5. Santa Rampage
Drinking a hallucinogenic liqueur—made by soaking marijuana in rum, and called "Reindeer Fucker"—the jolly "red tide" of several hundred Santa Clauses crashes elegant holiday parties, storms through swanky restaurants, boogies in strip clubs, and generally keeps Portlands Central Precinct busy and paranoid. Most American cities have their own "Rampage," but Portlands—held the second weekend in December—is still one of the biggest and best. For more details, see "A Postcard from 1996."
6. The Emily Dickinson Sing-Along
Did you know you can sing any poem by Emily Dickinson to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? Well, come the Belle of Amherst's birthday—December 10—join the crowd at Cafe Lena, 2239 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, to sing the collected works of Dickinson.
7. Abandoned Timberline Highway
From the lower end the old road to Timberline Lodge is almost impossible to find, according to Portland architect Bing Sheldon. The original route to the lodge, it's a curving scenic two-lane road that crosses stone bridges and skirts huckleberry fields. Bing says, "It really is an undiscovered treasure." Like the lodge, the road was built during the Depression but was obsolete and replaced by the end of World War II.
"It's still paved, and you can still drive on it," Bing says. "It's a wonderful engineering feat, built on a six percent grade." To find the old road, he says, start at the top, at Timberline Lodge. Driving down from the lodge, look for the first post of the ski lift and a road that heads off to the right, passing under the ski lift.
8. Fire Department Ride-Alongs
The Portland Fire Bureau responds to about one fire every three hours. If you can wait, you can ride along. According to a spokesman for the bureau, you must be eighteen and, yes, you can ride on the fire engine. The only thing you can't do is go into the fire. Bummer. To make your plans, call the chief at one of the fire stations.
9. That's No Lady
Most people think Gracie Hansen is dead.
Hansen was the queen of Portland for years, the big-busted, loud-laughing queen of the Roaring Twenties Showroom at the Hoyt Hotel, a faux—Gay Nineties palace of antiques and special effects built by some of Hollywood's top set designers.
Before 1961, Gracie Hansen was a schoolteacher from Morton, Washington, who dreamed of chucking the small-town life in central Washington State and moving to Seattle. There, she wanted to stage a burlesque show at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. "She needed fifty thousand dollars," says choreographer Roxy Leroy Neuhardt. "The story is, she found forty-nine Chinese men with a thousand dollars each and one Greek with a thousand." He says, "And they ended up serving Greek food—for whatever reason."
After the fair closed, the only things to stay were the Space Needle and the Monorail. Harvey Dick, who was renovating Portland's old Hoyt Hotel, recruited Hansen to come south and put on her burlesque show in his new showroom. His bar, the Barbary Coast, had no electricity, only gaslight, and it was famous for the urinals in the men's room: a sculpted, landscaped waterfall you peed into. Says Roxy, "They took a huge dirty old garage and when they were done, you'd swear that whole room had come around the Horn in the last century."
It was at the Hoyt Hotel that local actor Walter Cole first put on a dress. As a lark. It was a gown that Roxy had "borrowed" from Hansen's wardrobe.
"Gracie saw it and she was very angry," Walter says. "But she didn't say a word because she didn't know me."
About drag queens, Walter and Roxy say they're nothing new in Portland. Every burlesque and vaudeville program had a female impersonator, usually the master of ceremonies. The famed impersonator Julian Eltinge was a Portland favorite when he toured from New York, and a dozen pictures of him dressed as a woman still hung in Portlands Heilig Theater when it was torn down. Since the early 1900s, the Harbor Club at SW First Avenue and Yamhill Street had offered drag shows. It became the only bar in Oregon declared off-limits to members of the U.S.
Navy. In the 1930s drag shows moved to the Music Hall at 413 SW Tenth Avenue, which became Club Rumba in the 1940s. In the 1950s the Jewel Box Revue toured the country with female impersonators from Kansas City and played in Rossini's Clover Room, what's now the office space above the Finnegan's toy store.
In the 1960s Roxy was a choreographer and dancer in Las Vegas. He was in Hollywood when he met Hansen, both of them costume shopping for their respective shows. He came to Portland, but only for sixteen weeks, to help launch the new Roaring Twenties show. One night at the old drag bar Dahl and Penne's, Roxy met Walter Cole, a local actor and businessman. He'd owned Portland's first "Beat" coffeehouse, Cafe Espresso. And Studio A, a jazz club at SW Second Avenue and Clay Street. He acted at the Firehouse Theater on SW Montgomery Street. "Attorneys and doctors," Walter says, "that's all I ever got to play. At least I didn't have to do my own wardrobe when I wore a suit."
Since the early 1950s, the Imperial Rose Court of Portland had elected an empress every Halloween. In 1974, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Randy Shuts was a student at the University of Oregon when he won the national William Randolph Hearst Award for a newspaper article he'd written about the court. But like shanghaiing, brothels, and ghosts, drag queens aren't part of the official Portland history book.
In 1972, wearing Gracie Hansen's gown, using the name Darcelle, Walter Cole became the fifteenth empress of Portland, only the second empress elected in a new city-wide voting system that began the year before.
But Walter didn't just borrow Hansen's gown. He borrowed her entire persona. When the Hoyt Hotel went out of business, Walter in his own way became Hansen. Although diabetes took first one leg and then her life, Grade Hansen lives on, her jokes and dresses and loud personality, in the form of Darcelle XV
Well, they were sort of Hansen's jokes.
In her act, Walter says, Hansen carried a big feathered fan. But when she was learning a new routine, the fan would be paper so she could write her jokes on the inside. Her memory wasn't so hot. She'd stop, read a joke off the fan, and tell it. "When she needed new material," he says, "she went to see Totie Fields in Las Vegas and smuggled in a tape recorder."
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.