Moving Day

Never was a day more aptly named. The moving truck pulled up to our house in Portland, the one we moved into exactly 21 years ago tomorrow, and I felt my face spread into a face-wide smile as Floyd dissolved into tears. We looked like the masks of comedy and tragedy.

"You look just like a guy I used to work with," the mover said to Floyd. "He was a bad-ass dude." Floyd was just about to feel bad-ass when the mover added, "Yeah, then he hung himself."

(Movers Strong Like Bulls)

To say moving is a moving experience doesn't quite capture it. The packing alone requires therapy, each closet full of the Ghosts of Fuck-Ups Past. But the purge has been cleansing and cathartic.

I first wanted to leave Portland ten years ago on 9/11. I know it sounds counterintuitive to want to live in a city under siege, but I felt like something tragic had happened "at home" and I should have been there for it. Moreover, the more I heard Portlanders say how glad they were to be someplace safe, the more depressed I felt--that I had made a safe choice in my life, living in a city too irrelevant to be attacked.

I recognize how effed up that sounds, but that's how I felt.

It was former Oregonian columnist Margie Boule who convinced me to stay. "You haven't really experienced all that Portland has to offer," she said, and introduced us to one of the most original people I've ever met, Goody Cable, owner of the Rimsky-Korsakoffeehouse and the Sylvia Beach Hotel at the coast. Then How I Paid for Collegecame out and the world seemed to open up to us. Floyd became a docent at the Portland Art Museum, we both got involved with Live Wire Radio.

We immersed ourselves in Portland's creative community and opened our little house to it for a number of raucous dinner parties. Blogger Byron Beck told a rude guest to "shut the fuck up." Mayor Sam Adams ate several helpings of dessert. Rocker Storm Large first met Pink Martini's Thomas Lauderdale in our living room, and now she's touring with the band. We played Hillbilly Scrabble and Fake Porn Title Charades and made Man Soup by squeezing as many naked men as the hot tub would allow. Portland has been so nurturing to us - a moist, fertile place where just about anything can grow. But between the Hound of the Baskervilles climate and the Portlandia attitude toward ambition ("It's where young people go to retire!") I'm ready for a new adventure.

So we're off to New York, where I'm going to write for the theatre and Floyd's going to produce it. It's not a safe choice, but we were both emboldened by a recent New Yorker profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Stanburg in which we learned she had a sign put up in the headquarters reading "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"

Now we're literally sneaking out like thieves in the night--on a Jet Blue red-eye--which I suppose makes a Jet Purple eye. I know that decision has disappointed some of our friends, but the intensity of a big goodbye felt like more than we could handle. And we justify the choice with the knowledge that we're moving to a city everyone visits. In the past year I've been bi-coastal, our apartment has already been the Flophouse for Wayward Oregonians.

So here's the piano being loaded up - off to write Broadway musicals...

Center Stage at Portland Center Stage (and the Portland Art Museum)

Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman ain't fiddlin' around in his performance in Michael Hollinger's Opus, in which he plays the first violinist in a fractious string quartet.
I've known Chris for ten years. He directed the workshop of my play Birds of a Feather at PCS's JAW Playwrights Festival. We've hung out, gone to the beach. He even once heckled me while I was raising $20,000 for the theater, so he's damn lucky I didn't return the favor on his opening night.

Seeing him act for the first time was a revelation. First off, there was the immense relief that he didn't suck. Quite the opposite, he was fantastic--real, exposed, raw. It was a particularly brave performance for a public figure because the character can be such a jerk.

I'm immensely proud of him and look forward to seeing how it affects his directing of both plays and the theater itself. According to his blog, it's already given him new insights into both.

Working on more than one side of any equation really helps your understanding of your own discipline. Like Chris, I'm a product of the Carnegie-Mellon theater program, where studying acting and directing really informed my career as a writer. Being an opera singer gave me an education in 400 years of western history. And I know I'm a better writer because I teach.

That said, I seldom take center stage. I'd much rather write a musical than be in one. But I will tread the boards this Friday night for my last public appearance in Portland before moving to New York. I'm the emcee of Objectivity, a game show produced by my partner the Long-Suffering Floyd, to promote Object Stories, an innovative installation created PAM's education director Tina Olsen, in which regular people (and irregular, I suppose) bring their personal objects to the museum and record a commentary about them.

Here's the deeply moving one Floyd did, of which I could not be prouder, and not just because it makes me sound like a helluva guy.

Objectivity is one-night only this Friday. Admission to the museum is free, so seating will be limited. I'll be joined by a panel of Portland luminaries, including NY Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain, Mayor Sam Adams, Oregon Ballet Theatre's Christopher Stowell, Daria O'Neil Eliuk of The Buzz and Helen Raptis of AM Northwest.

Here's our groovy game show music, as performed by Gwen Verdon to the Bob Fosse choreography that inspired Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Jeez, could I drop any more names?