The Backstory of How I Came to Write the Musical, A Symphony for Portland? (Part 1)
Part 1. THAT FIRST STEP
The musical journey that eventually became the musical “A Symphony for Portland,” began one January evening in 2011. I was tired of driving in circles in downtown Portland, Oregon waiting for my husband to leave work. With a history of driving down one-way streets the wrong way, just to correct and find myself driving down the wrong way on another one way street, I was beginning to feel perturbed with each passing of my husband’s office building and not seeing him waiting outside for me. I parked in a garage and was walking toward his office building, when this man, who was dressed in the recognizable Portland homeless fashion of multiple layers of hoodies, torn jeans and duct-taped shoes, asked me for some money. He wanted to eat at the fast food restaurant behind me. Since it was very cold and spitting sleet, I decided to give him some money. As I handed it to him, I looked up into this face and saw the face of a young man. He could have been one of my sons. I was taken aback. When I was a paramedic, I ran calls on homeless men, but most of them were older and had been homeless for years. But this young man, how in the world did he find himself needing to beg for food? And what, if anything, could I do about it?
I began to research homelessness among young adults, specifically in Portland. And some things really stood out.
1. Sometimes it is safer to runaway than it is to stay home. That is really appalling when you think of about it.
2. Many of the homeless teens and young adults deal with difficult to treat mental illnesses.
3. Some are addicts to alcohol or drugs.
4. Some are kicked out of their foster homes when they reach 18 when the foster homes don’t have to provide for them any longer. (Not all, but enough do to be counted.)
5. 35% of all homeless teens and young adults identify as LGBTQ+. What is particularly sad about that percentage is that 35% accounts for 50% of all suicides among young homeless people under the age of 25.
6. One of the last things I researched and that I am still learning about, is sex trafficking. Heart breaking to discover its prevalence in our society. Disgusted that it exists because there is a market for it.
7. Portland, at the time of my initial research, was a mecca for the homeless. A local newsgroup was doing lots of research on just that issue. Historically, cities on the coasts, because of their warmer winters, are heavily populated with homeless persons. I knew this from working EMS in Galveston and Fort Worth. A mild winter climate, lots of caring people willing to provide food and a reputation for keeping things weird, Portland drew homeless people to it.
8. Financial insecurity, being chronically poor, facing job loss, medical issues, all contribute to the homeless population. When doing a couple shifts as a volunteer with my church’s turn with the WHO shelters in Vancouver, WA, I was saddened by the number of working homeless people including mom and dads with newborns.
9. Sometimes, people, especially teens and young adults, make unwise decisions. If they are lucky, they learn and move on. If they aren’t so lucky, they suffer terribly and maybe find themselves on the streets.
I don’t have any solutions for homelessness. Once someone is homeless, it is a difficult and baffling journey back to safe refuge.
THE RESPONSE AND THE STRANGE WAY THINGS HAPPEN
Lullaby
After I first met that young man in Portland, I expressed my feelings in a composition for strings, “A Symphony for Portland.” The first movement sounds like bicycles racing through the city; The 2nd movement, a sad, poignant prayer; The 3rd, a busy, busy city, too busy to see the homelessness living on its streets. It helped me feel better but didn’t do a thing to help homelessness. This was March, 2012.
Now it’s June, 2012. I’m in Texas, visiting my oldest daughter. I am working on the choral parts for a poem I’ve written, “In a Warehouse.” The poem tells the story of a homeless young adult woman giving birth in a warehouse at Christmas time. There’s a competition looking for a new type of Christmas Carol. Maybe if I win this competition, I can then sell the sheet music and donate the proceeds to my favorite shelters. As I’m writing babies are on my mind. My oldest is at the doctor getting one final sonogram before being induced. She is almost a week past her due date. The phone rings. I’m thinking she’s going to tell me she’s already in labor. She tells me the baby is dead.
The next several days, instead of having a baptism, we had a funeral.
Devastated, I returned home. But that song about a baby being born, to a homeless woman, who sacrifices her life when she wraps her newborn with her own coat, that forever “heart” beat of music, would become my play. And the lullaby a broken dad sings to his newborn grandson in the song, will always be the lullaby I would have sung to my little grandson, David.
The musical, A Symphony for Portland, has a happy ending. Even though the story contains dark themes of sex trafficking, domestic violence and LGBTQ+ intolerance, the themes of Faith, Family, and Forgiveness dominate.