Lynn Twiss

This week raced past like a smiling, rape-ready bum!

First, a little background: Last October, prior to my jaunt to Boise to see Ministry and Hanzel Und Gretyl (damn Thrill Kill for not being there!); I called Sarvas while I was in town and we spent some time at a pub having a beer. As we prattled on like ninnies, I handed Sarvas (myspace) my PDA and he started scrolling through the images I had stored on it. He stopped at one particular image and asked, “Who is this woman?” and pointed at an image of Sharon.

“That’s Sharon! That’s who I’m going to see this week.”

Sarvas got really excited. “There is a guy in Portland who showed me a picture of her when she was a model in Italy, and asked me if I knew her. I said that she looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure!”

“Really? What was his name?”

“Aristai.” Sarvas answered.

Hmmm. I picked up my cellphone and called Sharon, “Sharon do you know anyone named Aristai?” The other end was silent. “Sharon?”

She blurted back, “Are you screwing with me?”

“No, Sarvas is sitting here telling me there is a guy named Aristai, who lives in Portland looking for you.”

“Oh my god, that’s K! My best friend from when we lived on the Oregon Coast and were club kids! He kept his club kid name!!”

That’s where it started, via Sarvas; that Sharon and Aristai began communicating after over a ten year absence. This past week, they met here in Portland for the Run Hit Wonder. They never made it to the run.

Instead we had a blistering week of shopping, gaining weight via great food, hitting the bars and dancing like freaks (I simply CAN NOT dance to anything but my music – I look so silly out of my element, to the enjoyment of others.)

It all started out Thursday at the airport as Aristai and I picked Sharon up, then it was straight to the Oregon town of Seaside, where they both worked in the summer of yore to make enough money to travel into Portland and hit the clubs. We booked into our hotel and headed down the Seaside promenade, past the aquarium, down the street to this little narrow concrete wall enclosed pathway that ended at a rickety door. This is where they had lived. After a nostalgic moment we headed back to the strip and gorged ourselves on ice-cream, fudge and taffy.

My father and Woofie drove down from Warrenton and hung out with Sharon and I in the restaurant, where tales of my troubled-youth surfaced.

The next day Sharon, Aristai and I drove back to Portland.

Friday Night: Ember’s & Egyptian Room.
Ember’s was ‘dead’. Sharon and I arrived and met up with Honeybucket. The dance floor had maybe twenty people on it and the side bar – where the drag-queens do their stand up routine – was equally as lame. Honeybucket suggested we leave and head to the Egyptian room. Once we arrived there (after a long drive) we found the company there less than epic. One woman wouldn’t stop hitting on Honeybucket and Sharon and I both wanted to deck her in the head. We left and called it a night.

Saturday Night: Saucebox – Dementia – Spring Roll – Dan – Jenny – Viper Room – The Tube – CC Slaughters

There was so much crammed into this evening. Sharon and I had a utterly stunning dinner at Saucebox.

While we were there we met a couple that was Sharon and I in 35 years. They were seated at a table right beside us when a waiter attempted to take the man’s bowl of salad. He stated that he wasn’t done yet, and the waiter apologized. Sharon and I really were doing nothing but getting our napkins settled into laps when he said pointedly to Sharon, “Did I offend you which what I said?”. We were confused and answered that, no he had not offended us in anyway.

He looked at me and asked where I was from and I answered in the typical, “I’m originally from Warrenton, but I just recently moved back here to Portland from Montana.”

He paused, sighed sharply as he said to me, “I was born in Transylvania.” The woman who was sitting with him shuffled and made noises like he was pulling my leg.

“Really?” I retorted, knowing that he was playing with me, but he nodded in confirmation and continued.

“Actually my mother was born in Transylvania, that’s where she had my sister and me. My mother was a vampire.” The lady with him just smiled at him, shook her head and continued to drink her water.

I quickly asked, “where you born before or after she became a vampire? Because in one way you could be a ghoul.”

He turned to me, looked me up and down, “Boy, you’ve really thought about this haven’t you?”

“Well, I am dressed all in black. I myself may be a vampire, or a ghoul.” He simply nodded at me.

As our dinners proceeded, from time to time, our conversations would cross again and more information was gleaned from them. He and the lady, were but friends; friends for the past 40 years who were in town for a funeral of a work colleague. He made a quip about her abandoning and not supporting him when he was trying to stop drinking. She said they fought from time to time, and he gruffly responded, “but making up is sooo much fun.” She blushed. It was all a very cute encounter and really made my and Sharon’s night start out on a good note.

From SBX we wandered around waiting for Jenny and Dan to show up, who were walking downtown from their apartment on 23rd, both very drunk. Jenny kept calling me and asking, “Where are you?”, “We’re at Saucebox, just like I said already 5 times silly!” We ended up meeting them at Dante’s, a bar on Burnside that has yet to impress me at all – but for some reason people really like it. From there we grabbed a taxi to Noir, my favorite bar, where on Saturday nights they hold a Gothic Industrial dance night. I had been really excited for Sharon to come to this event. Once we arrived, Honeybucket showed up with his friend Spring Roll. The bar was really dead, which was a great disappointment to me, because usually it was really lively (I found out later it was because of a SCA event). Spring got bored quickly and so I got up and danced with her while Honeybucket and Sharon watched us. From there we attempted to get into the Viper Room, but there didn’t seem to be anything going on worth paying a cover for, so we scrammed.

While Spring Roll talked on my cellphone to Sarvas (myspace), we drove across the river to The Tube. What a joke this place is. It houses about 40 people in this cramped room that glows like a TV tube. It once was a tube for skaters to get drunk and skateboard in, I hear (like there isn’t ENOUGH places for skaters to do that. Where’d all the straight-edgers go?). Anyway, the manager of Tube is a real bitch, and kicked us out because of a mistaken identity issue with Honeybucket (she believed that Honeybucket was responsible for throwing a martini glass at the bartender, when it was really just some other jerk in the party. The crappy part is, that dude is allowed back in, because they can’t remember his face, but HB isn’t. Everyone always remembers the drag queen!)

Sunday Night: Crush – Hive

Dinner was nothing special, considering our previous nights was the best, we ate sushi at a sushi resturant in the Pearl. Eh. From there Sharon and I walked over to a little Italian restaurant and had deserts before rushing across the bridges to Crush.

Crush had just reopened after a renovation, and I must say I loved the place! They made the yummiest Ginger Ale I’ve ever had. It was real ginger root. Mmmm. Sharon was additionally happy because of the clientele and the fact they had alternative drinks besides alcoholic beverages. Soon Honeybucket and his friend Andrea arrived. We had a few delicious drinks called: Green T and Black T (I loved the Black T drink) and then all of us scooted off to Hive.

Hive was everything I had told Sharon to expect and a bit more. There was a ‘safari’ man that continued to creepily, lustfully stare at Honeybucket. Andrea bitched out a boy, in the girls bathroom. That same boy then decided he wanted to get to know Sharon a bit more and moved to her shoulder and said into her ear, “I want too get to know you [insert breathy pause]…” Honeybucket saved the moment by hauling him away and saying that Sharon was his girlfriend. The music was terrible and undancable. Just when one good dancey gothic track would load, the next song would be a deadpan, slow floor killer. I moved up to the request list and was going to write down a few songs I figured they’d play, before I wrote mine down I glanced above to see what others had desired to hear and written across the sheet in HUGE LETTERING was the following request: STOP PLAYING SHIT! I chuckled, and wrote my request down. As the evening winded down, and the last booze kicked in, people started to exit.

This is where mayhem erupted.

Honeybucket and I were exiting just ahead of Sharon and Andrea, when to our left we saw a really tall guy and a little goth/rivet girl ‘rolling on the ground. At first, I thought they were playing. Then the guy kicks the girl in the hip, so hard, that it launches her up into the air and upright to her feet. I gasped and started to move towards it to see what was going on, Honeybucket took the same initiative. Moving towards them Honeybucket asked what was going on and the goth/rivet girls response was a scream of: “Back off you TRANNY BITCH!” Now I fully realize that everyone was drunk, Honeybucket, this girl, her boyfriend (who ‘heroically’, slammed Honeybucket into some people and then scampered away like a little coward) and the guy that kicked her; so I understand her response. If I had just got attacked and then a really tall drag queen came walking towards me to help (how am I to know?), I’d probably scream out something defensive too. But Honeybucket really was only trying to help the girl from this tall guy. I see no fault by anyone except the guy that kicked her, unless she had attacked him first (and still…) There were words exchanged, but it all smoothed over in the end. As we walked away, the creepy ‘safari’ guy started following us, or more exact: Honeybucket. So, Sharon turned around and confronted the guy: “Where are you going? Why are you following us?!” “I’m not, my car is over here.” “Really? Where are your keys? I don’t think so, you back the hell off and leave us alone.” He did. Hell, I would too. Sharon and her new guns, who wants to be on the receiving end of those suckers? Not even women in Disneyland. After that we took Honeybucket home and woke up poor Foofie. On the taxi ride back to my place, the driver mentioned he knew Aristai. Small world. It had to do with the lead singer from Interpol. Like I said: a very full evening of events.

Monday: Sharon misses her flight home – Night Light

The next and last day of Sharon’s trip, we walked around Portland, got insulted by Saks Fifth Ave employees (lost some commissions there – and future purchases) had a GREAT lunch with Aristai (I had nummy pesto basil gnocci) and then headed to the airport. Well, that didn’t work out so well, Sharon missed her flight. Not that we complained, that meant she got to play one more night! So, Aristai took us to the Night Lite Cafe where we met up with Andrea and played Connect 4 and consumed more fattening good food. Sharon and I couldn’t stay late because her flight was leaving really early in the morning, so we bailed out relatively early.

I had so much fun, and I can’t wait for Deviltissue to come back!

The best places we went to:
Crush
Saucebox
Andina’s

Maybe better on another night? places we went:
Egyptian Room
Viper Room

Not so cool places we went to:
Tube
CC Slaughter’s