Walter says, "I inherited all her wardrobe, and I'm still using parts of it. Her jewelry. Her sewing room... I'm still sewing on some of those sequins and beads and rhinestones from the Hoyt Hotel." He points out a framed photo of himself as the character Darcelle, wearing a sequined blue Gracie Hansen gown.
If you ask, Does it still fit him?
Walter says, "Yes... ?"
And the staff of his nightclub laughs.
"Okay!" he says. "So I added some feathers on the side. That's no sin!"
In 1972, when Walter opened his nightclub in Old Town, Roxy was in the original show. His first night tap dancing there, "Roxy's first boy tap dance got this," Walter says and claps once. "The next night, in drag, he got a standing ovation because nobody'd ever seen a tap-dancing drag queen."
Officially called "Walter Cole Presents: That's No Lady—That's Darcelle XV and Company," Walter and Roxy still run the last real burlesque show in town. In the North End's dark tradition of cabarets and music halls, it's a storefront theater, where—sick or well—the show must go on. Even now, at seventy-one years old, Walter Cole still adjusts the stage lights. He cleans the toilets. He makes his own costumes. When it rains too hard, the gutters flood the basement, and mopping up is also his job.
But when the curtain rises, he's wearing Gracie Hansen's gowns and jewelry, laughing her laugh. Telling her jokes. Well... telling Totie Fields's jokes.
"The only way I'll retire is when they plant me," Walter says. "And I hope it's during a full house."
"And he's just gotten a laugh," Roxy says.
"And I've just gotten a standing ovation," Walter says.
Darcelle's is at 208 NW Third Avenue. Phone: 503-222-5338.
10. Behind Closed Doors
Portland is chockablock with beautiful, historic houses, and on the right day, you can walk right in the front door. To qualify for property tax breaks, the owners of historic houses and buildings must open them to the public at least one day each year. On any day you can go to the website of the State Historic Preservation Office, www.shpo.state.or.us, and find out which local houses are open.
11. MONK-FOR-A-MONTH
Here's getting away from it all. Live as a Trappist monk for thirty days at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey. You'll be out of bed for vigil prayers at 4:15 every morning and spend your days working with fellow monks, binding books, baking fruitcakes, and tending the forest that surrounds their isolated abbey. You'll be assigned a mentor to show you the ropes. The monastery is southwest of Portland, in the small town of Lafayette. Phone: 503-852-0107. Or write: Monastic Life Retreat, Trappist Abbey, Lafayette, OR 97127.
12. Triceratops Cleaning
Sixty-five million years ago, a baby triceratops was trying to cross a river in what would someday be eastern Wyoming. Well, the little tyke didn't make it. She drowned. Now she's "field jacketed" in thick plaster and waiting for you to come help scrape away the millennia of hardened mud. According to Greg Dardis, OMSI earth science lead educator, this cleaning will take the next fifteen to twenty years.
"Paleontology is all about humility and patience," Greg says.
"And calluses," adds volunteer Art Johnstone, as he scrapes away with a dental pick. The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is at 1945 SE Water Avenue.
13. Eviction Court
For anyone who thinks the tradition of oral storytelling is dead, this is a must-see. Go to the Multnomah County Courthouse, downtown, at SW Fourth Avenue and Main Street. Enter through the main door on SW Fourth Avenue and go to Room 120. Eviction Court meets Monday through Friday at 9:00 a.m., and all dirty laundry is loudly thrown around. It is the professional wrestling of the courthouse.
14. The De-Virginizing Dance
The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been playing as a midnight movie at the Clinton Street Theater for more than twenty years. According to Rachel, a student at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Northwest Portland, anyone who has never been to the costumed audience-participation event is labeled a "virgin" and hauled up onstage for a rite of passage. The legally eighteen are separated from the under-eighteen, and... "They took this one girl up onstage and stripped her naked," Rachel says. "Then they wrapped her in gauze and dribbled this sticky red stuff on her and called her a used tampon." Rachel calls this "the de-virginizing dance." After all that you must swear to come see the show at least three times a year.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show plays every Saturday night at the Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton Street.
(a postcard from 1985)
Our third night shooting on location, no one can find our meat.
The set dressers and props people are pissed. They bought special cuts of meat for this, steaks thick as dictionaries. Chops big around as tennis shoes. They spent time rubbing the raw meat with face powder so it wouldn't shine under the hot lights. So it would look okay on camera.
This is a music video being shot at Corno's Supermarket at SE Union Avenue and Morrison Street. The band is called Cavalcade of Stars, sometimes just COS, and the song is called "Butcher Boy." All night, from the time the market closes until it opens, a video crew is here on location. Night after night.
The chorus boys are dressed as butchers in long white coats, but with big blue-eye shadow eyes and cheekbones defined with smears of plum and magenta. Their hair, moussed and teased into stiff crowns. The chorus girls wear oversized sweatshirts in Day-Glo yellow or pink, with the collar and sleeves ripped off. They wear striped tights and pull the sweatshirts to one side so one bare shoulder always shows. Their hair is streaked with bright green or pink and tied with scraps of orange or blue lace. Their eyes are sunk into deep holes surrounded with black mascara.
For take after take the boys flop the steaks around behind the butcher counter, trying to look busy, tossing the meat with dirty hands and dropping it on the floor. The girls dance with shopping carts as partners.
Local celebrities make cameo appearances. The rock critic John Wendeborn drinks champagne in the background of one shot. Billy Rancher, the lead singer of Billy Rancher and the Unreal Gods, looks thin and cool, his hair frosted in streaks, his band poised to be Portland's next Quarterflash.
Me, one night out bar hopping with friends, a stranger gave me a business card and said to come for an audition. Now my role is to give the lead singer, Rhonda Kennedy, a come-hither look and make love to her in the meat locker. While dry ice fog cascades over us, we writhe naked in an antique bed surrounded by frozen sides of beef.
The blue and red lights in the meat locker are melting the frozen meat. Pork and beef blood drips on us. It drips on the purple satin bedsheets. Rhonda gives me my first cocaine, a fat envelope I take into a bathroom stall. I have no idea what to do, so I poke my nose into the white dust and inhale it all in one long breath. My face flushed red, dusted with white, I could be a slab of our missing meat.
And Rhonda says, "That was for all of us."
She and I, we embrace and spin together under the colored lights, we fall into the big damp bed, and Rhonda's breasts bounce out the top of her black lace negligee.