Pacific Northwest
Oregon, My Oregon
I've lived in the Portland, Oregon
metropolitan area nearly all my life -- in a grand total of one
house and five apartments, not necessarily in that order. The
present apartment has lasted me something like ten years now, which
is moderately astonishing in today's ultra-mobile society.
Whenever I work up the energy and resources to move, there will be a
lot of stuff to pack....
I like Portland. We have very good
public transit (important to a
non-driver), lots and lots of bookstores (including the legendary
Powell's Books, possibly the largest retail bookstore in the US,
if not the world), a great many very good restaurants, and a lively
arts-and-culture scene.
"Walla Walla Wash & Kalamazoo"
That's right, my alma mater is
Whitman College in bucolic Walla Walla, Washington.
You've probably heard of Walla Walla, if only in comic strips and
Christmas-carol parodies. In real life, it's a pleasant
farming community almost precisely in the middle of nowhere -- if
you define "nowhere" as being framed roughly by Portland, Seattle,
Spokane, the Rocky Mountains, and the Oregon/California border.
Whitman, though, is a startlingly good Small Liberal Arts College In
The New England Tradition, and graciously provided me with a degree
in English and four years of semi-independence.
It also helped nurture a healthy interest in and respect for the
theater. Whitman's drama department makes its actors work
hard; it was among the first colleges to actually stage the
memorable but grueling eight-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens'
Nicholas Nickleby -- very well, too, I might add. Its
graduates have found work of varying degrees of distinction over the
years. Among well-employed Whitman thespians one can count
Batman (Adam West), Lt. Starbuck of Battlestar Galactica
(Dirk Benedict), and Walt Disney's Lumiere and Scar, from the stage
versions of Beauty & the Beast and The Lion King
(Patrick Page).
Whitman drama graduates have also appeared in respected
theatrical companies all over the United States, from Seattle to
Utah to Arizona to the highly regarded
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
in Ashland -- another small but attractive community almost
precisely in the middle of nowhere, in this case just under 20 miles
from the Oregon-California border next to Interstate 5. OSF is
now the largest repertory theater in the country, presenting an
eleven-show season that runs from February through October in three
separate theaters, one of them an outdoor Elizabethan stage.