Planning to be downtown getting a jump start on holiday shopping this Thanksgiving Weekend? On Saturday, November 28th we invite you to take a break mid-marathon and join us for a relaxing Holiday Oasis at the Armory- you can pick up A Christmas Carol tickets at half price* when you show a Pearl District shopping receipt, cross some theater (and cupcake!) lovers off of your shopping list, and spend some precious moments rejuvenating with a FREE chair massage, a cocktail and the soothing sounds of our Holiday Jazz Trio.

Bring the kids and they can get their photo taken by our production photographer Owen Carey in our Victorian Family Photo Booth and then enjoy some free hot chocolate and some holiday cartoons on our big screen while you check out the offerings at the cafe.

{photo: The Cratchit Family Photo Outtake. photo by Owen Carey.}

Here’s some of what we’ve got planned:

FREE Victorian Family Photo Booth. 11 am to 3 pm.
Dress the family up in their finest and get your holiday photo taken in front of our Victorian backdrop by professional photographer Owen Carey. We’ll email you the picture- feel free to use it in your holiday e-cards!

FREE Live Holiday Jazz. 1 pm to 4 pm and 5 pm to 7 pm.
Chill out to the jazzier holiday classics from the Dan Gaynor Trio from 1 pm to 4 pm and the soulful stylings of Ali Ippolito from 5 pm to 7 pm.

FREE 15 minute Chair Massages. Prep for the next leg of your shopping marathon with a quick chair massage from professional massage therapist <XX>.

FREE Package Check. 11 am to 7 pm. Don’t want to make the trip back to the car? Check your holiday packages at the Armory Coat Check. We’ll keep an eye on them till you get the car pulled around.

Kids Colouring Lounge. 11 am to 7 pm.We’ll have A Christmas Carol themed Colouring Activities and Holiday Movies on the big screen TV for the kids to chill out with. They can redeem their completed coloring activity for a complimentary cup of hot cocoa from the Armory Cafe.

Holiday Themed Treats at the Armory Cafe. All day long we’ll be serving post-Thanksgiving holiday treats, including Turkey/cream cheese/cranberry sandwiches, harvest salads, mulled cider, and a whole bevvy of holiday cocktails at the upstairs bar.

Hot Deals on A Christmas Carol. Show your Pearl District shopping receipt at the box office and get 2 for 1 adult tickets to A Christmas Carol. Choose a performance before December 7th and tickets are $15 for kids and $30 for adults- a family of four could see the show for just $60 TOTAL if they show a Pearl District shopping receipt on Saturday!

Great Green Gifts for Everyone on Your List. Give the gift of experience this holiday season for a LEED Platinum certified holiday experience. Give PCS Gift Certificates and you can double the value of your certificate purchase when you mention the PDX Green Gift Guide.

Instant Gratification Giving: Our Sweetness and Spotlight gift package includes a pair of tickets to any PCS performance plus a dozen cupcakes from Cupcake Jones for just $75. Buy yours on Saturday and walk away with a complimentary cupcake for yourself (while supplies last).

What are you waiting for? Marshall the troupes and make a day of it! We look forward to helping make your downtown holiday shopping a bit more enjoyable this Thanksgiving weekend.

Ali Ippolito is back this week, TODAY (Saturday, Nov. 14) at 5 pm with Sweet Williams Ghost, the kind of luxurious music that lives in the dreamy recesses beneath the floorboards of roots-rich Americana. It features Ali with Dean Gorman (guitar, vocals) and Ben Cartwright (dobro, lap steel, guitar). And it’s damn fine. You’ll rarely have a chance to hear this kind of thing, this up-close and FOR FREE.  Pull up a chair, get an Armory cocktail and simmer in the sounds. 

LIVE MUSIC EVERY SATURDAY!

PCS & Music Millennium, the place where people and music still matter, invite you to  SOUNDS. LIKE. PORTLAND—our new early evening showcase of the best in local music, every Saturday from 5-7 pm.

November’s artist-in-residence is vibrantly talented Ali Ippolito.

Ali Ippolito (of Heroes and Villians, Nick Jaina fame) writes music with a haunting poetry and quiet authority that simultaneously tugs, pulls, coaxes, vexes, and inspires.

A mezmerizing singer, Ippolito accompanies herself on piano, accordion, and the curious banjolele, giving us fading, sepia-tinged sonic postcards of love and loss. This is music that, to paraphrase the poet Mina Loy, “infects us with unendurable ease/touching nerve-terminals.” And that’s a good thing, folks

Join us THIS Sunday, following the 2 p.m. matinee of Josh Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin Unplugged for Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind, copresented with The Oregon Psychoanalytic Center.

For this installment, Dr. Nancy Winters will delve into issues of independence, family and parental disappointment, and self-reliance in Kornbluth’s play. Winters quipped that Kornbluth’s play is “a great example of psychotherapy in action,”  encouraging, as it does, Josh’s journey to find his own inner Ben Franklin.

One-part cocktail conversation/one-part talk-back session, the lively series, now in its third year, puts theater on the couch and the audience in the conversational driver’s seat for post-show discussions that reveal that the world on the stage is truly a glorious microcosm of life. Join us for this field trip into the nooks and crannies that theater inhabits—from humor and mannered whimsy to the insatiable lust for life to the menage-a-trois between power, justice and truth, to idiosyncratic family dynamics and taboo.

Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind
Nancy Winters, MD on Josh Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin Unplugged
When: November 8, 2009 (following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Ellyn Bye Studio , Gerding Theater at the Armory

Discussions take place in the theater directly following the 2 pm matinees. Free with theater admission

Another exciting  IDEAS IN PLAY program
IDEAS in PLAY are free public programs offered by Portland Center Stage that bridge conversations around theater and the arts, sustainability, history, and community. How can we use the lens of the theater to talk about who we are, what we believe and how we connect to one another? IDEAS in PLAY inspires stories to come to life in unexpected ways through conversation-based programs that ask: what’s the big idea here?

more posts about Ben Franklin: Unplugged || Get the Details on the Show || Buy Tickets

IDEAS in PLAY
What do the ideas on the stage tell us about who we are/what we believe and how we connect to one another? Discover how stories come to live in unexpected ways and explore another level of PCS’ exciting season through conversation-driven public programs offered free to the community. What’s the Big Idea?

Join us this fall as we explore the quirks, characters and big ideas behind the shows of the 2009/2010 season at a variety of FREE discussion and participation events taking place at the Armory and all over the city.

RAGTIME Events

Ragtime Metropolis: Progressive-era Portland
presented in collaboration with the AIA Center for Architecture
When: September-October, 2009
Where: Lobby spaces of the Armory

Visual Exhibition, co-coordinated by historian Don Nelson that looks at the impact of immigration, the 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition and tension between tradition and change in Portland paralleling the narrative of Ragtime.

History Pub: Old Town Stories
presented in collaboration with Oregon Historical Society/McMenamins
When: September 28, 2009, 7 pm
Where: Kennedy School, McMenamins (5736 N.E. 33rd Ave)

These informal beer and banter “history pubs” feature a free history lecture and cold frosty one. Jackie Peterson-Loomis of the Old Town History Project tells tales of Ragtime era Portland- the people, architecture and events that sparked a century of sweeping change in our fair city (and the nation).

Portland: from Ragtime to Our Time
presented in collaboration with the Multnomah Library
When: September 29, 2009, 6 pm
Where: North Portland Library (512 N Killingsworth St)

A lively program looking at impact of race, class, culture and progress on Portland during era of Ragtime (1900-1917) and parallels to contemporary growth/change of the city. Panel discussion moderated by Judith Mowry, Office of Neighborhood Involvement’s Restorative Project.

Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind
presented in collaboration with the Oregon Psychoanalytic Center
When: October 4, 2009 (following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory

Now in its third season, this post-show discussion series delves into issues of power, justice, family, betrayal and bigotry in the award-winning musical. Discussion will be led by Scott Murray, M.D.

Redirect: Law and the Theater
presented in collaboration with the Multnomah Bar Association
When: October 18, 2009(following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory

A new partnership with MBA invites lively post-show conversation exploring themes that touch upon law, liberty, justice and freedom in the theater. First in a four-part series. Co-sponsored by the Multnomah Bar Association

Architecture, Power and Justice in Ragtime-era Portland
presented in collaboration with the Multnomah Library
When: October 25 at 2 pm
Where: Central Library (801 S.W. 10th Ave)

Panel discussion about the intersections of architecture and power in turn-of-the-last-century Portland moderated by architectural writer Randy Gragg, featuring historian Jan Dilg, Philip Niles, and others. Co-sponsored by AIA Center for Architecture, in conjunction with the Portland Architecture and Design Festival.

BEN FRANKLIN: UNPLUGGED

The People’s Press: Ben Franklin and Letterpress
presented in collaboration with the Independent Publishing Resource Center and Stumptown Printing
When: November-December, 2009
Where: Lobby spaces of the Armory

Visual Exhibition of Letterpress printing featuring a curated selection of work by local artists; a letterpress/printers fair with demonstration (you too can be Ben Franklin for a day!) on Saturday, November 7 from 10 am to 1 pm, plus a lecture on printing, democracy.

Redirect: Law and the Theater
presented in collaboration with the Multnomah Bar Association
When:October 25, 2009 (following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory

A new partnership with MBA invites lively post-show conversation exploring themes that touch upon law, liberty, justice and freedom in the theater. First in a four-part series. Co-sponsored by Multnomah Bar Association.

Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind
Oregon Psychoanalytic Center
When: November 8, 2009 (following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory

Now in its third season, this post-show discussion delves into issues of independence, family, self-reliance in Kornbluth’s play. Discussion moderated by Nancy Winters, M.D.

{photo: Eric and Dylan, the Columbine shooters.}

But how prevalent is school gun violence really?

According to Wikipedia, there have been 60 school shootings since 1990. That’s 3 schools a year affected by student-to-student gun violence.

It’s a frightening number, even though its a statistically insignificant portion of the overall pool of public and private high schools and colleges. And in the aftermath of major incidents we can find ourselves clamoring for profiling metrics, preparedness drills, stiffer penalties for smaller infractions and even an armed on campus security force. But what really is the right approach to preparing our students and ourselves against the threat of violence? How much is too much? And when do we cross the line into creating the very violence we are trying to prevent (by isolating “problem kids” or creating an anxious, defensive population)?

These are some of the questions raised by tonight’s JAW Made In Oregon reading of local playwright Brian Kettler’s In School Suspension.

Check it out tonight at 6 pm on the PCS Main Stage.

P.S. It’s FREE.