OUR OREGON TOWN TO YOURS

via grandyouth.org

Not Much Happens In Our Town And That’s How We Like It. Our Oregon Town Likes It Too.

Our Town opened in 1938, portraying the lives and events of a small town in New Hampshire from 1901-1913.

The dates are important. Our Town shows life before WWII.

Thornton Wilder had WWI and The Great Depression under his belt by 1938, so he might have indulged in some nostalgia.

The three act play inside Portland’s Gerding Theater shined like a new penny during the Thursday Matinee.

From pcs.org:

An irrefutable classic of the American theater, this Pulitzer Prize-winning work transports us to Grover’s Corners, a small New England town at the turn of the twentieth century whose secret desires, family conflicts, loves and losses are resoundingly familiar to us today. This beloved drama receives a fresh interpretation at PCS, inviting us to ponder what Our Town is today, and celebrating both the marvel of everyday existence and the “something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

General Performance Times:
Evenings: Tuesday – Sunday at 7:30 p.m.
Matinees: Saturday and Sundays at 2 p.m.
Thursdays at noon

The usual theater fans were there from senior season ticket holders to theater students and everyone in between.

I was there with my wife and mother in law who needs a bit of temporary assistance after a car accident. We bought an extra ticket so two would sit together, one would sit apart.

The ticket lady arranged all three of us to sit together. I said to her, “I had a chance to sit alone? Not now.”

She took a shocked look before I told her I was kidding.

At two and half hours Our Town is long. With two intermissions it’s almost never ending. The woman beside me said as much to her companion.

“That’s how it is in small town, ma’am. Time goes by slow,” I said.

“Is that from experience?” she asked.

My small town was like a lot of others on the southwest Oregon coast. Highway 101 running through the center, sawmills on the bay front.

It’s similar to valley towns beside I-5, 101’s parallel route on the west side of the state.

Not much happens in those small towns.

Like Our Town, the big news is births and deaths, people moving in and moving away. Those who stay can’t imagine living anywhere else; those who leave often wonder what life would have been if they’d stayed.

The cycle of life runs from growing up outdoors, going to school, playing sports, helping out, getting married and having kids and spinning along the circle of life.

The curtain comes down when a mass shooting happens in Roseburg. Ten people died on the Umpqua Community College campus Thursday. Seven others were injured in the gunfire.

That’s not supposed to happen in Our Town, your town, or any town in between. Whatever guns were invented for, it wasn’t for shooting and killing kids in schools, in movie theaters, or malls.

Our Town shows the mundane lives of characters happy to know their place. Tragedies are small and local, contained within the community of those who know and care about each other.

The shooter in Roseburg demonstrated the opposite. Like others acting out their self centered, self inflicted dream of the future, the shooter made his statement in strangers’ blood. Then his own.

By his act he joins the diseased cadre of shooters professing their anger, their fear, their reaction to being bullied, being rejected, then arming themselves with enough weapons to start their own Rat Patrol. Except they are the rats.

In a free country how can you spot the rats? How can you help them before they follow through on their ill conceived plans?

If shooters are on board a journey with a one way ticket, how can we make sure they don’t stop along the way for one more job?

Our Town didn’t have such calamity. Neither should yours. Our Oregon Town, Roseburg, finds itself in the cross hairs?

Now what?