He had discovered the most marvelous cocoa there, he enthused, and offered them a tiny, wrapped sample of stone-ground, small batch “virgin” chocolate, which he sells in four flavors including Blueberry Lavender and Vanilla Rooibos.

“I had just seen Portlandia,” Mr. LaRosa told The Observer, referring to the indie sitcom. “And as this nice guy began telling us all the trouble he’d gone to to make this chocolate, my head went straight to the first episode, where a young couple cannot order the chicken on the menu without knowing the chicken’s name and whether it had any friends.

“In his eyes it wasn’t a simple chocolate bar, it was this whole thing, it was all wrapped up in Thailand and meditation and yoga and beautiful paper,” Mr. LaRosa went on. “This is a guy you could imagine would be a young Wall Street exec or something but he’s making artisanal chocolate bars in Brooklyn.”

Earlier that month, Brooklynites were passing around a clip of Brian Williams riffing on the ironic glasses frames, homemade beads, shared apartments and gourmet grilled cheeses of their home borough, and the New York Times's marveling at them. “I’m leaving here to get to an artisanal market that just opened up today!” the anchorman snarked. “It’s a flash artisanal market! The newest thing!”

How often the Connecticut commuter actually gets to the better borough is unknown, but the bit killed. “It was dead on,” said Eric Cunningham, a Carroll Gardens-based comedian, who was inspired to start a website calling on Mr. Williams to run for president.

Heroic though it was, Mr. Williams’s intervention may have been too little too late. Brooklyn’s overwrought mustaches and handmade ice cream in upcycled cups are now well-established facts of life. It’s as if the tumor of hipster culture that formed when the cool kids moved to Williamsburg had metastasized into a cluster of cysts pressing down on parts of the borough’s brain. Around the militantly organic Park Slope Co-op, for example, or Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, where you can buy rings glued to typewriter keys as well as used, handmade, vegetable-dyed, vintage Oriental rugs for $1,000. Brooklyn is producing and consuming more of its own culture than ever before, giving rise to a sense of Brooklyn exceptionalism and a set of affectations that’s making the borough look more and more like Portland, Oregon.

“Would you like one of my cool little bags?” the chocolate vendor asked after Mrs. LaRosa bought a few bars to use for baking. No thanks, she said.

So it wasn’t until later, when he passed by again, that Mr. LaRosa noticed a sign above the bags. He took a picture because he was afraid he wouldn’t be believed: “Raaka’s packaging is designed by his friends and printed with soy inks on 100 percent postconsumer-recycled, chlorine-free, processed paper that was made from wind-generated energy.” He put the picture on his blog in a post titled “Brooklandia?”

Portland was “Brooklyn before Brooklyn was Brooklyn,” as NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro once quipped. His colleague Kurt Andersen, host of the public radio show Studio 360 and co-founder of Spy, put it more starkly: “Brooklyn without black people.”

Mr. Andersen co-founded the Portland Brooklyn Project, a “loose sister-cityish entity” to unite what the organization calls “creators of culture … with an interest in the connection between Portland and Brooklyn,” in 2010; it’s since changed hands. “Both suffered from an urban inferiority complex that during the last decade or so has become a superiority complex,” he explained in an email. “Brooklyn at its best today is in lots of ways probably like Manhattan at its best in the middle third of the 20th century, although with less hard-core, playing-for-keeps, drunken, druggy, up-all-night Bohemianism.”

I lived in Portland for two years after college. It’s a delightful place with plenty of drunken, druggy Bohemianism. But, dear Brooklyn, you do not want to go there.

This cautionary tale begins in December 2008, when your unemployed college graduate reporter wrote a post on Couchsurfing.com looking for a place to stay. “I’d love to show you around (currently underemployed) so weekdays are just fine for me,” replied Laura, a filmmaker who became my first friend in town. She lives with three or four roommates in a vast former church in Southeast Portland, across from New Seasons, Portland’s pricier answer to the pricey-enough Whole Foods. “I can teach you how to properly wipe your tush with just one square of toilet paper,” she promised on her Couchsurfing profile.

I never took her up on that offer, but she gave me a copy of the Zinester’s Guide to Portland—this was before I knew about zine culture, when I thought “zinester” rhymed with “sinister”—and loaned me and my then-boyfriend bikes so we could ride with her to the Green Dragon, a warehouse-turned-bar known for a rotating selection of 50 microbrews and geeky gatherings such as Beer and Blog. We rode back tipsy and crashed on a pile of mattresses in a corner of the church.

We wound up sharing a house with a yoga instructor and an underemployed deejay. Our rent was $195 each; we spent about four times that on food and beer. I bought a bike immediately and talked about it a lot; I developed a highly discerning palate for gourmet coffee and I.P.A.’s. We bought local and composted impeccably. I carried around a Kleen Kanteen to which I’d affixed a map-of-Oregon decal with a green heart over Portland. We were irreproachable environmental stewards with one guilty exception: the gallons and gallons of water we used to fill and refresh a 12-foot inflatable pool in the front yard, a gift from the Israeli backpackers we were hosting during the summer heat wave of 2009. We had a video projector in the living room for movies and Nintendo. Pot was $30 an eighth and very potent. We indulged frequently on the front porch, splayed on the full-size couch we got for $25 on Craigslist.

One of Portlandia’s catchphrases is that it’s “where young people go to retire,” but that doesn’t fully capture it. Rather, think back to the moment when you realized you were grown up enough to buy candy whenever you wanted. Then imagine extending that phase indefinitely, for years.

Portland, a city of about 600,000 residents (compared to Brooklyn’s 2.6 million), is, according to various lists, the “greenest,” most bike-friendly and most-tattooed city in the nation, in addition to boasting the highest concentration of food carts. It’s also the 11th-most alternative city in the nation, according to a “Weirdness Index” commissioned in 2006 by the Chicago-based nonprofit CEOs for Cities; weirder than Austin, Texas (17th), and New York City (14th) but not as weird as San Francisco (first).

The city has embraced the idea, and for good reason. Without the weirdness, Portland would be little more than a dreary, down-and-out, virtually all-white town in the flyover between San Francisco and Seattle. It inspires a weird pride: more than 18,000 “Keep Portland Weird!” bumper stickers are said to be in circulation (they sell for $2 apiece). “Keeping Portland Weird ought to be the theme of our economic strategy,” Portland economist Joe Cortwright wrote in an editorial in The Oregonian. “As Hunter S. Thompson advised, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

But Portland’s weirdness is hard-won. The place was settled by pioneers who had the guts and grit to schlep across the country and then ford rapids to traverse the Cascade Range. More recent factors contributing to the city’s popularity with independent spirits—and its lack of appeal for more typical American hustlers who might have provided a countervailing force—include economic stagnation that set in after the collapse of timber industry; redlining and other manifestations of racial discrimination that persisted into the 1990s; and lush soil and unrelenting rain (a boon for local produce of both the edible and smokeable varieties). Hippies, hipsters, homosexuals and other deviants moved to town in waves until weird started to look normal. Consequently, those who wanted to keep defining themselves as weird had to worry about being more alternative than the Joneses—which explains people like Dingo Dizmal, a 30-something clown of my acquaintance who rode around on a tall bike made of two frames fused together while rocking a top hat.

At the same time, the generally lousy economy meant that, like kids in a poor neighborhood bouncing on an old mattress, Portlanders had to make their own fun. Hence the thrift store industrial complex that keeps ’80s blouses circulating until they fall apart or get made into pillows; the competitive sport of coffee connoisseurship; and the Sunday tradition of midnight “zoobombing,” in which participants unlock a fleet of kids’ bikes piled high around a bike rack downtown and head west to the top of an 800-foot hill at the Portland Zoo.

Brooklynites seeking a vision of the future need only visit Portland’s Casa Diablo, which claims to be the nation’s first vegan strip club, then pop into Voodoo Donut, which sells doughnuts covered in Froot Loops or shaped like a phallus with cream-filled balls (the shop also officiates weddings). And don’t miss the regularly scheduled Adult Soapbox Derby or the food carts. Portland’s food carts have their own iPhone apps and trade journal, FoodCartsPortland.com. They are organized into food-cart “pods,” with names like Cartopia, Good Food Here and Cartlandia, a “bike-centric food cart superpod.”

Last month Portland held its Eighth Annual Naked Bike Ride, a beery, movable party that doubles nominally as an environmental awareness event. The police sent out a press release reminding everyone that it is legal to be nude in public in Portland, but to please wear a helmet.

The city’s effect on people goes beyond the urge to strip. Emi lived three houses down from us. She’d arrived in Portland, age 24, a gorgeous, perfectly manicured Gucci- and Prada-clad rich-girl princess. A friend of mine dated her for a while. Then she went full-on Portland. She shaved her head, gave away her iPhone, started wearing flowy dresses and spending weeks at a commune she called just “the farm.” She and the couple next door conspired to rip up all the concrete between their houses. Then it rained and her basement flooded.

Such dramas kept things entertaining, but after nearly two years, it became clear that none of my three very part-time jobs were going anywhere, and I started to feel trapped in Neverland. In September, I crash-landed on my mom’s couch in Manhattan, which meant I was spending most nights in Williamsburg and Bushwick. But it wasn’t until I walked out of the Bedford stop during the cold light of day for the first time and saw 40 bikes stuffed into the racks on the sidewalk and a frozen yogurt truck and thrift store racks in the street that it really hit me: I’m in Portland. But this Portland was in an alternate universe, where people have money and ambition!

“I get all the press releases from, let’s say, Third Ward,” said Robert Smith, an NPR reporter based in New York who went to college in Portland, referring to the crafty collective in Williamsburg that hosts art installations and offers classes in glass blowing and medicinal herbs. “They’re doing it on a sort of almost Manhattan kind of scale. When they do D.I.Y., they have the giant building and press releases and marketing opportunities and that’s great, but it seems a little too proud of itself.”

A recent game of human Scrabble on Bedford Avenue reminded him of Portland, as does the popular Brooklyn pastime of crocheting sweaters for statues and fireplugs, “which is darling,” he said. “Although apparently there is an ür–yarn bomber who started on the East Coast somewhere.”

He added, “There’s a whole culture around that sort of thing now. It says something about you. It says, ‘Yeah, I ride my bike every day, I make pickles in my basement, and I sell those myself.’ It’s funny that those were discrete things that someone would do 20 years ago in Portland but the cultural package didn’t all come together in one nice stereotypical whole.”

It does now, thanks in part to the IFC series starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.

“Portlandia, as a 20-something Brooklyn person, hit home,” said Max Silvestri, a comedian who has lived in Williamsburg for five years. “Like ‘Put a Bird On It,’ where it’s just two artists where what they do is they put a bird on things?” he went on, referencing a now-famous sketch in which two interior designers decorate everything with bird appliqués. “I feel like that’s what Brooklyn Flea is. No offense to Brooklyn Flea. A lot of things look better with birds.

“I am guilty as or more guilty than anyone of it all,” he added. “None of this comes from a place of condescension or loathing. Only self-loathing.”

Alex Basek, a freelance travel writer, recently settled in Prospect Heights after eight years in Manhattan. “I live within a five-minute walk of two bike shops that sell $700-plus bikes,” he said. “That’s the Portlandiest thing about it. There’s Glass Shop, a fancy coffee spot, like single roaster blabbity blah, all the way on Classon Avenue. Which heretofore I thought was one of those stops you wonder about on the A train en route to J.F.K.”

And then there’s Dr. JJ Pursell, a naturopath and owner of the Herb Shoppe, a botanical medicine pharmacy located on Hawthorne Street, the double-bike-laned main drag of Southeast Portland, who plans to open her second outpost in Boerum Hill. “I just read in The New York Times, maybe a month ago, some article about this warehouse party that was happening in Brooklyn, I think it was even under a bridge,” she said when asked about the two cities. “It was definitely very much the theme that you often see in Portland for a late-outing type of event where there’s a lot of art and music and interactive art going on. I don’t want to use the term Burning Man, but it was that kind of feel.”

Mike and David Radparvar, who founded Holstee, an environmentally conscious apparel company after David decided pants pockets were too tight to carry a wallet and sewed a “holster” onto the side of a T-shirt, can relate. “We were really attracted to Dumbo,” said Mike. “We found that it’s an area that attracted a lot of forward-thinking, progressive people in similar types of spaces and mind-sets. You’ve got everyone from leading agencies like BBMG to Etsy,” he said. “Like, it’s right next to Brooklyn Flea.”

When they started, they used 6-percent recycled fabric. Now the shirts are made with 100-percent recycled jersey knit fabric fashioned from plastic bottles and industrial scraps, and excess fabric from making the shirts is turned into “fins,” small scarves that can be worn around the neck or arm.
The brothers were speaking to The Observer from a cafe where they were prepping for a TEDxEast talk. Mike read from a slide: “‘Are we a generation driven by hippie values—minus acid, plus funding and smart phones—that can create sustained change? Or are we just a group of overprivileged, underexperienced, overconfident Bohemian revivalists that are just trying to defer reality?’” He added, “You know what I’m saying?”

The Radparvars, like many Portlandy Brooklynites, have only the purest motivations. But money, native competitiveness and proximity to the Manhattan media machine are quickly escalating what would pass for endearing quirks in Portland into lucrative commercial ventures and conspicuous consumption in Proco and Bococa. While Portland seems destined to remain a funky cheap neighborhood for the rest of the nation unless someone discovers oil, Brooklyn has been gentrifying from the Manhattan-side in since long before the Lonely Planet named Brooklyn “the hippest part of New York City” in 2007.

“You get a concentration of people who are visibly different in some way that’s not repulsive but kind of attractive for other people to consume,” explained Sharon Zukin, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. “That becomes a kind of brand for a neighborhood, or for the city as a whole, in the case of Portland.

“Then real estate developers start jumping on the bandwagon and marketing the brand, so that what starts out as alternative culture, alternative lifestyle, laid-back, D.I.Y. or whatever you want to call it, that becomes a product and the brand of a place, and then it becomes part of a business cycle where the media pick it up and”—she threw The Observer a bone—“not you, of course, but you know it could be rock critics or lifestyle journalists, they pick it up … and then it becomes very expensive to live there because more affluent people beg to move in, because they want to be different too.”

This process, she added, “seems to be getting more intense faster than before.”

At this point, Brooklyn is already so Portlandy that even the media appear to be tiring of the story. “One of the things I’ve found is that as a reporter it’s getting harder for me to pitch Brooklyn stories that start like, ‘Hey, there’s a group of guys in Brooklyn or a group of young people in Brooklyn who—’” Mr. Smith said. “You can sort of feel the eye-roll of the editor, like, yeah, there’s a bunch of people in Brooklyn who, you name it, are constructing a huge skyscraper out of used coffee cups! They’re learning how to butcher pigs in their own kitchen!

“I’m not trashing Brooklyn folks who try things,” he hedged. “God love them. They’re making it a more interesting place.”

“It’s a little overhyped,” admitted Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin, 34, who grew up in Park Slope. Mr. Dobkin refused to participate when his writers asked for input on a recent listicle, “100 Reasons Why Brooklyn Lives Up to the Hype,” which included Smorgasburg, Kombucha Brooklyn and the borough’s “alt-performance art party scene.”

“Williamsburg is just becoming like a circus,” he said. “When I’m there, I hear the circus music in my head. Mustaches were like 2010. We’re on to mutton chops. Everyone is walking around like the Sartorialist is about to take a picture of them. That’s not a healthy way to live.

“It’s all just becoming so precious,” he reflected. “And Brooklyn is not supposed to be a precious place.”

I don’t want to trash Portland. It may be precious, but the people who live there enjoy life tremendously. You can eat and drink really well without having to work very hard. I miss having to choose whether to pass the time with pub trivia, disc golf or mushroom hunting.

But I’ve been thinking of checking out Detroit. The Times says an influx of young creative types is turning it into a Midwestern Tribeca.

Correction: The original version of this story reversed the "distinctiveness" rankings of New York and Austin in the City Vitals study. New York is 14th weirdest and Austin is 17th weirdest. The Observer regrets the error.

The new show, which premiered Friday on IFC, depicts a eco-friendly wonderland where the denizens of this magical Portlandia enjoy a rigorous pursuit of the liberal ideal. There are militant feminist bookstores, restaurants with overly extensive information about your dish's living experience on a sustainable farm, and the openness to not scoff at adult hide and go seek games held solely as an excuse for the microbrew-sponsored after party.

How accurate is the show? The New York Times treks all the way to the Pacific Northwest to investigate whether or not the people of Portland like the show as much as the more objective New York crowd who watched it with The Observer at the premiere party.

Local opinions are mixed, but The Times managed to find a cast of characters who may very well be future targets for "Portlandia" creators Fref Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. Let's take a look at the representative sample!

• A restaurateur that has on hand the skull of the pig that provided the pork head mortadella (The name of the deceased was Sir Francis Bacon).
• The owner of a nonprofit feminist bookstore.
• A boad member of said nonprofit feminist bookstore.
• A photographer for the blog Eater PDX.

Like it or not, Portland may have to get used to the mocking on "Portlandia," as they're providing the writers with no shortage of episode fodder.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"City eyes putting transit dinosaurs back on track in Red Hook, Brooklyn," reads this morning's New York Daily News headline. Streetcars, which seemingly went the way of bowler hats and impromptu musical numbers, could be the latest (if not the most cutting-edge) solution proposed for Brooklyn's public transportation strain.

"We're looking back to the future with our transportation network," Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said yesterday.

Residents quoted by the Daily News don't seem to mind that most of the vehicles move at a leisurely pace. "It's an absolutely positive idea," said Shayla Sweatt. "It's up-and-coming, and this could really open it up."

Brooklynites may perhaps do well to speak with residents of Toronto, which has the largest street car system in North America. Asked a recent headline, "When does a 5-kilometre trek take 40 minutes?"

The Obama administration may, however, have made it easier for Red Hook to build a better system, now that funding for cities to build up their transportation systems isn't solely based on cost-effectiveness. Apparently street cars fare better on factors such as liveability and economic development.

Ask that other hipster center, Portland, which debuted a state-of-the art system in 2001, where cars roll along at a more respectable 30 miles per hour.

lkusisto@observer.com

To the Editor:

Thanks for the thoughtful review of Bob Dylan’s new album and current incarnation [“Fix Is In on Dylan: Modern Times Worst Since Self-Portrait,” Ron Rosenbaum, Edgy Enthusiast, Sept. 11]. I don’t agree wholeheartedly, but I appreciate Mr. Rosenbaum’s well-pleaded case that allowed me to think deeper about my attitude toward Mr. Dylan’s latest work.

That said, I treasure Mr. Dylan’s last three albums (I, too, dislike the idea of the trilogy) as much, perhaps even more, than that other “trilogy” from his first creative zenith. There are a variety of reasons: I’m growing up with them as they are released; his voice, I feel, is more evocative, expressive and even triumphant than ever before; I can see him play old and new songs in concert and flip them all on end.

This idea of “rootsiness” appeals to me, since I feel my generation is more a pastiche culture than any other. All of our clothes and ideas seem borrowed, so why shouldn’t the music be, if it’s good? Dylan has adopted these older forms while making them “new” through lyrical juxtapositions delivered with trademark phrasing. Where else will you find a jogging politician “running for office” placed beside a quote from President Lincoln? This is theft, yes, but with joie de vivre and a whopping good time that I don’t find elsewhere, not even in the originals he steals.

I’m sure Mr. Rosenbaum is getting plenty of upset e-mails. That’s unfortunate, because it’s necessary to be critical of one’s heroes. When done modestly and thoughtfully, as he’s done, it’s the best tribute one could offer. I don’t appreciate the cult of Mr. Dylan barring criticism, especially since I don’t believe Modern Times lives up to Love and Theft, my favorite album of his, so I welcome any straightforward reaction thrown into this tiring discourse.

Evan Kennedy

Brooklyn

Novel Touch

To the Editor:

Thank you for this timely and heartfelt column [“An Honest French Novel and a Message for Today,” Richard Brookhiser, The National Observer, Sept. 11]. An excellent novel of recent vintage that touches upon many of the same themes is Edie Meidav’s Crawl Space.

Biff Dorsey

Portland, Ore.

Last week, Brownstoner broke the news on this Scarano-designed 190-foot, 80,000-square-foot mixed-use "freestanding sculptural element placed within the cityscape" in Fort Greene at Fulton and Portland streets.

Well, now Set Speed features a poster of what we can only guess is the start of a protest against the towering tower, due to be completed in 2008.

Like it or hate it, the design is more than just a bit unusual for the neighborhood.

-Matthew Grace

(Sifry's also a former Rasiej aide, who said he'll be posting a post-mortem of that campaign on his site soon. In case you just can't get enough.)

I liked your oped in Newsday today. I agree the city's political blog scene is pretty anemic and surprisingly so. But in addition to the reasons you give for its weakness, I wonder if there aren't some additional forces at work.

And this mirrors the larger weakness of NYC's Democratic/liberal culture--the political actors are either careerist/ambitious pols or operators seeking a bigger slice of the pie for their tribe/interest-group. That fact that Slantpoint has a vibrant, if small, community of Republicans is not a contradiction with this, actually.

The alternative press here hasn't drawn blood in a while, and it's amazing how much sway a few very unaccountable institutions (like the NYTimes editorial board or the producers of NY1) have over political developments here.

Micah suggested The Politicker more regularly do a round-up of local blogs. The ones that spring to mind are Daily Gotham, Slantpoint, Alarming News, that new DMI blog, Gotham Gazette's Wonkster and the Voice's Power Plays. Other suggestions?

Nobody is more surprised to find Jane Powell in a role like this than Jane Powell herself. "Honey, I didn't do it for the perks. I take the bus to work every night like everybody else," she said on July 21 in a break from rehearsals. "I didn't do it for the money, either. Financially, I never have to work again as long as I live. I did it because it's the first time I have ever originated a role of my own onstage. I wanted to grow. You get stale if you don't keep progressing and changing. I don't know why they thought of me, but I loved the script.… In all those MGM teenage musicals I used to just make up my own dialogue, and the scripts were so bad that nobody ever knew the difference, anyway. This play has laughs, but the issues are contemporary.

"Also, it's a great relief being part of an ensemble cast, because I don't want to be a star." At 71, Ms. Powell has a son who is 49, a daughter who is 48, and another daughter who is 45 and the mother of a seven-year-old. "I'm a grandmother myself. It's about time I started playing my own age. The luxury of being a character actress at last is something I couldn't turn down."

It's not her first time at the rodeo. In 1974, she replaced her former MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds in the Broadway musical Irene . It was a daunting experience. Director Gower Champion, another MGM alumnus, never showed up for one rehearsal and Debbie never offered any help of her own. With only 10 days before her opening night, Jane was deserted, terrified and hopping mad. "It was a very sad time because we used to be friends," she said. "He just walked out. The producer said he didn't expect me to last seven weeks. I lasted nine months and got better reviews than Debbie. Then I took it on the road. After that, I did an occasional job here and there, but I was soured on show business and I went on to other priorities. Avow is not a comeback, because I never officially retired. But it is sort of a new beginning."

She still looks like the daisy-faced kid who made fried chicken and potato salad for layouts in Photoplay in 1945, but her private life hasn't always been a cream puff. She's had four bad marriages, a son with a drug problem and serious career troubles. But she's never had a shrink and it doesn't look like she's ever had a facelift. Her family is happy now, she owns an airy apartment on West End Avenue and a charming country house in Connecticut, her money is well invested and she's still got her sunny disposition.

Her fifth marriage, to former child star Dick Moore ( Blonde Venus , 1932, with Marlene Dietrich), is right out of a Dick and Jane book. In fact, it was a book that brought them together. Dick, now a public relations executive, was researching a book on Hollywood child actors of yesterday called Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star-But Don't Have Sex or Take the Car! Jane's friend Roddy McDowall arranged an interview, and Dick stayed for 18 years. Neither of them watch their old movies. They are not nostalgia freaks. She has constantly refused to appear onstage at those retro concerts at Carnegie Hall celebrating the MGM stars. She calls them dog-and-pony acts. "It's like a circus. The old stars work like dogs and the producer gets all the profits," she said. "Fans show up out of curiosity to see if they can still talk or walk without a cane and count the lines in their faces. It's exploitation of a piece of the past that no longer exists, and I find it sad. Some people are exhibitionists. Not me. I like those people, but I was never socially involved with them and never will be."

Now that her friend Roddy is gone, she has few acquaintances from the old MGM days. "Arlene Dahl is a friend. June Allyson has visited us in Connecticut. But despite all the movies I made with Debbie, I've never been to her house for dinner. I've never been to anyone's house that I worked with. There was an A Group and a B Group. I was in the F Group."

If she's trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, you can't say she hasn't earned the right. She hit the screen when she was 14, a little girl named Suzanne Burce from Portland, Ore., whose father ran a doughnut shop. She was a child soprano with a two-and-a-half octave range who won an MGM contract when she sang an aria from Carmen for Norma Shearer. Her first film was Song of the Open Road , an insipid piece of fluff in which she played a rich little girl movie star who ran away from home and joined a group of itinerant tomato pickers. Her character's name was Jane Powell, and it stuck. Only the stardust didn't rub off. "People are always fascinated by the so-called golden age of musicals, but it wasn't all that great. Everything was glazed. Those movies didn't reflect reality," she said. "I was at MGM for 11 years and nobody ever let me play anything but teenagers. I was 25 years old with kids of my own and it was getting ridiculous. Publicity was froth. Everything you said was monitored. With me, they didn't have to worry. I never had anything to say, anyway. It was hard work, I had no friends, no social interaction with people my age and the isolation was tough. But I had to support my family, so I did what I was told and had no other choice.

"I wanted to go to college. My mother said 'Why? You already have a job!' So my only education was three hours a day on the set with Margaret O'Brien and Elizabeth Taylor," she recalled. "But we never met in the commissary or talked girl talk. I never went to sleepover parties or football games or did any of the things my friends back in Portland were doing. If I had a hiatus, they sent me to New York to sing six shows a day at the Capitol Theater, and that was my vacation. I made a great deal of money but I never got to spend it. My mother took everything. I don't know what she did with it. Probably hid it under the mattress. After that, my first husband took half of everything I made. Everyone wanted to keep me young. I didn't even know anything about sex until I was 21. I was forced to live up to an image, and the only advice I ever got in acting was, 'Stay as sweet as you are and never change.' If I never grew as an actress, it's because no one ever taught me how."

In retrospect, she considers the filmmakers she worked with as nothing more than traffic directors. "Of all the films I made, Royal Wedding and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers were the only two you could call classics. I can't even remember what my last film was at MGM. Women stop me on the bus and tell me they loved my movies and they still have Jane Powell paper dolls and coloring books and I think, 'How nice, but they must be talking about someone else.' I never knew those things existed. MGM put them out and I never got any money from anything. I never even saw them. My whole life seems to have happened to somebody else. I just wish I could have been around to enjoy it. None of it sunk in. It was just a job and I was a fly on the wall watching it happen, and a fly doesn't have any feelings."

When did she quit the movies? "When they stopped asking me," she said, laughing openly. "I didn't quit movies. Movies quit me. Nobody wanted me. Musicals were finished and they never gave me anything else to do. I was 25 when I left MGM and it was the first time I had nobody to protect me. I didn't know anything about decisions or agents or income taxes. And the rejection hurt more than anything in the world."

When the MGM-musical era ended, its stars were like prize purebred Abyssinians suddenly dumped out of a sack in the middle of the desert and left to fend for themselves. "It was a shock.… And it was scary. I did summer stock, commercials, TV, but that was considered slumming. At MGM we weren't even allowed to be photographed in front of a TV set. That was a terrible time in my life."

She got a few grownup parts in movies; they were dreadful. She played a South Seas cannibal in a black wig in Enchanted Island , a low-budget horror based on Herman Melville's Typee : "I did it because they promised me a death scene, then they took it out because they said, 'Jane Powell cannot die.' The film was so bad the director, Allan Dwan, would tear pages out of the script after each scene and throw them over his shoulder." Then she played Hedy Lamarr's neurotic, oversexed daughter in a thing called Female Animal : "At last I got to play a sexpot, but it was so bad I never saw it. Nobody did. It was the first time in my career I ever felt animosity or jealousy from another actress. Hedy didn't want to play anybody's mother. She was the worst person I ever worked with and the whole thing was just miserable. After that, I just gave up on movies."

Singing, too. "My voice is not what it used to be. I can't hit the high notes and I won't be second-rate. It happens to 99 percent of all singers, but with women the hormones change and you have to lower your keys," she said. "You also have to stay in condition like an athlete, and I don't want life to become a regimen. I did it for 20 years and it no longer brings me joy. I know too many singers who should have stopped making fools of themselves 25 years ago."

In Avow , she doesn't have to sing a single note. "It's the first time in my life a director has said anything to me besides, 'Just be Jane Powell.' I've signed for three months and then we'll see what happens. I have no future plans. I have everything I've ever wanted in life and more-a wonderful marriage, a beautiful home, perfect health. I've worked all my life to be a normal person, and why give it up? I never thought I was a star of any importance. That may have been my salvation. Even now, audience applause is something I cannot hear. I think it's for somebody else. I have other priorities. At 71, I'm learning to enjoy Jane Powell for the first time in my life."

The old days may be dead, but she can't fool me. Jane Powell winks, and the smile is still Technicolor.

No city "shows" better on a beautiful day than San Francisco. In this particular, nothing has changed: the views remain incomparable and seductive. But downtown, the city is quite transformed atmospherically. Boom times. Fifteen years ago, 20 perhaps, San Francisco harbored visions of becoming the financial capital of this side of the Pacific Rim; but it lost out to Los Angeles. What Wells Fargo and Bank of America could not bring about, however, dot-com has, with a key push from Charles Schwab Corporation. Montgomery Street, the center of the business action, seethes and teems; you can feel the hum. It must have been like this during the 19th century Gold Rush that built the city, one imagines: all this excitement, energy, greed.

The pleasant, leisurely pace of years past-San Francisco has always maintained a good, profitable line in anachronism and nostalgia, the cable car bells still play counterpoint to the foghorns-has been quite swallowed up in the bully frenzy of the present. Not that anyone minds. Today's money and action are too good. At work, wherever one turns there is that compulsion to squeeze every iota of time and space for the last drop of financial possibility. The real estate operators are having a field day. Crime and corruption are two of the three great enemies of civilized urban existence, and the third is realty, at least when it is-as so often-merely the licit cousin of the first two. For example, as noted in our own paper of record, there's a scheme afoot to hand a chunk of the Presidio, the old Army base on whose golf course I was allowed to play in the early 50's (thanks to my mother's friendship with the commanding general, Albert Wedemeyer), to George Lucas for a film facility. What The Times failed to note was that the Presidio golf course itself has already been licensed out: to the Arnold Palmer Golf Company, the Industrial Light & Magic of golf, in a deal that still has knowledgeable folks muttering.

But who's complaining? San Francisco is where it's at, folks. Los Angeles? Los Angeles is nowhere, as anyone who watched The Night of the Living Dead , a.k.a. The Academy Awards, where L.A. puts its house industry on display, could quickly divine. San Francisco stands for Smart, Los Angeles for Dumb: both are awash in money, but these days everyone seems to be, so one has to look for other distinctions and gradings.

You might say the L.A.X.-S.F.O. dichotomy is a West Coast extrapolation of the distinction a stroller beside the Charles River would sense between M.I.T. and Harvard. One of the great subjects for future historians of our era will be the interesting irony that the takeover of our loftiest cultural institutions at levels high and low, elite and popular, by values centered on publicity and the box office, the so-called "dumbing down of America," has largely been engineered by Harvard graduates. People who were supposed to have been taught better, or so they've told us all these years. But that's a subject for another day.

Today, to turn a corner in San Francisco is to confront an epiphany. Francis and I encountered one such at the city's spanking new Museum of Modern Art. This is a major retrospective of the work of Sol LeWitt, an artist at whose work I now realize I haven't, until now, looked closely or appreciatively enough. Organized by Gary Garrels, the show will be coming to the Whitney this November. Although I can't imagine it will look as well on Madison Avenue as it does south of Market Street, or that its transformative impact will be as great, I urge you not to miss it.

I will leave it to my colleague Hilton Kramer to do the LeWitt show his own justice when the time comes, but I have to say this: The cumulative effect of the exhibition, which centers on a number of huge, room-filling wall paintings, struck this beholder as very similar in feeling and effect to the great decorative cycles of Western painting. This is as close, I found myself thinking time and again, as postwar art is going to get to the Sistine ceiling or the great Baroque and post-Baroque schemes, religious and secular, which built on Michelangelo's model: from the Gesu to Wurzburg. It celebrates and incarnates the sensibility of the postmodern age with an artistic power I would not have thought possible in an era I regard as generally unworthy of celebration and incapable of monumentalization on this scale, and of this quality. Doubtless the Whitney, which has long since abandoned art for vaudeville-it cannot be long before the joint's current director, one Mr. Anderson, appears at one of his minor-celebrity-studded openings in a chicken suit-will find a way to compromise LeWitt's achievement, but this may be beyond even the Whitney's endlessly renewing capacity to confer mediocrity on whatever it harbors (or to invent it where none exists). I sure as hell hope so.

From San Francisco, Francis and I headed north, to Portland, to visit my No. 1 son Jeffrey, his wife Laura and my two elder grandchildren, Anna and Cooper. Portland was a revelation. This is a city that must have doubled in size in the almost 15 years since I last visited, but has managed the growth with uncommon grace. It has what I value so about where I now live in Brooklyn: The sky is always widely present, there are a lot of good bridges and the jerks are, generally, somewhere else. Speaking of which, while I was there, the Portland Oregonian (issue of March 26) carried as intelligent a critique of the current Whitney Biennial (by Randy Gragg) as I have read anywhere. Best of all, though one is always aware of the presence of blue in Portland, one is not hammered second-by-second by the clamorous ubiquity of green-as in "the green stuff." Portland is prosperous, no doubt of that, but it remains pleasant, in a way managed by few places that have been touched by Irrational Exuberance's fairy wand. A good place for small and quiet pleasures, for "Grandpoop" to pop his buttons with pride as Anna and a partner dispatch a cello-piano passage from Bach with panache and technique sufficient to win them "the Halfway to Haydn" award at the Waldorf School's talent show.

We spent two days in Portland, then Francis and I drove into deep country, on Oregon's spectacular south coast, to play golf at Bandon Dunes-but that's a story for another time and place. A remote part of the world, but then again, thanks to the Net, "remote" is a word that has lost its meaning. Maybe it's a good thing never (if one can't resist) to be cut off from The New York Times or Page Six, or maybe it's a bad thing-I personally go this way and that-but connectivity is a fact from which it is no longer possible to escape. And thus it was that I learned, over a modem hooked up to a hotel-room phone, that my favorite novelist Anthony Powell had given up the ghost.

I've read A Dance to the Music of Time right through, all 12 novels, four times, and I intend to do so again at least once before I finally get to meet Powell in the sky or elsewhere. Powell's a part of me; his passing leaves me feeling diminished. On the wall of the loft hang the drawings the late Marc Boxer made for the covers of the paperback edition of Music of Time. When I returned to Brooklyn, I went and took a look at them, all those characters I know so well, the infamous Widmerpool, Mrs. Erdleigh, Sillery and the rest, and I found myself hoping that if there's a special corner of eternity reserved for novelists, playwrights and poets, it's a place in which they're brought together with their creations: so that Shakespeare can be seen having a chinwag with Hamlet, and Dickens and Proust, arm in arm, taking a turn with Pickwick and Charlus, and Anthony Powell giving ear to Pamela Flitton. Then I went to the window and looked out at this miracle city, in which so much has gone so right, and where so much continues to go wrong, and was awfully glad to be back home.

Now the whole world knows. If, a quarter of a century after the fact, Al Gore can get busted for smoking pot, it seems like there is no statute of limitations on embarrassing stuff. It all causes me concern because there are certain things in my own past that could be perceived as, well, checkered, and could be disastrous if they came to light 20-odd years after they happened .

Yes, it's true, I am no Al Gore. But I've got plans. I've actually been putting some thought into trying to find some time during the day to start mapping out a screenplay, which I will do as soon as I get around to reading that Robert McKee book. I've got some pretty good ideas, too! Maybe, someday, I don't know, somebody will care.

So, for you, my biographer, or any Newsweek writer who wants to keep some dirt on me, just in case I win a lot of money on one of those quiz shows or something, here are my biggest sins, in rough order of their occurrence.

1978. At six years of age, I momentarily shed my lethargic nature to practice some hooliganism. I ran out of my house on a fall afternoon, and crept into the backyard of my classmate, Anna Kuperman. There, after making certain that none of the Kupermans or any neighbors were about, I stomped all over an overturned Walt Disney Donald Duck wading pool. My stomping caused irreparable cracking in the bottom that would prevent the pool from ever holding water, or a Kuperman, again. Although the Kupermans had,

only months before, emigrated from Russia, this was no symbolic act of xenophobia, or even anti-Disney sentiment, as it may have appeared to the Kuperman family, who at that point were still working the kinks out of their English. Plainly and simply, any wading pool that was left in the yard for weeks at a time, pristine and ungaraged, was just asking to be stomped on.

For follow-up interviews, the Kuperman family, to the best of my knowledge, is still in Portland, Me., at the house they moved into not long after the pool-stomping incident. (The Kupermans, reporters should be aware, may be surprised to learn that I was the one who stomped on their first American wading pool.)

Summers, 1978-1982. Whenever possible, I urinated in the public swimming pool run by the Kiwanis Club on Douglas Street in Portland, Me. Though the pool was only a 10-minute walk, I made a habit of not going to the bathroom before leaving the house, and certainly not using the lavatory in the pool's locker room once I had paid my 50-cent admission. "Saving my pee" is how I remember thinking about the practice. The behavior was interrupted briefly in the summer of 1979, after my best friend, Paul Fenton, convinced me and a large group of afternoon swimmers that Parks and Recreation officials had begun dumping a solution into the pool that would cause a large bloodlike red cloud to surround any urinators. After a few anxiety-provoking trials, I realized that Paul had either gotten bad information or was spreading a false rumor because he didn't like the idea of other people's pee in the pool. The behavior resumed.

Although, to my knowledge, Paul Fenton never knew that I enjoyed urinating in the Kiwanis pool, he would be able to confirm the details of the Red Dye Scare of 1979. Last I checked, he was an officer for the police department in Cape Elizabeth, Me.

1979-1981. In the summer of 1979, I began an illicit relationship in the finished basement rec room of Heather Dutton, who was my contemporary, but was a good foot and a half taller than me, and could certainly have beaten me up if she'd ever gotten the idea to. There were approximately a dozen assignations, the first taking place not in the finished basement, but in the woods behind the Kuperman house-approximately 50 feet away from the scene of the Donald Duck pool incident-where we disrobed and were soon apprehended by Heather's father, Roger, a pharmaceutical salesman who discouraged us from taking our clothes off outside anymore. Whenever her parents were away, Heather Dutton would call my house and ask, "You want to come over?" It was a mutually agreed-upon euphemism for disrobing in the basement, followed by some astonished gazing, an occasional prod and some Love Boat -style kissing. Then we would play bumper pool and drink Tab, which were certainly added enticements.

I should note it was Heather Dutton's idea to terminate the relationship in the middle of 1981, citing, "It's weird," although I protested her decision with increasing frequency in the years 1982, 1983 and 1984, to no avail. Please do not call Heather Dutton's father; he does not know that we took our clothes off again.

1982. In Ms. Nylen's fifth-grade class at Nathan Clifford School, during the circulation of a get-well card for a young fourth-grade teacher I didn't know, but who had undergone a hysterectomy, I signed twice. Once with a red pen, and my right hand, I signed, "Get Well Quick! Andy Goldman" in perfect penmanship. With a black pen, and with my left hand (a tactic designed to disguise my writing and lay the blame squarely on the class sociopath, Maple Rasza, who had crappy handwriting) I signed "FUCK," which seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time.

Note to reporters: It would be pointless to try to get in touch with the formerly hospitalized teacher. I don't remember her name, and by the time the card arrived at Maine Medical Center, Ms. Nylen had deftly incorporated the block letters into a drawing of a smiling cow, so the teacher on her sickbed never knew that a fifth grader whom she'd never met really didn't care about her hysterectomy. One person who may be of great help on this matter was Timmy O'Sullivan, who witnessed the whole event and reported all of the details to Ms. Nylen, who never quite looked at me in the same way again. I have no idea where Timmy is these days, but back then, he was about 4 feet 3 inches, weighed maybe 65 pounds and favored an Ocean Pacific painter's cap, if that helps at all. Nathan Clifford Elementary may have an alumni office by now. Who knows?

And of course, if there is anything that you'd like to know about my precognitive life, my parents, Carlene and Edward Goldman, may be willing to fill you in on some details. They're listed in Portland, Me., and they love to talk. I've heard that I was a nasty biter and slow to be weaned. You'd probably want to get confirmation from them on that one.