Well, you can't say I didn't warn you. Look for some of Portlands best ballroom dancing at "Lindy in the Park," held every Sunday from noon until 2:00 p.m., in good weather. Dancers spread cornmeal on the concrete plaza and practice the lindy hop in the South Park Blocks, behind the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
The first Sunday of each month, look for Johnny Martin's three-piece swing band and swing dancers at Saturday Market, under the west end of the Burnside Bridge.
For indoor dancing, check out:
The Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside Street, phone: 503-225-5555, ext. 8810.
The Viscount Ballroom, 724 E Burnside Street, phone: 503-226-3262.
The Melody Ballroom, 615 SE Alder Street, phone: 503-232-2759.
Call each venue for hours and types of music available.
Exotic Wednesday
The Jefferson Theater, one of the West Coasts last big-screen porn theaters, offers "Exotic Wednesday" on hump day at 9:00 p.m., admission $8. This isn't so much a movie ticket as it is a one-night, twelve-hour membership in a private club. You're free to cum and go, and come back throughout your twelve hours.
This being a private club, the signs around the lobby warn you that sexual activity may take place. And just in case the wrong Mr. Right wants to get up in your stuff, the signs declare that no means no. That, and you must be at least eighteen years old.
Also look for "Video Feed Mondays," when a couple performs for the camera in the upstairs porn-movie studio. A closed-circuit system shows them live on the auditorium's big screen, and the audience gets to direct the cameraman's shots and dictate the sex acts.
On Exotic Wednesday or Nasty Karaoke Night, whatever you call it, at nine o'clock the movie stops and a celebrated local dancer does a set to a half dozen songs on the stage below the screen. Instead of a dancer, sometimes it's a girl-on-girl whipped-cream show or an S & M demonstration. After that, the movie—and so much more—begins.
A crowd of party girls and a drag queen come down the center aisle wearing stretch-velvet dresses. One girl, a big girl with strawberry blond hair piled in a chignon and a fake daisy behind one ear, she jumps up onstage, shouting. Another girl climbs up onstage, and the two make shadows against the huge penis and vagina behind them. They make shadow animals and run a commentary about the gigantic sex action. The blond leans down to an older woman in the front row and says, "Mom? Can you give me the shoes out of my bag?"
To the audience of sixty or seventy people, she says, "Yes, that's my mom, and no, I'm not going to do a sex scene with her. That would be too Jerry Springer."
She puts on the high-heeled platform shoes and says, "Check out these shoes!"
The second girl kneels onstage and lifts her black skirt, and the drag queen slaps her exposed ass and labia with a riding crop. The strawberry blond jumps in place, trying to touch the spot where two big-screen erections are sodomizing a woman's stretched asshole. Surrounded by this huge pink genitalia, the blond shouts, "How many of you guys know what 'Russian' is?"
No guys respond.
"You guys don't deal with a lot of escorts, do you?" she says. She shrugs the dress straps off her shoulders, and the tight dress shrinks down to her waist, exposing huge pink breasts that look to be—at least—half covered with nipple.
She squeezes her breasts in both hands, saying how "Russian" means getting off between a woman's breasts. Still squeezing, she says, "I might even let you do it, if you promise not to cum in my eyes."
The drag queen is still spanking the second girl. The movie still towers above them all. Other women in black dresses come and go from the dark auditorium. Men follow them out into the lobby ... to talk. Couples paw each other in the couples-only section.
The theater owner gives the blond a long chrome flashlight and she works the audience, auctioneer-style, coaxing guy after guy to take the erection out of his pants. "I've got seven boners," she says. "Does anyone want to give me eight?" Like a topless game show host, she says, "You guys want to play a sexual/intellectual game?" Pointing the flashlight at each boner in the audience, she says, "I bet you call your dick something different every day of the week. How about everybody shout out the name you have for your dick?"
In the dark guys shout, "Boner... Peter... Willy..."
By now at least half the theater is openly jerking off. The exception is a group of men sitting together in the back, near the couples-only section. This group of men laugh and talk about their jobs, and the blond comes up the aisle saying, "What? You guys think that just because you're friends sitting together that you can't whip out your dicks and get off?"
More women go onstage, making a shadow play against the big porn. They flicker their shadow tongues against the huge shaved vaginas. They put their shadow arms around the thirty-foot erections. As the movie works toward orgasm—the happy ending of porn—the audience talks to the new women who seem to arrive a few at a time. The strawberry blond kneels on a theater seat and leans over the back toward the man sitting behind her. With one hand she's touching his dick. They talk. It's dark.
A little later, the big blond's in the theater lobby, looking at the covers of porno movies for sale. Other men and women meet, mingle, whatever. Some move on to the couples-only section. The blond adjusts the plastic daisy in her hair as she tells the guy behind the candy counter, "If I can get just thirty hard dicks in there, then I'll be happy."
The Jefferson Theater is at 1232 SW Twelfth Avenue. Phone: 503-223-1846.
The I-Tit-a-Rod Race
Organized by the Portland Cacophony Society, this annual race requires you to visit as many nude dance clubs as possible in a twelve-hour period. You need proof you were there, usually a photo snapped outside near the business sign, and you need to consume one drink in each club. Most players work as teams with a designated driver. With as many as fifty strip clubs to visit, no one's been able to hit more than thirty in a single race.
KlNKFEST
This is the annual weekend of workshops and play parties organized by the Portland Leather Alliance (PLA). A recent Kinkfest, hosted at the ACE of Hearts, included seminars such as "Erotic Humiliation and Degradation," "Anal Pleasure for Everyone," and "Saline Inflation." The event is held in the spring, so it won't conflict with the PLA's annual Leather Pride Week in August. For this year's schedule, check out www.pdxleatheralliance.org.
With more than four hundred members, the PLA meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at C. C. Slaughter's, 219 NW Davis Street. Many members meet there early, at 6:00 p.m., to have dinner together before the meeting.
Lulu's Pervy Playhouse
Sorry guys. It's women only for this sexy "play party" held on the second Saturday of each month. For time and location, check out the website www.spiretech.com/~auntie/ lulu. htm.
M & M Dances
Named for Marv and Marsha, these swingers' dances are held on the fourth Saturday of each month at 8:00 p.m. For details, call 503-285-9523.
Stripper Bingo
Also organized on an irregular basis by the Portland Cacophony Society, this game uses bingo cards designed for, well, strip clubs. Instead of numbers and letters, each space is marked with a typical stripper detail. Did she slap her own ass? Did she tweak her nipple? Clean your glasses with her manicured pubic hair? Did he pick up your tip money with his ass? You need to watch for all these little details and mark them off until you can yell "Bingo!" And please, tip the dancers who make all this fun possible.
XES
Located at 415 SW Thirteenth Avenue, XES is a private sex club for men. Inside is a maze of black-painted plywood with nonstop porno playing on monitors mounted overhead. Within the maze you'll find plenty of tiny rooms for privacy, plus a leather sex sling right in the center of things. The only room with a bed is also wired with a video camera so the entire club can watch you in action. The club runs from 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. and has more than fifteen hundred members who pay about $4.00 for an annual membership, plus $8.00 per visit.
Zippers Down
Located in the basement of the Club Portland bathhouse, the "paramilitary" sex club Zippers Down is at 303 SW Twelfth Avenue. Comprising most of the city block, the basement is decorated in army-surplus everything, with barrack bunks and acres of camo netting hung to create the full M.A.S.H. effect. The management has even hauled a real Willies Jeep down here and wired it so the headlights work. Porno plays on monitors overhead, and the fantasy is complete.
A membership fee is required for admission. Hours are noon to 6:00 a.m.
(a postcard from 1992)
Riding my bike, I hear the music and go to look. In the dozen blocks between Lloyd Center and the Steel Bridge, here is the opposite of the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.
After the parade on Saturday morning, after the floats are displayed all weekend, this is where they go.
This is a Sunday evening in June, just before dark. And these are the parade floats almost forty-eight hours past their moment of glory. Towed by rusted pickup trucks, towed by flatbed trucks and tractors, they wind through back streets on their way to a pier in Northwest Portland where they'll be dismantled.
The flowers are wilted and crushed. Tens of thousands of flowers. Roses and carnations, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and daisies. Instead of Rose Festival royalty, beauty queens and civic leaders, now long-haired young guys ride, passing a joint among them. Waving. Middle-aged moms in sweatpants ride, toting babies and surrounded by their toddlers. Waving. The sidewalks are empty. No one's here to wave back. Instead of marching bands, different floats carry suitcase-sized radios blaring head-banger rock music. Gangsta rap music. You can smell the sweet dead flowers and bottles of sweet fortified wine. A fat man and woman sprawl in a red carpet of crushed roses, smoking cigarettes and holding tubs of soda pop so big the woman has to use both hands. You can smell the diapers and marijuana.
The streets around the Oregon Convention Center are empty, and I can ride my bike, weaving around and between the string of doomed parade floats. I don't even have to pedal, from the Lloyd District to the bridge to the piers, it's all downhill. Everyone waves, and I wave back. Their audience of one.
Nature But Better: Gardens Not to Miss
From the annual Rose Festival parade to the International Rose Test Gardens—where Katherine Dunn wandered, inventing the concept for Geek Love— Portland is a city of gardens. Some are lumps of nature trapped in town, like Elk Rock Island. Others, like the Maize and the flower-covered parade floats, are very man-made. Most fall somewhere in between.
City Parks, the Largest and Smallest
Portland boasts both the largest and the smallest park in the world. The largest forested municipal park is five-thousand-acre Forest Park. With more than sixty miles of trails, it connects to five other parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Forest Park runs from NW Twenty-ninth Avenue and Upshur Street at the east end to Newberry Road at the west end.
The smallest park is Mill End Park, also called "Leprechaun Park," in the traffic island at SW Front Avenue and Taylor Street. About the size of a big dinner plate, the park is surrounded by six lanes of heavy traffic.
Classical Chinese Gardens
At NW Third Avenue and Everett Street, enclosing a city block, this is a maze of walled garden rooms, lakes, and pavilions. This Ming Dynasty garden includes more than five hundred tons of rock shipped from China, as well as mature trees donated from throughout the Portland area. Phone: 503-228-8131.
Columbia Gorge Gardens
The first of these three gardens is an old Italian-style villa and gardens planted deep in the Columbia Gorge. Take Interstate 84 east to exit 28. At the stop sign turn left onto the Old Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway. At 48100 turn right, through the gates of the Sisters of the Eucharist Convent, an order of Franciscan nuns who live in the sprawling estate of an old timber baron. The sisters are friendly, but behave yourself.
Landscaped in the 1920s, the gardens of the Columbia Gorge Hotel include bridges and duck ponds, a 208-foot waterfall, and incredible clifftop views. Take Interstate 84 to exit 62 and turn left at the stop sign. Cross back over the freeway, toward the river, and turn left again.
Be warned: The gardens of Maryhill Museum feature peacocks because those birds kill the rattlesnakes that crawl in from the surrounding desert. Before the museum, the natural spring on this basalt cliff made it a sacred camping spot since prehistoric times. To find Maryhill Museum, take Interstate 84 east to exit 104. Turn left and cross over the Columbia River. Then follow the museum signs.
Berry Botanical Gardens
The gardens founder, Rae Selling Berry, traveled the world to gather rare rhododendrons and primroses for her six-acre garden. When she died, developers planned to plow it all under until a group of Rae's friends stepped in to preserve this repository for rare native plants and plant seed at 11505 SW Summerville Road. Phone: 503-636-4114.
Bishop's Close at Elk Rock
This thirteen-acre estate has been the property of the local Episcopal diocese since 1958. Designed by John Olmsted, the son of Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, it was built to look like a Scottish baronial manor on the cliffs above the Willamette River and was completed in 1914. It's at 11800 SW Military Lane.
Elk Rock Island
Elk Rock Island is possibly the most beautiful place in Portland—and easily the hardest to find. Take SE McLoughlin Boulevard south from Portland, through Milwaukie. Just past the light at Oregon Street, you'll see signs for River Road. Take the River Road exit and go straight a few blocks until the street (SE Twenty-second Avenue) T's into Sparrow Street. Turn right on Sparrow Street and park as soon as possible. Parking near the park entrance is almost nonexistent. Walk to the end of Sparrow, crossing under the low railroad trestle. Look for the dirt path near the elk rock island sign. Take the path through the woods and marsh, and it will lead you out to the island in most weather. During the worst high water, the river cuts around both sides of the island, making it inaccessible to anything but boats.
The island itself is a castle of basalt rising in the Willamette River and topped with an acre of dark, mossy forest. Across the main channel of the Willamette River, you can see the posh homes of Dunthorpe. The faint rush of traffic you might hear is Macadam Avenue on the cliff high over the river.
The Grotto
Using dynamite, Servite priests blasted this hole in the basalt side of Rocky Butte, where Mass has been celebrated outdoors since July 16, 1925. At NE Sandy Boulevard and Eighty-fifth Avenue, the sixty acres of gardens and shrines are wrapped in colored lights every December for the Festival of Lights. An outdoor elevator takes you up a cliff to the Priory, where the Servites live.
On the secluded road that connects the Priory to Eighty-second Avenue, look for the small cemetery reserved for grotto priests. Burnt black candles and other grisly leftovers prove this spot is still popular with Satan worshipers.
Japanese Gardens
Designed in 1963, this is one of the oldest Japanese-style gardens in the United States. It includes five traditional themed areas—including a sand garden and water gardens—plus a teahouse and pavilion, and hosts festivals and events almost every month. It's at 611 SW Kingston Avenue. Phone: 503-223-4070. Or check out wwwjapanesegarden.com.
Joy Creek Gardens
A combination nursery, art gallery, and school for landscaping and gardening, Joy Creek also has free homemade chocolate chip cookies—and the area's largest and best privately owned show gardens. They're at 20300 NW Watson Road, in Scappoose. Take Highway 30 west, about 18 miles from downtown Portland. Phone: 503-543-7474. For information about rare plants, free classes, and special events, check out www.joycreek.com.
The Maize
Wait until dark and use flashlights to explore this enormous labyrinth of corn at the Pumpkin Patch, 16511 NW Gillihan Road on Sauvie Island. Take Highway 30 west to the Sauvie Island Bridge.
Recycled Gardens
This is the closest we have to a humane society for plants. Here are sho
pping bags full of rescued sword ferns. Boxes of salvaged ribbon grass. Pots of iris and miner's lettuce.
Blueberries. Photinia. Honeysuckle. And many plants are huge mature trees or bushes that need a new home.
Here at 6995 NW Cornelius Pass Road, in Hillsboro (phone: 503-757-7502), Recycled Gardens is a fundraising division of Pets Over-Population Prevention Advocates (POPPA). All proceeds go to pay for vouchers people can use to defray the cost of spaying or neutering stray or adopted animals. The director of the gardens, Keni Cyr-Rumble, says about 75 percent of the plants, building materials, and planting products are recycled, reused, or donated. No pesticides are used. Fertilizer comes from the Humane Society's rabbit warren and the barn's resident bats.
Here, every plant has a story behind it. Keni says, "There was a fellow out on Plainview Road who wanted everything out of his yard so he could put in a Japanese-style garden. We took truckload after truckload out of there." Describing how they salvaged trees and plants from an 1860 homestead about to become a strip mall, she says, "We were out there digging while the bulldozers circled us."
Four times each year POPPA opens a gallery in the old barn, offering art, jewelry, and housewares made by local artists who donate 40 percent of sales to the nursery's cause. Twice a year they have a rummage sale. In the fall, after the surrounding filbert orchard is harvested, volunteers glean the remaining nuts and sell them. Volunteers also build the birdhouses and garden furniture. They raise the bonsai trees and teach courses in animal behavior and crafts.
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