Eugene Weekly

“I’ve been an artist my whole life,” says Mija Andrade, who made national news in 1986 at Salinas High School in California, when she went to the senior prom with her best friend, another girl. “We had boy friends at different schools. When we were denied permission, we took it to court and won the case.” Andrade studied graphic arts at University of California, Santa Cruz and worked for a decade as a graphic artist in Monterey. She began to study massage therapy in 1994, a year before moving to Eugene with her then husband. Continue reading →

 “My parents both taught piano,” says Amy van der Linde, whose father also taught math at Bennington College in Vermont. “When I was 6, they opened a summer piano camp in our house. I started teaching at age 9.” The camp, called Summer Sonatina, became so popular that the family moved, seven years later, into a 42-room mansion, previously a convent. “We had 26 pianos for 50 students,” she says. Continue reading →

  At age 15, Serena Orsinger has spent 10 years in French immersion classrooms, from kindergarten at Fox Hollow/Charlemagne through middle school at Roosevelt, to South Eugene’s International High School. She’s front row center in the photo. As a freshman last year, she was looking for a way to get involved in the community beyond school. “I wanted to volunteer at the hospital,” she says, “but they said I was too young.”  Continue reading →

“I started guitar lessons in third grade,” says Linda Burden-Williams, who grew up in Marysville, Washington, and played bass guitar for 15 years in Puget Sound-area rock bands. “Shady Lady, She, Ship of Fools, City Slicker,” she enumerates. “We changed names regularly. We played music on the road, six months at a time. We traveled with eight people, two dogs and a monkey in a school bus with a VW van on top.”  Continue reading →

A physician, a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst, Dr. David Rosen spent 25 years in College Station, Texas, where he held the McMillan Professorship in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University. When he retired in 2011, Rosen moved to Eugene, a city he had first visited six years earlier. “I house sat for someone on Crest Drive and worked on a book,” he explains. “I enjoyed Eugene.”  Continue reading →

 When Lauren Moore was 6 years old, her mother, Anne Marie, suggested that she try a class at the U.S. TaeKwonDo College. “I liked it,” Lauren reports. “We were totally sedentary,” says her father, Michael Moore, who spends his working days on a computer. He decided to enroll as well and also recruited his mother Bonnie Moore, a Eugene native and a pharmacist. She calls it “a great family activity.”  Continue reading →

Ever since 1999, when the Rooster Man, aka Gavin Fox, long-time host of KLCC’s Saturday afternoon Blues Power program, was struck down by ALS, Skip Jones has kept the weekly Rooster’s Blues Jam alive. “Rooster hired me to be the house drummer in 1990,” says Jones, a regular at the Monday night jams at Taylor’s Bar. After years of hopscotching from club to club, the jam has enjoyed a stable venue for the past six years, Tuesday nights at Mac’s at the Vet’s Club, 1626 Willamette Street. Admission is free.  Continue reading →

In the spring of 2015, Samantha Wise took a job delivering The Register-Guard newspaper. She had a 5-mile route that took four hours to walk in the early morning. “I had painful knees from jogging,” she says. “I learned about barefooting, and I went without shoes around the house and doing errands.”  Continue reading →

Growing up in Nevada City in Northern California, Lisa Shea-Blanchard got her start in community theater at age 9 with the Foothill Theatre Company. “It was a big part of my childhood,” she says. “My sister and my parents were involved.” Shea studied for a degree in theater at UC Davis and an MFA at the University of Wisconsin, then moved to Seattle and took a job at the Museum of Flight, where she met exhibit manager Ken Blanchard. They got married and moved to Eugene in 1995.  Continue reading →