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Saturday, September 09, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion 

Next time Sir Alan Sugar gives me a small kitty and orders me to flog stuff to the general public, this will be my money spinning scheme: I’ll set up a market stall selling pancakes.
We wandered around the food stalls at the Saturday Market in Portland, and there was only going to be one winner: the Jerry Garcia lookalike with the same birthday as me. You can have sweet fillings, savoury fillings, and nobody who saw Jerry's stall thought twice about stopping to buy one.
Remind me of this should I ever need to call up a Plan B.

After browsing round the market, we headed for Powell’s City of Books, a place of departmental store proportions, so vast it has it’s own car park on the roof and they issue maps to help you find your way around. It was all a bit too much, overwhelming even. I didn’t know where to start and ended up in the café, which isn’t unusual.

Then we took a look at Pioneer Square and strolled along the riverfront.
Hempfest was in full swing, a mini-festival celebrating the joys of cannabis use. People were selling clothing and bootleg DVDs. One stall was selling video tapes offering advice on what to do should you be apprehended by the police. Essentially, this is: don’t run away because they might shoot you. The man on the tape also recommended repeated viewings of the tape, so that it all sinks in, thus implying his audience were idiots with short term memory problems. I wonder why that might be so?

It was another hot day, and we spent a good while people watching around the Salmon Street Springs fountain.
I liked Portland, or at least, what little we saw of it. It has a nice, liberal, easy going kind of feel. It’s a small city, noticeably down on it’s uppers here and there, rougher around the edges than Seattle or Vancouver, but no less endearing for that. Walk.

We sat in the soaking pool for half an hour, chatting with a man about how the presence of the hotel had been good for the neighbourhood as a whole. For one thing, local residents got to use facilities like the soaking pool free of charge. I can think of places round our way that would - or would have - benefited from the McMenamins treatment.
Through a gap in the trees we could see that a wedding ceremony was about to start. We considered the comic possibilities of appearing in the background of somebody’s wedding video, clowning around in our swimming costumes, then thought better of it so went to catch a movie instead.

Tonight’s show was A Prairie Home Companion - “We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should ever feel really happy, be patient, this will pass.” It's a lovely end of the era comedy about old theatres and variety shows, and couldn’t have been more right for the venue.

Then we ate, and after that we drank cocktails in the Detention Bar until fuzzy o’clock.

Breakfast shot: Strawberry pancake.

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