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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (March 28, 2019)
THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 // 13 Continued from Page 4 Colin Murphey ASOC’s production of the ‘The Real Lewis and Clark Story’ tells a less-than-historically-accurate version of the Corps of Discovery. Dining Out North Coast and Peninsula I putter around here all day just to be on time for the S ILIE FAM OME! C WEL continued. “It’s not a job you can live on, but it’s a great thing for the community to have a community theater. We have a home, a building, and we are trying to buy it and keep it. We keep doing these shows to maintain ourselves. The history of the Astor Street Opry Company is so big — it’s 35 years.” The company has especially been strug- gling since Astor Street stalwart Bill Carr passed away the day after Christmas. “He was just gone,” Jayne said. “It seems like the past three months every- thing has come back to, ‘Well, Bill died,’ because he did everything here. He kind of ran the place, so there’s a learning curve going on here. We’re trying to fi ll his shoes with about four different people. “We all miss him very much. He directed, stage managed, he was our tech guy, he was hanging lights, running lights, teaching ... He is sorely missed,” she added. It has been diffi cult for the company to recruit people committed to staying. They have begun to rely on people who haven’t done certain jobs, and they have relied on youth in the children’s theater to play roles in the adult theater as well. She said the children’s theater gets kids excited about theater in general, and by the time they are old enough, they can join the adult theater. “We’re raising some kids up who like doing it, and who want to be here,” Jayne said. “They are focused on what they are doing, and they do a really good job.” Osborn said she hopes the children’s theater will inspire children to continue performing, so they can continue the leg- acy of community theater in Astoria. “This is a family establishment — behind the scenes, onstage, everything — and it is something that is magic. It works,” she said. “And it sometimes brings tears to our eyes to see how well things are pulled together, and it ends up being a big family — including little fam- ilies in the family — and that’s how it happens.” CW Happy Hour! 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And because the image is meant to represent the entire Columbia-Pacifi c, it must be thoroughly beachy yet unrecog- nizable — no Haystack Rock, no Seaside Promenade, no Astoria Bridge. The Our Coast planners convened a meeting, ostensibly an update on where the magazine stood generally, but one question drove the discussion: What the actual #$*! were we going to do about the cover? We looked at a series of possibilities on a projector in the conference room. A couple of candidates were last year’s alternates: a mother and son overlook- ing the beach at Hug Point as a marine layer rolls in; a lone fi sherman out in the surf, the water around him marbled with foam. None quite worked. After all, those rejected covers were rejected for a reason. As a near-last-ditch measure, Colin offered to dig through old unpublished photos. He landed on one he’d taken in September of Lisa Habecker, the Hay- stack Rock Awareness Program’s edu- cation and volunteer coordinator, check- ing on rehabilitated seabirds after they’d been released into the ocean. In the photo, she’s bounding into the waters of Cannon Beach, arms outstretched, her back to the camera, as the waves hit her head on. It’s a nice, symmetrical image, sure, but nothing about it immediately screamed “cover!” I feared readers would think this faceless fi gure was plunging to her death, that we’d put them in mind of Virginia Woolf or Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening.” Yet it had an elemental appeal … a woman becoming one with the waves, all but com- manding the tide. Her Coast Magazine. It was the perfect photo. Once we’d cal- ibrated the colors, cropped it from a hor- izontal shot into a vertical, zoomed in a little and laid down the text, it was every- thing we needed — and with the glossy fi nish it turned out better than we dared hope for. A great cover had been in our fi les all along — true, it needed greatness thrust upon it, but the result is the same. There are lessons here. Something you think is beautiful might work on its own, but in the context of a larger project may not be quite right. Something you think is unexceptional can be made sublime in the right context. Finally, it’s usually a good idea to check with your publisher before unilaterally deciding the cover for your company’s lifestyle magazine is in the can. And those three rejected covers — mother and son, the fi sherman, and volley- ball at sunset? They’re all in Our Coast, each covering two full pages, as God intended. CW
