Two Portland Conversations

1. Downtown parking garage

Me: Brrrrr. It’s cold down here.

Valet: Damn straight it is. You know, it’s funny, we get these guests in from Wisconsin and they’re all, “Meh, it’s not THAT cold. In Wisconsin…” And I say this, “I’m from HERE and for HERE, this is cold!”

Me: [Laughing]

Valet: … and we’ve got cheese, too, it’s CALLED Tillamook and it’s better than Wisconsin cheese. My buddy got stopped at the airport once for trying to get some on the plane, they thought it was explosives. He said, “No, it’s just a brick of cheese, I’m trying to get it back to the Midwest where they THINK they have cheese, but really, that stuff is NOT CHEESE. THIS IS CHEESE.”

2. New York style deli, Kornblatt‘s, NW 23rd

Me: Can you settle something for us? I can’t really see from here, but is that a painting of Kramer?

Waitress: Yeah, it sure is.  [Pauses…] Lemme tell you a story. So, that thing’s been here forever — there’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer commissions a portrait of himself, that showed up here shortly after that episode aired, but you know when the actor went off on his rant…

Me: Yeah, I remember that.

Waitress: Well, people complained. The owner was going to take it down. But we ended up covering it over, you know, like he was sitting shiva for his career killing suicide. And it was like that for a while, I don’t remember how long…

Me: Probably the appropriate amount of time, you know, what is it… fourteen, no, seven days…?

Waitress: I don’t remember, it was much longer than that — it might have been a few years. We uncovered it after a while. And he’s moved around over the course of his time here and people notice, they come in and they’re all, “Where’s Kramer?”