Culture Features

In a small shop near the Deschutes River Woods, Wade Beauchamp bends metal to his will. He cuts it, shapes it, grinds it and fuses it together with lightning. He isn’t an alchemist. Beauchamp builds bicycle frames and is the man behind Vulture Cycles, Bend’s preeminent bicycle frame builder. He’s humble, amiable, clever and just a little geeky. He can make almost anything he can dream of out of metal and magic. He’s also, appropriately, completely mad about bicycles.

Derek Sitter loves his family, excellent movies, fine microbrews and theater so powerful you have to wash off when you get home.
“I’m not going to stop until I’m under your skin,” says Sitter.
As early as 1995, his dream was to produce fringepub theater in an environment where the actors surrounded you, manifesting their art in a casual space where you can come in, grab a beer and be swept up in the moment.
When Sitter moved to Bend from Los Angeles with his wife Jeanne in 2007, he had two goals: to raise their daughter away from LA and to have the freedom to do theater on his own terms.

Here’s a short list of things gay people have to be happy about these days:
The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
A second trouncing of Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, this time, in February, by a federal appeals court.
Same sex marriage endorsements by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Colin Powell, the NAACP, Jay-Z and even George Bush’s former attorney, Ted Olson.
Gay marriage is now legal in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and New Hampshire.

The list of names of local women profiled in the Lives on the Line event at the Oxford Hotel this Friday is a who’s-who of some of the most interesting and inspiring women in Bend.
It includes Reverend Heather Starr, who shepherds Bend’s Unitarian congregation and whose partner is genderqueer; Amy Fraley, who started a program that gives under-privileged kids backpacks full of food for weekends so they don’t come to school hungry on Monday; and Rene Mitchell, who runs the nonprofit Art in Public Places and was recently widowed.