More women go onstage, making a shadow play against the big porn. They flicker their shadow tongues against the huge shaved vaginas. They put their shadow arms around the thirty-foot erections. As the movie works toward orgasm—the happy ending of porn—the audience talks to the new women who seem to arrive a few at a time. The strawberry blond kneels on a theater seat and leans over the back toward the man sitting behind her. With one hand she's touching his dick. They talk. It's dark.

A little later, the big blond's in the theater lobby, looking at the covers of porno movies for sale. Other men and women meet, mingle, whatever. Some move on to the couples-only section. The blond adjusts the plastic daisy in her hair as she tells the guy behind the candy counter, "If I can get just thirty hard dicks in there, then I'll be happy."

The Jefferson Theater is at 1232 SW Twelfth Avenue. Phone: 503-223-1846.

The I-Tit-a-Rod Race

Organized by the Portland Cacophony Society, this annual race requires you to visit as many nude dance clubs as possible in a twelve-hour period. You need proof you were there, usually a photo snapped outside near the business sign, and you need to consume one drink in each club. Most players work as teams with a designated driver. With as many as fifty strip clubs to visit, no one's been able to hit more than thirty in a single race.

KlNKFEST

This is the annual weekend of workshops and play parties organized by the Portland Leather Alliance (PLA). A recent Kinkfest, hosted at the ACE of Hearts, included seminars such as "Erotic Humiliation and Degradation," "Anal Pleasure for Everyone," and "Saline Inflation." The event is held in the spring, so it won't conflict with the PLA's annual Leather Pride Week in August. For this year's schedule, check out www.pdxleatheralliance.org.

With more than four hundred members, the PLA meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at C. C. Slaughter's, 219 NW Davis Street. Many members meet there early, at 6:00 p.m., to have dinner together before the meeting.

Lulu's Pervy Playhouse

Sorry guys. It's women only for this sexy "play party" held on the second Saturday of each month. For time and location, check out the website www.spiretech.com/~auntie/ lulu. htm.

M & M Dances

Named for Marv and Marsha, these swingers' dances are held on the fourth Saturday of each month at 8:00 p.m. For details, call 503-285-9523.

Stripper Bingo

Also organized on an irregular basis by the Portland Cacophony Society, this game uses bingo cards designed for, well, strip clubs. Instead of numbers and letters, each space is marked with a typical stripper detail. Did she slap her own ass? Did she tweak her nipple? Clean your glasses with her manicured pubic hair? Did he pick up your tip money with his ass? You need to watch for all these little details and mark them off until you can yell "Bingo!" And please, tip the dancers who make all this fun possible.

XES

Located at 415 SW Thirteenth Avenue, XES is a private sex club for men. Inside is a maze of black-painted plywood with nonstop porno playing on monitors mounted overhead. Within the maze you'll find plenty of tiny rooms for privacy, plus a leather sex sling right in the center of things. The only room with a bed is also wired with a video camera so the entire club can watch you in action. The club runs from 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. and has more than fifteen hundred members who pay about $4.00 for an annual membership, plus $8.00 per visit.

Zippers Down

Located in the basement of the Club Portland bathhouse, the "paramilitary" sex club Zippers Down is at 303 SW Twelfth Avenue. Comprising most of the city block, the basement is decorated in army-surplus everything, with barrack bunks and acres of camo netting hung to create the full M.A.S.H. effect. The management has even hauled a real Willies Jeep down here and wired it so the headlights work. Porno plays on monitors overhead, and the fantasy is complete.

A membership fee is required for admission. Hours are noon to 6:00 a.m.

(a postcard from 1992)

Riding my bike, I hear the music and go to look. In the dozen blocks between Lloyd Center and the Steel Bridge, here is the opposite of the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.

After the parade on Saturday morning, after the floats are displayed all weekend, this is where they go.

This is a Sunday evening in June, just before dark. And these are the parade floats almost forty-eight hours past their moment of glory. Towed by rusted pickup trucks, towed by flatbed trucks and tractors, they wind through back streets on their way to a pier in Northwest Portland where they'll be dismantled.

The flowers are wilted and crushed. Tens of thousands of flowers. Roses and carnations, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and daisies. Instead of Rose Festival royalty, beauty queens and civic leaders, now long-haired young guys ride, passing a joint among them. Waving. Middle-aged moms in sweatpants ride, toting babies and surrounded by their toddlers. Waving. The sidewalks are empty. No one's here to wave back. Instead of marching bands, different floats carry suitcase-sized radios blaring head-banger rock music. Gangsta rap music. You can smell the sweet dead flowers and bottles of sweet fortified wine. A fat man and woman sprawl in a red carpet of crushed roses, smoking cigarettes and holding tubs of soda pop so big the woman has to use both hands. You can smell the diapers and marijuana.

The streets around the Oregon Convention Center are empty, and I can ride my bike, weaving around and between the string of doomed parade floats. I don't even have to pedal, from the Lloyd District to the bridge to the piers, it's all downhill. Everyone waves, and I wave back. Their audience of one.

Nature But Better: Gardens Not to Miss

From the annual Rose Festival parade to the International Rose Test Gardens—where Katherine Dunn wandered, inventing the concept for Geek Love— Portland is a city of gardens. Some are lumps of nature trapped in town, like Elk Rock Island. Others, like the Maize and the flower-covered parade floats, are very man-made. Most fall somewhere in between.

City Parks, the Largest and Smallest

Portland boasts both the largest and the smallest park in the world. The largest forested municipal park is five-thousand-acre Forest Park. With more than sixty miles of trails, it connects to five other parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Forest Park runs from NW Twenty-ninth Avenue and Upshur Street at the east end to Newberry Road at the west end.

The smallest park is Mill End Park, also called "Leprechaun Park," in the traffic island at SW Front Avenue and Taylor Street. About the size of a big dinner plate, the park is surrounded by six lanes of heavy traffic.

Classical Chinese Gardens

At NW Third Avenue and Everett Street, enclosing a city block, this is a maze of walled garden rooms, lakes, and pavilions. This Ming Dynasty garden includes more than five hundred tons of rock shipped from China, as well as mature trees donated from throughout the Portland area. Phone: 503-228-8131.

Columbia Gorge Gardens

The first of these three gardens is an old Italian-style villa and gardens planted deep in the Columbia Gorge. Take Interstate 84 east to exit 28. At the stop sign turn left onto the Old Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway. At 48100 turn right, through the gates of the Sisters of the Eucharist Convent, an order of Franciscan nuns who live in the sprawling estate of an old timber baron. The sisters are friendly, but behave yourself.