There was a delicatessen/coffee shop just down the street from my apartment. Delilah’s became my office, the owners became my friends, whose names I don’t now remember. They let me run a tab, because writing doesn’t always pay good. Or on time. Or often. From January 11, 1989.
Holy Shih tzu!! The things you see when you’re not looking.
Sitting in Delilah’s on Northwest 21st Avenue, wondering how to commence this week’s column, I gaze out the fogged-over glass into an apartment building across the street. I can see an attractive young woman standing in the window practicing with her hula-hoop. Hope this does not forecast her performance in the talent competition for Miss Oregon.
I spend a lot of time at Delilah’s. Depending on who you are, that’s either an endorsement or a warning.
I like Delilah’s. You can get a good cup of coffee for sixty-five cents, a free refill, and a third cup for two bits. They’ll put two pats of butter on a large cinnamon roll and nuke that baby for a buck-seventy-five.
Think of it. All that caffeine, sugar and fat – three of the four basic food groups – for just $2.65. There are such goodies as omelettes (before eleven a.m., noon on weekends) and chicken enchiladas and sandwiches and salads and garden burgers and daily specials and an incredible desert case. There’s wine, and oil-can-sized blue containers of KB Lager cost $2.50.
Always good music playing. This morning I’ve sat through Sting’s latest, Chuck Berry’s greatest, and Paul Simon’s Graceland.
Here they let you sit… and sit… and sit… and sit… until the blood pools in your butt, for all they care. No pressure. No tension. Just a civilized place to spend some time and watch some people and think some thoughts.
If I have one complaint, and you knew I would, a few too many habitues are smokers.
Delilah’s is probably most civilized on Tuesday nights around 7:30. Recently, Sharon Doubiago – an amazingly attractive woman with big hair and slim hips, if you’ll pardon me that accurate description – read to an SRO crowd. She read from her collection of stories The Book Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Graywolf Press).
I sat in a corner at the back of the room next to two big lumpy guys in corduroys who were holding hands. This is a very personal book, more than a little autobiographical. Doubiago sees this work as a portrait of the artist as a young woman.
It seems to me stunning in its candor. The words are chiseled in their clarity. When Doubiago describes one specific female physical response as “the sound the earth makes as it turns on its axis,” I believe, fool that I am, I understand women better.
Her description of the looks that pass between two former lovers accidentally meeting as “the wound of recognition” reminds me of the last time I saw that redhead who broke my heart and left it out in the noonday sun in the middle of the road to be run over by eighteen-wheel trucks and pecked at by crows and washed into the shallow gutter by acid rain. I’m mostly over it.
An evening with Sharon Doubiago, who claims Kronos as her only god, will alter your perspective, that’s for sure.
Just down the street, in the knotty-pine-paneled nether regions of the Silver Dollar Saloon, the Portland Comedy Underground was hosting a special Christmas benefit show for the Toy and Joy Makers.
I figured I’d sit off to the corner up close to the front so I could watch the stage. So I could watch the sweat bead on the performers’ upper lips when their jokes bombed and check out the audience response at the same time.
Stupid.
Dave Anderson gets to the microphone, looks at me taking notes and asks why.
“Just in case you’re funny,” I respond.
“You didn’t bring enough ink,” he says with a laugh and starts the show.
I didn’t bring enough. He was right.
Anderson is unmarried. He’s looking for a wife, he admits. An intelligent woman but not so smart she can identify him to the authorities.
I can understand why. He has this theory about why some men don’t wear underpants.
“I guess, if you don’t have a dog, you don’t need a fence.” Then he claimed to be wearing not one but two pairs of tightie-whities.
A number of performers who should be kept on a short leash followed.
Denny Gray, after pointing out fifteen-year-old stepchildren have no sense of humor, did a reasonable impression of Howard Cosell announcing a ping-pong match.
Smokin’ Joe Rastatter reminisced about his days as a beer vendor at Seattle’s King Dome. He thought it was a great job, except he hated going to all those high schools for career day.
Lorette Carey is a newcomer to Portland. She moved here by mistake. She used to live in San Francisco. She came home late one night and kept driving around the neighborhood looking for the closest parking spot and pretty soon it got light and here she is.
J.P. Linde described Horizon Airlines as being named after their only navigational instrument.
And, “How about the Enchanted Forest?” Thinking of that little family-owned amusement park south of town just off the Interstate.
“I love it. Now we know what Walt Disney would’ve done with two hundred dollars.”
Art Krug made an effective defense of his warped personality by noting he’s the son of a Presbyterian minister in Bend.
Krug confessed he was once pulled over by a state trooper, removed from the car and given a marijuana abuse test.
Right in front of Art, right in front of his face, the cop tossed a bag of Doritos into the air. Not fair.
Chris Alpine was the star of the show. Not only the evening’s funniest comic, he was also the most professional. Insightful, too. For example, Alpine is convinced women are better drivers than men. “After all, they can put on their make-up in the rear-view mirror at sixty miles an hour.”
The show lasted two hours and eighteen minutes. If they had kept telling jokes, I’d still be there.