This weekend the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland, OR, celebrates its 25th anniversary. I was lucky to find my way into the program with the guidance of an incredible teacher, Jeff Ditzler. IFCC became my second home for the next several years. Here's a wonderful article about the IFCC and its continued importance in Portland. If you're in town, make sure you go party on my behalf. My brother, and dear friends Danny and Adrienne will be performing too.
A stellar cast comes home
Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center has Homecoming
By ERIC BARTELS
The Portland Tribune, Oct 23, 2008
L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO
The Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center is throwing a fundraising homecoming party for its 25th anniversary. Former members of its Student Production Company, including (from left) Linda Brown, Andrea White, Adrienne Flagg — as well as the public — are invited.
Adolescence is rarely perfect for those living through it. But Heidi Durrow has started out worse than most.
She was 10 years old when her family came to Portland from Europe. Unfamiliar surroundings were one thing, but her new block at Northeast 13th Avenue and Alberta Street was no street of dreams in the early ’80s.
Her mother was mugged one night in front of the family’s residence and Durrow had to take precautions when returning home from school and elsewhere.
“I used to walk in the middle of the street to keep from getting attacked,” she says.
Fitting in also was tough for a bookish kid born to a black Air Force sergeant and a Danish mother.
“At that time, black and white didn’t get together anywhere,” says Durrow, 39. “Black and white communities didn’t connect. I found that to be particularly challenging.”
But Durrow found a safe place in her new world, the Student Production Company at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center on North Interstate Avenue.
Designed to offer arts to the working-class community surrounding a converted turn-of-the-century fire station, the IFCC interrupted Durrow’s darkest days with a vision of a fanciful future.
“It was the defining point in my life,” says Durrow, now an acclaimed New York writer with advanced degrees from Yale and Columbia universities. “I was a nerdy kid that had these theater aspirations, and I didn’t know how to do it.”
On Saturday, Oct. 25, the IFCC will throw a fundraising party celebrating its 25th anniversary. The event will feature music, dance, comedy and a rare appearance by the Crazy 8s, a popular local ska band from the ’80s.
But the evening also will serve as a reunion for a remarkable group of alumni who were brought together by a daring IFCC experiment in the empowerment of young artists.
Apart from Durrow, the Student Production Company included New York playwright Dan Trujillo, Pink Martini founder Thomas Lauderdale, local actresses Andrea White and Eleanor O’Brien, singer Linda Brown and a woman whose skill set may have saved the IFCC from extinction in recent years.
On the frontier
Durrow, whose novel “Light-skinned-ed Girl” is due out next year, says the IFCC program was created at a troubled time for the city’s east side.
“It was a disorienting time in Portland,” she says. “All of a sudden there were drugs. There was crack cocaine. North and Northeast Portland was a dangerous place. I found IFCC as an eighth-grader. I don’t know how I would have gotten through the next four years without it.”
Adele White, co-founder of the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics and a longtime public school teacher in Portland, says the Student Production Company stood alone.
“That program reflected the multicultural aspect of IFCC’s mission,” says White, whose daughter, Andrea, a two-time Drammy Award-winning actress, was a participant.
“I think the acceptance piece is the part I remember most,” White says. “Here, she could be with people of different backgrounds. Older kids and younger kids working together, not only multicultural but multiage. She was getting good role modeling.”
Like Durrow, Andrea White was the product of a mixed marriage that later failed. For her, finding a peer group was especially meaningful.
“We were all very awkward,” she says. “It was nice to be in a place where we all just fit. I remember loving being at rehearsals. I remember knowing that this was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”
“Our home families were shifting in new directions, and we didn’t know what our role was,” Durrow says. “At IFCC, we integrated. It was freeing and liberating. That was the place you could go and have feelings. Maybe they didn’t understand your story, but you could tell it.
“I spent 20 to 40 hours there every week. We created a family there.”
The program had begun as a Portland Parks Bureau project called the Overlook Acting Company prior to the IFCC’s 1982 conversion. It was run almost entirely by students. Aside from performing, they wrote plays, built sets, handled technical jobs and even formed the company’s board.
“It was an opportunity to try on many different hats,” says Trujillo, the award-winning playwright. “There was a sense of ownership. We really felt like we had control over our destiny.
“For a lot of us, it was socialization for social idiots. It was an opportunity for us to have a peer group. It was also something to do. There wasn’t time for self-destructive behavior.”
Trujillo wrote his first piece of theater – an adaptation of a “Winnie the Pooh” story – at 13. His contemporaries showed early gifts as well.
“It was obviously a very small pond, but you got this sense that they had a fundamental contribution to make,” he says. “I take a lot of pride in knowing those people. What they’ve done is far more important than what I could’ve imagined at 13.”
Pink Martini’s Lauderdale was no exception.
“He was already a brilliant pianist,” Trujillo says. “I was taking lessons at the time, and I remember telling him I had just learned a new piece, a Bach minuet. He said ‘Oh, you mean this?’ And he turned around and played it perfectly.
“There was something mischievous about Thomas. He delighted in jokes and tricks.”
Trujillo recalls Lauderdale inviting some of the others to his home to watch Hitchcock movies, including the classic “Vertigo.”
“I remember him enjoying the part at the end where the nun comes up and scares the crap out of everybody.”
One to lead them
No one from the old gang has given back to the IFCC like Adrienne Flagg.
A Southwest Portland native, Flagg began crossing town when she joined the Student Production Company. She later attended nearby Jefferson High School, then renowned for its theater program.
An award-winning actress and teacher, she already knew the IFCC was in trouble when city Commissioner Sam Adams proposed a rescue plan in 2005.
“I knew that the IFCC was falling apart because I had done a couple of educational projects there,” she says. “When I heard rumblings that it was going to close, I thought ‘Who do I have to write a letter to?’ I just came in as a community member.”
In 2005, Flagg was hired as interim creative director. If she could boost the center’s programming and raise $80,000 from donors, the amount would be matched by the city.
“I made it my personal mission to prove that it was viable and important,” she says. “The community responded immediately. Every day five or six people would walk through the door. That started happening in the first two weeks.”
Still, she says, “I never intended on staying. I had other stuff to do. I was working full-time as an arts educator.”
But while performing in a touring show with Artists Repertory Theatre, Flagg found herself juggling her phone and laptop almost constantly, tending to IFCC business. She had an epiphany.
“All of a sudden I thought ‘What the hell am I doing? This is the best day job in the world for me.’ Everything I had done prepared me to step in and do this job. I love this building, and I have this perspective for what it can do for different groups.”
In March 2006, Flagg signed on as the center’s full-time creative director. She has nearly tripled IFCC’s budget to $400,000 and filled the center with dance, performance art, storytelling and theatrical productions. Two of the city’s most successful new theater companies, Stumptown Stages and Third Rail Repertory Theatre, took up residency.
IFCC sends visiting performers to local schools, and its upstairs gallery has became a vibrant space for local visual artists.
“I think it’s one of the best neighborhood-based arts centers in the entire United States,” says Adams, now the city’s mayor-elect.
Flagg also brought in the Portland Theatre Brigade, a program she’d started for youngsters.
“The Theatre Brigade I founded because there weren’t any programs like the one I did as a kid,” she says. Like the old Student Production Company, this one both nurtures and challenges young artists, Flagg says.
“I put these kids in situations that really might not work. A lot of programs don’t give kids the chance to experience failure. I want this to be a place where people take risks.”
Flagg says the Theater Brigade’s 45 participants mount five productions a year, performing as many at 40 times.
And she knows as well as anyone what that can do for young people.
“I started the Brigade because of my experiences at the IFCC,” she says. “It was a place to be safe but also take on a lot of responsibility. That helps me do what I do now. The parallels are absolutely there.”
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