After each successful step, Kristine spits out a chunk of hot dog as a reward.

The official name is "Canine Musical Freestyle," and Portland dogs haven't stopped dancing since 2001 when Kristine starting giving lessons.

Unlike regular obedience training—where the dog stays to the handler's left—doggy dancing handlers have to prove they can work the dog from every angle or direction. They dance to everything from Strauss waltzes to disco to country-western music. One handler is training her dog to dance to opera. "Ultimately, the goal in freestyle is you want them to cue off a word or a small body motion," Kristine says. "You don't want someone out there shouting commands or doing really obvious body motions."

She and Leah Atwood demonstrate dancing with their dogs. Leah dances with her two-year-old Australian shepherd, Flare, to the song "I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)." In their show routine Flare wears a black bib and silver sheriff's badge. Leah wears a prisoners striped uniform. As they dance, each time she shoots Flare with her finger, he falls down dead. At the end of the routine Flare takes Leah away in handcuffs.

To find out about pet activities in the Portland area, Kristine recommends checking the NWDogActivities group within Yahoo!Groups on the Internet. The site lists upcoming pet activities and links to a calendar so you can plan your pet's vacation with yours.

To cut a rug with your dog, call Kristine Gunter at 503-788-3152.

With her cheek still stuffed with wieners, she says, "I'm the only dog-dancing teacher in town."

Pug Crawl

Beer and dogs make such a great combination. Now throw in a costume contest for pugs, a pug dog kissing booth, and a mob of pug owners with their dogs, and you have the annual Pug Crawl. Look for it around the third week in May, at the Rogue Ales Public House, 1339 NW Flanders Street. Phone 503-222-5910.

Pug Play Day

The last Sunday of each month, a sea of small dogs takes over Irving Park at NE Fremont Drive and Seventh Avenue. Starting around 2:00 p.m., several hundred pug dogs waddle in with their owners. Also welcome are similar small breeds, including chihuahuas, French bulldogs, and Boston terriers. Among the regulars look for Portland author Jim Goad, who wrote The White Trash Manifesto and Shit Magnet, there with his pug, Cookie.

(a postcard from 1999)

In July of 1995,I sat down with a group of friends and showed them a type-written manuscript called Fight Club. We were drinking beer, and I asked everyone to make a wish on the manuscript. Everyone there had said something, done something that went into the story, and it just seemed right they should get a reward.

Nobody made a wish except my friend Ina. She said, "I want to meet Brad Pitt."

A year later, in 1996, the manuscript was a book. That Saturday night I was with friends at the annual falling-star-watching party thrown by Dennis and Linni Stovall, up on Dixie Mountain Road. Someone brought a copy of the local newspaper with an article about the book. My friends Greg and Sara were reading it in the Stovalls' kitchen and started to laugh.

When I asked, "What was so funny?"

They said, "He's following us."

In the article it said how a Fight Club movie might be made, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It turns out my friend Sara dated Brad in high school and went to the prom with him. Her husband, Greg, had been his college roommate.

Two years later the movie was filming in Los Angeles, and I went to watch with some friends. My friend Ina met Brad. Most mornings, we ate breakfast at a place called Eat Well in Santa Monica. Our last morning in town, our waiter came to the table. He'd shaved his head the night before, he told us, so he could work as an extra in a movie they were shooting in San Pedro. A movie called, well, you guess.

A year later, in 1999, a friend and I were flying down to Los Angeles to see a rough cut of the film. In the gate area, in Portland, we were waiting to board our flight. Near us was a man wearing a fifties-style brimmed hat, a sort-of fedora with a feather in the hatband. I joked to my friend Mike that he should get a hat just like it. A few minutes later, we end up sitting next to this man in the plane. During the two-hour flight I pull out an emergency pocket card and tell Mike how the director, David Fincher, is having parody pocket cards made for the film. The parody cards would show people fighting for oxygen masks and panicking as their plane crashed.

The man next to us, in the hat, we never talked to him.

Two days later, in Los Angeles, David Fincher is driving me around to the ad agencies that are promoting the film's release. At an agency called Paper, Rock, Scissors, David says I've got to meet the man who designed the movie poster.

They bring him in—and it's the man from the plane, the man in the hat. He and I, we just stand there open-mouthed, staring at each other. Sitting next to me on the flight, he'd overheard me talking about the pocket card but didn't speak up. He thought maybe he'd misunderstood, he didn't think it was possible we'd meet in such a random way.

The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground

You can't come to Portland and not hear stories about the downtown tunnel system.

Michael Culbertson, the concierge at the Benson Hotel, will tell you how kids used to get into the tunnels through an abandoned building a block off the waterfront in Old Town. Remembering his childhood in the 1940s, he says, "There used to be a whole culture down there. Our favorite place was an old, abandoned Chinese restaurant with beautiful ceramic murals. We fixed it up, and that became our clubhouse."

Adam Knobeloch, an engineer at the Freightliner Corporation on Swan Island, will tell you about a trapdoor in the basement of the old Broadway Theater, and how he'd wander lost underground.

Mark Roe, a local archaeologist, talks about the elaborate ivory opium pipes and tiny carved figures found in the tunnels during downtown urban renewal. The tunnels are littered with single shoes and broken glass, he says. Possibly because the local "crimps" shanghaied sailors and kept them prisoner underground by leaving them with only one shoe so they couldn't escape over the layer of broken bottles.

The term crimp was originally British slang for "agent." Men like Joseph "Bunco" Kelly, Billy Smith, and Larry Sullivan ran boardinghouses where sailors could eat and sleep between voyages. In return, the crimp had the right to book the sailors next job and get a fee from the new ship's captain. When the boardinghouse was empty, these crimps weren't above drugging loggers, cowboys, and miners with knockout drops and selling them as sailors. When no one was around to drug, legend has it, the crimps might sell dead men or even wooden cigar store Indians, wrapped in burlap, to desperate ship captains. To get these "sailors" to the waterfront, crimps dragged them through the tunnels.

Rumored to stretch from the West Hills to the river, the tunnels are also supposed to be the hiding place for hoards of Alaskan gold dust—and the tomb of an occasional treasure hunter who opened the wrong door, looking for that gold, and was instantly buried alive by the loose dirt behind that door.

Local historians even talk about a proposed law from the 1920s that would've required all deformed or sick people to travel about downtown using only the tunnels.