March 26th, 2015

FEATURING:

Matilda Bickers and Amy Pitts, two ex-dancers at the strip club Casa Diablo who are suing their former workplace in US District Court for back pay, unlawful fees/fines and sexual harassment.  Central to their suit (unprecedented in Oregon) is a challenge of their employment status as independent contractors rather than protected employees, the latter of whom are guaranteed minimum wage, worker's comp and other workplace protections.  Their lawsuit is concurrent with an effort to lobby the Oregon state legislature for labor reforms in the strip club and exotic dance industry.

AND

Laura Lo Forti, the program director of participatory oral history project the Vanport Multimedia Project, a program of the North Portland Multimedia Training Center and the Skanner Foundation.  The project aims to preserve memory of what Smithsonian Magazine called an integral chapter in Oregon's racist history, the Vanport flood of 1948, which displaced tens of thousands of residents from the hastily constructed public housing development, many African-American.  Community members received story-gathering and audio/visual recording training in order to record their own interviews with Vanport survivors.  Shorts from the project will be shown of an April 10th screening and panel discussion at the NW Film Center, "An Evening with Community-Driven Storytellers," part of the University of Oregon's larger "What is Journalism?" conference.