Culture Features

…just another Whole in the Wall.On a recent road trip to the sleepy berg of Mitchell, 82 miles from Bend, my husband and I stepped into a world that would make David Lynch jealous. Mitchell, population 170, is the kind of town that embodies the wholesome earnestness of Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks praising a small town's coffee and cherry pie blended with the quasi-dark undertones of the Twilight Zone. Where was Rod Serling, stepping in front Mitchell's Whole in the Wall, a dilapidated shack that once sold modest treasures, to wax philosophic about the prizes and pitfalls of small town life?

Our unofficial tour guide, a friendly woman corralling her curls into a stocking cap, invited us into her second-hand store to warm our hands by the woodstove. On this unseasonably cold day in mid-April, our guide motioned toward a card table heavy with tattered Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, a Flowbee Haircut System (the intriguing device you once saw on late-night infomercials that cuts hair through a masochistic vacuuming process), and too many bodice-ripping romance novels to count.

And Dog said, "Let there be flight!" Well at least it seems that way to 'Frisbyterians.' Baseball may be the Great American Pastime, Football and NASCAR may have the most spectators, but to me, there is nothing more American than the Frisbee.

Next slide, please.It's tough to get excited about Power Point presentations. Who would
believe the software that your company's HR departments uses to outline
the new personal day policy and your professor employs to bullet point
the notable events of the Crimean War could possibly lend itself to
anything even mildly entertaining?

Yet this conference room slideshow
software is perhaps the key ingredient for the June 4th Ignite Bend
event at the Tower Theatre. And unlike those HR presentations, the
event should prove to be a big draw. Ignite events have been
flourishing across the country for three years now and the concept
landed in Bend in February when the first-ever Ignite Bend took place.
The
concept is pretty simple: Each presenter has five minutes of stage time
in which they present 20 different automatically rotating 15-second
slides. Once the slideshow starts, it doesn't stop, regardless of the
performance - which range from informative lectures to musical comedy
routines to performance art. At the first Ignite Bend, there was a
presentation on the correlations between poker and life, a defense of
local Christians, a talk on the history of Legos and a song about
getting laid off.

It's not everyday that you get an invitation into the inner sanctum of
a bona fide secret society that's been linked to countless
conspiracies, but then again, calling the Freemasons a "secret" society
is a little misleading.

As several of the Masons, who were happy to share their identities with
me as well as a baked lasagna (with vegetarian option) dinner, told me,
it's more of an organization with secrets than it is a "secret
society." Still, there's something intimidating about walking into a
largely windowless granite building with an upper-level sanctuary for
rites and rituals, wherein all of the members have titles like Master
Mason, Grand Tiler and Grand Sword Bearer, and all of the proceedings
are as regimented as an all-boys' reformatory school.

In other words, it's not for everyone - including women, who are barred
from the society but have their own auxiliary clubs, not unlike the
VFW. It's a place where men can be men, but not in the college
dormitory sort of way. Members take the rituals and the ceremony of the
"Lodge" as serious as a Gulf hurricane.