Liv Osthus came to Portland in 1996 because she didn’t know where else to go.
After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts, the aspiring writer and musician couldn’t imagine returning to Minnesota, where she grew up. And New York and Los Angeles just seemed like too much, too soon.
So she landed in Portland, a midsized industrial city in transition.
Osthus made a good choice. It was an exciting time to be young in the Rose City. Cheap rent abounded and everybody was in a band. You could be whoever you wanted to be – and you could make it, in a low-key kind of way.
That was then.
Over the past half-dozen-or-so years, Portland’s good vibes have largely disappeared. Record-breaking numbers of murders, homeless encampments and fentanyl overdoses have turned the city of Osthus’ youth – the Portland of Satyricon, the Red and Black Cafe and, yes, the TV show “Portlandia” – into a distant memory. People miss it.
Which is why, Osthus says, she made a decision a couple months ago that surprised even her: She would run for mayor. She wants to bring back the buoyant, striving, look-at-me city that lured her here all those years ago, and she believes she knows how to do it.
Her campaign announcement scored headlines across the country and beyond, but not because political observers believe she has a shot at winning. It’s because Osthus is best known as the erotic dancer Viva Las Vegas, longtime Mary’s Club habitué and subject of a feature-length 2018 documentary.
A stripper running for mayor? How very Portland, commentators from Toronto to New York have opined.
See, Osthus says, her plan is working already.
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It’s not unusual for an attention-seeking oddball with no experience in politics to run for Portland’s highest elected office.
There was Steven J. Entwisle, a self-described former Chinatown bouncer and “frequent testifier at City Hall,” in 2016. And Scot Campbell, aka Extremo the Clown, in 2004. To name just two of many.
Osthus, 49, and her supporters insist she doesn’t fall into this category. Sure, she’s a stripper, but so what? This is Portland.
Besides, says the novelist Chelsea Cain, who recently hosted a rooftop “house party” for Osthus, “taking off your clothes, dancing in front of strangers and managing a crowd are all excellent prep for politics.”
Cain brought together many of her friends on Osthus’ behalf, she says, because the first-time candidate is offering a unique vision that revolves around what, before the city’s recent downward spiral, gave Portland its identity.
Osthus is running to focus attention on the arts.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: Stripper Viva Las Vegas’ unusual approach earns devoted following.
What happened in the city in the 1990s and aughts, when it seemed that everyone of a creative bent wanted to be in Portland, can happen again, Osthus says. The government simply needs to aggressively step in to help artists.
When bankrupt office buildings emptied by the coronavirus pandemic go to auction, for example, the city should buy them and “turn them over to artists” for work and living spaces, she recently told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “That’s how downtown can come back.”
This doesn’t mean she thinks the corporate types should follow the musicians and painters and potters back to the city’s core. Considering the climate crisis and the advent of work-from-home technologies, there’s no longer a good reason for anyone to be driving from far-flung suburbs to sit in downtown skyscrapers, she says.
She also wonders if the city could “do arts coverage,” hiring people to review plays, gallery shows and other artistic efforts that get little attention from the press.
Osthus admits she hasn’t worked out the details of her proposals, and she has no idea how much they’d cost. She’s still in the there-are-no-bad-ideas-in-brainstorming phase of her campaign, with only a handful of volunteers and few events planned.
But she knows for sure that running for mayor is not just about identifying the right policies.
“I think we really need a voice of optimism,” she says. “Fentanyl is so cheap that addicts won’t get straight without hope. And the arts bring hope, energy and ultimately money.”
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Historically speaking, optimism has never come easily in Portland.
This is a town that, throughout the 20th century, got attention from the wider world only when things went very wrong. When mobsters tried to muscle their way into the city’s inner sanctum, say. Or a teenage couple was battered to death in a lovers’ lane attack. Or a gang of white supremacists turned murderous.
But by the 1990s, something different – something hopeful – had started happening in the Rose City. Priced out of bigger, higher-profile cities, young artists from around the country were arriving in town by the busload.
Osthus was one of them.
She soon made a name for herself on local stages – more than one name, in fact. She was Coco Cobra, lead singer for a punk group. And she also became Viva Las Vegas as Portland was becoming a hot spot for strip clubs thanks to an unusual 1987 decision by the Oregon Supreme Court that safeguarded all-nude dancing.
Portland being Portland, life remained difficult for her. There was never enough money, her big break staying just out of reach.
Then, at 33, she got breast cancer.
She didn’t tell any of her Portland friends or colleagues about the diagnosis, because, as she put it in an essay, “it felt like a personal failing.”
Then, finally, she did tell them – and immediately wondered why it had taken her so long.
Her fellow artists helped her through this period, becoming like family to her. After recovering from surgery and chemotherapy, she returned to Mary’s Club, Portland’s iconic downtown strip joint, proud of her new scars. She tweaked her approach to the job, now talking with patrons – and listening – more than dancing.
Her local celebrity grew, culminating in a documentary about her, “Thank You for Supporting the Arts,” named after her standard response when a customer slips cash into her bikini bottom.
Osthus really does believe that Portland’s musicians, novelists, strippers and visual artists – her close-knit community – can save the city from its current ills. Because she’s seen them do it before.
The early 21st-century boom years that filled new, gleaming Pearl District condo towers with tech- and ad-agency professionals? Scratching-to-survive artists made that possible, Osthus says.
In the couple of decades before, they created the 24-Hour Church of Elvis and Danzine and the Velveteria. They packed rock clubs along Burnside, making the city a breeding ground for talented, ambitious bands.
They turned a grimy, working-class city into, as The New York Times called it in 2015, “one of our national capitals of cool.”
Portland has since reverted to its historical mean. But it doesn’t have to stay this way, Osthus says. The city’s artists can spark a second boom period, post-pandemic. One that lasts this time.
“We’re deciding Portland’s soul,” she says of the November mayoral election, the first that will employ ranked-choice voting.
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The conventional wisdom on Osthus’ candidacy is crystal clear: She doesn’t have a chance.
The city faces a phalanx of tough problems, and voters don’t seem to be in any mood to take a flier on an unorthodox, inexperienced candidate.
City Commissioners Rene Gonzalez, Mingus Mapps and Carmen Rubio are considered the frontrunners.
But nostalgia is always a powerful lure, and that’s Osthus’ pitch – that the Portland that made Viva Las Vegas possible can rise again.
“Her true, deep ties to the arts community are a strength that no one else in the race has,” says Jessie Glenn, a Portland-based book publicist who’s known Osthus for years.
Glenn, Osthus’ “ersatz campaign manager,” adds that Osthus is “brilliant and warm-hearted and well-meaning.”
Osthus says that, if elected, she will come up with a 24-hour plan, a seven-month plan and a seven-generation plan.
When asked what the 24-hour plan will be, she thinks for a moment and then says: “Connect, listen, uplift.”
As it happens, she’s already launched the 24-hour plan. And it appears to be working, at least with her primary demographic.
Though they have friends in common, Cain and Osthus had never met each other before that recent rooftop gathering. Cain says she didn’t know what to expect from Osthus as a mayoral candidate, and that she came away from the get-together enthused.
“She made me believe in Portland again (in the possibility of Portland – both the Portland I miss and the one I want, which is better than the one I miss),” Cain wrote in an email.
Those two Portlands of the imagination are undeniably linked, to each other and to the Rose City in the real world right now.
The dirty, rundown Portland of today, after all, looks much like it did three decades ago, when Osthus arrived in town – and everything felt possible.
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