Spotted at the Performing Arts Festival

Quiz:
What is the most striking element of this picture?

Answer: It's that in the three weeks since I leopardize my bicycle, no one has noticed it.

Well, no one except several homeless people, various of whom have commented positively as I rode by them.

This kind of hurt my pride.

And here I mean the vanity kind of pride, and not the pack of wildcat kind of pride. I'm pretty sure there is not yet a pride of leopard-bike riders in town. But it's Portland, you never know.

I even put in extra miles on the bike, shlepping all over to see TBA events. And by TBA events, I do not mean Traditional Birth Attendant. It's not that I don't know nothin about birthin babies. It's that I know this much about birthin babies: I have no damn desire to be doing it.

I mean Time Based Art, Portland's performing arts festival. Where you can see such inspired creativity as this:

Those are not hip artists doing performance art. It is a bunch of art lovers trying not to drop dead from the heat while sitting in Pioneer Courthouse Square on a ninety degree day, waiting for the performance art to start.

Here are the hip artists:
Or are they here?No, wait, right here! Here is art happening:Not the dude with the Free Hugs sign. He's just a random freak.  Not unlike Bovine of Arabia in the picture above.

The artists are the two short guys, who are part of a theater troupe called Back to Back Theatre (wily buggers, since they are actually pretty much belly to belly in this shot).  Back to Back features actors with disabilities, who perform plays in public spaces.

Spaces that happen to be filled with other people.  And, in this case, with tents, balloons, and free huggers (which now that I think of it are perhaps an inevitable  product of cross-pollination between Portland institution of free box and Portland infestation of tree huggers).  

The point is, none of this stuff was put there by the troupe.  They're just a handful of actors, performing without stage sets or extras.  Or performing with whatever stage sets and extras happen to turn up.

Part of the audience experience for me was watching everyone else in Pioneer Courthouse Square, to see whether they noticed the show.  Which most of them didn't.  Which is a great comment on how much human drama is going on around us all the time, and how oblivious we often are to the emotional struggles and triumphs of our fellow human beings.

Not everyone, of course.  You could see that too:  every so often, someone in the crowd would happen upon the actors and totally notice them.  Go up to them.  Maybe even try to talk to them.

There's a word for these kind of people.

Homeless.

That was my biggest epiphany while watching the play:  we middle class people spend a lot of the time that we are in public space trying to keep our focus as narrow as possible.  Trying not to notice anything that seems a little weird.  Definitely not stopping to soak it up or communicate with the person involved.   Anything too weird might sully us. Or sully our sense of safety.  Or our sense of entitlement.

Homeless people, by contrast, keep their eyes open for anything that might be going down. Might be a boon to them.  Might be a threat to them.  Might just be an animal print-decorated amusement to them.  That's why they're voted Mostly Likely to Notice My Bike.

My second biggest epiphany while watching the play is that their is a reason paper hats have not caught on as a long-term millinery medium.  And it's not just that it's hard to adorn them with cat ears.

I Yam What I Yam

Once upon a time, back before the Republicans had important things to do, like prevent Americans from getting health care, they had to while away their days with more frivolous matters like preventing Americans from seeing art.

I, for one, was grateful to the Republicans for banning controversial art.  After all, I was raised in a suburban shopping mall. How would I have known what culture was if it weren't for some crusty old senator railing on about how I better not lay eyes on it?

Of course, it's easy to be nostalgic for those good old days when the government still funded art and thus could censor it.  

Back then, we young irate feminists would rant about how empowering it was that Karen Finley advocated peeing  in art museums that didn't display enough work by women artists or artist of color, or peeing in polling booths when only white males are on the ticket.

Now, alas, I live in mail-only ballot Oregon, so if I pee in my polling place, it also means I'm mopping my floor and trying to blame it on my cat.  

And most of my sisterhood-was-powerful feminista comrades have turned breeder.  They still talk about peeing all over the place, of course.

It's just that now they're talking about it because they're swapping stories about pregnancy-related loss of bladder control.

(Note to Republicans: if you really don't want teens to have sex, don't bother telling them about the merits of abstinence.  Tell them that sex leads to peeing in your pants.  And your car.  And in at least a few cases I've heard of, the grocery store.  Trust me, that will be more persuasive.

Or you could just teach them to use condoms.  That way we won't need nearly as many clean-ups on Aisle Seven).

All of this might explain why I never became a Karen Finley-level performance artist.  It's not that I don't admire her for shoving a yam you-know-where.  It's just that when given a yam myself, my inclination is to shove it into a nice sweet potato pecan pie.

Because that is my level of subversive behavior, really:  substituting yams for sweet potatoes.  

It sounds a little more rad if you call it commingling the ol' angiosperms.

But not much.

In fact, I am such a garden-variety goody two shoes, that when I was in a performing arts fest this weekend, it involved 

not yams in the can (and no, I don't mean the kind of can you can find in Aisle Seven, if you step rather gingerly around the all-too-apt Piso Mojado sign), but merely pancakes from a mix.

And even then, when I was having trouble getting my 1 cup measure into the box (I know, getting my 1 cup measure into the box sounds like it could possibly be a euphemism for some really perverse thing one of the NEA Four might have tried and failed to get funding to do, but really, it isn't), I was so goody two shoes that instead of just dumping my Bisquick all over the place (again, dumping my Bisquick all over the place is, alas, not a sexual euphemism), I just fumphered my way through the performance, hoping if I cut back on the milk, all would go well.

It didn't.  

Which meant no steaming stack of pancakes to buy the audience's love.  

But we did win their hearts with the video that played while my batter ran rampant over the sizzling-hot onstage griddle (again, NOT a euphemism).  

Because if you are going to confront an audience with a brilliant director's impenetrable storyline, you might as double your pleasure, double your fun by mashing it up with yet another brilliant director's impenetrable you-know-what.

And no, I am not talking about his yams.

The audience was certainly amused.  Though I don't think any laughed so hard they peed themselves.  Sorry, Karen.  Maybe next year.

Ten Artistically-Inspired Days that Shook the World, Just As Though the World Was an Itsy Bitsy Snowglobe and Art Was a Curious Toddler

As we all know, in Christianity the biggest holiday of the year involves a kindly man in a fabulous red suit getting loaded on his sleigh. 

 I mean, loading up his sleigh and giving everyone a nice gift.

Judaism being the fun time that it is, our biggest holiday of the year involves a week and a half of begging forgiveness, culminating in swinging poultry around and then beheading it.

Why do we do this?  Because if you behead the poultry and then swing it around, it makes a really big mess.

Oh, you meant, why the swinging chicken in the first place?  It's because we're hoping God will let us live for another year.  Unlike poor Mr. Chicken.

Something is Kosher in the State of Sweden

Thus, the Days of Awe:  ten days to prove your life is worth something. 

Now, I realize we're barely past Bastille Day, talking the run-up between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur may seem a little premature.

Mayhem and Mob Violence:

Storming of the Bastille, 1789, or

the Fortunoff's Going Out of Business Sale, 2009?

I guess the Ten Days of Awe are on my mind because here at Dutchboy, we are heavy into the Ten Days of Are We Really Going to Pull This Off?

Instead of swinging a soon-to-be-headless hen around, we are swinging around the words of a certain glabrous playwright.

Of course, when you are working with Richard Foreman's diaries, you can let fly any which way you want, because no matter how the pages land, they are not going to make any less sense than they did when they were delicately packaged by the genius' own hand.

Oooh, that makes it sound like Foreman has The Thing is taking his dictation.

Thing, take a memo:  it is once again time for the Annual Richard Foreman Festival.

Which means that for the past week, the Cheez and I (and a bunch of other Portland artists/performers) have been madly making art.  Or what we hope is art.  It's a little hard to tell until the bun is out of the oven.

I'd love to tell you all about it, because it's been zany and weird and wonderful.  And because I pretty much tell you whatever the hell else I've been up to.

But I won't.  Because I'm hoping you'll come see the performance.  It's this Sunday, 5 pm, at Imago Theater. Which no, is not the usual venue, but yes, is air conditioned.  So hopefully this year we'll really do some performing, and not just some perspiring.

Although I don't want to give too much about our piece away, I guess I can whet your appetite (HINT!) by sharing this exemplum of a perFOREMANce from the year before last.  Click that full screen icon and turn the volume up.  Because who doesn't want to see a larger-than-life Hello Kitty confront the Golfish King?

Of course, this year's piece is totally different, because the text is totally different.

Well, maybe there are one or two similarities.  Suffice it to say, we found we had a few more random objects around the house that are waiting for their close-up, Mr. Demento.