THE DREAM OF THE 90’s IS ALIVE IN PORTLAND!! 

It’s not just a clever song. The Dream of the 90’s IS alive in Portland. Tribal tattoos, the One More Time Around Again Marching Band, double-decker bikes… this is real! The Dream of the 90’s!

• Who: Blann Reynolds, Dan Reynolds, Dan K
• Where: East Burnside, PDX
• What: Blackened Tofu and Egg Scramble, grits, coffee, 2 delicious bloodies

A full-time Portland resident from 1984-1999 (with a smattering of visits before and varying frequency of extended stays for many years after), I will admit I had started to question whether I really knew this city in its current form. After all, it had been over 10 summers since I had really lived there, and my 17-year-old self wasn’t exactly hanging out in Portland’s hot spots at 2am on a Friday night. No, 17-year-old me was chillin up in the woods at Witches Castle with 1 zima split between 4 girls, feeling the pulsing beat of Z100 playing out of the open windows of someones older brother’s forest green Jeep Cherokee, hoping that the penny in my pocket would work against a breathalyzer if the cops came. [Mom, the farmers market was really fun on Saturday. Please focus on that if you ever read this.] Just a guess, but probably not the kind of night I’d be having in today’s modern 2011 era.

After a trip to brunch on Saturday, however, any doubt that still remained in my mind (even after the farmers market) was totally 100% entirely canceled out. Portland is the same. The Dream of the 90’s lives on! Have these people been sitting here since 1999 when I left? Or maybe Portland is just some weird vortex that exists in an impossible-to-recreate mixture of

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     all at the same place!

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To help me struggle through this realization, we were joined for brunch at Screen Door by my great friend Becca and her husband Dan (also great) who recently moved back to Portland to see if the Dream of the 90’s was still all it’s cracked up to be (and so Dan could go back to school). I’ve known Becca almost my entire life, a friendship that reached its apex when I beat her in the last cross country meet of the season Freshman year (her Sophomore year) in the last 400 meters, coming out of nowhere and totally leaving her in the dust. Becca and Dan were able to provide some great insight as to what it’s like to move back to the Dream of the 90’s, after having lived the Dream of the 90’s in real time—in Portland during the 90’s.

As you can see, Becca and Dan have already adjusted quite well, growing alternative facial hair (see #2), donning handcrafted wooden jewelery and seeking a non-traditional living arrangement with some hip older couple roommates. They are Portland. They are living the dream. The dream of retiring early to work full time at the local coffee shop, the dream of clown school (for the record, Dan is NOT in clown school), the dream of Aimee Mann as your housekeeper. The dream that Becca and I grew up with. The dream of Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter and Jerome Kersey. The Dream of the 90’s!