Home is where the Multnomah Arts Center is

By sharon martini

The Southwest Community Connection, Jul 1, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

ADVERTISEMENTS

A raccoon once moved herself and her three cubs into my house. She marched right in the backdoor and straight upstairs to my sons’ bedroom.

Thankfully, mama raccoon – spooked by a surprised, but euphoric, Moses and Malik, who hadn’t yet cultivated their poker faces and were salivating audibly in bug-eyed glee – apparently forgot she had scythes for fingernails and fled, dragging her dazed babies behind her.

Creatures of all kinds feel at home in my house. Some of them, arriving uninvited, stay just a while. Some are pets/family members. Others, contraband, smuggled in by my nature-loving boys, pop up in unexpected places having absconded their cages – “unbeknownst” to my little darlings, of course – to live large in quiet, warm crevices in my humble abode, sometimes for 10 free-wheeling days! Snakes in the master bathroom, anyone?

I, however, for many reasons, have never quite felt at home here, in that settled, rooted, connected-to-the-soil way. There’s a general disquiet that has haunted me intermittently. Don’t get me wrong, I love my house and I’ve spent a lot of creative currency making it into a home for my family – there is definitely no denying “Sharon Martini Lives Here!”

Returning recently to Portland from a triumphant trip abroad, my restlessness returned, magnified. I felt like an out-of-place boulder, a recalcitrant beaver, no longer building dams, becoming the dam, blocking a rushing river, being battered by its current that simply needed to flow, wanting to move into the stream but unable to.

Then, I had an epiphany. “Dance!” Not social dancing but, specifically, take a dance class. This revelation astonished me. I consider myself a freestyle dancer – a “play the music and let me groove my way” type of dancer.

Whenever I perform in musicals, it’s the dancing piece that perturbs me, for I feel bound and restricted by the confines of the choreography, even though as a child I danced ballet and tap for almost 10 years.

1 | 2 Next Page >>