A Conversation with Alan Adelson & Kate Taverna

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2020. May we recall its blustery wail, its penultimate tantrum before we all were forced inside again. Twenty-four hours earlier, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced another pending exile — she called it a “freeze,” like we’re naughty kids playing “Tag” (and maybe we are) — for her constituents. Mother Nature celebrated the news by tearing into her trick bag, whipping the year’s symbolic pestilence into a living torrential metaphor. Pelting slashes of rain and a gently whipping wind. We haven’t quite hit winter yet, but fuggit, mang: Here’s a soaking blast fer yer ass.

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So this was it, the Last Saturday Night. I haven’t experienced many Saturday-night-type Saturday nights in quite some time — not since February, when Dave Wilson and I hit Dante’s in Portland for a scorching Madwagon bill. We didn't know then how lucky we were, how rare. A few weeks later, the world went to hell, I landed in the hospital, and humanity itself took a shamefully sour detour. We gleefully swapped dimensions with our more disgusting natures. And here we were now, older, dumber, and walking seven blocks in the rain.

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Yet I love downtown at night. I’m reminded of an older Albany and a younger me, spending my weekends at the Venetian Theater, a nectar of promise in the air. I was in my early 20s, a neophyte journalist, my reporter’s notebook an extra limb in my jacketed right mitt, pacing the dance floor around the stage while scribbling adjectives in real-time reactions to guitar solos. From the upstairs balcony I’d nurse a beer, cloaked in Day-Glo Red Dog neon, and contemplate the ’90s as they crashed to their inevitable denouement: shattered dreams in a cum-stained dress.

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Downtown seems newer now, cleaner. Yet I miss the decay, those buildings’ historic bones rotting in place. The town had character. Open wounds. Interesting smells, not all of them pleasant. The Olde Towne Café, where I was a broke writer with a tab, now a high-end salon. The wine joints and heady restaurants attract a better class of highbrow, but I wonder what happened to the artists, freaks, and degenerates I called friends. Some of us, like me, became respectable, boring, with better haircuts and pointier shoes. The rest were pursued to the fringes, hounded away by the new affluence. Albany was never kind to the creative classes, anyway, desperate to snuff anything too weird. It killed the Venetian. It killed whole blocks, pricing out the people who gave the area its color, replacing them with a mundane “weird” it found more palatable. In what should be a Dali-esque tapestry, Albany’s a still life of a molding lemon.

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