Original title was something like “Weird Week.” I have no explanation.
Remember nothing but am confident it’s all true. From July 11, 1990. – JDW
It was a very weird week.
Read my lips. Very weird. No lie.
One sweet moment came when the bankers put Donald Trump on an allowance. He’s limited – limited – to just $450,000.00 PER MONTH for his expenses. And he now has to take out the garbage and mow the lawn.
Fork-tongued George Bush The First admitted his selection of Little Danny Quayle – to pilot the Hubble telescope – may have been ill conceived.
Jesse Helms called the choice “obscene” and threatened to hold his breath until he received assurances the vice president wouldn’t go potty while orbiting above the Bible Belt.
Mealy-mouthed John Frohnmayer, the Neville Chamberlain of the art world, was in town to tell the we’re-so-cool City Club why artists’ rights should be pre-empted by pandering politicians.
Because the public is supposedly demanding its money go for black velvet paintings of Elvis. Above the waist.
That’s why. Frohnmayer, it must be noted, is not related to our Republican gubernatorial candidate, except by birth.
Maybe I should quit trying to simultaneously chew gum and pedal. I fell off my bike for the third time in the last year.
Landing yet again on my helmet.
The good news is, I can now play in the six-foot-and-under basketball league and my car seems to have more headroom.
I had a vision while lunching at Charburger Country in Hood River. I sat down to eat and I noticed someone else sit down at the same table.
It was Neil Goldschmidt. Not the actual real one. This one was more like a see-through version.
I knew right away this wasn’t going to be any regular bacon burger with onion rings.
Nobody else in the restaurant could see him. Or hear him. “I’m running for Mayor in ’92,” he stated, out of the blue.
“Sounds like a step backward, if you ask me,” I said. Then he launched into a long discussion of the future of Portland and his great love for the city. He moved his hands a lot when he talked, stabbing the air to emphasize important points. “There’s so much to do.” Stab.
Being governor had been a lifetime dream, since he was a kid. Kind of like playing King Of The Hill and winning the adult competition. When he got to the top, he found there was nothing there.
“Like Bend,” he offered by way of explanation.
“You can’t beat the hands-on excitement of City Hall,” Neil explained, as his eyes glazed over with fond memories. Glazed like an Easter ham.
“When I became governor, I was like a teacher who is taken out of the classroom to become department chairman. I missed the kids. I want to be on the front lines, not back at headquarters.”
Makes perfect sense to me. But then I’m the kind of guy who has political visions in burger joints.
And that’s just sick.
Thus, I felt right at home on opening night of “Lloyd’s Prayer.” Artists Repertory Theatre seems to have another hit on its hands with this comedy about a boy raised by raccoons – I can so relate – befriended by a spiritual swindler and tempted by an angel of the Lord who wears red tights and has the body of a Texas drum majorette. BE AMAZED.
“Is there ever a time when you feel like there’s a gerbil inside of you, eating up all the the happiness in your life?,” Lloyd the preacher asks.
[Am I the only one thinking Richard Gere?” – ed. note]
Then he answers. It’s like a meatball that falls on your shirt and rolls down your tie, onto your pants across your shoes and leaves a tomato sauce stain everywhere it rolls. “The Devil is a meatball with a plan.” BE AMAZED.
Be amused.
Finally… did you ever watch a petite young lady in a big flowered hat and a feather boa – who looks like she just escaped from Frau Humpschtuper’s Finishing School – eat barbeque ribs? That’s an image that will never leave me. It was just part of what some people are calling “the hippest event” in Portland. THE MUDDIES.
It IS a cool affair, this Cascade Blues Association tribute to local greats of the blues, the only music our country can truly call its own.
By the end of this week, sitting in Erickson’s Saloon, with a bunch of guys who play harmonica for a living, even that seemed to make plenty of sense.
Like I said. Weird.
Real weird.
Epilogue.
Humpschtuper?
On March 7, 2011, the Oregon Senate President and Speaker of the House released a statement that Goldschmidt’s Governor’s portrait had been removed from the walls of the State Capitol building in Salem and put into storage, out of respect for his victim, with whom he perpetrated a sexual relationship for a year or more. He says one, and she says three.
He was Mayor and she was thirteen.