eliminating another option.

Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map

Source: Erin in the Morning (Substack)

“ Most folks are not staying in regular shelters,” Cox says. “Folks that do choose to stay in the shelters absolutely experience discrimination and violence. Most of the time from the other residents who were staying at the shelter, and sometimes the staff.”

The result is that many transgender people couch surf for as long as they can and then end up living outside, which feels safer when compared to unspecialized shelters.

In 2020, Marc Jolin, then director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, requested a combined $500,000 from the city and county to support transgender-specific services.

A year later, then-County Chair Deborah Kafoury announced a partnership with Black and Beyond the Binary Collective to directly help with housing costs for Black trans people. (About 1 in 5 unhoused trans people are BIPOC, according to the most recent point-in-time count.) The county dedicated another $50,000 this year to housing 10 transgender people and crafting future policies. County officials could not tell WW the results of any of this spending by press deadline.

“ We’re about to have a major problem on our hands,” Cox says. “We saw it coming.”

By Any Other Name

Rose City Catholics fight for LGBTQ rights—and start a war with Portland’s archbishop.

BY JAKE MOORE jake@wweek.com

Two weeks ago, at the behest of Archbishop Alexander Sample, the Archdiocese of Portland abruptly pulled the plug on its Department of Catholic Schools. The superintendent and the assistant superintendent, both women, were fired.

The issue that likely led to the personnel shakeup: a community rebellion against Sample’s suggestion that students be addressed by their birth pronouns rather than their chosen pronouns. News of the closure, first reported June 23 by WW, occurred on the eve of Portland Pride and has turned the 15 Catholic schools in this city—especially St. Rose School in Northeast Portland—into the local epicenter of an escalating battle over transgender children. Across the nation, disputes over Pride in schools have sparked heated demonstrations and even brawls. In Portland, another combustible element is involved: religious education.

Yet what’s actually happening in the archdiocese is shrouded by euphemism and silence. (These are, after all, private institutions.) We’ve tried to answer some of the more vexing questions.

What happened to the Department of Catholic Schools?

Principals and pastors of Portland-area Catholic schools sent emails to staff and teachers on June 22 and 23, alerting them to the firings of Supintendent Dr. Jeannie Ray-Timoney and her deputy, and the closure of the department. One of them asked that teachers refrain from sharing the information widely until the archdiocese made a formal announcement.

“ Yesterday, Archbishop Sample let pastors of schools know of an important change for Catholic schools for our Archdiocese,” Father Matt Libra of St. Rose Church and School said in a statement to parents on Friday. “The Department of Catholic Schools has been ‘temporarily’ closed.”

The principal of The Madeleine, a Catholic K-8 school in Northeast Portland, asked teachers in an email on Friday to pray for the superintendent and assistant superintendent. “I personally have worked with [Ray-Timoney] for 21 years and couldn’t have thought of a better person to serve as Superintendent,” the principal wrote. “I consider her a friend and she will be missed.”

It was not until after WW broke news of the closure that the archdiocese posted a brief statement on its website addressing it. In the statement, the archdiocese said all normal functions would continue “as we work to reevaluate how to best integrate schools more fully into our mission.”

Along with his announcement of the department’s closure, Libra informed families that the pastoral center and a team of principals would take on the responsibilities formerly held by the DCS.

The pastoral center refers to the institution of the archdiocese itself, from Sample to the many offices and employees under his control—the Department of Catholic Schools being one of them.

“If he wanted to make himself superintendent of catholic schools he could do that,” says Arthur Canales, a theology professor at Marian University in Indianapolis. “It would be unheard of, but it’s definitely within his right to do so.”

Why did Sample so abruptly shutter the Department of Catholic Schools?

To answer that question, we have to rewind a few months.

On Jan. 25, Archbishop Sample quietly released a 17-page document titled “A Catholic Response to Gender Identity Theory.”

The document was presented as a resource for Catholic schools: In it, Sample writes that gender is not a matter of fluidity, but rather a binary—and that personal pronouns, too, are not a matter of interpretation. The document was presented not as a mandate or policy, but as guidelines.

The document caused ripples of discomfort across the 15 schools within the Portland Archdiocese.

Tensions heightened when, earlier this month, the principal at St. Rose School began asking teachers, one by one, to agree to the guidelines laid out in Sample’s document.

Parishioners from St. Andrew, a progressive Catholic church on Northeast Alberta Street, began meeting in March in response to the guidelines. By June, the result was a community petition that had garnered more than 1,000 signatories, alongside numerous letters submitted by parents and a cover letter that asked for a meeting between Sample and a small group of representatives that had put together the petition.

An initial letter was submitted by St. Andrew parishioners in the spring and was met with a lackluster response.

“It was just like, ‘I confirm that I received your documents.’ No further anything since then,” says Claire Willett, a queer St. Andrew parishioner and one of the primary organizers of the petition. “We had hoped that the [second] letter that came from the bigger coalition would potentially generate more interest in potentially him meeting with us.”

The petition, signatures and letters submitted by parents, teachers and parishioners was dropped on the doorstep of the archdiocese on June 21.

Not 24 hours later, Sample closed the Department of Catholic Schools.

What does Sample say?

The archbishop insisted in a statement published to the archdiocese’s website that the closure had nothing to do with his gender document.

“The Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon’s Department of Catholic Schools is temporarily closed as we work to reevaluate how to best integrate schools more fully into our mission,” the statement begins. “This decision is unrelated to the publication of ‘A Catholic Response to Gender Identity Theory’ or to one

school adopting a classical education model.”

However, Sample did not say the closure was unrelated to the document dropped on his doorstep the day before.

Sample was appointed archbishop of the Archdiocese of Portland in 2013 by Pope Benedict XVI, who was conservative in his views on abortion and sexuality. While Sample is considered conservative by many Portland Catholics, he appears to be in step with other archdioceses across the country that remain more socially conservative than the current pope, Francis.

“There’s a whole group of archbishops and bishops who pay lip service to Pope Francis,” Canales the theology professor says. “They’re called to be obedient to the pope, but they don’t always do that.”

In Portland, Sample is a fish out of water. Many of the school administrations he oversees have progressive views on sexual orientation, gender fluidity and abortion, and have student-led “ally clubs” matching the liberal leanings of their communities.

Ray-Timoney, the superintendent Sample fired last week, did not respond to interview requests. But those familiar with her say she often served as a buffer between the principals of the archdiocesan schools and Sample himself—possibly putting her in the crosshairs of Sample’s beef with the petitioners lobbying against his January document.

“They ’re kings of their kingdoms. The Catholic Church has a very hierarchical structure,” Canales says. “Even though laypeople have the numbers and the masses…they don’t have control.”

Neither Sample nor his office have made any statement since. His office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

How has this impacted the community?

Since the abrupt closure, parents and teachers in Portland’s Catholic schools—and in some parishes—have felt a mix of confusion, instability and anxiety.

For the family of one trans student, who asked to remain anonymous but goes to a Portland-area Catholic high school, the statement didn’t seem to mean much at first, but as some schools have begun to implement policy following the archbishop’s guidelines, concern has crept in.

“If their school has to implement these rules, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” the student’s mother says. “Frankly, it’s not going to make them go back to being the person they are on their birth certificate.”

The closure of DCS has only increased fears that Sample’s guidelines might become concrete policy. “Staying at the school under those rules isn’t really an option,” the student tells WW “It’s either hope that it doesn’t get implemented or leave if it does.”

The worry extends beyond trans students and their parents.

Debbie Murphy is a doctor at a Providence hospital (itself a Catholic institution), a parent to children in Catholic schools, and a parishioner at a church with a large LGBTQ community.

“The statement that the archdiocese put out was about children and schools, but it was an immediate gasp of, ‘What does this mean for our patients?’” Murphy says.

What happens now?

Observers have struggled to make sense of Sample’s actions.

“I think that the fact that we’re in summer, and there’s the possibility of certain decisions coming down the pipeline at the 11th hour, is scary to people,” says Molly Hiro, an associate professor at the University of Portland and parent of a student in the Catholic school system.

It’s unclear if and when Sample will install a new superintendent. It’s also unclear whether he’ll make his gender guidelines school policy in the coming year. The Portland Archdiocese insisted in its website statement that no school functions would be disrupted by the closure.

“If this keeps going down this road, a lot of [parents] will pull their kids out of school,” Canales says. “If my kid’s going to be ostracized at Catholic school, I want to save my $3,000 or $5,000 a year.”

It’s been widely rumored, according to two sources, that the guidelines would become policy when the 2023-24 school year begins in the fall.

But amid the confusion and anxiety within Portland’s Catholic schools, one thing is indisputable: Sample can do as he pleases. “The archbishop is extremely significant,” Canales says. “He is one step below the pope. So he is the king of his kingdom.”

Sophie Peel contributed reporting to this story.

ST. ROSE CITY: The Catholic school at the center of a pronoun debate.

Good Habits

The Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence aren’t looking for trouble—but they don’t mind a little extra attention.

BY ANDREW JANKOWSKI @andrewjank

The Los Angeles Dodgers caved to homophobic pressure this May and disinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s L.A. chapter from the ball club’s 10th annual Pride Night. A week later, the Dodgers—proving true to their swerving name— flip-flopped and reinvited the philanthropic nonprofit to Chavez Ravine.

In Portland, John Clark enjoyed the attention.

“I like that the haters are giving us more exposure and more chances for people to figure out who we are,” says Clark, also known as Sister Donna Vanewday (pronounced “dawn of a new day”), prioress of Portland’s Order of Benevolent Bliss. “One of our sisters here in Portland was the photo for a lot of the L.A. Dodgers stories in the news just because it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s a picture of a Sister, let’s pop that on!’ The public doesn’t make that distinction a lot of the time.”

The Sisters—who have chapters around the world, from Alabama to Uruguay—first convened on Easter 1979 in San Francisco, spreading cheer and absolving guilt in traditionally Catholic nun habits. They host charity events, fundraising for sex education, gender expression and social equality.

Historically, the Sisters have supported HIV patients since the outset of the AIDS crisis (along with cancer research and marijuana legalization). They have faced decades of opposition from the Catholic Church and Christian conservatives, from Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant to Bishop Robert Barron and, now, Dodgers pitching ace Clayton Kershaw.

Today’s Sisters do not adhere to any one spiritual practice and wear self-styled habits with drag makeup painted on clown-white foundation instead of Sister Act costumes. But they’re a prominent target for hate nonetheless: The Sisters tap into the fabulosity of Catholic ritualism for the LGBTQ+ community’s benefit, à la Madonna and Lady Gaga, and in so doing draw criticism that they’re mocking people of faith.

Clark sees an opportunity. “We have had people more interested because they see more hate directed our way,” Clark says. “They go, ‘Wait, if these people are being hated, they must be doing something [right]!’”

The Order of Benevolent Bliss got its Portland start in June 2005 as an offshoot of the Abbey of St. Joan, Seattle’s house of Sisters. Clark, who joined the Sisters in 2012 after seeing them on YouTube, tells WW that the Portland order hasn’t suffered the same level of online hate as the L.A. house, and that local membership has actually increased.

That’s in part because the order keeps a lower profile. It has no plans to appear at major sporting events—no Timbers, Blazers, Thorns or even Pickles games. Instead, the Sisters will be found among revelers at such functions as the Sea Sickening Boat pRide on the Portland Spirit, the Portlandia Mermaid Parade, and Portland’s Trans Pride March during the Pride Parade.

For more than five years, the Order of Benevolent Bliss has deployed yards of rainbow flags to shield marchers from homophobic and transphobic hecklers, and it plans to do so again this year.

“ What I realized is, we need some way to block

these people out,” Clark says. “If we can keep our community from even having to look at them, then that solves multiple problems.”

Problem one: The stress of being targeted with vitriol while marching. Problem two: The thrill hecklers get from seeing a reaction or starting a confrontation. “It cuts off the source of what the protesters want,” Clark says. “They want that stress. They want people to be upset and yell at them and push back so they can feel like they’re doing something.”

The Sisters would rather focus on parties. More precisely, they’re helping get Portland’s LGBTQ+ community back together for in-person events. That’s especially crucial for newer Sisters who joined during the pandemic, and for people who

feel overwhelmed and isolated by a tide of hate.

“It may not feel helpful to say, ‘You’re not alone,’ but a lot of people are feeling the same thing, and a lot of the Sisters are feeling the same thing,” Clark says. “I think what can help is focusing on the things you can affect. It can be very easy to look at some of the wider things happening in our country or our world and think, ugh, everything is horrible! If we all focus more on our own community and neighborhoods and shore up there, and everyone’s doing that, then that’s how we change things.”

GO: The Sea Sickening Boat pRide boards at 1010 SW Naito Parkway, 801-368-8918, portlandsisters. org. 2-5 pm Sunday, July 16. $55-$130.

SISTER PEARL E. GATES

SISTER SHELBY HARRY

Q&A: Paul Lumley

The new director of Cascade AIDS Project explains how being two-spirit impacts his work.

BY AARON MESH amesh@wweek.com

Paul Lumley remembers the bad old days. The time when President Ronald Reagan blocked funding to assuage the plague killing Lumley’s friends, when slurs and beatings were dished out to the Native kid from the Yakama Reservation whose queerness stood out in the schoolyard.

But Lumley remembers something before that. He is part of an Indigenous tradition of honoring people who didn’t fit the typical molds of gender. The tribes called them “two-spirit.” And Lumley, 60, has embraced that identity.

Next week, Lumley becomes executive director of the Cascade AIDS Project, the first two-spirit person in that role. It’s another job on an already full plate: He also runs the Native American Family Youth Center, or NAYA, and serves on the volunteer committee setting boundaries for Portland’s new City Council districts.

WW spoke to Lumley last week over coffee about bullying, political scapegoating, and a tradition that transcends both those things.

WW: Can you walk us through what it means to be two-spirit?

Paul Lumley: The term is a new term. It was coined at a big Indigenous gathering in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1990. They wanted to come up with a term that was different than being included in a list of letters. And so they had a very good conversation about what it means to be what we call two-spirit. You’re born with both the man spirit and the woman spirit. Historically, tribal governments and tribal communities didn’t discard you because you were that way. They actually gave you positions of importance within the community because you had that blessing the Creator gave you.

Is the term interchangeable with LGBTQ, or are there distinctions from a colonial understanding of gender?

I think it’s interchangeable, actually. Within [NAYA’s] high school, the Main Nations Academy, there are many two-spirit kids. They cover the whole range: lesbian, gay, bi-, transgender, gender nonconforming.

As you grew up, was it a term that was common on the Yakama Reservation?

No, no, I predate that term.

So our youth were stolen from our homelands and taken off to these boarding schools where they drum the Native out of you. Through time, Christianity changed the way we think—this new kind of thinking where gay people were bad, the Bible said so. When I was growing up, I lived that injustice, that discrimination. I lived on a reservation, but it was the local public school system too. I was horribly bullied, treated terribly. I didn’t have any support structure at home. So I ran away at the age of 15 and didn’t go back. It was largely because I was gay and I was being bullied.

My aunt and my uncle mentored me. They kept encouraging me to go to college. I did. I was lucky to go live with them. You know, it seems hard when I tell [my story] to other people. To me, it’s just my life [laughs]. I didn’t know any better.

Are you still seeing the effects of that thinking on kids today?

There’s a lot of kids that come to us at NAYA from other reservations and it’s because they’re getting the same kind of discrimination. They come to us because they know we’re gender affirming and we have a place for all two-spirit kids. They have incredibly low self-esteem and they come to us that way.

And I know that because I was the same way. It was fashionable to discriminate against gay people. People called gay people really bad names and beat them, like what happened to me in college. I got beat up pretty bad. It was the 1980s. Different time.

But it’s also an extremely hopeful moment for people who are diagnosed with HIV. How does that change the mission of the Cascade AIDS Project? It is quite a bit of advancement in medications. In fact, I was talking to a friend not long ago who’s been living his life with HIV. He now has to worry about his retirement because he didn’t save when he was younger. He thought, “Why save for retirement? I’m probably gonna die.” And now that’s not the case. I don’t think it changes our mission at all. There’s some different medications which are wonderful, and it changes the way we deliver our service but doesn’t change our mission. We still have to support those who are, who need us.

It’s not that different a time. I feel like it’s becoming fashionable again.

That’s what I think is so awful about what’s going on right now with these politicians who are using transgender issues and gay education or youth as weapons. It’s all to get votes, and I think it’s shameful. What they’re trying to do is to distract people so they end up voting against their own interests because they somehow think that a transgender person is going to hurt them. I’m guessing never in their life they’ve ever been harmed by a transgender person. But [politicians] make them feel like, “We must vote in this way to protect our kids from these transgender people.”

Most of these people who are voting this way don’t realize the politicians don’t want to support clean water. They don’t want to have taxes who can have good roads or good schools. These are things that affect their real lives.

What different perspective do you bring to the Cascades AIDS Project?

I’m a daily reminder: Two-spirit have always been here. We predate this country. We predate Christianity. And so when people say that this land was founded on Christianity—no, this land was not founded on Christianity. This land was founded on Native cultures and we’ve always had two-spirit and we never rejected them. We included them in society. So that’s a daily reminder, just me being there.

READ MORE: Go to wweek.com for a discussion with Paul Lumley about setting four new Portland City Council districts.

GET READY: AIDS Walk Northwest begins at Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St. 10 am Saturday, Sept. 9. Proceeds benefit Cascade AIDS Project. Register at aidswalknorthwest.org.

“ Two-spirit have always been here. We predate this country. We predate Christianity.”

Ultimate Pride Guide 2023

Pride is more than a party. But there are parties.

BY ANDREW JANKOWSKI @andrewjank

Portland’s Pride Festival and Parade moved to July in an effort to avoid overlap with Juneteenth, the Delta Park Powwow and Father’s Day. (The Stonewall riots, the uprising that Pride recognizes, started June 28, 1969, so it’s always been a cusp observance.) The primary celebration is the weekend of July 15, but the LGBTQ+ community keeps the party going all summer. Pride Weekend 2023 hosts more block parties than last year, with dance nights and drag revues in nearly every neighborhood.

MULTIDAY EVENTS

Pride Festival

Tom McCall Waterfront Park, portlandpride. org. Noon Thursday-Friday, July 15-16. $10 suggested donation. All ages. Scores of vendors and organizations assemble on the waterfront to celebrate LGBTQ+ love and pride while sharing recognition within the community. DJ Spinderella and RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Kylie Sonique Love headline a bill of nearly 100 LGBTQ+ entertainers.

Drag-a-Thon

208 NW 3rd Ave., darcellexv.com, wildfang.com. Monday-Sunday, July 10-16. $10 for a 2-hour time slot. 21+.

Poison Waters, along with resident performers of Darcelle’s and a roster of local drag artists, attempt to break the world record for longest drag artist stage show with the help of celebrity hosts (tickets at Wild Fang’s website). But when emcees like Frankie Grande go home, Poison and the rest of Darcelle’s All-Stars will return to regular programming, including Sunday brunch.

Scandals Patio Party

struction, but Portland’s “gay Cheers” will host a light version of its annual weekend rager all the same.

Stag’s Pride Block Party Stag, 317 NW Broadway, stag-pdx.com. 11 am Saturday-Sunday, July 15-16. $25-$50+. 21+.

Stag’s Pride Block Party lets hot bodies and cool drinks spill out into the adjacent parking lot. Saturday is devoted to trans and nonbinary dancers during Jay Colby’s Penthouse shows.

Ankeny Alley Pride Festival

Linda Recessionista and Ty Givens transform the Melody Ballroom’s next-door neighbor into a nightmare realm right out of Stranger Things, with drag performances by Violet Hex and Asia Consent.

Gaylabration

Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., crystallballroompdx.com. 9 pm. $18-$80+. 21+. Portland’s annual gay circuit party celebrates 20 years with a future rave theme.

BOYeurism

Bossanova Ballroom, 722 E Burnside St., bossanovaballroom.com. 9 pm. $25-$225. 21+. Burlesque dancers Margo Mayhem and Broody Valentino headline Isaiah Esquire and Johnny Nuriel’s quarterly cabaret revue.

Switch

Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., holocene.org. 9 pm. $10-$60. 21+.

Kevin Aviance, the legendary New York drag recording artist whose voice you’ve heard sampled by everyone from MikeQ to Beyoncé, headlines Holocene’s LGBTQ+ dance party.

Alleyway by Voodoo Doughnut, 22 SW 3rd Ave. 5 pm Friday, July 14-8 pm Sunday, July 16. Free.

All ages.

Pride Northwest organizers coordinated with Ankeny Alley’s businesses, venues, entertainers and restaurants to be extra welcoming during Pride Weekend.

Lacefront

Sissy Bar, 1416 SE Morrison St., sissybarportland.com. 9 pm Friday-Sunday, June 14-16. $5. 21+.

T’Kara Campbell Starr hosts a charitable Pride weekend drag show of local talent. Sunday’s show features titleholders of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court.

FRIDAY, JULY 14

Scandals, 1125 SW Harvey Milk St., scandalspdx. com. Friday-Saturday, July 14-16. $5 suggested donation. 21+.

Scandals’ annual block party has been postponed until September due to ongoing con-

Queerer Things Portland PRIDE –

80s Remix Dance

Party

The Get Down, 615 SE Alder St., seetickets.us. 9 pm. $25-$40. 21+.

SUNDAY, JULY 16

Pride Parade

Sea Sickening Boat pRide

1010 SW Naito Parkway, eventbrite.com. 2 pm. $55-$130. 21+.

RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Mariah Paris Balenciaga and the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s Order of Benevolent Bliss are among the entertainment for the Portland Spirit’s three-hour tour of the Willamette River.

It’s Bolivia!

CC Slaughter’s, 219 NW Davis St., ccslaughterspdx.com. 7 pm. $10. 21+.

Bolivia Carmichaels is a treasure. Give her more money than she asks for, sit back and watch for her iconic impressions of redheaded royalty like Lucille Ball and Reba McEntire.

Lumbertwink

Jackie’s, 930 SE Sandy Blvd., eventbrite.com. 2 pm. $15-$40. 21+.

Gay bears and flannel enthusiasts take over Sandy sports bar Jackie’s and its rooftop patio for a night of dancing and shirtless fun.

Iridescent

Old Town, pridenw.org. 11 am. Free. All ages. Make sure to get up early this Sunday if you can.

The best views along Southwest Naito Parkway, the parade’s historic route, tend to fill up quickly as everyone wants a glimpse of the city’s favorite queer personalities and organizations (and allies) strutting their stuff.

The Get Down, 615 SE Alder St., seetickets.us. 9 pm. $25-$40. 21+.

Jayla Rose Sullivan, Lala Benét, Silhouette, Atlas, Katya and Linda Recessionista meld minds for a high-concept drag and dance party.

Twirl

World Famous Kenton Club, 2025 N Kilpatrick St., kentonclub.com. 3 pm. $15. 21+.

The cuties behind Twirl bust out the turntables and transform Kenton Club’s patio into a queer oasis for their monthly disco soirée.

BEAR TRAP

Photos by David Frazier

On Instagram: @davidmfrazier

There were plenty of beards, brawn and passionate embraces at Bearracuda, the traveling dance party for bears, cubs and their admirers. The diversity of bear culture was on display Saturday, June 17, at Bossanova Ballroom, which saw attendees don everything from harnesses to cowboy hats to bandannas (and little else). There was also at least one mask resembling the face of a furry mammal of the four-legged variety worn by someone who appeared to be a fan of the go-go dancers. While Bearracuda did not coincide with Portland Pride (that has been moved to July this year), no one seemed to mind. The event now has a long history: Launched in San Francisco in 2006 after the founder noticed a lack of bear-oriented celebrations, it’s since been held in dozens of cities around the globe—there’s now even a Bearracuda-branded cruise.

GET BUSY

GO: Sword & Veil: A Dark Arts Holiday Soirée

Abandon the realm of mere mortals by immersing yourself in a magical night of dining, dancing, tarot readings and avant-garde performances. Come dressed in an elegant costume as your favorite fantasy alter ego and lose yourself in the mystical world created by The Victorian Belle, a mansion that typically hosts weddings but also features non-nuptial-related events. Yes, it sounds like the makings of the erotic masked ball scene from Eyes Wide Shut, which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on your preferences. While that experience isn’t promised, a menu by an award-winning chef and cocktails prepared by top mixologists are advertised. The Victorian Belle Mansion, 1441 N McClellan St., 503-298-9884, victorianbelle.com/shows-events. 6-10 pm Wednesday, July 5. $20-$100.

LAUGH: Steve Hofstetter

Known as “the hardest-working man in show business” by anyone who’s never heard of James Brown, Steve Hofstetter sure has been active while on his way to a stage near you. The comedian may best be known in the college circuit, booking more than 100 gigs at higher ed institutions across the country each year, but he also has hosted three podcasts and appeared on multiple TV shows, including The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson on CBS, Showtime’s White Boyz in the Hood, and Sundance’s On the Road in America, and has written for multiple publications, from The New York Times to Sports Illustrated. Catch him live in town while you can since there’s no telling when

he’ll be back given that busy résumé. Newmark Theater, 1111 SW Broadway, 503-2484335, portland5.com. 8 pm Friday, July 7. $35-$100.

GO: Portland Indie Book Fair

The Portland Indie Book Fair is back with a summer edition that’ll blow your literary mind. You can expect an array of Portland publishers, bestselling authors and a lineup of zinesters, all selling their work directly to the public. There will also be artists on location with everything from prints to stickers to apparel to purchase. And if that’s not enough, there’s also going to be raffles, prizes, scheduled readings and a tarot table. Stock up on some summer reads while supporting independent publishers at the same time. Honey Latte Cafe building, 1033 SE Main St., portlandindie.com. Noon-5 pm Saturday, July 8. Free.

GO: Chinese Kunqu Opera Culture Performance & Exhibition

Enjoy a spectacular night of beauty and culture in honor of the 35th anniversary of the sister city relationship between Portland and Suzhou, China, at the Lan Su Chinese Garden, which will host a night of Kunqu—one of the oldest forms of Chinese opera. You’ll be captivated by performances of selected scenes from The Peony Pavilion, the 16th-century masterpiece performed by National Class-II Kunqu opera star Yu Liu and other visitors from Suzhou. Costumes and photography exhibits will also be on display alongside opera hair and makeup demonstrations. Lan Su Chinese Garden, 239 NW Everett

St., 503-228-8131, lansugarden.org. 6:308:30 pm Saturday, July 8. $15-$40.

WATCH: Poltergeist at Rooster Rock State Park

Oregon State Parks and the Hollywood Theatre have teamed up to resume their popular outdoor summer movie series. Dust off your favorite picnic blanket and take a short road trip to majestic Rooster Rock State Park in the Gorge, where you can get lost in the scenery and then the paranormal cult classic Poltergeist that had children of the ’80s throwing away all their clown dolls. Witness the Freeling family as they’re tormented by restless spirits who suck the youngest daughter through the TV set and into a terrifying dimension. The themes should be as salient as the screams at this screening under the stars. Rooster Rock State Park, Corbett, 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 9 pm Saturday, July 8. Free.

GO: 2nd Annual East Portland Summer Arts Festival: Celebrating Black Excellence!

Park for two days of fun, art and performances fleshing out this year’s theme of Celebrating Black Excellence. In addition to performances by multicultural music and dance groups, there will be a screening of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a Be Your Own Superhero activity (kids create their own capes, shields and helmets), a scavenger hunt featuring historical Black figures, and karaoke. Don’t miss out on Sunday’s evening showcase: a concert by PJ Morton, the Grammy Award-winning keyboardist for Maroon 5. Ventura Park, 460 SE 113th Ave., 503-823-2525, portlandparks.org. 4-8:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, July 8-9. Free.

DRINK: Sauced!

If a fair focused primarily on booze instead of carnival games and fried food, you’d get something like Sauced!, which will feature more than 30 women-owned beverage brands offering samples of their products (including non-alcoholic options). Tickets also include tastes of four pies made by talented female pizzaiolos, a souvenir glass, and ice cream sundaes from Oatly to sweeten the deal. Redfox Commons, 2024 NW 27th Ave., rouxportland.com/sauced. Noon-4 pm Sunday, July 9. $75.

The East Portland Summer Arts Festival is back and better than ever. Get to Ventura

SUMMER IN THE CITY: Ventura Park is again the site of Portland Parks & Recreation’s second Summer Arts Festival, with a new theme: Celebrating Black Excellence.

FOOD & DRINK

Pride Fuel Guide

BY THOM HILTON

In a post-The Roxy Portland, where nearly every restaurant hangs a Pride flag in the window (some year-round, some with visible folds from being packed away till June), it’s sometimes hard to identify what exactly makes a gay meal. Where can LGBTQIA+ Portlanders go to sit down, talk and eat? In some ways, thankfully, everywhere. Drag brunches continue to pop up all over, and incredible queer-owned spots like Sammich, Red Sauce Pizza, Makulit, Cheese & Crack Snack Shop and countless others hold it down. But even so, dining outside our homes usually takes place in the cafes and brewpubs of the everyday world before we head to the gay bar. We gather in places that are for everybody before we gather in places where we sometimes need a little “just us.”

The gay restaurant is a much more amorphous and much less identifiable object than the gay bar. It’s a feeling, safety, an ability to breathe, even a bit of a secret. It’s something that maybe, after The Roxy, it feels like we’re missing entirely. So what if we turned to the gay bar itself? Most in Portland have kitchens. Talented people work in them. Good food is made in those spots. Yet, when polling friends and colleagues about this piece, I was often met with laughter. The thought of eating at gay bars sounded deeply unserious: a joke, a last resort—possibly something you do while unhinged, or at least something reserved exclusively for the most reckless.

This is not to knock classic bar snacks—the chicken strips and onion rings at Darcelle XV Showplace are reliably crispy and pair perfectly with a megasweet cocktail served in an enormous plastic leg (as long as you’re mindful not to get your cash tips too greasy). But I was on the hunt for something more: gay bar meals for the older set, the sober set, a group of friends on a Tuesday night who just wanna chill, or your seventh date where you finally unpack that “family trowma” as Jamie Lee Curtis would say. I found what I was looking for. I was surprised, I was moved and, perhaps most importantly, I was sober. This Pride, the shame of eating at the gay bar is gone. Chow down, baby.

Overall Best Bite: Ribs ($8, $26) at The Sports Bra (2512 NE Broadway, 503-327-8401, thesportsbrapdx.com). Congratulations, you are the winner of this week’s challenge. These baby back babies—cooked in a clay pot and caramelized with coconut milk—are so tender, one can hardly pick them up without the meat sliding off the bone. Sticky and sweet, the little burnt bits sing when working in tandem with the summery cilantro-cabbage slaw. This is peak bar snack, enjoyed in the nation’s first women’s sports bar, perfect to eat while watching gymnasts twirl and snowboarders…snowboard.

Best Snack For A Group: The nachos at Sissy Bar (1416 SE Morrison St., 503-206-4325, sissybarportland.com). No notes. Simple, classic, you know ’em, you love ’em. Juanita’s chips topped with cheese, tomato, jalapeño and sour cream are melty and fresh and even better with the addition of avocado salad ($8), a kind of sweet and hunky guacamole with cucumber, lime and scallion. This music video bar filled with colorful light panels makes for a great hangout spot, with a menu of Colombian food that also includes some pretty solid chicken and hogao arepas ($12-$15). Our server gave us a bottle of hot sauce and warned, “This sauce doesn’t seem hot, but it comes back for you!” I abstained. I didn’t think I wanted it to come back.

Best Dessert: This category is a little unfair, seeing as it’s basically the only dessert at a gay bar in Portland, but luckily, it rules. Warm white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies ($7) at Shine Distillery and Grill (4232 N Williams Ave., 503-825-1010, shinedistillerygrill.com) are fragrant, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and served with a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream. With seating on a second-floor patio overlooking Williams, or in the enormous dining room that hosts drag bingo on Wednesdays, Shine also offers savory snacks, like a creamy-briny artichoke dip with pita ($12) that’s served so hot I’d call it slutty. The

Editor: Andi Prewitt Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com

Buzz List

1. TOCAYO AT PALOMAR

959 SE Division St., #100, 971-357-8020, barpalomar.com. 2 pm-sunset Saturday-Sunday. 21+.

Palomar is the latest spot to get in on the “restaurant within a restaurant” trend by turning its rooftop bar into a pop-up taqueria. Tocayo, which is the Spanish term for two people who have the same name, is a nod to owner Ricky Gomez and chef Ricky Bella, who combine their love of Cuban cocktail and Mexican drink cultures in this project. Expect plenty of fruit flavors in everything from a mule with roasted coconut water to a frozen guava margarita to a pineapple-infused gin and tonic, so if a south-of-the-border vacation isn’t in the budget this summer—escape with a drink instead.

2. ZULA

1514 NW 23rd Ave., 503-477-4235, zulapdx.com. 11:30 am-9 pm Wednesday-Sunday.

We now know what Rotigo’s reimagining looks like: Roasted chicken is out and Mediterranean cuisine is the focus. We’re still swooning over the filo and feta roll, served hot with honey drizzle, and the fire-roasted eggplant. But don’t overlook the brightly colored collection of cocktails that will transport you to the coast of Israel. Not only are they named after neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, where Zula owner Tal Tubitski once lived; the concoctions are made with ingredients from the region. The tequila-pomegranate blend of the Levontin, or the Montefiore, made with date-infused rye whiskey, were our first picks.

3. DIRTY PRETTY

popcorn chicken ($13) is also intriguing, brined in black tea and served coated in a sweet-hot barbecue sauce.

Best Loner Meal: The crispy chicken Caesar wrap ($13) at Crush Bar (1400 SE Morrison St., 503-235-8150, crushbar.com) is god-tier, actually. I’m not usually a wrap fan—something about when the tortilla folds into the other part of the tortilla and they layer…could this be a phobia? But on a recent Sunday night, I was really effing tired, and this revived me. Chicken strips, romaine, red onions, Parmesan cheese and Caesar dressing gone handheld. A side of ultra-crispy tater tots with ranch. A Diet Coke. I sat in the window, looking out on one of Portland’s best patios and people-watching spots. The sun was setting behind the trees. “This Must Be The Place” by the Talking Heads played as I finished my meal, and I thought, “So true, baby David.”

Best Vibe: Escape Bar & Grill (9004 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-255-4300, escapebarandgrillpdx.com). No, this place has nothing to do with the all-ages alcohol-free dance club of yesteryear. Yes, it’s a spacious, gorgeous, lesbian-owned wonderland that satisfies something deep in my soul. Escape feels like an old-fashioned haunt, complete with dark lighting, wood paneling and a disco ball. I took the bus there at dusk and felt like I was in a slower, calmer world. Just me, my trusty Diet Coke, local news on the TV, three other people, and a bunch of Pride flags on a summer night at 8:30 pm.

“I want some elote,” I said.

“ YES YOU DO, THEY’RE FUCKIN’ DELICIOUS” was the reply from behind the register. And indeed they were! Three big pieces of tender corn on the cob ($8) dressed with lime, Tajín, cotija, crema, and lots of cilantro. I went full Corn Kid mode. It had the juice! Other hits included crispy ground beef tacos ($6), which gave Taco Bell vibes in the best way: exactly what you need and want, with cheese placed in the bottom of the shell to make sure it gets melted by the beef. Clearly built by a pro.

The thing I can’t stop thinking about, however, are the fried pickles ($9), a bar snack I already love but can sometimes be ruined by the shape choice: thin and flaccid coins? Girthy spears? The pickles at Escape are cut shoestring fry-style, which I now demand to be industry standard. Lightly battered, uber-salty, served with herby, fresh ranch. My mouth waters as I recount them.

I missed the bus back home and there wasn’t another for 40 minutes. I decided to walk down Sandy for a bit as the sky got darker and the air cooler. I’d had my little dinner that was just for me, in a place where I could breathe. I felt full. I felt lucky. I felt proud.

638 E Burnside St., 503-841-5253, dirtyprettypdx.com. 4 pm-1 am Sunday-Thursday, 4 pm-2 am Friday-Saturday.

With the opening of Dirty Pretty, the third bar in the Pink Rabbit and Fools and Horses family, it feels like owner Collin Nicholas and chef Alex Wong have created a brand. Each property has a distinct theme, but the core feeling and elements of flair unite the trio. Cocktails by beverage director Ben Purvis are fun and extravagant. Guava Wars, for instance, drinks like a tropical smoothie, while the Jungle Juice with Jamaican rum and pinot noir tastes like something that could make one act very, very sassy.

4. TORO MEXICAN KITCHEN

1355 NW Everett St., Suite 120, 503-6732724, toropdx.com. 4-10 pm Sunday-Thursday, 4-11 pm Friday-Saturday. The former Tilt space in the Pearl District is empty no more. Toro, a Mexican eatery operated by the ever-expanding Urban Restaurant Group (Bartini, Brix, Swine), has transformed the dark, industrial-themed space into an airy cantina. The initial food offerings we’ve sampled have all been satisfying—but the delightful surprise was the lengthy cocktail list. Early favorites were the sunny Passionfruit (vodka, passion fruit puree, pineapple juice and a Tajín rim) and Ocean (vodka, lemongrass and basil syrup, cucumber), which is a shade of turquoise so alluring you’ll wish you could swim in it.

5. GRAPE APE

77 SE Yamhill St., 503-261-3467, grapeape.wine. 11 am-bedtime Tuesday-Sunday.

Sorry to break it to fans of the ’70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, but you won’t find a 40-foot purple primate at this new Central Eastside bar. However, much of the décor is from that era, and the lineup of fine natural wines should soften the blow. The curated list highlights selections from low-intervention labels, including Oregon’s Hooray for You chardonnay, California producer Populis’ sauvignon blanc and a Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme gamay from France. Pair one with marinated white beans and mayo on toast or a jamon baguette and pretend you’ve made an escape to Paris for the afternoon.

You’ll be surprisingly rewarded by embracing the kitchens at Portland’s queer bars.

SAUCY: The baby back ribs at The Sport’s Bra are peak bar snack.

ESCAPES

Hike of the Month: Tualatin Hills Nature Park

A suburban safari awaits just a short stroll from the Beaverton Creek MAX stop.

BY ANDI PREWITT aprewitt@wweek.com

Portlanders seeking sanctuary in nature who don’t want to drive out of town naturally turn to Forest Park, one of the largest urban woods in the country. While nowhere near as large, Tualatin Hills Nature Park is the close-in green retreat of choice for westsiders, which is arguably easier to get to since it’s just a short walk from the MAX line.

This 222-acre wildlife preserve offers nearly 5 miles of trails, all of which can be tackled in less than two hours. You could easily cobble together a much shorter route, however, exploring the entire northern perimeter, along with a series of four loops on the south side, allows you to take in all of the diverse terrain, which includes forests, marshes, grassland, two creeks and several ponds.

From the Beaverton Creek MAX stop, resist the urge to walk north directly into a wooded area with a fleet of sleek black Biketown cycles waiting for riders. Despite the welcoming appearance of the paved path, that area is not Tualatin Hills. Instead, head southwest through a different kind of park—one where you can spot Nike corporate office workers in their natural habitat—until you hit Southwest Millikan Way, turning right to reach the parking lot and visitor center.

There’s a good reason why the kiosk near the restrooms is well stocked with maps: It’s easy to get a bit turned around in this network of trails and boardwalks, even though junctions are all well marked, because there are so many different options. Grab one of the brochures as a form of assistance in case you end up getting lost or to use it to chart your progress, then set out on the Vine Maple Trail—the main artery through the

center of the park.

At the first intersection, veer right onto the Oak Trail and continue to circle around the property counterclockwise. Many of the paths here are named after the flora they meander through (a helpful identifier for anyone who’s a lousy botanist), including soaring old firs, wetland-loving ash trees whose roots are often submerged after hard rains, rare west-of-the-Cascades ponderosas and blooming trilliums in spring. As you explore the northern edge of the park—using the Oak Trail to connect to the Old Wagon Trail—you’ll also encounter some non-natural yet still interesting sights, like TriMet’s Merlo bus barn.

To reach the sequence of loops to the south, follow the Old Wagon Trail’s leftward bend through a thicket of two different types of Oregon grape and past a lily pond (though take the short spur to the pad-filled bowl, which could be filled with water in spring or parched by summer’s end). You’ll then reunite with the Vine Maple Trail that connects to the Elliot Path after less than a halfmile. Take that right, where there are trees pockmarked by both woodpecker holes and beetle burrows, and then go right again at the Big Fir Trail. That will bring you to the named loops (Chickadee, Ash, Trillium and Ponderosa) bordering a particularly mellow segment of Beaverton Creek. The last one links back up to the Vine Maple Trail, just a short jaunt from the parking lot.

Along the route, always keep an eye out for squirrels, chipmunks, newts, deer, fuzzy orange-and-black woolly bear caterpillars (an undeniably cute critter) and more. You can then record your sightings on a white board back at the Nature Center and compare the success of your visual hunt to those of other visitors that day.

DISTANCE: About 4.5 miles to see most of the park.

DIFFICULTY:  out of 

DRIVE TIME FROM PORTLAND: Approximately 20 minutes in the car or 40 minutes on MAX from downtown.

DIRECTIONS: Head out on Highway 26 west for roughly 6.5 miles before taking exit 67 for Murray Boulevard, then turn left onto Northwest Murray Boulevard. After a little more than 2 miles, turn right onto Southwest Millikan Way. Continue for about half a mile and make one more right into the Tualatin Hills Nature Park. If you use MAX, take the Blue Line west to the Beaverton Creek stop, then walk southwest to Southwest 153rd Drive, turning left on Southwest 154th Terrace. Continue until you reach Southwest Millikan Way and turn right. Follow driving directions from there to reach the parking lot.

RESTROOM AVAILABILITY: Multiple flush restrooms are located at the trailhead and inside the Tualatin Hills Nature Center.

A shorter version of this story appeared as part of Oregon Summer, our annual free magazine out now all over Portland.

SHOWS OF THE WEEK

WHAT TO SEE AND WHAT TO HEAR

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

SATURDAY, JULY 8:

The Crumb Connection

How Portland old-time trio Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few came to collaborate with R. Crumb.

BY CHRISTMAS CRAFT

On the cover of Portland old-time strings trio Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few’s debut album, No. 1 (released this spring), is a portrait of founding members Candra and Ethan Francis, smiling modestly in bygone garb with guitar and banjo in hand. Edging the illustration is a tiny signature: “R. Crumb 2022.”

“It’s pretty simple how it happened, it’s not even crazy,” insists guitarist and vocalist Candra Francis, explaining how the first drawing by the cartoonist and counterculture icon since the 2022 passing of his wife and collaborator, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, came to grace the cover. “We told him, ‘You do not have to do this,’ and it almost didn’t happen.”

Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few is a collaboration between the Francises—who are partners in both music and life—and fiddler Elliot Kennedy. The band’s freshman record is a DIY effort of 14 songs from 1924 to 1936, along with two sneaky originals written and recorded with such faithful fluency to the time period that their modernity is indiscernible.

“The music is authentic to us—we don’t treat it like an artifact,” says Ethan Francis, who sings and plays guitar, banjo and cello, among other string instruments.

Stone & Sue’s album art was a Christmas gift from Crumb, who befriended the Francises after his daughter Sophie began corresponding with them via Instagram about her father’s love of their music before encouraging the couple to send her father a handwritten letter. A two-year pen pal exchange culminated in an almost grandfatherly connection with the illustrator, who ultimately invited the Francises to visit the Crumbs’ estate in Southern France.

“ We stayed up late listening to records,” Ethan Francis says. “We would go to dinner and [Crumb] would collaborate with his grandkids on placemat drawings. [Aline Kominsky-Crumb] had to take the placemats away just in case someone tried to sell his drawings.”

In France, Crumb accompanied the band in performing live as a quartet, taking up the banjo, baritone ukulele, and mandolin. “He

still knows every single song we play,” Candra Francis says. “And everyone in the village thought we were Amish,” Ethan laughs.

Crumb and Stone & Sue are a match made in heaven. An accomplished self-taught musician, Crumb, who is left-handed, prefers to play string instruments upside down rather than string them backwards for left-handed play. Perhaps even more impressive is his extensive private collection of rare 78 rpm records, which number in the thousands.

Godfather of the “underground comix ” movement, Crumb is best known for his alt-satire cartoons of the 1960s and ’70s, featuring characters like LSD-soaked Mr. Natural, contending with the wily temptations of buxom Amazonian women, and the sex-obsessed Fritz the Cat. His anti-corporate oeuvre of unflinching observations lampooning American absurdism earned him folk hero status as an “equal opportunity offender.”

Despite moving from California to Cévennes, France (where he has lived quietly with his family since 1991), Crumb, like Stone & Sue, maintains warm nostalgia for the simple folkways of late 19th and early 20th century America. Overlapping interests have helped dissipate the decades between Crumb and the trio, who describe the famously reclusive cartoonist as “a humble sweetheart.”

Ethan Francis shares a singular bond with Crumb: He is also an illustrator and cartoonist, as well as a self-taught master of string instruments and music history expert. He counts Crumb as an influence and mentor as well as a friend.

“I sent him two zines that I made,” Francis says. “He has a whole drawer just for my zines and drawings, alongside drawers for each of his grandchildren.”

Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few is set to release their second album over the summer, along with a solo effort by Ethan Francis (they also have upcoming shows this Friday at the Landmark Saloon and July 23 at the Moon & Sixpence). The trio maintains close contact with the Crumbs and plans to meet up with the family this summer in Portland.

“They felt like family immediately,” Candra Francis says.

Portland is a great city for loud rock-’n’roll music right now, and Alien Boy is a major reason why. Loud, queer, sincere and blessed with a guitar tone that sounds like a wall of liquid gold, Alien Boy are steeped in PDX rock lore (they’re named for a Wipers EP and named a song in tribute to Dear Nora) and happy to keep the tradition going by mentoring young bands like Growing Pains. When the annals of West Coast DIY are written, Alien Boy may come out as the definitive Portland rock band of the early ’20s. Mission Theatre, 1624 NW Glisan St. 8 pm. $18. All ages.

SATURDAY, JULY 8:

Few producers have taken techno further into uncharted astral realms than David Moufang, the German who records as Move D. Moufang’s music is in the tradition of early ambient techno by bands like the Orb and the KLF, and yet it’s earthier and more organic, playing as much like psychedelic rock or jam band music as electronic music. Building slowly and seamlessly over a marathon 10-plus minutes, Moufang’s tracks are studies in contrast between the precision of techno and the woolliness of psychedelia. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St. 9 pm. $20. 21+.

SUNDAY, JULY 9:

Anacortes, Wash., breeds a unique strain of indie rock that sounds like what you’d expect people on a rainy forested island to make: spooky, awed by nature, and seemingly hammered together from raw lumber. Karl Blau is based in Philly now, but his roots are in a scene that includes luminaries like The Microphones (who named a song after him). And though he’s given a boost of countrified sweetness by Jon Hyde’s pedal steel, the songs on his new album, Love & Harm, are as raw and unpredictable as ever. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St. 9 pm. $15. 21+.

SHOW REVIEW

THE 2023 WATERFRONT BLUES FESTIVAL

BY ROBERT HAM

In our ever-changing city, it’s reassuring to know there’s at least one thing we can rely on: the continued existence of the Waterfront Blues Festival. The four-day event has been a constant of the concert calendar since 1988, with only the lineup and scope of the event altering from year to year.

For the 2023 edition, organizers played it a little safe, leaning on reliable names from the old guard of blues and zydeco (Buddy Guy, C.J. Chenier, Rick Estrin) or young acts that color within the same crowd-pleasing lines (Cory Wong, Yates McKendree). Whatever your feelings about the lineup, the schedule—on the two days we were able to attend before deadline, at least—resulted in scores of Portlanders descending upon downtown to gently cook in the early July sun.

It also put the quieter and slightly more offbeat acts at a bit of a disadvantage. Sunny War, the folk artist from Nashville, took a little longer to win over the beer-swilling crowd with her finger-picked acoustic guitar and hushed vocals. But during both of her sets Saturday and Sunday, she eventually had everyone within earshot—even those rubberneckers on the Hawthorne Bridge—leaning in so as not to miss a single detail of her finely textured songs.

War’s Saturday set was marred only by location: the Crossroads Stage, the small platform set in the middle of the grounds. The sound bleed from the larger stages was impossible to ignore. So much so that when the PDX Jazz Collective and Bridge City Quartet, two local jazz ensembles made up of players still in their teens, played, I feared they would get overwhelmed by the added noise. Credit to them, they held firm and played strong sets filled with wide smiles and a keen understanding of their chosen genre’s history.

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Departing artistic director Nataki Garrett directs the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of Romeo & Juliet.

BY ERIC ASH

At Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, director Nataki Garrett has brought a fresh spin to Romeo & Juliet, which is playing at Angus Bowmer Theatre through Oct. 15.

Like many productions that Garrett has spearheaded as OSF’s artistic director, it’s a contemporary update. This production retains the original dialogue, but the setting is a houseless encampment under a bridge in a West Coast city, complete with a hip-hop soundtrack and parallels between the Capulet and Montague blood feud and today’s ever stronger social divisions.

Originally from Oakland, Garrett connected to the source material in middle school English (Mercutio’s final monologue was her first choice to recite in class). As an adult, she came to appreciate the play’s musicality, likening it to the jazz and soul and hip-hop she grew up with.

Since the production premiered, it has become Garrett’s Ashland swan song. In May, she resigned as artistic director and interim executive director of OSF, following an emergency fundraising campaign to save the company’s summer season.

As the first Black female artistic director in OSF’s 88-year history, Garrett’s tenure

was marked by racism, death threats and complaints about her productions being too modern and diverse for a majority white audience. Her detractors would have been shocked by the audience at the matinee I attended; the crowd laughed at every witty turn of phrase, applauded between each scene, and gave the production a standing ovation.

Attendees came hundreds of miles in some cases (a woman from San Anselmo, Calif., remarked on how the stage could visually pass for Oakland, Los Angeles, or Portland, with its variety of digital backdrops).

Garrett has staged a compelling production, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the talents of a terrific, largely BIPOC cast. Though not a hard and fast rule (the Nurse and Montague, both white, serve as counterexamples), lighter-skinned characters tend to be more privileged. Erica Sullivan’s Prince comes to mind.

The Prince is just one character who inverts the Elizabethan tradition of female characters being played by male actors. Several traditionally male characters (Balthazar, Mercutio and Capulet, among them) are here played by female or nonbinary actors.

That makes for a curious irony when lines of gendered dialogue are retained, such as

Tyrone Wilson’s Friar Lawrence admonishing Jeremy Gallardo’s Romeo not to cry “womanish” tears. Even more ironically, as the scene progresses, Friar Lawrence can’t hold back his own tears.

As Romeo, Gallardo is like an overgrown puppy: excitable and physically affectionate with everyone around him (leading to a running gag of Mercutio recoiling from his breath).

As the story turns darker, Gallardo retains that expressive nature, but is also shown in the fetal position and screaming in anguish. Jada Alston Owens as Juliet builds up to similarly explosive fury, but starts out quiet and reserved, playing the daughter of Capulet as a sensitive artist who paints her space above her parents’ ramshackle trailer.

Garrett, of course, is an artist in her own right. She may be leaving Ashland, but with Romeo & Juliet, she’s leaving on a high note, biting her thumb at all her detractors in style.

SEE IT: Romeo & Juliet plays at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, 20 E Main St., Ashland, 541-482-2111, osfashland.org. Shows through Oct. 15. $45.

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson | Contact: bennett@wweek.com

Orca (1977)

If orca whales are going to keep attacking boats in the Strait of Gibraltar, it was only a matter of time before someone did the responsible thing and put Orca back in a theater.

Critically harpooned in its day as a shaky Jaws rip-off, Orca (which screens at the Academy, along with Free Willy) did little to dispel that reputation. Executive producer Dino De Laurentiis explicitly asked for a “fish” antagonist bigger than a great white shark and bankrolled a whale-revenge thriller in which Richard Harris essentially plays Captain Quint and Charlotte Rampling is the marine biologist (Jaws cameraman Ron Taylor even provided shark b-roll).

Orca feels Frankensteined together by director Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run), but many of its pieces are unimpeachable. Ennio Morricone’s score lends romance and longing to the plight of the orcas hunted by Harris’ deathly hungover Ahab archetype, and there’s striking location cinematography of the Newfoundland fishing village attacked by a grieving whale.

Then there’s the orca itself— actually cast in the role of antihero—with shrieks of pain, rage and gloating no mere fish could muster. If Jaws is one of the great movies about fear, Orca is simply about whales. For that, it still deserves a long, piercing orca battle cry. Academy, July 7-11.

ALSO PLAYING:

Cinema 21: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), July 8. Cinemagic:

The Thing (1982), July 6. Brain

Damage (1988), July 7. Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird (1985), July 8. Clinton:

Under the Skin (2013), July 6. Xanadu (1980), July 7. The Hidden (1987), July 8. Solaris (1972), July 10. Hollywood: The Maltese Falcon (1941), July 6. Grease 2 (1982), July 7. The Big Lebowski (1998), July 8. Waiting for Guffman (1996), July 9. Frida (2002), July 9. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), July 10.

MOVIES

Edited Out, Mic’d Up

Eden Dawn and Fiona McCann redefine “newsworthy” with their podcast We Can’t Print This.

BY CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER @chance_s_p

Any journalist knows the feeling: You file a carefully crafted story but know deep down that it doesn’t contain the best bits of your reporting.

It’s an occasional and perhaps inevitable disappointment of the trade. Maybe the story’s prescribed structure had no room for memorable tangents. Maybe the source dropped an “off the record” at a scintillating moment. Maybe the best interview nugget simply wasn’t verifiable.

With 35 years of journalism experience between its hosts, We Can’t Print This aims to pick up those many choice pieces and reassemble them into a podcast that amplifies “the stories we don’t know behind the stories we do.”

Eden Dawn and Fiona McCann, two former longtime Portland Monthly editors and self-described “work wives” wrapped their podcast’s first season in late spring—12 conversations with writers (most of them Portlanders) that don’t fit that sometimes narrow definition of “newsworthy.”

They know that game well.

“I had a very long, extended Tonya Harding experience where she ended up wearing my prom dress in front of me,” says Dawn of the time she helped style the Olympic figure skater for a Portland Monthly photo shoot. “It was a really weird day. That can’t go in print. That’s like the bit you tell around the cocktail party.”

In the podcast forum, however, the guests are more than happy to share the yarns they couldn’t publish or the experiences no one thought to ask about—like novelist Emily Chenoweth’s take on the bizarre dynamics of celebrity ghostwriting, Melissa Maerz’s account of crafting the pitch email to Richard Linklater that became her oral history of Dazed and Confused, and screenwriter Jon Raymond explaining how First Cow was born from drunken porch chats.

Unearthing these stories on the air, Dawn and McCann have the coordination of right and left hands, engaging with guests in cordial, equal measure. Specialties may vary, though. Dawn is more likely to recite Cool Nutz lyrics; McCann is more likely to invoke English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In their Writers’ Block podcast studio in the Pearl District, Dawn and McCann approximate their beloved Portland Monthly confines, where they spent nearly 20 years combined before departing in 2021 and 2022,

respectively. Back in the day, they shared “an office for one” and planted the seeds of both their shared 8-year-old Monstera plant (“Daisy Rose Dawn McCann”) and their eventual podcast. Frequently, a colleague would duck in, shut the door, and enthusiastically recount a story that could never make the magazine.

“I’ve always strongly felt that gossip had a bad rap,” McCann says. “It’s how we pass information when we’re outside of defined information circles.”

In Season 1, We Can’t Print This created its own information circle with guests familiar to Dawn and McCann. That streak of interviewing friends could shift in Season 2 (stay tuned after a “short summer break”) and has to end eventually if the podcast ever lands dream guests like Stephen King, Julio Torres, Saeed Jones or Maggie Nelson.

Heading into every recording, Dawn and McCann have had some idea of what guests want to discuss. But in each episode—sometimes edited from several hours down to 40-odd minutes—they’re still digging. Sometimes the best shovel is Dawn’s go-to interview closer: “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about today?”

That question paid especially compelling dividends in Episode 8 when Portland actor and writer Vin Shambry—ostensibly there to discuss his forthcoming film Outdoor School—dropped a closing anecdote from his collegiate theater experience in Wyoming. Shambry, who is Black, going public with an absurd, nightmarish memory about his otherwise all-white class staging Showboat essentially explains why We Can’t Print This exists.

The tales themselves mitigate any risk of the podcast becoming inside baseball for journalists. When advice for writers does sneak in, it typically concerns another of McCann and Dawn’s professional ambitions—building creative community in an often isolating profession.

“I don’t know when it’s ever been a great time for writers,” McCann says, “but I don’t think it’s now.”

“ Writing can feel like a very exclusive world where you have to be granted the keys,” Dawn adds. “Where you have to have gone to [journalism] school or have a published novel, and I think all of that is total bullshit. I want to call people in.”

LISTEN: Episodes of We Can’t Print This stream at wecantprintthis.com.

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Contact: bennett@wweek.com

BIOSPHERE

You haven’t seen every possible buddy-comedy configuration until you’ve holed up with Mark Duplass and Sterling K. Brown in a self-sustaining, post-apocalyptic biodome as they experience “accelerated evolution.” Time is plentiful and space is limited, so the lifelong pals—possibly the last people on earth—ponder which member of their duo is Mario and which is Luigi, the intricacies and pitfalls of the dome (designed by Brown’s character, a brilliant scientist), and their childhood memories. Like any bottle movie, especially of the indie sci-fi variety, Biosphere’s success depends on suggesting a wider world without showing it and how compellingly its actors can turn exposition into story. Duplass, ever shaggy and smirking, and Brown, ever proud and deep-feeling, are utterly committed to Duplass and director Mel Eslyn’s script, which gutsily upends the heroes’ biology and relationship, even if the story’s biggest cracks actually develop around the margins (i.e., did one of these guys kill all of humanity? Don’t think about it!). As with many Duplass brothers-produced comedies, there’s a charm to the pure, idea-driven screenwriting no one was asking for (Biosphere is like Humpday by way of Claire Denis’ High Life). Just put the buds in a bubble and, to paraphrase Biosphere’s paraphrasing of Jeff Goldbum in Jurassic Park, let the movie, uh, find a way. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinemagic, July 7-13.

NO HARD FEELINGS

The raunchy midbudget summer comedy is back and better than ever. The premise behind No Hard Feelings is as simple as it is morally ambiguous: Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) is a lifelong resident of a vacation town in New York who’s struggling to pay the rising property taxes on the house her mom left her. While trolling Craigslist, she stumbles on an ad posted by parents of a 19-year-old boy who are looking for a young girl to “date” (emphasis on the quotation marks) their socially awkward offspring. If she can bring their son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), out of his shell before he heads to Princeton in the fall, Maddy gets a used Buick Regal. Lawrence stuns with her hilarity— between a full-frontal nude fight scene, using a stuffed lobster plush as a cum rag, and squeezing in a Chinese-finger-trap-ona-dick gag, her physical comedy skills are on par with predecessors like Steve Martin and Jim Carrey. Lawrence is perhaps one of the few bona fide female stars with the chops to usher in the renaissance of Superbad-style comedies, and Feldman offers a hilariously uncomfortable performance that pairs beautifully with hers. All in all, No Hard Feelings is the antithesis of family friendly, but perfectly treads the line between risqué and offensive. One minute

you’re laughing to the point of tears, the next you’re asking yourself, “Am I a bad person?”

R. ALEX BARR. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza.

PAST LIVES

As Nora (Greta Lee) is about to share a first kiss with her future husband, Arthur (John Magaro), she explains the Korean phrase in-yun—fate’s hand in human connection and reconnection. Intentionally or not, she’s referring just as much to Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), her best friend and crush from before she immigrated from Seoul to Canada. Ever since, Hae Sung has reappeared to Nora like a 12-year comet, and in director Celine Song’s Past Lives, Hae Sung visits Nora in present-day Brooklyn. Both unambiguous romance and genre experiment, Past Lives sustains itself on love’s textures and musings: endless gazes, mirrorlike skyscrapers, a twinkling synth score (by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen), and a vibrant but melancholy obsession with New York City. Gorgeous 30-somethings who can’t keep guileless vulnerability off their faces, these characters aren’t looking to blow up their lives

for the sake of movie contrivances, but through every private conversation, they’re drawn to discussing the same narrative possibilities on the audience’s minds. Who is the right lover in a story sense? Even Arthur wonders. Are in-yun and Nora’s brief, almost multiversal encounters with Hae Sung potent enough to alter the years in between? And when she glimpses the past in his kind, mournful eyes, is she dreaming or seeing? PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Movies on TV, Vancouver Mall.

FALCON LAKE

No, of course 13-year-old Bastien (Joseph Engel) doesn’t want to watch anime with his kid brother all summer, he protests when chided by 16-year-old Chloé (Sara Montpetit), the family friend with whom he’s sharing a lakeside cabin in Quebec. Instead, they swim, try terrible wine, and question each other’s fears. Falcon Lake observes Bastien and Chloé’s age difference carefully, exploring how one adolescent’s puppy love is another’s safety net—how the messiness of teenage sexuality, intimacy and friendship bunk together in a cramped bedroom and a sliver of time. Shot on 16 mm and directed by Charlotte Le Bon (an actor best known to Americans for The Walk and The Hundred-Foot Journey), Falcon Lake is summer-loving in the vein of Call Me by Your Name, both innocent and daringly amorous, as every Bastien and Chloé interaction—each bike ride, prank and outfit change—is charged, taken personally and riddled with perspective gaps. Strangely, though, hovering around this enthralling coming-of-age snapshot is an obsession with ghosts (allegedly in the lake and in characters’ imaginations) that never connects to Falcon Lake ’s best qualities. There’s an argument that departing childhood is a kind of death, but who needs the metaphor? The core of Falcon Lake is blistering, awakening life. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On demand.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

The Indiana Jones saga gives its iconic character a fifth adventure that moviegoers didn’t ask for, but that longtime fans should appreciate. Yes, the story blatantly mines the series trope of an archaeological artifact chase with a foreign adversary threatening catastrophe, but director James Mangold (Logan) has crafted an installment laden with pleasing referential tips of the fedora to Steven Spielberg’s previous chapters. As comforting as the homages are, what saves the film from being a rolling boulder of mediocrity is 91-year-old composer John Williams, who has scored every Indiana Jones film. Harrison Ford still charms as Jones (an aging icon recognizable the world over by his statuesque silhouette), but Indy could have become a relic of the ’80s if not for Williams. His inspired work on Dial of Destiny breathes life into the action scenes, authenticates the otherwise unearned emotional interludes, and adds a tickle to the comedy in ways its 80-year-old lead can no longer pull off (to quote Indy, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage”). This cinematic serial has run its course, but thanks to Williams, Indiana Jones can now retire with his dignity mostly intact. PG-13.

RAY GILL JR. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Lloyd Center, Regal Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.

JOY RIDE

In a seeming attempt to reflect the

diverse array of untold Asian narratives—a shared pressure among many Asian American artists—Joy Ride accomplishes the opposite, offering a rushed 90 minutes overcrowded by underdeveloped characters and plot turns. Adopted Chinese American Audrey (Ashley Park) travels to her birth country for the first time, along with two eccentric best friends, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a Chinese soap opera actor hiding her sexual past from her God-fearing virgin fiancé, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), a fledgling artist who makes playground models resembling genitalia to “get the conversation going” (Lolo also brings along her BTS-obsessed cousin, played by a wide-eyed, scene-stealing Sabrina Wu). Audrey’s business trip to China quickly turns into a cross-continent search for her birth mother, and the film sharply illustrates certain minority challenges—internalized shame, dissonance between internal and external perceptions of self. Yet its efforts to provide a comprehensive cultural education (the work of not one, but many, many more representative films) result in stilted dialogue and a hasty denouement. The comedy’s saving grace lies in its effectively over-the-top humor; filled with riotous bits and clever one-liners, Joy Ride promises to leave the audience feeling lighter than before they entered the theater. And sometimes, that’s all we need from a movie. R. ROSE WONG. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Progress Ridge, Vancouver Mall, Vancouver Plaza.

ASTEROID CITY

1950s movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) are bonded because they’re both “catastrophically wounded people”; we know because Midge tells us so. Why so literal? Because they’re in a film directed by Wes Anderson, whose movies have grown so maniacally precise that they seem more suited to a museum than a multiplex. The Anderson who chronicled Schwartzman’s mad romantic pursuit of Olivia Williams in Rushmore has been replaced by an automatonlike auteur so fastidious that he frames Asteroid City as a film within a play within a television broadcast hosted by Bryan Cranston. There are flashes of fun in this nested narrative—including a bobble-eyed alien’s visit to the titular desert town—but only Anderson lovers with the constitution of devout Catholics will make it through without losing their faith (lines like “You see that wonderful crackly patch right out there, between the dead cactuses and the dried-up river bed?” are so Andersonian that they may as well be in Latin). Anderson has preached solely to his choir of fans before; his twee oceanic epic The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou was certainly not for normies. But that film let its emotions rough up its images, most memorably when a son was mortally wounded and his father remembered his first glimpse of him in a daggerlike burst of memory. Death haunts Asteroid City, but not enough to disturb its stoic actors, who all speak in the same mopey monotone as Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson’s best film) whether they’re talking about religion, science, politics or pancakes. Hence the unspoken but obvious motto of Asteroid City : for the fans, by the fans. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Vancouver Mall.

: THIS MOVIE IS EXCELLENT, ONE OF THE BEST OF THE YEAR.

: THIS MOVIE IS GOOD. WE RECOMMEND YOU WATCH IT. : THIS MOVIE IS ENTERTAINING BUT FLAWED.

: THIS MOVIE IS A STEAMING PILE.

ACROSS

1. Brooks who turned 97 this year

4. Planktonic crustaceans

9. Political Pelosi

14. Eggy start

15. Capital of Vietnam

16. "___ a couple seconds

..."

17. Source of coincidental thoughts

19. Manicurist's expertise

20. Driver's permit that's only for the First Lady?

22. Have a sample of

23. Faux ___ (misstep)

24. Copy mistake

27. Amounts owed

31. New Jersey players

35. Regatta racer's implement

36. Le ___ (French seaport)

37. Decked out

38. "That sound! Is it a giant keyring?"

41. From ___ (effective immediately)

42. Baryshnikov's company, once

43. Suffix for Nepal

44. Mumford's backup?

45. Mombasa's country

46. "Bullet Train" star Pitt

47. "Shameless" network, for short

49. Actress Vardalos

51. Either of my kids, compared to me?

58. Insults, when thrown

59. Obvious sticking point?

61. Monty Python member Michael

62. "Buenos Aires" musical

63. Matchbox Twenty's Thomas

64. Concert venue

65. Spouts off without reason

66. Old-school icons, slangily

DOWN

1. Actress Gretchen of "Boardwalk Empire"

2. Satan's specialty

3. "The Avengers" villain

4. Cambodian language

5. Save point?

6. Wayside taverns

7. Big deposit

8. Rolling Stone article, often

9. Stealthy sort

10. "Henry and June" diarist

11. Part of NdGT

12. Biology class unit

13. Gridiron stat

18. Hi-C ___ Cooler ("Ghostbusters"-inspired drink)

21. "Call of Duty: Black ___"

24. Commuter train stops

25. Owner of Tumblr (until 2018)

26. Jumbo shrimp

28. Bring up memories of

29. Boston hockey player

©2023 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-900-226-2800, 99 cents per minute. Must be 18+. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-800-655-6548. Reference puzzle #JNZ990.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Genius physicist Albert Einstein said, "The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from new angles, requires creative imagination and makes real advances.” What he said here applies to our personal dilemmas, too. When we figure out the right questions to ask, we are more than halfway toward a clear resolution. This is always true, of course, but it will be an especially crucial principle for you in the coming weeks.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.” So said Taurus biologist and anthropologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). I don’t think you will have to be quite so forceful as that in the coming weeks. But I hope you’re willing to further your education by rebelling against what you already know. And I hope you will be boisterously skeptical about conventional wisdom and trendy ideas. Have fun cultivating a feisty approach to learning! The more time you spend exploring beyond the borders of your familiar world, the better.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Hooray and hallelujah! You’ve been experimenting with the perks of being pragmatic and well-grounded. You have been extra intent on translating your ideals into effective actions. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you so dedicated to enjoying the simple pleasures. I love that you’re investigating the wonders of being as down-to-earth as you dare. Congratulations! Keep doing this honorable work.

of no value to the recipient. I disagree with these assessments. Chani Nicholas, Michael Lutin, Susan Miller, and Jessica Shepherd are a few of many regular horoscope writers whose work I find interesting. My own astrological oracles are useful, too. And by the way, how can anyone have the hubris to decide which horoscopes are helpful and which are not? This thing we do is a highly subjective art, not an objective science. In the spirit of my comments here, Libra, and in accordance with astrological omens, I urge you to declare your independence from so-called experts and authorities who tell you they know what’s valid and worthwhile for you. Here’s your motto: “I’m the authoritative boss of my own truth.”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Is it a fact that our bodies are made of stardust? Absolutely true, says planetary scientist Dr. Ashley King. Nearly all the elements comprising our flesh, nerves, bones, and blood were originally forged in at least one star, maybe more. Some of the stuff we are made of lived a very long time in a star that eventually exploded: a supernova. Here’s another amazing revelation about you: You are composed of atoms that have existed for almost 14 billion years. I bring these startling realities to your attention, Scorpio, in honor of the most expansive phase of your astrological cycle. You have a mandate to deepen and broaden and enlarge your understanding of who you are and where you came from.

30. Discworld creator Pratchett

32. Lawn tool

33. Second-largest city in Oklahoma

34. Go too fast

36. QVC rival (and corporate sibling)

37. "Captain Underpants" creator Pilkey

39. Included

40. "I Love Rock 'n Roll" singer

45. "Kitchy-kitchy-___!"

46. ___ mi (sandwich on French bread)

48. "Laughing" animal

50. Small amounts

51. " ___ she blows!"

52. Hearty partner

53. Laptop owner

54. Suddenly bright star

55. Sheepish look, sometimes

56. Italian money

57. Pollution in big cities

58. Resort to retreat to

60. Little pellets

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I wrote my horoscope column for over ten years before it began to get widely syndicated. What changed? I became a better writer and oracle, for one thing. My tenacity was inexhaustible. I was always striving to improve my craft, even when the rewards were meager. Another important factor in my eventual success was my persistence in marketing. I did a lot of hard work to ensure the right publications knew about me. I suspect, fellow Cancerian, that 2024 is likely to bring you a comparable breakthrough in a labor of love you have been cultivating for a long time. And the coming months of 2023 will be key in setting the stage for that breakthrough.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Maybe you wished you cared more deeply about a certain situation. Your lack of empathy and passion may feel like a hole in your soul. If so, I have good news. The coming weeks will be a favorable time to find the missing power; to tap into the warm, wet feelings that could motivate your quest for greater connection. Here's a good way to begin the process: Forget everything you think you know about the situation with which you want more engagement. Arrive at an empty, still point that enables you to observe the situation as if you were seeing it for the first time.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): You are in an astrological phase when you’ll be wise to wrangle with puzzles and enigmas. Whether or not you come up with crisp solutions isn’t as crucial as your earnest efforts to limber up your mind. For best results, don’t worry and sweat about it; have fun! Now I’ll provide a sample riddle to get you in the mood. It’s adapted from a text by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace. You are standing before two identical closed doors, one leading to grime and confusion, the other to revelation and joy. Before the doors stand two figures: an angel who always tells the truth and a demon who always lies. But they look alike, and you may ask only one question to help you choose what door to take. What do you do? (Possible answer: Ask either character what the other would say if you asked which door to take, then open the opposite door.)

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I found a study that concluded just 6.1. percent of online horoscopes provide legitimate predictions about the future. Furthermore, the research indicated, 62.3 percent of them consist of bland, generic pabulum

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I foresee that August will be a time of experiments and explorations. Life will be in a generous mood toward you, tempting and teasing you with opportunities from beyond your circle of expectations. But let's not get carried away until it makes cosmic sense to get carried away. I don't want to urge you to embrace wild hope prematurely. Between now and the end of July, I advise you to enjoy sensible gambles and measured adventures. It's OK to go deep and be rigorous, but save the full intensity for later.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Is there a crucial half-conscious question lurking in the underside of your mind? A smoldering doubt or muffled perplexity that’s important for you to address? I suspect there is. Now it’s time to coax it up to the surface of your awareness so you may deal with it forthrightly. You must not let it smolder there in its hiding place. Here’s the good news, Capricorn: If you bring the dilemma or confusion or worry into the full light of your consciousness, it will ultimately lead you to unexpected treasure. Be brave!

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In Larry McMurtry’s novel Duane’s Depressed, the life of the main character has come to a standstill. He no longer enjoys his job. The fates of his kids are too complicated for him to know how to respond. He has a lot of feelings but has little skill in expressing them. At a loss about how to change his circumstances, he takes a small and basic step: He stops driving his pickup truck and instead walks everywhere he needs to go. Your current stasis is nowhere near as dire as Duane’s, Aquarius. But I do recommend you consider his approach to initiating transformation: Start small and basic.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Author K. V. Patel writes, "As children, we laugh fully with the whole body. We laugh with everything we have.” In the coming weeks, Pisces, I would love for you to regularly indulge in just that: total delight and release. Furthermore, I predict you will be more able than usual to summon uproarious lifeaffirming amusement from the depths of your enchanted soul. Further furthermore, I believe you will have more reasons than ever before to throw your head back and unleash your entire self in rippling bursts of healing hysterical hilarity. To get started, practice chuckling, giggling, and chortling for one minute right now.

Homework: What’s the smartest, safest gamble you could take?

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"Get the Hook"--another letter, please.