Scoop

[September 26th, 2007] THE TRASH IS BACK: “When did you lose your virginity?” Rev. Tony Hughes asked a frizzy-haired blonde, her childbirth-stretched stomach hanging slack beneath a shiny bikini top. “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” she replied. Now that, folks, is a winner. Last Saturday, Hughes and his band, Jesus Presley, crowned Dawn Hindman of Kalama, Wash., Miss White Trash 2008 from a field of 15 Tonya Harding wannabes at the Mount Tabor Legacy. The contestants in PDX’s seventh annual “Miss White Trash Pageant ” ranged from beer-spitting wench “Trixie” to runner-up Linda Mitchell, who wore thong undies and stripper heels with a black, sheer lace nightie stretched over her DDD jugs—which she could twitch on command. “Now, there’s slutty, and then there’s trashy,” remarked judge Amber Lee (Miss White Trash ’05) as she marked down Mitchell’s score. In the end, Hindman won the crown (along with a ’73 GMC pickup and assorted meat products), but not before she actually fell off the stage during the final round of judging. “I was pushed,” she later grumbled, her voice gravelly from what sounded like a millennium of trailer-park whiskey-drinking.

UNEXPECTED TRUCK DELIVERY: Oni Press was gearing up for the Stumptown Comics Fest (see page 33) last Wednesday, Sept. 19, when the local indie comics publisher experienced its own action-adventure moment: A truck drove into Oni’s window . The Chevy had just been in a collision on the neighboring corner of Southeast Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard when it jumped the curb, crashing into Oni’s glass. Car accidents are nothing new on Oni’s stretch of MLK—“we probably hear a half-dozen near-misses a week,” Oni editor-in-chief James Lucas Jones says—but this one was “kind of awesome .” When Jones heard the accident, he stood up…and saw the Chevy barreling at him. No one was hurt, and there’s no word on whether Oni plans to use the crash in an upcoming comic panel.

SOUR NOTE: Perhaps the loudest refrain at Portland Opera’s opening performance of Carmen was, “Can the condescension!” Opera general director Chris Mattaliano wasn’t especially popular after his pre-performance curtain speech, during which he offered a special welcome to “people attending an opera for the first time tonight .” He went on to explain in detail what, exactly, opera is: “Basically, opera is people singing to each other instead of speaking,” he deadpanned. At intermission, patrons expressed shock at the statement. “Does Mattaliano think we’re that dumb?” one well-dressed audience member marveled. In Mattaliano’s defense, company spokesman Jim Fullan wrote WW : “Hopefully, our core of passionate opera aficionados recognized that [this comment] was meant for our newcomers and that the aficionados would agree that anything that can be done to make newcomers welcome... is certainly in all of our best interests, yes?” Stomp one if your answer is yes.