Willamette Week, July 26, 2023 - Volume 49, Issue 37 - "Life In Hell"

By Lucas Manfield

THEATER:

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER

VOL. 49, ISSUE 37

Wasps become more aggressive in the fall. 4

Ashley Real filed a strangulation complaint against Jesse Lee Calhoun four months before she disappeared. 6

In 2021, Seattle produced five times the housing units Portland did. 7

Scott Posey won’t sell the Forest Park Drive-In to a bikini barista 7

Multnomah County wanted to spend its homeless service dollars to buy “PODs.” 9 Portland’s top fentanyl dealers are Hondurans riding standup scooters and wearing matching backpacks. 14

“Clean fetty” is the strongest opioid for sale at 6th and Washington. 15

ON THE COVER:

Where there’s smoke downtown, there’s fentanyl; photo by Blake Benard

Six, Broadway in Portland’s 2023-24 season opener, is about Henry VIII’s six wives 21

Lan Su Chinese Garden’s firstever fashion show spotlights Hanfu , the centuries-old attire of the Han Chinese. 21

Now through the end of August, you can order ice cream floats at Smith Teamaker. 22

New on the menu at Dolly Olive: lunch service and paninis 22

The Kicking Giant reunion tour is in full swing. 22

Beware Englishmen demanding buckets of sugar. 23

Now I am become Barbenheimer, the savior of movie theaters. 24

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK: For the second week, it’s the identification of Jesse Lee Calhoun as a suspected serial killer.

ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE

On July 17, WW revealed that law enforcement officials suspect Jesse Lee Calhoun, 38, in the deaths of four women whose bodies were found in the Portland metro area this year. Making that report more explosive is the fact that Calhoun was one of 41 inmates whose sentences were commuted by former Gov. Kate Brown for fighting Oregon wildfires in 2021 (“Criminal History: Jesse Lee Calhoun,” WW, July 19). WW later broke the news that one of the women found dead this year, Amber Real, had filed a domestic violence and strangulation complaint against Calhoun four months before she went missing (see page 6). Here’s what our readers had to say:

FIFTH_DOCTOR, VIA WWEEK. COM: “F*ck sake. Are there any agencies in this state that actually function?”

PACSANITY, VIA REDDIT: “Holy shit, our unhinged Redditors were right all along. They caught the Rip City Ripper.”

DIABLO JO, VIA THE WEBSITE FORMERLY KNOWN AS TWITTER: “Sigh. The way this will be used by the right is already exhausting.”

JOSHUA MARQUIS, VIA WWEEK.COM: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Virtually any forensic psychiatrist or psychologist will attest to that.

“This guy has established himself as a dangerous, violent man. It does not take a fortune teller to have predicted he would do

something violent. Clemency is supposed to be an extraordinary, rarely granted interference in the judicial process.

“Kate Brown (and her allies) proved themselves to be allies of violent criminals, not victims or the general public.”

ROGER LINDSLEY, VIA WWEEK.COM: “His scheduled release date was July of 2022. The first woman was killed in February of 2023. Getting out 11 months early didn’t make him a serial killer. Just like 11 years of education didn’t make you good at deductive reasoning.”

TK, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Kate Brown should have predicted this and given them all preemptive life sentences just in case something like this happened! I feel so empowered by this newfound righteousness I’m going

Dr. Know

BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx

Am I mistaken, or are there a lot fewer bees cruising around our formerly friendly skies this year and a lot more pesky wasps, hornets and yellow jackets? Also, is it true wasps get meaner in September? There are so many of them, the thought they might get even more temperamental makes me nervous.

—Micah S.

You’re probably familiar with bee colony collapse disorder, the condition where beekeepers return to formerly healthy hives to find the queen and her larvae intact, but all the workers missing—not dead, but mysteriously vanished overnight, like the crew of the Mary Celeste (It’s said in some cases the bees disappear so suddenly keepers find tiny kettles still boiling on their little bee stoves.)

If you’re like me—paranoid—this fact has been lodged in your subconscious since it was widely reported in the media in the mid-2000s, oozing unease like a seemingly minor detail in the first chapter of a Michael Crichton novel that actually foreshadows the entire coming apocalypse.

to pretend to act incredulous by this lapse in foresight!”

KANEN MCREYNOLDS, VIA

WHAT WAS TWITTER: “I would say on balance the release of prisoners with good behavior who did firefighting is a good thing. At the same time, already being the worst governor and now having six deaths indirectly on your hands…I hope she has a good foreign consulting job.”

GLOBALJUSTIN, VIA REDDIT:

“Everyone is wrong on this I’ve seen so far. Clemency didn’t cause this, two years wouldn’t have changed this person.

“ Weak sentencing is the actual problem here.

“Fifty months is just over four years, for a case where he resisted arrest and injured a cop and police dog….The problem is we let these horrible repeat offenders off with little time over and over and over and over. That’s the problem, we refuse to put the forever repeating offenders away for good.”

OATMEAL_FLAKES, VIA REDDIT: “We really just gift wrap material for Fox News.”

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

So it would have been nice if the media had also widely reported the fact that CCD has waned significantly since peaking in 2007, and now accounts for less than a third of all colony failures. So whatever happened to your bees, it’s probably not that.

That said, bees have had a rough year. Last year’s wet spring and long, dry summer (both bad news for bees) took a toll on populations, and this year’s cold, wet spring didn’t help either. Both Portland Urban Beekeepers and apiculturists at Oregon State University say swarms—which happen when a healthy hive grows large enough to split in two—are down in 2023: You may well be seeing fewer bees.

I could not find any information suggesting there are more wasps this year than usual, but who knows? If you’re seeing more of one particular species—yellow jackets especially—on your property, it may be because they’ve built a nest nearby. (Look for a hole in the ground with a shit-ton of yellow jackets going in and out of it.)

If you do find a nest, you should deal with it soon: Wasps really do become more aggressive in the fall as their food—nectar, fruit, insects and carrion—becomes more scarce. In fact, in a depressing echo of capitalism, every single wasp in a yellow-jacket nest except the queen will starve to death by the end of the fall. It’s no wonder that by the time Labor Day rolls around, many may feel they have little to lose by challenging you one-on-one for the rest of that burger.

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

CHALLENGER FOR MULTNOMAH COUNTY DA

GETS FREE OFFICE SPACE: Nathan Vasquez, the county prosecutor challenging Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt for his job next year, has received a sizable donation from a major Portland real estate developer. According to a filing with the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office, Vasquez received a $71,280 donation from Greg Goodman in the form of “office space rent” on July 22. Goodman has also given Vasquez a $25,000 check, he tells WW. (If this sounds familiar, discounted rent given by real estate owner Jordan Schnitzer to City Council candidate Rene Gonzalez became a contentious issue in the November 2022 election.) Goodman has been a longtime critic of Schmidt’s, blaming his policies for the rise in vandalism and property crime downtown. “Mike Schmidt is the single biggest problem we have,” Goodman says. “He’s not enforcing the laws.” Vasquez has been aggressively raising money in recent months, asking supporters to organize house parties to solicit contributions. In fundraising speeches, he criticizes Measure 110, the state ballot measure that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of hard drugs, and accuses Schmidt of allowing crime in Portland to get out of control.

CAR THEFT HITS TWO-YEAR LOW: The monthly number of stolen vehicles in Portland has hit a two-year low after steadily decreasing this year. There were 607 in June, according to data published by the Portland Police Bureau earlier this month. It’s welcome news in a city that earlier this year ranked fifth in the nation in car thefts per capita. But it’s unclear what’s behind the decline. “I think our analysts would say it’s too soon and not enough data to analyze or speculate on any trend at this point,” says PPB spokeswoman Terri Wallo-Strauss. A variety of recent developments may be playing a role. The bureau has been conducting targeted stings over the past two years, but recently refined its methods with help from Oregon Health & Science University researchers. And just this month, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced it had dedicated a task force to prosecuting the crime. Kia and Hyundai models, both manufactured by the same South Korean conglomerate, remain the most popular targets, thanks to a defect that allows them to be easily started with nothing more than a USB dongle. The decline corresponds to the release of a software update by the manufacturer in February that fixed the bug by requiring that the key be inserted in the ignition for the car to start.

MOBILE LIBRARY STILL IMMOBILE: The

Multnomah County Library announced lots of news last week about its ongoing renovation of existing libraries: Northwest (open house July 30), Belmont (open house Aug. 5) and the July 12 groundbreaking for the new, 95,000-squarefoot East County Library. Those projects and the renovation of the Multnomah County Central Library are part of a $387 million bond voters ap -

proved in 2020. One sour note: To accommodate users inconvenienced by the serial renovations of existing branches, the library purchased a mobile library in June 2022 that it initially said would be rolling by the end of the year. Then, in March, a library spokesman told WW it would roll by April. It didn’t. The latest on the 38-foot RV, which cost $464,434, is more troubles. “The slideouts aren’t locking in place properly, and it’s not safe to drive in that condition,” library spokesman Shawn Cunningham says. “Other repairs have been completed, but we’re waiting on parts for the slideouts. Latest word is that they should arrive on Aug. 2. The team tentatively plans to resume service Aug. 4 if the repair can happen on schedule.”

STATE TRIES TO SHUT DOWN MUSHROOM CHURCH’S SCHOOL: Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission issued a cease-anddesist order against Myco-Method, one of the many programs in Oregon that train people to guide psychedelic mushroom trips. The order means Myco-Method must stop marketing its program and enrolling students until it gets a license or an exemption from licensure, HECC said. Myco-Method program director Shasta Winn says HECC has no authority because the program isn’t a school. “Myco-Method is only a written curriculum,” Winn said in an email. “It’s a training used by Saba Cooperative, our nonprofit interfaith religious cooperative, for teaching how to utilize psilocybin as a tool to access the source of nonhuman intelligence that heals and transforms.” At press time, Myco-Method’s website still advertised its program, saying students who take it can be licensed by the state as facilitators because the curriculum has been approved by the Oregon Health Authority, a claim an OHA spokesman confirms. But without HECC approval, students won’t be allowed to submit claims to the state for lost tuition if Myco-Method were to close, the commission said.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS

SELF-PROMOTION: Willamette Week took home four first prizes at the 2023 AAN Awards, presented by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia on July 21 in Dallas. The four wins tied for the most by any paper, along with the Chicago Reader and Seven Days in Burlington, Vt. Nigel Jaquiss scored two first prizes: investigative reporting for his examination of real estate dealings by the R.B. Pamplin Corp. (“Trader Bob,” Feb. 23, 2022) and solutions journalism for a look at city efforts to return Black residents to Northeast Portland (“Comeback,” May 25, 2022). Lucas Manfield was recognized for health care reporting for several stories about a capacity shortage at Oregon State Hospital, while Sophie Peel won first prize in explanatory journalism for unpacking how dozens of seniors with disabilities were removed from their apartments (“The Mystery of the Taft Home,” July 27, 2022). “Peel had me from the headline,” a judge wrote. “The kicker quote gutted me.”

NATHAN VASQUEZ

NO LAWYER FOR YOU

A public defender couldn’t reach her client inside the dysfunctional Multnomah County Jail.

DOCUMENT TYPE: Motion for Release

FILED ON: July 14, 2023

LOCATION: Multnomah County Circuit Court

FILED BY: Public defender Erin Suggs

In a scathing motion filed earlier this month, a public defender demanded her client be released from jail after officials denied her repeated requests to speak with him, citing behavioral issues.

Erin Suggs says she made eight failed attempts to call or visit her 45-year-old client, a homeless man who was caught sneaking into an empty apartment during a snowstorm and later arrested after fleeing a traffic stop. Citing “ongoing violations of his constitutional rights to assistance of counsel,” Suggs demanded his immediate release.

In her motion, Suggs listed her failed efforts over two weeks to reach her client. At one point, she overheard a corrections deputy say “he did not appreciate” how her client had been acting, and denied her request.

Later, on July 14, Suggs took a doctor to the jail to perform a mental health evaluation. They were denied access, without explanation, the motion alleges.

“[The jail] does not have the authority to determine which incarcerated people deserve access to their attorneys based on individual staff members’ subjective assessments of their behavior,” Suggs wrote, and demanded his release given her inability to speak to her client.

DEATHS IN MULTNOMAH COUNTY CUSTODY

Sources: Reuters, Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office

The motion filed this month offers a window into increasingly precarious conditions within a county jail system where staff are scarce and five inmates have died this year.

A jail spokesman, Deputy John Plock, said it had already addressed some public defenders’ concerns by instituting a procedure to refer requests to supervisors. It’s unclear whether Suggs made use of it. Plock also noted that attorneys’ difficulties in reaching clients are generally “not due to staffing, but simply to accommodate routine jail operations” like shift changes or meal times.

Still, Suggs’ motion comes as Multnomah County jails face multiple crises, including a string of recent inmate deaths and staffing shortages stretching back years. In 2021, an independent review panel warned that “the lack of adequate staffing has led

LOOSE ENDS

A week after WW identified

As investigators from multiple jurisdictions work toward indictments of suspected serial killer Jesse Lee Calhoun, WW has over the past week reported more background and context about his situation.

Calhoun, 38, is in state custody at the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario for violating the terms of his post-incarceration supervision. Gov. Tina Kotek revoked a conditional commutation that former Gov. Kate Brown issued to Calhoun and 40 other inmate firefighters in 2021, shaving up to 12 months off their sentences.

Kotek’s office has declined to comment on Calhoun, citing a pending criminal investigation. That is the same stance that all involved police agencies and prosecutor’s offices have taken.

In the meantime, here’s what we’ve learned

about Calhoun since WW first identified him July 16 as a suspect in the deaths of four women: Kristin Smith, Charity Perry, Bridget Webster, and Ashley Real.

CALHOUN MAY HAVE VIOLATED THE TERMS OF HIS RELEASE. Public records show that on three occasions, Calhoun may have violated the requirement in his conditional commutation that he obey all laws after he was released early in July 2021.

In May 2022, a Clackamas man sought a stalking order against Calhoun, alleging in a court filing that Calhoun followed and threatened him (a judge dismissed the request). In October 2022, Calhoun was charged with and subsequently convicted of driving while suspended. In November 2022, one of the women Calhoun is suspected of killing, Ashley Real, filed a complaint of domestic violence and strangulation against Calhoun with the Portland Police Bureau.

PPB referred the complaint to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, which, like the Police Bureau, declined to comment.

Real was last seen on March 27, 2023—four

to a vicious cycle of corrections staff burnout.” The five deaths inside the jails in 2023 appear to be an all-time record for a full year, let alone seven months.

Meanwhile, public defenders hardly have time to waste calling the jail day after day fruitlessly attempting to contact clients. They say they’re already stretched too thin, and are refusing at times to accept new clients amid rising caseloads.

Circuit Judge Kelly Skye weighed the motion in a hearing last week. “This does present a concerning problem,” Skye said, and directed her staff to resolve it.

But she denied Suggs’ request, noting that her client is also facing charges of shoplifting at a JCPenney in Clackamas County and, if released, would simply be transferred to jail there. LUCAS MANFIELD.

months after she filed the complaint against Calhoun. Her body was found May 7 in Clackamas County.

OTHER INMATE FIREFIGHTERS ALSO STUMBLED AFTER RELEASE. Records show that 11 of the 41 inmates released for their work fighting wildfires in 2020 have subsequently been arrested on felony charges, and two others have been arrested for misdemeanors. In none of those cases did the governor’s office revoke the commutations, as it did in Calhoun’s case this June.

Although the rates of arrest are in line with typical recidivism findings in Oregon, the state’s two GOP members of Congress last week asked Gov. Tina Kotek to examine the cases of the more than 1,000 inmates to whom Brown granted early release. “We urge you to review every single conditional commutation granted by Governor Brown,” wrote U.S. Reps. Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Cliff Bentz.

THE DA ABSTAINED FROM VETTING CALHOUN’S COMMUTATION. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office says through a spokeswoman it was not given a “meaningful opportunity” to determine whether to support Calhoun’s commuted sentence in March 2021. The DA’s office did not take a posi-

tion on releasing Calhoun—or on any of the 14 cases presented to it by the Oregon Department of Corrections.

In contrast, the Washington County District Attorney’s Office objected to 17 of the 19 proposed commutations submitted to it by the DOC, according to emails reviewed by WW.

Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt, like Gov. Brown, has pressed for progressive reforms to the criminal justice system. But his office says the corrections department gave prosecutors in Calhoun’s case only a week to weigh in, and did not provide prosecutors the customary packet of information that includes an application from the inmate, prison records, and any letters of support. The DOC responds that the DA’s office did not ask for more time.

Four of the six inmates from Multnomah County whose sentences Brown commuted were eventually arrested on felony charges after their release. That number does not include Calhoun.

NIGEL JAQUISS and LUCAS MANFIELD.

Jesse Lee Calhoun as a suspected serial killer, clues emerge about how poorly he was monitored.

DANIEL STINDT

Seattle Is Winning

Our neighbor to the north is producing housing at a clip superior to Portland’s.

TOTAL ANNUAL HOUSING UNIT PRODUCTION

Source: Bridge Economic Development

FOREST PARKED

A historic burger joint tantalizes passersby.

ADDRESS: 8410 NW Skyline Blvd.

YEAR BUILT: 1960

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 776

MARKET VALUE: $311,000

OWNER: 8410 LLC

HOW LONG IT’S BEEN DARK: Decades

WHY IT’S EMPTY: Location, location, location.

Atop Cornell Mountain in the West Hills are towering trees, beautiful scenery and palatial homes aplenty. Customers for burgers and ice cream, however, are few.

That’s the challenge for the forlorn Forest Park Drive-In, an aging white cinderblock structure that sits moldering at a four-way stop where Northwest Germantown Road and Skyline Boulevard intersect. A faded red neon sign promises burgers and “freshly frozen soft cream,” but it’s been many years since anybody got a meal there.

Ask Gregg Colburn, assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington, what causes homelessness, and he’ll tell you that it’s not poverty, drug addiction or mental illness.

To find the real culprit, Colburn uses a statistical method called “R Squared,” which shows how the differences in one variable can affect differences in another. In a helpful eight-minute video on the Seattle Channel, the city’s video website, Colburn graphs homelessness against drug addiction, poverty and mental illness and finds little correlation.

Those results are borne out in real life. If drug addiction caused homelessness, West Virginia, where the opioid epidemic is raging, should have a huge homeless population. But it doesn’t. Same with poverty: Detroit is the poorest city in the U.S., and homelessness isn’t rampant there.

So, what factors correlate with homelessness?

High rents and low vacancies.

“ What you see when you plot median rents is that in places that are expensive, homelessness is high, and in places that are cheap, homelessness is low,” Colburn says.

Seattle and Portland have high rent and low vacancy, but only one of those places is proving

effective at switching those, says urban planner Alisa Pyszka, president of Bridge Economic Development and a former candidate for Metro Council president.

Excluding their suburbs, Portland and Seattle are similar in size. Seattle has 750,000 people, and Portland has 635,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Both cities are about 145 square miles in area, including water features. Back in 2017, Portland produced more housing than its larger neighbor, 8,835 units to 6,820, data compiled by Pyszka shows (see graph above).

By 2021, Seattle was walloping Portland 8,727 to 1,639.

Reasons for that gap vary. Portland’s design review, where bureaucrats and citizens can weigh in, and construction slows to a crawl, is a factor (see “Fixer Upper,” page 11). And Pyska blames the city’s inclusionary zoning policies— but Seattle has those, too, and the rules haven’t dampened developers’ ardor.

The bottom line is that Seattle is building more housing of all kinds, which, if Colburn at UW is right, should lead to lower rents and less homelessness. Time will tell. ANTHONY EFFINGER.

As The Oregonian detailed in a lengthy remembrance last year, a World War II veteran named Benjamin Pachkofsky built the joint in 1960, outfitting it with a zipline and a giant swing as added attractions.

Although bucolic and even beautiful, the location didn’t generate much traffic. (A nearby watering hole, the Skyline Tavern, eked out an economically marginal existence for a much of the past century before closing permanently in 2022.)

A couple in the sparsely populated neighborhood, Scott and Michelle Posey, bought the property from Pachkovsky in 2011. Records show some permitting activity in 2014 and 2016, but nothing has happened with the property, which sits on a 26,000-square-foot lot.

Scott Posey, who did not respond to WW ’s request for comment, told The Oregonian last year he’s turned down lots of suitors.

“ I don’t want a 7-Eleven,” Posey said. “I don’t want a ‘bikini barista’—they’ve approached me a hundred times.”

Becky Newman is among those who hope the Poseys or the building’s next owners can roll the clock back.

“ It’s on a stretch of Skyline where there’s otherwise very few nonresidential buildings,” Newman says. “As a cyclist who frequently rides on Skyline, I’d love to see this building restored to its original use as a snack stop.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

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.

Scrooged

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners engaged in an exercise last week most elected officials can only dream about. It discussed what to do with more than $100 million of unspent money from the Metro supportive housing services measure.

That tax, which voters approved in 2020 to alleviate chronic homelessness, has produced like a runaway oil well, gushing dollars far faster than Multnomah County can spend them.

After WW highlighted that underspending (“The Big Number: $22.3 Million,” March 22), a key player took notice: Metro, the regional government responsible for collecting the SHS tax and watchdogging its allocation.

What followed over the ensuing three months was a series of increasingly testy emails from Metro chief operating officer Marissa Madrigal to Multnomah County COO Serena Cruz.

Madrigal let Cruz know that the county’s failure to spend its 2023 allocation—it was on track to miss its $123 million budget by $69 million—represented a “material deviation” from Multnomah County’s contractual agreement with Metro. That necessitated a corrective action plan, a development that communications between the two governments show the county stiffly resisted.

The situation grew more complicated when Metro informed the county in late June that, in addition to the unspent money from 2023, Metro had collected another $50.3 million from taxpayers paying 2021 assessments in arrears.

Metro is responsible for making sure the county spends SHS dollars effectively—but the money must first get out the door. When prodded, Multnomah County first suggested rolling over most of the money into next year (when it will have even more), bristled at greater oversight, then proposed some not fully baked ideas, such as buying housing pods for the city of Portland.

It’s not clear why Multnomah County officials have struggled to spend big money on the region’s most obvious crisis. In the past, county officials have cited the pandemic, a lack of capacity among service providers, and their own procurement system. But in recent weeks, pressed by Gov. Tina Kotek and 3rd District Congressman Earl Blu-

menauer to appoint a drug czar and address the sky-high rates of addiction on Portland streets, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Peterson cried poor, saying local governments lack the money they need.

Vega Pederson, who calls the slow spending of homeless dollars unacceptable, also says the Metro money can’t solve all ills. “The one-timeonly funds alone will in no way cover everything this community needs to address the cascading crises of fentanyl and behavioral health,” she says. “We do have a responsibility, but so does the state to fund treatment and recovery services.

The needs are that great.”

In any case, correspondence WW collected through a public records request shows the county’s struggle to spend its portion of the funds and its resistance to greater oversight from Metro.

Sometimes, written communications between public officials tell the story of conflict so effectively, it’s best to let the documents speak for themselves. Here are selected excerpts from the correspondence, with emphasis added:

APRIL 17, 2023

Metro housing director Patricia Rojas to Joshua Bates, interim director of Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services

“At the current rate of spending, Multnomah County is at risk of not meeting the spending expectations set in the Annual spend down plan and could also constitute a material deviation from the County’s spend-down plan if action is not taken.”

MAY 12

Rojas to JOHS director Dan Fields

“We also presented potential options for onetime-only investments that could enhance the homeless services system and address some acute needs experienced at the service provider level. However, the subsequent proposal that Multnomah County submitted on April 29, 2023, did not adequately address the material deviation.”

JUNE 7

JOHS deputy director Joshua Bates to Metro “Multnomah County has a total SHS budget in FY23 of $123,342,534. During Q1-Q3, we spent

$39,897,779 and without further action, we anticipated spending $14,251,220 in Q4.” [Editor’s note: That means the county expected to end the year with $69 million of the SHS money unspent. It later whittled that number to $58 million.]

JUNE 12

Metro chief operating officer Marissa Madrigal to Multnomah County COO Serena Cruz

“Metro has examined Multnomah County’s June 7th CAP proposal and finds that it is insufficient to address the material deviation in Multnomah County’s spend-down plan for fiscal year 2023. While we applaud several of the specific investments proposed - such as expanded funding for service provider COLAs ($2M), provider grants ($10M) and Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites (TASS)($4.7M) - we find that too many of the proposed expenditures lack a clear concept, plan, timeline or specific alignment to goals and outcomes.

“Additionally, the county’s proposal to move nearly half of its projected underspend to contingency and reserves ($34M) is unacceptable. Homeless service providers have recently communicated to the Metro Council that they can spend additional rent assistance and client assistance dollars today. Multnomah County must make every effort to do so.”

JUNE 15

Madrigal to Cruz

“We are happy to see that funding grants and advances are incorporated into proposed strategies and encourage the county to expand those opportunities as you did during the COVID-19 emergency. However, while getting funds into the hands of providers is an important step toward satisfying the CAP, the endgame is delivering services with those dollars.

“ While allocations or awards made to other governments or service providers will be considered indicators of real progress, the milestone used to determine satisfaction of corrective action plan requirements will be actual expenditures for services rendered.

“ Yesterday we also discussed the county’s desire to be given a chance to show that it can make progress on the CAP without being burdened by unreasonable reporting requirements or interference in Multnomah County’s operations. I shared that I was sympathetic to Multnomah County’s position and also that Metro must have a level of detail sufficient to monitor the county’s progress toward its CAP goals. Therefore, Metro will require that the county increase financial reporting from quarterly to monthly, and report specifically on the projects listed in the CAP.”

JUNE 22

Madrigal to Cruz

“As shared during our last discussion, the general areas of focus you’ve identified in the CAP feel responsive to immediate needs, but the document doesn’t provide a level of specificity necessary to confidently monitor progress.”

JUNE 23

Cruz to Madrigal

“The JOHS has had a challenging year marked by uncertainty and transition.

“Additionally, the County as an enterprise, spent this last year reviewing our procurement processes from purchasing through contract administration. In the budget just passed by the Board of County Commissioners a couple of weeks ago, the Department of County Management was awarded funding to establish a

new countywide procurement program that will mirror the County’s purchasing strengths with centralized and decentralized approach to contract management.”

JUNE 28

Cruz to Madrigal

“While the County very much supports and understands Metro’s interest in monthly reporting of the underspent funds, we do not support monthly reporting of our FY24 SHS expenditures.

“It makes sense for us to report monthly on those funds we committed to spending that went unspent this year, but given our leaning into this situation, we do not think it calls for monthly reporting of all of our SHS spend for FY24, as that would be overly burdensome to our team.”

JUNE 29

Madrigal to Cruz

“We are close to agreement, but, in response to your last correspondence, there are a few key areas where Metro must remain firm.

“1. Financial reports must be monthly and include all SHS expenditures.

“2. Progress toward completion does not equal completion.

“3. Purchase of PODs does not advance the goals of the LIP if there is a significant doubt by the county that they will not be used. We greatly appreciate the county’s creativity in working with the city of Portland to purchase PODs and other materials for shelter spaces. However, from our limited information, we understand that Portland is still waiting for a response from the county regarding whether the county will provide services at these sites. If the county declines, then the likelihood that the PODs will be purchased and/or used significantly declines.”

JULY 5

Cruz to Madrigal

“While we have come much closer toward an agreement, we remain some distance apart at this time.”

JULY 12

Cruz to Madrigal

“Multco will report to Metro monthly on all SHS spend, both the CAP and our spending plan for FY24. MultCo will develop the reporting tool. As MultCo reaches 75% completion of all CAP categories reporting will move to quarterly.”

County commissioners got their first chance at last week’s board meeting to weigh in on a tentative agreement the two governments have negotiated(that plan allocates $40 million of the underspending from 2023). Commissioners Sharon Meieran and Julia Brim-Edwards suggested some of the remaining one-time money could pay for bricks and mortar, such as replacing the sobering center that closed at the end of 2019 (“Surprise Intervention,” WW, July 19).

Or it could buy some of the low-cost hotels around town for shelters and services. One example Meiran pushed: the 241-room Crown Plaza at 1441 NE 2nd Ave. That hotel, well served by transit, is close to a city of Portland safe rest village and Hooper Detox Stabilization Center.

Moving toward such purchases seemed to gain support from the board. “Underspending is not OK,” Commissioner Susheela Jayapal said. “Capital investments are one of the best and most logical uses for this one-time-only money.”

The board is expected to vote on a final allocation of the one-time funds in late August.

Emails show that even as Multnomah County massively underspent homeless services dollars, it fought Metro’s corrective action plan.

MORE MONEY, MORE PROBLEMS: Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson faces a challenge many politicians would envy.

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

Now is the season when the people who occupy Portland City Hall dream of running it.

As WW has previously reported, all five city commissioners are weighing bids for mayor in 2024. None has ruled one out. That means all five may be foraging for a signature achievement they can trumpet to voters.

And two of them have dialed in on the same issue: fixing the city’s busted permitting system, a root cause of Portland’s housing shortage.

Within two months’ time, Commissioners Mingus Mapps and Carmen Rubio will each bring a proposal before their council colleagues to fix the broken permitting system. And the proposals are mutually exclusive—Mapps and Rubio can’t both win.

At issue is a convoluted permitting process for building new housing that stretches across seven city bureaus and can leave developers in limbo for years.

Talk of permitting is a powerful a sleep aid. But the political backdrop of the simmering duel is not. Whoever wins the battle may go into an election year with real political clout.

“It makes sense that each of them would be interested in having a political trophy, but particularly one that addresses the issue of the day: housing and homelessness,” says Chris Koski, political science and environmental studies professor at Reed College. “Being able to say you streamlined government is a really popular thing to say.”

Last month, WW reported that Commissioner

Fixer Upper

Rubio planned to consolidate all permitting under one office that doesn’t yet exist—an idea she hopes to bring to the City Council for a vote as soon as August.

Just weeks later, Commissioner Mapps, who announced his run for mayor last month, told WW about his alternative to fix the permitting system—an initiative he says is “fundamentally incompatible” with Rubio’s plans, which he had strong words for.

“It’s very much a cosmetic fix that doesn’t get to the underlying causes,” Mapps says. “I’m awfully afraid that we’ll stop all the progress that we made over the past few years of building better business processes. That would be really unfortunate.”

Rubio tells WW that Mapps’ representation is inaccurate.

“There is a structural issue in the system. And I simply refuse to keep taking staff to work harder to overcome a system that’s not their fault and that’s not in their power to change,” Rubio says. “His refusal to support systemic change is the biggest barrier to a long-term solution.” (Mapps’ plan would comb through city code to clarify ambiguities and delete conflicting code, but keep permitting staff within their current bureaus. Rubio’s plan would bring all permitting staff under a new office and, her office says, clean up code simultaneously.)

Both commissioners have recently held positions of influence over the permitting system.

Earlier this year, Mayor Ted Wheeler reassigned bureaus under the new slate of city commissioners. He did so in anticipation of an overhaul of city government that kicks in

on Jan. 1, 2025—but which the city began preparing for as soon as voters approved it last November.

The switch landed the various planning bureaus in Rubio’s portfolio: Housing; the city’s economic development arm, Prosper Portland; and the city agency that deals most directly with permitting, the Bureau of Development Services.

Buoyed by Gov. Tina Kotek’s aggressive goal of building 36,000 new housing units each year, Rubio undertook a number of initiatives to speed up the city’s production capacity. She surveyed developers and builders to figure out which of the city’s building requirements and code were most onerous (see “Seattle Is Winning,” page 7). Last month, she announced her intent to get to the heart of the matter: cutting down the time it takes to obtain city permits.

“ We’ve been talking about this for over 25 years,” Rubio says. “There have been plenty of half steps that have been tried during that time. We need to be investing in one team and one system.”

Rubio says Gov. Kotek supports her plan and did from the start.

But less than a month after Rubio announced her plan, Mapps spoke to WW last week about his own proposal to fix the city’s permitting system: sifting through city code to rewrite pieces that are outdated or no longer relevant and eliminating duplicative and conflicting code. “There are literally thousands and thousands of micro-irrationalities [in code]”, Mapps says.

“We need to review the entire code from A to Z, with an eye toward eliminating redundant

and conflicting code.”

He says he’ll present his plan to the City Council before September—right around the same time Rubio aims to bring hers to the dais.

Mapps says he is “willing to eat the cost,” finding money to fund the project from his own bureaus: Environmental Services, Transportation and Water. He estimates it will take two or three staffers one to two years to complete. “I would imagine it being relatively cheap,” Mapps says. “A couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe.”

Mapps has long staked a claim to cutting red tape around permitting. He claims a task force he oversaw in tandem with Commissioner Dan Ryan cut “the amount of time to get permits out the door in half.” Data provided by BDS shows the city has reduced the time it takes to process permits internally—but the back and forth between the city and customers means there’s been little change from a year ago in the time it takes to get most permits. (Rubio’s office claims a decrease in workload likely contributed to the faster city processing times.)

Former longtime City Commissioner Randy Leonard tried to consolidate permitting in 2009 under the Bureau of Development Services but failed to win the support of his fellow commissioners. Leonard says he ran into resistance from city employees.

“The bureaucracy itself didn’t like the idea of consolidation, at least those that were going to be transferred to BDS,” Leonard recalls. “They feared potential job loss and decision making being politically influenced. Once the bureaucracy dug in and was able to capture the attention of three of my colleagues, I didn’t have the support.”

That may be a barrier this time around, too. A union that represents 100 BDS employees and another 65 that may be impacted by consolidation, Professional & Technical Employees Local 17, also expressed displeasure: “Moving people won’t help and may hurt review timelines as members look for transfer opportunities to stay within their home bureaus,” says union representative Rachel Whiteside. “A hasty consolidation is not a magic bullet.”

Mapps tells WW that permitting employees will “absolutely quit” under Rubio’s plan. Rubio says she’s made it clear that centralizing permitting will not result in job losses.

Leonard believes Mapps’ proposal is a half measure. “It cannot be effective unless there’s a singular chain of command,” he says. “The idea is good, but it should be done under the auspices of Rubio’s plan. That’s the only way it can work.”

Koski says both plans are logical—but both also have inherent vices. “You can see a scenario in which we have centralization, but if it’s centralization of a bunch of disparate code, then it will just be centralized bad decision making,” Koski says of Rubio’s plan.

In a little under 18 months, the method by which city commissioners traditionally establish their bona fides—by overseeing and protecting a portfolio of bureaus—will vanish because of charter reform. No longer will individual city councilors make policy for bureaus they control, and no longer will bureaus be places to wage war.

Koski says this is a prime example of why the city so badly needs charter reform.

“Putting individual politicians in charge of bureaus only gives them the tools to fight each other in ways that get in the way of good governance,” Koski says. “That’s the irony.”

A turf war between two city commissioners has political as well as policy implications.

SHOWDOWN: Commissioners Carmen Rubio (left) and Mingus Mapps (right).

MOTOYA NAKAMURA/BLAKE BENARD

On Portland’s fentanyl corner, a dance with death sells for $20.

BY LUCAS MANFIELD lmanfield@wweek.com

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BLAKE BENARD

If you want to buy fentanyl in downtown Portland, the choice spot is the corner of Southwest 6th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street. The market opens at 6 pm, after cops and commuters go home to their families.

The sellers are Honduran kids who wear black ski masks and look barely old enough to drive.

On any given evening, this downtown intersection, ringed by some of Portland’s swankiest hotels, is manned by a half-dozen dealers peddling the most dangerous drug in America.

Buyers smoke “fetty” in the stoop of the nearby Three Kings Building, the former bank and historic landmark that is now nearly vacant.

Dealers chat with passersby on the corners as lookouts stand watch behind. Some carry guns, which they’re known to occasionally fire skyward in battles over turf. Men roll by on bicycles, hawk-

ing groceries and consumer electronics. Trash sweepers tasked with cleaning the sidewalks push rolling bins, filled with collected needles and tinfoil, down the sidewalk.

For the past month, WW has been observing this corner, which is now ground zero for Portland’s fentanyl crisis. Here, a drug manufactured by Mexican cartels is sold for small bills. When pure, it’s 100 times more powerful than morphine. This intersection, and the people who frequent it, are at the center of a myriad of crises facing not only Portland, but the nation: an epidemic of addiction and homelessness, understaffed and beleaguered first responders—and a staggering number of deaths.

Overdoses have surged in Portland over the past few years. Last year, the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office recorded more than

OPEN FOR BUSINESS: The historic Three Kings Building at Southwest 6th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street.

350 overdose deaths involving opioids, nearly triple the number only three years earlier, an increase driven by fentanyl. Oregon has the highest rate of drug use disorder in the country, and the fastest-growing fatal overdose rate among teenagers.

The sale and use of opioids in downtown Portland is a perennial story, featured on the cover of WW since the 1970s, when the Rose City became a heroin hot spot. What’s different about the fentanyl market is the potency of its product.

What’s now being sold on this corner is a drug so powerful and unpredictable that observers can watch its victims collapse within feet of obtaining it. Unlike with heroin, every hit can be a potential overdose. The people who use it choose between risking their lives with each injection, or smoking it, which often means brutal withdrawal symptoms within hours, making daily life a constant battle to stay “well.”

Ryan Lufkin, who prosecuted drug crimes for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office a decade ago, says the roots of Portland’s fentanyl problem go back more than 10 years to when pharmaceutical companies flooded the county with powerful prescription opioids like OxyContin. Once people became addicted, they turned to a cheaper alternative, heroin.

In 2009, there were 94 overdose deaths in Multnomah County. Lufkin was alarmed by the

rising number. But it was just the first stage of an opioid crisis.

The latest escalation is fentanyl, which is commonly found in counterfeit pills, called “blues,” that mimic the appearance of the prescription opioid they replaced.

This is the story of the corner that leaches this poison into the city—and, on one weekday evening, the consequences.

Another thing: Although many buyers and cops refer to the dealers on the corners as “the Hondurans,” it’s not clear how many actually are. To be sure, people of all races sell fentanyl downtown. And while San Francisco’s mayor has said “a lot” of their dealers are from the Central American country, such a trend isn’t clear in Portland from arrest records.

Twenty-one-year-old Reinel Raudales-Escalante, however, is Honduran.

Raudales-Escalante has been arrested a half-dozen times in Multnomah County just in the last year, mainly for selling fentanyl, and parts of his life story can be pieced together through court interviews. His primary language is Spanish, and he spoke to authorities through an interpreter.

Raudales-Escalante grew up in central Honduras, left school in sixth grade, and lived for two years in Georgia before arriving in Portland last May. He was earning minimum wage packing vegetables.

HAND-TO-HAND: Drug deals are easy to spot.

his arrest on drug charges in San Francisco. The four-member bike squad, tasked with addressing livability problems in Portland’s downtown core, has become the city’s de facto street drug enforcement team.

Spotting dealers has gotten easier, Arnold says. “After [Measure] 110, everyone started doing drugs out in the open without even trying to hide it. Suddenly, it became super productive. You can wait 10 minutes and see a drug deal. I started

AS RECENTLY AS LAST YEAR, PORTLAND’S drug market was centered in Old Town. Drug deals were a daily nuisance, recorded in reports from occasional police stings that describe the nearby bus mall and its surrounding environs as “crack alley,” a parking lot called the “boneyard,” and the “benzo benches.”

Spurred by complaints, Mayor Ted Wheeler and the neighborhood association agreed in March 2022 to a crackdown, marked by an increased police presence and subtle streetscape shifts. The notorious wooden benches along Northwest 5th Avenue disappeared.

Thus began a game of whack-a-mole, migrating southward. First, the drug trade moved to the parking lot outside Dante’s. Then to Washington Center, a vacant office complex at the busy corner of Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street. And when the center was boarded up earlier this year following WW’s reporting on the state of its surrounding sidewalks, the fentanyl market moved west, to Southwest 6th Avenue.

The shift of Portland’s drug market toward the downtown core coincided with the arrival of a new group of dealers: Hondurans.

They arrived downtown over the winter, on standup scooters wearing matching backpacks.

Portland police believe they are dispatched from suburban safe houses, distributing fentanyl produced with Chinese chemicals in superlabs operated by Mexican drug cartels and shipped up the Interstate 5 corridor.

There’s a hierarchy to the international drug trade. While Mexican cartels do the manufacturing, the dirty work of selling and moving the drugs falls on young men, often immigrants fleeing poverty in countries like Honduras, with little if any connection to the cartels that supply their product. In San Francisco, they’re known as “commuter drug dealers” due to the fact that they tend to stay in the cheaper East Bay and take the BART downtown.

Here, investigators have uncovered safe houses across the Willamette Valley. Two Honduran men were arrested earlier this year moving pounds of fentanyl from California through a house in Gresham.

The first time he was caught dealing fentanyl was last August, at the benzo benches in Old Town. He was picked up near Dante’s in January and, by February, had moved downtown to Washington Center.

He claimed he was homeless, living on the streets of Gresham. The jail interviewer was skeptical of that claim, noting inconsistencies in his stories. Some of the dealers are juveniles. One person familiar with investigating drug trafficking operations in Portland has a theory: They’re being exploited by higher-ups who know there’s little consequence if the kids are caught.

Over the past year, Raudales-Escalante has been charged with drug crimes six times. His most recent arrest occurred after he was doing doughnuts in a BMW outside Pittock Mansion, nearly hitting nearby pedestrians, before leading police on a high-speed chase through the West Hills.

He was indicted by a grand jury twice, paid more than $2,000 in bail, and then failed to report to pretrial supervision. A warrant is now out for his arrest.

WHY DON’T POLICE BREAK UP THE drug market?

In fact, they do make arrests. One recent afternoon, the Central Precinct’s bike squad pulled up to the corner. Officer Eli Arnold, who’s made a specialty of spotting dealers, was watching the action from a neighboring building. Cops arrested 36-year-old Rey Maudiel, who told police he had just arrived in town after meeting a man in Los

Angeles who recruited him to sell dope in Portland. Maudiel said he commutes downtown on the MAX from Gresham. A warrant was out for

“You can wait 10 minutes and see a drug deal.”

SPOTTING: Officer Eli Arnold.

LUCAS MANFIELD

doing it all the time because it was working.”

He set up shop in a vacant office building overlooking Southwest 5th Avenue. Thanks to Arnold’s binoculars, he says, the squad arrested more than 20 dealers early this year. But the numbers have dropped off since.

The bike squad works only the day shift, which ends at 5 pm. “They know when we leave,” Officer David Baer says.

The Central Precinct once had a street crimes

unit that patrolled downtown after the bike squad went home. But the Portland Police Bureau, facing staffing shortages, disbanded it years ago.

Even with the reshuffling, the precinct still routinely operates with staffing at a minimum, sometimes significantly so. The precinct requires 17 officers on patrol to safely respond to 911 calls during the afternoon shift, the Police Bureau says. On one recent afternoon that WW was downtown, there were 12.

The result: The Hondurans roll in at 6 pm and sell in peace.

ROBERT IS A 33-YEAR-OLD MAN with piercing blue eyes and tightly cropped brown hair who grew up in a small town in Eastern Washington.

He was introduced to opioids as a teenager when a neighbor handed him a fistful of prescription pills in exchange for mowing her lawn. Eventually, he started injecting heroin, which helped numb the pain after his best friend died of an overdose and his mother died of cancer.

When the veins in his arms collapsed, he

“The daily struggle consumes your life.”

switched to smoking fentanyl, “a game changer for a lot of us,” he says, because of how easy it was to get a cheap high.

How easy is it to purchase fentanyl in downtown Portland? I ask Robert for some tips.

First, he explains, avoid “blues,” the pills that are stamped to look like prescription OxyContin. They’re fake and the dosage is weak. They’re as cheap as a buck per pill on the streets.

Instead, he says, ask for “fetty,” the powdered fentanyl that’s surged in popularity in the past year. And, if I don’t want to be ripped off, make sure I ask for it “clean.” It’ll cost more, between $30 and $60 a gram, but you’ll get a stronger product, he says.

I decide I can do without the clean stuff.

“Fetty?” I ask one of the Hispanic youths. He nods, pulling a small plastic bag of white powder out of a sweatshirt pocket.

“How much?” he responds. I hold out a $20 bill. He turns around, extracts a white rock from the bag, chips off a piece with a knife, and then drops it into my outstretched hand.

I had expected, naively, for him to hand me the baggie. Instead, the loose rock is now dissolving in the sweat of my palm. I drop it into my pocket and run to a water fountain to rinse off.

WW sent the drugs to a lab, which confirmed it was fentanyl—a weak dose, heavily cut with the diuretic mannitol.

of the block, within sight of the dealers, a pair of men sought shelter under an eave at a branch of U.S. Bank. One of them, Jeff, sat against the wall, his arms around his legs and his hoodie pulled up far over his head.

Jeff grew up in the Portland area, he says. Found a job as a landscaper, fell in love with a girl. They planned to buy a house and get married, until she ran off to Qatar with another man. He took to alcohol, and then fentanyl.

For a while, Jeff lived with parents, until they moved to the country. Now he is homeless, constantly seeking his next high. “The daily struggle consumes your life,” he says. “You’ve got to be on top of your shit.”

The night before, he was not. He fell asleep on the sidewalk. When he woke up, everything he owned, including his drugs, money, shirts and even underwear, were gone.

It’s not the first time he’s lost everything. It happens every time the police take him to jail or the city sweeps his camp, he says. Sometimes, it’s an ex-girlfriend who hunts him down and burns his tent. Setbacks, setbacks and more setbacks. “I’m constantly restarting,” he says. “It’s not a winning battle.”

Tonight, he’s back at the corner looking for drugs, or at least a buddy who can hook him up. He’s been looking for him all night, but no luck. And he’s got no more money to buy fetty himself. He’d go to a shelter, but he knows there’s a warrant out for his arrest and he’s afraid the staff will tip off the cops. Tomorrow he’ll scrounge up some cans and redeem them for cash.

But for now, with withdrawal looming? “I’m fucked.”

AS THE SUN GOES DOWN THAT NIGHT, first responders rush from overdose to overdose.

At 8 pm, cops administer Narcan to a man passed out in front of the Hi-Lo Hotel on Southwest 3rd Avenue. His name is James.

Nineteen minutes later, there’s a call a few blocks away on 1st Avenue. As the ambulance arrives, screams can be heard from an encampment under the Morrison Bridge. Another victim lies in his own vomit on the stairs, wearing nothing but a pair of overalls. A man living in a nearby tent, Endoe Parra-Cisneros, calls over the paramedics. He’s already administered Narcan.

Parra-Cisneros says he’s seen 60 overdoses in the few months he’s been unhoused.

At 9 pm, outside Washington Center, a half-dozen cops and paramedics surround an elderly man lying face up beside an overturned wheelchair on the sidewalk. His name is Gary. It takes four doses of Narcan to revive him. A piece of tinfoil and a lighter lie on the sidewalk.

SMOKING SUPPLIES: County officials are debating the merits of distributing tinfoil and pipes to encourage safer drug use.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, at one end

The paramedics pull Gary into his wheelchair, wrap a thin white blanket around his shoulders and then leave. He is briefly alone on the sidewalk. One of Gary’s legs has been amputated. His scalp

YOU DON’T HAVE TO LOOK FAR TO SEE THE consequences of the commerce happening on this downtown block.

GETTING A FIX

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)

We asked city, county and state elected officials to explain what they’re doing about the social cost of fentanyl in downtown Portland. Here are their responses. LUCAS MANFIELD.

Multnomah

County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson

“The death and destruction caused by fentanyl is heartbreaking and unacceptable. This is a drug wave unlike anything we’ve seen since the meth crisis 20 years ago, and this new drug is cheaper, more prevalent, and more deadly. As a result, we are reexamining our strategies and approaches.

“ To date, we’ve prioritized outreach, stabilization, treatment and sobering. We run 18 prevention programs, 13 treatment programs, and seven focused on recovery. We distribute more than 50,000 naloxone kits a year. We fully fund the Behavioral Health Resource Center to serve 100 people each day and transition them into a 33-bed shelter or 19-bed bridge-tohousing facility. And we’re incorporating what works into new, multiyear strategies that include our partners in health care, government, and our safety systems.”

Mayor

Ted Wheeler

“We are constantly working to enforce drug distribution laws with the resources we have.

“ The Central Bike Squad and Central Neighborhood Response Team, for example, have arrested 35 drug dealers downtown since Feb. 1, 2023, but nearly all of which were immediately released from custody (and many have not been prosecuted). As such, we are working with our criminal justice partners to increase system capacity and strengthen the impact of our arrests.

“ We are also eagerly awaiting the governor’s signature on House Bill 2645, which will help reduce barriers to additional fentanyl distribution arrests. In the meantime, the Central Bike Squad issues approximately 10 Measure 110 tickets daily. Officers hand out resource cards with those tickets to help those individuals seek treatment. In addition to tickets, cited persons are often arrested for outstanding warrants. This added presence from police has helped break up large groups of users congregating on sidewalks and eases the impact on local businesses.”

Multnomah County District Attorney

Mike Schmidt

“My office’s role is to prosecute criminal cases that are referred to us by law enforcement. So far this year, we are issuing charges in 90% of drug delivery cases—the highest rate in at least the last eight years. We also assign deputy DAs specifically to work on drug teams with our law enforcement partners. While Ballot Measure 110 has presented some challenges, House Bill 2645 (which my office supported) will give us additional tools we can use to hold individuals accountable who are delivering or holding substantial quantities of fentanyl.”

“Fentanyl’s destructive impact on Portland and communities statewide is painfully clear. I’m pressing U.S. Customs and Border Protection to crack down at the border and cut off fentanyl’s flow into Oregon via I-5 and I-84. I support the Fend Off Fentanyl Act, which would declare fentanyl a national emergency and require the administration to use sanctions, forfeiture and other law enforcement tools. And I’ve passed legislation that provides federal support for mobile crisis response teams like Portland Street Response working to help people dealing with behavioral and mental health crises often triggered by abuse of—and poisoning by—fentanyl.”

1st District Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici

“Today’s fentanyl and meth are stronger than substances we’ve encountered before, and we need a corresponding response to help people manage their addiction and recovery. Behavioral health leaders in Portland have well-reasoned approaches, but many told me they need `more support, resources and staff. I’m advocating to invest in workforce training immediately to get more qualified people into these critical roles. I recently secured funding for United We Heal Training Trust’s behavioral health apprenticeship program. I’m also supporting efforts to expand federal resources for models like Portland Street Response and Eugene’s CAHOOTS. We also need more education and other prevention measures.”

Police Chief Chuck Lovell

Declined an interview with WW.

Gov. Tina Kotek

“One of my top priorities is to improve access to mental health and addiction services in Oregon. Since taking office in January, I have:

 Called on regional leaders in Portland and Multnomah County to designate one individual to lead the response to the addiction crisis and develop a 60-day plan of action.

 Directed the Oregon Health Authority to launch a statewide assessment of the state’s need for mental health, substance use and recovery services, treatments and supports and a multiyear plan to meet that need.

 Reset the Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission by appointing a new director.

 Supported the Oregon State Police in their focused enforcement efforts towards the disruption of fentanyl trafficking and impaired driving.

 Advocated for $200 million of additional investment to add capacity for detox and substance use disorder residential treatment facilities, provide incentives to stabilize and support the behavioral health workforce, and increase community services for individuals who are likely to end up in the state hospital as well as other legislative progress.

 Requested Coordinated Care Organizations to reinvest a portion of their income into community behavioral health services based on their 2022 financials.”

all we do.”

is covered in lesions—a common consequence of long-term opioid use.

At 9:21 pm, another overdose on 6th Avenue. Officer Stephen Pettey was driving his squad car to a report of gunfire on the corner when he saw a man passed out in the street.

According to data provided to WW by Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications, overdose and poisoning made up 6.1% of all medical calls in the first half of 2023. That’s a jump from 3.9% in the later half of 2021, the oldest comparable data due to a shift in BOEC bookkeeping.

Portland firefighter Mike Fullerton is often first on the scene to an overdose. “It’s all we do,” he says.

ROBERT WOULD LIKE A DIFFERENT LIFE.

He spent a year in prison after being caught driving stolen cars. (He says his legal problems began after he moved into what turned out to be a chop shop to save on rent.) He’s now living on the street after being released earlier this year, cobbling together enough cash each day to feed his addiction.

The conviction has made getting a normal job difficult. So Robert turned to “canning.” He rides the bus every few days out to the suburbs where he collects bottles and cans from car wash trash bins, which he redeems for cash.

On a good day, it amounts to $50, which he spends on fentanyl.

On a bad day, his dealer fronts him so he can avoid the withdrawals, which are so “gruesome,” he says, they make it impossible to go out and find the drugs needed to stop them.

Exit strategies from fentanyl are hard to find. Especially in Portland.

Oregon Health & Science University researchers reported last year that Oregon has half the drug treatment beds it needs. The state lost nearly 150 during the pandemic—a “staggering” number, a top official admitted last year. Before that, in early 2020, Portland lost its only sobering center, where cops could drop off people intoxicated on booze or narcotics. City, county and state officials have failed, despite years of discussions, to open a replacement.

The result is the situation on the streets, says Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland. “Right now, if someone wants to get clean and sober, there’s no door for them to do that.”

For Robert, who’s motivated to get clean and get off the street, the process has been frustratingly slow. He says he’s on the waitlist at the county’s new downtown shelter. And he wants to eventually enter a methadone program, where he can get a supply of the long-acting opioid used to wean substance abusers off street drugs.

But more than 40% of the people who wait in line at Central City Concern’s detox facility are turned away for lack of room. And methadone clinics are notorious for their long waitlists.

“They say there’s help for us if we want it, but it’s really not that easy to get,” Robert says. “It’s a waiting game—and a lot of people don’t make it.”

“It’s

Fentanyl Seized in Portland Area Source: Oregon-Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area

GETTING WELL: Privacy is in short supply on the streets.

TRUE COLORS

Photos by Aidan Barbar @barbarbarbarbarbar__ and Chris Nesseth @chrisnesseth

The Pride Parade is a highlight of Portland’s Pride Festival in part because attendees are just as fun to watch as the procession itself. Sitting on the sidelines really isn’t a spectator sport in this instance, and the crowds brought their A-game when it came to attire for the July 16 event, which included everything from a pair of sparkly Speedos to a shawl made of plush animals to a pooch dyed Barbie pink. Portland Pride moved to mid-July this year to avoid holding conflicting events during a week that included Juneteenth, Father’s Day and the Delta Park Powwow, but that didn’t seem to deter attendance.

GET BUSY

JULY 26-AUG. 1

GO: Danielle Centoni & Kerry Newberry at Powell’s

There’s no shortage of cookbooks highlighting the state’s agricultural bounty, but what makes Oregon Wine + Food stand out is the inclusion of stories from 40 influential wine professionals, which are featured alongside 80 recipes. Authors Danielle Centoni and Kerry Newberry will discuss their new tome, which you can order in advance, at Powell’s City of Books. Also joining the panel: Brianne Day of Day Wines, Jeanne Feldkamp of Corollary Wines, and Kelsey Glasser of Arden. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com.

7 pm Wednesday, July 26. Free. $34.95 for a preordered signed edition.

WATCH: Six The Musical

While Broadway in Portland’s 2022 season began with a touching production of To Kill a Mockingbird—a play with no singing, which is highly unusual for the company—2023 will start with the powerhouse musical Six. The rollicking mashup of 16th century politics with 21st century spirit and humor turns the six wives of Henry VIII into divas celebrating feminism through song. No tickets were left at press time; however, you may get lucky if a friend falls ill and ends up letting their seats go. Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 503-248-4335, portland.broadway. com. 7:30 pm Wednesday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday, 1 and 6:30 pm Sunday. Sold out.

WATCH: Movies in the Park Oregon may have only a few proper drive-in theaters left, but fortunately there is no shortage of parks showing movies, including Imagination Station in Troutdale. While most of these events don’t get underway until after sunset (a 9 pm start time is pushing it for some families), Troutdale Recreation can hit “play” at 6:30 pm thanks to the installation of a giant LED video wall that features sharp images even under the evening sun. This Friday, take in

a double feature of millennial childhood classics: First up is the timeless baseball comedy The Sandlot, followed by a Rob Reiner classic, The Princess Bride. There will also be free popcorn, food vendors and a rock climbing wall—a feature that doesn’t necessarily fit in with the traditional drive-in experience, but it should help little ones burn off energy before showtime. Imagination Station, 1900 SW Cherry Park Road, Troutdale, 503-665-5175, troutdaleoregon.gov/rec/page/movies-park.

6:30 and 8:30 pm

Friday, July 28. Free.

GO: Dress Han: Night of Hanfu Fashion

Best known for its traditional tea ceremonies, you might say that Lan Su Chinese Garden is getting a bit edgy with its newest event: a fashion show. Hanfu, the centuries-old attire of the Han Chinese, has seen a resurgence in popularity among Chinese youths, who have been posting photos of themselves in flowing robes and ornate embroidery on social media. You can see some of that style up close and personal at Dress Han, which will showcase creations by renowned Chinese American designer Kerry Yu and her team, Oceana Blue. Hanfu-inspired music composed by award-winning Taiwanese American artist Dr. Yuan-Chen Li will serve as the soundtrack while models take to the garden’s runway, with its beautiful bridges and walking paths. Lan Su Chinese Garden, 239 NW Everett St., 503-2248455, lansugarden.org. 7-9 pm Friday, July 28. $15 for children, $25 for members, $40 for general admission

WATCH: JAW New Play Festival

Every July for the past 25 years, playwrights, directors and actors have come together at Portland Center Stage to rehearse (and sometimes rewrite) a series of new plays. The finalized productions are then shared with audiences via readings during JAW, and 2023’s batch should make you laugh, cry and think. The lineup includes Best Available by Jonathan

Spector, a comedy about online dating and identity; In the Basement by Bailey Williams, a gripping drama centered on secrets and survival; and Dorcas Sowunmi’s Safe Ride, a powerful story about race and justice. In addition to that, you can expect a selection of short plays written by local teens commissioned specifically for the event, and a concert featuring Lauren “Lo” Steele, who you may remember from PCS’s recent production of tick, tick… Boom! Portland Center Stage at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, pcs.org. 6 pm Friday, 3 pm Saturday and noon Sunday, July 28-30. Free.

DRINK: Pearlfest: Pearl District Beer & Arts Festival

Filling the slot traditionally held by the Oregon Brewers Festival (the last full weekend in July) is Pearlfest, which will take place near the Brewery Blocks, where craft brewing all began in the Pacific Northwest. Sample at least 20 different beers and ciders from some of the finest producers in Oregon and Southwest Washington while raising money for the Oregon Food Bank, so drink well and do some good. In addition to booze, there will be local artists displaying their work and live music. Oregon Brewers Festival who? North Park Blocks, 235 NW Park Ave., eventcreate.com/e/pearlbrewed. Noon-8 pm Saturday, July 29. $30 for a souvenir mug and 10 tasting tokens. $5 entry without tokens. Free for kids 12 and younger.

GO: WasabiCon PDX

Formerly known as Newcon PDX and Fandom PDX, all you really need to know is that WasabiCon PDX is the ultimate pop culture extravaganza, which this year is bigger than ever. This two-day celebration of all things Asian pop culture, cosplay and gaming will feature more than 50 exhibitors as well as discussion panels, contests, live performances and more. Be sure to meet Monica Rial, the voice of Tsuyu “Froppy” Asui from the smash hit anime My Hero Academia, along with Ian Sinclair,

who lent his pipes to Brook for One Piece Hilton Portland Downtown, 921 SW 6th Ave., pdx.wasabicon.com. 10 am-11:59 pm Saturday, 10 am-6 pm Sunday, July 29-30. $45 weekend pass, $35 Saturday only, $25 Sunday only.

GO: 10th Montavilla Street Fair

The Montavilla Street Fair, the single largest one-day event in east county, is back following its return last year after a pandemic pause. This year, there will be even more vendors (140-plus vs. around 120 in 2022) as well as live music on three stages. Organizers expect some 15,000 to attend, which would match the turnout in 2019, so get there early to beat the crowds or pack your patience. Downtown Montavilla, Southeast Stark Street between 76th and 82nd avenues, metba.org/montavilla-street-fair-2023. 10 am-5 pm Sunday, July 30. Free.

LISTEN: The Common Opus

The Common Opus bills itself as many things: an interactive, groundbreaking concert; a humanistic celebration; and a COVID-19 farewell party. Whatever it is, the experience should at least be worthwhile since it features the stories of 95 diverse Oregonians who shared their personal experiences of living through the pandemic for the project. Their tales have been transformed into stunning musical compositions by the brilliant Emily Lau, an award-winning composer who is known for her innovative and genre-bending style. Dolores Winningstad Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, 503-248-4335, big-mouth. org. 6-9 pm Sunday, July 30. $27.25-$212.

DRAMA QUEENS: Six, a modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s wives, kicks off Broadway in Portland’s 2023-24 season.

1. SMITH TEAMAKER

Buzz List

WHERE TO DRINK THIS WEEK.

3. BREAKSIDE BREWERY

BEAVERTON

12675 SW 1st St., Beaverton, breakside.com. 11 am-10 pm daily. Just when the patient beer fans in Beaverton were beginning to give up hope that Breakside would ever actually open a long-planned taproom in Old Town, the company suddenly announced June 11 that the facility was ready for eager drinkers. The outpost isn’t complete, but you can now enjoy a roughly 150-seat beer garden and suds poured from Breakside’s retro Winnebeergo, which will serve as the temporary outdoor bar until the 80-seat interior is completed. Order a classic like Wanderlust or the refreshing Mexican Lager (especially when temps top 90 degrees) and raise a glass to this powerhouse brand’s latest expansion.

4.

TOCAYO

AT PALOMAR

500 NW 23rd Ave., 503-206-7451; 110 SE Washington St., 971-2543935; smithtea.com. 10 am-6 pm daily.

All we can say is THANK GOD that stubborn heat dome has clamped down over the South and not the Pacific Northwest. Nobody wants to relive the misery brought on by 2021’s record-breaking heat wave. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of oppressive temperatures in the forecast; however, we’re entering the hottest part of the season, which means you’ll need to find ways to cool off. Smith Teamaker has an idea: a new Summer Chill Down menu. The lineup includes five iced teas along with three seasonal flavors (blackberry, coconut swizzle and agave sunshine), an iced matcha latte, mocktails, and even two different varieties of ice cream floats. Get ’em through Aug. 31.

2. JOHN’S MARKETPLACE – HALL

3700 SW Hall Blvd., Beaverton, 503-747-2739, johnsmarketplace.com. 11 am-8 pm Sunday-Wednesday, 11 am-9 pm Thursday-Saturday. Formerly parched downtown Beaverton has been swimming in beer for the past few years. The area has outlets for two breweries as well as a handful of beer bars. Joining the perennial beerfest is John’s Marketplace, which opened its third location on the edge of Old Town in April. Most everyone is here for a pint paired with the wellcharred, quarter-pound smash burgers, including beer nerds sporting branded swag and moms clad in Lululemon with children in tow. Join them under the beer banners in the taproom before perusing the bottle shop for something special to take home.

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.

5. TORO MEXICAN KITCHEN

1355 NW Everett St., Suite 120, 503-673-2724, 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.

Top 5

Hot Plates

WHERE TO EAT THIS WEEK.

1. DOLLY OLIVE

527 SW 12th Ave., 503-719-6921, dollyolivepdx.com. 11 am-3 pm and 5-9 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-3 pm and 5-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

This month, The Wall Street Journal declared we’re “becoming a nation of early birds,” and it’s hard to argue with that point since Portland’s nightlife has never really rebounded from the pandemic. If we are all turning in earlier these days, might as well make the most of lunch, a meal that’s never been as leisurely as brunch nor as elegant as dinner, yet you can apply both of those adjectives to the midday meal experience at downtown’s Dolly Olive. Lunch service began in May and includes items that would suit just about anyone’s tastes, from a farro salad to a slow-roasted rosemary prosciutto-and-Gruyère panini to a crispy chicken confit. You can even pretend you’re at a fancy dinner and order a salted caramel cannoli for dessert—a move we highly recommend.

2. HIGGINS PIGGINS

KICKING GIANT AT THE LOLLIPOP SHOPPE

BY ROBERT HAM

On the Oregon Historical Society terrace at 1200 SW Park Ave., 503222-9070, higginspiggins.com.

One of downtown’s most charming pandemic patios is back open for the summer season. Higgins Piggins returned to the South Park Blocks in early June, and this year’s iteration pays tribute to Venice’s backstreet locals bars known as bacari: cozy, simple inns that typically serve wine and small plates built around seasonal ingredients. At Piggins, you can expect a Pacific Northwest take, with a menu that

includes artisan cheeses, charcuterie, salads, and cicchetti—snacks like tea service-sized sandwiches.

3. CÂCHE CÂCHE

1015 SE Stark St. 5-10 pm Wednesday-Saturday, 1-8 pm Sunday. Câche Câche, a raw seafood bar from Kurt Huffman’s ChefStable and St. Jack chef John Denison, is Portland’s newest and neatest oceanic idyll. The new place is aptly named after the French term for “hide-and-seek” since it’s hard to find and there is no phone number or website. The search is worth it for the lobster roll alone, though, which might cause a Mainer’s eyes to grow misty. Three ounces of meat are lightly dressed with a tarragon-infused aioli and then stuffed into a cuboid cut from a crustless Dos Hermanos Pullman loaf. Everyone must order this; sharing is a bad idea.

4. CHELO

Located inside Dame, 2930 NE Killingsworth St., chelopdx.com.

5-9 pm Monday-Wednesday.

Chef Luna Contreras’ cooking has made appearances all over the city, and she’s received acclaim at every turn. Sometimes, Contreras flits about so quickly it can be hard to catch her. But from now until mid-August, you can find her playful, vegetable-forward take on traditional Mexican street foods inside Dame restaurant. Order a few items that likely won’t carry over to a smaller-plate version of Chelo that will open in a new location later this year, like the incredible chuleta de puerco, a bone-in pork chop, served with hot housemade tortillas, a super-tasty fire-roasted tomato salsa quemada and brothy beans, cooked to perfection.

5. TUSK

2448 E Burnside St., 503-894-8082, tuskpdx.com. 5-9 pm Monday-Thursday, 5-10 pm Friday, 10 am-2 pm and 5-10 pm Saturday, 10 am-2 pm Sunday.

At long last, brunch is making a comeback after the pandemic wiped out the weekend tradition. Our favorite chickpea palace, Tusk, is the latest to reintroduce the midday meal. Diners with a sweet tooth will want to order pastry chef Tara Lewis’ baharat roll frosted with pistachio farmer cheese, or the cardamom doughnut with tahini pastry cream and rhubarb jam. Brunchgoers who require sunny yolks with their mimosas should look to the shakshuka verde or lamb poutine, which can be topped with an egg, of course.

Kicking Giant, the duo born from Olympia’s bountiful underground rock community in the ’90s, reemerged this past weekend for a rare, much-anticipated run of shows in the Northwest. There was no special occasion attached to these gigs, booked as they were to coincide with guitarist-vocalist Tae Won Yu’s return to the region from New York to give a lecture in Seattle about his graphic design work. But the excitement surrounding the band’s Friday night appearance at the Lollipop Shoppe was enough to pack the intimate bar with fellow musicians (including both members of Quasi, Jason Traeger, and Rose City Band’s Ripley Johnson) and fans alike.

The beauty of Kicking Giant’s set was how quickly it erased the three decades separating the band’s inception from today. Yu and drummer-vocalist Rachel Carns still played with a shaggy enthusiasm that veered occasionally into discord. Their music pulls from the same punk and garage-rock sources that fed the Cramps, but uses it to express more starry-eyed feelings of romantic yearning.

“We’re a little rough around the edges,” Yu said at one point. His admission barely registered with anyone in the room. They were too far gone, losing themselves in the sugary rush of “Satellite” or fighting back tears as the band leaned into the willowy psych-pop pleas found in “She’s Real.” Even more affecting was Yu’s heartfelt expressions toward everyone in attendance and his onstage partner. “We just love playing together,” he said, dreamily. That truly went without saying, given the heartfelt smiles he and Carns shared during their set and the long hug they gave each other at the end. Their bond remains strong, even at a time when they live nearly 3,000 miles apart.

Then and Now

Bag&Baggage Productions explores the life of a Black actor in a slave-owning society.

BY LINDA FERGUSON

Towards the end of Bag&Baggage Productions’ Red Velvet, a wall of pictures begins to talk. In director Nik Whitcomb’s powerful version of the play, the wall is actually an open structure hung with fancy picture frames, suggesting traditional upper-class British décor, complete with portraits of privileged ancestors.

When three characters stand with their faces centered in the frames and repeat lines they’ve spoken earlier in the play, the production evokes the idea that the past will continue to haunt us in the present.

The past—and what we can learn from it—is a theme that runs throughout Lolita Chakrabarti’s 2012 script, which is based on the real life of American-born actor Ira Aldridge. In 1833, as Britain was about to pass its Slavery Abolition Act, Aldridge became the first Black man to star as Othello at London’s Covent Garden.

Red Velvet takes these facts and imagines the reaction to Aldridge’s presence as a microcosm of the roiling politics of the day. While rioters for and against abolition can be heard out in the street, the Othello cast members are similarly divided.

One of those actors, Bernard Ward (Stan Brown), expresses his opinion in a persnickety English accent that makes King Charles sound like a country bumpkin. After insisting the country’s economy relies on slavery, he orders Connie, a Jamaican-born maid (Victoria Alvarez-Chacon), to serve his tea with “buckets of sugar,” in defiance of those forgoing the sweetener in support of abolition.

Despite the intensity of the play’s material, Whitcomb is adept at emphasizing its humorous moments, beginning with the instant Aldridge (a compelling Eric Zulu), with head held high and heart open, confidently strides into the theater for his first rehearsal. The white Othello actors literally stop in their tracks and stare at him with open mouths. Even Connie, who before now has kept her face expressionless and her eyes down, gasps then smiles to herself.

Some of the characters, such as Ellen Tree (an effervescent and nuanced Elizabeth Jackson), are open to Aldridge taking over the part, which had been played by the famous white actor Edmund Kean before he collapsed onstage. Although Tree is shocked that her Desdemona will now be married to an Othello who is actually Black—as opposed to wearing blackface—she quickly comes to admire and is inspired by Aldridge’s professionalism.

One comic scene involves Tree beginning a rehearsal by acting

SHOWS OF THE WEEK

WHAT TO SEE AND WHAT TO HEAR

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

FRIDAY,

JULY 28:

Formed in 1977, Riders in the Sky are heirs to a long tradition of Western singing ensembles, taking their name from an album by the Sons of the Pioneers, the daddy of such groups. Their survival at a time when singing cowboys are a quaint anachronism has much to do with their willingness to kid themselves—you might know them for performing the “Woody’s Roundup” song in Toy Story 2—yet beneath the comically large cowboy hats and plywood cactus props lies a deep respect for country tradition. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St. 8 pm. $35. Minors admitted with parent or guardian.

SATURDAY, JULY 29:

the way she always has, using ridiculously exaggerated poses and gestures. With melodramatic music playing in the background, she seems to be channeling the comically mannered acting style in silent movies. Aldridge, who believes in a more modern, naturalistic method of performing, suggests she try to convey honest emotion, and the sparks of their mutual commitment to improving their craft is a joy to watch.

Such joy, though, can’t last. Although the Othello audience gives Aldridge a standing ovation—and, as proof, the audience of Red Velvet gets to hear their applause and cheers—the press skewers his performance. Quoting an actual article, one reviewer says Aldridge’s African features prevent him from speaking proper English.

The tragedy heightens when his friend, theater manager Pierre Laporte (Joseph Hugh-Martin Murley), fires him from the show. In the scene, mournful music plays as the two men slowly enter the stage and stop on opposite sides. Soon, they are arguing with a building ferocity that has the audience of Red Velvet holding their breath.

As potent as Aldridge’s story is, Chakrabarti packed her script with reflections on a plethora of other issues (including class, gender and sexual orientation, to name a few). The connection between these issues and race is valid (for instance, Laporte, as a gay man, lives a perilous existence in 1833 England). But despite the skillful and spirited acting of the entire Red Velvet cast, the script starts to drag a bit when Chakrabarti devotes large sections of her two-plus-hour play to these other stories.

Such minor flaws, though, can’t diminish the power of the production. Especially when the once-optimistic Aldridge becomes half-mad from not being fully accepted as a man and an artist in his adopted country and eerily paints his face white for a performance of King Lear. The scene is painful to watch, but that’s the point.

Whitcomb has said the mission of Bag&Baggage is to use art “to unpack the stories we carry with us.” His vibrantly compassionate production of Red Velvet does that in a way that even the most accurate reporting can’t, by bringing to life the emotional truth of a 140-yearold tragedy that’s still with us today.

SEE IT: Bag&Baggage’s Red Velvet plays at The Vault Theatre, 350 E Main St., Hillsboro, 503-345-9590, bagnbaggage.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, through Aug. 6. $20-$35. 14+.

Funk, punk, ska, reggae, heavy metal, free jazz: Fishbone has had time to explore all these styles over almost 45 years in business, often within the same song (they even had time to back up Annette Funicello in Back to the Beach, essentially the Barbie of 1987). Fishbone were contemporaries of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the sweaty ’80s L.A. rock scene, and any band ever to marry slap bass and punk attitude—Primus, Mr. Bungle, even Korn and Limp Bizkit—owes something to their pioneering experiments. Bossanova Ballroom, 722 E Burnside St. 7 pm. $27. 21+.

SUNDAY, JULY 30:

“Dark music” record label The Flenser is based in San Francisco, but it’s never really considered itself an “S.F.” label, aiming instead to convey a unified vision of the West Coast’s primal majesty. Signees include Drowse, the mossy ambient-folk project of Portland singer-songwriter Kyle Bates, and Ragana , a queer doom-metal duo split between Olympia and Oakland whose music sounds no less caught up in old-growth tangles. The two performers co-headline at Mississippi Studios this Sunday. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave. 8 pm. $12. 21+.

A STAR IS BORN: Eric Zulu.

Ugetsu (1953)

On its face, the midcentury Japanese classic Ugetsu is a “careful what you wish for” yarn. Yet there are grander dimensions to this tale of two peasant husbands (Masayuki Mori and Eitarô Ozawa) so preoccupied by dreams of material wealth and military glory (respectively) that they’re blind to their wives (Mitsuko Mito and Kinuyo Tanaka) and a raging civil war.

Based on two 18th century tales by Ueda Akinari, Ugetsu becomes more than a mere parable by slipping into macabre eeriness. The husbands, Genjuro (Mori) and Tôbei (Ozawa), encounter the ghostly remnants of fallen noble houses and disgraced samurai—and director Kenji Mizoguchi employs languid pans, misty auras, atonal flutes, and mournful folk songs to suggest the netherworld they’ve invited.

True to form, Mizoguchi, who made many films about the plight and strength of Japanese women (from Osaka Elegy to The Life of Oharu), lets the spurned wives have their say in scorching fashion. In a critical, dust-settling scene, it’s Ohama (Mitu) who tells Tôbei the brutal truth: “You were too stupid to learn except through misfortune.”

See Ugetsu at the Clinton Street Theater on July 27 as part of its Hanabi Japanese Film Festival.

ALSO PLAYING:

5th Avenue: Angel’s Egg (1985). Ghost in the Shell (1995), July 28-30. Cinema 21: Rosemary’s Baby (1968), July 29. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), July 30. Clinton: A Letter to Momo (2011), July 29. The Tale of Zatoichi (1962), July 31. Floating Weeds (1959), Aug. 1. Hollywood: Fight Club (1999), July 28-30 and Aug.

3. Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972), July 29 and 30. Living Room: Cape Fear (1962), July 30.

MOVIES

TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Contact: bennett@wweek.com

OPPENHEIMER

At the start of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, raindrops fall; at the end, fire rages. You’ll feel it burn long after the end credits roll. Nolan has made violent movies before (including Inception and Dunkirk), but Oppenheimer is not just about physical devastation. It submerges you in the violence of a guilt-ravaged soul, leaving you feeling unsettled and unclean. Confronting the film’s moral and spiritual weight is a fearsome challenge, and one well worth rising to.

With agitated charisma and vulnerability, Cillian Murphy embodies J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist whose mind birthed the atomic bomb. When we first meet him, he’s a curly-haired lad staring at a puddle, but he swiftly evolves into an excitable visionary leading a cadre of scientists into the deserts of New Mexico, where they will ultimately build and test a plutonium device (referred to as “the gadget”) on July 16, 1945.

While Nolan exists a world apart from Oppenheimer—his creativity far exceeds his fascination with destruction—he has absorbed some of his subject’s frantic energy. Attempting to squeeze decades of a man’s intellectual and emotional life into a mere three hours, Nolan sometimes reduces moments to fragments, egged on by Ludwig Göransson’s eerie and pulsating score (which is excellent but overused).

What saves the film from becoming a connect-the-dots biopic is Nolan’s ingenious chronicle of the postWorld War II rivalry between Oppenheimer and Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The more Oppenheimer fights to put “the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” the more Strauss seethes and schemes, thrusting the movie into a maze of double-crosses that echo the exhilarating games of perception in Nolan’s 2001 breakout hit Memento.

Of course, the thrill can’t (and shouldn’t) last. A decade ago, I applauded jubilantly as Nolan wrapped his Dark Knight trilogy, but Oppenheimer left me silent and still. As many as 226,000 people were killed when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they haunt the film like ghosts—especially when Oppenheimer imagines a charred corpse beneath his foot. A man dreamed; people died. All a work of art can do is evoke their absence. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Studio One.

DAIEI FILM

BARBIE

Once upon a time, Barbie dolls liberated all women from tyranny. The end…at least according to the first few minutes of Barbie, a sleek and satirical fantasia from director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women). Set in the utopian kingdom of Barbieland, the movie dramatizes the existential crises of the winkingly named Stereotypical Barbie. She’s played by Margot Robbie, who was last seen battling a rattlesnake in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon—and her misadventures in Barbie are hardly less bizarre. Plagued by flat feet, cellulite and fears of death, Barbie seeks the source of her ailments in the real world, bringing along a beamingly inadequate Ken (Ryan Gosling) with catastrophic consequences: Awed by images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, Ken becomes a crusading men’s rights activist, leading a revolt against the government of Barbieland and instituting bros-first martial law. And they say originality is dead! With its absurdist wit, glitzy musical numbers, and earnest ruminations on whether matriarchy and patriarchy can coexist, Barbie is easily one of the most brazen movies released by a major studio. Yes, its tidy ending betrays its anarchic spirit—after insisting that empowerment can’t be neatly packaged in a doll box, the film seems to say, “No, wait! It can!”—but it would be churlish to deny the charm of Gerwig’s buoyant creation. In an age when genuine cinematic joy is rare, we’re all lucky to be passengers in Barbie’s hot-pink plastic convertible. PG-13.

BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.

AFIRE

In the tradition of his many compromised romances (Phoenix Transit Undine), writer-director Christian Petzold explores connections missed, made and retroactively illuminated during a novelist’s work-cation on the Baltic Sea in Afire. In black denim and gray New Balances, Leon (Thomas Schubert) is practically in uniform as someone who hates the beach. He’s destined to miss out, but the audience doesn’t. Petzold lets us enjoy Leon’s companions—his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), their unexpected housemate Nadja (Paula Beer) and a local lifeguard (Enno Trebs)—and Germany’s north coast. All the while, Leon frets over his manuscript, and a forest fire rages in the distance. Dreamy yet frustrated, blunt yet forgiving, Afire holds space for modern life’s many scales—a creative’s navel-gazing, less selfish characters’ acceptance of provincial life, existential dread. Reveling in Nadja’s beauty, intelligence and generosity (she’s always making goulash), Petzold keeps challenging the audience with Leon’s shaky grip on protagonist status. Often, this sour lump is the last character whose vantage point you’d want in this film, but that’s all part of Petzold’s ever-fascinating “both/and” filmmaking. People will still take meaningful vacations as the world burns; a bad writer can

tell a good story; and Nadja will offer Leon a welcoming smile because they’ve shared a deeply imperfect moment. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE

Danger is a drug—and in his third Mission: Impossible film, director Christopher McQuarrie simultaneously shoves it up your nostrils and stabs it into your veins. As usual, daredevil secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is chasing after an explosive MacGuffin that he must protect from a doomsday-loving maniac (Esai Morales, in this case) lest the world go boom. Rather than vary the formula, McQuarrie simply refurbishes it (brilliantly) with fresh flourishes of suspense. You’ve seen Ethan race against the clock, but you’ve never seen him rushing through an airport in Abu Dhabi during a countdown to a nuclear explosion. You’ve seen him in one-on-one fights, but never with a demented French swordswoman (Pom Klementieff) in a terrifyingly cramped alley in Venice. You’ve seen him battle his adversaries on trains, but never run through one as it tumbles into…oh, just see the movie already, will you? Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t just cinema. It’s the essence of everything cinema was made for—not

just triumphantly tense violence, but delicious glamour and sex appeal (a nighttime negotiation with Alanna Mitsopolis, a broker played with a lascivious grin by Vanessa Kirby, is nearly erotic enough to deserve an NC-17 rating). And while the apparent death of a main character strikes a sour note—these films work best when they’re disposable and delightful, not tragic and ruthless—I’m hopeful that it’s a red herring designed to goose our sympathies before Part Two arrives next year. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Mission: Impossible movie has manipulated its audience to irresistibly grand effect. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Eastport, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Theater, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.

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. Living Room.

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-continental 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. Eastport, Fox Tower.

QUICKSAND

A bickering couple on the brink of divorce gets stuck in a muddy hole in the forests of Colombia in Quicksand. Carolina Gaitan and Allan Hawco play Sofia and Josh, health care professionals who have journeyed to the country to assist a friend. After going on a hike and winding up in an area they were warned about, Sofia and Josh end up in a fight for their lives. The two have to put aside their differences in order to survive the ordeal, but Matt Pitts’ screenplay never rings true as it jumps from scene to scene. Quicksand could have worked as a survival scenario crossed with a therapy session, but the couple’s conflict feels underwritten and their inept decision making makes it hard to root for them. Director Andres Beltran tries to overcome the thin screenplay by overselling many scenes with music and style; many sequences are well shot, but the messy editing often betrays the images. Quicksand does provide some minor enjoyment with unintentional laughs (some involving a snake), but most of the time the film is alternately boring and annoying. NR. DANIEL RESTER. Shudder.

by Jack Kent TRUE SCENES FROM THE STREETS!

JONESIN’

BY MATT JONES

"Must Be"--I know it's early.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): You are about to read a thunderbolt of sublime prophecies. It’s guaranteed to nurture the genius in your soul's underground cave. Are you ready? 1. Your higher self will prod you to compose a bold prayer in which you ask for stuff you thought you weren't supposed to ask for. 2. Your higher self will know what to do to enhance your love life by at least 20 percent, possibly more. 3. Your higher self will give you extra access to creativity and imaginative powers, enabling you to make two practical improvements in your life.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1991, John Kilcullen began publishing books with “for Dummies” in the title: for example, Sex for Dummies, Time Management for Dummies, Personal Finance for Dummies, and my favorite, Stress Management for Dummies. There are now over 300 books in this series. They aren’t truly for stupid people, of course. They’re designed to be robust introductions to interesting and useful subjects. I invite you to emulate Kilcullen’s mindset, Taurus. Be innocent, curious, and eager to learn. Adopt a beginner’s mind that’s receptive to being educated and influenced. (If you want to know more, go here: tinyurl.com/TruthForDummies)

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): "I could be converted to a religion of grass," says Indigenous author Louise Erdrich in her book Heart of the Land "Sink deep roots. Conserve water. Respect and nourish your neighbors. Such are the tenets. As for practice—grow lush in order to be devoured or caressed, stiffen in sweet elegance, invent startling seeds. Connect underground. Provide. Provide. Be lovely and do no harm." I advocate a similar approach to life for you Geminis in the coming weeks. Be earthy, sensual, and lush. (PS: Erdrich is a Gemini.)

ACROSS

1. Garden crawlers

6. Slangy pet name

9. Big girder

14. Eyelashes, scientifically

15. "Blue Rondo ___ Turk" (Dave Brubeck song)

16. Auli'i Cravalho role of 2016

17. Time away from work, for short

18. She inspired a boycott

20. "SNL" alum who starred in the recently canceled "American Auto"

22. Muscle below a delt

23. Madrid money, before the euro

24. Presley's middle name

26. Copier powder

29. Go too far with

33. Pro at CPR

36. Board

38. Barnyard noises

39. Her Modernist sculptures include "Contrapuntal Forms" and "Rock Form (Porthcurno)"

43. Cheese with Buffalo wings

44. Comedian Silverman

45. One in favor

46. Vacillate

49. Behavioral boo-boos

51. Eagerly repetitive greeting

53. Give

57. Word after meal or sewing

60. Big name in 1990s tennis

63. Tag on some holiday

presents--or where the beginnings of each theme entry derive?

65. Lucky Charms charm

66. Chick who was once keyboardist for Miles Davis

67. Thoughtful ability?

68. Online mag, outdatedly

69. Stifled laugh

70. Hearty bread

71. Heavy, like bread

DOWN

1. Old metal

2. Former "Weekend Edition" host Hansen

3. Bones in forearms

4. Sally Field TV title character

5. Upstate N.Y. battle site of 1777

6. S.F. area transit system

7. Plant for balms

8. Breezy class

9. Acting on the spot

10. Fabulous neckwear

11. Sandwich rank

12. Lyricist for Sinatra's "My Way"

13. Schooner part

19. Prefix with dynamic

21. Comparatively sound

25. Verne's captain

27. Delayed flight stats

28. Kingdom in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"

30. Actor Kinnear

31. Lavish attention (on)

32. Labor Dept. div.

33. Points of decline

©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.

34. "The ___ gaze" (early card in the Cards Against Humanity starter pack)

35. Sloth's hangout

37. Late pianist Peter

40. #43

41. Tibetan mammal

42. Rushed (by)

47. Sets as a goal

48. "Hold on there!" (this is the correct spelling, and I will be taking no further questions)

50. Hay fever symptom

52. Sanctum or circle preceder

54. Four-time Formula One champ ___ Prost

55. Beach birds

56. Lauder with an empire

57. Some red-and-white fast food outlets

58. Multivitamin additive

59. Symbol in el zodiaco

61. "The ___ Bitsy Spider"

62. Superhero accessory

64. "La ___" (Debussy opus)

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I hereby appoint myself as your temporary social director. My first action is to let you know that from an astrological perspective, the next nine months will be an excellent time to expand and deepen your network of connections and your web of allies. I invite you to cultivate a vigorous grapevine that keeps you up-to-date about the latest trends affecting your work and play. Refine your gossip skills. Be friendlier than you’ve ever been. Are you the best ally and collaborator you could possibly be? If not, make that one of your assignments.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): There are two kinds of holidays: those created by humans and those arising from the relationship between the sun and earth. In the former category are various independence days: July 4 in the US, July 1 in Canada, July 14 in France, and June 2 in Italy. Japan observes Foundation Day on February 11. Among the second kind of holiday is Lammas on August 1, a pagan festival that in the Northern Hemisphere marks the halfway point between the summer solstice and autumn equinox. In pre-industrial cultures, Lammas celebrated the grain harvest and featured outpourings of gratitude for the crops that provide essential food. Modern revelers give thanks for not only the grain, but all the nourishing bounties provided by the sun’s and earth’s collaborations. I believe you Leos are smart to make Lammas one of your main holidays. What’s ready to be harvested in your world. What are your prime sources of gratitude?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): For many of us, a disposal company regularly comes to our homes to haul away the garbage we have generated. Wouldn't it be great if there was also a reliable service that purged our minds and hearts of the psychic gunk that naturally accumulates? Psychotherapists provide this blessing for some of us, and I know people who derive similar benefits from spiritual rituals. Getting drunk or intoxicated may work, too, although those states often generate their own dreck. With these thoughts in mind, Virgo, meditate on how you might cleanse your soul with a steady, ennobling practice. Now is an excellent time to establish or deepen this tradition.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I'm wondering if there is a beloved person to whom you could say these words by Rumi: “You are the sky my spirit circles

in, the love inside love, the resurrection-place.” If you have no such an ally, Libra, the coming months will be a favorable time to attract them into your life. If there is such a companion, I hope you will share Rumi’s lyrics with them, then go further. Say the words Leonard Cohen spoke: "When I’m with you, I want to be the kind of hero I wanted to be when I was seven years old."

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Your theme for the coming weeks is "pleasurable gooseflesh.” I expect and hope you’ll experience it in abundance. You need it and deserve it! Editor Corrie Evanoff describes "pleasurable gooseflesh" as "the primal response we experience when something suddenly violates our expectations in a good way.” It can also be called "frisson"—a French word meaning “a sudden feeling or sensation of excitement, emotion, or thrill.” One way this joy may occur is when we listen to a playlist of songs sequenced in unpredictable ways—say Mozart followed by Johnny Cash, then Edit Piaf, Led Zeppelin, Blondie, Queen, Luciano Pavarotti, and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Here’s your homework: Imagine three ways you can stimulate pleasurable gooseflesh and frisson, then go out and make them happen.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “Fire rests by changing,” wrote ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In accordance with astrological omens, I ask you to meditate on that riddle. Here are some preliminary thoughts: The flames rising from a burning substance are always moving, always active, never the same shape. Yet they comprise the same fire. As long as they keep shifting and dancing, they are alive and vital. If they stop changing, they die out and disappear. The fire needs to keep changing to thrive! Dear Sagittarius, here’s your assignment: Be like the fire; rest by changing.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): There’s ample scientific evidence that smelling cucumbers can diminish feelings of claustrophobia. For example, some people become anxious when they are crammed inside a narrow metal tube to get an MRI. But numerous imaging facilities have reduced that discomfort with the help of cucumber oil applied to cotton pads and brought into proximity to patients’ noses. I would love it if there were also natural ways to help you break free of any and all claustrophobic situations, Capricorn. The coming weeks will be a favorable time to hone and practice the arts of liberation.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone,” said Aquarian author Gertrude B. Stein. She was often quirky and even downright weird, but as you can see, she also had a heartful attitude about her alliances. Stein delivered another pithy quote that revealed her tender approach to relationships. She said that love requires a skillful audacity about sharing one’s inner world. I hope you will put these two gems of advice at the center of your attention, Aquarius. You are ready for a strong, sustained dose of deeply expressive interpersonal action.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, 95 percent of high school students acknowledge they have participated in academic cheating. We can conclude that just one of 20 students have never cheated—a percentage that probably matches how many non-cheaters there are in every area of life. I mention this because I believe it's a favorable time to atone for any deceptions you have engaged in, whether in school or elsewhere. I'm not necessarily urging you to confess, but I encourage you to make amends and corrections to the extent you can. Also: Have a long talk with yourself about what you can learn from your past cons and swindles.

Homework: What single good change would set in motion a cascade of further good changes? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com