Tales from Stumptown

Some stories from Portland that you've probably already heard...

--So we're at BrewFest on Friday...And every five-to-ten minutes someone in the increasingly drunk crowd will start a loud "Wooooooooo" that other people will join in with until it builds into a full crowd crescendo of Wooooo's. Once we get wise to this, we, of course, vow to start one ourselves by day's end. Fast forward a few hours and many many spent tokens later. We start our Woo with great, expectantly contagious enthusiasm and ample volume...and nothing happens. A few charity woos but nothing more. Flummoxed, we try again a few minutes later and again, we are collectively shunned. What the hell, fellow BrewFesters?

--Early Sunday evening, Nicole and I took a short walk up to Multnomah Village, a charming small-town-ish main street just a block or so from Sarah and Bill's place. It was after 5 so just about everything was closed. Even though it was in the upper nineties with 'Nam-like humidity, it was nice to be out for a bit and just window shop this quiet little village. On our way back just ten minutes or so after arriving, we were about to turn down a side street when my compulsion pulled me into what appeared to be the only open store in town. Even though it was not the least bit visually enticing from the street and the name of the store left me a little confused as to what we might find inside, I did not fight the tractor beam pulling me towards Post Hip CDs. Once inside, I quickly realized the dusty stuffed animals that filled the front window display (wtf?) were not a fluke. The place had the feel of a thrift store. CDs loosely grouped into genre but otherwise totally unorganized. No artsy end caps or featured albums. The listening stations were two ratty old chairs with a couple of discmans. Fingerprints, it was not, but I was loving it anyway. A middle-aged guy with Harry Potter-ish think, very round frames seemed to be the owner. He was talking to two older gentlemen seated on a couch. They weren't shopping or working; they were apparently there just to talk. It felt like an old barbershop at that point. I found a huge stack of old, used Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Rolling Stones, and Chet Baker, and I sat down to give them a listen (as if I didn't know I was going to get them). Wow, I had forgotten how great a CD sounds. A CD on a CD player with any decent pair of earphones is pretty tough to beat. Eat your heart out, IPod (and I love my IPod). Another couple came in as I was sitting there, and somehow I deduced that they were fellow merchants from another store down the street. They visited for a few minutes and I was really taken by the whole experience of this small town, very low maintenance, no frills music store that seemed to double as a local piazza just 15 minutes from downtown Portland. When I went to check out, the proprietor (I really should have known his name) stepped around several stacks of CDs piled on the floor, behind the short counter that was really nothing more than a formality. There was no cash register, just a spiral notebook where he wrote down by hand the albums I was buying on an otherwise blank page. He did the math in his head(!) and I handed him the cash (I wasn't going to dare hand a debit card). He handed me my discs in a plastic bag I would later notice was being reused from a drugstore. On the way out, I pointed out the vintage typewriters by the door and we ended up talking for another ten minutes. It was really cool. I left with a renewed faith in humanity and six great albums to boot. Viva Portland.