clumsygirl: art + craft + tomfoolery

This evening I ran out the door at school, after making several calls to parents of delinquent yearbook staffers, to hurry over to the Bagdad Theatre again. A few of us had heard about this event from K, called IgnitePortland. It was supposed to feature presenters who had 5 minutes to talk about their passion. Doors opened at 5:15pm, and when I arrived at 5:20pm... there was a line all the way around the block to the backside of the theater. wow! I'm really glad that some of the girls made it before me to snag a place in line. The event was free; they only asked that you register w/ your name and email, and vote for The Hulk or Andre the Giant. I, of course, support Andre ("anybody want a peanut?") There was free food, with both veggie and vegan options. Pretty tasty stuff, combined with the sale of McMeniman's beerverages = yum. We got pretty good seats and settled in to wait for the show to start. It took awhile, as they hit firecode capacity and had to turn away loads of people at the door. I guess there was somewhere around 750 people in the theater.

The presentors are given 5 minutes and no more than 20 slides. They are timed, and the next person in line jumps up on stage when the previous presentor's 5 minutes are up. We heard some really amazing presentations on things like Why Deutschland Loves Hasselhoff, Open Source Rockets, History of the Stick Figure, How to be an Undercover Hooker, Six Weeks to Robot, and Biodiesel: Things to Know.

Things I really loved:
Help Launch a Nano-Satellite!
legion of tech sounds like a good idea.
"change = imagination + action" was a phrase I love.
self professed "geek about town" peat bakke takes amazing photos of abandoned places.

It was very fun and super interesting. There will be another one in April or May, and I'm totally going!