Culture

“Something happened to you today. Some moment happened that related to the entire human condition.”
This is how Guy Jackson kicked off SpeakEasy, an innovative addition to Bend's artistic landscape.
Working as a cashier at Target, I get to see a whole lot of the human condition – more perhaps than I might like. By the end of each day we all have a story to tell. We might tell it to just one or two friends, but if it's really good we will end up relating the details to a bar's worth of people.
Now that the SpeakEasy has begun at the recently opened Bend Performing Arts Center, next time you regale someone with something that happened to you, you can call it a rehearsal. At the first SpeakEasy event, the sign-up list was only four names long, but by the time the second performer left the stage, everyone there was eager to tell their own tale. In the converted church, which opened its doors earlier this spring, we heard two hours of true stories.

After close to 40 years of participating in, writing about and photographing individual, self-propelled sports, I recently developed a passion for a team sport. Not any team sport – girl's basketball and one team in particular: the Pilot Butte sixth grade girls park and rec basketball league team called the Greenwave.
In the beginning, I figured my role would be one of dutiful grandfather, delivering and picking up my granddaughter to and from practice and games. But as things developed, I found myself watching the practices and getting involved in the games.
Soon I was photographing the Greenwave in action and found myself slipping into the role of the worst possible male on the planet: the little league granddad. Luckily, a sharp reprimand from a ref after I loudly protested what I though was a bad call shocked me back into the role of calm observer. That was only on the outside. On the inside, I wanted the Greenwave to win.