CLASSIC PORTLAND, JAKES, JANE AUSTEN

Start with a plan, and since it’s Portland, make it a classic Portland plan.

If you come in from the west side, hit the Sunset Highway. If it’s later in the day, or early evening, don’t worry about the sun in your eyes as you drive east.

Stay in the middle lane for the Market Street exit. You’ll notice all of the traffic breaking off to 405 north and south leaving a clear center lane.

Don’t gloat at your good luck.

Take a left on SW 12th. Cross Burnside near Powell’s City of Books and turn right into the parking structure. You’ll know the place by the Parking sign lights.

Hit the streets and backtrack across Burnside to Jakes Famous and settle into a classic Portland room. What makes Jakes classic? They aren’t any amateurs in the room. Strictly professional restaurant people move around the tables.

But why Jakes? It was the steelhead and gumbo, that’s why. But there’s more to a classic Portland date. This one included a play in the Gerding Theater on NW 11th. I didn’t want to park twice and Jakes is right in the neighborhood.

Finish up and pay up, then head back across Burnside. If the dinner part works out it helps when the play doesn’t, and Jakes feels like a show with taste.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was up. Before the start a woman at the cookie plate said it was a good show, but she hadn’t seen this production. Was it updated or revived?

Portland Theater Review

Like a loop artist on stage building sound from scratch, S and S started with the players hopping around wheeled stage props, giving a backstage view of dramatic warm-ups.

Warming up for what? They were warming up muscles and voices and showing what it takes to get ready.

Things got started with a heavy beat and modern dance. The updated or revived question got its answer until everyone whipped off their clothes with period costumes underneath like an NBA player hustling into the game off the bench.

Then came the reason for the thorough warm-up, and the music loop comparison. Instead of set pieces on stage, the actors created rooms and scenes with the wheeled windows, doors, chairs, and tables.

In their organized but manic choreography I believed every room, every dinner table, every carriage ride they created. More than that they set an emotional environment of nightmare quality, like you hope to never seen in a dream.

What would it mean to see ghostly figures slicing through space pushing and pulling and riding objects of common use? It looked fun. They had to have crashed in rehearsals but not tonight.

Seventy minutes, fifteen minute intermission, then the wrap. Out on the sidewalk at 10:30, opening my front door by eleven.

In big cities you’ll get a bigger bite out of the clock coming and going if you move to the suburbs. Long time suburban people say they never go downtown anymore, that Portland is too dirty, crowded; parking is a drag and it smells like piss. That’s what they say. And they’re right, but so what?

Classic Portland isn’t a memory, or some sort of dream. It’s not a TV show or a few blocks on the Eastside. Classic Portland is what the new people see when they move here; it’s what they’ll complain about when they move to Tigard in ten years.

When that happens, do the rest of us a favor: Give it more time before you start waxing on about the good old days when the river ran less full of crap on a rainy day, when a pint only cost $8, and you could find ethnic ‘street food’ for the price of traveling to the country of origin.

Or make a plan, get downtown and back, and know it’s a better experience than any city you’ve lived in or visited. That’s Classic Portland with a side of Jakes and Jane Austen.

What’s your Classic Portland?