Category: Portland Phoenix

From the Backseat: Maine, Live on the Street

From the Backseat: Maine, Live on the Street

img_0656-3It was a Thursday, normally a workday but we were tucked in the downstairs of the Portland Museum of Art, around 100 of us taking pause to listen to Maine, live.

That’s what they call it: Maine Live. Like a TED conference fitted with flannel, 15 speakers with 15 minutes each to talk about whatever they want. Mainers of all backgrounds: a former U.S. Olympic luge racer, the co-founder of ReVision Energy, the department chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Maine Medical Center, business owners and nonprofit directors and artists. Pious Ali, Maine’s first African-born American and Muslim to be elected to a public office, shared stories of young immigrants and people of color searching for jobs amidst more roadblocks than on-ramps. Kennebunk-based architect Brian Beaudette talked about knowing he was gay but pushing his feelings aside through high school, college, a marriage and fatherhood. MaineWorks founder Margo Walsh shared her own struggle with alcoholism and how her work helping felons and addicts find jobs helps her, too.

Like most conferences of the inspirational type there were standing ovations, moments of teariness, hors d’oeuvres during intermissions and photo handshakes. But at Maine Live there was more. It was a distillation of creative energy, the state concentrated. Put 15 Mainers in a room and let them to speak on whatever they want and there could be 15 distinct topics, no linking thread. But themes emerged: immigration, climate change, the power of business for positive impact. If you wanted a pulse on Maine, a hint at what was important and pressing in the state today, with Maine Live as a carotid snapshot you got a chance to see it, what matters to those in the thick of it, out in the morass.

And there was a shadow among themes, a darkness that kept rearing: any Maine Live participant would be forced to note how often heroin came up. Among a roomful of professionals, nonprofit-types and business people opiates were everywhere. One speaker, Biddeford-based plumbing and heating business owner Jim Godbout, devoted his entire talk to addiction, to the impacts of heroin and other drugs and the toll they’ve taken on his community. He stood wet-eyed on stage and shared stories of more than 40 friends and loved ones lost. This inside the white walls of the art museum, a space more familiar with the picturesque projections of upper-middle-classness than somber stories of social decay.

But opiates have emerged so insidious they’ve wormed their way into all our halls, part of everything and everywhere, in the art museum not in some scrawlings by an on-edge surrealist but among the crisp crowd who rents the space for the ambiance. Addiction has left the shadows, gone mainstream.

It is a funny thing, watching talk of heroin and opiate addiction wind its way through such circles. These $100-tickets events are usually reserved for generative conversations that lighten the heart, exchanges that make you think, make you wonder. Perhaps they highlight a societal problem, but one distant. But here sat a hint of alarm bells, indications of a problem metastasizing close to home. Addiction the wrecking ball swings at all walls, even those lined by Wyeths and Winslow Homer. Something needs to happen, soon.

That was in the museum. Then Maine Live ended. I walked out onto Free Street, crossed over to Congress in my sport coat and dress shoes.

Around Forest a man pointed at me from a few feet away. He was walking towards me wearing a tee shirt and dirty jeans. “Wait!” he said. “Before you take another step…”

I kept walking, closing our distance.

“…can I have a dollar for something to eat?”

I continued to walk, brushing past him. I heard him turn but he didn’t follow.

A dozen more steps and I heard his voice again, this time shouting: “Who is going to give me a dollar so I can buy SOMETHING TO FUCKING EAT!”

Maine, live.

No one paused to listen.

This column appeared in the Portland Phoenix.

From the Backseat: MECA, Me and Swirling Eddies

From the Backseat: MECA, Me and Swirling Eddies

14444663_1636164186409660_5623119052921151833_oI’ve always loved the Porteous Building. The home of the Maine College of Art sits regal and square, a hub spinning eddies of creative energy into surrounding streets. Behind its department store facade hides an economic engine, a piston of Portland’s arts economy, sweeping windows and cascading stairways that breathe life to center Congress.

I first noticed it in 2001, the first time I moved to Portland. I was 20, dropped out of college a second time, working a warehouse shift at L.L. Bean. I lived diagonal from MECA crashing on the couch of my sister’s third floor apartment for token rent, woke each morning before dawn to catch a carpool to Freeport, home by early afternoon. Life was rote, routine, boring.

But just down the street MECA was a cauldron of creation, pluck and juice. There was an energy in the punk-style of the art kids who poured through her doors each day. A fire draped the work that hung in her windows. From my perch I could watch it stream past like artistic magma, stirred and prolific but too far to touch. I left Portland having never walked through her doors.

Four years later I was back, my second try at Portland aimed to finish college; this time as a double-major in political science and media studies. MECA’s creative curriculum wasn’t my syllabus. But I needed money and MECA needed models.

The first time I took my clothes off in a roomful of students was for an evening class. Painting. We were on the third floor in a room with the floor-to-ceiling windows that make Porteous so beautiful. I sat naked on a couch holding a 45-minute pose.

At first I thought I was comfortable. But after 10 minutes my neck grew tight. Soon my shoulder ached, my legs trembled with fatigue and my back cramped. By 25 minutes I was in agony, resigned to stillness among shuffling palettes. Sitting there naked I wondered if anyone outside could see in; if the glow lured peering eyes perhaps from some third floor apartment across the way.

When the teacher called a break I collapsed, wrapped myself in a second-hand bathrobe I’d brought for modesty and walked to the window. I looked out at the street dreading the next pose’s 45 minutes of pain.
Then I turned around. In front of me ran canvas after canvas of bold readings of my body, interpretations like twisted mirrors of paint and light and skin tone. I wandered from easel to easel mesmerized by translations striking and alive, bound by darkness, light and mystery. And I was a part of all of them.

I walked back to the podium transfixed. Suddenly the next 45 minutes became a different dance: I now knew the creative fires being lit around me, and that knowledge steadied my pose. I sat engaged, part of the process, a willing actor, no longer concerned with who might look in. I wasn’t there for the money anymore but a witness to the creation unfolding around me, a central ingredient to its birth. I would not miss it for the world.
Two days later I was back for a drawing class. Then for comic class. Then another, and another. I had a front row seat to unselfconscious expression and every class was opening night. Porteous was hemmed by reckless creation and inspiration. And I sat in its center.

But all good things die. It lasted a year, then my modeling career came to an end.

This past Sunday I walked into Porteous once more, this time a student. I carried my drawing pad to a room where I once stood naked. Our model, a woman of perhaps 60, sat casually in the corner. When it was time she stripped her dress and took to the podium like a prizefighter, she the captain, the room her ship. I did my best to anchor her poise and certainty in charcoal, but untrained fingers tripped and fumbled. My renditions were colorless. Only she could do her body justice.

Porteous’ windows and stairwells, however, knew better: Mine was one more act of creation born within her walls. One more mesmerizing eddy.

This column appeared in this week’s Portland Phoenix.