Friday, June 12, put together your Revoluntionary Costume when you attend Grey Gardens and receive a $10 gift card to Sweet Masterpiece chocolates. Generations of fashion designers have been inspired by Little Edie (check out Project Runway winner Jay McCarroll below). So show us how this icon of DIY fashion inspires you!

Just come to the box office by 7:15 on Friday June 12 and say “This is my Revolutionary Costume!” If your costume is deemed revolutionary, you’ll receive your gift card  (limit 100)

“You should wear white more often—it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriguing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.”—Frank O’Hara

À la recherche du temps Pardue

In conjunction with our Main Stage production of Grey Gardens , PCS is proud to host an exhibition of breathtaking white-on-white paintings by Portland visual artist Eugenia Pardue .

Please join us here for an Artists Reception on First Thursday, June 4 from 5-7 pm in the Lobby of the Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW Eleventh). Featuring the music of Grammy-nominated singer Nancy King and jazz pianist Steve Christofferson , refreshments and no-host bar.  Paintings will be on view until July 26. Exhibition made possible in part with the cooperation of the Heidi McBride Gallery .

A critically-acclaimed presence in the Portland visual artscape, Eugenia Pardue has had numerous solo, group shows and  international exhibitions (including at Linfield College, Jordan Schnitzer Museum, at Art Basel, Switzerland, at Mark Woolley Gallery and at the Nines Hotel in the coveted Presidential Suite).

Pardue’s stunning white-on-white works are concerned with nature, sensuality and ornament. In her studio, deploying gallon upon gallon of acrylic paint, the artist uses tools to braid, mold, and weave paint into shapes that are sometimes soft and graceful, sometimes spiky and dynamic.

Reflecting an inclination toward both the opulent decorative roots of painting and the heroic impulse of contemporary abstract canvases, Pardue’s work references, “flowers, vines, trees, seed pods, and other vegetative motifs I find in the world around me, as well as in antique floral prints, wall paper, tiles, tapestries, and jewelry design.”  The paintings are pure, meditative, and sacred, painterly and sculptural, minimalist and maximalist, serene and dramatic.

Whimsy and foreboding mix it up in the work of Pardue—inspiring a meditation on the color white in all its varieties:

White as elegance, cooling, hopeful balm or a blurring, burning intensity. Like the polarity between Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and the sweat-and sin-inducing velocity of Jimmie Lunceford’s big band playing White Heat (delivered at a blistering 364 beats-per-minute). White as hygiene, modesty, innocence, or for the Japanese–death and “deuil blanc” mourning. The color white can suggest an aching, minimalist ars poetica where white space is synonymous with silence and small gesture—think of John Cage’s 4′33”—the  little white dress of the avant-garde. White-on-white painting can conjure a slow-motion riot between translucence and opacity offering infinite variations, permutations, and transfigurations of white that are far from blank or meaning-free.

Simultaneously baroque, austere and threatening in their beauty, Pardue’s paintings mirror the promise of the 1940s-era Bouvier Beales, prior to going native and becoming what Kim Morgan describes as “exotic birds of a paradise lost–two real-life Daisy Buchanan’s gone Baby Jane Hudson.”

The paintings’ organic and botanical sensuality suggests echoes of another 1940s era siren:  the moral ambiguity of white-dressed Lana Turner in the Postman Always Rings Twice. Hollywood figured that “dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous.” Instead of purity or hope, Turnerian White took on a corrosiveness that was anything but neutral.

The works look lovely against the renovated 1891 walls of the Armory, but could easily fit into the collection of a Norma Desmond, Miss Havisham, Edie or any of those “rowdy girls that mesmerize us with their musty mansions, fierce honesty, and haunting presence.”

Like the wildly creative Little Edie, the paintings refuse to be held within the acceptable bounds of the frame —seeking instead to be alive in the world and in the minds of the viewer. The work straddles a fragile tipping-point between clarity and grace and danger and seduction and begs the ultimate white question: does illumination truly trump darkness?

Grey Gardens as depicted in the recent HBO film

Confession proven good for the soul!

Are you living in a 28 room mansion with 52 cats? Then you completely understand how Big Edie and Little Edie lived. Even if you don’t, though, send us photos of the part of your house or gardens that most resembles Grey Gardens. We’ll share them on our website; you’ll feel better. Submit your photos to trishap@pcs.org, using the subject line: “My Grey Gardens.”

Big Edie and Little Edie Beale

I can’t believe they did that!

Do you have a great story about eccentric relatives? Maybe they didn’t live with 52 cats or wear “revolutionary” costumes, but if they make you shake your head and say “da da da dum dum,” we want to know about them. All stories will be entered in a drawing to win free tickets to Grey Gardens, so submit yours before June 10! Send your story to trishap@pcs.org.

shopping in East Hampton

They can get you in the Hamptons for wearing red shoes on a Thursday!

How much do you know about the Bouvier Beales? Take our trivia quiz and you could win gift certificates to some of the Pearl District’s most delicious boutiques. It’s true.

What signs of the zodiac did Little Edie claim would be her ideal husband?

What was the monthly steady income the Beales lived on for their years at Grey Gardens?

Which health code violations did inspectors find when they raided Grey Gardens in 1971?

Name three prominent American families with whom Little Edie claimed romantic attachments.

Name three of the Beale’s cats.

Submit your answers to these questions to trishap@pcs.org. All correct quizzes will be entered in the prize drawing!

more posts about Grey Gardens|| Get the Details about the Show || Buy Tickets

Have you been blown away by Storm’s breathtaking honesty? Still tapping your feet to the tunes from Guys and Dolls? Gained some valuable lifestyle alteration advice from How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found? Here’s your opportunity to say Bravo! to the artists who made it all happen (and share the love with your friends, family, and those hundreds of people you twitter/facebook/im all day…)

Here’s What to Do.

Our goal is to inspire 200 new donors to contribute to Portland Center Stage in honor of the opening of Grey Gardens on Friday May 29th. So every gift given online from midnight to midnight on Friday, no matter what the amount ($10? $25? $100? You decide!) will help us reach the goal. Just use the promo code “MATCH” to participate.

And, if we reach our target of 200 new donors, each and every SWEET NOTE donor will be thanked in the sweetest way possible- with a $10 gift card for delicious, creamy chocolate from our friends at Sweet Masterpieces.

To further sweeten the deal, one lucky donor will win a pair of season passes to the Portland International Film Festival (thanks to our friends at NW Film Center) and ALL donors will have their gift matched dollar for dollar by a special group of donors, doubling the impact of your gift.

So, will you give $25 to help end the season on a SWEET note?

Make a donation of any amount and then enter the promo code “MATCH” here on Friday May 29th to make your gift (of any amount!) and show your support for the artists who make Portland Center Stage your place to get inspired, awed, intrigued and entertained.

Make Your Donation

Then pass this link along to everyone you know, and encourage them to help you help us hit that SWEET goal.

Never have your just deserts come with such delicious….well…dessert.

This elegant little lady, Jackie Bouvier,  is one of the last available kittens waiting to be adopted from our Grey Gardens cat family currently in a CAT foster home.  Cat Adoption Team named this sweet litter after characters in Grey Gardens in honor of the cat-loving Beale ladies. Brooks Heir, Sr., Lee Bouvier and Little Edie have all been pre-adopted and will go home as soon as they are big enough to be spayed/neutered.

Jackie Bouvier is a beautiful Tortie full of life and mischief.  She currently weighs around 2 lbs and is thriving in her foster home. If you’d like to make Jackie part of your family, contact her foster mom.

If you want to support CAT, but your home isn’t kitten ready at the moment, you can still help! Just drop off bags of dry cat food, scoopable cat litter, and break-away cat collars to the Big Kitty Bin at the Armory throughout the run of  Grey Gardens, May 26 – June 21, 2009.

more posts about Grey Gardens|| Get the Details about the Show || Buy Tickets