KIDS ON THE STREET & THE GUTTER LIFE : Streetwise (1984)

The movie  today is a film that details a place and time I have some first hand knowledge of- NW street kids in 1984. I was neither homeless nor unloved by family, but I spent so much time hanging out in downtown Portland around this time I got to know many characters similar to the ones featured within this documentary. At 14 your relationship with your parents can be tenuous if they fail to understand how it is you are developing, and you seek support and community elsewhere to salve those emotional wounds. Being very much outside what society and the system dictated I should be, I spent as much time as I could hanging around other kids my age with a similar emotional situation- shoplifting, smoking weed, dancing in the streets, hanging out at shows, trying to make sense of what the adult world wanted. These kids had a much tougher road to travel that I- they were mostly running from abusive homes, or kicked out, or were unwanted. I had some traits I bonded with- I was adopted, I had a tumultuous upbringing- a child of divorce, an outsider who lacked the ability to understand the kids at school. When I discovered the downtown hang around lifestyle, it clicked, and made sense to me in oh so many ways. But soon after I found my focus (music and writing)- and left the idle time wasting behind, happy I found place and purpose amongst what was once chaos and disorder. STREETWISE details many of the kids who had a harder time escaping, who have not found that focus. Some survived, some did not, some went onto better things. It is a privilege for us to be able to glimpse the real world as it happened in films such as this- before reality television manipulated such things into a commercial endeavor for profit and gain. "You gonna be downtown, you gonna be cool, you better learn the ways of the streets if you're gonna be doin' the shit that you're doin'."