Gossip Should Have No Friends, Except Clowns.

By WW Editorial Staff
  1. CLOWNS ON FILM: Saturday Night Live mainstay Kristen Wiig has optioned Portlander Monica Drake’s girl-with-the-rubber-chicken book Clown Girl, with plans to adapt it into a movie script. When the novel debuted in 2007, Drake was best known for being a member of Tom Spanbauer’s lauded “Dangerous Writers” group, along with some dude named Chuck Palahniuk. “I’m totally happy. Wiig’s gonna write the screenplay. I’ll just get to watch it,” says Drake, who found out that the deal was approved last Thursday. “Kristen Wiig will be so great, she’s perfect for it. She can be really funny but she can have a sad edge and be a real person too.” Drake has her own new project to focus on; she says she’s just about finished with another novel. She’s keeping the plot to herself at this point, but she did give us one hint: “It takes place in part of the Portland zoo….”
  2. REAL ESTATES: Oregon gets an odd cameo on MTV this Wednesday and Thursday during the season finale of Teen Cribs, when the cameras focus on a pair of really huge houses not owned by anybody remotely famous. The Roseburg estate of Disneyland builder Tom Pappas, which boasts a 300,000-gallon pool that looks like part of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, as well as a home casino and some truly terrible dining-room-chair upholstery, gets a segment. A second property, a ginormous $6.5 million log cabin near Grants Pass owned by the Jantzer estate, decorated with tons of dead animals and featuring an indoor basketball court, is also on the show. Psst: Both properties are for sale through Cushman & Tebbs Sotheby’s International Realty, which means that each segment doubles as the most elaborate real estate ad ever.
  1. SHOWTIME: This year’s Best New Band showcase last Friday at Berbati’s was another at-capacity show. The night kicked off with Deelay Ceelay and its trademark fog machine/trippy videos combo and a cover of 2004 BNB winner Menomena’s “Strongest Man in the World.” Typhoon followed with a raw, energetic set of songs off its brand-new album Hunger and Thirst, and headliners/poll winners Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside didn’t skip a beat in delivering jaw-dropping new material, despite being down a bassist. We’d like to thank those three groups, as well as all those who responded to WW’s seventh-annual Best New Band ballot. Most of all, we’d like to thank you for supporting the local music you love and sharing your own Best New Band list at wweek.com. We’ve got a long, long list of local acts still to check out in 2010. IMAGE: Darryl James
  2. CHEAP, BUT LESS SO: In last week’s Cheapskate column, we printed that Black Cat Pub offers $1 Hamm’s and Pabst on Tuesdays to students. The beers are $1.50, not $1. We regret the error. Owner Nancy Shire also requests that patrons not, as our headline suggested, “get drunk after class.”

WWeek 2015

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