Today I thought I'd take you on a tour of our office, to give you a taste of where we work every day. If you've never been down here, our office is on the SE waterfront, nestled between OMSI to the north and the Portland Spirit dock to the south. We have a beautiful view of the river (or, right now, of construction for the new bridge -- more on that later) and front door access to the esplanade and Springwater Corridor.

Get yer walkin' shoes on, kids, we're going on a trip!

Welcome to Portland Opera!





Above our front walkway, we recently had a set of solar panels installed. These south-facing panels offset our own electrical use -- and they look pretty cool.



Inside the front door, you can watch the energy pour in!



In the lobby, two employees discuss the construction outside.



On our first floor are our rehearsal spaces, Box Office, Patron Services, costume shop, and one of the kitchens, as well as an entire room of additional costume storage, rooms for costume work (dyeing, laundering, etc), and our physical plant room. We also have four practice rooms down here. And the snack machines.

We just received a grant to upgrade our kitchen, and it is BEAUTIFUL.

Inside the costume shop is magic.

There is a ton of neat stuff in the costume shop. An entire room full of hats, jewelry, aprons, spats, ties, feathers -- you name it. A kid into dress-up could have a field day. (This kid = me).

There are some strange things too. I would imagine this is a fat suit, but nobody is around in the shop today to confirm. I was tempted to put it on over my outfit.



Sharing a hallway with the costume shop are our two main rehearsal rooms: the music studio (currently set up for an event)...



…and the staging studio (currently used as a holding space).



Our building used to be the Fox 12 building, and these two studios were the broadcast studios. We've modified them some over the years we've been in here, but generally they were, from the get-go, a pretty good fit as opera rehearsal spaces. Plus, they have a cool feature:



(We do use it to signal that we're in rehearsal, but today I just turned it on for fun.)

Outside the studios is our new bike rack! This is our third one; we have one inside and one on the other side of the building as well. Unfortunately no bikes were available for comment at the time of this photo.



The City of Portland is a tenant on the second floor of our building. They've been working on the Big Pipe Project for 5 years now.



One of the art pieces on the walls leading up to the third floor reminds me of ribbon candy.



On the third floor, we have an AWESOME deck overlooking the river. The sun shades were installed a few years back.

Currently, we're also overlooking the transit bridge project.



Inside, our walls are lined with show posters from previous seasons.

We mostly keep it classy, but we might occasionally have a wicked sense of humor.

(Trophies from our company softball team)



(The leg appears in the middle of the floor every once in awhile. Occasionally it's jutting out from a closed door. It's the marketing department's doing.)

We also like to show team pride.

Occasionally we have fun in the break room.

And here's the music library. It doesn't look like much, does it?!



But inside those cabinets is a WHOLE LOAD of music.



My desk is pretty much always covered in sheet music. Sometimes I joke about building myself a fort.



Oh!! I almost forgot: the most important place:



Our massive copy machine! I LOVE HER. Helpful hint: if the librarian is not at her desk, she is here. Or she is downstairs, trying on the princess dress.

This concludes our building tour for the day! Thanks for joining us -- see you next week.