Gossip should have no friends

[July 16th, 2008]

• MEAN STREETS OF BELMONT: Arts Equity’s Llewellyn J. Rhoe got a shock after the Sunday matinee of 21A (see review in this issue), the company’s first production in Portland after three years in Vancouver. During the show, some unknown hooligan picked the lock on the door to the box office with a straightened hairpin and made off with some $400 —the receipts for the entire opening weekend (tickets were $17-$20). “We don’t have insurance that covers the loss,” Rhoe told Scoop. “We’ll have to do some kind of benefit ASAP to get us through.” Who burgles a theater, anyway? Were liquor stores getting dull?

• BRING YOUR WEED: Ever wonder what that ghastly, 5-foot, Little Shop of Horrors- like plant in your garden is? It’s probably a weed. And if you’ve got a mammoth one, then put on your celebration pants and get ready to compete. At the Washington County Fair (July 24-27 in Hillsboro), you can bring the most impressive weed in your garden and enter the Invasive & Noxious Weed Contest, organized by the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District. Prizes are still to be determined, but after the competition, district employees will “bag [plants] in plastic and dispose of them properly,” says district coordinator Judy Marsh, who, oddly enough, didn’t know the exact process for disposal. Only plants on the Oregon State Noxious Weed List will be accepted for entry—then sent in plastic body bags to invasive-species hell.

• HE’S BAAACK: Multimedia arts center Disjecta has had more lives than most cats—and now it has another. Founder/director Bryan Suereth has announced the opening of a new venue, a former bowling alley in the Kenton neighborhood, where Disjecta will mount visual-arts programming as well as music events, dance and performance art. The 12,000-square-foot building at 8371 N Interstate Ave. will be the nonprofit’s third location after eight years plagued with anemic community support and frequent problems with the OLCC. SEE CORRECTION BELOW. To kick off, Disjecta is mounting a show this Saturday called Immaterialized (see page 49 for more info). Two recent windfalls enabled Disjecta to move forward: a $35,000 grant from the Portland Development Commission and a $25,000 grant from the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation. Suereth acknowledges that past donors are not jumping through hoops to shower him with cash. “Until we prove ourselves again, some people are sitting back and saying, ‘We’ve given.... Now we want to see some results.’ And I think that’s fair.”

CORRECTION: The OLCC never directly issued any sanctions against the longtime arts nonprofit at its previous locations. Back in 2002, director Bryan Suereth was personally cited on criminal charges of selling liquor without a license for the art-and-music shindigs he threw at Disjecta's original North Russell Street location. All charges were dropped or dismissed. "There wasn't anything like Disjecta [back then], and the OLCC didn't have anything in place to deal with that kind of entity," Suereth says. Since 2003, Disjecta hasn't had a problem with the OLCC. Suereth also says Disjecta's public support has never been in question, noting that it raised the third-largest amount of money of all the nonprofits featured in WW's 2006 Give!Guide. "It’s not the money," he says. "[The problem has been] finding the appropriate location to build the infrastructure that’s sustainable."

• IF ONLY VOTE-BY-MAIL OFFERED PRIZES: Congratulations to the randomly selected prize winners of our Best of Portland Readers Poll. Nathan Miller will take home a Specialized Globe Sport commuter bike from River City Bicycles, Christina Gremore gets a $200 shopping spree at Powell’s Books, and Alex Pence will pass a day tooling around in a convertible Mini Cooper courtesy of Zipcar. Check out the poll results, plus WW’s own favorites for the year, in next week’s issue.