ATL 10/1/07 - Oregon, SF

ART/OREGON NEWS

ART NEWS - Looking forward to "Jacques Brel" at the Alliance. "Dark Play..." at Actor's Express was excellent. The last Improv in the Park is this Wednesday in Piedmont Park.

OREGON NEWS - The Oregonian intends to replace 'Peanuts' reruns in its funny pages. Every two weeks, it runs a new cartoon and then has readers vote for either Peanuts or the new 'toon. Peanuts has never lost one of these comic smackdowns. (Charles Schulz died on February 12, 2000).

The hybrid Vietnamese/ American wedding that I attended included the groom's side of the wedding party forming a procession and walking 1/4 mile to the ceremony, bearing gifts of fruit, rice wine, & tea.

Portland's annual Breast Cancer walk drew over 47,000 supporters, raising nearly $3,000,000.

Mt. St. Helens has been continuously erupting for the past 3 years, pushing lava into its crater - it would still take 200 years at that rate to recreate the mountain's former size. (Mt. St. Helens' first big eruption in recent history was May 18, 1980; I was a sophomore in high school and got out of mowing the lawn for a week or two for fear the newly fallen ash would dull the reel mower blades.)

I went to a going away party for Jacob; a funny, engaging high school kid who made me feel welcome at his shindig & who just happens to be in a wheelchair; when most kids his age are heading off to college, he is 'going away' to a clinic of sorts in CA for OT and tendon replacement. He has an amazingly upbeat attitude and makes any reason I might feel sorry for myself for extremely insignificant.

Roslyn Lake Park had a going away party, too. An impending $17 million project to tear down the hydroelectric dam that creates the lake is cheaper than modifying it to meet new salmon protection regulations. No one mentioned how the electricity it 'currently' generates is going to be replaced.