Storied: San Francisco: Recent Episodes
Storied: San Francisco
Weekly conversations with San Franciscans who are making this city a better place. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2, Aft joins us to chat about the band—Top Chefs.
We start with the story of how TJ met Aft. A mutual friend of his and Loveberry's, Lucas Hanson, put on a show at DNA Lounge called "Liam Berry and Friends." TJ was just getting out of high school at the time. They asked him to join them on stage, something he'd never really done before. TJ had been playing smaller sets in restaurants, but joining a band at a bona fide venue was new for him.
Loveberry (Liam) had met Aft at something called a "sound gig" for a set they would play as part of the effort to keep People's Park in Berkeley from being closed. They called Loveberry because he had a PA and they needed someone to run sound. Loveberry didn't really know what that meant at the time, and he might've been mistaken for a guy named Jeff whom they'd been expecting. Nevertheless, Aft was one of the few people who was nice to Loveberry that day in Berkeley. The band ended up needing a guitar player, and so a mutual friend told Aft that he should have this guy, Loveberry, play guitar with him. They agreed and ending up borrowing a guitar from a member of the crowd. Aft later invited Loveberry to a rehearsal back in SF.
Afterthough, aka Aft, joins the conversation at this point. He recounts his version of that day in Berkeley. It was still early pandemic enough that folks were wearing masks. He liked Loveberry's playing that day enough to ask him over. They played a couple of shows as "Aft and His Band" or "Aft … backed up by (various musicians.)" Aft was also asked to play with "Liam Berry and Friends." At that DNA Lounge show, Aft met TJ and the trombone player Will, who's also in Top Chefs now.
Aft had played in bands for years, including with a set of twins who played piano and bass. But those guys moved to New York around the time he connected with Loveberry. And soon after that, TJ and other members of today's Top Chefs. There's some collective fuzziness around when this all went down, but that doesn't matter. It was the beginning of coming out of a worldwide pandemic when time began to get totally skewed for everyone. But also, they were just busy playing music and making friends.
I ask the three of them who came up with the idea to play shows on the stoop of Aft's childhood home on Scott Street. Loveberry and TJ credit Aft with the idea. Liam talks about arrangements that Aft was putting together with complex horn sections. And in those sessions, one of the musicians started a habit of saying, "Yes, chef" to Aft when he was asked to do something. That came from watching cooking competition shows. The dude was messing with Aft, so at the end of a show one night, when Aft was introducing band members, he called this guy "the top chef" to get him back. The name stuck for the entire band after that.
There's a story about TJ's Filipina grandma, who lives near DNA Lounge, making Filipino BBQ on a stick and madeleine cookies for the band. TJ wasn't sure what to do with the food, so he set it out in the crowd while they played a song called, "Everybody Eats." It was a whole thing, and something Aft says he wants to bring back.
I ask the fellas whether anyone has ever compared their Stoop Sessions to NPR's Tiny Desk music series. There's a resounding "yes" from all three. Then Aft shares that Top Chefs actually shot a Tiny Desk audition video on the stoop. It was early 2024, and despite not making it onto the hit public media show, they realized that they had something in shows on the stoop. In 2025, thanks to a fundraiser show, the band went to South by Southwest in Austin. After that, they played in the Haight, Hunters Point, Bernal Heights, downtown.
Then Top Chefs started ramping up the quality of the videos. In late 2025, just before they planned to take a break from the band, Aft called a media day. The video of that performance went viral. Top Chefs' Stoop Sessions had arrived. It must've been around that time that my wife and I discovered them and immediately knew we'd found something special. And it was basically in our backyard.
This coming Sunday, Aug. 2, they'll be at Chapel of the Flowers in Berkeley. If you're in the South Bay next weekend, they're playing San Jose Jazz on Friday, Aug. 7. There's a show in Levi's Plaza in The City on Saturday, Sept. 12. And for more shows and info, and to lose yourself in videos of past Stoop Sessions, follow @stoopsessionslive. The band account is @topchefsband. Their website is topchefsband.com. Sign up for their email list to learn about upcoming Stoop Sessions. That's the only space they share that info with folks.
That's a wrap on Season 8: Every Kinda People. Thank you for listening and supporting our effort to uplift and share the stories of artists, activists, and working people who make San Francisco what it is.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
There's a band in San Francisco comprising musicians from The City and whom I discovered on social media playing shows on a stoop here in SF. I can't quite be sure when I discovered them, or whether it was me or my wife, but either way, right from the start, we knew we'd stumbled upon something special. Something truly unique. Something joyful, beautiful, free … something for the people. People could gather around with neighbors, some they know, some they might be meeting for the first time.
Community is something of a buzz word lately, especially in light of things like gentrification, neo-tech fascism, and just plain ol' fascism. But for good reason—it's one of the most powerful tools we have not only to resist all the nonsense being forced on us, but also to overcome that crap and move on toward creating a world of inclusion, equity, diversity … and good tunes.
The band's name is Top Chefs. This last episode of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco is, not by accident, all about them and the magic they create.
We start things off with TJ Milan, lead arranger for Top Chefs and co-editor of what they call "Stoop Sessions." TJ was born and raised in San Francisco. His dad came out here from Connecticut, and his mom is from The Philippines. His parents lived in South of Market, and TJ lives in that neighborhood today.
TJ's mom came to The City with her parents when she was young. She later joined the Army, serving with a support group for the Green Berets. His dad had moved to New York first for work. Then he got offered a job in San Francisco in the late Eighties and took it. In the mid-Nineties, the two met at a law firm where they both worked. In 2002, they had TJ, the youngest of their three kids—he has an older sister and an older brother.
His dad is an amateur saxophone player. More on that in a bit. The family lore goes that his sax stylings played a part in his parents' union, because duh.
I give TJ the opportunity to rattle off his SF schools, something he's proud to do—Clarendon Elementary, Hoover Middle School, and School of the Arts (SOTA). He describes his time at SOTA as "very chaotic." There was beef between the SOTA kids and the Academy kids in his days. Academy is sort of a school-within-a-school for SOTA, a majority/minority arrangement. Despite that situation, though, TJ met the person who's still his significant other to this day.
The only time TJ left San Francisco for any significant time was to go to college at The New School in New York City, where he studied jazz. But he credits most of his education with Community Music Center in The Mission.
The entire time TJ spent in NYC, he felt in his heart that he would return to his hometown. He played out a lot while he lived in New York, but the market for saxophonists was saturated. He came back to SF around September 2024. It started off rough, as he puts it. He started busking to make ends meet.
Then we turn to Liam Berry, aka Loveberry, the head of audio production and guitar player in Top Chefs and co-editor of Stoop Sessions.
His mom came here from San Diego. Her mom came to the US from Ecuador, where she was raised. His mom's dad is from Illinois. Loveberry's grandfather was on a work trip in South America when he met his grandmother. That couple went to Philadelphia before landing in San Diego. Their daughter, Loveberry's mom, moved to The Bay to go to UC Berkeley to study biology.
I take us on a sidebar about how San Diego can be cool to visit for like two days, max. But there's only so much that good Mexican food and nice weather can do for me before I need to get back home.
His dad is from Cupertino. His dad's dad is from Philadelphia and his dad's mom is from Houston. They met when his grandfather worked for NASA and was stationed at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. His grandfather was transferred to the Ames facility on the Peninsula and brought his wife with him.
Loveberry's dad wanted to get out of the area where he grew up, but he didn't want to go too far. So he got into SF State for meteorology. He ended up working in the data science field after discovering that meteorologists don''t make great money.
His parents met at a party through mutual Cupertino friends who'd moved up to Berkeley and Oakland. They were still together until a couple years ago, when Loveberry's dad passed away.
He was almost raised in Oakland. His dad worked a low-paying job at a tech company and his mom, back then at least, worked different admin jobs (today, she's a librarian). They'd lived in the Inner Sunset and put bids in on a couple houses in Oakland, where they could afford to buy in the late Nineties/early 2000s. They also bid on one house here in The City, in The Castro. And that's the one they got.
That's the house Loveberry grew up in, and when his parents first bought it, the house needed a lot of work. There are family stories about moving in and a mysterious tub of some sort of toxic goo.
Schools he went to and music intertwine for Loveberry. He started at Rooftop K–8, where kids worked on a different art project every year. When he was in second grade there, Loveberry started to gravitate toward guitar and started taking lessons. He went to high school at Gateway, which didn't have a music program at the time. So he and some friends started the school's music club.
In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Loveberry smoked pot for the first time. He also did an internship at NASA over that same summer. Going back and forth between those two wildly different worlds, he preferred the community that came with smoking pot with friends. Music became more and more a thing, but so did partying. Shit got out of control. He got out of high school to get himself into rehab.
After rehab, he wanted to go to music school in Los Angeles, but his parents nixed that idea. Instead, he stayed in The City and worked at a few different local eateries. So he never left.
A guy he met playing open mics in SF offered Loveberry $1,000 a month to open a recording studio and music business. It didn't work out, but it showed him that he could persue music and art as a lifestyle. He worked at some nonprofits and did visual art as well as music. He met Afterthough (Aft) in 2021. Top Chefs formed soon after that.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the final podcast of Season 8.
We recorded this podcast on Scott Street near Alamo Square in June 2026.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
In Part 2, we begin with Todd and me rapping about how much digital technology has changed just in our lifetimes.
Even when he was in school in Colorado, San Francisco had been a goal for Todd, a destination. He got his impression of The City from skateboarding magazines and TV shows. But before moving here, Todd went to Europe, as he puts it, "chasing a girl." He even tried living overseas. When that didn't work out, he moved back to Grand Rapids to save money. In 2001, he made the big move west.
When Todd arrived, he had a job already lined up for him. He just needed to find a place to live. He'd respond to Craigslist ads for apartments, but when he showed up to look at one of them, a roommate situation, it had turned into a party. He got the place, his first San Francisco apartment, at Waller and Masonic. Todd takes a moment to reminisce about living in that area, which he's continued to do in the many years since he moved to San Francisco. His walk down memory lane leads us to the Lower Haight.
Todd met a lot of cool people at that first SF job, a dotcom, naturally. One of those coworkers had a separate office space in the Lower Haight that served as an auxiliary pressing plant for a record-pressing company based in the Czech Republic. That coworker was bailing on their job and handed the space and the gig over to Todd. It put him face-to-face with musicians in need of vinyl to be pressed. He handled album art as well. His worlds of art and music were colliding in meaningful ways. He quit his dotcom job to do this new gig full-time under the name Circuit 73. More on that later.
In addition to the record-pressing gig, Todd was doing flyer art for a friend's monthly zine as well as other various flyer work. He also did album artwork. Two friends who were new at the time were looking for a space to open a music gear store. They ended up in the same space in the Lower Haight where Todd based himself. Todd's graphic design work really started to take off around this time, the early 2000s.
He'd only been in San Francisco a couple of years, but Todd felt like he was where he needed to be. I ask Todd whether, all those years ago, he had a plan for how long he would try his new city out. He says he didn't, but back then, he felt like he wouldn't be here the rest of his life. And yet, more than 20 years later, here we are.
Then we turn to one of Todd's alter egos/pseudonyms/whatever you wanna call its—Ink Letterman. That persona was born when Todd got his first Instagram account, around 2014 or so. He wanted an alias, and landed on that. It took off around 2020, when he started doing mural work in the early days of the pandemic.
Rewinding a bit, Todd started DJing under the name Circuit 73 (another alias) around 2005 or so. He eventually took a lot of time off from music, though. His growing collection of physical media started to make him anxious, so he stopped buying records. He also started a family in this time. Eventually, digital music platforms more or less solidified, so that helped. He also started listening to KUSF/90.3 FM.
Being in an office, sitting in front of a computer, it all led to burnout as well. His son was born in 2015 and he semi-retired from graphic design to focus on being a parent and leaning in more to his art (and away from design). Todd's art is part of a group show curated by Known SF and 415 Zine that's up now through August 24 at Mini Bar.
Eventually, DJing came back into Todd's life. He's quick to give credit to KEXP/92.7 FM for roping him back in. Another source of inspiration is his son, Oscar. He loves music as much as his dad does, and the two listen together quite a lot. Todd points to both the quantity and the quality of new music in the recent past. He's excited about a surge in old music being reissued as well. He's got a monthly gig, last Friday of every month, as DJ Circuit 73 at 540 Bar on Clement. And his radio show, Directions in Stereo, is on KXSF/102.5 FM every Monday from 10 p.m. to midnight.
We end the episode with Todd plugging himself. Follow him on Instagram @inkletterman. Find him on Soundcloud @circuit73.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
Todd Kurnat is everywhere.
In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he's also known as Ink Letterman for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan.
Both sets of Todd's grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so.
Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done some college, and his dad had joined the US military to teach about weapons-grade rockets. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Todd says that engineering DNA in his dad runs through him, although Todd uses it for less destructive ends.
Sometime after Todd came around, the family moved to Johnston Street, still in the inner-city part of Grand Rapids. The neighborhood had access to downtown. Todd spent a lot of time riding his BMX bike around the area with friends. Eventually, bikes gave way to skateboards, which he took all over his city. But we'll get to that.
His earliest memories on Johnston Street involve playing in the front yard—baseball and football with kids from the hood. In the backyard, they had a basketball hoop. Eventually, Todd was joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother. He remembers spending a lot of time with his sisters before his brother was born when Todd was 13.
Another of Todd 's earliest memories involve listening to music. His dad had an 8-track player that Todd used a lot. Those tapes made him so happy that he'd run around the house doing laps. The radio was also on a lot in Todd's house.
Todd went to Catholic school until his early high school years. One day, his mom showed up at his private school, got him out, and said, "we're leaving." Both his parents worked to support themselves and their (at the time) three kids. But changes had to happen, and so they put their oldest kid in public high school. It proved to be a life-changing move for Todd.
Right away, he made new friends, a few of which have proved to be life-long buddies. The common thread for them was music and movies. Bikes and skateboards, too. Speaking of bikes …
Around age 12, Todd had a newspaper route. Because he already had a bike when the BMX craze really took off, around the mid-Eighties, he followed that. He and his friends eventually started riding their bikes on street ramps. They also built and rode on dirt tracks.
BMX gave way to skateboarding when Todd was 13 or 14. For a minute, he did both, but then someone stole his bike. Like me, skate videos got him hooked—videos from Powell Peralta featuring pro skaters like San Francisco's own Tommy Guerrero. And it wasn't just the skating in the videos that impressed Todd—he also dug the music enough to record it from VHS to cassette tape.
Toward the end of his high school days, Todd taught himself to play guitar. He bought a four-track Tascam recorder and started experimenting with it. He did stuff on his own, but also joined with some friends to form a band called Landis. They played for most of the rest of the Nineties.
Relevant to who Todd would become years later, a lot of the existence of Landis involved him screwing around with different configurations and recording locations. Think: experimental, but not necessarily falling into the so-called experimental genre.
After high school, Todd moved to Denver and kept playing music. He and two roommates called their Colorado group The Suspect. They played a couple shows. Todd and I go on a sidebar on playing live vs. recording vs. writing songs. Live was always my favorite, and Todd agrees.
Moving to Denver was all about escaping Grand Rapids, seeing a little bit of the world, and going to art school. He studied illustration and graphic design. He'd been drawing and doodling about as far back as he could remember. In high school, at the public school his mom put him in, there was a counselor who had steered Todd in the direction of graphic design, and he's grateful for that. Turns out he has spent the better part of the last 30 years doing graphic design.
We end Part 1 with Todd looking back on how much technology has advanced since he got started in the digital art world.
Check back this Thursday to hear all about Todd's move to San Francisco and what he's been up to since he got here. It's a lot, and it'll all be in Part 2 of this episode.
We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
Listen in as I chat with German Gonzalez, musical conductor and principal director of the Golden Gate Park Band, now in its 144th year.
We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.
In Part 3, we hear from Keiko and Michael about the history of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
In the late-1950s, a San Franciscan named R.G. Davis taught a class in movement—mime, dance, physical interpretation of stories … that sort of thing. A performing troupe sprang out of that class, and it was known as the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe. It was the era of the early Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, and the troupe became more and more political, basing much of their work around social issues of the day. The group started off doing silent mime work, but shifted later.
Michael offers us the definition of mime at this point—"the exaggeration of everyday life in story and song." Not all mime is silent. As the audiences kept getting bigger and bigger, Davis's troupe realized that they needed to abandon the silent style. They dived into doing commedia dell'arte with more and more masks and colorful decorations. Classic commedia almost always involved stories around class—think servants vs. rich assholes. The Davis troupe started writing mimes about civil rights, women's rights, workers' struggles. And they realized that changing their name to "San Francisco Mime Troupe" was a wise move.
The newly named SF Mime Troupe played around California. They went to the Midwest and East Coast. They were getting bigger and bigger and getting more and more attention. In the early 1970s, they decided to become a collective. R.G. Davis left at this point. But the troupe wanted to practice what it was "preaching" on stage. I ask Michael to tell us the difference between a collective and a co-op—basically, a co-op is shared ownership of an entity. A collective is simply the way of running the thing. It doesn't necessarily speak to ownership.
Keiko joined the collective as an actor. Soon after that, she helped to build props and design costumes and sets.
I ask Keiko and Michael to explain the "why" part of getting involved and staying with SF Mime Troupe.
Keiko takes us back to her childhood, when her parents took her to anti-war protests regularly. She cites that as a foundation for why she was attracted to the work that the SF Mime Troupe had been engaged in already for so long. She believes in the power of the people to come together and overcome whatever is thrown at us. And the fact that there's a theater company, where she could combine all her passions, didn't hurt at all.
For Michael, it goes back to the first SFMT show he saw. It was Factwino vs. the Moral Majority. It's a show about free speech and manipulation. He was hooked. He'd be a fan forever. Then, he got that audition. He agrees with Keiko about the mime troupe community, but Michael goes a step further—he points to that camaraderie he finds with audiences. He appreciates being able to express his passion for politics regularly.
The Mime Troupe aims to be topical and newsworthy with whatever is going on at the time. But some things just keep repeating themselves. War, capitalism, the continued deterioration of a livable climate. Michael talks about taking pride in the collective's diversity—race, age, economic levels. And this sets the SF Mime Troupe apart from other theater companies.
Then we start talking about what going to a Mime Troupe show can do for audiences. It can inspire and empower showgoers. It can also help them feel less alone in dark times like the present. Michael talks about how, as a performer, they need to leave the audience wanting to take action, that the revolution can't only happen on stage.
Because Storied is my show, I assert that San Francisco isn't the liberal bastion that many here (and away from here) believe it to be. Michael takes that idea a step further to talk about the difference between being a social liberal and an economic liberal. This town is full of social progressives. On economics, not so much. He feels, and I agree, that many folks here hold conservative economic opinions and hide that in their social progressivism. We end this segment of the recording with my assertion that the only reason our local politicians don't admit that they're Republicans is because you can't win that way here. Michael agrees, and goes off on that point, much to my delight.
Keiko speaks to the sacrifices that artists living and working in San Francisco have to make. And Michael describes SF as a suburb of Silicon Valley, with many here espousing the belief that tech can solve everything. For the record: I do not believe that tech can solve everything.
We wrap with Keiko talking about the Mime Troupe's new season, which kicks off this Friday, July 3, and runs through Sept. 7. The show is called Wreckage, a musical tragicomedy. Keiko is busy learning roles and making costumes for her castmates. Michael steps in to talk about the show in more depth. We're in a time where people feel like everything is falling apart—economics, the environment, relationships, hope. What's gonna be left when it's all over? The show asks us all, "What do you have to let go of to move on?"
Find out more and donate at the San Francisco Mime Troupe website. Follow them on Instagram @sftroupers.
Both sides of Michael Gene Sullivan's family are from Detroit. In Part 2, we get to know Keiko's fellow SFMT collective member.
Michael was born in Livonia, Michigan, a small town outside of Detroit. His parents met at a summer camp, but we need to rewind a bit before we get to that.
When his dad was a boy, he was kidnapped. Yes, really. He and his brothers, all Black boys, were taken from Detroit to work on a plantation in Louisiana. One day, three years later, a car pulled up to the plantation. Some people got out of the car, grabbed Michael's dad and uncles, and threw them into the car (not minding the trauma these boys had already been through or might be experiencing in the moment). Much to the boys' relief, their mom was in that car. She'd been looking for her sons the entire time.
They made it back to Michigan, but the effect of having been kidnapped and missing key years with his family stayed with Michael's dad. Michael characterizes his dad's side of the family as old-school gangsters.
His mom's family were upper-working-class, many of them with jobs at Ford. The aforementioned camp was in Detroit and it was designed to bring kids from all different economic levels together. The camp held a dance, and his dad found himself with all the boys on one side of the room—on the other side, the girls, of course. No one had started dancing when one of the girls suddenly got up (on a dare from a friend), walked over to the boys, and sat in Michael's dad's lap. That girl was his mom, of course. They danced, talked a little, then had to separate.
The next summer, at the next camp, the two met again. Then it happened again the following year. Eventually, they started dating and fell in love. Michael's mom's family wasn't too pleased, given the criminal aspect of his dad's family. But his mom was a bit of a rebel and went with love.
The new couple settled in Detroit. They had three children—two girls and a boy, Michael, their youngest. His dad did radio work in the Army and his mom studied art. When dad got out of the service, he parlayed the tech work he'd learned into the infant industry. He got a job with National Cash Register, who relocated the family to Los Angeles.
Michael was three when his family moved to California, so he doesn't have distinct memories of that. With the move to LA, his mom started doing more and more art, sculpting and painting. His dad worked a lot, but the couple also started getting involved in politics. They went to protests, rallies, Black Panther meetings. Michael shares his family's story of being at a protest against LBJ's visit to Los Angeles. It involves a family of five plus their pet rabbit climbing a tree.
The next year, 1968, was a presidential election year, and Michael's mom worked for the Bobby Kennedy campaign. She was there on primary night, June 5, when RFK was assassinated. She was in the same room, even. Soon after that, the FBI showed up at their house looking for witnesses. To make up for known failings around the JFK assassination, the agency moved to protect witnesses around this tragedy. They sent his mom back to Detroit.
The rest of Michael's family stayed behind. The FBI gave Michael rides to school in that time period. Two weeks later, when his mom returned, his parents decided to move the family to San Francisco. It was originally planned as a temporary visit, but they never left.
The first place his family landed was The Sunset District. He was seven, and started school in San Francisco. From there, the family moved to Bayview, Western Addition, back to The Sunset, over to The Richmond District, and back to Western Addition. I ask Michael to list his SF schools, and he obliges.
Now settling into the Bay Area, Michael's family kept their political interests. He recalls his parents taking him with them to a Black Panthers meeting. His dad was now working in Silicon Valley as a diagnostic engineer. Michael's mom had given up creating her own art and shifted to film publicity work.
Michael has always been a passionate person. When he was a kid, he and his sister got into film. He was also deeply interested in history. He wanted to be a history teacher when he grew up. They planned to make movies together. They wanted to remake Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but recast as two Black kids.
At school, the kids considered Michael shy. When he got to Marina Junior High, he decided on the first day of school that it wasn't for him. And it wasn't difficult for him to transfer, because his family had that habit of moving around The City. Michael asked his mom to drive him around town, and when he saw Roosevelt Middle School, he loved the building's architecture. So, he transferred there. He shares the story of another transfer student, who arrived in his last year at Roosevelt, a girl so pretty he developed a crippling crush on her right away. We'll get back to that.
He and his crush ended up going to Washington High the next year. He still wouldn't/couldn't talk to her, but they were both in band. She ended up in a theater group called Street of Dreams Theater Company. Michael's best friend was also in the group, so he was around them a lot.
Michael still had his sights set on being a history professor. That, or he would write horror short stories. One day, a teacher more or less forced him to sing in choir. His crush was also in choir. And he ended up joining Street of Dreams in order to be closer to her. They graduated, and within the following year, Michael was artistic director of the company.
He started doing more and more with Street of Dreams, eventually directing shows. Both Michael and his crush, whom he could at least talk with now, if not look in the eyes, were at City College and also joined a group of friends singing at the Renaissance Faire. By then, she'd had a couple boyfriends and he a couple girlfriends. Then the two decided to go on a "test date." They even shared a "test kiss" that night. A year later, they were dating. And today, they're married and have three children.
Around this time, Michael's dad took him to see a show by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Theater was still fairly new to both of them, and Michael was blown away. He even saw Keiko performing in a show back in the day. Because he'd had some acting experience, once there was an opening, he auditioned. But they told him he was too young. Eventually, they had an actor call in sick and asked Michael to sub. And so he stepped in.
It was 1988, and Michael toured with SF Mime Troupe. And he and his wife have been with them ever since.
Check tomorrow for Part 3, when Keiko and Michael will share the history and legacy of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
Keiko Shimosato Carreiro was born in the Bay Area … the Boston Bay Area.
In Part 1 of this episode, meet Keiko. Today, she's a longtime member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe collective. But her story goes back to her parents' migration to the US from Japan after World War II.
Keiko's dad got a Fulbright scholarship to come to this country. He studied medicine. Her mom came to visit the US for one year, but in that time, met Keiko's dad at a Japan Society picnic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two weeks after they met, her dad proposed, and roughly a year later, they had their first child—Keiko, named thusly because she was conceived on Cape Cod.
Because her dad was doing his residency in Boston, Keiko was born in Cambridge, just across the Charles River. She spent the first 15 years of her life in the Boston area, frequently going to protests of the war in Vietnam with her parents. Keiko also attended "Burn Your Bra" rallies in Harvard Square.
Her family comprised the only Asians in Lexington, where they lived. Keiko and her sister were the only Japanese school kids in the district. Perhaps because of that dubious distinction, reporters approached Keiko when she was very young to ask her what she thought of the US war in Vietnam.
On the other hand, there were white Americans who welcomed Keiko and her family. Her mom had a sponsor, an American woman who had been a journalist in Japan during WWII. And her dad came here on a Fulbright scholarship, after all. Both had plans to return to their home country, but meeting and considering that Japan was still something of a war-torn country, they decided to settle in Massachusetts. Before they knew it, they had three daughters.
We shift the conversation to talk about Keiko and her sisters and their sibling relationships. Keiko sees the demands from her parents on her, as the oldest child, being the highest. Going younger in age among her sisters, the demands lessen. I know this all too well, being the youngest of three boys myself.
Keiko and her youngest sister didn't get along when they were young. Maybe it was the seven-year gap in age. But through the experience of Keiko caring for her aging and dying parents, and then losing their middle sister after their parents' passing, the two became and remain close as adults.
Midway through her time in high school, Keiko's dad moved his family from the Boston area to Iowa. There was a job opportunity there, but the main reason to leave went back to racism. Her dad didn't feel that he was appreciated at the Boston area hospital where he worked.
Going from afternoons in Harvard Square to her parents' new house amid corn fields and barns was a shock, to put it mildly. Keiko also had to say goodbye to her boyfriend back home, which, at 15, was of course devastating.
In her new city, the only place Keiko felt comfortable and welcomed was in high school band. She'd been playing flute for some time and wanted to go on to study music in college.
There were no Asian grocery stores in Iowa City at the time. Keiko's parents helped to open the first of those. Later, folks from Vietnam, Korea, and some Southeast Asian countries arrived. And when they got there, there were food shopping options available to them.
Keiko graduated high school a year early and went to the University of Iowa. Fueled by a desire to escape a cruel world in school, she also started taking college-level courses before graduating high school. The university gave Keiko a full music scholarship to study there, in fact.
For fun, she took an acting class amid her music studies at UI. That acting class flipped a switch for Keiko. It felt more like what she wanted to do, more than music did. Eventually, she changed her major to interdisciplinary arts, which freed her up to take classes like dance and creative writing.
I take us on a sidebar here, mentioning that I believe it's more important to find something you enjoy doing than it is being quote/unquote good at it.
Then Keiko shares the story of how she transported herself from the corn fields of Iowa to the best city in the world—San Francisco.
It involves a theater company in Canada. Keiko had married her clown teacher while still in college. He was Canadian, and the theater company called for him. But he wasn't home and so they asked about her. They told her they didn't like to separate couples, so they invited both of them to join.
Keiko and her now-ex met this horse-drawn theater company in the middle of its tour (where else?) in California. For the next year-and-a-half, she and her husband traveled with this theater company doing shows of a political nature, mostly around climate issues.
That caravan stage company ended up staying in the Bay Area. For Keiko, the thought of returning to Iowa to finish her master's program, especially in the winter, was not attractive at all. She got a job here as an actor in a children's theater company and decided to stay in The City. In 1986, the San Francisco Mime Troupe held auditions for The Dragon Lady's Revenge. Keiko tried out and joined the collective that year.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of our SF Mime Troupe episode. In it, you'll meet Keiko's friend and fellow collective member Michael Gene Sullivan.
We recorded this podcast at the SF Mime Troupe studio in the The Mission in June 2026.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. While in college at Marymount, Theo ran the Boys and Girls Club program with Phillip Redd. He liked the connections and impact he had made in SoCal, and wondered whether he could do the same at home. This was back when Barack Obama was first running for president, and there was a prevailing sense of hope and possibility pervading life for a lot of folks.
And so Theo moved back home. He transferred to Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont after his sophomore year, and got a degree there three years later. Upon his arrival in The City and concurrent with his time in college in The Bay, he got involved in SF politics serving on commissions and boards. It helped him really dig in to living here.
Then-mayor Newsom appointed Theo to the Youth Commission. He had done yet another documentary in high school, this time on homelessness in The City. That got the mayor's attention. "The Homeless Orchestra" compared the crisis of the unhoused population to the inner workings of an orchestra. The mayor took that doc to Davos, Switzerland, and showed it at the World Economic Forum there. Young Theo talked with folks like Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez for his movie.
He lived near his transfer college, Notre Dame de Namur, in Belmont on the Peninsula. After class, he'd hurry back to San Francisco for Youth Commission meetings. He also sat on the Southeast Community Facility (SCF) Commission. Theo and I go on a sidebar here about how we use the tools at our disposal—tech, government—for better and for worse.
From his place on the SCF Commission, Theo joined the commission on community investment and infrastructure. They oversaw the development of Hunter's Point Shipyard, Mission Bay, the Transbay Terminal, as well as a few other spots around The City. They worked on housing in those areas and approved 3,000 units, one-third of which were affordable and 250 that were set aside for formerly houseless families.
Theo, his mom, and his brother had moved to Third and Newcomb, near the opera house where we recorded. With that move, Theo saw BVOH as a community fixture. The opera house has been there since 1888 (which we learned in our episode with them). Theo took classes there when he was a kid. Around 2010, he walked in and asked how he could get involved. He joined the board and took over years later as interim executive director after a shakeup.
In his tenure as interim ED, he helped get a $250K grant for lighting and sound. They were able to give grants to artists and they launched their SF Sounds series: an artist is actually on the floor with eventgoers for those events.
I ask Theo about friend of this show Allegra Madsen and her time at BVOH. After stating the obvious, that Allegra is awesome, Theo says that the opera house wants to bring back Frameline and other film fests. "You shouldn't have to leave your neighborhood to catch a film," he says.
We also talk about the Hey, Auntie! gumbo contest, which I helped judge, back in 2025 and which took place at the Bayview Opera house.
Then we talk about Theo's run for D10 supervisor. The campaign's premise: We can do better in the Southeast. He ran back in 2018, but he's running again because of the potential he sees for the area to dictate the kind of community it wants to become. San Francisco obviously has equitable differences among different parts of our city. Theo cites better transit, housing, and support for small businesses among the most important issues he wants to tackle.
Visit his website for more info: https://www.theoellington.com/.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Today, Theo Ellington is the secretary at the Ruth Williams Opera House. This born-and-raised San Franciscan is also running to be the next D10 supervisor.
In Part 1 of this episode, meet Theo. His maternal grandfather, Clifton Weeks, came to SF because his sister, Marie Weeks (Theo's great-aunt), had come here. Clifton and his sister had grown up in rural Natchez, Mississippi, but they came out West during the Great Migration. Their first landing spot was The Fillmore.
Clifton found work as a laborer, where he helped build roads and bridges. He also did a little work at the shipyard back when it was still in The City. He had three daughters and made enough money to be able to buy a house in Bayview. Theo grew up in that house with his aunts and cousins.
Theo's dad, Grant Ellington, a veteran, came here from Cleveland as an adult. While Theo isn't 100 percent sure what the story is, his parents say that they met at a party … in the Eighties, no less. Grant was a big dude, 6'5", and he commanded a presence.
Grant would come by the house, Theo says, and seemed overly concerned with whether his son had a girlfriend. Theo would get that question as young as 6. His dad passed away when Theo was in high school.
Theo has two brothers—one older and one younger. He was the third-youngest among the 10 cousins living in his house at Third and Palou. They grew up pre-internet, and so, like a lot of us, went out and made up their own games. He and his cousins and their friends would stay out until the streetlights came on. Theo goes an aside about one of the games they invented—"baserunner." They rode bikes and skateboards, as well.
He was born in 1988 and went to a lot of school all in The Bayview. Because he's born-and-raised, I ask Theo to rattle off the schools he attended: Charles Drew Elementary, afterschool at Leola Havard, and Gloria R. Davis Middle School, where he helped make a documentary on a grant from Salesforce about the 24-Divisadero called Bus 24 "The Diversity Bus." It's very much worth watching.
That experience really helped to shape Theo's perspective. He started to see his neighborhood, The Bayview, in a different light. And he saw the rest of The City. It sparked a curiosity in him—why was his own hood living in such poverty while other parts of SF thrived?
Theo was in the top of his class at Davis Middle School. He began high school at Sacred Heart, and suddenly found himself at the bottom of his class. Drawing from his experience making the Muni documentary, for his junior year, he transferred to School of the Arts (SOTA), where he could focus less on academics and more on filmmaking and documentaries.
When he was a kid, Theo had done some acting with American Conservatory Theater (ACT) and WB TV, back when they had a studio in The Bayview. He spent two years in SoCal at Marymount College. One aspect he appreciated as a young freshman was the townhouse dorms, which felt less like typical college dorms and more like adult homes. The move served two goals—go to college, but also, pursue his dream of working in the film industry.
While at Marymount, Theo worked at the local Boys and Girls Club, where he and others helped young boys who lacked role models. The experience allowed him to see how life in Southern California was different than life in his hometown.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Theo Ellington's story.
We recorded this podcast at the Bayview Opera House in Bayview in November 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I chat with Frameline50 Associate Director of Programs Kate Bove about this year's historic 50th annual LGBTQIA+ film festival, which runs June 17–27.
For more information, including this year's program and to buy tickets, please visit frameline.org. Follow Frameline on Instagram @framelinefest.
We recorded this podcast at the Frameline office in South of Market in June 2026.
Painter George, aka George Harry Crampton-Glassanos, is fine if you wanna call him just "George."
In this episode, meet and get to know George. Both of his parents came to San Francisco early in their lives. His mom hails from the East Coast and her family were all working-class folks. His grandpa was a business agent for a machinist's union in Massachusetts. That grandfather shaped George's later involvement in organized labor. (Today, he's a member of the ILWU).
George never knew this grandparent who had an outsize impression on him. He died shortly after George was born. But in Massachusetts, in addition to his union involvement, he owned a store that sold records on one half and hats on the other.
His dad moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to attend school at the Art Institute (RIP). He got into that school and often slept overnight on a ledge on campus.
Both of George's parents were punk rockers in SF in the late-Seventies. Amazing. His dad even lived with the guitarist from The Avengers (Penelope Houston's punk band). Though they would meet later, both spent time at the famed Mabuhay Gardens back in the day.
George's dad was a painter as well, and that turned out to have a huge influence on George. His parents met when his mom got a job with his dad's construction working crew. This was around the mid-Eighties. George came along in 1989. After that, his parents had two more boys, making George the oldest of three.
His earliest memories are from around the mid-Nineties in The Mission. George spent time when he was a kid running around The Mission and pre-gentrification Dogpatch with his dad. They lived on 18th between San Carlos and Lexington (or, zooming out a bit, between Mission and Valencia). That's two blocks from where I lived from 2003 to 2017, incidentally.
But George's family got evicted from that apartment on 18th. The building sold and the new owners evicted tenants one by one, including families like George's. Both of his brothers were born in that apartment. His dad had made modifications there, handyman that he was. And George was old enough to remember all the awesome neighbors they had.
I ask George about his favorite restaurants when he was a kid. "I fuckin' ate burritos every night of the week," he answers. He'd hit up nearby La Cumbre or El Buen Sabor around 300 times a year. Whiz Burger also figured big in George's childhood diet. There was a diner across 16th from The Roxie called Aunt Mary's (George shows me a coin purse from the place while we're recording) that he loved as well.
Art was always encouraged at home. George's dad would bring home boxes of fax paper for him to draw on with ballpoint pens. He'd draw and draw and draw, often of things he saw. He remembers staring out the window of their place on 18th and watching cars go by, and he'd draw those. But it wasn't until high school at School of the Arts that George really started cranking it out.
At SOTA, teachers encouraged George to draw whatever the hell he wanted to. He remembers drawing a skeleton pushing a paleta cart. When George tells me he attended SOTA 2004–2008, I mention that a number of past guests of this show went there around that time. "[The school] churned out a lot of us," he says. Joe Talbot, who co-wrote, produced, and directed The Last Black Man in San Francisco, went to SOTA in that era.
George goes on a sidebar to share a story of getting caught smoking pot by a SOTA vice principal. I ask him to rattle off the SF schools he went to, and George obliges. Waldorf in The Mission for Kindergarten, then a Waldorf school in Pac Heights through eighth grade. They wanted him to attend their high school, but he chose SOTA instead.
The Waldorf schools also encouraged art, which George appreciated. The social dynamics could be strange, though. You'd have kids like him who got into that school thanks to financial aid being classmates with kids who lived in mansions. After eighth grade, he needed a change.
After he graduated from School of the Arts, George took some classes at City College. He'd been working summers painting houses for his dad, and eventually, college tailed off so he could work more.
It also gave George more time for his artistic painting. This was about 20 years ago, and since then, he's been painting murals, hanging out with graffiti painters, doing work on Clarion Alley, and working with Precita Eyes to paint various houses and walls in The Mission.
I ask whether George's art has evolved over the years. After thinking it over, he talks about the influence of cars and his mom and dad's comic book collections. He loved his mom's underground comics collections, and talks about going down to 23rd Street with them to Scott's Comics and Cards and SF Comic Book Co. next door.
George points to artists like Spain Rodriguez, R. Crumb, and the Hernandez Brothers as having shaped his art from a young age. He'd go to Avalon on Mission for iron-on old English letters to have put on hats. The cholo influence of his neighborhood was seeping in, and George ran with it. The gumball machines on Mission with their foil stickers also played a part.
He'd take those stickers home, many with images of cars on them, and draw from them. And of course the cars cruising Mission Street caught his artistic eye. George also touches on some of the violence he witnessed in The Mission in the Nineties, when he was a kid.
George and his friends got around on skateboards, beater bikes, and Muni. He's quick to point out how, back in the day, you could take the 26-Valencia if you wanted to avoid potential trouble on the 14-Mission.
I ask whether George got into any trouble himself. He says mostly harmless stuff like shoplifting. That was before his aforementioned time at School of the Arts.
George has mixed feelings about the art scene, and I get it. He's had his art in shows, but prefers bookstores or community-oriented spaces vs. white-walled galleries. He doesn't feel like the audience that goes to those spaces is his.
When he talks about painting at home after a long day at work, I ask George to talk about that work. He's currently part of a crew painting the new container cranes in the Port of Oakland. The ILWU is assembling the cranes and George and others use marine enamels to make the cranes look good.
We end the podcast with how you can find George and his art. "You can find me on 24th Street," he says. No website. He's on Instagram at @paintergeorge415.
We recorded this podcast at George's home in South San Francisco in April 2026.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
Listen in as I chat with Circus Bella founder and performer Abigail Munn.
If you enjoy this podcast, you might also like the episode we did on Club Fugazi and Dear San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Abigail's home in the Mission in May 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I chat with past guest Connie Chan about her run for US Congress. To learn more about Connie and her vision of representing San Francisco in DC, head to her website, ConnieChanSF.com.
Please consider this episode an endorsement of Connie's campaign. And please vote, by May 26 (today) if you're mailing in your ballot, or on June 2 if you're voting in person.
One of the most important ways to both advance our goals of a more just and inclusive society and to beat back billionaire/tech fascism is to vote. It's a privilege, and it matters.
We recorded this podcast at Connie Chan for Congress HQ on Cathedral Hill in April 2026.
Ed. note: Please be advised that there's some very heavy subject matter discussed in this episode.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Jenny left San Francisco for college, heading east to go to school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Part of it was wanting a change of scenery. As she says, she "wanted to see snow." But all it took was a few winters before she realized how good the weather in SF is. She also wanted to return to help take care of her mom, who was getting older.
This was around the time that Jenny went to China and came back determined to spread the untold histories of what happened in her homeland during WWII. The nonprofit learning curve was steep, and it was almost certainly going to mean shifting gears lifestyle-wise, due to not having as much income.
During the first year of Pacific Atrocities Education's life, it was fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts, an SF-based arts nonprofit. Jenny enrolled in and went to as many workshops as she could. She felt generally well-respected and taken care of.
With her nascent nonprofit off and running, Jenny traveled to a part of China she had never been to before—Shanxi—to visit and talk with women who survived the war as so-called comfort women (think "sex slaves"). Jenny goes on a sidebar here to talk about some of the things the Japanese did to women during their occupation of China. It involved the Japanese not wanting their soldiers to pick up STDs while in a foreign country. If they could control the situation, i.e., enslave Chinese women to have sex with their soldiers, they could solve that "problem." So disgusting.
Hearing these women's stories wasn't easy for Jenny. One story involved one of the women being pregnant after the war ended. She went back to live with her mother, who helped her along. When the baby was born, they abandoned it. Just horrible all around. We sidebar, a little, to talk about the ripple effect of wars and how it's not just tanks and bombs and guns and soldiers fighting other soldiers. There are untold numbers of innocent folks caught up in the destruction, folks whose lives are forever upended, if they even survive.
Jenny says that the experience on that trip to China gave her perspective on her own childhood in the Tenderloin. She thought maybe it wasn't so bad after all.
It wasn't only women in China. She went and spoke with women in California's Central Coast area about their own experiences as "comfort women." These were Filipinas who relocated to the US after the war. Most of their families didn't know their stories. And it wasn't until the Obama era that light started to be shone on them and what they'd been through. Obama's administration was the first to recognize them, but it was complicated, to say the least.
Jenny talks about the delicacy of what she set out to do. Specifically, the difficulty of balancing the need to share these stories, but also to be respectful of the lives impacted by them. In addition to the research she was undertaking for Pacific Atrocities Education, Jenny was also writing a book on the topic. She was able to scan documents from the National Archives, documents the US has due to its occupation of Japan following World War II. One of the more alarming things she found in digging through archives was that the United States traded immunity with Japan's Unit 731 scientists, whose work involved developing biological weapons. Yikes.
She goes on to describe other atrocious acts the Japanese undertook in China, stuff so horrible and inhumane I have trouble enumerating it here. I ask Jenny how she handles learning about such terrible stuff. She chalks it up to its being mission-driven work. We chat a little about how the people doing bad things never get held accountable, something true to this day.
That immunity mentioned above was given to the Japanese scientists in exchange for the information contained in their research of biological weapons, naturally. You read that right: The US looked the other way while essentially poaching incredibly deadly weapons from its vanquished enemy.
Please visit pacificatrocities.org to learn more and get involved. Their YouTube channel is called Pacific Front Untold. Follow them on Instagram @pacificatrocitiesedu.
We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Ed. note: We recorded this episode outside on a windy day near The Bay. Apologies for the wind gusts you'll hear throughout.
Jenny Chan found Storied: San Francisco thanks to Toshio from Sad Francisco. Jenny and I kick off her episode talking about Toshio, in fact.
Jenny was born in Hong Kong. Growing up, her dad's mom babysat her a lot. Young Jenny really loved anime and would turn it on at grandma's house. When she did this, her Chinese grandmother would get upset, and Jenny didn't know why. She thought maybe her grandma was senile.
Later in Jenny's life, when her grandmother passed away and she helped clean and organize her home in China, she discovered items her grandma kept that pointed to a life spent under Japanese occupation before and during World War II.
We mentioned anime, but when Jenny was a kid, she just loved Japanese culture all around. She indulged in manga whenever she could save up enough money. As with the anime, her grandma didn't take kindly to these Japanese things in her home.
When she was 10, Jenny's parents split up. She and her older brother then joined their mom and moved to the US. When Jenny remarks that she's not sure how her mom did it, we go on a sidebar. Jenny shares that her mom grew up during the time of the US war in Vietnam, so she's a survivor. I add that, simply, women are amazing.
In US schools, Jenny learned about the Holocaust. She also learned about Pearl Harbor, but like most school-age kids in this country, it was in the context of what got the US into WWII. Japanese colonialism and dominance in east Asia never really came up.
Her family came straight from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 2000. Members of her mom's family had already been here, dating back to the Seventies and Eighties. Jenny and her mom and brother lived in the Tenderloin when they arrived. She saw the dirty streets in that hood and wondered why they traded Hong Kong skyscraper living for this. Her mom told her that for many reasons, including not having to buy school uniforms, life in SF was more affordable.
Jenny's run of schools in The City—Lafayette, Presidio, Washington High.
I ask her if she experienced culture shock moving halfway around the world. She says yes and points to knowing only people from Hong Kong when she lived there. Here, she quickly learned that there are folks from all over China and differences abound. She says also that Chinese people she met in San Francisco or The Bay were stuck in whatever era they moved here during, and that was sometimes startling.
We go on a sidebar here after Jenny asks me about my own move here from Texas in 2000.
Jenny spent a lot of time in the school library, including during lunches. She dedicated herself to learning from an early age. She recognized the hardships her family was going through and saw education as a way to climb out of that. She used her 45-minute Muni commutes from the Tenderloin to school in the Richmond to read and do homework.
Her mom worked in restaurants here in The City. Jenny would go with her mom to places like the bank to do the translation. Jenny was learning about life in the US in real time and for practical reasons.
At my prompting, Jenny and I rap about all the awesome food in the Little Saigon area of the Tenderloin. I share the story of coming home from my trip to Vietnam and eating at Turtle Tower right away because I missed the food of that incredible country.
Jenny lived in the Tenderloin through all her public school days in San Francisco. When her paternal grandmother passed away, she went back to China to clean out her home, as we've mentioned. And that's when Jenny and other members of her family started finding items—military yen, rice-rationing coupons—that pointed to life spent under occupation. Back home, Jenny had found a decent job after college, but was feeling stuck. The revelation of her grandmother's lived experience was a light bulb.
It was around this time that Jenny realized a massive hole in her US education. Why didn't she learn about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, for example? Most of the emphasis was on the war in Europe, with Pearl Harbor and later the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the main subjects of the history of war in the Asian theater. In her own words, Jenny went "into a deep rabbit hole" to learn those untold stories.
Her first stop was the library, where she discovered books like The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang and The Rising Sun by John Toland. The more she learned, the more she sought existing nonprofits she could join forces with to amplify the stories of the Japanese occupation of China. To her dismay, there weren't any.
It was around 2012 or 2013, and Jenny figured that she already knew how to live without much income. And so, she decided to start her own company—a nonprofit dedicated to getting those stories out to the world. Pacific Atrocities Education was born.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Jenny Chan.
We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up right where we left off in Part 1, with Gina's first official address in San Francisco.
In talking about finding a place to live in The City, Gina mentions that all her friends either live in rent-control apartments they've been in forever, or they're able to live in a place that someone in their family bought and has kept in the family. When she tells me where that first apartment in SF was, I let her know that my first place here, back in 2000, was less than a block away. As we're name-dropping hotspots on the block, I have a brain fart and can't remember the name of Cordon Bleu, the rad greasy-spoon Vietnamese joint still there on California near Polk.
From that first apartment, Gina would take Muni to her job over in Potrero Hill. Back then, in the days before smartphones, she'd read on her long, chill Muni rides. She'd come home, make dinner with her roommate, and maybe head out to Polk Street or for karaoke in the hood.
That AmeriCorp VISTA gig lead to a job doing literacy work. At that part-time job, Gina also started doing events. She also ran a non-profit dance company, and was trying her best to make both things work out for her.
We step back to talk about Funkanometry SF, Gina's dance company. It started in LA, moved north, and the founders handed Gina the keys, so to speak. That happened in Gina's senior year at Berkeley. Because the dancers she was directing were older and more experienced, and because she had literally no experience running a non-profit or a business, she went to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy of a book from the "For Dummies" series.
In Gina's time running it, Funkanometry took off. They received invitations to perform internationally, to places like the Philippines, the UK, and Colombia. On the back end, Gina figured out a way to pay herself $600 a month. She felt like she'd made it. Despite all those successes, though, the company didn't make money.
The low-paying, part-time job and non-profit dance company was fun, but it wasn't meant to last. She got hit up on LinkedIn by a recruiter for Google and got an interview. Gina had reservations and talked with her mom about them. Lillian told her to daughter to go and listen to what they have to say, and so that's what Gina did. After the interview, she still didn't know if it was a good fit, but she accepted the offer regardless. She was now a software engineering recruiting coordinator at Google.
To get to work, Gina took the infamous Google bus. As someone from The Bay who already had immense pride in her city, she felt ashamed. The money was good, but standing in line to wait for the hated busses felt bad. When cars or pedestrians passed by while she waited, she wanted to let them know that she wasn't "one of those people," that she's from here and runs a non-profit dance company. It didn't matter. Her internalized shame remained, but she says the job was fun enough to make up for it.
That Google contract job turned into full-time work, and Gina stayed at the company for seven years. During this time, Gina met and started dating a San Franciscan who grew up in the Inner Richmond. They got engaged and Gina moved to that hood. She still worked at Google and now waited for their corporate bus in a chiller area with fewer protests.
Then Gina's family suffered a tragic loss. One of her first cousins died by suicide. She says the experience "broke [her] family open," meaning it obviously hurt them all, but it also brought them closer. It made waiting for the Google bus that much more impossible for Gina, too. She'd moved into a new role at the company and was doing events for them. She decided it was time to branch out on her own and do what she loves.
She was able to go part-time while launching her own events company. She'd tried to quit, but Google asked her to stay on. It ended up serving her well, as it provided some needed income while she undertook all the stuff it takes to start a company from scratch. The first event she produced under her new moniker, Make It Mariko, was Undiscovered SF, which began in 2017 as the first Filipino night market in SOMA.
The first Undiscovered SF was such a success that it inspired Gina to transition Make It Mariko to her full-time work. The stories goes like this: A friend let her know about the nonprofit SOMA Pilipinas. She met with those folks and pitched a launch event. They applied for and received a $5K grant to do the event. A friend was able to wrangle $150K on top of that. That one launch event turned into six events, spaced out one per month.
In 2020, Undiscovered SF went virtual. Gina had her tech background, and they had plenty of time to transition. This allowed them to connect Filipinos across the diaspora, sitting on panels and interacting with one another. And of course, there were DJs from all over.
Prior to the pandemic, in addition to many other kinds of events, Make It Mariko had quite a lot of corporate event-planning business. Since COVID, though, a lot of that went away. Gina decided she wasn't gonna sit around and wait for big events to hire her company. She wanted to build on the success of self-produced events like Undiscovered. The seeds of what became POC Food and Wine were planted.
Gina loves wine. During the pandemic, she got a scholarship to join a wine program where she was able to dive into that world. One of the topics was pairing, and so she was able to take that knowledge and apply it to the POC Food and Wine Festival, pairing POC chefs with specific wines and other beverages. Attendees were encouraged, but not required, to navigate the space and its makers along the lines laid out for them by Gina and her staff. I'll just say: It was one of the best, most unique experiences I've had in my 26 years here in the Bay Area.
We end the episode with me letting Gina know how much I also enjoyed this year's Love Thy City event, which took place in February. It was to celebrate Make It Mariko's 10th anniversary and to establish a relationship with The Foundary space in South of Market. The love (right there in the name) that night was palpable—love of San Francisco, of community, of one another.
All of these events—Undiscovered, POC Food and Wine Festival, Love Thy City—for me show how dedicated Gina and her people are to uplifting real people doing extraordinary things.
Find Gina all over the place, really:
- Brave New Spaces, whose goal is to help creatives eventually own their spaces
- Make It Mariko, her events company
Photography Mason J.
Chances are, you've been to one of Gina Mariko Rosales' events, even if you weren't aware.
In this episode, which kicks off our Asian-American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month programming, meet Gina. Born in Daly City, she's lived most of her life on the Peninsula and in San Francisco. But let's talk about how she got to where she is today.
Gina was born at Seton hospital in Daly City and her parents raised her in Pacifica. In her words, Gina "grew up with a bunch of skaters and surfers." Sounds fun. But she was one of only a few Filipinas in her hometown. She was also shaped from an early age by her time in Catholic school, which she went to beginning with her preschool days.
She also a performer, dancing specifically, but we'll get to that.
Gina is part of the first generation in her family to be born in the US. Her parents, Armando and Lillian, both came to this country from the Philippines for college in Ohio, where they met. Lillian's family moved around the Philippines because her dad was an engineer. Gina's dad is half-Filipino and half-Japanese—his Japanese lineage is from Okinawa.
Lillian came to The States to pursue international law. But life had other plans. She ended up getting married and having kids, and instead did consulting work. In starting to talk more about her dad, Gina goes on a tangent about how, in 2025, she was able to visit both her mom's homeland in the Philippines and her dad's in Okinawa.
Gina's mom was the first in her family to come to the US. Then one of Gina's aunts came. Then slowly, the family starting working on getting more and more members to relocate. Eventually, her grandparents and all her mom's siblings arrived in The Bay. Suddenly, Gina had hella cousins around.
Her mom's family has done quite a job tracing their own lineage. Gina says they've been able to trace the line back six or seven generations. And many living members of that clan get together every couple of years for massive family reunions. Think 250–300 folks. I love that.
Though she's not 100-percent certain, Gina believes that it was jobs that brought her parents the The Bay after they met at college in Ohio. Lillian worked at Levi's and Armando at Charles Schwab. They had their first child, Gina's older brother, out here. That was the early Eighties. Around mid-decade, Gina was born.
Her early memories are of her time in Catholic preschool. Her school was pre-K through eighth grade, so Gina says that once you're labeled by your peers, it sticks. And those students are with you for a minute. Ninth grade provided a chance for Gina to get out of that situation. She "busted out" and attended Sacred Heart here in The City.
She remembers being pretty little and visiting her mom at Levi's in San Francisco. She climbed on and ran around the now-defunct Vaillancourt Fountain. They'd go to Fisherman's Wharf. And they'd visit her grandfather's grave at the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio, followed by trips to Japantown for sushi.
We sidetrack here after Gina talks about how St. Mary's was their church and I mention that it's the "washing machine" and "city titty" church. Gina wasn't familiar with either term and I'll characterize her reaction as, simply, mind blown.
Because her school, Sacred Heart, was nearby, Gina describes the scarce parking available for students and a lottery system they all had to operate under. We go on another sidetrack here to talk about ways to get around DPT's trickery—chalk marks and all that.
At her school, Gina was in the choir and she was a member of the step team. She'd often stay around after a day of school to participate in both groups. She and her friends would frequent 1000 Van Ness movie theater and Venture Frogs, where they'd drink boba and eat popcorn chicken. I remember both spots from my early days in The City, around the year 2000.
Gina says starting at Sacred Heart after doing K–8th in Pacifica was refreshing. She made friends with people who looked like her, finally. She was part of an Asian girl crew, in fact. Most of those girls were also on the step team and so much bonding was happening. So was "parking lot pimpin'," whether it was in San Francisco or Daly City, after school or on the weekends.
She talks about the prevalence of unhoused folks around her school. Sacred Heart would have outreach days where students would make sandwiches to take to those people. Gina looks back fondly on that time.
She and her friends would also hang out in Japantown, taking the bus up Geary or just walking the few blocks down. They also went to hella under-18 parties that had names and themes. There were rave rooms and hip-hop rooms. Gina calls them "the early party days." These were the days before "face the DJ" parties.
For college, Gina went across The Bay to UC Berkeley. That meant moving out of her house in Pacifica for the first time. She lived in a dorm her first year, then moved into a co-op house and eventually into an apartment with friends.
Philosophy and education were Gina's majors. She intended to graduate and become an English teacher. We go on another sidetrack about studying philosophy (something we have in common) before Gina explains how grad school ended up not working out for her.
And we end Part 1 with Gina's story of graduating college in 2008 when the Great Recession hit. Her dreams were dashed and she moved back to Pacifica to live with her parents. She applied for countless jobs and ended up getting into AmeriCorps VISTA, a branch of the larger organization that focuses on alleviating poverty. The program wants its members to experience a level of poverty themselves. It paid just enough for Gina to move to San Francisco.
Check back Thursday to hear Part 2 and the rest of Gina's story.
We recorded this episode in the Brave New Spaces at Make It Mariko in South of Market/SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District in March 2026.
Photography Mason J.
Listen in as I chat with guests at 415 Zine's 415 Day celebration at Madrone last week.
Find the guests of this bonus episode:
Mackenzie C Kirk
- https://www.mck-film.com/
- @m.c.k.film
Carrie Cotini
- https://carrie-cottini.squarespace.com/about
- @carrieann22
Mike Bruno
- https://www.mbrunophoto.com/
- @mbrunophoto
Allison/If n Wendy
- @ifnwhendy
Stephanie
(no online presence)
Spike
- https://madroneartbar.com/
- @michaelspikekrouse
- @madroneartbar
Fredo
- https://www.fonzerelli415.com/
- @fonzerelli415
Laine
- https://www.teatimewithlaine.com/
- @teatimewithlaine
Find 415 Zine on IG @415zine and https://www.415zine.com/.
We recorded this podcast at Madrone Art Bar in April 2026.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Todd has just learned the process of importing automobiles into the US. He had one under his belt. He was ready for more.
He'd learned about older Japanese fire trucks and set his sights. He was still going to Japan frequently, and began to make "car friends" over there. As could be expected, there's quite a subculture around cars in many countries, and Todd had found his in his home away from home.
He found a tiny Japanese fire truck on an auction site, but the going price went out of his range of comfortableness. Normally, he'd need his family's backing to make a move for another automobile. But this time, they were let down that he didn't get the car. And with that, Todd decided to skip auction altogether and instead work with an importer in Sacramento.
We sidebar a little here for Todd to talk about how Japan incentivizes exporting its slightly used cars all over the world. He brings this up to mention that, when shopping for a Japanese car to import, thanks to a robust selling market, you have a good idea of what you're gonna get.
Working with that importer, there was another fire truck that caught Todd's eye at auction, but he let that one go, too. Then that same truck ended up on a Japanese used car site with much better photographs, and together with his importer, they pounced. Kiri had served a tiny mountain village, and despite being 30 years old at the time, had only a couple thousand miles on the odometer. And because it had served as a vital utility vehicle, it had been well-maintained. The asking price was well within Todd's comfort zone. Then began the process of getting Kiri to California, a whole other ballgame.
One snag was that the buying process got underway the first week of March 2020. Yep. The world shutdown and so, Todd thought, did getting his new red fire truck home. But in July that year, the importer called him one day and said, "Your truck is here." Kiri looked pretty much like it looks today—a signature red coat of paint, lights, sirens. But it didn't come with firefighting equipment. Todd supplied that on his own.
Emblazoned on the door of his new fire truck was the name of the Japanese town it had served before retirement—Kirigamine, a mountain town in Nagano prefecture. Todd, who's visited many times since buying the truck, compares the tiny town to Pescadero along the coast. Todd goes on a tangent here to explain why, as he himself learned along the way, Kiri the car is so small.
Then I share my reflection on that time in the world. I got married about a year later (in 2021), and my wedding took place outdoors and in the streets of San Francisco. I remember how happy it made people we passed, and ask whether Kiri, once it hit the streets, had a similar effect. Todd goes into some depth about the serendipity and sense of wonder Kiri evokes when he drives his fire truck around.
Todd says he gets a lot of requests to bring Kiri to birthday parties, but he isn't accepting those at the moment. (He jokes that when you start seeing him at parties, it means he isn't doing too well financially and has turned to his fire truck to help him through tough times.) He will, however, bring the truck to parades and other civic events. He says that since he first rolled Kiri out, it has served as a bridge between Japanese people and the Bay Area. In addition to Japanese and Chinese folks taking delight in seeing Kiri, Todd says that members of our local low rider community have been drawn in as well.
Kiri's flashing red lights work, but Todd is reluctant to use them, mostly because you're not supposed to. He says that in Japan, fire trucks like Kiri use their sirens/PA system to double as public service announcement speakers. To get their PSAs into Kiri's (and other trucks') system, an input jack was fitted. Todd is able to connect his own player through the same input, and has been loading various messages into Kiri's PA system, including what you heard in the intro to Part 1.
Thanks to Todd's partner working in publishing, they've been making Kiri calendars, which they sell to raise money for CalFire. Get yours on Kiri's website, teenytinyfiretruck.com. And follow Kiri @teenytinyfiretruck on Instagram.
There's a little red Japanese fire truck rolling around all over San Francisco. But instead of putting out fires, Kiri the Japanese Fire Truck is spreading joy and inspiring smiles.
In this episode, meet and get to know Todd Lappin, the human being who brought Kiri from Japan to the US—Bernal Heights specifically.
We start with Todd's life story in Part 1. He has lived in the 94110 ZIP code for 34 years. But he's originally from New Jersey. "Even after 34 years, New Jersey is like a stain that doesn't wash out," he says. He grew up in what he calls the "Ohio part" of the state. I call it "the pretty part," meaning not New York City-adjacent.
Todd is a self-described Gen Xer—growing up mostly in the Eighties, latch-key kid, etc. Most of the growing up happened in Hackettstown, NJ, one of the places where M&M's are made. It's not far from the eastern end of I-80, also. NYC was an hour away and Todd spent plenty of time there as a kid. In addition to being born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Todd spent one year in Oakland as a kid when his navy dad got stationed in Alameda.
He's long held a fascination with cars, specifically what are known as "working vehicles." Think of them as cars people use for jobs. He appreciates the aesthetic honesty of such automobiles.
Though it was and still is small, Hackettstown served as a hub for surrounding farmland and even smaller nearby towns. When Todd was in high school, one of those surrounding towns' volunteer fire department sold a Cadillac ambulance for $600. He didn't buy it, and regrets that to this day. It's his "Rosebud," so to speak.
When he was young, he also started getting deep into Asian culture. For Todd, this fascination stemmed from diving more into the US war in Vietnam. He learned about Confucianism. He ended up going to Brown University for college and getting even deeper into Asian history and culture—focusing first on Chinese, then moving onto Japanese.
Todd did a semester abroad in Japan, in fact. He didn't love the school part of his time there, but ended up traveling around the country on his own. Those travels eventually led him into China. After this, he pivoted from studying modern Japan to digging into ancient China, with a specific focus on Daoism. He ended up with a degree in Chinese intellectual history.
Going back to Todd's Bay Area connections, besides that one year in Oakland when he was little, he'd visited with his parents when he was a teenager. When he graduated from Brown, he was dating a woman from here. But it was a high school spring break visit that really cemented it for him—this is where he wanted to be eventually.
For young Todd in the Eighties, San Francisco felt urban in a way that reminded him of his time in NYC. After that, it was the beauty, the thoughtfulness, as he puts it, that hooked him. Six years or so after that spring break visit, Todd put down roots in SF.
The two of us digress to talk in some depth about differences between SF and NYC. One way that Todd characterizes it is: The East Coast anoints. The West Coast creates. I can see what he means.
Todd still loves Providence, RI, where Brown is. But a year after graduating and staying there, that SF "hook" pulled him here. When he landed in early-Nineties Mission (1991), it felt like Providence, so there was a familiarity to his new hometown.
Zine culture was still big at the time, and Todd did a little writing, much of it journalistic. One of those gigs was to edit a book by one of his mentors—Orville Schell, who was once the dean of the UC Berkeley journalism school. Like Todd, Schell studied Chinese history and culture.
So, that was 34 years ago. Todd doesn't think the 94110 has changed, or, as he puts it, hasn't changed enough. The City has grown, but the Mission and Bernal for him are mostly the same. He eventually got a job at and worked for Wired for a while. Years later, he launched Bernalwood, a blog about his neighborhood. This is where Todd's and my worlds first intersected. Todd sees blogs as a natural progression from zines—both have low barriers to entry and so foster a more-independent spirit than established or corporate news orgs. I agree, having been part of the blogging world myself.
At this point, we turn to the topic of this episode—Kiri, the tiny Japanese fire truck. Todd shares that story with us all here.
Going back to his pivot from studying Japanese to studying Chinese culture, Todd says at that point, he felt he was done with Japan. But in 2004, a friend who was going through a divorce mentioned wanting to visit Japan and Todd accompanied him. This trip brought it all back for him. He had enough of the language stored in his brain to be able to function and had a terrific time.
With that flame reignited, Todd has visited Japan "nonstop" since then. On one of those trips, he met someone who'd become something of a "car creator," meaning he was making content around cars and publishing it on YouTube. Todd had been driving Jeeps and SUVs back in the US, automobiles that he'd outfitted to look like company trucks. This is where Telstar Logistics—a fictitious company he created—comes in. But that new friend who made videos about cars introduced him to a Nissan Skyline R32 while he was in Japan. Todd was so taken by the car that he bought and imported one back to California.
Through that importation process, he learned that any car that was 25 years or older could be brought to the US from another country. There were some other California-specific hoops he had to jump through, metaphorically, but he had learned what it took.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 to hear how Todd locked sights on the automobile that became known as Kiri.
We recorded this episode at Pinhole Coffee in Bernal Heights in February 2026.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
For Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Soleil was working in restaurants in Minneapolis, both front-of-house and back, and also starting writing about food around this time.
There was a new food publication in Minneapolis at the time called Heavy Table, and Soleil offered to intern for them. At first, it was a lot of looking around for events for the publication to cover. Eventually, there were opportunities to do some writing, and Soleil pounced. That led to other chances to write, and the proverbial ball was rolling. They were also on food stamps at the time, which doesn't surprise me too much.
Rewinding a bit, Soleil talks about the food blog they had around 2007. It was mostly for recipes, but it was theirs and theirs alone. They looked up to the big food bloggers of the time, people who are still around and still writing about food.
From Minneapolis, Soleil moved to Portland. After they, tried New Orleans with the idea of going to grad school there, but fell back to restaurant work. And then they went to Puerto Vallarta to help their mom open a restaurant there. After Soleil's sister went off to college, their mom had moved to Mexico City. She worked for a restaurant group for a while, then moved to PV to be with friends. Before Soleil arrived in Mexico to help their mom, their mom had opened a bar that later became a restaurant.
During their time in Puerto Vallerta, Soleil was still writing about food, and they did a podcast with friends, too. Racist Sandwich had started in Portland, and Soleil kept it going from Mexico. The show was a reaction to blatant white supremacy in the food and restaurant worlds, a problem that, though it's eased some, is still with us today.
Juggling the many responsibilities that came with being in their mom's restaurant in Mexico, along with podcasting when they could, it all eventually gave way to Soleil deciding to move back to the US to try being a full-time food writer. So they went back to Minneapolis and stayed for about six months. (Honey the dog chimed in here again, and you'll have to use your imagination to guess what she had to say.)
It was 2018, and longtime SF Chronicle food writer Michael Bauer was retiring. Soleil picked up on that from Minnesota and it piqued their interest. The Washington Post was writing about the retirement, and asking folks out here in the Bay Area what they wanted the Chronicle do next. They published a slate of candidates to take over after Bauer, and it included Soleil. Shocked, they applied for the job. They got a phone call shortly after that, and here we are.
Soleil's only prior visit to The Bay came in 2011, when they stayed at their friend's apartment in the Tenderloin for a while. They visited Western Addition a lot, went to Zuni (such a good restaurant, though it's mostly for special occasions for my family), and finally had good coffee at Phil's.
I ask them whether San Francisco and the Bay Area stood out for them among the many, many places they've called home. They cite the history of the place as being quite the magnet. Then we get to the story of the approach Soleil wanted to bring to writing for the Chronicle, which, in their words, was to give more context to the art of food preparation.
After writing on staff for a bit, Soleil got one note from their bosses: They were writing about too many Asian restaurants. We both agree, though: DUH. There are hella Asian restaurants here, and it's part of what a lot of us love about the place. Still, Soleil feels that the paper gave them enough freedom to write about what they wanted to write about.
I share the context of my own life and the world around me back in 2018 when I first learned about Soleil, letting them know that I, among many others I'm sure, welcomed them after such a long tenure of their predecessor. We start talking about doing their work during the pandemic, and they mention that they feel they were predisposed to talking about labor and other social aspects of the restaurant business.
Eventually, though, it was time to move on. One reason they cite for leaving the Chronicle is that they got tired of being so visible. A significant number of readers were hostile to Soleil, and it got to feel like a mismatch. The rightward political drift of the paper didn't sit well either. They left in 2025.
That year, Soleil joined with some friends to launch COYOTE, a worker-owned media outlet. Those friends include: Nuala Bishari, Emma Silvers, Danny Lavery, Rahawa Haile, Estefany Gonzalez, and Cecilia Lei (visit the COYOTE Staff page to learn about a couple other folks who are involved). While still working at The Chronicle and in their off-time, they'd enroll in seminars on what cooperatives are and how to start and run them. They note that existing co-ops are very generous with their years and decades of knowledge, singling out Rainbow Grocery and Oakland's Sustainable Economies Law Center.
COYOTE launched last September. Soleil says it's going well, six months in.
Follow Soleil on IG @soleil_ho. Follow COYOTE Media Collective @coyotemediacollective.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
The story of Soleil Ho starts with their grandparents.
In this episode, meet and get to know the food writer and COYOTE Media Collective member who's been on my radar since they replaced longtime Chronicle food writer and mysterious human Michael Bauer. In Part 1, we dive into Soleil's family story.
It begins two generations back, when their grandparents came to the US from Vietnam in the Seventies. They were refugees from the US war in their homeland. On Soleil's mom side, the grandparents brought Soleil's mom and seven other children from Vũng Tàu to Freeport, Illinois. They had first ended up in a refugee camp in Arkansas. It wasn't easy finding a new home for such a large family, but an older refugee from Nazi Germany who lived in Freeport took them in. Soleil's mom was around 10 years old when she got to Freeport.
Soleil's dad's family comes from Central Vietnam. After the Viet Cong took over, they put his dad (Soleil's paternal grandfather) in a re-education camp, where he remained for around 10 years. After that, he was released and was able to flee his homeland for the US to join his family (also a large one). They also ended up in Illinois, where Soleil's parents eventually met.
The story of how their parents met goes something like this: The Illinois Vietnamese scene was relatively small, and folks mostly knew one another. By Soleil's description, their maternal grandfather was "the guy," meaning he threw parties and made connections. So their parents' families just hung together, sometimes at big parties like at Lunar New Year, and there was always a lot of food.
It was a shotgun wedding, with Soleil present in fetal form. They have a younger sister and their parents are now divorced.
Soleil was born in 1987 in Illinois. Their mom had moved to Chicago to go to school there. Their earliest memories take place in Chicago, in fact. With two young parents working a lot to support their family, Soleil and their sister spent a lot of time with their maternal grandparents. They remember learning to make sandwiches in their grandparents' kitchen.
Another early memory that I find fascinating and a little funny is of Michael Jordan individually wrapped hot dogs. It was Chicagoland in the Nineties, so it makes perfect sense that Bulls merch was everywhere. And that extended to food, remarkably.
There's one memory from preschool involving contraband Gummy Bears. Fun stuff. As Soleil got a little older, they developed a love of vampires. In art classes, when asked to draw hand turkeys or Santas, Soleil would do so, but they would add fangs and bloody teeth.
Fast-forwarding a bit, Soleil says that around the time they went off to college, they realized that the family had moved around 20 times. They moved to New York City when Soleil was eight. Their mom worked in fashion and lived on the east side of Manhattan. From there, they moved to Brooklyn.
When I express awe at living in NYC in the Nineties, Soleil is quick to point out that this was Giuliani's New York. Policies of that administration transformed much of the city, especially Manhattan. We'll just leave it at that.
It was around this time that Soleil started to develop a "taste in food," as they say. Their mom was now a single mom, working a lot, and like many families, they had the drawer full of take-out menus. Through this, Soleil learned about various Chinese cuisines, Indian food, and dishes from many other cultures, all represented right there in the kitchen.
After Brooklyn came a short stint in Long Island before returning to Brooklyn, where Soleil went to high school. They compare that school to Lowell here, where you have to test to get in and "all the smart kids" go.
With a quick, feeble calculation in my head, I ask whether Soleil starting high school around 9/11. They confirm and share their story of that day—suffice to say that they saw the whole thing happen in real time.
I ask whether they're scarred from 9/11. Soleil says that, yes they are, but mostly existentially. Then they pivot to talking about how it brought about an end to illusion about the world, which is a net good thing. But seeing 9/11 in the greater context of conflict around the world really opened their eyes.
(Our second guest that day, Honey, seen in the first photo with Soleil above, took issue with a canine passer-by, which I've left in the recording because duh.)
September 11 led to Soleil's becoming an activist anti-war person, starting in 2003 with Iraq. Rather than being scarred by 9/11, it allowed them to put their own life into context. As a Vietnamese person with a French first name, they started questioning things like: Why was it so easy for the US to go to war after 9/11, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq?
When it came time for college, Soleil says that they wanted to "get as far the fuck away from New York as" they could, which for them meant Iowa and Grinnell College. They chose the school to be closer to their grandparents, who still lived in nearby Illinois, and because Grinnell essentially billed itself as a place for folks to figure it out, so to speak.
By the time Soleil graduated college four years later, the sub-prime crash had happened and the subsequent recession had begun. They worked on a farm, which was hard but helped them better understand food systems. And then they moved to Minneapolis and began working in a restaurant, where we wrap up Part 1.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the rest of Soleil Ho's story, including how they helped found COYOTE Media Collective.
We recorded this episode at Strawberry Creek Park in Berkeley in March 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We're talking about Mission bars, and I share a story about the backroom at Delirium. Rae brings up similar stories of her own at places like Thee Parkside, and we agree that Parkside owner Malia Spanyol is the best. Rae shares a story that confirms it.
She looks back on the years before she got her SSN grateful that Kerrang! allowed her to work. She says and I agree—those jobs don't really exist anymore. The industry itself was misogynistic, but there was also a freedom to the job. They flew her to shows all over the place. And they paid her enough to live in San Francisco.
After Rae recounts a couple of specific incidents of mistreatment she got, we go on a sidebar about the music industry specifically and entertainment industry more generally and how riddled with misogyny they are. Rae managed to get out of music journalism, but it took some time and effort. She says that when folks ask her to write about music nowadays, she recoils.
Then we talk about Rae's new book. I share how it all came to me, and that originally it was supposed to be a bonus episode where we talked "only" about Unsung Heroines. After reading the book, I decided it needed to be a feature about this incredible woman who herself should possibly be in her own book.
Rae says that if she'd stayed in the UK, the history she'd know and would hear about constantly would revolve around royals and their lives and their wars. So she dropped history. But upon moving to San Francisco, she became curious about everything she saw and heard and read. It felt natural that at some point, she'd spend her curiosity and mental energies writing some sort of history or another. We go on a sidebar here about Emperor Norton and what a troublesome character he was.
She was working at KQED writing about pop culture. After about a year, she found herself, as she puts it, "being insufferable in bars to strangers about the fact that women had been written out of history." Writing about history would be a new hat for Rae at KQED, but in 2018, she persuaded her editors to let her write five essays for Women's History Month. The series was a hit.
In 2019, her department, Pop Culture, folded and she moved into KQED Arts. She'd written a couple more essays in the interim, but once in the Arts department, she really picked up the pace. In January 2020, Rae decided to turn the essays into a monthly series, upping the pace. The series had come to be known as "Rebel Girls," a Bikini Kill reference. But that March, all the libraries closed when COVID shutdown hit.
She pivoted to library websites, but then I prompt Rae to shout out all the libraries she frequented to research her book. The SFPL History Center and the California Historical Society stand out. When I ask about women she researched who didn't make it into the book, she points out that the series, which again predates the book, includes essays about 55 women. City Lights Publishing, who put Unsung Heroines out, settled on 35 for their edition. They wanted a digestible book, and for teen readers, they felt they needed to remove women with … let's just say more risqué stories.
I ask Rae to pick three of her favorite essay subjects, and while she's thinking it over, I offer some of my own. I start with Judy Heumann, the disability rights advocate who did so, so much to guarantee the rights of other disabled folks in our country. Rae mentions Judy, whom she'd been researching well before her unfortunate passing in 2023; Ruth Beckford, who figured big in Black Panther history; and Abby Fisher, a formerly enslaved woman who couldn't read or write but, with the help of others, published a cookbook.
We take a slight detour as Rae begins to describe how they went about illustrating Abby Fisher and others, for whom there was no photographic or other visual reference. The Unsung Heroines publisher, City Lights, asked her about imagery, and when Rae told them that it's been difficult for her, she suggested illustrations. But City Lights doesn't do illustrated books and told Rae as much. Then City Lights' publisher struck up a conversation with another swimmer at the pool one day. That other swimmer was Adrienne Simms. Following that talk, the publisher found Adrienne's art, brought it to Rae, and the rest of history. Adrienne illustrated Unsung Heroines.
I ask Rae not who her favorite heroines are, but of the 35, which one or ones she'd want to join us at Vesuvio that day we recorded. Without hesitation (in fact, I believe she says the name before I finish asking), Rae offers Pat Maginnis, an incredible champion and fighter for women's reproductive rights.
Unsung Heroines is available wherever you get books (but please, don't use that one horrible fucking website). City Lights is one obvious choice, but most Bay Area independent bookstores should carry it. If not, ask them to order it for you. More people need to know about and read this book.
Follow Rae on Instagram @rae_alexandra_writing. She's on Threads @rae_alexandra3.
We end with final thoughts from Rae, specifically her feelings about all those ubiquitous dumb fucking AI billboards.
Rae Alexandra has 35 stories to share with you, plus her own.
In this Women's History Month episode, meet and get to know Rae. She recently published a book with City Lights Publishing called Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area. It's of course available at City Lights, but you can also find it at your local independent bookstore.
I read the book and could not put it down. Only toward the end of the 35 essays did I start to recognize the women Rae features. I love history and I love learning and I have mixed feelings about the fact that there are so many rad women whose stories are untold. Thank you, Rae Alexandra, for shining on a light on these incredible women.
These days, she's a staff writer at KQED. But Rae's story starts in Wales in the UK. She grew up in Cardiff, the capital of the country. (I learn in the conversation that Wales is a country. I also learn that "United Kingdom" and "Great Britain" are the same thing. Now, British vs. English we don't touch, for obvious reasons. But I digress …)
Ed. note: I'll describe my conversation with Rae as two Gen Ex journalist types with ADHD (is that redundant?) doing their best to be linear. To me, the meanderings of our talk are totally normal.
Rae says that Wales is delightful and has all the best castles, but that's because of the number times the country has been invaded and conquered. Close to where her mom lives today is a castle that boasts the world's largest crossbow. When I ask when Rae was born (1978), we discover that she's a horse as in Year of the Horse (aka 2026). Cool.
Rae continued to call Cardiff home up through her college years. She didn't go to another school outside of Wales that had accepted her because she was attached to a group of skateboarders in her hometown. After she graduated, though, she moved to London.
Music has been central for Rae as far back as she remembers (same). She shares stories of being maybe 5 and listening to the Top 40 with her cassette recorder ready to nab her favorite songs (same).
According to Rae, the English look down on the Welsh, and have for some time, based on classist generalizations. Wales is where the UK mines most of its coal. London-types consider their neighbors to the southwest feral, and in some regards, the Welsh are, she says.
In the Eighties, she remembers stories about IRA bombings appearing on the news nightly. Also, in Wales, miners went on strike and everyone knew about it. Rae says that Wales in the Eighties was essentially like listening to The Clash.
We go on a sidebar about siblings, birth order, and what it means to be the youngest, which Rae and I both are. Growing up, she was close with both her older sisters. Today, one lives in Australia and the other lives in the London suburbs.
Around age 10, Rae discovered metal. By 12, she decided that she would become a music journalist. In her teen years, she "snuck" her writing into local and college newspapers. The music journalism she consumed in those days included publications like Smash Hits, Kerrang!, NME, and Melody Maker. In fact, her first job out of college was at Kerrang!
We go on a sidebar on the whole idea of living somewhere vs. visiting, and how they're so totally different on every level. I use Chicago, where I lived for a full six months in the Nineties, as my example. Rae offers up a stay in Brooklyn as hers.
That job at Kerrang! is what brought Rae to London, another place she found impossible to live. I ask her to expound on what it was about the place, and she indulges me. She says that you have to be obscenely wealthy to live in Central London, so most folks are forced to the outskirts. But the jobs are in the middle of town, and so you end up spending around two or three hours a day commuting underground.
It was/is also gray—the weather, the architecture—and the people in London were, as Rae describes it, hostile. When she goes into detail about the ways in which they were hostile, we agree that only you get to shit on your own hometown. People who aren't from there aren't allowed. It's a rule. Look it up.
After a year working for the magazine in London, Rae met a guy from San Francisco. She'd been to The City and even spent significant time here working for Maximum Rock 'n' Roll. (At this point in the recording, I mistakenly call the BBQ place near Hayes and Divisadero until sometime in the early 2000s "Brothers." It was in fact called Brother in-law's. My apologies.)
She moved in with that guy she met, lived with him for six months in London, and then it was time for him to come home to SF. He asked her if she wanted to join him and she accepted. She had already transitioned to freelance writing for the magazine, because office life didn't suit her, so work wasn't so much a problem. But upon arrival, she soon discovered how difficult it was to do anything without a Social Security number.
That added an extra layer to moving here. But it wasn't the place itself or its people that made things hard. It was the system, so to speak. Also, while she was getting settled and learning how to survive in the US without an SSN, she started to see that the guy was, let's just say, not for her. She felt he'd been playing the long game when they lived together in London, but once back on his home turf, some of his sociopath tendencies emerged.
It was 2002 and she lived in Bernal Heights on Cortland. She spent most of her time in the Mission, just down the hill. After a short time, the guy convinced her that they needed to get married, so they moved back to London. The marriage lasted three months, and Rae returned to her new home—San Francisco.
When she came back, she experienced a stretch of housing instability. You could call it "couch surfing," but either way, it was dicey. Six months or so later, things settled. It was easier to live cheaply in the early 2000s, also. A $5 burrito could be a whole day's worth of food. And Rae had befriended enough bartenders that she rarely paid full-price for booze. She describes "The Blackout Triangle" of Killowatt, Delirium, and Dr. Bombay's. She also regularly visited Beauty Bar until that place went downhill.
Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Rae Alexandra.
We recorded this episode at Vesuvio in North Beach in February 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Part 3 picks up right where we left off in Part 2. While she was still working that real estate job, Sonia was treating dating like a part-time job. She signed up on several dating sites (this was before swipe apps like Bumble). She went on many awkward coffee dates. Then a friend introduced her to a guy, and the two hit it off right away. They were inseparable from the moment they met, in 2008. They moved in a couple months later. In 2010, they got married, and had a kid shortly after that. But in the middle of all this amazing life shit, Sonia was smacked with a breast cancer diagnosis. She was 38.
Sonia had never necessarily wanted to be a mom. She was always happy for friends when they started having kids, but figured it just wasn't in her stars because she wanted a different kind of life. But her new partner and eventual husband told her it was a deal-breaker, and she figured, Why not? They moved from Dogpatch to Glen Park around this time, because they wanted to raise their kid in The City but needed more space to do that, and the options weren't great. Their son was born and they began raising him, eventually getting him into SF public schools.
When the kid was about two-and-a-half, Sonia and her husband started to wonder whether he was on the autism spectrum. A positive diagnosis was made eventually. Sonia praises The City and its programs for kids with special needs. And, like some kids on the spectrum, he's obsessed with public transportation, so he's in the right place. (If you listen all the way through to the end of this episode, you'll hear his recording of a BART announcement.)
Like most of us, the pandemic did a number on Sonia's little family. Their version went like this: The marriage did not survive.
Ed note: We had Sonia and her then-husband on for our Valentine's 2019 episode. After the break-up, at Sonia's request, we took that episode down.
She says that before the pandemic, she imagined that the relationship was as good as it gets. In hindsight, she thinks maybe her second breast cancer diagnosis, after her son was born, broke her husband. Up to that point, he'd been a great partner and excellent dad and solid caretaker for his wife through her first bout. The second diagnosis, coupled with a worldwide pandemic, inspired him to do not great things. Sonia tried to save the marriage, but some of her girlfriends took her down to the Madonna Inn and, as she puts it, "shook the shit out of" her.
Her new reality meant figuring out what to do every other weekend when she didn't have her son. It was a lot of going to movies solo and doing 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles while listening to podcasts. The road to healing involved early stints on dating apps, but usually only to wake up the next morning and immediately pull back. She's really learned to love her alone time.
We rewind back to 2015 to talk about the origins of a big part of Sonia's life today—podcasting. She and her now-ex-husband launched Old Movies, New Beer, a show where they'd drink a beer that was new to them while chatting about some film from the past. She enjoyed it, but he fell off quickly. A friend from her movie theater days hit her up to do a show about movies, and so Dorking Out was born. It also didn't last long, but in that time, Sonia started discovering podcasts she liked. There was F This Movie and Book vs. Movie. One of the Book vs. Movie hosts was Margo Donahue, and Sonia was a fan. She reached out and the two started following each other. The love was mutual.
Dorking Out had Margo on as a guest and she and Sonia gelled so well, her co-host essentially became a third wheel. When he left for unrelated reasons, she kept having Margo come back on the show. Margo slid in to become the show's new co-host. The two became as close as you can living across the continent from each other.
One day, Margo shared an idea she had for a new show. She wanted to call it Seriously, Fuck That Guy. It was amid the Me Too Movement, and they'd talk about whatever piece of shit man they wanted (think: Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein). But every episode would end with someone who's not an asshole. Sonia was in, no question, but she thought maybe they needed a different name. It was early 2017, and What a Creep was born.
Early episode creeps included Lance Armstrong and Newt Gingrich, someone Sonia considers an OG creep. When Sonia and her ex split up, Margo was her main support. They continued doing What a Creep until 2025, when Margo suddenly passed away. They were supposed to record one day last year and Margo didn't show up. Sonia called and texted mutual friends and eventually called NYC police. Sonia had to decide whether to keep What a Creep going. She settled on having rotating guest hosts on (Erin of Bitch Talk Podcast was on recently to talk about Dick Cheney; we're in talks to have me on soon as well, which I'd be stoked to do). She appreciates the community that has developed over the years around the show. She loves it so much that it's what keeps up her presence on Facebook.
I ask Sonia whether there are any San Francisco creeps we might hear more about in the future. She mentions our mayor and our governor while saying that the show leaves space for so-called roads to redemption. I like that. But I also suggest doing episodes on AI or the stupid-ass billboards all over The City.
In contrast to that, we end the episode with Sonia talking about the kind of tech we do want.
We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Sonia's life right after her stint at community college. She left the Bay Area to attend college up north at Chico State. Widely known as a party school (perhaps rightly so?), they also had a reputable journalism department and an award-winning newspaper. This attracted Sonia, of course. But some friends also attended, and that didn't hurt. Once in Chico, Sonia joined said college paper and got a job (where else?) at a movie theater.
It was her first time to move out of her parents' house. She lived with a couple of roommates in Chico. That was one culture shock. Another was that, well, Chico isn't The Bay. And then there's those foothills winters. It also gets hotter in the summer there than it does in Concord.
Sonia wrote for every section of the school paper, and even did some online writing, thanks to Chico State's early adoption of the internet. She even developed a little campus fan base. Sometimes walking around, she'd get shout-outs. There was even a Sonia character in one of the local comic strips.
It was another phase of finding her people. She thinks that because all her roommates in Chico were men, she got really exciting to hang out with young women.
She graduated after three years, in 1996. That Bay Area magnet snatched her back after that, and she moved in with her parents again in Concord. That gave way to an apartment she shared with her sister. Sonia got a job at the Martinez News-Gazette around this time, a three-day-a-week paper where she earned $213 per week. Anywhere she could find free food, she pounced.
At the newspaper, she more or less did it all—cops, local and community news, school board meetings, and, of course, a humor column. I ask Sonia who her humor influences and inspirations are, and she immediately cites George Carlin (this is probably a big part of why we're friends). Her dad loved Carlin, too, and Sonia says the old man also has a wicked sense of humor that rubbed off on her. Another source of jokes was none other than Bugs Bunny. And lastly, Alan Alda's Hawkeye in M•A•S•H is another humor muse.
That newspaper job led to her time at the San Francisco Independent, a paper owned by the Fang family. Sonia did a neighborhood beat on that job, reporting on school board, planning commission, and other community meetings.
We rewind for a minute so Sonia can share early memories and impressions of San Francisco, having grown up across The Bay. When she was a kid, her grandma would take her to see The Nutcracker. She'd visit on other special occasions, but it wasn't until she was an adult that The City really grabbed hold of her heart. There's a hilarious story about showing up to dance at The Palladium wearing a "Ross Perot for President" T-shirt.
Years later, with that job at the Independent, Sonia found herself in San Francisco most days. Though she had to write only three stories, the money was better and the circulation bigger than her previous job in Martinez. The beat was familiar—school board and planning commission meetings. She and her sister had bought a house for themselves in Concord, where they lived with her young niece. Eventually, the paper transferred Sonia to its Burlingame office, but it was to start writing movie reviews. Eventually, she even convinced the Independent to let her write TV show reviews.
When the Fangs bought the San Francisco Examiner, they kept Sonia on to be their TV critic and moved her back to The City, to an office above the Warfield. She'll be the first to admit that when you're getting paid to watch TV, it's not so fun anymore. The paper cut Sonia, but brought her back three weeks later, this time to be the A&E editor.
The Examiner was a slimmed-down, tabloid version of its former self. That's how it was a few years later when, fresh out of journalism school at SF State, I got a job there as a copy editor. I distinctly remember one of my favorite daily tasks was editing Sonia's celebrity gossip column—Scoop, which happened early in my shifts, around 4 p.m. or so. In the episode, I riff about how much I loved reading Scoop every day, even though I've never been good at or cared much for celebrity news. I also let Sonia know that I also appreciated her presence off the page, in the newsroom.
She describes her time at The Examiner as something she loved, but it was also hard. She shares that, after working long days for little pay, she'd go home and play The Sims. Once, around 3 a.m., playing the game, her character was going to a party. And it clicked: Sonia couldn't remember the last time she went to a party. She needed to make some changes, and one was leaving The Examiner.
First up was an HR temp job where her mom worked, in Vallejo. Next was a job writing press releases for a real estate company. Then she found work at a printing company in Oakland called PS Print. (Our lives intersected again around this time, but that's another story.) She helped them create a social media presence. Outside of work, Sonia had a blog (which she still has) called The Sonia Show.
Check back tomorrow for Part 3 with Sonia.
We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
The story of Sonia Mansfield has roots in The Bay.
In this episode, we meet and get to know my friend Sonia. She and I worked together at the Fangs' Examiner back in the mid-2000s, and have been friends since. I loved her presence in the newsroom. I'd often listen to her make us all laugh from her A&E desk across the room. We've been through weddings, births, illness, divorces, and many, many beers together. These days, she hosts the What a Creep podcast, and I'm so glad you get to meet her now.
We begin Part 1 with the story of Sonia's parents. Her dad is from Richmond, California, and her mom is from Concord. Her dad eventually moved to Concord, where he went to Mt. Diablo High and dated a girl who turned out to be Sonia's mom's best friend. After her dad got his heart broken by that friend, Sonia's mom jumped right in. They were high school sweethearts who got married right after graduation, and have been together ever since.
The young couple had their first kid—Sonia—a couple years later, when they were 21. Another girl came around about three years later, followed by a boy five years after that.
Sonia was born and grew up in Concord. She recalls the East Bay town before BART, with plenty of wide-open fields and other undeveloped spaces. She rollerskated a lot (hey, it was the Seventies, after all) at local roller rinks. The Concord Pavilion (now known as Toyota Pavilion at Concord—barf) was where big touring acts played, and Sonia went to her share of concerts there.
Her childhood and early adulthood were, in her words, "so Gen X." She and her siblings and their neighborhood friends ran wild, like feral animals. Anyone from this generation, including me, can relate. Looking back as an adult with a kid now, Sonia figures her parents just wanted them out of the house. What's the worst that could happen?
The only "surveillance" would be: If the family dog, a Dachshund named Oscar, was sitting outside a nearby house, you could bet that Sonia was inside. He got there by chasing his favorite person while she rode her bike. No leash. Why would you?
It was so laissez-faire, in fact, that Sonia says she would walk into strangers' houses. "You're watching cartoons. I like cartoons." Cool. Her sister was always part of her crew, her and other kids from the neighborhood. They also had hella cousins. Sonia's mom is one of eight kids in her family.
We go on a little sidebar about all the crazy, dangerous shit we all did as kids. In Texas, there was a certain kind of injury, where some part of your body scraped across cement or asphalt. We called it "getting skinned," and it hurt like hell. But it was just part of the game.
The conversation turns to Sonia's earliest days loving TV and movies. She's loved them as long as she remembers, thanks to her dad. He used to love going to theaters to watch movies. Now, he prefers seeing them from the comfort of his own home, but it speaks to his love of the medium. And Sonia says she got that from her old man.
Her mom also loves movies, and kept going to theaters longer than her husband. She took her eldest daughter with her almost always. The movies they saw were never age-appropriate, but she got in because she was with her mom. Young Sonia also loved TV Guide, and would read the magazine from front-to-back, word-for-word. She says that before the internet, before Google, her dad would call Sonia and ask her about movies.
The TV was always on, something else I relate to (my parents, both in their mid-eighties, still do this). Sonia was an early MTV adopter. Probably because her parents were younger than most, they liked cool music and Sonia heard a lot of it.
That whole "walk into neighbors' houses, everyone's my friend" ran head-first into seventh grade, when Sonia learned the hard way that it just can't be true. One day, on the bus she rode every day, one kid started teasing her and then got other kids on the bus to join in. And it happened again the next day. And the next. The torture lasted for months. And it wasn't just the bus—the dude kept up the torment in the classroom.
She says that the bullying changed her chemically. She went from open and outgoing to shy and afraid. She started spending more and more time in the school library during lunch. She didn't share her shame with anyone—not friends, not her parents. She internalized it.
Part of turning inward for Sonia meant watching more and more TV. She'd go see movies alone. But it's not like she had zero friends. Sonia found her weirdos, the nerds and theater kids, and kept her circle small.
She got even more into writing during this time in her life. In middle school, she'd write "really shitty short stories." She asked her parents for and they bought her an electric typewriter. In high school, she took a creative writing class and joined the school paper staff, for whom she wrote movie reviews (duh). Siskel and Ebert were huge influences, and she regularly read the Contra Costa Times' A&E section.
When her family would go off on camping/hunting trips and leave Sonia behind because she wasn't into that kinda thing, she'd take the $20 they left her and go rent movies at her local indie video store. She'd browse the aisles and read the backs of every tape. She credits this with why she has so much useless knowledge around movies in her brain all these years later.
After she graduated from high school, Sonia got a job at the local movie theater. And at that job, she started making friends with other movie nerds. Because her coworkers were new in her life and not privy to the BS she put up with in middle and high school, she could start fresh with them. And she was getting attention … from boys.
Some of the folks she met at that theater job and another that followed have remained lifelong friends, in fact. Sonia was really finding herself as a young adult.
We wrap up Part 1 with her decision to stay close to home and go to community college, vs. moving away and going to a four-year school.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2.
We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Toshio talks about those chess players at Powell and Market and other early impressions of The City before they moved here.
Having grown up in Orange County, with its underfunded public transit system, Toshio always wanted to live somewhere that had a subway. Being able to walk was important, too, in contrast with SoCal, where you pretty much need a vehicle to get anywhere. SF and The Bay checked those boxes.
Like Part 1, this episode is rife with sidebars. I guess that's just what happens when you get two people together who both like to talk. The first one in Part 2 is about running any sort of independent media within the larger framework of late-stage capitalism, especially when the content you create is inherently anti-capitalist. You know, light stuff.
I try to get us back to Toshio's story of moving to San Francisco, then I can't help myself—another sidebar, this time about Craigslist, which of course Toshio used to help find a place to live in San Francisco. They were able to get work, as we've mentioned, but finding housing was much harder. Their first two places were in the Mission. They left the first one after only one month, thanks to a fire. Their next spot was at 24th and Bartlett, close to BART. Toshio splinters off to talk about some of the other spots they looked at and open houses they went to. "Oof," they say.
In 2013, they were able to move into a below-market-rate apartment near Civic Center (the very home where we recorded this episode, in fact). Toshio is their own landlord, something I congratulate them on. Sometime after they moved in, they met their boyfriend. They also got exposed to more and more leftist politics in SF during this time. They talk about coming to terms with the fact that the world they want to see will probably not come about in their lifetime. That's a hard pill to swallow, but it's probably best to accept that and then fight like hell to overcome it.
Toshio's light-green living magazine job afforded them the opportunity to write for further left-leaning publications like Truthout. When Al Jazeera opened its US office in The City, they got work there. They've also written for Them and Vice. It all served as background for Toshio to launch their own outlet—Sad Francisco.
We go on a sidebar about the corporate takeover of the news, and how local outlets and indie operations like our own have stepped in to try to fill that void. Toshio mentions some newer publications that they're excited about, including Bay Area Current, The Phoenix Project, and Coyote Media. (Ed. note: Look for an upcoming episode with Coyote Collective founding member Soleil Ho.)
Sad Francisco started (and continues) as an effort to fill the massive gaps left by said corporate media in the Bay Area. Toshio was curious about the podcast medium, and kicked things off reading and riffing on versions of 2,000-word pieces they had already written for traditional media. They mention that we're at a point now where every journalist, no matter the medium or the employer, should probably be diversifying the distribution of their work. I couldn't agree more.
Sidenote: I've been witnessing Toshio's move to self-facing camera reels, with them laying out whatever issue is on their mind, then expounding on it. It's a delivery mechanism I see more and more of, in my limited social media consumption. My wife, Erin (of Bitch Talk Podcast), has begun doing more of these as well, and they seem to resonate with folks. I haven't yet decided whether or when to do them myself for Storied. But I digress …
Toshio feels that in 2026, people are looking for authenticity. They don't care so much if your media product is polished. They're more interested in substance, which would be a gain for society, if true.
When I ask them how folks can find, follow, and support Sad Francisco, Toshio mentions the podcast's Patreon page. Follow them on Instagram @sadfrancis.co. And check out their website, sadfrancis.co. They're also available on most podcast apps and YouTube. Another sidebar here about how much I used to love Twitter (RIP).
We end the episode with my asking Toshio how they do it, how they report so well and so relentlessly on the vast amounts of sketchy shit going down in San Francisco and The Bay. Their answer involves their various journalistic jobs and gigs over the years, and how that work trained them to package up complex ideas and explain incredibly complicated scenarios in a simple, easy-to-understand way. Then Toshio and I indulge in a lovefest for 48Hills.org before wrapping.
Toshio Meronek's parents met at a bar.
In this episode, meet and get to know Toshio. Today, they do Sad Francisco, a really fucking amazing project that reports on and holds truth to power around here. I first became aware of Sad Francisco a few years ago and right away, I was struck by the deep reporting on and understanding of the many complex relationships and goings on in San Francisco and The Bay. And so I sat down with my fellow podcaster to get to know the human behind those efforts.
Toshio's story starts with their parents. That bar where they met was in Los Angeles. Shortly after meeting, the couple moved to Germany, where Toshio's dad had found work at a major German tech company. But after getting pregnant with Toshio, the young couple came back to Southern California—Orange County to be exact, where Toshio was born.
Some of Toshio's earliest memories involve not really digging that infamous SoCal heat. We'll get into this more later in Part 1, but Toshio picked Portland for college in part because of its more temperate, albeit wetter, climate.
Born in 1982, Toshio did most of their growing up in the Nineties. When I ask them what kinds of things they were into as a kid, they immediately say, "zines." Making zines, collecting zines, living and breathing zines. We hop on a short sidebar about Riot Grrrl, a Nineties feminist punk-adjacent movement that seeped into both our lives at different points—mine early in the decade, and Toshio's toward the end of the Nineties.
Riot Grrrl arrived in the typically and generally conservative Orange County later than a lot of other parts of the country and the world. But arrive it did, and it had an outsize impact on Toshio's young life. Zines were huge in that subculture, too. To expound on their interests as a kid, Toshio was generally into media, curious about how others live, and also sci-fi and fantasy (think D&D). Toshio was around 13 or 14 when they started writing their own zines.
Here we go on a sidebar about one of my favorite pet topics—Kinko's (RIP). IYKYK.
Eventually, Toshio eschewed the ubiquitous copy+print shop and had their zines printed on newsprint paper. It was part of a deliberate attempt to appear legitimate, more like "the establishment," something I find fascinating. They wanted people to take them seriously, and that just makes a lot of damn sense.
Music was very much a part of the Riot Grrrl movement Punk rock music to be specific. And Toshio's early publications covered that. In fact, topics ran the gamut from music and politics to culture and community.
We turn to the topic of Toshio's surroundings when they were a teenager. Record stores, zine shops, cafes that also had live music. They dabbled in the SoCal rave scene as well. They settled into the Candy Kids rave subculture and talk a little about that.
There's another short sidebar where we talk about how amazing youth activism is, and how much we always need it.
As much as young Toshio was part of these communities and subcultures, they also describe this time in terms of being a loner. They also experienced a lack of self-confidence, lots of acne, therapy to work through their being Japanese and white, or hafu (another term for "hapa"), being gay. Though Toshio has grown past those struggles, they consider them powerfully formative.
Then came time to relocate and go to college. Besides Portland having more desirable weather, Toshio chose it in part because of the Northwest's grunge legacy. College life started right around 9/11, and they started going to protests. Lots of protests.
College lasted four years, and after that, Toshio stayed behind in Portland. They got work at a magazine covering ecology for K–12 kids. They were also in bands (they play guitar, ish, sing, and play tambourine). "It felt like everybody was in an alt-country band," they say.
And then, in 2006, they left Portland for … San Francisco.
An editing job brought Toshio here. The publication was a so-called "light-green living" outfit, targeted, as it said, to yoga moms who drive their hybrid SUVs to Whole Foods. I ask Toshio if the job was editing words, and then mention that it's been my profession for a long-ass time. And we go on a sidebar about how important the work is. I'll add that everyone (including editors!) needs an editor. Sorry (not sorry), AI.
That leads to yet another sidebar (can you tell we're both podcasters?)—this one from Toshio about the nature of the "yoga mom" publication. They grew disillusioned with their work there, suffice to say.
We end Part 1 with Toshio's early memories of visiting San Francisco, before they moved here. They involve the older men who used to be found daily playing chess off Powell and Market.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Toshio Meronek.
We recorded this episode at Toshio's home at the confluence of The Transgender District, Tenderloin, UN Plaza, and Civic Center in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we hear the story of how Danielle and Sara met and eventually acted on the totally bananas (but shouldn't be) idea of opening a women's sports bar. Sara and her partner had just landed in San Francisco and fell right into a supportive community. Not that they didn't have that back in the UK. But their friends there were starting to settle down and have kids, and that life wasn't for them.
Then we turn to the story of how Danielle and Sara met, on a soccer field, of course. An SF Spikes soccer field to be exact. Danielle was a leader in the queer nonprofit organization at the time, a role she fell into somewhat by accident, but she did manage to make some needed updates. One of those was to bring in more women and non-binary folks. And she considers her time in leadership successful in part because she was able to hand it off and step away.
Shortly after their first meeting came the idea to open a women's sports bar. Danielle had been putting together watch parties for women's sports championship games for a few years. It involved calling around to see what bars would air the game in question. Not easy. Eventually, she mentioned to a friend the idea of opening her own place. Sara overheard this and chimed in, "I wanna do that!" Neither of the two had any experience opening and operating a place like Rikki's. They did both work service jobs when they were younger. But what they did have under their respective belts was important—building community.
Danielle's time with the Spikes also served her well as far as things like budgets and taxes are concerned. The watch parties Danielle had organized became more and more of a thing, and started happening regularly at SF spots like Standard Deviant. In addition to offering space, folks from the brewery helped them with financial stuff. Getting wildly differing advice from various sources helped Sara and Danielle learn more about themselves and the two as a team.
Opening Rikki's around the time that the Golden State Valkyries' inaugural season was starting didn't hurt matters.
Danielle describes Rikki's early days, being at capacity. She'd walk the line of folks outside and let them know the situation. She even offered neighboring bars that might have Valkyries games on. She talks about being struck by the amount of people who stayed there anyway, watched the game on their phones, and eventually made their way into San Francisco's women's sports bar.
We rewind a little to talk about Sara and Danielle's decision to name the bar Rikki's, after Rikki Streicher. Back in the day, Streicher owned lesbian bars such as Maude's and Amelia's. We sidebar to hear some of Sara and Danielle's name ideas that didn't make it. Diva Dribble Dive might be my favorite. But back to Rikki …
They wanted a name that resounded with and was relevant to San Francisco. They went through lists of historic lesbian and women's bars, and kept seeing Rikki's name listed as an owner. They dug deeper on this mysterious character to find that Rikki had a very strong connection to local sports in addition to the bars she ran. She was one of the first sponsors of the Gay Games. The woman part was there. The sports part was there. And the queer part was there. Check, check, check.
Then we go back to opening the bar. They announced the location on New Year's Day 2025 and opening day was … sometime in mid-June. Because they're still in their first year as a business, every holiday or event either is or feels brand-new. And because they got started amid the Valkyries' rise, they're finding new ways to utilize the space. That includes trivia nights, live music and DJs (eventually; it's all being applied for), other theme and game nights, and soon, the Olympics.
We end the episode hearing what surprised Danielle and Sara about opening San Francisco's women's sports bar.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
San Francisco has a women's sports bar!
In this episode, meet Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich. Together, they own and operate Rikki's, a women's sports bar on Market in the Castro. We'll hear from Danielle and Sara about their early lives and how they made their way to San Francisco and became friends. We'll also hear the story of why and how they opened The City's first women's sports bar, as well as the incredible woman they named it for. Most importantly, both Sara and Danielle (and me, Jeff) are Libras 😉.
We start with Danielle. She grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Born in 1990, her earliest memories are mid-Nineties, and she was around 10 when Y2K happened. Soccer was huge in Danielle's life, starting around age 6. She sites the US Women's Team winning the World Cup in 1999 as a profound influence in her life. It was the first time she'd seen women's sports generate that level of excitement, and she was hooked.
She continued playing into her high school years, and says that it was around this time that she started noticing how good some of the other players in her soccer club had gotten. Because Danielle's high school was so large (6,000 or so students), she set her sights on a "big" university. It was between Michigan and Indiana universities, and she choose Indiana, whose state college is in Bloomington.
In her college years, Danielle didn't really play soccer. Instead, dorm life because a central focus. She landed in the Collins Living-Learning Center, which she describes as "a weird, niche, hippie place," and she loved it. There was space for many different kinds of people and activities, including pottery and bicycle racing, something Danielle took up in her time at college. I've never lived in a college dorm, and probably never will. But this place sounds rad.
The dorm also allowed young Danielle a certain freedom she hadn't yet experienced. I'd call it freedom of expression today. Back then, it was the ability to be as weird as she wanted. There would always be someone nearby a little more "out there," no matter what.
After Indiana, Danielle returned to her home state and went to grad school at the University of Michigan. While Ann Arbor, and through friends, she met and started dating someone from San Francisco. After Danielle got laid off from a job in Michigan, she decided to join her long-distance partner and move to The Bay.
It was 2015. June 25 to be exact. We know this because the very next day was when the United States Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the country.
We turn to Danielle's business partner, Sara, to hear her life story and how she got to San Francisco. Sara grew up in Benicia, across The Bay. Her parents met at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. After college, her dad joined the Navy and got stationed in Vallejo, where the young couple moved. Some years later, they settled in nearby Benicia and had five kids. Sara is their youngest.
She's also her parents' only daughter. All her older siblings are boys. She owes getting into "all of the sports" to that fact. Her mom signed Sara up for soccer when she was three. Through some kind of odd accident, her mom also inadvertently became the coach. Sara also played volleyball, basketball, baseball, tennis, golf … she was a jack of all trades, master of none," as she puts it.
But Sara's mom always put her on boys' teams to make her more competitive, or so the thinking went. When her mom tried to put young Sara on a football team, though, she drew a line.
In her high school years, being the only girl on a team came with specific sexist challenges. But for all the jerks who gave her shit, she was able to find boys who were cool, who had her back. She also eventually got a taste of revenge. The coach's son was particularly nasty, but his dad was cool and paired Sara up with the kid for catch before a game. Sara wound up and threw the baseball so hard, the kid cried. We Libras strive for balance.
Sara came to San Francisco regularly as a kid, especially when out of town family visited. Eventually, her oldest brother (16 years older) moved to The City and she came to see him a lot. Another brother moved in with him and they lived in several apartments all over town. Sara shares her earliest memory of visiting SF. She remembers a high-rise penthouse and going to Chinatown.
We end Part 1 with the time Sara left The Bay—to go to college, first in Santa Barbara, then for her last semester in Kent in England.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Sara and Danielle.
We recorded this episode at Rikki's in The Castro in January 2026.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Kathy left her hometown of San Francisco for the first time to go to college at USC. Originally, she wanted to major in science. There was and perhaps still is a prevailing expectation in her culture to go into some sort of lucrative career. Surely, no one would want to go into the food business intentionally, so the trope goes. So Kathy set out to make her parents proud.
Soon enough, though, she realized she doesn't like science, and switched to becoming a business major. She earned a bachelor's in entrepreneurship and operations and soon got a job in the corporate world at the stock brokerage Merrill Lynch. A short time later, not too happy, she moved to Johnson and Johnson, another job that ended up boring her. Despite this, she was getting more and more used to LA and wasn't thinking necessarily of coming back.
Still in her Twenties, the idea of joining her parents at their restaurant started to grow on her, and she took the plunge. She moved back to San Francisco and lived with Lily and Peter for a time. She'd been bringing college friends to her hometown for a while, parading them around to ride cable cars or eat at places like Taddich Grill. They'd explore San Francisco neighborhoods and restaurants with Kathy as their guide. Her friends loved it here. Duh.
Returning home felt good for Kathy. Her husband had lived in Hawaii and Georgia and would sometimes urge to go other places. But Kathy is a city girl, an SF girl. "It's always good to be back."
Her first year back, she worked with Peter and Lily at House of Nanking every day. She aimed to prove to her dad that she was serious about restaurant work. After that year, Kathy went to culinary school. When she graduated, Peter lovingly let her know that three is a crowd at his eatery and asked his daughter what she wanted to do. "I kinda wanna open another restaurant," she told him. He'd resisted opening a second location for House of Nanking. The idea of Kathy branching out, however, offered an opportunity to do a second restaurant, but have it be unique and distinct from his own place.
Because the new joint would be father/daughter (vs. the husband/wife structure at House of Nanking), it provided space for Kathy's dishes, Peter's dishes, and menu items featuring collaborations between the two. The scaffolding was there, and it was solid. But right away, Kathy found herself the victim of outdated stereotypes of what it means to be a chef. Some even felt that the operation was nepotistic, that Kathy was just riding her dad's coattails. They couldn't imagine that she'd because a great chef in her own right. People, amirite?
I ask Kathy whether it's an apt metaphor to say that House of Nanking gave birth to Fang. She agrees. She uses this topic as a springboard to describe physical differences between the two restaurants. House of Nanking feels older, more disheveled, with dim lighting. Fang is newer, cleaner-feeling, brighter. I was sitting there that day at House of Nanking, talking with Kathy, and I couldn't help wonder whether Anthony Bourdain had eaten there. She wasn't sure on the spot that day, but I looked it up. I'm almost certain he did not, but I can't help but believe he eventually would've made it. House of Nanking is just "like that."
Kathy seizes on the opportunity to share celebrities who have been to her parents' restaurant, and tells the story of a recent mention by comedian and writer John Mulaney. She was in London when Mulaney performed in SF. On stage in The City, he mentioned loving House of Nanking and wishing it was open after his show. Kathy made a few phone calls from across the Atlantic and had food delivered to him. The next night, Kathy Griffin basically said the same thing. And Kathy Fang once again came through, having food brought to the comic actor. Griffin let it be known that House of Nanking is on an unofficial "comedy circuit," meaning a group of comedians who share tips about various cities and what to do and eat there.
We start to wind down the conversation by talking about the book that Kathy wrote. Along with her dad, Kathy's new book, The House of Nanking Cookbook, is something that's been in the works for a while. Folks kept asking them to share their recipes, and Peter resisted. But then the show Chef Dynasty: House of Fang came out on Food Network. After her dad saw the show (and he's in it, mind you), he changed his tune. He wanted there to be a record of everything they'd accomplished. Kathy convinced Peter that a book was the best way to do just that.
The book is written in both Peter's and Kathy's voices. So it's got the story of opening and carrying on all those years. But it also has Kathy's perspective, growing up in the restaurant and eventually becoming a chef in her own right. After doing research and seeing a dearth of Chinese-American cookbooks, getting her family's recipes out there became even more important for Kathy.
The House of Nanking Cookbook is available at local bookstores.
House of Nanking, 919 Kearny Street, @houseofnankingsf
Fang restaurant, 660 Howard Street, @fangrestaurantsf
Find more about Kathy on her website, kathyfang.com.
Kathy Fang was born in the Chinese Hospital in Chinatown in San Francisco.
In this episode, meet and get to know Kathy. These days, she's the co-owner (with her dad) and chef at Fang restaurant in South of Market. She's also joined her parents in running their restaurant, the legendary House of Nanking. But her story starts with Lily and Peter (her mom and dad).
We'll get to Lily and Peter's story, of course. But Kathy begins by talking about her unique position being born just up the hill from her parents' restaurant, and essentially growing up at House of Nanking. She sees herself as perfectly positioned not only to continue their story but also to share it widely. This podcast serves exactly that purpose.
Prior to emigrating from China, neither Lily nor Peter had any professional kitchen experience. They came to the United States having been educated and were looking for good jobs and a better life. But they landed and reality hit. They needed money. Besides a lack of funds, there was the language barrier. Getting jobs in Chinatown restaurants proved the path of least resistence.
Time spent behind the scenes in restaurants helped them learn English. Kathy describes her mom as the "risk-taker" of the pair. Lily started noticing that the folks who owned the places they worked in and ate at owned homes, had cars, sent their kids to private schools … that sort of thing. Opening a restuarant was her idea.
After convincing her husband to pivot away from his plan to become a realtor, Lily's dad (Kathy's grandfather) found the location on Kearny Street, almost at Columbus, that became House of Nanking. With no experience running a business, let alone a restaurant, the Fangs opened in 1988.
When they first welcomed diners, Peter was cooking traditional Shanghainese food, something fairly new to San Francisco at the time. Peter saw right away that they needed to make food for more than the 10 or so folks who knew their cuisine. He saw how incredible the locally grown and raised food in Northern California was, and soon sought to incorporate those ingredients into his dishes. One example was replacing the pork in a bun (bao) with fresh zucchinis and peas, to be accompanied by a side of peanut sauce. It was an instant hit.
If Lily is the risk-taker of the couple, Peter is the creative force. From a young age, in a family with four kids total, he was always interested in food. He read cookbooks and watched his mom closely while she made food. She was always one to put her own spin on things, and that carried through to her son many years later.
Though he obviously never fully pursued it, Peter did dabble in real estate. But between that and opening his restaurant, he had little time for administrative work. His young daughter, Kathy, started answering his calls when she was six. She repeated his requested message verbatim, doing her best to sound like an answering machine (remember those?). Kathy is pretty sure he never sold a single house.
Success for House of Nanking wasn't immediate. After some time, Peter realized he needed to pivot away from Shanghainese food. But they needed some luck, too. And they got it when Peter Kaufman, the son of moviemaker Phillip Kaufman, showed up outside the restaurant with the daughter of famed Chinese actress Bai Yang, who lived in Shanghai. The daughter insisted that they try the restaurant because it smelled "like home." Peter Kaufman loved the food Peter Fang had made him so much that he told his dad, who soon came back with food critic Patty Unterman. Unterman's review of House of Nanking appeared in the Sunday paper—the Bible for folks in the days before the internet.
That review appeared next to a column about a little place called French Laundry. Both restaurants got three stars—but their affordability dollar signs were dramatically different. The next day of service at House of Nanking saw the first of its now trademark long lines to get in.
We turn at this point in the conversation to talk about Kathy and her life. From her earliest memories, she recalls just being in her parents' restaurant all the time. It was an exciting time in San Francisco—the late Eighties/early Nineties. Broadway and its liveliness were basically next door. Life was colorful for young Kathy.
She knew her life was atypical. "Sometimes I wish I could (be like the other kids and) go to sleep at a decent time," she says looking back. She sometimes slept in the restaurant. But she also go to eat at North Beach restaurants with her parents after they closed up their own eatery for the night. I ask Kathy to name drop names of places they went—New City (the best Alfredo) and Basta Pasta (veal piccata) stand out.
Kathy didn't do quote-unquote normal kid things until middle school. Up to that point, it was all restaurant, all the time. One notable exception was seeing Chinese movies at the Great Star Theater, another thing kids didn't normally do.
At my prompting, Kathy rattles off the San Francisco schools she went to. It starts with Jefferson Elementary. Then she went to Convent of the Sacred Heart for middle school and high school. Around the time she started middle school, as noted earlier, her life changed. She spent less and less time at the restaurant and more time doing homework. She saw her parents much less in this era, too. But she did get to see her dad when he'd pick her up from school. They'd almost always go eat in Chinatown after that. Those meals formed the foundation of a strong father-daughter relationship for Kathy and Peter.
We end Part 1 with Kathy sharing all the sports she played throughout her school days. In varsity volleyball, playing back row, she had a "killer serve that no one could return."
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Kathy Fang.
We recorded this episode at House of Nanking in Chinatown in December 2025.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
Listen in as I chat with return guest Jacob Rosenberg about his latest book, Epicenter. The photobook beautifully captures the skateboarding scene at the Embarcadero from 1990 to 1993.
The accompanying IRL photo exhibit for Epicenter has been extended through Sunday, Jan. 25, at 201 Jackson St. More info here.
Here's the last episode we did with Jake, all about his previous book, Right Before My Eyes:
- Jacob Rosenberg and the Bay Area Hip-Hop + Skateboarding Scenes of the Nineties
We recorded this podcast over Zoom in December 2025.
Photo of Jovantae Turner by Jacob Rosenberg
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. The "bootcamp" post-college and early career experience Hollis had at Creative Circus was interesting—she found herself seemingly taking it more seriously than many who'd come right out of a four-year program. She also balanced getting engaged and married in this time.
Every year, Hollis's grad school organized portfolio reviews with advertising agencies in either New York or San Francisco. Luckily for all of us, the year it was her turn, Creative Circus took students to The City. Once here, they met folks from big firms, including one that offered her an internship. It was Hollis's first visit to San Francisco.
And on that first time, I have to give her credit here—she went to North Beach, had drinks at Gino and Carlo's and pizza next door at Golden Boy. I may or may not have spent New Year's Day in a similar way last week. Just sayin'. Hollis's takeaway from that first impression? "This is a really beautiful town."
We go on another sidebar at this point about the very San Francisco phenomenon of the sun blinding us (I call it "lasers"), probably because of the hills here, right?
It was 2016. Her husband was working back in Georgia, but she called him up and told about the internship offer, which would last three months. He was in a meeting back East where he learned that his company's West Coast salesperson was about to quit, and he was tapped to take over. The Universe, again, spoke.
The newlywed couple packed up their four-runner and headed west with their stuff and their dog.
Ahead of the drive, which would end in her husband's first visit to SF, Greg's grandma told him he had an aunt in The Bay, in Walnut Creek. Aunt Suzy's house was their landing spot, from which they'd take BART into The City to look for a place of their own. Hollis had a friend from college who keyed her in on the Inner Richmond as a potential place to live. We go on yet another sidebar, this one about how Hollis grows actual vegetables at her Inner Richmond home.
They found a studio on Seventh Avenue and Lake Street and moved in with their dog, Mamut. A couple years later, they moved on up to a one bedroom, where they live to this day.
Hollis's internship got extended six months, which was fortunate. Her husband's job paid a Georgia salary. IYKYK. That internship became a job, and so they were able to stay, something the couple wanted to do. Her husband got a job based here, and it all worked out.
I try my hardest to forget what chronology is and jump ahead, but Hollis brings us back to pre-pandemic times. Her design job was corporate-y, but she enjoyed it nonetheless. She got an animation put up in Times Square in this era. Still, owing to the buttoned-up, corporate nature of the job, she was burning out. The Creative Circus invited her back to talk to students. But yet again, Hollis ended up one-on-one with a recruiter from REI. She respected the company and gave in.
A trip to Seattle, to REI HQ, later, the company offered Hollis a job on their brand team. She wasn't thrilled to be leaving her adopted home in San Francisco, but it was a good opportunity. It was January 2020.
Fast-forward to March that year, and the movers were ready. Jobs were quit. Hollis and Greg had just returned to SF from a backpacking trip when REI told them that the movers were not coming, and that her job would start remotely a couple weeks out. Do y'all remember March 2020? How the lockdown was supposed to last "only" until April 1 (dude)? Yeah, so REI told Hollis that her job would be a little different than what they hired her to do. And then they told her, "Psych! JK. No job for you." (I'm paraphrasing.)
Hollis did what any sane San Franciscan would do. She drove to Baker Beach, screamed at the Pacific Ocean, and came home and made a plan.
She'd had a going-away party already, for fuck's sake. It was brutal. The world was upside-down. And it all turned out to be the kick in the pants she needed. Hollis started her own company.
We then go into the story of the open call for art to adorn San Francisco's "I voted" stickers. The contest had come across her radar, and she filed it away for later. Then a relative sent it to her along with the suggestion that she give it a try. It turns out there were more than 600 applicants (in her estimation). The SF Department of Elections had a panel that narrowed that down to 10. And then it went to The People to decide. I remember all of this vividly. Needless to say, Hollis's design won.
Hollis is also integral to the Clement Street Art Walk, which she runs with Fleetwood's Nico. The next one will be on March 19. Fall this year will see the next Clement Street Art Fair. As of our recording, she didn't have any art shows, but please browse Hollis's website of beautiful work and buy some (and sign up for her newsletter). Follow Hollis on Instagram. Or just walk down Clement Street on any given day and chances are high you'll see her. (I learned as we shot photos after our recording that Hollis designed the newly painted intersection crosswalk lines at Sixth and Clement.)
We end the episode rather uniquely, for this show anyway. Hollis asks me if I have a favorite flower. You'll have to listen to find out. (#dahliatalk)
Photography by Jeff Hunt
We're baaaaaaack! Happy New Year, y'all!
In this first episode of 2026, meet and get to know San Francisco artist Hollis Callas. Hollis first came across my radar a few years ago when she won a contest to design our city's new "I voted" stickers. I soon learned that she's something of an artistic fixture in one of my adopted neighborhoods—The Inner Richmond. So I sat down with her one afternoon in November to learn more about her life.
In Part 1, Hollis, an artist, illustrator, and designer, begins sharing her life story, which started in Atlanta. She grew up in the same Georgia house where her dad was also raised. Her grandpa lived there when Hollis was young, and her parents still live in the house today.
Both of Hollis's parents are creatives. Her mom studied fabric design and textiles and weaves quilts these days. Her dad is a carpenter and "builds everything." Along with her crafty dad, Hollis often found herself making big changes in her house when she was little.
Her parents met when they were both at the University of Georgia, in Athens. When the two moved in together, Hollis's mom was friends with members of the B-52s. That now well-known band played one of its early shows at her parents house, in fact. Hollis met the band when she was a kid, but doesn't really remember it.
After they each graduated college, Hollis's parents moved back to Atlanta to that ancestral home we talked about earlier to take care of her dad's dad, who had fallen ill. First, her older sister was born. And then, in 1987, along came baby Hollis.
Life in Atlanta in the Nineties for Hollis meant lots of time outdoors. There's an acre of land with the house she grew up in, space for lots of trees and a bird sanctuary. It was still a time of latch-key kids, and she was definitely one. Hollis roamed her parents' land, wading in creeks and running through the forest. Her parents eventually got a second home up in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she also spent a lot of time.
Hollis went to public school the whole way. Her mom went back to school to become an elementary school librarian, and her dad taught at her high school what we used to call woodshop and coached the boys cross-country team (Hollis was part of the girls team). Kids at her high school loved Coach Griffith, she says.
Art didn't necessarily "enter" Hollis' life. It was always just there. She answered that dreaded question some adults ask kids of "what do you wanna be when you grow up?" with "an artist or a vet." But then she stared getting good grades in art and didn't do so well in math. The Universe spoke, and Hollis listened.
Sports remained a big part of Hollis's life up to and through college, where she played intramural soccer. There was an art school in a small North Carolina town she'd had her eye on, but she ended up getting a scholarship to stay in-state, and landed at UGA in Athens, where she studied art.
UGA is one of those intense Greek life schools (I relate, having gone to UT Austin), and Hollis found out quickly that it wasn't for her. She found her art school homies right away.
At this point in the recording, Hollis and I go on a sidebar about recurring end-of-semester nightmares.
Hollis graduated from UGA with two degrees—ceramics and art education. She student taught one year and got out in five total. After that, she and her boyfriend (now husband) applied for teaching jobs in Spain. They heard back almost a year later, and found themselves living in Zamora and staying for two years.
We chat about her time in Spain. They had such a good time the first year and got really embedded, making friends, working, learning Spanish, and joining a bicycling group that they decided to double-up and stay one more year. At the end of that run, though, pressures started to mount for them to return to the US.
They came back to Atlanta and Hollis got a job teaching ceramics at a high school. Not even 30 yet herself, she found it difficult to lead a group of kids who weren't that much younger than she was. And they were going through their own hard times.
After one year teaching, when colleges came to recruit the teenagers, The Creative Circus ended up picking Hollis. It was a two-year "bootcamp" type of learning environment, geared toward careers in advertising. But before her two years were up, Hollis got a job in San Francisco.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with artist Hollis Callas.
We recorded this podcast at Hollis's studio inside of Chloe Jackman Photography in The Inner Richmond in November 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as my friend Vandor Hill and I wrap up his second year of Whack Donuts' brick-and-mortar location. This is Vandor's third appearance on Storied: SF. Here are the other two episode's we've done with him:
- Vandor Hill of Whack Donuts
- Whack Donuts' First Anniversary
We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in Embarcadero 4 in December 2025.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up right where we left off in Part 1. Continuing her history of 3117 16th Street, Lex notes that "The Roxie has lived many lifetimes." She describes the Eighties and Nineties as busy times for the theater. They ran a series of Werner Hertzog films in that era. Akira Kurisawa visited for some of his movies. Many local films and film festivals took place at The Roxie. Frameline was set there. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area were becoming something of a cinema mecca.
The aforementioned Roxie Releasing ended up helping the business in times when ticket sales weren't so hot. Even then, the theater went through some really rough patches financially. That persisted into the early 2000s. And then, The New College came along. The Roxie became the school's film center, in fact. Hope emerged … until The New College lost its accreditation and had to shutter.
In 2009, with a still-uncertain future ahead of it, The Roxie officially became a nonprofit, one of the first of its kind. It was a huge turning point for the theater—but it didn't solve all their problems. There were numerous "Save The Roxie" campaigns, and about 10 years ago or so, the Board contemplated closing down for good.
Obviously, that didn't happen. But in 2020, like every person and business on the planet, The Roxie fell victim to the pandemic. Lex walks us through how COVID and the ensuing shutdown impacted the theater. In the years leading up to 2020, the theater was finally thriving again. But they were the first movie theater in San Francisco to shut down, which they did so voluntarily before the mandate. The Roxie stayed shuttered for 434 consecutive days during COVID. In that time, employees sent postcards to Roxie members; they did pop-up drive-in cinemas; they did "Virtual Roxie," in which the theater curated movies folks could watch from home; and they held online panel discussions with filmmakers.
Once they felt it was safe and they reopened The Roxie, it all felt worth the sacrifices. Instantly, the theater was full of people and life and joy. Despite all that, though, financial struggles resumed once again. Eventually, as many businesses were able to do, they got back to full capacity movie screenings.
The conversation shifts to The Roxie's ongoing efforts to buy the building it's situated in. Henry describes the process, which began with a feasibility study. The study came back in the affirmative—they had a real shot at raising the money needed for such a huge endeavor. He describes the current board members as a cohesive bunch. No factions exist and they all are aligned with laser-sharp focus.
The next step was convincing the landlords to sell to them, to prove that the non-profit was capable of raising the kind of money it would take to get the deal done. That took about a year of back-and-forth. But after that process of negotiating with the building's previous owner, they had an asking price. They could then raise money.
The first donations came from Roxie Board members. In fact, within two weeks of launching the capital campaign, every member of the Board had donated. Then many of those Board members began pitching … and pitching … and pitching. This April, the efforts went public, and to great success. The lovefest began.
The goal from the outset was to raise $7 million in three years. As The Roxie approaches the end of the second year of its fundraising (meaning nowadays), it's within striking distance. Because the total amount that they're raising includes money for way overdue maintenance and upgrades, they already have enough for the basic purchase. In fact, the building is already under the ownership of The Roxie Theater nonprofit organization.
Now that the goal is in sight, they're aiming to close 2025 with a final push to make it to $7 million in two years instead of three. And that's where you and I come in. If you or anyone you know would like to help a San Francisco landmark further cement its legacy in our city by buying its building, find more info and make a donation, please visit the Forever Roxie page. For donations of $30 and above, you will receive a Forever Roxie enamel pin. Donations of $60 and above receive the pin and a specially-designed pair of Roxie socks. For a donation of $120 and above, you receive all of the above along with a long-sleeve Roxie tee shirt. Also, from now through December 31, the Walter and Elise Haas fund will match every gift to the campaign.
We end this episode with Lex reminding folks about The Roxie's weekly newsletter, which goes out every Wednesday and is always a delight. Go to roxie.com and click the "newsletter" button at the top-right to sign up.
When you tell friends you're going to see a movie at The Roxie, there's an almost palpable envy that sets in for them.
In this episode, meet Lex Sloan and Henry S. Rosenthal. Lex is The Roxie's executive director and Henry is on its Board of Directors and the chair of the theater's capital campaign, which we'll get to. In the meantime, if you'd like to help keep a bona fide San Francisco landmark in its rightful home until the end of time (they'd sure love you to, and so would I), donate to the Forever Roxie fund here.
We start with Henry, who lets us know that the "S" in his name stands for Sigmund. Henry was born in Cincinnati and had what he describes as an "idyllic childhood" there. He started going to music shows when he was 13, seeing bands like Iggy and the Stooges and MC5. After graduating from high school, he moved to San Francisco in 1973 to attend school at The New College of California.
He was an early subscriber to Rolling Stone magazine, where he had seen a New College ad. That ad captivated young Henry's imagination. He visited the campus, which was in Sausalito at the time, after a road trip from Ohio to the West Coast. The school tried to get him to enroll right then, but Henry decided to go back home and finish high school first.
Henry produced cable TV shows while in college. In a sense, it's what he's been doing ever since.
When Henry moved to San Francisco, there were still operating movie palaces on Market. Before really making friends here, he'd spend a lot of time inside those theaters. It was the era of movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Enter the Dragon. He says it's difficult to put into words (it is), but San Francisco just grabbed him and never let go.
Then we turn to Lex Sloan. Lex went to college in Bellingham, Washington, at the type of school that allows you to design your own degree, which she did. Lex got a bachelor's in "social change media," which is so on the nose, it tickles. Post-graduation, she went to what she calls "the middle of nowhere, Arizona," but that lasted all of seven or eight months.
Looking for where to land next and being a spreadsheet nerd (like me), Lex made a list. And lo and behold, San Francisco checked the most boxes. She got a job in Redwood City, not knowing that that Peninsula town wasn't exactly The City. No matter—she landed.
The job involved teaching video production at a community center. At first, she stayed in a hostel on Mission Street before finding a place all her own on Craigslist. That was 2005, and Lex hasn't looked back.
We go back to Henry to hear the story of how The Roxie drew him in. Perhaps jokingly, he says he laments not visiting when The Roxie was a porn theater. Henry doesn't recall his actual first visit, but says he's been a regular since first learning about the place.
He knew Bill Banning, who created Roxie Releases, the organization's distribution operation. (Rivers and Tides, the documentary about artist Andy Goldsworthy, is among their releases.) Banning and he were friends for a while. Their kids went to school together. Their lives kept intertwining, including at film festivals. When The Roxie transitioned to a nonprofit and created a board, folks like Bill invited Henry to join it. He politely refused … until the theater was on firmer ground financially. And once it was, he was in.
Henry's goal in joining The Roxie board was singular, he says: To help the organization buy the building where the theater sits.
Lex does remember her first time at The Roxie. After she landed in The City, she sought work on local film crews. She found a crew and their film (Getting Off) premiered at The Roxie during Frameline. Because she was "only" a production assistant, she wasn't comped a ticket. Lex remembers showing up and seeing a rather long and daunting line to get in. But! That line was filled with her people. She calls that screening "magical" and "electrifying."
Over the years, she came back time and again, for one-off movies as well as for film festivals. When Lex worked for Frameline, one of her jobs was carrying film prints into the projection booth at The Roxie and other theaters. Fast-forward to 10 years or so ago, when Lex became operations director at The Roxie.
We then turn to the history of The Roxie, with Lex as our tour guide. The space where the theater sits today was built to be just that—a movie theater. It wasn't converted at any point from something else to become a place where folks watch movies. The folks who run the theater today have discovered and held onto the original blueprints from 1913. Its first name was The Poppy Theater. Then it was The 16th Street. Then The New 16th Street, The Gaiety, The Rex, and finally, in the early 1930s, The Roxie. That oh-so-recognizable marquee came to The Mission from an auto dealership in Oakland aboard a barge that traveled across The Bay.
A lot of the history of The Roxie before the Seventies is not well-known. But, after becoming The Roxie, it was first a German-language cinema (concessions at the time were German candies). Thanks to some projectionist's notes they've found, they know that in the Fifties, it became a variety space of sorts. In the late Sixties/early Seventies, it was an XXX theater, as mentioned in Henry's story earlier. In those days, a turnstile out front kept underage folks and those who didn't pay out (or did it?).
In 1976 or '77, a group of local artists took over. That group changed a lot of things. It became more of an arthouse cinema, as it remains to this day. The folks who ran the place put people before profits. Midnight movies became a thing The Roxie was known for.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Lex and Henry.
We recorded this podcast at The Roxie in The Mission in October 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I join Erin and Ange of Bitch Talk to chat with H.P. Mendoza about all things Mission District. We wax poetic about H.P.'s home hood, spinning yarns about the infamous neighborhoo'd's past, present, and future.
We recorded this podcast at Zeitgeist in (duh) The Mission in November 2025.
Photo by Wally Gobetz
In Part 2, we pick up more or less where we left off in Part 1, hearing the story of how Randall and Al came to love all things neon. Their enthusiasm kicked into high gear when they started noticing neon signs coming down, and they decided to try to do something about it. That something started with documenting the signs. And with that came a bit of a learning curve, especially around photographing artificial lights at night.
Over the next five years, they captured and captured and captured, getting as many extant signs as they could find. Randall had some book design experience under her belt, especially aspects like packaging and getting it to a printer. She also knew how to put a book proposal together, and so they did. But friends and people in the publishing industry warned them that it would difficult to find a publisher. Randall suggested to her partner that they publish the 200-page book themselves, and that's exactly what they did.
They had the photos and the design down. All they needed was money. Kickstarter was still pretty new, and they chose that platform. Within two weeks, they had met and exceeded their goal. It was on. Donations came in from all over The City, the country, and the world. In addition to money to fund publication, Randall and Al were gifted a community of fellow neon enthusiasts. These days, many folks in that community attend symposiums that Al and Randall put on.
I ask the couple to name other towns, besides San Francisco, that have what I'm calling "good neon." They rattle off a few—Denver; Portland, OR; Livingston, MT; Reno; Los Angeles. Randall plugged a site by Debra Jane Seltzer called RoadsideArchitecture.com that documents neon and other signage in all US states except Hawaii and Alaska.
To help design the cover of their book, Randall and Al asked their Instagram followers. A photo of the Verdi Club and its neon won, easily. That venue quickly emerged as the obvious choice for where to host the book's launch party. Around 300 guests showed up that night in 2014.
After launch, they realized they needed ideas to keep the book and The City's neon signage in people's minds. Tours were among the first of those ideas. But that started as a one-off in Chinatown. A few of the guests on that first tour were tube benders—folks who, among other things, bend the glass that goes into making a neon sign. In the end, the students taught the teachers that day. Those tube benders introduced Randall and Al to a guy in Oakland named Jim Rizzo who does neon restoration work at Neon Works. They've been working with Jim ever since.
When I ask if that Chinatown tour in support of their book was what got them started doing tours in general, Randall turns back to The Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD). The group was holding its convention in San Francisco and asked Randall and Al to take visitors on a tour of The City. They learned a lot from that, including how long to hold your tour before folks get tired or hungry. Fast-forward to after their book was published, when folks who bought the book reached out asking if Randall and Al could show them around San Francisco's various noteworthy neon signs. They didn't think they had it in them to do that on a regular basis. But then other San Francisco tour guides signed up wanting to be shown our city's neon. Little by little, those guides taught Randall and Al tools of the trade.
In the beginning, they second-guessed themselves. "We're a photographer and a graphic designer. What are we doing giving tours?" But they soon learned the real value of neon walking tours—the chance to walk around San Francisco at twilight with people from all walks of life. The side hustle was its own reward (something very familiar to me, in my role hosting this podcast).
If you'd like to take one (or all) of Randall and Al's tours, sign up on their website—SFneon.org. You'll also find other books about neon that they've published.
One of those books is all about saving neon. They got in touch with folks they were meeting from all over the country who were doing that work in their own cities. The book is a good resource for anyone who, like Randall and Al in the Mission all those years ago, wants to preserve signs in their area.
So, they published the book, started doing tours, launched an annual conference … but still, they wanted to do more. They talked with folks at SF Heritage, picking their brains for things like how to get grant money for neon sign preservation. They told them to talk with people at The Tenderloin Museum (TLM), and mentioned Katie Conry specifically. When Randall and Al talked with her, Katie just got it, immediately. TLM has been SF Neon's fiscal sponsor ever since. (Ed. note: This podcast was arranged with help with Katie at Tenderloin Museum. Thanks, Katie!)
As you learned on this show back in April of this year, TLM is expanding. Part of that expansion will free up the museum's current space. Once they move all of their exhibits and artifacts into the new space, the current Tenderloin Museum will become a San Francisco neon gallery. Randall and Al are of course a huge part of that work. The first sign donated to the new gallery is from Tony's Cable Car, a spot near and dear to my heart and just blocks from my home.
We end the podcast with Randall reminding folks that this time of year is best for the kinds of tours they do. It gets dark earlier, so there are more hours in the day to see neon signs in their glory, and the hours start around 4:30/5 p.m.
The story of how Randall Ann Homan got her name is a unique one.
In this episode, meet and get to know Randall and her partner, in life and in neon, Al Barna. Today, the couple are all about all things San Francisco neon. But we'll get to that.
When Randall's dad was a teenager, he saved a young girl named Randall from drowning. After saving the little girl, he taught her to swim. Years later, when he had his own daughter, he carried the name forward.
Randall Homan grew up in Goodyear, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. The town was named for the tire company, and it was where, back in the day, the eponymous blimp lived when not in use. Randall has a fun story about being brushed by the Goodyear blimp's ropes when she was a kid.
She considered her hometown "Nowheresville" and left as soon as she could—at 17, after graduating from high school early. Randall came straight to San Francisco to attend Lone Mountain College (the University of San Francisco today). "It was wild," she says about her time in the Seventies in The City.
Art school is what brought both Randall and Al to San Francisco. At her school, there was a dorm where all the art students, including Randall, lived. Views out the window of that dorm were always completely foggy except for one thing—the neon sign at the Bridge Theater on Geary pierced that blanket of gray. It left a strong impression on them both.
Rewinding a bit, Randall says that there was a little neon in her hometown of Goodyear, and she was fascinated by it. She was interested in how it worked, but also was drawn to the beauty of the colored light.
When I ask Randall whether she ever left San Francisco after her initial move here, she rewinds a little bit to talk about how young they both were when she and Al met. "Cupid hit us both square in the heart," she says. But they wanted to see the rest of the country. They both wanted to visit where the other is from (Al came here from Pennsylvania), but they compromised on New Orleans.
They were drawn to NOLA by the music, and they sure did see a lot of that. But getting jobs was a different story. That didn't come easy in "the Big Easy," and so they came back. They've been in their San Francisco apartment for 30-plus years, and they're not going anywhere.
As mentioned, Al comes from Pennsylvania, specifically the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre northeast area of the state. It was coal country, but young Al wanted to pursue art. And so he came to The City to go to the San Francisco Art Institute (RIP). It was 1976, and even though he was in college, Al never intended to stay longer than a year or two. The Beats influenced Al, and though San Francisco figures largely in their history, so does travel.
But he and Randall were here during the so-called Season of the Witch—1978. Randall is quick to point out how much easier it was to move within The City back then, something they did every six months or so for a stretch. I ask them to rattle off the different neighborhoods, and they oblige me: Lower Nob Hill, North Beach, and The Mission figure prominently, among others.
Al goes into a little more detail about how the two met. It was at a going-away party for a mutual friend. For him, that first meeting settled it. Randall was about to go to school in Los Angeles, and Al decided to join her down south.
After a couple years at SFAI, Al left school to work for a film company, where he did a lot more learning. He was taking lots of photos, and it wasn't until Randall pointed out the abundance of neon signs in the backgrounds of his pictures that Al picked up on it.
In addition to LA, they also spent some time in Flagstaff, Arizona, where they both got jobs at a silk screen company. Randall also got a job working for a sign painter whose hands were too shaky for his craft. The work she did painting signs left a big impression on Randall, and you can see it in her love of old neon signs today.
Between the Eighties and early 2000s, they each worked in their respective crafts—photography for Al, and graphic design for Randall. Al worked for several decades for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the parent org for the de Young and Legion of Honor museums). He shares a story of helping prevent a bomb from exploding at the old de Young museum building, just before it was scheduled to be demolished anyway.
Randall's graphic design work had her, among other jobs, designing album covers for bands. She did show posters, logos, and branding—work she still engages in to this day. In the Nineties, she designed the cover page for one of the Bay Guardian Best of The Bay issues.
Eventually, the two decided to create a book all about neon. Putting together that first book—San Francisco Neon: Survivors and Lost Icons—took five years. We'll talk in more depth about that and their other, more recent projects in Part 2.
We end Part 1 with the story of how neon became the central focus of both Al's and Randall's lives. It involved a sign in the Mission that was there one day and gone the next.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Randall and Al.
We recorded this podcast at Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store in North Beach in November 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with that fateful visit Saikat took to The Mission. He and friends worked a lot, but didn't have a lot of money (sound familiar?). To learn The City and have some fun, they signed up for as many walking tours as they could find. After a few months living in Park Merced, Saikat relocated to The Mission—16th and Hoff, specifically. Esta Noche was nearby, and it's where he saw his first drag show.
A buddy worked with Saikat to build a web wireframing tool (think the basics of web design, the skeleton of sites, so to speak). They knew some other folks in tech, naturally, and met the people who were launching Stripe, an e-payments then in startup mode. Stripe eventually hired Saikat and his friend. Saikat was the fledgling company's second engineer. He started to see tech as a force for social good, but that didn't really jell well with the work he did for Stripe. And so he quit a couple years in.
The woman he was dating at the time (whom he later married) still lived in New York, and Saikat visited as often as he could. He didn't yet consider himself political, but he was thinking about issues, specifically income inequality, poverty, and climate change. In early 2015, Bernie Sanders announced his run for president in the 2016 election. Saikat hadn't heard of Sanders at that point, but he was addressing those very issues that had become important to Saikat. He signed up to be a Bernie volunteer and started on a sub-Reddit called "Coders for Sanders." But Saikat wanted "in" in. And so he got in touch with someone working on the campaign.
That someone was Zack Exley, whose political biography runs deep. Exley's job with the Sanders campaign at the time Saikat got in touch was to organize all the volunteers wanting to work for Bernie but who didn't live in the first four primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina). That effort needed tech solutions, which Saikat brought. But they weren't hiring technologists at the time. Still, Exley "snuck" him on as an organizer.
He expected the experience not to be a big deal. He'd work for about a year, maybe learn a thing or two. But the Bernie 2016 campaign had other ideas. "We were on the brink of actually doing these big, structural changes," he says of his time on the campaign.
Coming out of that experience, he and other organizers decided to take what they had learned and start applying it to folks running for Congress, starting with the 2018 midterms. Initially, they called their effort "Brand-New Congress," and the goal was to recruit 400 people nationwide to run for office. They fell far short of that ambition, managing to get around a dozen folks to run. They wanted people from all walks of life, not just lawyers, which Congress was and is made up of primarily. And they got that, just not on the scale they had hoped.
The group became Justice Democrats, which is still in existence today. They didn't have the money to spend heavily on most of their candidates, so they went all-in on someone named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out of The Bronx. Her brother had nominated her as part of Brand-New Congress, and Saikat had gotten to know her through the process. He saw early on what a powerful candidate she was. He moved to NYC to help run AOC's first bid for Congress as a co-campaign manager. She won, of course, and Saikat had a front-row seat for AOC's ascendancy to the national stage. He says she was her authentic self through it all.
Saikat helped start a think tank coming out of the Sanders campaign as well, developing many policy positions and ideas, among them what came to be known as the Green New Deal. It was a policy platform as much as anything else. It called for a renewed and very much intensified effort to combat climate change while also creating and upgrading infrastructure. They approached every candidate running for president in 2020 asking them to sign on to a Green New Deal pledge. They all eventually did. (Biden's "Build Back Better" platform was essentially a version of the Green New Deal.)
Around this same time, Saikat had signed on to be AOC's chief of staff. But Ocasio-Cortez wanted him to be her insider-type guy (I bring up Veep because, well, duh), and Saikat politely refused. He offered to help her staff up and get good people in place instead. By April 2019, having got the Green New Deal launched, so to speak, he let her know that he'd be leaving that summer, around the time his daughter was expected. That September, Saikat moved back to San Francisco.
One of the first things he did was rejoin think tanks and work on filling out gaps in the Green New Deal. The pandemic hit and he dug his heels in on policy. By the time the 2024 election approached, they were ready to hand something to Kamala Harris if she were to win. Obviously, that didn't happen. He believed those who warned that a Trump victory had bad implications for democracy. But then he watched his own rep in DC, Nancy Pelosi, shrug the 2024 loss off in a "You win some, you lose some" way. He launched his campaign for that seat in Congress "by tweet" in February 2025.
Turning from the national to the local, I ask Saikat what San Francisco issues are top of mind for him. He starts with the idea of meeting with and listening to San Franciscans, his would-be constituents: town halls, office hours, mass Zoom meetings … he's already doing a lot of that work. Saikat believes that to begin to effectively address issues at the local level—ICE kidnappings, healthcare, housing, transit—big changes are needed nationally.
The California primary election takes place on June 2, 2026. The candidates who come in first and second place in that election will go on to compete in the Midterm election next November.
To learn more and get involved, head to Saikat's website—saikat.us. Follow the campaign on Instagram and Threads.
The story of Saikat Chakrabarti begins in a time when his parents' and ancestors' country was being torn apart, almost literally.
In this episode, meet and get to know Saikat. These days, he's busy knocking on doors and otherwise hitting the ground in a bid to represent San Francisco in the US Congress. As I write this, just last week, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not run for a 20th term. Timing!
Let's go back to mid-Nineteenth Century India. Because his dad's family is Hindu, they were forced to relocate after Indian/Pakistani partition, fleeing their home country of Bangladesh for Kolkata (Calcutta) in India. Folks had warned Saikat's grandfather, a school teacher, to leave, and they did.
Once in Kolkata, his grandfather opened a school largely for the kids of other refugees living in the area. Owing to the school's success, he was able to secure a one-bedroom apartment for his family of 12—he, his wife (Saikat's grandmother), and 10 kids, including Saikat's father. Saikat has been back to that apartment. He says that, walking around that neighborhood all these years later, folks still recognize his dad, Samir, thanks to what his grandfather did for them and their family.
His mom, Sima, had it better than his dad. But still, she went to a school with dirt floors. Saikat looks to his ancestors' struggles—the communities they were part of, and how those communities came together to address issues the government neglected—for inspiration today.
When his dad was young, a friend took him to an office where he was pitched to come to the United States. There was a whole set-up. The sell was simply the so-called American Dream.
Saikat's parents met in India through an arrangement. Their respective parents knew someone who set it all up. They met and got married about a week later in a field. The visa his dad had applied for at that office came through after he'd been married, making it a bigger decision than it would've been if he were still single. He was also the primary earner in his own family, and they didn't want him to leave. He decided to take that leap regardless.
His dad showed up in the US with $8 in his pocket and no job yet secured. He slept on a friends' couch in Manhattan and hit the pavement, résumé in hand. And it worked. He got a job.
Saikat's dad had studied civil engineering in college. His first job in his new country was with a company that built skyscrapers … NYC skyscrapers. It was 1979. Saikat's mom came to join her husband soon after, and they had their first kid, Saikat's older sister, Urmi, while living in Queens. His dad and his mom also experienced their first cold-weather winter that year.
After a stint in New York, Samir moved his family to Pittsburgh. He had visited there in the summer, liked it, got a job offer, but relocated in the winter. Once again, the weather got the better of the young family.
Seeking a warmer climate, they moved to Texas, first to Houston, and then to Fort Worth.
At this point in the podcast, I decided to do something I've never done in the eight years since Storied: San Francisco began. And that's because I've never had any guests on the show who are from where I'm from. I chose to dork out with Saikat about my hometown. Thank you for indulging us (me, really).
The first question I had for Saikat is: What hospital were you born in? Harris Methodist. Holy shit, same! He asked me my age (52), what schools I went to (Bruce Shulkey Elementary, Wedgwood Middle School [Saikat went there for one year], and Southwest High School). What a fun turn on this podcast, me rattling off the schools I went to like born-and-raised San Franciscans do. Heh.
I digress into a sidebar about the race riot that happened at my high school during my junior year. You'll have to listen, or you can read a little more about it here.
Then we get to hear about Saikat's experience growing up in the same city. His family lived in a suburb (apparently not far from where my parents still live), and he describes his early life as fairly standard—hanging out with friends, going to the mall (the same mall I was a regular at a decade or so before). But, being an Indian-American, Saikat experienced racism I was privileged enough to avoid.
Saikat makes a distinction, though, between intentional, malicious racism and what I'd call accidental or unintentional racism. It's an important distinction, and he says most of what he experienced in Fort Worth was the less-harmful variety.
He summarizes his childhood thusly—family, school, the Bengali-American community in Fort Worth. One member of that community, Saikat's best friend from childhood, lives downstairs from him in San Francisco today.
His whole world in high school was, as Saikat puts it: hip-hop, basketball, and math. He got into Harvard, which he says he didn't expect. Many of his friends went to UT Austin (my alma mater), and he figured he'd go there, too. But he wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to attend one of the most highly regarded universities in the country.
But Harvard was a culture shock for Saikat. The Fort Worth community he'd known all his life was working- and middle-class. The student body at Harvard was largely kids who came from money and had wildly different interests than he did. Saikat went into his shell his freshman year. As he emerged from that shell, he found his people at Harvard.
In 2007, Saikat graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science. He'd spent a summer in San Francisco between his junior and senior years, and loved it. All his life, The City had been presented as this place where "cool shit happened." Movies, music, TV shows, skateboarding, the LGBTQIA and civil rights movements … and of course, the fledgling internet. Tech and social justice—both existed in a cutting-edge environment here.
He lived in New York City for one year immediately after he graduated. We riff on life in NYC vs. life here, agreeing on most aspects. When it was time for Saikat to find a new place to live, San Francisco was the obvious choice. The woman he was dating (his wife and mother of his child today) went to school at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, where he visited often. But even her friends told Saikat that he was much more a NorCal-type.
Unable to find housing anywhere else in SF, Saikat first landed in Park Merced. He was happy to have a San Francisco address, but didn't feel like he was living in The City. A trip to The Mission changed that quickly.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Saikat.
We recorded this podcast at Duboce Park Cafe in October 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I chat with SFFILM's Soph Schultz Rocha and Keith Zwolfer all about this year's Schools at Doc Stories program, which runs Nov. 6–10.
Learn more about this year's film festival at SFFILM's website.
We recorded this podcast at SFFILM's Filmhouse in South of Market in October 2025.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Ian and I talk about how big baseball was in his life in his high school and early college years. He was a left-handed pitcher, which made him attractive to coaches. By the time he transferred to UC Berkeley, though, sports receded and academics took over. He played what's called club ball, which Ian explains is something between varsity high school-level and community college.
At Berkeley, Ian majored in renewable energy, a topic that shows up in the art he does today. He minored in education, something that shows up in his coaching of kids these days. He lived in Berkeley while going to school there, and speaks to that experience.
Ian moved back to The City after he graduated, in 2014. But, as he puts it, since then, he's "left and come back many times." First was Seattle for a summer. Then Portland for a year and a half. We go on a bit of a sidebar after I offer up my opinion that some folks in the Pacific Northwest can come across as friendly, but they can also be rather passive-aggressive.
After Portland was New York City, where Ian lived for half a year. Then Nashville for three months. And after that, he got into a teaching program in Madrid, Spain, which I express my jealousy of. (Barcelona is one of my favorite places on Earth.)
He was in Madrid right as the COVID pandemic hit, in fact. The teaching program he was in allowed him plenty of downtime—he worked essentially four days a week, four hours per day. And a lot of that time on his hands was filled with a rediscovery of doing art. His plan had been to leave at the end of a school year, and that happened to coincide with the onset of COVID.
His return to his hometown, and his time here since 2020, has been spent trying to do art full-time. And that's where Ian's and my life intersect. It happened one day in the very location where we recorded this podcast: 540 Bar.
Break Fake Rules was born when Ian lived in Spain. It started with stickers. He handed them out—to friends, to strangers. He came up with the phrase and liked it, among other reasons, for its openendedness. He feels "Break Fake Rules" requires participation, something he sees as going against the way technology is leading us. But BFR isn't the only artistic endeavor in Ian's life.
Ian does a lot of collage work. Lately, he's been cutting up vinyl from discarded billboard signs. He'd tried working with paper and glue to make murals, but the elements always got the better of his outdoor art. Old billboard vinyl is the solution he's been looking for.
Those of you who follow Storied:SF on Instagram might have recently noticed a few collaboration reels between us and Break Fake Rules. Ian approached me a couple months ago about being on a series he produces called "People Should Know," where someone—an artist, a small-business owner, a podcaster—comes on and speaks with a fencing-masked interviewer to talk about what they do and what folks should know about what they do. You can check out full-length videos of everyone who's been on People Should Know on the Break Fake Rules website. It was a lot of fun to do, so thanks, Ian!
In asking Ian to let people know how to find him, we decided to start off with our favorite platform—in real life! He's currently selling furniture at Stuff by Luxe. He's got Break Fake Rules stuff there, too, as well as some of his 2D and 3D art. His website is BreakFakeRules.com. Find @breakfakerules and his personal account, @ianglues, on Instagram.
Listen in as I chat with Tommy Leyva, who has been decorating the fuck out of his home on Divisadero for nearly 20 years.
Whether you're able to drop by, now or until a few days after Halloween, check out the video below the photos on this page.
Follow Tommy and the Divisadero Halloween House on Instagram @divisaderohalloweenhouse.
We recorded this podcast at the Divisadero Halloween House in October 2025.
Photos and video by Jeff Hunt
This one starts out a little differently. Ian Paratore was born and raised in San Francisco, but he's moving away. This week. To Oakland.
Ian's dad, Vince Paratore, moved into a Victorian in The Haight in the late-Seventies/early Eighties, and is still there. That's the house Ian grew up in starting roughly 10 years later. Both of his parents are artists and teachers. His dad came to San Francisco from Syracuse, New York, to study photography at SF State. And his mom, Valerie O'Riordan, is from Long Beach in Southern California. She moved to The City to work with ACT (American Conservatory Theater).
The house at Page and Clayton is the only place Ian's dad has lived in SF. I asked Ian whether he knows any stories from that house before he was born in the early Nineties. Both his parents being "natural hosts," there were many parties. Nowadays, when his dad is out of town, Ian will sometimes have parties of his own at his dad's place. When he does, he says his dad often offers up stories from back in the day. One involves a party with so many people already inside cramming a hallway, folks had to come and go via the first escape.
Back in the day, his dad was a general manager at restaurants like Stars, Donatello, Garibaldi's, and Beach Chalet, which he helped open. Both his parents were big in the San Francisco restaurant scene.
We turn to Ian's early life, which he experienced in the mid-Nineties to early 2000s. As a kid, and a kid without a backyard, he spent a lot of time in Golden Gate Park and The Panhandle. He hung out on playgrounds and basketball courts. He adds that "the craziness of Haight Street was just … normal." I ask Ian about Skates on Haight, which I knew from my Eighties/Nineties skateboarding days from ads in magazines like Thrasher. (Marcella, who took photos for this episode and was with us at the table, chimes in at this point.)
Ian rattles off some spots from his childhood in The Haight—places like Gus's before it was known as Gus's, an Ethiopian restaurant, and a musical instrument store.
In high school, Ian got into visual arts and playing sports—mainly baseball and basketball. By the time he got to college, he played baseball "at a high level," and art fell more or less by the wayside. More on that in Part 2. But during high school, though he took art classes, sports dominated his life.
We end Part 1 with Ian rattling off the San Francisco schools he went to. He did a stint at College of San Mateo (CSM) before getting into UC Berkeley, which was the first time he lived outside his childhood home. He had flirted with college on the East Coast before deciding to stay closer to home.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Ian. And join us tomorrow for a very special, timely bonus episode.
Follow Ian and Break Fake Rules on Instagram.
We recorded this podcast at 540 Bar in the Inner Richmond in October 2025.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1.
It was 2010, and seeing that guy with the broken guitar on Risa's next visit to SF was the nail in the coffin, so to speak. She was moving here. One of her friends who already lived here found a spot in The Sunset for her. She packed up a car and drove north with her dad. She didn't necessarily have a plan back then, but Risa and I share how The City just got both of us and hasn't let go.
Risa tells the story of how her parents moved to Japan briefly when she was 18. She asked her mom, "So, why did you come back (to California)?" And her mom told her (paraphrasing), "Because you wouldn't be able to do what you're doing there, you wouldn't have the same opportunities." It further affirmed for Risa her decision to move to San Francisco and pursue art.
I ask Risa to catch us up on the last 15 years of her life. Generally speaking, she's been working to find her voice as an artist. She got into letterpress-printing, which she did for more than 10 years. She started a company with a friend and worked there for three years before branching out on her own. Doing so wasn't easy, but in hindsight, it made Risa stronger. She talks about a specific strain of misogyny that presented itself to women printmakers as well as how Risa handled that nonsense.
That solo venture started off as a stationery company. She reached back to childhood memories, of a time when she witnessed letters coming to her mom from Japan as well her mom's messages back to her homeland. Risa saw those as lifelines to her mom's people back home, and wanted to preserve those memories and emotions and help others to do the same. Papallama was born.
Before we talk about another fun thing Risa is up to, I need to express my newish-found love for 540 Bar on Clement. It's where Risa holds monthly "Drink and Draw" events, and it's quickly become one of my new favorite spots in The City. Risa started her monthly art events at the bar in 2022. The idea came from her letterpress days, when she'd do frequent "Letter-Writing Saturdays." She told her friend Leejay, one of 540's owners, about it, and they decided to bring that same idea to the bar.
Shortly after they hatched the plan, though, Risa's dad passed away. The first drink and draw was a month later, and so many of Risa's friends turned out for her. What started out as every second Thursday of the month now takes place at 540 Bar on the third Thursdays of every month.
Risa speaks in a little more detail of the care and intention she puts into her Drink and Draw events. For me, it's an extension of her art as well as her love of community. But it's also just her being a good host. The next Drink and Draw takes place the same day that this podcast drops—October 16, 2025. See ya there!
The conversation shifts to Risa talking about taking part in our Every Kinda People show at Mini Bar. And we end the podcast with Risa sharing all the ways to find her, both online and in real life. Follow her on Instagram @risa_iwasaki_culbertson. Her website is risaculbertson.com.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Risa Iwasaki Culbertson was born in Japan.
In this episode, meet and get to know Risa, one of the 12 artists in Every Kinda People, our group show at Mini Bar. Please join us this Sunday, Oct. 19, from 4–7 p.m. at Mini Bar for our Closing Party happy hour. Some of the artists will be on hand, as will friendly bartenders and me (Jeff).
Back to Risa, though. Her mom is Japanese and her dad is from Ventura County in Southern California. Risa spent her first five or six years in Japan before her parents moved to California. She has memories of life in Japan before they moved. And after the move, Risa often went back to visit her grandmother. Risa says that, as a kid, she loved going back and forth between two very different cultures
Her dad was in the military, which is what brought him to Japan, where he met his wife. Risa is their only child, something she and I go on a bit of a sidebar about. I'm not an only child, but I've met and befriended my fair share of well-adjusted only children. Hell, I married one.
Risa found creativity early, and ran with it. Her parents were older, and being half-American, half-Japanese, she didn't feel like she fully belonged in either culture. Risa might've gotten her creativity from her mom, who did pottery, quilting, and other artistic things. Her dad was "a mad scientist of sorts," she says. He was into taking things apart and repurposing found objects.
In Southern California, Risa spent time with other Hapa kids. Her mom was part of a large Japanese community, and there were plenty of mixed-race kids among that group.
She's very much a product of the Eighties and Nineties and Southern California. She remembers the beginning of grunge and flannels. Risa remembers vividly when Kurt Cobain died (1994). Middle school for her happened in Orange County.
Risa did hula dancing and tap dancing for many years, always while also painting and drawing. In high school, her art teacher was switched out and replaced with a nun who told the kids they couldn't use black inks. It felt to young Risa like too religious of a message, and it instilled in her an attitude of not wanting anyone to tell her what she can and cannot do with her art. She never took another art class.
She was also something of a social butterfly in her high school years. Risa had different friend groups and in hindsight, feels like they were constantly getting together and doing things.
Then we turn to what got Risa out of Southern California. One friend she met in college moved back to San Francisco, and another friend from down south wanted to move here. She visited The City and remembers sitting in a cafe talking to strangers. She felt then and there that the friendliness was right for her, and something she wasn't getting in Orange County.
I share a quick story of being in Orange County and getting phone directions to a bar. Unbeknownst to me and my friends that night, the map put us on a highway … on foot. Yep.
We rewind a little to chat about Risa's time in college. She always wanted to be at least art-adjacent, and so she took classes on manufacturing and even calculus. Thing is, she ended up liking calculus.
Earlier in life, she sold stuff she made through catalogs she also created. That early entrepreneurship informed some business classes she later took in college, including business law. It all lead to Risa's getting a business degree. Right away, she started recognizing a disconnect between art and business.
Back to her first impression of San Francisco, that day in that Haight Street cafe made The City feel like a place where she could get to know people. Risa shares a story that happened right before her move here. It involves a man boarding a BART train she and her friends were on. He had a broken guitar. They'd made googly eyes at each other, but she and her friends were too scared to talk with him. When he got off the train, he looked back and waved. Risa figured she'd never see this guy again.
Three months later, she was back to visit her friend who lived here. She'd thought about him, but figured there was no way to actually find him. Then, as you can guess, it happened. Risa says she's still friends with that guy to this day.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Risa, which includes the story of her move to San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Risa's studio in the Inner Richmond in August 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I chat with Broke-Ass Stuart about, well, a lot of stuff. But we also talk about Stuart’s new book, The Worst of Broke-Ass Stuart: 20 Years of Love, Death, and Dive Bars.
The book is available at your favorite local indie bookstore and also at Bookshop.org. And get very affordable tickets for next Friday’s (Oct. 17, 2025) book-launch party at Kilowatt here.
We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton’s Boozeland in September 2025.
Photos of Stuart by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1.
To get us caught up to what Lisa is doing these days, we go back to her arrival in The Bay. Her work at the prop shop led to some other jobs, but competition was fierce and she sought a way to integrate art into the labor she undertook. She found it when the production of James and the Giant Peach hired her to do puppet fabrication. The work took place in a warehouse in South of Market and it wasn’t quite as glamorous as people think. In fact, it was grueling, but rewarding.
Her boss on that job was a woman named Kat. That was 30 years ago, and the two are good friends today. In fact, Kat is shooting a documentary about Lisa’s incredible life called Made of Iron. More on that below.
Lisa wanted to stick with animation, but was never able to get an art director job. She considered moving to LA, but shut that down pretty quickly. And so she decided to learn a trade—something her dad did back in the day. She went to a job fair and asked what the hardest trade represented there that day was. Lisa’s trade became ironwork.
Her introduction to the folks who did ironwork was a little rough. She was required to visit job sites and get an ironworker to sponsor her. It took her six months to get hired. She met a guy named Danny Prince who helped her get work in The City making precasts (think parking garages). She’d work during the week and go to classes for ironworking on Saturdays.
Ironwork has, quite possibly since its inception, been very much a “man’s” world. Lisa ran head-first into bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination from the get-go. But a combination of her own drive and the advice of a few mentors helped her get through it. There might have even been some “Go fuck yourself”s along the way, too.
That said, the highs were high and the lows were low. “I never cried on the job,” Lisa told me. But the tears would come once she was home in the evenings. Still, she persevered, and things got better and better for her.
One of her early favorite jobs was on the then-new California Academy of Sciences. Besides it just being a really cool building, Lisa got to do many different jobs all around the place. She says it was incredible watching it all come together.
Another job highlight was Lisa’s work on the arena that came to be known as Chase Center (and for Valkyries fans, “Ballhalla”). Photos of Lisa helping build Chase can be seen in the gallery to the left here. Another was Marin General Hospital. And then there was the Golden Gate Bridge.
After Chase Center and another, lesser job (and a divorce), Lisa got offered a job working on the Suicide Deterrent Net on my favorite bridge. But it wasn’t just any job. She would be foreperson. She didn’t think she could do it because she didn’t know bridge work (despite working a little on the new Bay Bridge). After being told it was foreperson or nothing, she decided to take the job.
Of course the crew she would oversee comprised all bridge-work veterans. Her approach was to be respectful of that. And her crew respected her back for it. The job entails taking out old pieces and beefing up the infrastructure of the bridge, which was finished back in 1933.
Lisa talks at some length about a societal need for us all to have more respect for labor. I’m with her 100 percent. There’s a lot that we take for granted every day, all over the place. Many people worked and still do work hard as hell so that we can have shit like roads and sidewalks, transit tunnels, housing, and so much more. We should recognize and respect that work.
We end the episode with Lisa’s thoughts about life, her work, and what she loves about San Francisco and the Bay Area.
You can donate to help fund Kat’s documentary at the Made of Iron website. And follow that adventure on Instagram @madeofirondocumentary.
Lisa Davidson is an ironworker with Local 377 San Francisco. Her team currently does ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we’ll get to that.
In this episode, S8 E3, meet and get to know Lisa. I first did that back in May at our Keep It Local art show at Babylon Burning (thanks, Mike and Judy!). Someone at the party that night approached me to let me know that there was a person there who works on the best bridge in the world (fact) and that I should meet them. I love when people really get me. Right away, I was drawn in by Lisa’s warmth, charm, and sense of humor.
And so we sat down outside in Fort Mason in early August and Lisa shared her life story.
She was raised feeling like she had complete freedom. It was something Lisa didn’t realize at the time, but looking back, it became clear to her. She was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a liberal household.
Her grandparents lived in Boston itself, and she loved visiting them when she was a kid. Her grandfather ran a tchotchke store in town called House of Hurwitz, and Lisa says that the place had a big influence on her outlook. It was located on the edge of what they call, to this day, the “Combat Zone” (think: red-light district). Her “wheelin’ and dealin’” grandpa sold mylar balloons to the Boston Gardens for events held there. He told young Lisa that she could blow up balloons and that that could be her future.
Lisa has a brother four years younger than she is. Her dad was an electrician. One of his clients was a lithograph press in Boston. He’d sometimes get paged for a job and have to leave his family, although Lisa now wonders whether he just wanted to get away from time to time.
When she was a senior in high school, her parents divorced, despite being a very loving couple up to that point. She says her mom was “crazy in an I Love Lucy way. She was raised in the Fifties the way many young women at that time were, in a way that did its best to stifle any creativity. Suffice to say that her mom had fun decorating the house Lisa grew up in.
Despite her and her family’s Jewishness, Lisa revolted and wanted to go to Catholic school or just become a preppy L.L. Bean-type kid. She of course regrets rejecting the norms of her family nowadays. It was what it was. The family was more culturally Jewish than religious, though, something Lisa says was a huge influence on who she’s become as an adult.
She graduated high school and went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn’t Ivy League, but it was (and is) something of a preppy school. Where Lisa grew up, there was an expectation that kids would go to college, and so she went. It wasn’t super far from home, but it wasn’t close either. Her parents did suggest that Lisa maybe go to art school. But in her family, it was the kid dismissing that idea. “That’s a not real school,” young Lisa told them.
She liked sports. At Amherst, she joined the crew team. She liked the competition and how good of shape it got you in. She liked it, but it was a lot of pressure. She graduated, took a year off working odd jobs, then dove into art school.
So next up was Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was surprised she got in, and even navigated a bit of impostor syndrome. Surprised by the school’s acceptance of her and feeling somewhat intimidated by other artist students, Lisa ended up doing printmaking. Rather than aiming for a master’s degree, she sought a second bachelor’s. Her studies had her spending a lot of time in the school’s foundry, where she discovered welding. She loved it.
During her time back in Amherst, she’d heard of a guy who was going to Alaska. (Lisa and I go off-topic into our shared distaste for camping at this point in the conversation.) Back to the Alaska story, her mom was fully supportive and even took her shopping at an Army Navy store. She went there and worked in canneries through the summer between her junior and senior years at Amherst. While she was up north, doing jobs all over the state, she met folks from California. From the stories they told her, it became a place she wanted to go. But first, RISD.
In Rhode Island, she met a guy from Danville in the East Bay. When his family learned of her interest in our state, they invited Lisa to spend a summer with them, which she did. And she and her friend came to The City as often as they could.
After those few months, she knew that California—and specifically, The Bay—was for her. She needed to go back and finish that second round of college in Rhode Island, and she did. After that, Lisa “beelined it” back to Oakland. She found work in a prop shop making sculptures out of foam with a chainsaw.
Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Lisa Davidson.
We recorded this podcast at Equator Coffee in Fort Mason in August 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I chat with Joanna Lioce all about the new Mabuhay Gardens.
Joanna is booking monthly shows in the new legendary North Beach punk venue through the end of the year. Get tickets for the Oct. 3, 2025, Mabuhay Gardens show featuring Kelley Stoltz, White Lightning (PDX), and The Boars at EventBrite.
We recorded this podcast at Vesuvio Café in September 2025.
Listen in as I chat with David Gonzales, creator of Homies and this year’s San Francisco Lowrider Parade Grand Marshal.
We recorded this podcast over Zoom in September 2025.
Photo of David by Anthony Gonzales
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Although it made all kinds of sense for Shrey to move halfway around the world to go to art school, he says it was "an uphill battle” convincing his parents of the plan. Still, his mom was and is a champion of her son and his art.
It was 2018 and Shrey was 20. We talk about his experience of arriving in San Francisco, a city that was “such a beacon of hope” for him. He dedicated himself to his studies at CCA. He also paid serious attention to the news, and even attempted political art. When that didn’t pan out financially, a professor at CCA strongly encouraged Shrey to stay with painting, that it was his lane. This was just before the pandemic. When he got his first stimulus check, Shrey bought an easel and began going out and painting en plein air. He did this so much and promoted his art so well that, by the time he graduated, he had started getting commissions. He was able to become a full-time artist—a dream of his.
Shrey is such an artist, through and through, that he even has an art job. Like, a job-job. Four days a week, Shrey works for ArtSpan—a local arts nonprofit possibly best-known for Open Studios. Shrey shares the history of ArtSpan and OpenStudios.
What began in 1975 in South of Market as a way for artists shunned by galleries to show their art and sell it today sees around 600 artists opening their studio doors all over The City. Shrey manages the Arts and Neighborhoods program for ArtSpan. That group helps organize exhibitions during Open Studios at non-studio locations. Mission Bowling Club is one such location. In fact, Shrey got his first art show after graduation through help from ArtSpan. It’s a beautiful full-circle story.
That first show led to other shows. And Shrey credits his entrepreneurial brain for recognizing an opportunity in all of this—if a cafe has suitable walls, you can talk with the owner about hanging art by local artists, promote an opening, and make things happen. And so that’s what he did.
Partly because putting on one art show, not to mention doing multiple shows at the same, is what the kids refer to as a lot, Shrey focussed his efforts at one location. Ballast Coffee on West Portal became the home of Ingleside Gallery. The first art show at his gallery brought in more than $10,000 in sales.
I have to insert some editorial here, so thanks for indulging me. Shrey and I recorded this podcast before our Every Kinda People show. I won’t pretend that my own art curation is anywhere close to the level that he (and my friend Anita of KnownSF and countless others around SF, The Bay, and the world) operates on. But Shrey does speak to the nature of both the volume and the intensity of the work that goes into putting on an art show. In my own way, I relate.
Back to my and Shrey’s conversation, I ask him to talk about how our lives intersected. It was earlier this year after I recorded with Ellen Lo of Ask Me SF. I needed to drop off a Storied: SF hoodie for Ellen, so she asked me to meet her one Saturday morning on Ocean Avenue. She and some friends and community members would be out there painting a mural over a dilapidated street wall in front of a PG&E substation. Sign me up! After politely declining to add my own (attempted) artistic touch to their creation that day, Ellen introduced me to a friend of hers. Right away, I got a sense of that exuberance Shrey embodies, a trait I am now very familiar with.
We end the episode with thoughts about the Every Kinda People show, up at Mini Bar through October 19. Follow Shrey on Instagram @shreypurohit and @inglesidegallery.
Shrey Purohit is the kind of person everyone should know. Not know about (although obviously that’s what this podcast aims to do), but know personally.
In this podcast, Episode 2 of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco, meet and get to know Shrey. A few of his art pieces are up at Mini Bar through Oct. 19 in our Every Kinda People show. And at the risk of being hyperbolic, through the experience of putting that show together, I am very happy that I’ve come to know Shrey.
We begin with Shrey’s birth, which happened in Mumbai, India, in 1997. Both his parents are doctors. Shrey’s mom comes from a family of doctors going back four generations. Her dad (Shrey’s grandfather) was driven out of what is now Pakistan and went to Mumbai with his possessions in hand to start a new life at just 15 years old. Shrey speaks of how fond he was of that grandfather, even describing some of his hobbies and wardrobe choices (bow ties because regular ties would get in the way of his medical duties).
Shrey’s family was rooted in the Sindhi culture in India. It’s a community steeped in entrepreneurship, and his grandfather was one of the first in his area to be a male gynecologist. His wife was an anesthesiologist and worked with her husband.
Shrey jumps ahead to note that his parents, too, worked together in the medical field. His dad specializes in diabetes treatment. The two met when Shrey’s dad was treating his mom’s aunt. It was what Shrey calls a “semi-arranged marriage,” but to my understanding, more like a “hey, here’s someone who might be good for you” type of situation. He says his parents’ coming together had some love to it, which is probably more than most arranged marriages.
They built a medical practice that became very successful, he says. So successful, in fact, that it allowed both of their children—Shrey and his younger sister—to live abroad. Because his sister was born when he was three or so, he got to help name her. “It was my first creative project,” Shrey says.
Shrey lived in Mumbai until he finished school. His formative memories take place in his neighborhood of Colaba in South Mumbai, near the water and the Gateway of India. He says it has “big-town energy with a small-town vibe.” Everyone knows everyone else, and Shrey has brought that same spirit with him halfway around the world.
We go on a sidebar about how San Francisco can have that big city/small town feel.
Shrey got started doing graphic design while still living in India. He even went to school for it over there. He did well in it, so well that he hired a few employees. But he soon found that people don’t take kindly to being bossed around by a 17-year-old.
He pivoted from design to art, something he’d always wanted to do. A formative experience for Shrey was going to an event a Kulture Shop in Mumbai, where he met Jas Charanjiva. Jas, who’s originally from Napa, helped open Kulture Shop to support Indian artists. He was 15 and had found a mentor in Jas.
Shrey has an uncle in Millbrae whom he had visited with family a few years before. His uncle took them to several spots around town, including to AT&T Park for a Giants game. His Indian school credits transferred, and so, when Shrey was 19, he moved to The Bay to attend California College of the Arts and study comics, illustration, and painting.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Shrey. And on Friday, look for a bonus episode with the 2025 San Francisco Low Rider Parade Grand Marshal, David Gonzales.
This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Root Division in South of Market in August 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Marga had just arrived in San Francisco and lived in a collective house with a lesbian and two gay men ("of course, the decorations were fabulous"). It was a bit of a party house, known for throwing spectacular Halloween fests. Marga talks about collective living, chore charts and stuff like that. Eventually, the woman Marga drove across country with split from her, as so often happens (I certainly relate).
Everyone who lived in that first house, she says, was into rolfing and coffee enemas. Marga wasn’t too keen on any of it. The meals were vegetarian and bland, and perhaps most importantly for her, not Cuban. Her roommates gave painful hugs and held hands before they ate. It just wasn’t her scene.
And so she found work in a Hippie coffeehouse called Acme Cafe on 24th Street. All her coworkers there were performers. She was just happy to make omelettes. Underground celebrities like R. Crumb and John Waters came in regularly, and Marga loved it. Her fellow cafe employees, many of whom were artists, would ask her, “So, what do you do?” And she would answer, “I make omelettes.”
She also worked at a bath house on Market called Finilla’s Finnish Baths. Marga’s job there was to hand out towels to spa-goers. She later learned that the owner sexually abused and exploited workers there, mostly the masseuses. A perk of her job, though, was access to the steam sauna, and Marga took advantage of that as much as she could.
That sauna room also served as a meeting space for a group of older women. One of them, an older Mexican woman, would leave her Chihuahua in the lobby while she steamed, the idea being that Marga would take care of the dog. Eventually, Ms. Montoya got 86’d from the bathhouse for steaming flour tortillas in the sauna on the hot stones.
Another regular, a famous singer whom Marga won’t name, was kicked out for a different reason. Marga takes a sidebar to explain what a “primal scream” is. Then she takes us back to the sauna and the famous singer, who proceeded one day to launch into her own primal scream. Marga describes other women from the sauna running out frantically. Meanwhile, she says, over in the men’s sauna, “there was a different kind of screaming.”
She goes on another sidebar about the time she got crabs at the bathhouse. You just have to listen to that one. Marga also had a job as a gardener at a house in Pac Heights, despite not loving that kind of work. She shares a story of using the “servant’s bathroom” on that job and discovering that she had crabs.
Then the conversation shifts to Marga’s next show—Spanish Stew. It will be her 15th one-person show, which she began developing at The Marsh here in The City, where she did her first-ever one-person show back in the day. The New Conservatory Theater Center commissioned the show, which is set in 1976 San Francisco, the year that Marga landed here. It’s also about cooking, something near and dear to her heart.
Marga points out that the New Conservatory Theater Center recently lost its NEA funding thanks to the fascist US regime, but that the community is helping keep the theater afloat.
Please go see this show. I know I will. It opens October 17, 2025. For more info and to buy tickets, please visit Marga’s website. Follow her on Instagram @themargagomez to keep up with everything she does and says.
This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Noe Cafe in Noe Valley in August 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Marga Gomez grew up in Washington Heights, New York City, immersed in a family of Spanish-language entertainers.
Welcome to Season 8, Episode 1 of Storied: San Francisco. I first learned of Marga more than a decade ago, through comedy and performance circles I was adjacent to. Because I don’t have the world’s best memory, I cannot recall exactly where or when I saw her perform, but I do remember feeling an immediate pull to her work. In this episode, Marga shares the story of her parents, growing up in NYC, and coming to San Francisco.
We begin in Manhattan, where Marga was born to a comedian/producer/screenwriter Cuban-American dad and a dancer/aspiring actor Puerto Rican mom. Marga went to Catholic school as a youngster, which she says was every bit as harsh as folks say. Looking back, Marga thinks the only discipline she got when she was a kid was through school. Her parents, she says, were narcissists.
The two met when Marga’s mom danced in a show produced by her dad. The shows were varietal in nature, and took place on stages live at theaters showing Spanish-language Mexican movies.
Her dad had danced in shows in Havana pre-Castro. Some white American show producer-types with Johnny Walker, the Scotch company, brought him to New York, unaware that he didn’t speak English. It was the Fifties—the height of a Spanish entertainment craze (think Ricky Ricardo).
Many folks from Latin America were also immigrating to the US, and New York especially, in those days. And they, too, wanted entertainment. Marga’s dad found work in that world, first as a performer, then as a producer.
Growing up with locally well-known/borderline famous parents instilled in young Marga a sense that she could do anything she wanted. But when they split up, Marga went with her mom to live in a white neighborhood on Long Island. She was one of the only kids of color in an otherwise homogenous, affluent area. No longer in the Spanish-language community that raised her, she lost that sense of becoming a performer in her own right. She just wanted to graduate high school and get out.
And that she did. She ended up at a New York State school on the border of Canada, in Oswego near Lake Ontario. It was still the same weather she used to, but it was time to explore—with pot, acid, and women.
She got really into “storyteller” musicians around this time, some women, Dylan, that kind of thing. And she met a woman who later was the reason Marga came to San Francisco.
Marga’s impression of San Francisco before she moved here was shaped by a magazine feature about the Hippies here at that time—the Seventies. She owes that attraction to her mom’s strict parenting style—it was a rebellion in every sense. She’d not made it through to graduation (too much acid, she says), but followed her girlfriend across country to this magical new city.
It was 1976, the year of the US Bicentennial. Marga’s girlfriend did all the driving (she still doesn’t have a license), taking the scenic route along Route 66, through the heart of the United States during its 200th birthday celebration. They saw a lot of Americana—the good and the bad (racism, misogyny, homophobia). It made landing in SF all the more poignant. They came up the California coast, saw Big Sur, then arrived in The City.
We end Part 1 with Marga’s story of the first place in San Francisco she and her then-girlfriend went—Castro Street. That story is also how her upcoming show, Spanish Stew, begins. More on that in Part 2, which drops this Thursday.
That’s also the date of the Opening Night of Every Kinda People. We hope to see you at Mini Bar that night for an evening of community, art, drinks, laughter, and love.
This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded it at Noe Cafe in Noe Valley in August 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as I talk all things off-season and the upcoming eighth season of Storied. Topics include:
- The 2025 Listener Survey, which is up until 9/1/25. Take the survey and you could win a Storied: SF zip hoodie!
- The “Every Kinda People” art show at Mini Bar. Opening night is 9/4/25.
- What’s new about the podcast? New music by Otis McDonald, shorter episodes, an even sharper focus on artists, activists, and working people
- I share my thoughts on these hella messed-up times we’ve all been enduring and how this project flies in the face of everything terrible.
- Next week’s Episode 1 with Marga Gomez
- The second and third episodes, one with an Every Kinda People artist and the other with the woman foreperson of the Golden Gate Bridge iron workers.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Carolyn and I talk about making decisions and intentionality vs. circumstance, need, and necessity. We then go on to talk more about Carolyn’s lifelong love of sports.
She shares the story of her maternal grandmother coming from The Philippines to live with them and how they’d watch games together. It was the days when, in much of the country, if you wanted to watch Major League Baseball, it was all Atlanta Braves, all the time (thanks to TBS, of course). Carolyn became a Braves fan, especially a fan of Dale Murphy. She watched football, too. She didn’t watch the Giants on TV much, because every game wasn’t televised in those days. But she could easily hop on Muni to see a game at Candlestick Park. Her dad often picked them up, showing up at the ballpark around the seventh inning, getting in free, and watching the end of the game with Carolyn and her friends and/or sisters.
We go on a short sidebar about bundling up in San Francisco—at Candlestick and if you just wanted to go to the beach.
In addition to Candlestick, she went to Warriors games a bit and also various sporting events at Cow Palace. Her dad learned how to bowl and would take his kids with him.
We fast-forward a bit to hear about Carolyn’s years in high school, when she went to the all-girl school Mercy High (which is now closed). Later, she took the same bus, the 29, to SF State that she had taken to Mercy. State was the only college she applied to. We talk a little about her decision not to leave San Francisco for school. In high school, she had decided that she wanted to be a sports writer. In fact, she aimed to become the first woman anchor at ESPN.
We rewind a bit to talk about some of the journalism Carolyn did in high school. She had her own column in the school paper called “Off the Bench.” She shares a fun story of calling the Braves’ front office to arrange for an interview with her favorite player—Murphy—the next time Atlanta rolled into town.
In her third semester at SF State, Carolyn got pregnant. Around this time, she also took her first Asian-American Studies class, something that kicked in for her and stays with her to this day. She dove in head-first. I ask Carolyn whether and how much of that history her parents were aware of. She says that, for them, much of it was just things going on in their lives in the city they came to—things like the strike at SF State or the demonstrations at the I-Hotel in Manilatown. Learning more and more about the history of her people in the US lead Carolyn to confront her dad. “Why did you bring us here?” she’d ask.
She ended up raising her first child, a mixed-race kid, as a single parent around this time in her life. She had figured that her son’s dad would bring the kid the Blackness in his life, and she’d bring the Filipino-ness. Her own ideas of how best to raise the kid had to evolve, and they did, she says.
She eventually returned to State and graduated. She lived in South City for a hot minute, held three jobs, and raised her son. She never felt that she couldn’t leave The Bay. It was more, “Why would I?”
Then, because if you know Carolyn Sideco, well, you know … then we talk about New Orleans.
New Orleans is why and how Carolyn came into my life. My wife is borderline obsessed with The Crescent City. I’d been there some earlier in my life, growing up not too far away and having some Louisiana relatives. Erin and I spent three weeks in fall 2022 in a sublet in Bywater, Ninth Ward. That NOLA fever caught on for me then, and I’m hooked.
Back home sometime after that, Carolyn came across Erin’s radar. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who seems to love New Orleans as much as I do and she has a house there!” Erin would tell me. In 2024, at a vegan Filipina pop-up at Victory Hall, we finally met this enigmatic woman. We ended up spending Mardi Gras this year at Carolyn’s house in New Orleans—Kapwa Blue.
“New Orleans has been calling me for about 20 years,” Carolyn says. One of her younger sisters lived there awhile. Her oldest son served in AmeriCorps there for three years and kept living in New Orleans four more. Carolyn and other members of her family visited often. This was around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit and devastated Southern Louisiana. A little more than a decade ago, Carolyn learned of the historical markers in the area that told the stories of Filipinos being the first Asians to settle in that part of the world. (Longtime listeners of Storied: SF might recall that Brenda Buenviaje hails from just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.) As Carolyn learned more and more of the Filipino history in the region, that calling started to make more and more sense.
Three years ago or so, her oldest son got married in New Orleans. That visit told Carolyn that she, too, could live there. Her husband devised a plan, and with some of Carolyn’s cousins, they bought a house in the Musician’s Village part of town, near the Ninth Ward—the aforementioned Kapwa Blue. They intended to bring that same sense of community her parents found and participated in back in San Francisco all those decades ago to their new neighborhood New Orleans. In addition to the house, Carolyn helped found tours of Filipino history in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Find them Bayou Barkada Instagram at @bayoubarkada
Back in The City these days, Carolyn has her own sports consultancy called Coaching Kapwa (IG). “I call myself ‘Your sports relationship coach,’” she says. This means that she provides comfort and advice to anyone interacting with any of the various sports ecosystems. She aims to apply the idea of kapwa to an otherwise competition-driven sports landscape.
We end the podcast (and the season) with Carolyn’s interpretation of the theme of Storied: San Francisco, Season 7: Keep it local. She shares what that idea means for her here as well as how it pertains to her time in New Orleans.
We’ll be taking August off as far as new episodes go. I’ll be busy putting together the first episodes of Season 8 and getting ready for the season launch party/art opening. “Every Kinda People” kicks off at Mini Bar on Sept. 4. That’s also the theme of the next 20 or so episodes of this show.
As always, thank you deeply and sincerely for listening/reading/sharing/liking/commenting/DMing/emailing/subscribing/rating/showing up and really any type of interaction you do with this passion project of mine. If you’re not already, please sign up for our monthly newsletter over on the About page.
See you in September!
Carolyn Sideco’s story begins in The Philippines.
Her dad, Tony Sideco, was born on the island of Cebu in 1938. Her mom, Linda, was born in Paniqui in 1942. By the time Carolyn’s mom was born, the Japanese occupied The Philippines. Young Tony worked for the electric company, which sent him to Paniqui. He soon met his wife-to-be there when he boarded at Carolyn’s grandmother’s house.
It wasn’t an overnight romance. The way Tony (who joined his wife in the room with me and Carolyn as we recorded) tells it, he had eyed Linda for so long that he went cross-eyed.
Linda was her parents’ first daughter, and she came after five older brothers. So she was always afforded chaperones. After Linda, her parents had three more girls. One of those girls, Carolyn’s aunt, lives next-door to where we recorded, a tradition of intergenerationality the family carried with them when they migrated to the US.
Tony came to the United States first in the late Sixties, shortly after Carolyn and her twin sister were born. His migration was motivated by the so-called “American dream.” Carolyn’s version is different, though. She thinks it had more to do with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which effectively did away with nationality quotas. By the time Tony arrived, several members of both his and his wife’s family were already here, many of them in the Outer Sunset.
When baby Carolyn, her sister, and their mom arrived, they first lived on 45th Avenue in The Sunset with her aunt and uncle. Then the family moved to 39th Avenue to be on their own. This was the house that Carolyn grew up in, and the one we recorded this podcast in. A community of Paniquieños already existed all around them.
In hindsight, Carolyn thinks it was a lot easier for folks like her parents to move halfway around the world because they landed, in essence, in an expat community. Her mom didn’t have to learn English so urgently when she arrived, to cite just one example. Several of those families are still around, spread around the North Peninsula. Some also still live in San Francisco, like Carolyn.
Carolyn talks about various aspects of her life that now, in hindsight as an adult, meant she rarely felt different from those around her. She says that in her adult life, meeting folks her parents’ age who didn’t have the same accent as her parents really opened her eyes. Today, Carolyn is the president of Paniquieñans USA, an organization as old as she is.
Then we get back to Carolyn’s personal story. Her and her twin, Rosalyn, joined their mom to go to the US when they were two. She shares a cute story of how their mom loved a party so much that she would celebrate their birthday every second day of the month (their birthday is Feb. 2). Because of this, Carolyn grew up thinking that birthdays happen every month.
She was five when her family moved out of her uncle and aunt’s place on 45th and into their childhood home on 39th Avenue, and Carolyn remembers it well. We talk briefly about the real estate agent who sold them the house and how little they paid (“$24,000,” Tony Sideco, who was in the room with us that day, chimes in—that’s the equivalent of roughly $173K today).
Linda Sideco found work at Little Sisters of the Poor Convalescent Home on Lake Street, where Carolyn would sometimes visit her. Both of Carolyn’s parents worked graveyard shifts. The young couple were able to save for a year for the down payment on their new home.
We take a sidebar for Carolyn to talk about the difference in how service and healthcare work are valued in The Philippines vs. how they’re valued in the US.
Carolyn then shares a story of how, when she was in the fourth grade, she and her twin sister started going to a new school in their neighborhood. Prior to this, they were bussed. At her new school, they asked Carolyn if she wanted to play volleyball. But to join the team, she needed to pay five dollars. She ran four blocks home to ask her mom for the money, but turns out she wouldn’t give it to young Carolyn, who was so upset that she cried until her mom relented.
She did well at volleyball and even made friends through her new sport. She felt so good about it all that she thought, ‘This is why dad brought us here.’ It was the beginning of what would become a lifelong involvement with sports.
We end Part 1 with Carolyn’s foray into many different sports and all the women along the way who inspired her.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the official last episode of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Carolyn’s childhood home in The Sunset in June 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Dregs shares the story of the day he started doing graffiti. It was also when he began experimenting with rapping.
Dregs talks about all the “cool shit in The City” back then, the early 2000s. From sports and music to the aforementioned underworld of San Francisco, SF was lit. It was a time when you could simply step outside your home and find something or someone or some people. You could take a random Muni ride and let stuff happen. And it happened all over town, with creativity pouring out of so many corners. For Dregs, tagging happened first.
He started hanging out more in The Sunset, which was quieter than his own hood. He and his buddies would tag, hang out in the park with their boomboxes, drink 40s, and freestyle. One of those buddies had a computer audio-editing program and a cheap mic (RIP Radio Shack). That friend sent him a track over AIM and it blew young Dregs away. Then he learned that two other guys wanted to battle. Dregs hopped on a bus to Lawton Park to join in. It was his first rap battle.
The crew that battled that day ended up uniting and making more and more music together. They formed a tagging crew called GMC (Gas Mask Colony), which didn’t last long as as a tagging crew, but they kept the name for their rap group. But the group splintered. As mentioned, Dregs ended up at ISA in Potrero. He got into a DJ program and honed his skills. Soon, it was time to get into a studio to lay down some tracks.
They recorded their first song and people liked it. The crew of four included several different ethnicities and neighborhoods across San Francisco, so they had widespread reach.
We take a sidebar to discuss how Dregs got his name. It’s a story that involves the movie Scarface.
Because of time, I ask Dregs to walk us quickly through the years between getting underway with hip-hop and starting his show, History of The Bay. He did music with his GMC posse as well as some solo projects. Days of hanging out and drinking 40s gave way to adult-life realities—jobs and such. They hadn’t figured out a way to make money off their art. Dregs went to City College and then spent two years at UC Riverside. He came back and worked as a youth counselor in the Tenderloin.
At another job in TL, a woman in supportive housing where Dregs worked had a psychotic breakdown. He was the only employee around, and even though he was about to leave for the day, he helped her out. The next day, a boss type thanked Dregs, but told him he’d never get properly compensated for what he did until or unless he had a bachelor’s degree. And so he enrolled at SF State.
He was in his late-twenties at this point, and did better in school than he had ever done. He was a straight-A student, in fact. He took a heavy courseload. It was the first time he’d had Black teachers. One of them advised Dregs to go to graduate school. He looked through the graduate-level programs available and decided that law was his best fit.
And so off he went, to law school in Davis. He did well at this level, also. He graduated, passed the California bar, and got hired by a firm. He was making good money and thought about saying good-bye to making music. But then the folks he worked with at the law firm convinced him not to.
One of the first cuts he did in that era was a collaboration with Andre Nikatina called “Fog Mode.” When the song dropped, it was the pandemic. Dregs had been doing his law work from home. It “sucked,” he tells me. But the track took on a life of its own. He realized amid it all that it was time to go for it with his art.
One of the first steps was to get his social media ramped up. Some people suggested TikTok, but Dregs wasn’t sure what content to throw up on that app. Others said, “Talk about you, talk about your interests.” He looked around and realized that no one out there was really talking about the SF/Bay hip-hop Dregs grew up on, or the prolific taggers he ran with. Around this time, in December 2021, his dad passed away. In the early stages of his grief, Dregs figured it was once again time to quit art and turn his energy and attention to taking care of his mom. But then something happened, something that some of us who’ve experienced loss can possibly relate to. In March 2022, Dregs launched History of The Bay on TikTok.
With his music and social media popping, his law work took a back seat. Folks in his firm took notice and laid Dregs off. It was for the best.
Find Dregs online at his website or on social media @dregs_one. Get History of The Bay on any podcast app.
We end the podcast with Dregs’ take on our theme this season—keep it local.
Listen in as I chat with Gaelan McKeown (director of the SF Art Book Fair) and Lisa Ellsworth (director of Development and Strategy at Minnesota Street Project Foundation) as talk all things 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair.
We recorded this podcast at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in The Dog Patch in June 2025.
Dregs One is a lot of things, including a podcast host.
In this episode, meet and get to know this prolific AF graffiti writer, hip-hop artist, and Bay historian. Dregs starts us off with the story of his parents.
His paternal grandmother was abandoned as a child. Her mother, a Black woman, was raped by a white doctor. She moved to Chicago, where she met Dregs’ grandfather, who was from Jamaica and, as Dregs puts, was a player. He, too, left the family, abandoning his grandmother after his dad was born. She tried ways of getting help to raise her son (Dregs’ dad, who was 13), but ended up dropping him at an orphanage.
Dregs’ dad experienced racism in the Catholic orphanage in Chicago where he spent his teen years. Education helped him emerge from that darkness, though. He eventually became a police officer in Chicago, but left that job after experiencing more racism and rampant corruption.
After that, his dad went on a spiritual quest that landed him in San Francisco. His parents met in The City, in fact, but we need to share Dregs’ mom story.
Her family was from Massachusetts. Her dad got into trouble when he was young, but managed to become a chemist. He helped develop the chemical process that went into Polaroid film, in fact. He later served in the Korean War before becoming an anti-war activist. He hosted the Boston Black Panthers in his home, in fact.
His mom mostly rejected her white culture, owing to many things, including alcoholism. She hung out with Black folks and listened to Black music. She’d be one of or the only white folks in these circles. She went on her own spiritual journey that also ended up here.
It was the Eighties in San Francisco when his parents met. Dregs is their only child, though he has some step-siblings through his dad. He says that despite his parents’ turbulent relationship, they provided a nice environment for him to grow up in.
Because both parents worked, and because he was effectively an only child, Dregs spent a lot of time alone when he was young. His dad got a master’s degree and started counseling AIDS patients in The Castro. His mom worked a pediatric intensive care nurse.
Though Dregs and I were both young at the time, we go on a sidebar to talk about how devastating the AIDS epidemic must’ve been.
Dregs was born in the late-Eighties and did most of his growing up in the Nineties and 2000s in the Lakeview. Make no mistake, he says—it was the hood. Although he lived on “the best block of the worst street,” he saw a lot as a kid.
His mom often got him out of their neighborhood, boarding the nearby M train to go downtown or to Golden Gate Park. His dad wasn’t around a lot, so Dregs spent a lot of time hanging out with his mom. They went to The Mission, Chinatown, The Sunset, all over, really.
Around fifth grade or so, when he started riding Muni solo, Dregs also got into comic books. He read a lot. He drew a lot. He played a little bit of sports, mostly pick-up basketball.
As a born-and-raised San Franciscan, Dregs rattles off the schools he went to—Jose Ortega, Lakeshore Elementary, A.P. Giannini, and Lincoln. But when Dregs got into some trouble in high school, he was taken out and put back in. It was a turbulent period. He eventually graduated from International Studies Academy (ISA) in Potrero Hill.
One of the adults’ issues with young Dregs was his graffiti writing. For him, it was a natural extension of drawing. He remembered specific graffiti from roll-downs on Market Street he spotted when he was young. He says he was always attracted to the SF underworld. “It was everywhere you went.”
Going back to those Muni trips around town with his mom, he’d look out the windows when they went through the tunnels and see all the graffiti, good art, stuff that he later learned that made SF graffiti well-regarded worldwide.
While at A.P. Giannini, a friend of his was a tagger. In ninth grade, Dregs broke his fingers and had a cast. One friend tagged his cast, and it dawned on Dregs—he, too, could have a tag.
After his first tagging adventure, Dregs ended up at his friend’s house. The guy had two Technics turntables. He was in ninth grade, but his friend was already DJing. Among the music in his buddy’s rotation was some local artists. “Whoa, this is San Francisco?” young Dregs asked. His mind was blown and his world was opening up.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Dregs One. And look for a bonus episode on the San Francisco Art Book Fair later this week.
We recorded this podcast in the Inner Richmond in June 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Young Ed was studying at UC Davis and exploring his sexuality. He didn’t consider himself bisexual, and instead thought that everyone was fluid. But he thought he had made a choice—that is, to be heterosexual. Part of that decision is that Ed always wanted a family of his own, and therefore, partnering with a woman was the only way to achieve that.
But between relationships with women, Ed would visit “cruise-y bathrooms,” places known for their hookup potential. This was before the internet and smartphones. Stuff like this was word-of-mouth and need-to-know. But during his visits, Ed never hooked up with anyone. He says that he merely wanted to be adjacent to that world.
After he graduated, Ed stayed in Davis. One day over coffee with a female friend at a lesbian cafe, his friend told him that she might be bi. He said he might be, too. She suggested that they “go to this club in San Francisco” where they could scratch that itch, so to speak. Ed says that The Box remains the most diverse array of folks in the LGBTQIA+ community he has ever been part of. And it wasn’t diverse only on the sexuality spectrum. There were folks from all over the gender spectrum, too, he says. Ed watched men of various ethnic backgrounds dancing with one another and thought, ‘Why are those straight guys dancing with each other? Wait, they’re not straight. Wait, I’m not straight.’
So now he knew. But the question of whether and how to come out was a totally separate question. It was the mid-Nineties. Coming out was, in Ed’s words, “really fucking scary.” He remembered that his dad, who has since come around and is loving and accepting of who his son is, often used homophobic slurs casually when Ed was a kid. Still, Ed summoned the courage and started telling folks. His mom was cool. His dad and brother were cool, too, but also probably confused. His friends shrugged him off in a very “no duh” kinda way.
But there was that one member of his friend group for whom the news seemed not to sit well. Brad had been Ed’s friend since seventh grade back in Hawaii. Three months after coming out to his friends, Brad let Ed know that he, too, wanted to come out of the closet, but that Ed had stolen his thunder. Laughs all around.
Going back to that night at The Box, Ed met someone and they started dating. His new partner lived in Berkeley and Ed moved in (they had a roommate). Then Ed and that first boyfriend moved to the Tenderloin together, followed by a move to the Mission. Ed got a job teaching at Balboa High School in The City. He says he was so young (23) and blended in with students enough that on his first day, the principal at Balboa told him to get to class. Again, belly laughs. Ed loved teaching and did well at it. He lasted at Balboa from 1996 to 2001, teaching English as a second language to students from all over the world.
The conversation shifts to the moment when Ed realized that San Francisco was home. Despite being here so long (since the mid-Nineties), Ed feels that SF is one of several places for him. Hawaii will always hold a place in his heart. He says that his sense of adventure and curiosity have him roaming around to other cultures regularly. But being married and having kids of his own grounds him in The City. One of his two children experiences mental health challenges, so that makes leaving tricky. All of that and community. Community keeps him here. I get it.
One space Ed finds community is at The Social Study, where we recorded. It’s his neighborhood bar, the place where bartenders know his drink without him ordering it. The spot where other regulars and semi-regulars ask him details about his life. Sure, he could find that in another part of town or in another city altogether. But right now, that community is his. And he relishes it.
There’s also his work. Aside from classroom teaching, Ed did some after-school work, education philanthropy work, and some other education-related jobs. Early in the pandemic, his non-binary older kid struggled. Ed says that in hindsight, he wished he had taken his child out of “Zoom school.” He wanted the kid to pick one topic, whatever they wanted, and learn that. They would spend time outside and hang out together. But that’s not what happened. The teacher in Ed pushed his kid, over and over.
Ed and his partner were able to find support groups around SF and the Bay Area that work with children who exhibit mental health issues. That helped, but he eventually realized that his own parenting needed help and support, because it wasn’t meeting the moment. He sought that help, but wasn’t impressed. He says it was mostly folks telling him what he was doing wrong, instead of being supportive and uplifting and actually teaching him. He found a couple of tools that served as Band-Aid solutions, but he was left looking and looking and looking for answers. He needed help that acknowledged and addressed his own traumas.
And so he began working more or less on his own. One of his first discoveries was recognizing a moment, however short and fleeting, between his kid’s stimulating action or words and Ed’s reaction. If he could interrupt that automatic reaction and gain control of his own emotions, it would serve both himself and his kid. He worked on stretching out that time … from one second to two seconds and eventually to five. Once he got there, he could respond thoughtfully and lovingly vs. reacting.
Realizing that he was able to overcome his shortcomings as a parent all on his own lead to Ed’s founding of The Village Well. He’d met others who were aligned with his parenting experiences. He knew that if they created a space where folks in their situations could come for comfort and sharing and advice, they’d be doing the right thing.
If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Village Well’s website and follow them on social media @villagewellparenting.
As we do at Storied: San Francisco, we end this podcast with Ed Center’s take on our theme this season—keep it local.
We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in June 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Listen in as Megan Rohrer and I reconnect after nearly four years to talk all about their new book, San Francisco’s Transgender District. Look for it on Arcadia Publishing in August at your local bookstore.
We recorded this bonus episode outside the front door of the Golden Gate Theater in the Transgender District in June 2025.
Ed Center and I begin this podcast with a toast.
I’m proud to call Ed my friend. I met him a couple years at The Social Study, where we recorded this episode and where my wife, Erin Lim, bartends. From the first time I spoke with Ed, I knew I liked him. His energy and humor and intellect and heart are all boundless. I’m hella drawn to people like Ed.
His story begins in Cebu in the Philippines, with his maternal grandmother. Her family was poor and her parents died in the Spanish Flu of the 1910s. That loss plunged the surviving family members into what Ed describes as destitute poverty.
Following that tragedy, her older brother signed up to work for the Dole company in Hawaii. Ed’s grandmother was 13 at this time, but still, it was decided that she would accompany her brother to the islands to help care for him while he worked the pineapple fields and earned a wage.
Ed points out that the Dole Food Company (as it was known at the time) intended these migrant workers to honor their contracts and then go back to their home countries. To that end, the company only hired young men. But Ed’s family paid a stranger on their boat $20 to marry his grandmother so that she could join her brother in Hawaii.
Ed goes on a sidebar here about the tendency in his family to exaggerate their own history. “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” or so the family saying goes.
He returns to the story of his maternal grandmother to share the tale of her younger sister being so distraught about the departure, she hugged her so hard that her flip-flop broke. It was her only pair of shoes.
In the Filipino community on Oahu at the time, there was an outsize number of men in relation to women. When Ed’s grandfather first set eyes on his grandma, he began to court her. A year later, they asked her older brother if they could get married, and he said no, that she was too young (14 at the time). But they got married anyway, with the understanding that they would wait two more years to live together.
They moved in and Ed’s grandmother had a new baby, including his mom, every other year for the next 20 years.
Like her brother, his grandmother’s new husband worked in the pineapple fields for Dole, doing incredibly hard labor. His grandma washed clothes for bachelor workers. The two saved their money and bought plantation property from Dole. The property was affordable enough that they were able to build multiple shacks for the kids to eventually live in.
At this point, Ed launches into what he calls “the shadow story” of his family. He learned that shadow story when he was a kid and his mom and aunties were cooking in the kitchen. He’d sit just outside the room pretending to read a book, eavesdropping. There, he learned things like which family members were smoking pot or getting into trouble. But there are more serious elements, which prompts Ed to issue a trigger warning to readers and listeners.
His grandmother didn’t quite agree to go to Hawaii. When she told her brother no to the idea, he beat her. He did this repeatedly until she acquiesced. But it was in one of these violent melees that his grandmother’s flip-flop broke.
All this to say that Ed’s grandmother didn’t have much agency in her life decisions. The last two of her 10 children almost killed her. After number 10, the doctor gave Ed’s grandfather an involuntary vasectomy.
Ed shares the story of how, on plantation payday, the women and children would hide in the fields with the men guarding them. It was a way to try to protect them from workers in the next village getting drunk and coming in to cause trouble.
He summarizes the family history to this point by pointing out the incredible amount of resilience his ancestors carried. Also strength and love. But also, violence. All of those qualities manifested in their and their children’s parenting practices.
Ed’s mom raised her kids in this way. The severity of the abuse waned over generations, but it was there nonetheless. Ed says he was ultimately responsible for his mother’s emotions. For many of these reasons, in his adult life, Ed founded The Village Well Parenting. We’ll get more into that in Part 2.
We back up for Ed to tell the story of how his mom and dad met each other. His dad was in the Army during the war in Vietnam. On a voyage to Asia, his boat took a detour and ended up in Hawaii, where he remained for the next five years.
His parents got together and had Ed and his younger brother. They grew up among a much larger Filipino extended family, but Ed didn’t really know his dad’s Caucasian family, who lived on the East Coast. He’s gotten to know them more in his adult life.
Ed grew up on Oahu in the Seventies and Eighties. His family was between working class and middle class, and there was always stress about money. But in hindsight, they lived well. We share versions of a similar story—that of parents telling kids that Christmas would be lean, that they didn’t have a lot of money (probably true), but that never ended up actually being the case. Both of our recollections was mountains of gifts on December 25.
Growing up, Ed was always feminine. He was also athletic. It was a time before Ellen, before Will and Grace, when “athletic” also meant “not gay.” Ed says he wanted to be “not gay,” but he couldn’t help who he was. That led to his getting bullied.
Moving to the mainland for college meant escape—from his own torment and from that of his peers back on the island. Ed went to UC Davis. He had played competitive soccer in middle school and high school, and because his teams were good, they came to the mainland a couple times. But Davis was a whole other world by the time he arrived to go to college.
It was the early Nineties. He took what we call a gap year before coming to California. For him, that meant working. In one of his jobs, he served tables at CPK in Hawaii, where Carol Burnett was one of his regulars.
We end Part 1 with Ed’s story of his time at UC Davis and not yet accepting his queerness.
This Thursday on the podcast, I talk with Megan Rohrer about their new book on the Transgender District in San Francisco.
And check back next week for Part 2 with Ed Center.
We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in June 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we start off talking about the underground nature of trans and drag safe spaces such as Compton’s back in the Sixities, and well before that. Because of this, precise records of places and events are often hard to come by. Saoirse also speaks to the human psychology of needing other people to act in order to justify joining an action. Of course, everyone’s threshold for this varies.
Shane joins in to talk about how queer history is the story of fighting back against hate when there’s nothing left to lose. Folks on the frontlines of these battles don’t always plan the fights that end up happening. Case in point—the events at Compton’s Cafeteria that form the basis of the play.
Then we shift the conversation to talk about Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and how the play came about. Mark Nassar (Tony and Tina’s Wedding) saw the Tenderloin Museum’s (TLM) exhibition on the riot at Compton’s and soon got in touch with Donna Personna and Collette LeGrande through a project the two were working on at the time—Beautiful by Night, a short documentary about their lives as trans people and drag queens. Over the course of about a year of periodic meetings at Mark’s house, where Donna and Collette shared their stories of Compton’s and the riot, the three weaved together enough personal stories to create an immersive play. Katie Conry at the Tenderloin Museum told the group that if something ever came out of what they’re doing, to let her know.
Shane shares her story of the first time she saw Donna Personna perform. Prior to that, Shane thought that drag was a young person’s thing. She’d never seen someone of Donna’s age do drag. But she was blown away and was able to meet Donna. That night, Donna hinted to Shane about the project she was working on with Mark Nassar and Collette LeGrande. She told Shane that when the time came, when they had something ready, she’d let her know. About a year later, Shane was at Mark’s house reading for the role of Rusty, the character based on Donna.
Some of this story has already appeared on Storied: SF, in the podcast on Katie and TLM. The museum helped bring the play to life by getting a space for the production. It was 2018. They were doing it. The first run of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot lasted several months. It was deemed a success and the plan was to bring it back in 2020. But the universe had different ideas.
Prior to the pandemic, the biggest challenge was securing a space. But then, Shane says she was at Piano Fight in February 2020 for an event to sign a lease on a new spot. Just a few weeks later, the first shelter-in-place orders were handed down. Shane speaks to what it means, now more than five years down the road and in a very different political and social environment, to get the play staged. And Saoirse talks about how honored she is and how personal it is for her to portray an actual living legend (Collette LeGrande).
I ask Shane and Saoirse to respond to this season’s theme on Storied—”keep it local.” Saorise then shares the story of being targeted and harassed by right-wing bigots (is there any other kind?) right here in San Francisco. She tells this story to emphasize that, even in The City, trans people are not safe from fascist transphobia and violence that are spreading across the nation and the world. She also speaks to the massive wealth disparity here in SF and The Bay. All of this to say that for Saoirse, keeping it local requires engaging with all of these truths.
Shane begins by riffing off of Saoirse’s response. She works for The City and County of San Francisco and wonders whether some of her coworkers know what’s at risk. She points to right-wing groups coming to SF to hold “de-transition” events. She then ends the episode by cataloging the many reasons she loves The City and wants us all to fight for it.
For more information and to buy tickets for Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, please go to comptonscafeteriariot.com.
And follow the production on Instagram @comptonscafeteriariot.
We recorded this episode in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play space in the Tenderloin in May 2025.
Photography by Mason J.
I joined Erin and Ange of Bitch Talk Podcast for another sit-down with Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen to talk all things Frameline49.
If it weren’t obvious from that moniker, this year’s is the 49th annual Frameline film festival, the largest and longest-running LGBTQIA fest in the world.
After listening to this bonus episode, please browse the Frameline49 program, buy tickets, get your butt in a theater seat, and let’s continue to uplift the LGBTQIA community through art!
We recorded this bonus episode at the Frameline offices in South of Marked in June 2025.
Saoirse Grace was one of the first successful in vitro pregnancies in Massachusetts.
In this episode, Saoirse is joined by her Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play costar, Shane Zaldivar. The two share short versions of their respective life stories and how they got to the Bay Area and San Francisco. Then we dig into the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, followed by a conversation on the play about the riot, their roles in it, and the actual lived experiences of trans people today.
Saoirse, who plays Collette in the play, was born in Boston and grew up a little there, and a little in San Diego. But she got into some trouble in school and was sent to reform school in Austria, near her ancestral homeland in the Dolomites. After high school, not exactly wanting to come back to the US, she went to France for college, where she studied Spanish language literature.
This whole time, Saoirse was a professional actor. She started acting in third grade. By seventh grade or so, she knew that acting was something she loved to do. After about a decade of just acting, Saoirse joined an aerial circus, where she was a trapeze artist for a group in Texas called Sky Candy.
After a few years in Austin, working and doing circus performances, Saoirse came to San Francisco to go to law school. She says, perhaps half-jokingly, that she still wanted to perform, but to do so in a way that made more money than acting. She went to USF and did some police accountability work, but ultimately, practicing law didn’t work out.
And so, after a short time in Las Vegas doing porn and sex work, Saoirse came back to The Bay to do a PhD program to become a professor. It was another opportunity to have an audience, but to also make more money than other performing careers. But that also didn’t pan out.
This run with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play is Saoirse’s first foray back into acting in more than a decade.
Backing up a little, I ask Saoirse about her first move to San Francisco and what she thought of it. She shares the story of leaving Austin, packing up as much as she could fit on her bicycle in Seattle, and riding down the Pacific coast to get here. Wow. At the end of that roughly 1,000-mile ride, she arrived in The City during the Pride parade in 2013. The timing! She soon found work as a bicycle mechanic, something Saoirse still does more than a decade later.
Then we get to know Shane Zaldivar, who plays Rusty in Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Shane was born and raised in Florida, where she spent time between there and Belize, where a lot of her family is from. Her mom had Shane when she was relatively young, and so she spent a lot of time with her mom’s family, both in Belize and in the US.
Life in Florida was rough for Shane. She was bullied a lot early in life for her femininity. She says that when she visits now, she gets no joy out of the place except to be with family members. Belize was much more hospitable for her. She went to middle school and high school in the Central American country.
But she ended up getting a scholarship to attend college at Florida International University, which she says is a diverse place. It was at college that Shane had several awakenings—her sexuality, her love of doing drag. But she says her biggest realization, the one that led her to the Bay Area, was around cannabis. Where she had previously bought into the idea that weed was this terrible thing, from the first time Shane tried it, it changed everything for her.
Shane set out to learn everything she could about the plant and its medicinal, healing properties. She took a college class in Florida on hallucinogens and in that class learned about a school in Oakland called Oaksterdam University. That’s what led Shane to The Bay.
She raised money for the flight and registration at her new school. Once here, she patched together a liberal arts degree in Oakland, studying such topics as hospitality, theater, and anthropology. It was 2014, and she lived in Oakland, too. But it dawned on her later that San Francisco was only a bridge away. After moving around from hostel to hostel, she found an affordable place of her own in The City.
It didn’t take Shane long to fall in love with the Bay Area. She soon discovered events like Folsom Street Fair and spots like The Stud. She got a job in the Ferry Building and found a place to live, a place she still resides in 10 years later.
She says that San Francisco is where she really got to explore her art and her activism. In addition to being in a band, Shane is the Pop-up Drag Queen, a local fixture who performs al fresco, usually in front of the Ferry Building.
Then we talk about her foray into acting, something that came about relatively recently in Shane’s life. From the first time she acted, back in Florida, she felt an intense joy that has stayed with her. It marked the first time she played with gender. Today, she identifies as a trans woman. The first run of Compton’s, back in 2018, was her return to the art and her first really serious acting gig.
We wrap up Part 1 with the historical event behind the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, the basis of the play.
It was August 1966, so nearly 60 years ago. No one is sure of the exact date, but it was a weekend. “The Tenderloin at the time was the Vegas of San Francisco,” Saoirse tells us. The neighborhood was also the only place that drag queens and trans women were allowed to exist. There was less of a distinction between the two back then—something important to understand, both in this conversation and also in the play.
Similarly to the story of Stonewall in New York (which took place two years after Compton’s), police did their best not to let these folks exist. The cops commonly conducted raids and sweeps, both on the street and in otherwise safe spaces, which Compton’s Cafeteria was. But on that day in August 1966, a trans woman at Compton’s decided to fight back, throwing a mug of hot coffee on an officer. Her tight-knit community had her back, as did Vanguard (a radical queer and trans youth organization), and the riot had begun.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Shane and Saoirse. And find tickets to the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play here.
We recorded this podcast inside the performance space on Larkin in the Tenderloin where Compton’s Cafeteria Riot is having its 2025 run.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce is a fourth-generation Chinese-American. Her twin brother has autism, and the two went to Jefferson Elementary in the Sunset because the school had a good inclusive special education program. Kyle says that from an early age, she fought for her twin, all the way up to teaching classmates ASL to be able to communicate with her brother.
After one year at Lick-Wilmerding High School, Kyle transferred to School of the Arts (now Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts) to major in music. She went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York after that, where she majored in ethnic studies and arts, followed by time at Columbia University for social work.
Then Kyle Casey Chu came back to her hometown. She says she missed the calmness here, the Queer scene, and her family.
We shift the conversation to the story of how San Francisco Drag Story Hour got started. Michelle Tea founded Drag Story Hour after having a kid of her own and discovering how hard it was to find spaces for queer parents or parents of queer kids. Tea thought, ‘Why not bring the magic of drag to youth spaces?’
When she set out, Tea sought drag queens who had worked with youth before, something that proved not too easy. But Kyle and her drag persona, Panda Dulce, did in fact have youth work experience.
Kyle had worked as a K–5 Spanish immersion teacher, a special ed. teacher, a music teacher, and a camp counselor. That plus her social work degree definitely qualified her for Drag Story Hour. She along with a handful of other queens joined the pilot program.
Fast-forward to June 2022, when members of the so-called “Proud Boys” (ugh) stormed a Drag Story Hour in San Lorenzo in the East Bay that Panda Dulce had been asked to read at. After barging in uninvited and definitely unwanted, they shouted transphobic slurs and calling Panda a pedophile, a “tranny,” and an “it.” She was forced for her own safety to lock herself in a back room of the library until authorities arrived. When they did, they simply asked these horrible people to leave. No citations. Not even a slap on the wrist or taking of names.
The goings on in San Lorenzo that day were awful enough. But starting soon after, the missteps by media were relentless for Kyle. Journalists seemed more interested in a preordained narrative than Kyle’s actual experience and associated trauma. It was like the story was being fed to her, rather than coming from her own words.
But Kyle and her writing partner, Roisin Isner, were talking one day. They decided that they wanted to reclaim authorship of Kyle’s story, to add dimensionality and humanity to her experience. Isner had been through a traumatic event of her own years earlier and could easily relate to her friend.
We talk at length about Kyle’s reliving her trauma to film the short film that came out of writing sessions with her friend. She says that she never really stopped living it, in fact, and that shooting the movie served as a sort of catharsis for her.
Then we talk about her new book, The Queen Bees of Tybee County, which is out now wherever you buy books (except for that one place—never buy anything there yuck). When we recorded that day in April, the book had just been optioned and could become a movie in the near future. She’s also got another short coming soon, Betty, which just premiered in New York.
Follow Kyle/Panda Dulce on Instagram and her Kyle Casey Chu website.
We recorded this bonus episode during SFFILM fest in The Presidio in April 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Part 2 picks up right where we left off in Part 1, with Mike’s move to The City. It was 2021, around the brief lull in COVID cases before Omicron hit.
Full disclosure: This part of my episode on Mike has way more content about me than most of what I publish here on Storied. I guess you’ll just have to deal.
Mike knew he could fall back on bartending here while he figured out his next gig in his new city. He’d taken one of what he calls a “big swing” with his move to New York City when he was 18. Now was time for another big swing, this one in San Francisco.
He worked briefly at a mezcal bar on Valencia and a month at a cocktail bar in Emeryville. Then, fate wanted a word with Mike Irish.
Someone he met at a memorial for a friend grew up with Emmy Kaplan and mentioned the restaurant to Mike, suggesting he try to work there. He started off with one or two shifts a week, mostly filling in. And then Emmy offered Mike more shifts.
This is one of several points in the podcast where I go on and on about myself. I share the story of my own decades-long experiences with Emmy’s, but for good reason. It culminates with my first time eating inside since the pandemic, when Erin and I sat at the bar and met Mike.
Back to Mike’s story, Emmy had just got her liquor license and needed a bartender who could do that. Mike was the guy.
He became “bar lead” (they couldn’t call the role “manager” and have Mike still receive tips) and created the cocktail menu for the place. He left the hiring of bartenders to Emmy, but Mike eventually took over ordering. He says he’s always had a mind for the business side of things, something not all bartenders carry with them. That possibly stemmed from Mike’s time making movies. He says film production is “the exact same thing” as running a restaurant.
Then we get to the elephant in the room—how Mike ended up owning his boss’s restaurant.
Emmy had told Mike that a neighborhood bar near her restaurant might be up for sale, and that he should look into buying it. She brought a broker into Emmy’s and he sat at Mike’s bar and chatted with him about what Mike thought was that bar for sale. It turned it he was talking about Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack being on the market. It was roughly early spring 2024, and by summer, the deal was done. Emmy and Mike kept that broker, but ultimately worked it all out themselves.
He does share the story of how the deal almost fell through. Obviously, it didn’t. But you just gotta hear this one. He says most of their agreement is verbal/handshake, which speaks to how cool Emmy is.
I prompt Mike to do something he says he hadn’t really done at the time of the recording—reflect on the massive life changes he’s been through just in the last five years. He moved across the continent, got engaged (and since married), had his first kid, bought a car, bought a business. That’s a lot.
Mike says that, after the first day of operation with him as the owner of Emmy’s, it all hit him—how hard it was and was going to be moving forward. He couldn’t take a day off or call in sick. After about a week or so of mental anguish, though, it all started to click for him.
And then we get to the part of this episode where my life and Mike’s really got intertwined—when I went on Check Please! Bay Area last summer, right around the time that Mike took over Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. In our recording, Mike did something that I don’t think anyone who’s been on this podcast has done over the eight years we’ve been around—he turned the mic around and asked me some questions. I was happy to oblige, since he was unaware of how applying to and being on Check Please! works.
This part of the podcast is essential Check Please! Behind the Scenes.
We end the podcast with Mike’s take on our theme this season—Keep it local.
We recorded this podcast at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in April 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Welcome to this bonus episode about Homeless Children’s Network (HCN).
Malik Parker is the director of the Jabali Substance Use Disorder (SUD) program at HCN. He is originally from Fayetteville, North Carolina, but his mom is from Oakland. He left NC for The Bay the day after he graduated high school in 2011.
Cameron Smith is HCN’s director of Afrocentric programs. He is from Columbus, Ohio, but has been in SF for more than 10 years now. Cameron came here on a whim; he had a friend who needed a roommate. His first job in The Bay was in San Jose at the YMCA as a basketball ref. He knew then that he wanted to serve, to give back.
Cameron shares the origin story of Homeless Children’s Network. HCN was founded in 1992 with the intent to serve as a connection between six different shelters in The City. Their CEO today, Dr. April Silas, has been with HCN since the beginning. The idea was that folks experiencing homelessness were transitory, and it would be best if services they received in one shelter followed them.
Nowadays, they serve more than 2,500 clients per year. They have around 60 partnerships with other service organizations in The City. Please visit the HCN website for more info.
They are currently in the middle of their Jabali awareness campaign, a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Public Health that provides services around the fentanyl crisis. Cameron points to the Black population in The City being about 4–5 percent of the total, while Black folks experiencing fentanyl overdose deaths range from 30 to 40 percent of the overall number in SF.
The Jabali campaign aims to bring awareness to treatment as well as warning folks of the dangers of the deadly drug. HCN runs ads on social media and YouTube as well as billboards around town. They aim through these ad campaigns to be as ubiquitous as, say, a Sweet James or Ann Phuong. The goal is to make folks aware of HCN and its services before they might realize they need it.
A big part of Malik’s job also involves meeting people where they are, bringing those same messages as HCN’s ads. He says that this aspect of his role with HCN is perhaps the most rewarding for him.
Malik has learned a lot in his time with HCN, including in their work with SFDPH. He’s uncovered his own biases, which is part of what he works so hard to help others see. He emphasizes for folks the “us” aspect of it all. He says he relishes the give-and-take of seminars, the things he hears people say to one another.
When I mention the United Playaz motto, “It takes the hood to save the hood,” we go on a bit of a sidebar about communities looking internally to solve their own issues.
HCN has workforce development programs, and I ask whether anyone who’s been through their programs has come back to work with them. That has indeed happened.
Then our conversation shifts to ways that The City has adopted a “tough on crime” approach in the last couple of years to several areas that HCN deals with (see the recall of Chesa Boudin and shift rightward of our Board of Supervisors, among other signs). No one in the room the day we recorded agrees with that approach.
We end this bonus episode with ways that you can get involved with HCN, whether it’s donating, volunteering, attending a seminar, or something else. Please visit HCN’s website to learn more. Follow them on social media @hcnkidssf.
We recorded this episode at Homeless Children’s Network offices in The Fillmore in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Mike Irish is his actual name.
Welcome to my episode with the current (it no longer works to say “new”) owner of one of my favorite places in San Francisco—Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. I’m not sure where to begin, but I suppose a sprinkle of backstory can’t hurt.
Back in 2022, I recorded an episode with Emmy Kaplan, then the owner and forever the founder of Emmy’s. It was a fun interview, and through that chat with Emmy, we discovered that we had been across-the-street neighbors in the Mission back in the early 2000s.
Fast-forward to summer 2024 when I applied to be on KQED’s Check Please! Bay Area and rated Emmy’s as my No. 1 pick among the three spots I proposed. Then a funny thing happened—before we shot the Check Please episode, Emmy sold her restaurant to one of the bartenders at the place—Mike Irish.
That brings us to this episode. From the first time Erin and I met Mike at the bar at Emmy’s, I knew I liked the dude. Now let’s get to know Mike together as he approaches the one-year mark of owning his first restaurant, an SF institution.
Mike was born in Houston, but he didn’t stay there long. His dad ran catering trucks for restaurants, and soon moved around bit before settling in Arizona, in the Phoenix area, where Mike mostly grew up.
He came of age in the late-Nineties/early 2000s. Being in Arizona, Mike tells us some of the things about life there that he just considered normal, things like wearing oven mitts to get into your car in the summer. It was hot, but swimming pools were easy to find.
Sports was pretty central to young Mike’s life. He played basketball, baseball, soccer, and other sports. His dad coached some of the teams he was on. He was a good kid. Basketball took over, eventually. He looked up to local players, especially Charles Barkley, whose number Mike shaved into his head.
But after a couple years playing in high school, basketball started to fade and was replaced by theater and drama. Looking back, he calls it a “hard turn,” but we both recognize the plasticity of that age—the teen years.
In his drama classes, Mike gravitated toward writing. He played guitar and wrote songs. He wrote a play for his school. All that young talent and creativity led to Mike and his friends making movies. He was also in bands playing mostly folk music.
With all this going on, he met his first girlfriend. They dated briefly, didn’t talk for 20 years years, and today are married. But we’ll get to that later.
Mike graduated from high school and went to New York City for college pretty much right away. He had visited NYC once before and liked it. He got into film school there, beginning a journey that lasted until three years ago or so.
And so, for nearly 20 years, Mike Irish existed as a filmmaker in New York City.
The school and his place were both in Manhattan. When he first arrived, he knew one guy from a band they’d both been in, and Mike was grateful for that. But of course they didn’t become close in their new hometown, as they attended different schools and made new friends.
Mike made student films, and kept going after he graduated. To survive and pay rent, he started bartending, something that, later in life, would prove crucial to where he is today. I ask him to name-drop some of the bars in New York where he worked. He rattles off several, then summarizes by saying he worked at possibly 50 different sports in NYC.
We talk about the films he made over that almost two-decade span. Some won awards, both domestically and internationally. The most highly acclaimed of his movies was The Life of Significant Soil, which Mike says he’s seen being played on airplanes. Another movie, Permanent Collection, premiered in San Francisco at the Roxie. Mike came out here for that and stayed for a week.
That was February 2020, weeks before COVID shut The City and the world down.
Going back to his first girlfriend, whom Mike had met in high school, she already lived in San Francisco. They had lost touch over the years. But she noticed his name on a movie showing at The Roxie and came out to the premiere. A reconnection was made, but Mike returned home to New York after that week.
Still, the two kept in touch. Once it was possible, one would fly out to be with the other, either in New York or here in San Francisco. That eventually gave way to Mike’s decision to move to The City.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode about Mike Irish.
We recorded this podcast at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Misstencil at a new school half a world away from her home in China.
Her time in Switzerland started off in business school, a topic that she admits she’s not the best at today. Aside from school, she visited other parts of Europe. She got a job in Switzerland, but called her family back home as much as she could afford to. One call she had with them around the new year one year had her feeling like family members were passing the phone and no one wanted to talk with her. She then learned that her grandfather, the one who had raised her, had passed away days before this call. The family had kept the news of his illness from Misstencil, ostensibly to protect her.
Her grandfather’s death took her about a decade to get over. She was left with a sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose. Going back home felt out of the question, and she liked Switzerland. But her school there had a joint program with a school in the US, and so she applied for a visa. That school was in South Carolina.
When her time in South Carolina came to an end, she had a choice—New York or San Francisco. She (correctly) chose The City.
Misstencil had friends in SF already, and they let her stay with her. Those friends told her about a website, then only in the Bay Area, that she could use to find her own place. That site was Craigslist, and they were right. She soon found a place of her own. The year was 2000, and little did she know that she was beginning what would be a decades-long stay here.
Her first job in The City was for a big company, one that had a dress code that put her in high heels. Looking back, Misstencil is so far removed from that corporate world that she cannot imagine wearing those shoes, or painting her nails, or other things that go along with corporate culture. But we’ll get to that.
She found herself meeting and befriending older hippies who encouraged her to pursue her art. She was broke, and they put her up. They helped her get art supplies. She had previously set aside any artistic ambitions while going to school and beginning what she thought would be a career. But summoning inspiration from the art her dad used to do and accepting the help of her friends in her new city, she decided to go for it.
Misstencil (not known by that name just yet) began to show her art. She recounts the first time she sold a piece, and how that felt. She walked by the gallery and saw that red dot and knew she had to tell everybody about it. She says that art and San Francisco and those early friends she made here saved her.
Looking back on her life and the emotional struggles she had endured, Misstencil came to realize that, as an adult and survivor of depression, she wanted to help kids going through that. She lived with roommates in a rent-controlled spot, thus allowing her to do side work of that nature.
The person who today is Misstencil of course wasn’t always known by that name. That started in 2022. She shares the origin story of her pseudonym.
It all began with her simply wanting to beautify parts of The City that had lost their luster, so to speak—boarded-up storefronts and the like. She found herself all over town, talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing how much neighborhoods meant to people. This led Misstencil to conceive of her “San Francisco Lonely Hearts” project, which is how my life intersected with hers. It’s a way for her to show her deep love for and appreciation of San Francisco.
She shares how she settled on stencil art for her method lately. She never had any formal training or went to art school. She says that because she didn’t have a very happy childhood, she wanted her art to help her feel like a kid again.
Misstencil goes on a side story about the time she connected with SF icon Frank Chu and invited him to do Bay to Breakers with her. We also talk about the day we met, when she showed her SF Lonely Hearts work-in-progress canvas outside of Vesuvio. In addition to the 2D art that day in Jack Kerouac Alley, she had Frank Chu on a Roomba holding his infamous “12 Galaxies” sign, and a Golden Gate Bridge bench placed in front of the canvas.
Before we wrap, I ask Misstencil about upcoming shows she has, and she humors me by plugging our “Keep It Local” show, which she’s in.
We end the episode with Misstencil’s thoughts about our theme this season and the theme of the show this week: Keep it local.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
Misstencil was born on a mountain in China.
In this episode, we meet artist Misstencil and she shares the story of her life. Before we get to that, be sure to RSVP to our Keep It Local show on May 23. Misstencil will be one of the six artists featured that evening, and for a very good reason. But we’ll get to that.
As the Communist Party came to power in China, her dad and his family found themselves on the unfortunate side of things. His side of the family had a history as successful business people, which was suddenly frowned upon. Her mom came from a family of professors, also not favorable in the “new China.” Her dad was from Hunan Province, where her mom’s family later moved.
When her dad was young, his family gave him up to a foster mother and foster sister. That foster family, capitalists like her dad’s family, was ostracized and became homeless. Misstencil’s dad was smart and talented, but because of his family’s background, was denied the opportunity to go to college.
He also had tough luck with women. When it came time to meet their parents, once it became obvious what his family’s political background was, they would end the relationship. This happened on more than one occasion.
Despite being attractive and talented (at art and engineering), he was still single at 30. Then someone introduced him to the woman who would become Misstencil’s mom. On their first date, he wasted no time letting her know his background. And it landed. She told him about her own background, and said she wanted to give him a chance.
After the two got married, the government sent them to work hard jobs in the mountains. The reality of life there meant that children went to day care while the parents worked. And after work, those adults had to attend political meetings. There was little to no time to raise kids. This was the situation in which Misstencil would grow up.
Because of this, her parents sent Misstencil to live with her mom’s parents when she was eight months old. She saw her parents only once a year until she was around 12.
Growing up with her grandparents was traumatizing for Misstencil, despite how good they were to her. And that led to depression. All the kids around her had parents, but she effectively did not. It also affected her performance in school. She didn’t do well in any subject except art. Her depression made it hard for her to be interested or to take school seriously.
Misstencil’s parents took her out of school eventually, out of fear that they would lose her, and were able to get her into an education program that was not goal-oriented. In that time, she started to change, which she attributes to the lack of pressure. “I no longer had this pressure of doing stuff I don’t like to do,” she says.
When she graduated, that school sent Misstencil and one other young woman to Shanghai for college. She says that it was an especially optimistic time in China, and she embraced her time in the country’s largest city.
Misstencil shares a fun sidebar about the first time she saw and went into a McDonald’s. Because she was totally unfamiliar with the menu, she ended up ordering a bunch of desserts.
Then she tells us about seeing an advertisement for a meeting about a school in Switzerland. More importantly, cookies would be served at this meeting. That was enough for young Misstencil.
Like many people in China, she was familiar with Switzerland and its amazing mountain scenery. Calendars depicting the Swiss Alps were common. But Misstencil never imagined that she’d have the opportunity to go there.
As we’ve mentioned, the Chinese government exploited people like her dad. He was never really compensated for the incredible contributions he gave to his society. But then he found himself with a little bit of money, and told his daughter that they could use it to send her to Europe for school, at least for a year. She jumped on that chance to get out of her home country.
Misstencil shares the detailed story of her journey to Switzerland. It involves large amounts of paper currency, some of which ended up in her shoes. Arriving was tricky, too. It was the middle of the night and there was a train to catch. And she needed to go to the bathroom, but didn’t have the coins needed to do that.
A further complication was that she didn’t speak the language (German or French). A friendly fellow train passenger offered help finding her stop. But then he fell asleep. Eventually, she made it … in the middle of the night. There was no one around. So she walked.
When she arrived at her new school, she was told that because school started the next day, she’d have to pay to stay there that night (which was already half over). Misstencil notes the contrast between this and what she was used to at home. She says she wondered if she had made a mistake.
But she paid, and the next morning after she woke up, she opened her window. It was like being inside of a calendar, she says.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the rest of Misstencil’s story.
We recorded this episode near Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park in May 2025.
Photography by Alfredo Becerra
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Fredo and Laine had worked for the same company for a minute, but both left eventually. That social group they’d formed with a few other artists they worked with kept in touch. Some years went by.
Fredo attended a workshop for artists at Hunt and Gather in the Sunset, and let Laine know about it. She says that he asked her to be his “accountability buddy.” He says it wasn’t a question, but more a half-joking demand.
Fredo shares what an “accountability buddy” is, in this sense. At the workshop, each attendee set up goals for the next year. Your accountability buddy helps you stay on-target for achieving those goals. For Fredo and his buddy (Laine), part of that meant meeting almost once a week to go over what Fredo had been able to cross off his list and what was ahead. One vital area he felt he needed her help with was networking.
With Laine holding him to task, Fredo knocked out most of his 20 goals for 2023 by August of that year. But, because his networking goal didn’t have a metric, per se, it proved trickier.
And so they got together for coffee and sat in the parklet outside of Gus’s on Haight. Fredo brought a newspaper with him that day. He’d noticed that he kept hearing about art shows after the fact. Because he wasn’t really part of a larger scene (yet), he wondered how people found out about these events. His idea was to create a publication to do just that, and more. And then a funny thing happened. Laine had had the idea to make an art magazine that very same week. Kismet!
They took that as an obvious sign that this was something they had to do. And so they started hanging out even more, talking and talking and talking about what they wanted their publication to be. What kind of paper? What would it look like? How do we make it free for artists to be featured? Do we want advertising?
They answered those questions with several notebooks and a lot of caffeine. The first issue of 415 Zine took them seven months to make. Over that time, Laine came up with the idea of tying the title back to the structure of the publication—it could be four of something, one of something, and five of something. They did their due diligence when it came to researching the media landscape, especially when it came to art journalism. They settled on having their boundary be a geographic one, rather than having an artistic-genre focus.
The “4” would be short features on artists—two pages of full-color examples of their work accompanied by brief write-ups about them. The “1” would be an in-depth interview with a single artist, with several samples of their art to go with the interview. And the “5” would be spots around San Francisco for folks to go experience art. Places like Madrone Art Bar, where we recorded this episode.
I ask Laine and Fredo to talk about those seven months, from conception to the first publication, and the ups and downs they experienced in that time. Laine says she was in “no looking back” mode, and Fredo concurs. The only questions that popped up were around content. They were in it, and nothing would stop them.
Though that first issue took them a little more than half a year, they quickly decided that 415 Zine would be quarterly. Most of the heavy lifting of creating something from scratch had been done. And though putting together a publication like this is no small feat, they felt they had it down.
As we recorded that day in April 2025, Fredo and Laine were about to celebrate the first birthday of their creation. That party fell before this podcast was ready to go out, but I asked them to talk about the anniversary and what it means to have a full year and now five issues behind them.
We end the episode with Fredo and Laine’s thoughts about our theme this season—Keep it local.
Photography by Mason J.
Alfredo Sainz’s grandfather came to US from Chihuahua, Mexico, in the Bracero Program during World War II. That family then migrated from El Paso, Texas, through New Mexico and Southern California, then as far north as San Francisco.
In this episode, get to know Fredo and his 415 Zine co-founder and co-publisher, Laine Wiesemann. We begin Part 1 with Fredo.
Fredo and his brother were his family’s first US-born members, making them both Chicanos. Most of his mom’s family immigrated to the US, but many family members on his dad’s side still live in Mexico, mostly in Guadalajara.
His grandfather followed the work, which lead him to San Francisco in 1946. He worked in construction, eventually bringing his wife and children, including Fredo’s mom, to live with him.
Fredo’s family settled in Excelsior near Crocker-Amazon Park. He attended Sacred Heart. After high school, he moved to Daly City and then the Sunset, where he lives today. Many of his high school classmates are still in SF.
He’s never lived anywhere else, though his family did spend summers in Mexico, something Fredo remembers fondly. His grandfather still had a ranch there where they would stay. They’d set out right when the school year ended, and return right before the fall semester began, with a side trip to K-Mart for school clothes, of course.
I ask Fredo if he’s ever been tempted to live somewhere else. He expounds on an emphatic “No!” Then he talks about a BBQ spot out near the ocean close to Doggie Diner where he was introduced to peach cobbler.
Next, we turn to Laine and her story. She’s from the Central Valley—Sanger, California, near Fresno. The family later moved north to Linden, near Stockton. Both her parents were train engineers. Her mom was one of the first women engineers, in fact.
Laine visited San Francisco a lot during her high school years. She remembers crossing the Bay Bridge and being awed. She has memories of her dad taking her and a friend to Amoeba Records.
She’d been doing art since she was little, but really started getting into it when she was in high school. In her freshman year, she did commissions. After graduation, she moved to Chico, where she says she “learned how to party.”
A friend of hers had moved to The City and her boss was coming here, so, with those things in mind, Laine decided it was time. She moved to San Francisco in 2008.
That boss ended up not moving here after all, so Laine had to find work upon her arrival here. She was able to do that relatively easily. Though she’d worked at Trader Joe’s in Chico doing her store’s art, by the time she got to San Francisco, she took a break from art. She worked for a caterer doing special events. And it was at that job that Alfredo and Laine met.
I ask them what year that connection was made, and the fact that they both struggled to remember says a lot. Deep friendships can do that. They ballpark it as 2009 or 2010, before the Giants won their first World Series in SF. A small subset of their coworkers were artists, and they all formed a tight social circle.
Fredo and others urged Laine to get back to painting. And, inspired by her and others in the group, he decided to pick something up also. He channeled the graffiti he’d done when he was younger. Soon enough, that work crew had a group art show and they asked Fredo to be part of it.
That show led to another with the same artists. They had their own art, of course, but the four also contributed to a single collaborate piece. Me, Laine, and Fredo struggle to remember the name of the game with plastic monkeys that Laine compared the piece to. “Barrel of Monkeys,” Fredo eventually recalls. Yep.
It was 2016 and with those shows behind him, Fredo decided to run with “above-ground” art. He says that, especially in those days, Laine helped him out a lot with the technical side of creating art. Fredo also credits her with being good at the business side of being an artist—promotion and sales and such.
Since she started doing art again, Laine hasn’t stopped. She shares how that got going again. She was visiting her girlfriend’s relatives in Tamales, where many members of that family paint. Laine was inspired. But when it came to subject matter, she felt she had two options—the surrounding natural beauty (specifically, a nearby creek), or a shiny red teapot. She settled on a mashup of sorts—the teapot pouring into the creek.
She had a lot of fun with that little painting. And so, she picked that up and ran with it.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Laine and Fredo.
We recorded this episode at Madrone Art Bar in April 2025.
Photography by Mason J.
Check out my conversation with previous guest Lincoln Mitchell as we chat about Lincoln’s new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco.
Look for Lincoln at the following events for his new book:
- April 29: He will be in conversation with Bill Issel discussing the book and what it can teach us about San Francisco today. Hosted by the Phoenix Project at the Roar Shack, 34 7th Street, from 6–8 p.m.
- May 1: He will be in conversation at the University Club with Corey Busch, who served on Moscone’s senate staff, was a senior member of Moscone’s mayoral campaign staff, press secretary and chief spokesman for Mayor Moscone, and was Moscone’s chief speech writer. This event will begin at 6 p.m.
- May 13: As part of the San Francisco Historical Society’s History Live! program, he will be discussing the book at 6:30. The event will be free in-person or online.
- May 15: He will be in conversation with writer and scholar George Hammond about the book at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco at 5:30 p.m.
- May 28: The Savoy Tivoli in North Beach will be hosting a book party, which will feature a brief discussion of the book as well as an exhibit of the works of noted San Francisco photographer Dave Glass.
For more information about these events, including how to RSVP and buy tickets, go to LincolnMitchell.com.
We recorded this episode over Zoom in March 2025.
In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school.
What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she made in San Diego, one was set on living in New York and going to NYU. And then 9/11 happened, and everything changed.
She’d had dreams of moving to New York and becoming an artist, but those plans were put on hold. After a short stint in Paris, in early 2002, Kundan moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. We take a brief detour to talk about Kundan’s time in Paris, a city, she says, that will always be a part of her soul.
It was in New York that Kundan says she really came into her own. She’d graduated college and was diving into the abyss of early adulthood, finding jobs, paying rent, etc. She also learned how to have fun. This meant, through her work at a music venue, absorbing all the acts that came through. She made lots of friends, too, through serving and bartending at the venue. It was in this job that she became friends with the one and only B.B. King.
That was Kundan’s first bartending job, at the club. She also did some “cater waitering” with a catering company in New York. But we’ll get back to that.
After New York, she pondered a couple different places to start the next chapter of her life. Her sister had quit practicing law and was writing for television in LA, so that was a possibility. But Kundan chose to be closer to her childhood home. Her adult life in The Bay began at a friend’s house in Palo Alto while she “figured out how to get her way into San Francisco.” It was 2007, and she got a 9-to-5er as a receptionist at an engineering firm near the North Point Shopping Center. Then the bottom fell out of the economy and Kundan got laid off in 2008. We go on a bit of a sidebar about that shopping center (I worked nearby back then).
Kundan used time after her layoff to travel. One of the first places she went was Memphis and Graceland, where she took her mom. There was a family trip to Spain. Then she traveled all over India with a friend for what turned out to be three months. Kundan talks at some length about the ups and downs and rewards of traveling.
When she came back to The City, she needed to find a new place to live. A friend had told her about a bar in the Haight that might be a little intimidating, but Kundan didn’t mind that. That bar was Zam Zam. Right away, she loved the place and made friends, including one woman she felt she knew from somewhere. Eventually, they figured out that she was Kundan’s bartender back in New York. Small world, SF-style. That woman is responsible for Kundan’s job at Zam Zam.
What started out as her filling in has turned into 14 years or so behind the bar at one of my favorite San Francisco spots—Zam Zam. She found a place to live nearby and loved that she could walk to her new beloved bar, whether to work or connect with a friend or meet a stranger.
We fast-forward a few years to when my life intersected with Kundan’s. I was on a “Bourdain Crawl” with Bitch Talk Podcast shortly after the renowned chef and author passed away in 2018. When we got to Zam Zam that weekday in June, we lucked out that Kundan was behind the bar. Shortly into the recording of Kundan’s retelling of Zam Zam’s history, Erin of Bitch Talk turned to me and said, “This would be good for Storied.” And that’s how our first episode with Kundan came to be.
Based on that first meeting, Kundan talks about learning the history of the bar she works at. It happened thanks to many factors—her own love of history, the bar’s unique story, visitors’ consistent questions about the place, and the current owner’s knowledge of his business. She goes on to talk about working at the bar the day that Bourdain died. Like a lot of people, he had meant a lot to Kundan. She had even considered culinary school after getting laid off. She worried that the day would be difficult, but it turned out to be the exact opposite—folks were there to honor the man.
Then we back up a bit chronologically to talk about art coming back into Kundan’s life. She’d never really stopped, but it wasn’t front-and-center for her like it is today. A cousin (one of 26) commissioned her to make paintings for his new office. Soon after that, she got the job at Zam Zam, which allowed her the time and freedom to paint more, and so she did. A friend tapped her to be in a show, her first, in the Mission. And when Kundan and I recorded, the show that she curated (her first) was still up at Mini Bar. She shares a little more about how much Mini Bar means to Kundan.
Kundan talks in some depth about the subject of her second appearance on Storied—Rootstock Arts, the arts nonprofit she started with her childhood friend, Sameer Gupta. For her, all the hassle and trouble and stress of doing an art show is nothing compared to the rewards, which are many. I have to agree, 100 percent.
We end the episode with Kundan’s thoughts on this season’s theme (also the theme of next month’s art show in South of Market): Keep it local.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
Listen in as SFFILM Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks and I discuss this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. Topics include:
- SFFILM’s THE HORROR! festival spotlight
- Festival Talk: Filming in San Francisco
- The film Outerlands
- A Tribute to Chris Columbus + Rent
Please visit SFFILM’s website for more info, including where to RSVP for free events and where to get tickets for ticketed events.
We recorded this episode over Zoom in April 2025.
It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan.
Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show:
- Kundan Baidwan's Oral History of Aub Zam Zam Bar (2018)
- Rootstock Arts' Color Your Mind Festival (2024)
Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself.
We begin Part 1 with Kundan’s birth (on Dolly Parton’s birthday) in January 1978. She was born in San Jose, but her family soon relocated up the East Bay to Fremont. Her dad had come to the U.S. for college. He went to school in Reno at UNR. When he and his first wife split up, he went back to Punjab, India, to find a new partner. One of his sisters introduced him to the young woman who would become Kundan’s mom.
Kundan’s dad had already graduated and moved to the Bay Area by the time he found his new wife. In fact, he had lived in The City—on Haight and in South of Market—in the late Sixties. He brought Kundan’s mom back to The Bay after they got married.
The young couple moved around San Jose a couple times, with her dad doing what he could to buy housing for himself and his family. This included their move to Fremont when Kundan was around 2.
All of Kundan’s early memories are set in the East Bay—Fremont specifically. They spent time there and at relatives’ places in San Jose. As a young kid, she enjoyed things like playing dress-up, singing songs in the mirror, hanging out with adults, and asking for recipes. She had visions of being a “culinary genius,” she says now.
Kundan has 26 first cousins, and she keeps up with every single one of them. She’s on the younger end of her generation in her family, but most of her cousins around her age don’t live nearby. In the Bay Area, Kundan was usually the youngest. Owing to this, she feels she benefited from constantly being exposed to culture through her older relatives.
Around middle school, Kundan says she became a “bad student.” What she means by that is school got harder and she didn’t feel up to the challenge. Other kids also began teasing and taunting her, which didn’t help.
When it comes to her own creativity, Kundan is quick to credit her mom, who, she says, was pretty much always drawing or illustrating. Her mom’s mom was a painter. Creativity ran through her and her siblings’ DNA—her brother and sister both wrote at various points in their lives.
She went to Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, where she found her people—the “weird kids,” meaning artists and musicians and theater people. High school wasn’t too cliquey, but as much as groups mixed, you knew who your people were. At this point, Kundan and I go on a sidebar about the movie Didi, Sean Wang’s 2024 film set in Kundan’s hometown of Fremont in the early 2000s.
Her parents were on board for Kundan’s to major in psychology in college. She’d taken art classes in high school, and found a strong art program at UC San Diego. But that’s not what she intended to study.
Kundan shares some of her early memories of visiting San Francisco from across The Bay. And we end Part 1 with her decision to leave the Bay Area and go to college in San Diego.
Check back next week for Part 2.
We recorded this episode at Mini Bar in April 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
The Tenderloin Museum turns 10 years old this summer, and I for one am here to celebrate that.
We first visited TLM early last year, when we talked with museum Executive Director Katie Conry. This bonus episode is all about the many, many programs going on as they approach a milestone anniversary.
To start us off, we hear from Program Director Alex Spotto. Alex shares many (but not all) of the upcoming events Tenderloin Museum is either producing or affiliated with. They include:
- a new production of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play (opens tomorrow, April 11!)
- an art show by Lady Harriet Sebastian (up through May)
- Monumentalizing Community (film screening and discussion on April 17)
- Club 181 Live at Great American Music Hall (April 23)
- McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers Issue Release Party in Myrtle Alley (May 1, 6 to 8 p.m.)
- Tenderloin Music and Arts Festival, by Psyched! Radio (May 16–17)
- Panel discussion about the book Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, Whore (May 22)
- Matthew G. Lasner talk about transforming apartments in the post-war era (May 29)
Visit TLM’s Programming page for more events and more info, including tickets.
Then, Katie and I go on a walking tour of the new space into which the Tenderloin Museum will be expanding. The new spot will triple the size of the current museum and provide, among other things, a permanent home for the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play. They’ll break ground this July, coinciding with the museum’s 10th anniversary.
The current space where their permanent collection lives will become the SF Neon Museum.
They hope to open the new areas of the museum in 2026.
And so, to put it mildly, exciting times at San Francisco’s Tenderloin Museum.
We recorded this episode at The Tenderloin Museum in March 2025.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin. In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it wasn't a fit for young Woody. A decade or so later, now married and with a kid, Woody and his wife moved to Durham, North Carolina, for nine months. It was yet another not-San Francisco town that provided a contrast with his hometown and reminded him how much he wanted to be here. After that brief stint in college, Woody decided he wanted to entertain, and so he enrolled in a clown school run by Ringling Brothers in Florida. He got work with the PIckle Family Circus back in The City. He did a lot of vaudeville with them and even went to Japan and on other tours. It was during his time in the circus that Woody met his wife. Nancy had a boyfriend at the time and was headed to Spain to teach English. Two years later, she returned to The Bay and Woody was single. Their first date was at Rock and Bowl, the spot on Haight Street where Amoeba is today. They walked down Haight after that to Mad Dog in the Fog. When they left Mad Dog, Woody knew it was love when Nancy asked him, "Where can we go play video games?" In 1997, they had a baby, their daughter Miranda. That effectively ended the Performer chapter of Woody's life. Nancy is a midwife, and he needed to be flexible enough that he could watch his daughter while his wife was working. After that stint in North Carolina, Woody came back with a renewed purpose—he decided to devote his life to letting people know how great San Francisco is. It would start with The City's past, and how that history informs the present and helps chart a path to our future. This led to the establishment of the Western Neighborhoods Project. David Gallagher was married to a woman who Woody had performed with. David and Woody formed a board with a couple friends also interested in SF history. They settled on being a nonprofit and built a website, something that was pretty novel at the time. They interviewed folks and shared stories of the west side of town. They also had (and still have) a podcast. Woody was with WNP for 20 years, until just recently. He talks about how the main objective of WNP was to gather as much forgotten history of the west side of San Francisco as possible, and then to make that available to as many folks as possible so that they might understand what came before and what could be possible in the here and now. We take a sidebar to talk about the so-called Doom Loop, especially as it relates to hearing from friends and family who aren't in San Francisco, but will ask us things like, "What the hell is going on out there?" Not to diminish the real problems facing our and other cities, bu that media trope is tired and was always nonsense. We talk briefly about the Outsidelands Podcast, which started way back in early 2013. Woody is no longer directly involved, but it's in good hands with WNP Executive Director Nicole Meldahl. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. From WNP, Woody joined SF Heritage, where he works today. SF Heritage's mission is "to preserve and enhance San Francisco’s unique architectural and cultural identity." Nowadays, Woody is the CEO and president of the nonprofit, and he says that in that role, he "doesn't get to do a lot of the fun stuff," being more on the business side as he is. Still, he of course believes wholeheartedly in the organization's mission—it was what drew him to SF Heritage, in fact. We end the podcast with Woody's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local. We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group.
Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of We Players, a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can.
While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as throwing banners off the clock tower and tying bodies to sculptures around campus. She discovered that art would be her life’s work, not just a hobby.
One idea she had while in Palo Alto was to do a production of Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet held all around the Stanford campus. It was a success, as the audience grew and grew as it moved around, picking up more and more people along the way. Ava was able to turn this type of theater into an independently designed major.
After graduating, she moved to the East Bay and started doing theater productions there and in The City. She started partnering with the National Park Service (NPS) in 2008 and then with SF Recreation and Parks in 2018.
Ava’s first production at Fort Point, the Civil War-era fort under the southern base of the Golden Gate Bridge, was in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, she had a three-year residency on Alcatraz, further deepening her relationship with the NPS. In 2013, she kicked off Macbeth at Fort Point. But a funny thing happened—a government shutdown that year effectively ended that run under the bridge.
Fast-forward nearly a decade, and the NPS reached out to see whether Ava and We Players were interested in trying again to produce Macbeth at Fort Point. That brings us to the present day.
Ava’s friend Ann had left theater and had been working in movies. She’d also been taking epic walks—as in hundreds of miles at a time, all over the world. She was on one of these walks when she and Ava connected over Zoom and Ann offered to play the part of Lady Macbeth to Ava’s Macbeth in We Players’ upcoming production.
Ann would not only play one of the two major roles in the play, but she would also be there for Ava to help with various aspects of putting it all together, including casting. It was somewhere in this time that the decision was made for this to be an all female-identifying and non-binary cast. We Players is run and was founded by women, but they hadn’t done a production with a cast like this before. It was 2024, before the election. It just felt right.
Ann and Ava talk about the themes of Macbeth and how they relate to the current times we’re in, no matter who we are. Ava touches on how important it is for her to foster a caring, kind, nurturing environment among her cast members, and how poignant that is for such a violent play like Macbeth.
Then we pivot to talk about how times have changed, 10 years removed from the last time they did this at Fort Point, and how they have not. Ava also describes what it’s like inside of Fort Point, something we in San Francisco might not all know about. One point they want to emphasize for anyone who comes to see their show—it’s cold as hell, even by SF standards.
We Players’ production of Macbeth at Fort Point opens on April 11 and runs through May 18. All shows start at 6 p.m., Thursday through Sunday (with a few exceptions), rain or wind (duh) or shine. Tiered tickets (for equitable access) are available at the We Players website.
We recorded this episode in the Gramercy Towers in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850.
In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of SF Heritage. But he’s so, so much more than that.
He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco.
On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His dad’s mom was single and fell on hard times in Texas. She came to San Francisco, where she had a step-brother.
Woody’s parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard (where Boudin Bakery is today). Donut Bowl was a combination donut shop/hot dog joint. At the time the two met, his dad worked as a cook there and his mom was in high school. His mom and her friends went to nearby Washington High and would hang out at the donut shop after school. The next year or so, his parents had their first kid—Woody.
They came from different sides of the track, as it were. Woody’s mom’s family wasn’t crazy about her dating his working-class dad, who didn’t finish high school. But once his mom became pregnant with Woody, everything changed.
The couple had two more sons after Woody. One of his brothers played for the 49ers in the Nineties and lives in Oregon today. His other brother works with underserved high school kids in New Jersey, helping them get into college.
Woody shares some impressions of his first 10 years or so of life by describing The City in the mid-Seventies. Yes, kids played in the streets and rode Muni to Candlestick Park and The Tenderloin to go bowling. It was also the era of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jonestown, and the Moscone/Milk murders. But for 10-year-old Woody, it was home. It felt safe, like a village.
Because I’m a dork, I ask Woody to share his memories of when Star Wars came out. Obliging me, he goes on a sidebar about how the cinematic phenomenon came into his world in San Francisco. He did, in fact, see Star Wars in its first run at the Coronet.
He attended Sacred Heart on Cathedral Hill when it was an all-boys high school. He grew up Catholic, although you didn’t have to be to go to one of SF’s three Catholic boys’ high schools. Woody describes, in broad terms, the types of families that sent their boys to the three schools. Sacred Heart was generally for kids of working-class folks.
After school, if they didn’t take Muni back home to the Richmond District, Woody and his friends might head over to Fisherman’s Wharf to play early era video games. Or, most likely, they’d head over to any number of high schools to talk to girls.
Because parental supervision was lacking, let’s say, Woody and his buddies also frequently went to several 18+ and 21+ spots. The I-Beam in the Haight, The Triangle in the Marina, The Pierce Street Annex, Enrico’s in North Beach, Mabuhay Gardens. There, he saw bands like The Tubes and The Dead Kennedy’s, although punk wasn’t really his thing. Woody was more into jazz, RnB, and late-disco.
We chat a little about café culture in San Francisco, something that didn’t really exist until the Eighties. To this day, Woody still spends his Friday mornings at Simple Pleasures Cafe.
And we end Part 1 with Woody’s brief time at UC Berkeley (one year) and the real reason he even bothered to try college.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Woody LaBounty. And this Thursday, look for a bonus episode all about We Players and their upcoming production of Macbeth at Fort Point.
We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street. The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events in the gallery. To couch our discussion of how they choose which books to sell at Medicine for Nightmares, Josiah points out that the last time he checked, something like 75 or 80 percent of bookstores in the US are white-owned. He shares stories of sneaking out of his home in Marin when he was a teenager, driving to The City, and going to City Lights, which was open until midnight in those days. It was there, though, that Josiah discovered Latinx poets, writers who spoke his language, literally. For him and his business partner, Tân Khánh Cao, it was always about wanting to see themselves reflected on the shelves. Josiah mentions a long-held, racist belief by publishers that Black and brown folks don't read. That, of course, is nonsense, and the bookstore stands with others in direct defiance and opposition to that mindset. On their first day of business, Josiah says that a young mom came in with her kid and went to the children's books section of the store. He and Tân noticed that she was crying, so they went over to see if everything was OK. "I've never been in a bookstore before and seen a kids' book that looks like my kid," she told them. That was the first day. We then turn to the story of how they came up with the name of the store. Joshia and Tân were throwing out potential names to each other out front on the sidewalk one day before they opened. "Each one of us was coming up with a worse name than the other," he says, half-jokingly. One of them suggested looking at titles from Sun-Ra, a musician they both like. One of his songs is called "Medicine for a Nightmare." It clicked for them instantly. Then we talk about the growing call to ban books in the US. In my opinion, simply opening for business and turning the lights on is an act of defiance for Josiah and Tân. He goes on to state that they're well aware that they could be shut down and/or arrested every day. He says they get harassing phone calls from time to time, in fact. We end the episode with Josiah's thoughts about our theme on Storied: San Francisco this season—Keep It Local. Medicine for Nightmares 3036 24th Street Sunday 12-9pm / Monday 12:30-9 pm Tuesday–Thursday 12:30-10pm Friday 12:30-11pm Saturday 12-11pm @medicinefornightmares (415) 824-1761 Photography by Mason J.
This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making.
We last talked with poet Josiah Luis Alderete back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer.
Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back.
One of his coworkers at City Lights came up with the idea of doing poetry out the window onto Columbus Avenue. The first poet to read up there was Tongo Eisen-Martin. Josiah says that the reaction from passersby, the looks of joy on their faces, is one of his favorite memories from this time.
Then we talk about Josiah’s monthly Latinx reading series, Speaking Axolotl, which has been going strong for more than six years now. It started pre-pandemic in Oakland, pivoted to Zoom from early in the pandemic, and resumed in-person in the Mission once that was possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves now.
Josiah reminds us that he was evicted from his home in the Mission back during the first dotcom wave of the Nineties, and that he hadn’t been able to move back until recently. Before getting the job at City Lights, he owned and ran a taco shop up in Marin for 20 years. He told himself toward the end of that long run that he never wanted to own a business again.
But then he went into Alley Cat Books one day and was talking with that store’s owner, Kate Razo. Josiah had been putting on events at Alley Cat for his friend for years, but now, Kate mentioned that she was considering selling the bookstore. To explain his reaction, Josiah begins to talk about how much the Mission means to him.
Having given so much to him, his life and his poetry, Josiah felt he owed the neighborhood. He knew that if he didn’t step up and take over the space as a book store, it would be prone to whatever trendy gentrifying business happened to move in. But he also knew that it would take a lot of work and a lot of money to do what he felt had to be done.
And so he assembled a group of folks and they approached Kate Razo with an offer. That was in August. They opened Medicine for Nightmares a few months later, in November.
He originally envisioned keeping his job at City Lights while helping to open the new store in the Mission. But the enormity of the task had other ideas. Some of those folks he’d gathered to do the work also fell off, which seems natural in hindsight.
Nonetheless, defying odds and perhaps expectations, the new book store opened. Originally, after having gone through the Alley Cat book inventory and given much of that back to Kate, they opened “bare bones.” Around Day 2 or Day 3 of being open, Josiah realized that he couldn’t be both there and City Lights. It was obvious that he needed to quit his job in North Beach, a tearful process he describes.
We end Part 1 with Josiah taking listeners through the space that Medicine for Nightmares inherited from Alley Cat Books.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Josiah Luis Alderete.
We recorded this podcast at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery in February 2025.
Photography by Mason J.
In Part 2, we pick up with Ellen's life after she graduated from Washington University. Next up was a move to New York City. In the Big City, she consulted for a financial services company. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis of those years. She found the job market tight, so she got a job in Washington, DC, where she lived for four years. Ellen says that during her time in the nation's capital, she behaved like a New York snob, never really giving DC a chance. She'd go back to NYC just about every weekend. Some of her New York friends didn't realize that she'd moved, in fact. Her return to NYC four years later was perhaps overdue. Ellen spent the next four years in New York, and she still loves going back to visit friends there. But it was time for a move across the country. Ellen's then-boyfriend/now-husband got a job in San Francisco, a city she'd visited before that move. She hadn't spent significant time here and was somewhat reluctant to leave New York. But she saw what a good opportunity the move was, especially for her partner. She approached her move out West setting aside her own reservations, and decided to embrace her new hometown. She wasn't able to keep her East Coast job out here, so that meant looking for work. It was 2016, and Ellen was able to find folks here whom she'd known in New York, and that of course helped her transition to SF life. Ellen goes into some detail about the adjustments that New York City transplants make in San Francisco. Parks, brunches before noon, exercise, just being outside a lot. She also noticed people complaining about the weather a lot, which we do. We're spoiled AF, right? We take a short conversational detour to talk about what all attracts us and draws us to SF, including when we leave on vacation and come back. Then we pivot to talk about Ask Me SF. Ellen lays the background for us, describing what folks who don't live here kept saying about her new city. She felt offended. "How dare you?" she often asked herself. She might not have had this term in mind, but Ellen was experiencing folks on the Doom Loop. But she felt differently about San Francisco. And so she set out to provide a service for people, a collection of resources meant to help experience all the good that is here. Like Storied: SF for me, she wanted to promote the things about living here that she finds joy in, to get word out so that others, too, might experience the wonder that's so woven into life here. We end the episode with Ellen's thoughts on our theme this season: Keep it local. Visit Ask Me SF and follow them on Instagram for more info and inspiration. We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in.
In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs Ask Me SF, a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode.
We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed.
Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town, and so she found it hard to relate fully to folks around her. Her family was in North Carolina, and Alabama before Ellen was born, because her dad, who’s a doctor, went to school but also wanted to go to small towns in the US to run his practice. He did well in that sense, but his American-born Chinese kids not so much.
The family moved to Taiwan when Ellen was 10, and that presented new challenges because of her decade in the US.
Before that move, she had taken up violin and piano (“like a good Asian kid,” she says) and dabbled in visual art. She drew and did some painting at home and at school, back when schools had art classes.
She kept that going in Taiwan. But she experienced culture shock just the same. Remember: She arrived when she was 10, and so she spent those very formative early teen years in a familiar but also not familiar part of the world. Other kids at the American school she attended were mostly relatable. But Taiwanese folks who’d never left their homeland presented some friction for folks like Ellen.
When it came time to choose a college, her parents encouraged her to do a pre-med program, but left room for that track not to stick with their daughter. She chose Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and ended up minoring in Visual Communication.
We go on a short sidebar here about Ellen’s older sister, Helen. Despite the age difference and their varied experiences back in Taiwan, the two have always been close.
[There’s a brief pause in the recording at this point. We relocated to the backyard at Ocean Ale House when the band began to play.]
Nowadays, in hindsight and with some life lived between then and now, Ellen has come to appreciate her ancestral homeland.
She says it was never a question whether to come back to the US for college. A counselor helped her choose a school that was both good for pre-med and had a solid art program. She chose Washington University sight-unseen.
She did pre-med, but only for the first two years. Then she switched, with her sister’s encouragement, to business with a vis-com minor. Ellen graduated in four years and set off for the East Coast.
Check back next week for Part 2 and Ellen’s move to San Francisco.
We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco. The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact. As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an understatement. "It's the closest I've ever come to literally shitting my pants." Nato then does a rendition of his first joke that night. Audible growls are heard in our recording. Nevertheless, he did a few more open-mics at that spot in Seattle. He liked it enough. But after graduating from college and moving back to The City, he dedicated his life to being a union organizer. As a history student at Reed, he'd written a thesis about the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco in the 1870s. Nato then explains how the series Warrior is based on this time in SF. There's bits in the story about the incredibly racist and anti-union human for which Kearny Street is sometimes attributed to. That thesis is what got Nato interested in doing labor work. He resumed going to comedy shows, but not getting up on stage. Around the time he turned 30, he found himself laboring over the jokes he'd tell at all the weddings he'd go to. He was also asked to give talks at labor conferences, which doubled as canvasses for Nato to deliver more of his own comedy material. All of these comedic sprinklings led him back to the stage. His first regular spot back in SF was the BrainWash (RIP) on Folsom Street. Once again, the jokes bombed, though his pants fared better this go-round. He offers up another telling of a joke from that era of his. You've been warned. As he left the BrainWash one of those nights, local comedy legend Tony Sparks asked him to come back the next week, and he did. Eventually, Nato invited his friends to come see him perform. He'd moved back to San Francisco in 1997 to do union organizing, as we've mentioned. Two years before that, John Sweeney had been elected president of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney pushed to "organize the unorganized" and bring young people into the labor movement. Nato was part of this wave. He got a job at Noah's Bagels and organized a union there. He went to anything he heard about that interested him. He and his then-girlfriend/now wife would attend talks and rallies together. Nato would sometimes find himself that only ally at, say, LGBTQIA union meetings. This was well before we even used words like "ally." Nato was approached to organize workers at the Real Foods on 24th Street. Then the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was beginning to organize bike and car messengers in San Francisco. Nato worked as a car messenger, which he did for three years, and helped organize his coworkers. We go on a short sidebar about bike messenger culture in The City in the late-Nineties. It was huge. A few moves from union to union here and there, and Nato found himself raising money and helping to open a low-wage workers' center for young and immigrant folks in the service industry. That center is still around today. The second time Nato left San Francisco was in 2012. This flight took him to New York City, where he relocated to write for his friend W. Kamau Bell's first TV show, Totally Biased. As Nato puts it, he "got the chance to be a Jewish comedy writer living in Brooklyn for six months." Then, in 2018, he and his family moved to Havana, Cuba, for six months while his wife worked on her PhD research. Nato says that the only time he was tempted to relocate permanently was during his time in NYC. His kids liked it there. They looked at different neighborhoods and even schools. But Nato wasn't all that happy in New York. The experience took a toll on his friendship with Kamau (they've since moved on and are tight once again). And then the show got canceled. The universe had spoken. That center he'd helped to found back in San Francisco had passed the nation's first minimum-wage municipal law. In 2006, they helped pass paid sick days here in The City. Nato had left the organization just before that to join the California Nurses' Association (CNA). Through that org, he was part of the ultimately successful effort to keep St. Luke's hospital open. It was after his time with the CNA, 2011 or so, that Nato returned to doing stand-up. He recorded his first comedy album and went on his first comedy tour (with Kamau). In 2014, he returned to organized labor, joining Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1021. He works there today, as head of collective bargaining. We return to comedy and Nato lists off some more folks doing open-mics with him a decade or so ago who've moved on to various levels of fame and recognition—Ali Wong, Chris Garcia, Shang Wang, Kevin Camia, Moshe Kasher, and Brent Weinbach, to name a few. Nato takes us on yet another sidebar, but it's a good one. It's all about the "Punchline Pipeline," the system by which local comics can test their chops for a while until they're ready (or not) to move on to bigger and better things. It took Nato three years to work up to the level of paid host at The Punchline. Around 2006, to go back, he and Kamau started doing political comedy shows together. This was during the George W. Bush years, when "leftist," "liberal" comedy was big. Then Obama got elected and that type of comedy cooled off considerably. Nato started to host shows at The Make-Out Room monthly. He credits that stint as the time that he "figured it out." Nato still does stand-up, though not with the intensity with which he performed in his Thirties. Today, he contributes regularly to The Bugle Podcast. He works with Francesca Fiorintini and her Bitchuation Room show. He's also trying to find time to write a book—a funny take on union organizing. And he's kicking around the idea of another comedy album, which would be his third. Follow Nato on Instagram and Blue Sky. His two albums are available to stream or buy on BandCamp. We end the podcast with Nato's thoughts on our theme this season: Keep It Local. We recorded this episode at Nato's home on Bernal Hill in January 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira
Nato Green started hanging out at San Francisco comedy clubs when he was in eighth grade.
Nato’s parents met when they both still lived in the suburbs of Chicago. They got married in 1968 and moved to San Francisco soon after that. Nato says that they “were in the counter-culture, but bad at it.” What he means by that is they didn’t take their subversive lifestyles all the way like many of their peers did.
But they were definitely left-leaning folks. They settled in Noe Valley, which was quite a different neighborhood back then. It was much more working-class than it is today. Think: blue-collar Irish- and Italian-American families. They had their first kid, Nato, and five years later, their second, his younger brother.
When Nato was in middle school, his parents split up. He went with his dad to live at 22nd Street and Dolores, and then up to Bernal Hill. He split time between there and his mom’s house in Noe Valley. Nato is quick to point out that Bernal Heights was also very different back then. There were even unpaved roads on the hill when he was a kid in the Seventies.
Today, Nato uses history and some pop-culture references to date his own memories here in San Francisco. He remembers things like the Mosone/Milk murders and ensuing “White Night” riots, to name just one. The Forty-Niners’ string of Super Bowl wins in the Eighties are another.
Nato admits that he wasn’t the best big brother. He lists off some of the SF schools he attended—Rooftop Elementary, MLK Middle School, and Lick-Wilmerding High School, where he went on a scholarship. His dad worked to the SFUSD for 35 years and worked on desegregation, among other things. He also taught in SF public schools.
Nato says he was a “sensitive, depressed kid.” He read a lot, especially comic books. He graduated from high school in 1993, when the local music scene was overtaken by thrash/funk. Bands of that genre were plenty. Nato went to those shows, where he was able to, anyway. He wasn’t yet 21.
The first indie comic book store in The City was on 23rd Street in the Mission—The SF Comic Company, and two doors down was Scott’s Comics and Cards. Nato became a Scott’s regular. Others who hung out there a lot became his buddies.
The SF band Limbomaniacs lived next to Scott’s. Nato goes on a sidebar here about how bands in the thrash/funk scene never really blew up, mostly owing to what a uniquely live experience the music was.
In 1990, when the Niners won the Super Bowl in a blowout, the Limbomanics played with guitar amps at the windows of their Victorian on 23rd Street, facing out. As Nato tells it, skater kids poured out of that house, and other neighborhood kids flocked to the scene. A mosh pit soon emerged, of course, on the asphalt.
Nato goes on another quick sidebar here about all the different neighborhoods and scenes interacting on a regular basis. At least when he grew up, they did.
Nato’s main modes of transportation in San Francisco were his feet and Muni. The main bus lines were the 24, the 49, and the 67. His high school was on Ocean Avenue, but he mostly hung out in the Mission. One of his good friends lived in Lower Haight and had a car, so Nato would sometimes take Muni over there.
That buddy with a car would also swing by and pick up Nato and his friends. They’d often go to the west side of town and hang out in coffeeshops. Nato rattles off several of those shops, also letting us what occupies those spaces today—Farley’s (still there), Higher Grounds in Glen Park (still there), Higher Grounds in The Mission (closed), Café Macondo (Gestalt today), Blue Danube (still there), and the Horse Shoe (empty today).
There’s another sidebar about Jello Biafra. Nato says, “Don’t meet your heroes.”
As mentioned up top, he started hanging out at comedy clubs in The City when he was in eighth grade. There was a show on KQED called Comedy Tonight that featured local comics. Originally, the show was shot at Wolfgang’s (now Cobb’s), but it later moved to Great American Music Hall. Alex Bennet was on Live 105 in the morning and Comedy in the Park was drawing 50,000 people to the Polo Fields. There were five seven-nights-a-week clubs in SF, and at least five more around the Bay. People made a living as regional headliners.
Around this time, Nato’s eighth grade science teacher’s roommate was the doorman at Cobb’s. Word got around to that guy that a kid was into comedy, and so he started taking him to that club. He saw comedians such as Greg Proops, Dana Gould, Paula Poundstone, Mark Pitta, Johnny Steele, Will Durst, Greg Behrendt, and Margaret Cho. He watched these folks, some of them anyway, become headliners.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode on Nato Green.
We recorded this episode at Nato’s home on Bernal Hill in January 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Barbara had just really become settled in San Francisco and was in what would become a decades-long process of learning the place (I can totally relate, btw). She hung out in the Castro more than the Mission, which in those days was a lesbian mecca. Café Flore (nowadays known as Fisch and Flore) was a favorite. Eventually, though, Barbara moved to the Mission. The company she had been contracting with hired her and that provided the security she needed. She called an apartment at 19th Street and Dolores, across from Dolores Park, home. She's quick to point out how different the neighborhood was back then. "You wouldn't wanna walk through that park at certain times of the night," she says. By the time Dolores Park Café and Bi-Rite opened and that area slowly gentrified, Barbara and her partner moved west to the Castro. They lived there for a few years before finally relocating to The Bayview, the neighborhood Barbara has called home since 1999. Barbara's foray into winemaking started, as many things do, as a hobby. A coworker's husband was making wine at home with friends, and he asked her why, as an Italian-American, she had never tried it. It was a "challenge accepted"-type of moment. 1997 was the first year Barbara made wine. That coworker's husband served as her mentor for about two years. Having grown up out east, part of her winemaking education involved learning to enjoy good California wines. The first wine she made was the first one she fell in love with: Zinfandel. The basement of her apartment on Dolores was a perfectly moldy, dank, dark space for making wine. They began with garbage-can-size containers of juice, and she and a friend took turns caring for the fermentation. They'd have bottling parties with their partners. They split the haul—six cases each. The next year, that friend bailed on her, and Barbara was solo. The year after that, 1999, she found a new grower. It was an all-Zin affair until 2009, when she added a Cabernet Sauvignon to her repertoire. For the first decade or so, the wine was shared with friends, at dinners, at parties, that sort of thing. Her friends loved her wine, but she wondered whether they were just being polite. Then opportunities arose for folks in The Bayview but outside of her circle of friends to try her wine. Art 94124 Gallery was one such opportunity. Barbara served wine at an art opening there and got excellent feedback. She'd already secured a permit for making wine at her home in The Bayview. We go into some depth discussing the permit process. After that, Barbara bumped her volume up to half a ton. She took her wines to a weekly market outside the Bayview Opera House, now known as the Ruth Williams Opera House. It was early in the time of pop-ups, 2012 or so, but that's what it was. The Bayview Underground Food Scene convened every Thursday at the opera house from 6 to 9 p.m. But when the opera house underwent renovations and the market moved to Pier 70, in Barbara's words, things "went downhill." Fewer people were willing or able to make the trek to The Bay. Eventually, it fizzled. But through that group, Barbara had met a baker. In 2015, the two decided to open up in the space where Gratta is today. At first, the wine bar was in back (where it still is today), but the front was her business partner's bakery. Today, that space is an Italian goods retail shop that Barbara runs. Seven years later, the bakery moved out. In 2017, Barbara had taken over the space just next door to the south, the idea being that it could serve as her winery. They moved everything from the garage in her home to the space where it is today (also the space where we recorded). Today, Gratta Wines and Market comprises a wine bar in back, groceries and a deli up front, and winery next door. They're located at 2022 Lane Street/5273 Third Street. And they're open Tuesday–Thursday 3 p.m.–9 p.m. and Friday–Saturday 12 p.m.–10 p.m. Barbara hopes to have the winery fully opened by this spring. Follow Gratta Wines for updates. We end the podcast with Barbara's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local. Photography by Dan Hernandez We recorded this podcast at the Gratta Wines winery on Third Street in the Bayview in December 2024.
One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari. In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at Gratta Wines in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners" (yum!). These involved aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as the older generation. Barbara and her immediate family lived upstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Because of this set-up, she says it was more like one big family. And every week culminated on Sundays, with as many as 30 people coming in and out of these get-togethers. The sauce was on the stove starting early in the morning. And if more people came, it simply meant more pasta. If, like me, you're thinking of the "Fishes" episode of The Bear, you're not far off. Saturdays were spent going "up the street," which meant shopping at places like Sears or Macy's. Maybe they'd stop at White Plains Diner for lunch. But they always ended up back at her grandmother's house for cake and coffee. Her mom's youngest brother went to school with Barbara's dad's youngest sister. They came from different towns, but all ran in the same circles. And thanks to this, as well as a tight-knit Italian-American community in the area, her parents met. They got married in 1958 and had their first kid, a son, in 1959. Then Barbara was born in 1960. The family is Catholic, but that manifested more in traditions than any religious sense. They went to church on big holidays, and Barbara shares a story about her grandmother giving her money for the Easter Sunday collection. But she and her cousins pocketed the money and spent the service on the church roof. After she was confirmed, around eighth grade, her parents gave her the choice whether to keep going or not. Barbara chose to hang up her career with Catholicism at that point. By the time Barbara was in high school, her immediate family moved to Florida, in the Sarasota area. She says it was a hard time for her, being torn from all the people and places she knew. There wasn't a lot of Italian culture in her new home. Her mom searched for ingredients to make the food she was accustomed to. She spotted a sausage truck one day and followed it. Only through this was she able to maintain some semblance of her cultural past. Barbara stuck around after high school down in Florida. She got a degree in physical therapy and worked for about 10 years on the west coast of the state. Still, neither she nor her two brothers (one older, one younger) loved it there. Barbara left Florida around 1989 or 1990 for California. Her first visit, before she moved to San Francisco, was a vacation with a coworker in the mid-Eighties. They stayed in a hotel on Van Ness near The Bay. They did what tourists do—Fisherman's Wharf, drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, that sort of thing—and didn't travel to any SF neighborhoods. The visit involved a quick drive down to Monterey to see a former coworker of theirs. The entire trip left her wanting to visit again someday. When the time came to move here, her job set her up with a place to live for a few months. Barbara kept renewing these contracts every three months. She started in the southwest corner of The City, within walking distance of Joe's of Westlake in Daly City. We end Part 1 with stories of Barbara's early friends in SF showing her around The City. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of my episode with Barbara Gratta. We recorded this podcast at Gratta Wines in the Bayview in December 2024.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
It's been a damn year, y'all. In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show Vandor Hill, owner and creator of Whack Donuts. His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead. This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event:
- 5x5 crew
- breaking battle
- $1,000
- donuts
- line dancing
- free giveaways
Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram for more info. And if you're able to, please donate to help offset some of the costs of putting on this event. We'll see you there! We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in January 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We'd just learned of the call Ashley received from The Fillmore while she was working in Seattle. She'd visited San Francisco once to visit a cousin, but that stay lasted a mere 48 hours. She had one friend here at the time. Up in Seattle, the shows she helped produce were huge acts like Beyoncé and Rihanna. What especially excited Ashley about this opportunity at The Fillmore was the potential to work on smaller shows with groups and people more on their way up, so to speak. For fans and showgoers, it was more about music discovery, as she puts it. It was June 2012. Ashley's move to San Francisco was more or less sight-unseen. The City immediately felt like a "bigger" place for her, its music ... just a bigger city all-around. It was big, "but not that big." She landed in the Mission, moving in with a friend of that one friend she had in SF. Ashley lived at 24th and Potrero for nine years, until just three years ago. We shift to talk about Ashley's time at The Fillmore. She shares conversations among staff there about the history of the place and placing that at the forefront. The venue partnered with the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation this past fall to reintroduce the public to the place and its long history, as well as really getting Bill Graham's story out there. Ashley then shares that life story of Bill Graham. It was Graham who put The Fillmore on the map. His first show there was in December 1965. He had fled the Holocaust as a kid, went with family to New York, then ended up in San Francisco. He wanted to be an actor and found the San Francisco Mime Troupe. That first show at The Fillmore was a benefit for the Mime Troupe, in fact. The place had been a dance hall and a roller rink previously. Graham might have had a hunch, but when he took over putting on music shows, it was right at an inflection point for rock music in The City. Bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin frequently played there. Bill Graham had a gift for pairing musicians from different genres together in such a way that shows attracted different groups of people. Ashley points out, though, that first and foremost, Bill was a businessman. He followed and created opportunities to make money. A few years after taking over at Fillmore and Geary, he opened The Fillmore West at Van Ness and Market. There's a fun tidbit about Bill Graham appearing on David Letterman back in the Eighties—which just speaks to how big a personality he'd become. Our conversation then shifts to two questions I had for Ashley. I wanted her to talk about the red apples that are always found in a bucket at the top of the stairs when you enter The Fillmore. That, and the posters handed out to showgoers on their way out of sold-out events. No one really knows how the apples got started, she says. There are versions of the story. One holds that Bill Graham gave them out as a simple gesture of hospitality. Another was that putting a little food in your belly after a night out can't hurt anything. A rather elaborate telling is that, as part of an exhibit on Bill Graham at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, someone who'd been in France with him when they were kids shared the story of sneaking out at night to go to an apple orchard. As for the posters, Ashley talks about their origins, when they were simply advertisements for shows at The Fillmore. The posters eventually took on a life of their own, though—for many of the early ones, the style of lettering worked better as a memento than an ad. It almost seems quaint at this point that the posters were anything but keepsakes. I ask Ashley what it's like to now have her name appear on these iconic pieces of art (in her role as art director). "It's strange ... but cool." She speaks to how much work goes into each poster. And then Ashley talks about the logistics of making posters for. "At this point, we have a pretty good idea of which shows are gonna sell out." (Seems obvious, but as someone on the outside, I wondered.) "It's not a perfect science, but we're pretty good at it," Ashley says. She thinks of her job as more art curation than direction. She considers the overall collection of posters a little more than the nitty gritty of what each poster's details are. We end the podcast with Ashley's thoughts on what it means to "keep it local," our theme this season. Follow The Fillmore on Instagram. Photography by Nate Oliveira
Ashley Graham will be the first tell you, "There's no relation (to Bill Graham)." In Part 1 of this episode, meet Ashley. Today, she holds the titles of marketing manager and art director at The Fillmore, a San Francisco institution. But let's learn how she got here.
Ashley comes to us from Spokane, Washington. Her mom is originally from there, too, but her dad's family moved around the Rocky Mountain West, from Colorado to Montana, and eventually, eastern Washington State. Her dad was a senior in high school when his family moved to Spokane. Her parents met a few years later and got married after knowing each other for a whopping five months (they're still married today). Ashley's mom worked at Bimbo's, a local Spokane burger joint. Her dad frequented the place ... with his first wife. At a certain point, he started to come in solo. And eventually, he asked her mom out. "The rest is history," Ashley says. Ashley's sister, Erin, is two years older than her. Growing up, the two had what Ashley calls "a classic older sister/younger sister vibe." They're close today, but it wasn't always that way. Ashley had severe asthma when she was young, and she thinks she was a drag to be around. Ashley is an Eighties kid. She was born in 1983 and grew up without cellphones and computers. At this point in the recording, we reminisce about those days and what it was like not having those things. She spent a lot of her early years playing Barbie with a cousin. She listened to a lot of music, too. She loved Michael Jackson, but it was his sister Janet who really stole Ashley's heart. Janet Jackson was her first concert, in fact. There's a good story about Ashley refusing to get on the school bus and her mom taking her home. After this incident, when she would take the bus to school, she'd receive a sticker. Once she accumulated enough of those, Ashley bought herself a copy of Rhythm Nation on cassette. Her high school years saw Ashley really, really dive into music. The Jacksons gave way to bands like Kiss (thanks to the movie Detroit Rock City), Aerosmith, and Poison. Then, in 1999, Ashley and her sister won tickets to see Sammy Hagar. "It was so good. So good," she says now. Looking back, she says that it was the relationship Hagar had with his fans that drew her in. The next day, she went out and bought a Sammy Hagar CD. A week later, she bought more CDs. She got a Hagar shirt on Ebay. Around this time, she also discovered Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She found the show thanks to her love of Stone Temple Pilots. Her, her mom, and her sister went to Seattle to see Stevie Nicks and Ashley seized the opportunity while there to see the Hedwig movie. Some in the theater were clutching their pearls, but the movie had a profound effect on Ashley. It "opened my heart and filled it with ... emotional intelligence," she says. Hedwig also helped open Ashley up to the wider world and the idea of possibility. This was all right before her senior year in high school. Despite her friends not really getting it, she took that inspiration and turned it into her drive to become a screen writer. And her senior English teacher encouraged those dreams. She read scripts while also writing her own. She graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles to attend Loyola Marymount. A year later, she came back to Washington to go to Seattle University and pursue a degree in "something between journalism and communications." But she says that about halfway through college, she decided that the old-school model of journalism school (think: hard news) wasn't a good fit. During her time in Seattle, though, music had started to take over her life. Ashley had gotten into The Strokes in her brief time in LA. "They felt like a band you could be friends with," the first time that had happened to her. At shows in Seattle, she started befriending bands. Eventually, she started a music site, and that blew up to the point that she cashed that in for internships at a local venue and a record label. One of those internships, the one at the venue, led to a job. And that led to her work with the Sasquatch music fest in Seattle. Rather than covering band quasi-journalistically, she was now working with bands behind the scenes, so to speak. Then, five years or so later, someone from The Fillmore called and offered Ashley a job. Check back next week for Part 2 with Ashley Graham. We recorded this podcast at The Fillmore in November 2024.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
San Francisco has such a rich history of comedy. No one can argue against that. In this bonus episode, meet SF Sketchfest co-founder and co-director Cole Stratton. I chatted with Cole about:
- his early days in Michigan and his and his mom's move to Davis, CA
- going to SF State, moving to The City
- meeting folks (David Owen and Janet Varney) with whom he later helped create Sketchfest
- how his desire to act drove him to Los Angeles, where he lives today
- the sketch crew he was in, which lead to the festival
- the 2002 launch of SF Sketchfest
- this year's 18-day event, which kicks off tonight!
Go to SFSketchfest.com for tickets and more info. We recorded this podcast on Zoom in January 2025.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. The siblings use which school they were going to estimate the date of the family's move to Valencia Street to live above Puerto Alegre. Just one example: When Amparo was set to attend Mission High, they moved the school to Poly out near Kezar Stadium while Mission was retrofitted. Then we turn to noteworthy things that have happened at Puerto Alegre in the 50-plus years that it's been open. Amparo shares how their dad, Ildefonso Vigil, brought pinball machines and a pool table into the restaurant. At one point, because Willy, Lorenzo, and one of their cousins got into fish, a 55-gallon tank went up in the front window. Their dad was also known to rescue dying plants he found around the neighborhood. Amparo got married when she was 16 and had a kid the next year. By 19, she had divorced and moved back in with her family. She got a day job at an insurance company, which gave her access to a typewriter. With that, she was able to create the first typed menu for the restaurant. Prior to that, the menu had been written by hand. The brothers being boys and all, they started to get into cars. They built cars and did some (probably illegal) racing. Other siblings would go watch, but at least one always stayed behind to help out at the restaurant. Over the years, the menu evolved. The neighborhood was changing. The clientele in the restaurant needed to pivot. Their parents introduced fried chicken and milkshakes at one point, a carryover from the Mexico Lindo days. Their mom, Maria Refugio Vigil, also made fresh flour tortillas. Willy and Lorenzo were big, big fans of those. They'd grab them as soon as they were ready, slap some refried beans on them, roll 'em up, and eat away. At this point, Amparo tells the story of El Faro taqueria. Going back to the Mexico Lindo days, El Faro was just down the block. Kitty-corner to that was a place called Johnny's. The owner of El Faro would ask the siblings, "What'd ya get over there?" Johnny's eventually made poboy sandwiches, and the Vigils ate those up, literally. Those poboys inspired the owner of El Faro to create burritos. This story is, quite possibly, the burrito origin story. Getting back to the topic of other immigrants from Ayutla in San Francisco, Amparo tells us about a club in the Mission where folks from that small town in Mexico would get together. The wife of the owner of La Rondalla (RIP) was from Ayutla. The owners of Don Ramon's and Taqueria La Cumbre were from there, as well. Back to Puerto over the years, Amparo talks about how their dad always wanted a liquor license. He'd served beer and wine since they opened, but he wanted to expand. The owner of Vic's next-door (where Blondie's is today) was retiring and selling his license, and Ildefonso bought it. That changed everything. Willy tells us about the learning curve to running a bar. This was around 1982 or so. Their liquor sales rep helped teach them how to set up a bar. Most importantly—he taught them how to make margaritas. Willy says he brought friends in to help "test" his new concoctions. It didn't take him long to get it down ... with ample feedback, of course. One casualty of the liquor license, unfortunately, was the fishtank. Next was the pool table. A familiar site around The City today, but rarer back then, they started to experience folks lining up for a table or a seat at the bar. We spend some time talking about a specific host from Puerto's past—Tirso, who has been beloved by me and my friends for decades now. We all talk about how much we love Debbie Horn (former server at Puerto, current co-owner of Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge). Amparo tells us about the art on the walls inside Puerto Alegre. It's not just for decoration. Rather, the restaurant serves as a community art gallery. What began as mostly neon beer company signs adorning the space turned into regular art shows and events that add to the magic that is Puerto Alegre. Over the years, Amparo started collecting posters and art of various aspects of Mexican history. Figures like Zapata and Pancho Villa went up as framed posters. That turned into Carnaval-related art. A friend who was a regular patron of the place and a photographer himself helped with that. This was roughly 20 years ago. When Carnaval season was over that first year, they wanted a new show. Another regular customer and artist, Bird Levy, suggested a show to honor Frida Kahlo on her birthday in July. That has become an annual show every July. The Vigils connected with Mission artist Calixto Robles to do a show at Puerto Alegre. They've done shows with Calixto's wife, Alejandra, as well. They've done art shows on women during March (Women's History Month). There've been shows on resistance, climate, and Day of the Dead. And just as a true gallery would, they throw art-opening parties. Willy shares what the restaurant has meant to him and his life. He met his wife there. She worked for a time at Puerto Alegre. They have three kids together. Lorenzo and Pattye follow their brother, talking about the role that the restaurant fulfills in their lives. Pattye shares the story of how their dad, after Puerto was established, bought a second building in the Mission—Puerto Alegre II on 25th Street. Idelfonso moved over to run that place while Maria and all the siblings stayed at the Valencia Street location. Amparo again stresses the importance of work, and how from a young age, their parents instilled strong work ethics in them all. Of all his siblings and cousins, Ildefonso was the only one to stay in the restaurant business all the way to the end.
Puerto Alegre has been one of my favorite places in San Francisco since around the time I moved here in 2000. I'm finally able to share their story here, and I'm humbled and honored to do so. In Part 1, we meet the Vigil siblings—Amparo, Lorenzo, Willy, and Pattye. Their parents opened Puerto Alegre around 1970, and these four continue their family's legacy on Valencia to this day.
To start things off, we travel to Ayutla, Jalisco, Mexico, which is where the Vigil family came from. Their dad was one of five boys and several sisters in his own family. They were working class folks who didn't have a lot of money, and so they decided to leave. Following a couple of his older brothers, their dad came to California when he was 14. He started in the southern part of the state and made his way north, working mostly in fields. The brothers from this older generation all ended up in San Francisco, where they lived together and eventually brought their wives up to join them. The Vigil siblings' dad had known their mom back in Mexico, and brought her to The City around 1957. At this point in the recording, we go on a sidebar about the size of Ayutla and how much it's grown over the years. The Vigil siblings do visit their family back in Mexico from time to time. Before their parents got started in the restaurant business, their dad worked at a laundromat here in SF on 17th Street. They had their first baby, an older sister who isn't affiliated with the restaurant at all, and made ends meet to support her. Their mom stayed home to care for their sister, and it was around this time that she started cooking. The parents lived in a shared space with family around 14th and Folsom before a move south to 24th and Folsom when one of the uncles bought a house there. More and more members of their dad's family moved to San Francisco, and the Puerto Alegre Vigils bounced around the Mission from home to home during this time. Their dad's idea was to save up enough to move back to Mexico (ed. note: The idea of saving money in San Francisco today is a different story). But eventually, the opportunity to buy an entire building, which came with a restaurant on the ground floor, arose, and their dad seized on that. That spot was between 19th and 20th streets on Folsom. And so the family moved again. Several members of their parents' generation worked at that first restaurant, which was known as Mexico Lindo. (The space is still a Mexican restaurant today—Chuy's Fiestas.) Various members of the family, including the Vigil siblings when they were young, took turns working at Mexico Lindo. Eventually, that worked out to different families taking over the restaurant for yearlong stints, while others went and worked other jobs. Two uncles branched out to open Vigil's Club, in the spot that today is Asiento, 21st and Bryant. The siblings' dad and one of his brothers stayed back at Mexico Lindo. In one of those years "off," 1968 or '69, the siblings' dad decided he didn't want to be away from the restaurant business for such a long period of time. He went looking and found the spot on Valencia between 16th and 17th where Puerto Alegre is today. The building's street-level space had been a second-hand store. The Vigils' dad built it out as a restaurant. Back then, Valencia was known as "auto row" and "funeral row." It was much different than it is today. The space next door, where Blondie's is today, was a bar called Vic's. We go on a quick sidebar about how, many years ago, it was common for kids to go into bars in San Francisco. It's something that comes up from time to time on this podcast. Then Amparo lets us know how good their dad was, even at his first restaurant, about creating spaces where people would want to hang out. Among other touches, he placed pinball machines and a jukebox in the eatery on Folsom. On the weekends, they served birria and menudo, which didn't hurt the operation at all. Getting back to their dad's venture over to Valencia, the siblings discuss the idea that he and their mom were really branching out on their own after so much time in business with their family members. But the new space, having previously not been set up as a restaurant, needed work done on it. A lot of work. There's a side story about a contractor from Watsonville who stiffed their dad on a deposit he'd handed over. Some of the siblings joined their father to chase the guy down. Wild. The new restaurant would be called Puerto Alegre. Pattye lets us know the meaning of the phrase in English, which is "happy port." The menu was all original, of course. Some items, in fact, came from Mexico Lindo. Many of the recipes were their mom's or their aunts'. Chile verde, enchiladas, chile rellenos, and chile Colorado were mainstays. Back at the old place on Folsom, the siblings all worked when they were kids. Their dad even built a box they could stand on to clean the meat for menudo. When he opened his place on Valencia, they all had kitchen experience and transferred that over to the new restaurant. We get into a detailed discussion of the various salsas that their mom used to make. They're the foundation for today's salsa at Puerto. Amparo says their mom used to carry peppers around in her pockets. To wrap up Part 1, Amparo shares the story of her dad eventually clearing out what had been SRO-type rooms for rent above Puerto Alegre for his family to move in. That move was from a one-bedroom to a four-bedroom. Movin' on up, as they say. Check back next week for Part 2 with the Vigil siblings of Puerto Alegre. We recorded this podcast at Puerto Alegre restaurant in the Mission in November 2024.
This bonus episode is presented in collaboration with the Chronicle Season of Sharing Fund. Season of Sharing Fund gave some peace of mind to aspiring boxing champ Keoni Washington, who became parent and breadwinner to his brothers after their mother passed away early in the pandemic. We meet him at the East Bay apartment he shares with three of his brothers. Keoni received rental assistance from Season of Sharing Fund in 2023, which has allowed him and his brothers to stay in their home. If you want to hear more profiles of help and hope, go to https://podfollow.com/1781750916. And if you want to find out how you can help neighbors in crisis, go to SeasonofSharing.org/podcast
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Allegra was bartending at Second City in Chicago. The day of her graduation ceremony, at Columbia College Chicago, she packed up all her belongings and drove to LA with a friend. Allegra really wanted to be in California. Not yet totally sure about what she was gonna do, she took the plunge, so to speak. She'd realized that she wasn't going to pursue art. But she figured, correctly, that in addition to the warmer climate, there would be opportunities to seize in Los Angeles. But Allegra soon found that the challenges of a pre-smartphone Southern California were overwhelming. But she gave it a go. Allegra managed to get what she refers to today as "the worst job she's ever had in her life"—taking school photos of kids. On September 11, 2001, as planes hit the Twin Towers on the other side of the continent, Allegra was at a school in LA taking photos of schoolchildren. Later that day, she had a job interview that, of course, required driving. The freeways were empty, which is an eerie sight. But she got that job. And that's the story of how Allegra Madsen became an art handler. Following a couple of years hanging art (Warhol's Mao and Brillo Boxes among the art Allegra handled), she dabbled in freelance work, putting art up on walls in the homes of Los Angeles billionaires among them. Several years into that, Allegra started to feel that energy—this time, pushing her away from LA. She packed up her red sports car again (a 1988 Porsche, by the way) and headed to The Bay. Going back to the time in her life when she immersed herself in books, Beat writers caught Allegra's imagination. She recounts her first visit to San Francisco and her eventual move north. Like me, she had no idea that she'd still be here all these decades later. It took Allegra some time to "unpack," so to speak. She moved around The Bay a little, before eventually settling back a block from her first spot in Oakland, where she lives today. She went to school at CCA (then known as CCAC) and studied curatorial practice. It's where she discovered and got really into social art practices, which she goes into in our talk. "Using art to build community," essentially. Her thesis project took place on Third Street, just as the light rail was being built along that corridor. Her thesis exhibition took place at the Bayview Opera House. A few years after getting her Master's degree, Allegra opened a cafe in Temescal in Oakland. The neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying at the time, and she wanted to have a space where folks from many different walks of life could visit and have a good experience. Allegra sold the café after about five years. She pivoted back to art and event planning. Most of her work took the form of events in the Bayview. And part of that event planning involved movie programming. This led to a role at the BVOH, where she did more movie showings. During her time at the opera house, she began to partner with Frameline. In 2021, she joined the film fest org as programming director. It was the first year since the pandemic started, and Allegra believes part of why she was hired is that she had proven that she could program movies in "weird" places. They hosted a movie as part of Pride that summer at Oracle Park and did some drive-ins (remember those?). In late 2023, Allegra became interim executive director of Frameline. She assumed the permanent job this February. Follow Frameline on Instagram and other social media to stay up to date on everything they do. We end the podcast with Allegra's take on our theme this season: Keep it local. We recorded this podcast in the Frameline office in South of Market in November 2024. Photography by Dan Hernandez
Allegra Madsen has a Polaroid photo of her birth. In this episode, meet and get to know Allegra. Today, she's the executive director of Frameline film fest, the biggest LGBTQIA+ movie event in the world. She might disagree, but Allegra is a big deal. (Quick side note: As we kicked off our recording, Allegra expertly solved a Rubik's Cube. No bigs.)
We begin with the story of how her parents met. Allegra's dad is from Chicago originally. He taught transcendental meditation (TM) and moved all over the world. Eventually, he landed in Virginia, where he met Allegra's mom, who is from there and was just beginning to practice TM. The two met and settled down, and soon enough, they had a baby—Allegra. She was born in Virginia Beach, VA, to, as she puts it, "two hippies who were trying to change the world by sitting quietly." A lot of Allegra's family is still in Virginia, from which, as she points out, the Supreme Court's Loving case originated. That was when the high court ruled unanimously that interracial marriages are, in fact, protected under the Constitution. Her parents are of different races, and not everyone in the family looked on approvingly. Her parents never did get married. But they raised their biracial kid together. She was a fairly typical latch-key kid growing up in the Eighties, though she split her time between her parents' families. Schools were mostly segregated, too. By the time Allegra got to high school, though, local governments and school boards did what they could to integrate, at that level at least. But, she says, that meant that the students themselves segregated within the schools. Going between the worlds of her mom's family and her dad's, Allegra says she felt at home in both, however differently. She was the only mixed-race kid though, and so, as much as she strived to fit in with any one group, it was difficult. Allegra has been tall for a while, and she was urged to play basketball, which she did. She says she liked it, but her passion for the game outweighed her skill. As a teenager, she read a lot. She says that it was probably the main way that she discovered a broader world beyond her hometown. Books gave way to movies, and they all helped form in Allegra a curiosity about how people relate to one another and share space in the world. This was around the time that VCRs really took off. In addition to local video rental shops, the expansion of Blockbuster stores nationwide made it easier to rent movies. Her mom had a job at a cable company, and when young Allegra would visit her at work, she had access to cable movies that many of her friends went without. At this point in the recording, Allegra and I go on a sidebar about movies we used to love that don't hold up well nowadays. But at the time, movies and books were ways for her to escape The South. Soon enough, something started calling Allegra to leave where she's from. She graduated high school after only three years and got a job in the office of the construction company her dad worked for, helping her earn a little money. She saved and funded a fledgeling scuba career. Yes, scuba diving. Her dream was to move to the Florida Keys to work as a dive instructor. But that dream never came true. Instead, she spent the year that would've been her senior year in high school working at a music store. Her work provided Allegra with easy access to so much music. There was also a Ticketmaster counter inside the store. Being an employee, she and her coworkers were able to pull tickets for themselves before they went on sale to the public. I go on a tangent here about what a pain it used to be to buy concert tickets over landline phones. Allegra rattles off an impressive list of bands she saw back then—one that includes Missy Elliott and Bob Dylan. When she figured out that the diving dream was dead, Allegra moved to Chicago to go to college. She had family there—aunts, uncles, grandparents. But they weren't especially close. It's not that her extended family wasn't accepting of her parents' interracial relationship, but more that they weren't prepared for it. And so Allegra turned to her peers. She found two people in her first week of college who turned out to be lifelong friends. She says her college experience was mostly a good one, but that, in hindsight, she still hadn't come into her own, per se. She studied film photography and design. Although she wasn't enrolled in the motion pictures program, Columbia College Chicago was and is known as a film school. And Allegra says that those friends she made early on helped her dive more deeply into the world of movies—it made her more of an active moviegoer. Allegra says she always knew she was queer. She dated girls in high school, but never really talked with her parents about her budding sexuality. She never really talked with anyone about it, in fact. Instead, she simply dated women and that was that. Check back next week for Part 2 and Allegra's eventual move to the Bay Area. We recorded this podcast at Frameline Film Fest's offices in South of Market in November 2024.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
Jacob Rosenberg had a front-row seat to some rad SF/Bay Area history. In this bonus episode, the filmmaker/storyteller shares some of that history, especially as it relates to his upcoming book, Right Before My Eyes. Jacob was born and raised in Palo Alto. He grew up in the Seventies and Eighties. His parents moved there from the East Coast and Midwest to raise kids in an environment that matched their liberal values more. He started skating in the Eighties and would visit Justin Herman Plaza/EMB in The City with his skateboard but also his camera. He was one of the first to capture the skateboarding going on at EMB who was a peer of the skaters he was documenting. He soon found enough success with photography that he dropped out of high school and moved to San Diego to do that work full-time. Two years or so later, he went to film school at Emerson College in Boston, where he met his mentor. That mentor passed away while Jacob was still in school, but he finished a movie that guy had been working on at the time of his death. After college, Jacob moved to Los Angeles, where he's lived ever since. At this point in the episode, I share with Jacob the draw that SF had on me from about age 12, thanks to skateboarding, Bones Brigade, and especially, Tommy Guerrero. I never got to visit The City when I skated, but it was always fresh in my imagination. Jacob then goes on a sidebar about Tommy. Jacob goes on to talk about the time frame covered in his book—1988 to 1998. His life changed at skate camp in the summer of 1988 (if my math is correct, this would be Jacob's last summer before high school). He met pro skateboarders that summer. Suddenly, unrelatedly, he was in Hawaii making a video for Hieroglypics. He cites 1988 as a pinnacle year for hip-hop. And he says that '91–'93 were the same for street skating. 1993 was also important for hip-hop. The conversation then shifts to what the two cultures—hip-hop and skateboarding—had in common. He cites his childhood hero, Chuck D. (who wrote the afterword for his book) who noted that members of both subcultures were disenfranchised youth who found a way to express themselves. Well-put. In the early Nineties, the dominance of ramp skating waned and gave way to street skating. With easier and more affordable access to video cameras, the scene got documented and documented well. Similarly, sampling and other recording equipment was getting cheaper and cheaper, and DIY hip-hop songs and videos flourished. And in a very specific way, a video that Jacob created and put Hieroglyphics' music in helped to unite the two groups in the Bay Area. Jacob says that his self-published book, Right Before My Eyes, is meant to be a coffee table book. He intends for people to see the world he was documenting all those years ago through his eyes. There are photos, of course, but the book also contains screengrabs from videos he made as well as ephemera from that time—stuff like photos of photos, the cameras he used to shoot, and more. Follow Jacob Rosenberg on Instagram to see his work. And visit Jacob's website to buy Right Before My Eyes, available now.
Photo by Stephen Vanaso
We recorded this episode over Zoom in November 2024.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Nicole's move to New York. She didn't necessarily have a plan for this cross-country relocation, but she dove in head-first nonetheless. Nicole of course turned to Craigslist to help her find a roommate. But she also hopped on FB Marketplace, which is where she eventually found someone. She moved in with an old friend from theater to an apartment in East Harlem on 125th Street. She considers her time in NYC "epic." She learned a lot, she grew up, she did laundry in the snow ... character-building, all of it. She came to hate winter, being a California girl and all. But she auditioned, worked as a waitress and bartender, and had a few other jobs. She made it onto New Amsterdam and Law and Order. At this point in the recording, thanks to my dorking about Nicole being the first guest of this podcast to have also appeared on Law and Order, we talk about that long-running TV show. There was also an "industrial sitcom" where Nicole played a lead character. Today, it is used to teach people around the world to speak English. Thanks to this and her own world travels, she gets recognized abroad. After nearly 10 years, she returned to The Bay, around the time of the pandemic. Part of it was COVID, but also, she feels that the Hollywood myth had been demystified. Nicole arrived at a new perspective on the industry, one that felt exploitative. And so she came home. Because Nicole and I recorded before Election Day, we go on a sidebar about what we thought might happen if you-know-who won. It's interesting to hear our chat about that from here. But I left it in for posterity, if for no other reason. Nicole's husband got COVID while they were still in New York. It was early in the pandemic, and NYC got hit hard. He wasn't able to go to the hospital, and so Nicole masked the fuck up and took care of her partner. She avoided contracting the new disease. He recovered, but it made her think of what could happen if one of their parents got it. That informed their decision to return to California. They were able to get on one of the last flights out of New York in April 2020. Once she got back home, she regrouped. It was still early during the shutdown and no one was shooting anything. She meditated, hiked, and cleaned her mom's house. In doing so, Nicole found a file cabinet full of her grandma's letters, including those from her time spent living in a San Francisco brothel. Her grandmother, Estrella Chavez, wrote about that time as well as her own ancestors, and Nicole was blown away. She discovered that the California State Assembly had named her grandma the first Filipina-American to do activism and cultural work in San Francisco. She was also recognized by Willie Brown when he was mayor. Around this time, she was also learning more about the uncle who gave her that camera—Patrick Salaver—and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Patrick was involved with the Third World Liberation Front that brought together many different ethnic student groups at SF State, including Filipinos. Discovering all this family heritage made Nicole focus on her own legacy. She had gotten into producing events for the Filipino community in South of Market. She was rolling. But then, she got pregnant. With a kid on the way, Nicole realized she needed a job. And that's how she got work as program manager at Balay Kreative. One idea she brought to her new job was starting a podcast to help amplify the stories of her community. Cultural Kultivators podcast serves to share Southeast Asian voices and stories and push the culture forward. Find it on Instagram and on all the podcast platforms. Also, please follow Kindred Kapwa, Nicole's production company. Learn more about her "Patrick Salaver Project," the life story of her uncle. We end the podcast with Nicole's take on this season's theme: Keep It Local. Photography by Mason J.
Nicole Salaver is the kind of person I wish I had met long before that happened. In this episode, meet Nicole. She's the program manager at Balay Kreative these days. But her San Francisco roots go way, way back. Her maternal grandfather came to the US in the 1920s. He was one of the first Filipinos to own a restaurant and pool hall in Manilatown (please see our episode on Manilatown Heritage Foundation). He was a manong who lived at the International Hotel. Stories that Nicole's mom has told her were that he was more or less a mobster, paying off cops to keep his place safe.
Nicole's maternal grandmother came to the states in the Fifties with her first husband. But he was an abusive alcoholic, and so her grandmother divorced him. She turned to the government for help for her and her four kids. They sent the single mother and her family to live at what turned out to be a brothel. But she wasn't aware of that at the time. The two met at the I-Hotel, where Nicole's grandmother helped the manongs with anything involving English—paperwork for green cards, lawyers, visas, etc. It was just a side hustle to her job at the US Postal Service. She knew all the manongs, but fell in love with Nicole's grandfather. They married and had three kids, including Nicole's mom. Her mom was born in the Sixities and grew up in the Seventies in San Francisco. Her dad's parents arrived in the US in the Fifties, after World War II. Her paternal grandfather was a merchant marine who cooked on a Navy ship. He met Nicole's grandmother on one of his voyages back to the Philippines and brought her back to the US. They had two boys—Nicole's dad and her uncle. Nicole says that her dad grew up a hippie in Sixties San Francisco, and retained that sensibility throughout his life. He worked for SF Recreation and Parks, smoked weed, and made art. He met Nicole's mother at a collage party while playing guitar in his brother's band. More on Patrick Salaver, Nicole's uncle, later. Nicole, an only child, was born at St. Luke's hospital in 1980. Her mom and dad lived in the Excelsior, where Nicole grew up. She went to Guadalupe Elementary. Her parents were agnostic, but her Catholic grandmother enrolled her in a Catholic school without telling them. Nicole's mom pulled her out on Day 1 and got her into public schools. She was supposed to go to Balboa High School, but it was the Nineties and that school was going through a rough time (see our episode with Rudy Corpuz from United Playas for more on that story). And so the family moved down to South San Francisco. From here, we sidebar to talk about The City of Nicole's youth, in the late-Eighties and early Nineties. She laments the massive loss of art and community that tech money wiped out. And she reminisces about taking Muni all over town. They went to film festivals, galleries, museums, restaurants. In her high school years, Nicole and her friends came to the Haight a lot. She'd also attend as many Filipino events as she could—Pistahan, Barrio Fiesta, and more. Her mom was a dancer and her dad a musician. They pushed her to do one of those two things or visual art. Of them, she gravitated toward art, but as she got to her teen years, she decided that acting and writing were more her jam. That all started when her uncle, Patrick Salaver, gave her a video camera when Nicole was 12. Nicole was and is a fan of "Weird" Al Yankovic. She says she digs quirky humor. She watched lots of SNL, In Living Color, Golden Girls. Using the camera her uncle gave her, she and her cousin created soap operas, commercials, talk shows, SNL-type sketches, and more. But despite loving creating that stuff, she saw that her parents' art was just a hobby. It didn't seem possible that it could be a career. It wasn't until her dad passed away suddenly that Nicole decided to pursue her art. She shares that story with us. She'd been performing a one-woman show about her grandmother, who had Alzheimer's, at Bindlestiff. She was taking classes from W. Kamau Bell and doing stand-up comedy, opening for big names like Jo Koy, Ali Wong, and Hassan Minaj. Then she got a call: "Your dad is in the ER. You should go." During a botched tracheotomy, his heart stopped. By the time doctors got his heart beating again, he was brain dead. Prior to that, not knowing that it would be the last time she saw her dad, she recorded him. He told her that she should move to New York, follow her dreams, and never work for "the man." One of the last things Nicole's dad said to her was, "If you stop doing art, you will die." Three months after her dad's funeral, Nicole quit her job and moved to NYC. Check back next for Part 2 with Nicole Salaver.
Photography by Mason J.
We recorded this episode at Balay Kreative in October 2024.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1.
Jackie considers it an honor to have worked for Lateefah Simon, who's running for Congress in the East Bay for the seat currently held by Barbara Lee. Jackie was tasked with writing memos, and she took that job and ran with it, digging deeply into the weeds of policy. What she found in the existing systems of that time piqued her curiosity around what it might mean if she herself were to enter the fray. Her life up to that point formed her world views, as these things tend to do. But the policies, she says, ticked her off.
She had been studying to take the LSAT, with the idea that she would go to law school ... all while volunteering for the campaign to get Lateefah Simon elected to the BART Board. But that November, in 2016, the 45th president was elected, and everything changed ... for a lot of us, but especially for Jackie. It all threw Jackie for a loop. Standing Rock and protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP) were also happening, which further disillusioned her. She traveled east to join the resistance. She met folks and had deep conversations with her Native American brothers and sisters. She spent time in Minnesota doing more work with indigenous folks. It all created a sense of hope despite the doom seemingly all around. She also noticed the protests in Seattle demanding Wall Street disinvestment. In February 2017, Jackie was back home, full of "let's do it" energy, ready to tackle issues in The Bay. She had moved to The City and started digging further into the weeds of policy in San Francisco. In 2018, she decided that she wanted to make a difference here at home. She helped found the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition. She was tapped to lead the campaign against the Police Officers Association's use of force measure. For that, she worked with Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco and the ACLU of Northern California. She also worked on the No on H campaign, which succeeded. Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, asked Jackie to teach her class at SF State, and Jackie seized that opportunity. At State, she taught Race, Women, and Class, where she talked with students about DAP and indigenous rights, among other topics. While teaching, she also worked restaurant jobs, mostly on the Peninsula. When 2019 came around, Jackie wasn't sure what to do. Looking back, she was experiencing undiagnosed ADHD. She had a nagging feeling that year, though, that she should run for office. Someone pointed out to her that State Sen. Scott Wiener was running for election unopposed. She thought of the successful ballot measure campaigns she'd been part of. She had spent time living in her van. She'd bounced around between apartments. She decided to go for it. The Jackie Fielder for State Senate campaign was off to a good start. Then lockdown happened in March 2020. Everything about the campaign turned virutal—Zoom speeches and meetings, phone banking on another level, social media like never before. She centered issues like affordable housing, climate change, renters' rights, homelessness, education. She got the backing of teachers, iron workers, electricians, tenants' rights groups, affordable housing groups, and various progressive cultural affinity groups in SF. Jackie didn't win that race, though. She took a step back and got into therapy, where she learned about self-care and self-compassion. She got to a point where she could take better care of herself so that she could then take care of others. Jackie also started a PAC in the time between the 2020 election and now. The Daybreak PAC's main purpose is to support candidates and ballot measures that reject corporate money. Also, Stop the Money Pipeline hired her to be its communications manager in 2021. Through that work, she was able to reconnect with many folks she met years earlier in her Dakota stays. By early 2023, Jackie was co-director of the organization. This summer, in 2024, she took an official leave to come home and campaign for supervisor. Then the conversation shifts to District 9. Of all the places Jackie has lived in San Francisco, she's spent the most time in the district. She's queer and loves the embrace of her community in D9. She also notes that the American Indian Cultural District and Latino Cultural District, two groups that are a big part of her identity, are located in D9. After our mutual love fest of the Mission, we shift to issues that Jackie hopes to address as the next D9 supervisor—public safety, how best to engage law enforcement, drug use, houselessness, housing, jobs, and more. Please visit Jackie's website for more info, especially if you live in D9 (if you're not sure, look up your supervisorial district here). We recorded this episode at Evil Eye in the Mission in September 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Jackie Fielder is quick to credit her ancestors with her life and where she is now that she's 30. In this episode, meet Jackie, who's running to be the next District 9 supervisor. District 9 includes the Mission, Bernal Heights, and the Portola. She begins by sharing the life story of her maternal grandparents, who are from Monterey in Mexico. Her grandfather worked in orange groves in Southern California, while her grandmother was a home care worker. She also did stints at See's Candies seasonally. Sadly, both grandparents passed away when Jackie was young. But she learned more about them as she grew up.
On her dad's side, Jackie is Native American. Her paternal grandparents grew up on reservations in North and South Dakota. Her dad was born in Los Angeles and raised in Phoenix and went to Arizona State. He got a job as an engineer in SoCal, where he met Jackie's mom. The two met at a club in the Eighties. Her mom's first job was at Jack in the Box, where she got minimum wage. She dreamed of becoming an EMT, but that was before she met Jackie's dad. She ended up working as a secretary for a school district. Jackie is her parents' only child. She was born in 1984. Her dad joined the US Navy. When she was six, the Navy deployed him to Seattle for six months, and the strain on his marriage during that time away never really subsided. It was hard on Jackie, too, of course. When he returned home, her parents separated. Her mom took her to live across the freeway from where they'd been, in a low-income apartment community. Jackie's life changed, dramatically, she says. She was in the same schools, but stopped hanging out with her friends after school or on weekends. Her mom didn't want her playing outside much, in fact. She felt that the new area she moved her kid to was too dangerous. In her new living situation, Jackie and her mom found community. Neighbors helped one another out in myriad ways. Jackie looks back on that time as formative to who she's become as an adult. She also spent time with her mom's extended family in South Central LA. Many family members were in the LA low rider culture. Jackie was immersed in that Latino community from a young age. This also informed her world view today. At this point, we pivot to talk about music—how it came into her life and what it means to Jackie. She grew up around disco and Motown, Spice Girls and the Men in Black soundtrack, CCR, TLC, Backstreet Boys. In middle school, Jackie found alt rock. She saw Foo Fighters with her mom. Jackie attended public schools the entire time. She was a good student, got good grades, liked her teachers and they liked her. In hindsight, she wishes she had engaged with sports besides soccer, which she played from age 4 or 5. She says that in Southern California, sports were as important as academics. There were something like 4,000 students at her high school, 900-something in her graduating class. But despite this, Jackie didn't simply receive her education passively. She was on an AP track and did community service work with other students. In high school, Jackie worked to establish gardens in elementary schools in her area. She paints the picture of having been such a quote-unquote "good kid" that I ask if she ever had a bad streak or a time when she got anything out of her system. She says not really, but then I half-jokingly suggest that maybe her life in electoral politics is just that. College was expected, though she wasn't sure where she'd end up going to school. She didn't think Stanford was a possibility. Berkeley was her goal, but she didn't get in. Friends and community, though, convinced her to apply to Stanford. She did, and she got it. Thus was Jackie Fielder's move north. Originally, she planned to do pre-med in her undergrad years. The motivation behind that plan was wanting to help people. But being interested in education thanks to her mom's work, she attended a talk on public policy and college admissions that opened her eyes, both to the larger societal issue and to her own experience getting admitted to Stanford. She really started thinking about how race and class factor into policy, both public and private. This led to an imposter syndrome-type feeling in her place at college. Still, despite that, she made friends at Stanford, some she's close with today. I note that it's my belief that Jackie is really, really smart (I've listened to and read many things she's said and written, and seriously ...), and suggest that she's driven to knowing things by virtue of a deep curiosity about how systems work. Jackie agrees about that motivating factor, and points to 9/11 and watching a lot of Travel Channel. Both experiences teleported her to different parts of the world, and left her with a deep desire to learn and know about how people organize themselves into societies. Her father was redeployed after 9/11, and that, too, had an effect on young Jackie. But back to her move upstate to Palo Alto. She spent four years there before earning her bachelor's degree. She was in a sorority for a spell, but got disillusioned by that. She describes rubbing shoulders with the kids of billionaires. That initial idea of doing pre-med gave way to working toward a degree in public policy, something she dove into head-first. She says that meant mostly studying economics. And economics at Stanford means the Hoover Institute. And the Hoover Institute means conservative theories. She got through it despite disagreeing with the theory. She told herself it was worthwhile to understand how the proverbial other side thinks to better understand it and be better equipped to debate folks who think that way. She also set her sights on getting a master's degree, and decided to major in sociology for that. During this time, she spent a semester in Istanbul, Turkey, an experience she relishes. She learned a lot about Middle Eastern history in her stay. Much of what she discovered about the struggles of the oppressed halfway around the world rang true for Jackie with the experiences of her father's people in the US. It took Jackie four years to concurrently earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree. I mean, I told you that she's smart. We end Part 1 with Jackie's story of deciding that San Francisco is where she needed to be. It's a story that involves working for Lateefah Simon. We recorded this episode at Evil Eye in the Mission in September 2024.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Aaron talks about volunteering at a nonprofit in The City called the Trust for Public Land, where he learned about land acquisition for parks and open spaces. Through that gig, he got a paid internship and eventually, a job. In fact, he met Nancy, the woman he would later marry, there.
He eventually moved into Nancy's apartment in North Beach, his first apartment in SF. The move came shortly after the couple visited Nepal to climb in the Himalayas. It was October 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake happened. We fast-forward to 2000, the year I moved to San Francisco. I set the stage for my first brush with Aaron at this point in the recording. My first apartment was on California Street near Larkin. The cable car runs on that block. One day, still very new in The City, I spotted a politician on a cable car campaigning. Back then, I had no idea what the Board of Supervisors was. But lo and behold, it was Aaron Peskin, campaigning for his first term on the Board. Aaron then tells the story from his point of view, backing up just a few years. In his time at the Trust for Public Land, he worked with elected officials often. He learned his way around Sacramento and DC. But more pertinent to this story, Aaron also worked with a North Beach tree-planting organization—Friends of the Urban Forest, in fact—and the Telegraph Hill Dwellers to be specific. The work involved getting volunteers together, convincing folks who'd lived in the neighborhood for decades to plant trees on the sidewalks in front of their houses. It was the late-Nineties. The first dotcom boom was still happening. Willie Brown was at the height of his mayoral power. Chain stores were trying their hardest to move into North Beach. Aaron remembered that he knew the mayor from his work with the trust, and got a meeting with Brown. He brought several disparate groups together with the mayor. Brown told Peskin, "If you don't like the way I run this town, why don't you run for office?" From that dismissive comment, Aaron got involved in the upstart mayor campaign, in 1999, of Supervisor Tom Ammiano. Through this, he met many folks from many grassroots and neighborhood organizations. Ammiano, a write-in candidate, forced a December runoff, which he lost to Willie Brown. But the experience transformed Aaron Peskin. Ammiano urged Aaron to run for the DCCC shortly after the election. Looking over what he'd already accomplished, he ran and got a seat on the committee. It was March 2000. That fall would see the resumption of supervisor district elections, vs. at-large contests where the top-11 vote-getters won seats on the Board that had been in place since 1980. Again, Ammiano nudged Aaron to run for the newly created District 3 supervisor seat. He thought, Why not try once? He won the seat. Aaron credits campaign volunteers with earning that victory. He ended up serving two four-year terms as the D3 supervisor. We fast-forward a bit through those eight years. Highlights include Matt Gonzalez's run for mayor in 2003, Aaron's dive into areas of public policy he had been uneducated on prior to his time in office, and bringing people together to get stuff done. I ask Aaron if it's all ever overwhelming. He says yes, and rattles off the various ways—hiking, canoeing, yoga— he deals with that. We talk about his addiction to alcohol as well, something he's kicked for the last three years. Aaron was termed out in 2008, and says he saw it as the end of a chapter of his life. He ran for the DCCC again, where he won a seat and was the chair of that group from 2008–2012. He helped get out the vote for Barack Obama in 2008, working to send volunteers to Nevada. After 2012, he figured he was totally finished with politics. He went back to the Trust for Public Land. But then a funny thing happened. Aaron's chosen successor for D3 supervisor, David Chiu, won the seat and took over after Aaron was termed out in 2008. Then, in 2014, Chiu ran for an California Assembly seat and won. Then-Mayor Ed Lee appointed Julie Christensen. A special election in late-2015 saw Peskin run against Christensen, mostly at the urging of Rose Pak. He won that election, as well as the "normal" district election the following year. By the end of this year, he'll be termed out again. Highlights of Aaron's second stint on the Board of Supervisors, for him, include: He's become the senior member of the Board, having served with 42 different other members. He's also come to relish the role of mentor for new supervisors. He goes over a litany of other legislation he's either written or helped to get passed Moving forward to the issues of today and Aaron's run for mayor, he starts by praising the Board and the Mayor's Office for coming together to deal with COVID. Then he talks about ways that he and Mayor London Breed have worked together in their times in office. And then we get into Aaron's decision, which he announced this April, to run for mayor. It was a love for The City and the people who live here. It was a lack of what he deems "real choices" in the race. But it was also what Aaron and many others, including myself, see as a billionaire-funded, ultra-conservative attempt to take over politics in San Francisco. It all added up to something he felt he had to do. Aaron says that, unlike his first run for supervisor, when it comes to his candidacy for mayor, he's "in it to win it." We recorded this podcast at Aaron Peskin for Mayor HQ in July 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Around this time last year, I covered my first film festival, SFFILM's Doc Stories. The screenings and other events all took place at The Vogue Theater, which is just a short walk from where I live. Long story short, I was hooked. Since then, I've covered SFFILM's International Film Festival, CAAM, and Frameline this year. And so I wasn't going to pass up a chance to speak again with Director of Programming at SFFILM Jessie Fairbanks. In this bonus episode, Jessie talks about this year's Doc Stories, the 10th such festival that SFFILM has put on to celebrate documentary filmmaking. Learn all about this year's programming, which includes many films and talks I'm hoping to attend. Event Details Thursday, Oct. 17–Sunday, Oct. 20 All screenings held at The Vogue Theater Go to SFFILM's website to learn more and buy tickets We recorded this bonus episode over Zoom in October 2024.
Aaron Peskin is incredibly easy to talk with. And his life story is one you have to hear to believe.
In this podcast, Episode 1 of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco, the multi-term D3 supervisor-slash-president of the Board of Supervisors-slash-current candidate for mayor of San Francisco shares his story, beginning with the tales of his parents and their families' migration to the United States.
On Aaron's mom's side, the story goes back to Russia. His maternal grandfather was one of five boys born to a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg. Two of the boys stayed in Russia, one came to San Francisco, and the other two migrated across Russia amid revolutionary upheaval there to the Mediterranean and later, to Haifa in Palestine. Aaron's grandfather ended up in Tel Aviv. His mom was born there in 1940, when it was still Palestine. She migrated to the US in 1963 to visit her sister, who taught at a temple in Oakland. Aaron's mom ended up meeting his dad on that fateful trip, and the two were married five weeks later. On his dad's side, his grandparents came to the US from Poland before the Nazi invasion in 1939, arriving in New York City where they ran a candy store. Aaron's dad went to City College of New York, where he graduated and got into UC Berkeley grad school for psychology. On his bus ride west, though, the elder Peskin got drafted to serve the US Army in its war in Korea. After service, he finished his doctorate at Berkeley and got a job teaching at SF State, where he stayed for 40 years until he retired. Aaron goes on a sidebar about running into many of his dad's students from over the years, something that happens to him up to this day. His parents settled in Berkeley shortly after they got married, in 1963. They had Aaron in 1964. As a kid, in the 1970s, he remembers some of the goings on at SF State, when student-led protests and sit-ins were happening and the Ethnic Studies was founded. Back in the East Bay, Aaron attended the first fully integrated public school class in Berkeley. One of his classmates, from kindergarten through third, was none other than Kamala Harris. (See photos in the episode post on our website!) Aaron's younger brother is a professor at Arizona State University. Both his parents ended up in higher education. He calls himself the "black sheep" of his family in this regard, as he "only" ended up with a bachelor's degree. Both parents were also therapists, something they carried on amid their academic careers. Growing up in the 1970s, the family spent significant time in The City, coming over as often as possible from their home in Berkeley. Aaron rattles off a litany of activities his parents engaged him and his brother in when they were young. He says that his time in high school in the East Bay was idyllic. He went to Berkeley High, still the only high school in that city. He fell in with a group of four other boys who took weekend hiking and backpacking trips as much as possible. Also around this time, in his later teen/high school years, Aaron popped over to San Francisco to do things like see kung-fu movies in Chinatown or go to The Keystone to see The Cure and punk bands. He saw The Greg Kihn Band, Talking Heads, and other legendary groups at places like the Greek Theater and Mabuhay Gardens. He graduated Berkeley High in 1982, though he and a handful of friends got out a semester earlier than everyone else. They packed up a van, the five of them, and drove around the Western United States and Canada for 100 days. They ended their trip spending the night in the van in the Berkeley High parking lot. The friend group then scattered, predictably, with Aaron and a couple others heading down to UC Santa Cruz. In his freshman year, he and a friend took the spring semester off and rode their bikes from California to North Carolina and up to Washington, DC, as you do. Santa Cruz was different enough from home, but not too far away. The school provided a challenging academic environment for him, also. He ended up studying animal behavior, specifically the northern elephant seal. Through that program, he lived with a team in experimental housing on Año Nuevo Island off the San Mateo coast doing research. But physical chemistry precluded Aaron from going for a marine biology degree. He instead got into a liberal arts program called "Modern Society and Social Thought." While he was going to school in Santa Cruz, he experienced his first political awakening. Aaron was involved in the effort to make the banana slug become the school's official mascot. The student government wanted the slug, but the chancellor wanted the elephant seal. Aaron had the idea of putting the decision to a vote of the student body. They put ballot boxes all over campus, and the slug won overwhelmingly. But the chancellor rejected the results. News articles helped the students' cause, and they won in the end. During his college years, he travelled to Asia on money he'd saved from a job at a photo store. Neighbors in Berkeley had climbed the Himalayas several times, and it had an effect on Aaron. He and some friends went and travelled over parts of South Asia to do some climbing themselves. He was gone for a year and four months. Upon his return to the US, still working toward getting his bachelor's, Aaron ran into trouble getting student housing. And so he set up a tent in the woods above campus, slept there, went to class during the day, and then did it all again the next day. Check back next week for Part 2 and Aaron's life after college.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
We recorded this podcast at Aaron Peskin for Mayor HQ on Market Street in July 2024.
Look at that gorgeous updated logo! Many thanks to my friend Lisa Wong Jackson for enhancing Jim Murphy's design from 2017. In this special episode, Jeff talks about what to expect in Season 7 of the podcast—what's changing and what's staying the same.
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Spike shares details of his West Coast road trip, the one where he shopped for a city to move to and possibly lay down roots.
It was 1993 and, of all those West Coast cities, San Francisco won. "The energy, the feeling that you belonged, the creative draw," they all contributed to Spike's decision to move to The City. "This is where I wanted to be," he says.
He had $600 to his name, which was possible back then. He rented a basement room and got a job at SF Golf Club as a caddie. Spike saw an ad for a creative assistant at an advertising agency in the newspaper, and he got the interview. The other candidates came prepared with portfolios. They were all design-school grads. Not Spike. He brought in painted golf balls and comics.
John McDaniels (famous for the well-known "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?" ads) ran the agency and hired Spike. They bonded over comics, of all things. They became friends in the two years Spike worked for John, and enjoyed (I mean, really enjoyed) lunch together every Friday.
Then, in 1995, a New York agency bought the firm and hoped to force John into retirement. They took Spike to lunch and offered him more money and a promotion. But Spike saw how they thought of his mentor, and decided to bail. He took a buyout and went to Paris for a year, where he drew comics and took language classes. He tried to get his comic, Man vs. Woman, syndicated in newspapers. That didn't work out, but it was a learning experience.
And so Spike came back to his 4,000-square-foot loft in South of Market, kept the comics going, and got a job bartending at many places all over SF. One of the places he sent his single-panel comics to was The New Yorker. He'd included a bottle of wine in one of his shipments, and that helped him stand out. Spike got an invitation to the magazine's office the next time he was in NYC. Folks at the table that day told him to go experience life, but keep doing comics.
One of the things they told him to do was paint. And so, upon his return to The City, Spike picked up a paint brush. Eventually, he started to earn a master's degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute (RIP), but never graduated. He made important connections at the school, though, and picked up skills along the way.
He kept bartending while going to SFAI. When he stopped going to grad school, he realized that his life had two streams—bars on the one hand, and art on the other. In 1997, his buddy Alex had the idea to take over what was called Jack's, a bar/venue at the corner of Fillmore and Geary. Alex asked Spike to help open the new spot—newly dubbed The Boom Boom Room—and Spike agreed.
They started with the gutted shell of a space. They aimed to create a classic Fillmore-style juke joint, a throwback to the incredible legacy of the neighborhood. Folks from the hood brought in photos of old spots, and Alex and Spike did their best to simulate that look and feel. Through his time with Alex opening The Boom Boom Room, Spike started to get to know so many musicians, some of whom play at Madrone to this day.
After Boom Boom opened, though, Spike went on to bartend at other spots around town, places like Tunnel Top, Tony Nik's, and Paragon. A new baby, his first kid, was on the way, and he tried to figure out a way to make more money. Managing a place could mean more money, but he also didn't want to manage for anyone else. He wanted to be his own boss.
For the next five years, Spike developed a vision of what it could mean to have his own place. Along the way, he'd sometimes stop in at The Owl Tree and chat with the owner. He thought, "I could do a place like this." He mentioned buying the place from Bobby, who owned it. But Bobby wasn't ready. Then Bobby told Spike, "OK, when I'm ready, I'll sell it to you. But I'm not done!" Bobby died a month after that, and so it never happened.
Then the spot that would become Madrone became available.
Starting in 2004, the Madrone Lounge opened. Spike would come to the hood a lot and liked the place. He knew the original owner, Layla, from their time at SFAI. Spike and I sidetrack just a bit to talk about the history of the building and the space.
Built in 1886, it was formerly a pharmacy. That shut down after the 1989 earthquake, and Burger King, who wanted a 30-year lease, wanted to take over. But folks in the immediate area opposed that plan. It was then that Layla got a liquor license and opened Madrone Lounge.
Layla ran the place for the first four years, until the day-in, day-out took its toll. And so she began to think about selling the place, but not to just anybody. She wanted the new owner to share a similar vision of what the place could be. Needless to say, that person was none other than Spike Krouse. But it didn't happen overnight.
Spike wasn't able to get the money together, but they had talked about the place enough that Layla came to realize how right it would be for him to take over. Shortly after Spike's dad passed away, he got the call on his first cellphone. Layla told him that she was about to list the place, but would sell to him if he was interested. He didn't have enough for a name change or a closure, so Spike just took the reins and went with it.
He started reaching out for mentors and investors, one of whom ended up being the then-owner of Tunnel Tops, who came through in a big way. Spike wasn't going to change the place itself, but he wanted to run things a little differently, and he knew there would be folks who wouldn't stick around.
To get things going, Spike put himself in the role of every employee, and he also got an idea of what it was like to visit the place. He would make the changes he felt needed to be made, and he'd do so in the time it took. It was 2008, and when Obama was elected in November, the street party was off the hook. At this point, Spike knew he was in the right place for him.
Some employees from back then are still with Madrone today. Some kids of those employees are around, even. That says so much.
At this point in the recording, I go off to Spike, gushing about how much I love Madrone and how I'm sorry that I only really discovered it about five or six years ago.
About the New Orleans vibe of Madrone, Spike said he had never been there when he started putting that aesthetic together. That's amazing, but you'll have to just see for yourself.
Speaking of seeing for yourself, I hereby invite you all to the Storied: SF Season 6 Wrap Party Happy Hour, happening tomorrow night (Wednesday, Aug. 21) from 6 to 9 p.m. There'll be free Brenda's Meat and Three (while supplies last), free music, drinks, and just good vibes all around. I really hope you can make it!
We end this podcast and Season 6 with Spike's take on our theme this season—we're all in it.
See you tomorrow or in October, when we come back with the first episode of Season 7!
We recorded this podcast at Madrone Art Bar in May 2024.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Michael "Spike" Krouse's arrival on this planet was something of a miracle for his parents. In this episode, get to know the founder of Madrone Art Bar (currently one of my favorite places in San Francisco). Spike's dad, a fighter pilot who flew missions in World War II, was much older than his mom. He flew for the Navy when the U.S. went to war with Korea as well. He ended up stationed in Alameda. When he retired from the Navy, in 1967, he took a job in Las Vegas, where the pay was good and the housing was affordable. His dad was director of operations for a nuclear test site in Nevada. Over the years, he dealt with his share of PTSD, and to cope, started gambling. Spike's mom was born in Paris during the German occupation of that city. Her father was "on a train," meaning he was headed to a concentration camp. He ended up being liberated from Dachau years later, but the experience took a toll on him—mentally, physically, and spiritually. He passed away and his family was devastated. Spike's mom, then an infant, was sent to live in the basements of different churches. Her earliest memory is of Allied troops liberating Paris in 1944. US troops handed out chocolate bars to French kids along the Champs-Elysees. When she was 13, she followed her older brother to Israel. After that, she migrated to Italy, where she was recruited to do TV commercials. With that success, Spike's mom moved back to Paris, where she danced for a living. She got into some movies, also. With that, travel picked up—New York, LA, and eventually, Las Vegas. In Vegas, she ended up doing a one-woman burlesque dancing show. Maybe you can see where this story is headed, but Spike's dad was in the audience at one of these shows. Soon after this, the two headed up to San Francisco and got married. Spike was born about a year later. By his dad, Spike has a half-brother and a half-sister, who was close to his mom in age (his sister has since passed away). But it was his mom's first marriage and Spike was her first, and only, kid. Spike says that the Vegas where he grew up was more like a small town where everyone knew each other. It was nothing like it is today, in other words. Among other activities, Spike and his friends would lock up their bikes and go pool hopping at the various casino resorts back in the 1980s. His family traveled around a bit when Spike was a kid. They visited his aunt and uncle (his mom's siblings) in Paris several times. Because his mom was born in France during German occupation, she hadn't been given citizenship at birth. But in the early 1990s, thanks to a reparations trial, that happened. And it extended down to her offspring and their offspring. Today, Spike's kids enjoy French citizenship, as does he. The family also visited San Francisco, when Spike was around nine or 10. He remembers riding cable cars and going to Fisherman's Wharf. They'd travel places in their pop-top van that was equipped with an RV hookup. They also went to San Diego, where his dad received cancer treatments around the time Spike was 13. In his high school years, he and his friends threw lots of parties, and Spike was the one who made flyers for these shindigs. There'd be illicit boxing matching between rival schools. There'd be kegs, there'd be gambling. He was into New Wave and metal, but his taste was really all over the board. Thanks to his parents, there was jazz at home, Serge Gainsbourg, Edith Piaf. And he'd go to all-ages clubs in Vegas. Spike never really played instruments, though. His talents around music were mostly visually artistic. He played sports—football, baseball, golf. As a kid, he and his friends stole golf balls from a nearby course. His punishment was to hit balls at a driving range for two months. Thanks to this, he got pretty good at the sport. But, especially by the time he went off to college, sports took a backseat to throwing parties. College meant Marquette University in Milwaukee. Spike talks about the art scene in Milwaukee and how much he liked it. His school didn't offer any art degrees, otherwise he would have majored in that. But someone at Milwaukee's art museum had amassed quite a collection of German Expressionist art, and Spike liked to check that out. He says he chose the school partly because it was so far from Las Vegas. He shares the story of a ballroom in Milwaukee that he rolled into looking for work. It was his first foray into the business side of parties. He was only 18, but that was OK back then. He got a job barbacking, and three months in, got promoted to bartender when someone called in sick. There was a Vegas connection to the place—it was part of a money-laundering ring that involved cash from casinos in Nevada. So, in a sense, Spike was right back where he started. Sort of. The place had big-name acts at its upstairs, 2,500-seat venue. Acts like Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the up-and-coming Smashing Pumpkins. Spike worked those events, and ended up making enough money from this job to pay for everything other than his tuition. He'd fully caught the nightlife bug. After he graduated, Spike went back to Vegas and got a job with Mirage Resorts in their executive casino training program. Within six months of this, though, he realized it wasn't for him. He was 21. He had a college degree. He was trying to figure out what his path would be. He wanted to travel. He wanted to foster his creative side, but also wanted to find a way to make money doing that. So he hopped in his car and drove up the West Coast, starting in San Diego, then LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, shopping for a city to put down roots. Check back next week for Part 2, and the last episode of Season 6 of this podcast. We recorded this podcast at Madrone Art Bar on Divisadero in May 2024.
Patrick Costello used to work at Anchor Brewing, where he was the production lead for the bottling and keg lines. He was also a member of the Anchor Brewing Union, where he served as a shop steward—essentially the union rep on the floor. Anchor's union was part of Local 6 of the ILWU. But Patrick wasn't exactly born into all of this.
His mom and dad met at a house party in the Mission in the 1980s. Patrick's dad was stationed in the Presidio and his mom came here from Nicaragua. His dad wouldn't leave his mom alone at this party, or so the story goes. They were married at a church in the Presidio soon after that. (Patrick and his wife recently got married nearby, at Tunnel Tops park.)
The family moved to Germany shortly after his mom and dad got married. This is where Patrick was born, in fact. They moved back in time for his younger brother to be born in The City. Then they went to Sacramento, where he went to school. After graduation, Patrick made his way back to The Bay, around 2010.
He worked for a while at Farley's on Potrero Hill, where he met Jerry, a maintenance worker from the nearby brewery. Farley's gave Anchor employees free coffee, and they paid it back with a keg now and then. Patrick loved chatting with the guy. One day, Jerry mentioned that the brewery was opening a bar and that Patrick should apply.
When he visited, the place was packed, with a line out the door. But the manager told Patrick that they didn't need help. He came back a week later—same thing. Same response. It went on three or four more times before the tap room figured out that they weren't going to get rid of this guy. They'd be better off hiring him.
He came on as a barback at first and hit the ground running. This was around the time that the Warriors were starting to win, and the place was always packed. Patrick learned fast.
When COVID hit, all the service jobs disappeared. But folks who ran the brewery brought a lot of the tap room workers over, to help keep them employed and also to keep up with demand. This is how Patrick got into the brewery. A production lead left, and he took over.
At this point in the recording, we take a step back as Patrick tells the story of how the Anchor Union came about. He says there'd been talk of forming a union for some time before Sapporo took over, because workers felt that management wasn't listening to their demands. When the Japan-based company bought Anchor, they felt it was a good time to try, with a large corporation now in charge.
At first, the efforts centered around educating employees on what a union means, countering popular misconceptions along the way. The campaign was tough and it took a minute, but they organized and got it done in 2019.
We do a sidebar on the rebranding of Anchor that happened, something most area beer lovers (including me) were not happy about. Not at all. Union members knew it was coming, but they didn't get into a room during the development stage, and it was too late. Many union members agreed, but they wanted to give it time for the beer-drinking public to decide.
The reaction was overwhelmingly negative, but ownership doubled down. The union made a statement. But it didn't matter. What was done was done.
Patrick says that workers felt the closing coming on. Orders had slowed down. There was a brooding feeling in the air. Supply chain issues affecting markets worldwide hit them. Then, in 2023, came the news that Anchor wouldn't be making its famed and beloved annual Christmas Ale. Shortly after that announcement, Anchor would be shut down totally.
Leading up to that, Patrick says employees found a way to get as much beer made and distributed as humanly possible. Even though he was a brewery guy, Patrick joined bar staff and worked for free the last night that the tap room was open. He says lines were out the door and that the whole thing was bittersweet.
In May 2024, Chobani yogurt founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya bought Anchor. My initial reaction was wondering whether Ulukaya would bring brewery employees, and therefore, the union, back to work. Not only is it the right thing to do, but also, no one knows the product or the equipment better. Ulukaya has said publicly that he wants to do this, but nothing is certain even as of this writing.
We recorded this podcast at Lucky 13 in Alameda in July 2024.
Z had started a family whom he had to leave when he toured for rollerblading. It didn't take long for him to feel that he should be home—both to be there for his newborn son and to assist his partner in raising him.
Being back in San Francisco, Z started searching for the new him, the next phase. Adding to his new role as father, he enrolled in culinary classes at San Francisco Cooking School. Compared with other things he'd gotten into, this was much more intense. Z was learning from others, rather than making it up "on the fly." But he took to the kitchen right away.
He ended up doing mostly knife-for-hire work around The City and the Bay Area. Z shies away from dropping names in the restaurant industry, pointing to the fact that he feels like the people who get credit take all the shine, while those who do most of the work are in the shadows, so to speak. He says that even back then, he decided that if he branched out on his own, he'd do things differently.
Following his stint as a knife-for-hire, Z became a private chef. Then the pandemic hit. In addition to making sure his kids were doing their at-home schoolwork, he'd joined a chef's thread online. It was a space for those in his community to share how they were coping with shutdown and the loss of doing what they love. Like approximately half of us who aren't chefs, many of the people in these forums were making bread.
At first, Z was apprehensive about making bread. But his friends in the industry kept nudging him. Reluctantly, he gave in ... and at first, the results weren't good. He went at it over and over and just wasn't getting it right. Slowly, over time, he started having some success. And then cops murdered George Floyd.
Z talks at length about the effect that Floyd's murder had on him. He stayed out of protests in public for fear that he wouldn't be able to contain all the anger and frustration he felt at that moment. Instead, he turned inward.
And in that solitude, he worked and worked on his bread. It was the only thing, he says, that gave him solace. The bread got better and better and Z got to a point where he wanted to share his creation, first with his community, then with the world. A friend out in Brooklyn asked Z to ship a sourdough. The day after he did that, orders exploded.
It didn't take long for Z to scale his operation up. A bigger mixer, a second rack ... it all allowed him to keep up with demand. Then he began adding flavors to the bread, at first just for himself. One of the first of these was called The Ninth Ward, a loaf with Louisiana hot sausage inside it (yum ...). Next, he added blackberries to a loaf, which are tricky because of how wet they are and how much they stain.
People started to notice ... people like food writers. One such writer from the Chronicle asked if she could buy a loaf and hang out and talk with Z. He didn't know she was a writer, and they sat down and chatted.
By this time, Z already had the name Rize Up. He had taken his kids to see Hamilton, which has a song about rising up. It was the summer of 2020, and people were actually out in the streets protesting racial injustice. And of course, bread rises as it bakes. The name was perfect.
Once vaccines came around and it got safer to leave the house, Z moved into a bigger kitchen facility, one that allowed him to hire and be able to deliver bread to stores and other customers. Rainbow was the first grocery store to carry Rize Up. Z developed the ube loaf for Excelsior Coffee.
Z talks about those ingredients and flavors he puts into many of his loaves. In the bread world, they're called "inclusions." "Our inclusions are inclusive," he says. They are intentional and reflect his love and appreciation for his community and his neighbors.
We end the episode with Z's take on this season's podcast theme: "We're All In It."
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Welcome to this bonus episode with Kundan Baidwan and Sameer Gupta. Kundan and Sameer talk all about the Rootstock Arts' event Color Your Mind Festival, which is happening in Yerba Buena Garden this Saturday, July 27, 2024 from noon to 5 p.m. (This episode was created in collaboration with Erin and Ange from Bitch Talk Podcast.) We start with Kundan. Long-time listeners will recognize or remember Kundan from ... Season 1, Episode 40, Two Storied Nights, and Hungry Ghosts. She's been a friend of the show since that fateful day in 2018 when I waltzed into Zam Zam with Bitch Talk on their Bourdain Crawl. But, podcast-wise, it's never been about Kundan. We learn that she was born in San Jose and raised in Fremont. She went to college in San Diego, and after she graduated, was off to Paris and then New York. She returned to The Bay around 2004. She says that SF was always close to her Bay Area roots. She's an artist (an amazing artist, I must say) who pays the bills by bartending at Zam Zam. Sameer Gupta was also born in San Jose. When he was around one year old, his family began moving roughly every couple of years. His dad was in tech and took jobs all over the world. While his family was in Japan, Sameer picked up playing music. He says he "caught the bug" there and started playing drums. When his family came back to the US, he stuck with drumming. It wasn't what his parents expected of him, but they encouraged him nonetheless. He went to college for music, where he was immersed in Western and Classical styles. He was gravitating more toward jazz, though. He played jazz through his time in and after college, and then he found Indian Classical music. Sameer moved to New York City and stayed for about 15 years, long enough to form a music collective. A little more than a year ago, he returned to the Bay Area. Then we hear how Kundan and Sameer met. It's a story that goes back to their respective childhoods. Their dads worked together before either of them was born. Their families lived in the same neighborhood and knew each other well. The two ended up in high school together. Beyond their families' histories, Sameer and Kundan both ran in creative circles around this time, and naturally gravitated toward each other. Both Kundan and Sameer are the only creative people in their families, and we get to hear how that informs the art that each of them creates. They recognize the abundance of creativity in their culture, but distinguish themselves as individuals who set out to make art their life's mission. And Sameer speaks to the example that folks like him and Kundan can set for the next generations, who see more possibilities than they might otherwise. Having grown up the entire time in the Bay Area, Kundan says she more or less always felt the influence of Indian culture. And Sameer talks more about what it can mean for their families to see them making a life out of art. Then the conversation shifts to this weekend's inaugural Color Your Mind Festival. Sameer and Kundan intentionally invited young artists to be part of the event. There will be art, music, crafts, books, and more. Sameer says their intention is for the festival to be "adventurous," not what people might think of as a traditional Indian event. They want it to be approachable for as many folks as possible. The festival's music will include North Indian Classical (think Ravi Shankar), South Indian Classical, and Sameer's group, the Jupiter Project. There will also be dancing between music sets. Follow Rootstock Arts on Instagram. We recorded this episode in collaboration with Bitch Talk Podcast at Medicine for Nightmares in the Mission in June 2024.
From a young age, Azikiwee Anderson left his heart in San Francisco. In this episode, Azikiwee (everyone calls him "Z"), the founder of Rize Up Sourdough, shares the story of how he got here. His dad was a famous drummer who got hooked on heroin while touring. When he returned home from the tour, the problems at home began. He started physically assaulting Z's mom. And so she packed up her three kids, all five and younger, and her things and split. The battered wives' shelter helped get them out of New Orleans and to San Francisco. Z has some memories of New Orleans, but they're coupled with trauma. When they landed here, they didn't really have people. His mom and her kids stayed at the bus station for weeks, and Z remembers a man giving them his lunch more than once. There's a poignant story of the brown paper bags that those meals came in and how Z has used similar bags for Rize Up breads as an homage. The family ended up at a shelter and his mom started to imagine what her new life could be. Z's mom got jobs and took classes. They lived in The City for six years and then moved to Chico. Z spent the rest of junior high and high school in that northern Valley town. The day after he graduated, he left for Santa Rosa to go to junior college. It was close enough to San Francisco that he could come here easily and often, which he did. In addition to school, he taught gymnastics, something he'd begun in high school. But because of his height (he's 6' 3") and relative inexperience, he decided that teaching was a better route for him than competing. He also rollerbladed. Like, a lot. He says kids would come into his gymnastics classes asking Z to teach them how to do flips on rollerblades. Never mind that he didn't know how to do that ... yet. One of these kids brought in a video of what he had in mind, and it was the first time Z saw people doing all these incredible things on rollerblades. Eventually, this led to Z getting sponsored to skate. It took him on a journey he never could've imagined. He started traveling, around the US, around the world. It became his life. He built skate parks, for roller blades, bikes, skateboards, whatever. Looking back on his time as a pro rollerblader, Z says that he owes the hardship of his young years to the fact that it doesn't take a lot to make him happy. When he started seeing the world, he didn't take it for granted. He was grateful for the opportunities it afforded him. Time spent traveling gave way to more time running businesses. And with a little more income came the opportunity to cash in on a life's dream—Z moved to San Francisco. He found a place on Bush between Van Ness and Polk. And he brought a small distribution company for rollerblading products with him. But when the 2008 recession hit, the business started to feel some serious pains. Check back next week for Part 2 with Azikiwee Anderson. We recorded this podcast at Rize Up Bakery in the South of Market in June 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Part 2 picks up right where we left off in Part 1, with Reem describing finding the anti-imperialist women's soccer team. Through that, she met her partner, who's now her co-parent. Reem worked in the nonprofit sector until around 2010, when she burned out. She'd moved to Oakland upon her return to the Bay Area, though she was still connected to The City through her work with AROC. She found herself wanting to take care of her community in other ways than what nonprofits were offering. She and her father had been estranged, but after leaving work, she joined him on a trip to the Middle East. The two were joined by Reem's youngest sister on a visit she calls "transformative." Besides gaining insight into who her dad was as a person, she truly discovered and fell in love with the food of her people. She knew right away that she wanted to create that feeling for others. Her Syrian family took note of her interest, and took her to bakeries in that country to get a glimpse of the kitchens after-hours. She returned to the Bay Area wanting to do two things: To combat tropes and negative stereotypes about Arab culture and people, and to do that by creating a sense of hospitality. Those two ideas would eventually form the foundation of what Reem's California does today. But she had to begin somewhere, and so she enrolled in a baking class at Laney College. Out of that class, she got a job with Arizmendi in Emeryville, where she got experience in a co-op and a kitchen. She started forming the idea of what her place would be, and while that came together, she settled on basing it around man’oushe, the street food of her people. Over a number of years and various kitchen and bartending jobs, Reem took as many entrepreneur classes as she could. The last of these was with La Cocina. The program helped steer her toward more practical, lower-cost methods of doing business. And that's where the saj comes into play. It's what Reem uses to make her man'oushe. "It's like an inverted tandoor," she says. An uncle in Lebanon was able to have two custom-made sajes for Reem. They arrived and that's what set it all in motion. They were approved for the 22nd and Bartlett market and the farmer's market at the Ferry Building around the same time. At both locations, they served Arabic tea and played Arabic music, creating that vibe Reem had been seeking. Within 16 months, they had grown from one market to five. Then La Cocina told Reem that it was time to take the operation brick-and-mortar. The first location was in Fruitvale in Oakland in 2017 and lasted a couple of years. Then, after a brief foray into fine-dining, the women owners of Mission Pie asked Reem if she wanted to take over their spot at Mission and 25th. She said yes and started doing the work to get open. And then the pandemic hit. Once the Mission location was able to open, Reem's California did better than a lot of nearby restaurants, partly because the food lends itself to take-out so easily. But for Reem, not being able to share space and that hospitality that was at least as important as the food itself was hard. Still, they found ways to connect with the community. In 2023, they opened a second location in the Ferry Building. They started appearing at Outside Lands a few years ago (and will be there again this year). Reem decided to start transitioning the business to a worker-owned model. Visit Reem's Mission location, 2901 Mission Street, Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and again for dinner from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The Ferry Building location is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Follow them on social media at @ReemsCalifornia and follow Reem herself @reem.assil. Her cookbook, Arabiyya, is available on her website. We end the podcast with Reem's interpretation of this year's theme on Storied: San Francisco—We're all in it. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In 2022, the Presidio Trust asked Favianna Rodriguez to be an activator, as the trust was preparing to open its Tunnel Tops park. Favianna recommended that the folks building the park employ color and visual art to transform the space. They were supportive of her ideas. And with that, Ancestral Futurism was born. Favianna grew up in Oakland next to the 880 freeway, where she still lives today. The area around that major thoroughfare is one of the most polluted corridors in the state. Because she comes from an area subject to what she refers to as "environmental racism," she sought to make a statement in the northwest corner of The City. "Ancestral Futurism" was a phrase that perfectly summed up her goal: "We cannot repair the present until we acknowledge the harm of the past." The land where Spanish colonizers established the Presidio was already inhabited by Native people, of course. Those people lost their land to the Europeans. They were murdered, pushed out, disenfranchised. For Favianna, the space is now one where we can talk about that. Tosha Stimage was born in rural Mississippi. College got her out of The South and to Ohio, where she studied art and design. After graduation, she spent a bit of time in Colorado, where she worked with kids doing art therapy. Then grad school brought her to the Bay Area: She started at CCA in 2012. She's been an artist since she was a kid, and that didn't change after grad school. One of the ways that art manifests for Tosha is in flower arranging. She had a shop in Oakland, but was forced out by gentrification. Now, she's got her shop, Saint Flora, back open for business in The City as part of SF's Vacant to Vibrant program. After the unveiling of Ancestral Futurism, Favianna and others realized that they needed to make it an annual event and bring in other artists. They also decided that it was important to honor native plants and animals along with the native humans of the area. For this year's iteration, Favianna invited Tosha to add her own interpretation to the ongoing project. After she was selected, Tosha started visiting the park, meeting people, and doing her homework. She began to notice the intention and care that went into plant programs already going in the Presidio. Right away, she felt it was something she wanted to be part of. Tosha gave her contribution the name "Superblooms" in part to honor that natural phenomenon. It also speaks to the resilience of the plants she chose to include in her art—checker bloom, Chilean strawberry, and California poppy. All are beautiful, of course, but they all have histories in the Bay Area. This Sunday, July 14, from 12 to 3 p.m., Tunnel Tops will host a launch party for Tosha's Superblooms. Activities that day include: an art unveiling with Tosha, hands-on art activities for all ages, a living floral Installation, free plant starters, DJ sets, and a show and tell with the Presidio Nursery. Attendance is free. For more info, visit the Presidio Trust site. We recorded this podcast at Tunnel Tops park in June 2024. Photography by Felipe Romero
Reem Assil has created a restaurant in the Mission that serves some of the most beautiful, delicious, and activist food of any new spot in San Francisco in a long, long time. Reem was born and raised in her early years in a Boston suburb. Her dad is from Damascus, Syria, and her mom is from Gaza, Palestine. Both were refugees in 1967. They met in Beirut and emigrated to the East Coast of the US. The suburb where they moved was predominantly white, but Reem's household was vibrant in Arab culture. Her parents didn't want the family to forget their roots. They were in Massachusetts because that's where the jobs were. But Reem's mom's family all came to California, which ended up having quite an effect on her. Her grandparents went to Northridge just before the 1994 earthquake that devastated that area. Reem says that, every summer, relatives from all over the world, including her and her family from out east, converged on her grandparents' home in the San Fernando Valley. She talks about the strength of that Arab culture in her home and among her relatives in California, but also, of reconciling that with the fact that she was a latch-key kid, especially when her mom went back to work. Reem was immersed in US culture, but felt those strong roots of her ancestors. In the late-Eighties and early Nineties, Reem was into Ska and "alternative" music, but also hip-hop. "Growing up Palestinian, you're aware of the world in a different way," she says. She's always had an affinity for justice. She talks about a history teacher she had in high school who had a big influence on her. In that class, she learned much more about the Civil Rights movement than anyone can get from a textbook. She went on several trips with that class, including to the Deep South. Being embedded like that, talking with people who lived the movement, had an enormous effect on Reem. In 1994, she joined her family on a trip to Gaza. She was 11 and the experience "wrecked" her. The stories she heard in the South resonated and reminded her of what she knew about her mom's homeland. Reem is the oldest of three sisters and says that hers was a very feminine household. As a kid and teenager, she had an affinity for cooking and baking. But as she navigated her more formative later teen years, she rejected the idea of women in the kitchen. Food would come back much later in her journey. She had just begun college at Tufts University in 2001 when her parents got divorced and 9/11 happened. She and other Arab folks had always dealt with Islamophobia, but that ramped way, way up after Sept. 11. That and her being the first to leave her house put a strain on her parents' relationship as well as her own life. She rejected the US-centric foreign policy ideas she was hearing and being taught at Tufts. She visited Lebanon and Syria in 2002, and when she returned to the US, she developed what she thought was a parasite. She couldn't eat. That affected her studies and her social life. It all coalesced and devolved into depression, and this further negatively affected her relationship with food. Reem quit college and made her way to California. At first, she considered her grandparents' place in Southern California. But she figured that LA would depress her further. An aunt, a white hippie from Humboldt, and an uncle who was an activist lived in Daly City, though, and felt more her speed. She didn't know much about the Bay Area other than an impression she got earlier in life when she came out for their wedding. They were the main attraction. She arrived in 2002, just as organizing around the then-proposed invasion of Iraq was taking place. Her aunt and uncle worked during the days and went to anti-war meetings at night. Reem went with them, and she cites these experiences as helping raise her out of that funk she'd been in—it lit a fire in the activist part of her life. While all this was going on, she'd also visit farmer's markets with her aunt and uncle. Fresh produce was somewhat foreign to Reem when she was growing up out East. Her relatives cooked a lot, and Reem would join them. It slowly brought the joy of cooking and eating back into her life. She spent a lot of time in the Mission in those days, and even helped found the AROC (Arab Resource and Organizing Center) on Valencia. When she wasn't organizing, Reem was heading north to Mendocino and Humboldt, discovering the natural beauty that surrounds the Bay Area. She went back to Tufts to finish getting her degree, then headed back to Northern California as soon as she could. In 2005, Reem got a job here with an activist group. After doing community organizing, she got into union organizing, eventually working with SFO workers. From there, she got into policy work. She also started playing soccer—with an anti-imperialist team, no less. It was more than just exercise for Reem—the people she played with were her "church." Check back next week for Part 2 and hear how Reem decided to make and sell and celebrate the food of her heritage. We recorded this episode at Reem's California in May 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Reem Assil has created a restaurant in the Mission that serves some of the most beautiful, delicious, and activist food of any new spot in San Francisco in a long, long time. Reem was born and raised in her early years in a Boston suburb. Her dad is from Damascus, Syria, and her mom is from Gaza, Palestine. Both were refugees in 1967. They met in Beirut and emigrated to the East Coast of the US. The suburb where they moved was predominantly white, but Reem's household was vibrant in Arab culture. Her parents didn't want the family to forget their roots. They were in Massachusetts because that's where the jobs were. But Reem's mom's family all came to California, which ended up having quite an effect on her. Her grandparents went to Northridge just before the 1994 earthquake that devastated that area. Reem says that, every summer, relatives from all over the world, including her and her family from out east, converged on her grandparents' home in the San Fernando Valley. She talks about the strength of that Arab culture in her home and among her relatives in California, but also, of reconciling that with the fact that she was a latch-key kid, especially when her mom went back to work. Reem was immersed in US culture, but felt those strong roots of her ancestors. In the late-Eighties and early Nineties, Reem was into Ska and "alternative" music, but also hip-hop. "Growing up Palestinian, you're aware of the world in a different way," she says. She's always had an affinity for justice. She talks about a history teacher she had in high school who had a big influence on her. In that class, she learned much more about the Civil Rights movement than anyone can get from a textbook. She went on several trips with that class, including to the Deep South. Being embedded like that, talking with people who lived the movement, had an enormous effect on Reem. In 1994, she joined her family on a trip to Gaza. She was 11 and the experience "wrecked" her. The stories she heard in the South resonated and reminded her of what she knew about her mom's homeland. Reem is the oldest of three sisters and says that hers was a very feminine household. As a kid and teenager, she had an affinity for cooking and baking. But as she navigated her more formative later teen years, she rejected the idea of women in the kitchen. Food would come back much later in her journey. She had just begun college at Tufts University in 2001 when her parents got divorced and 9/11 happened. She and other Arab folks had always dealt with Islamophobia, but that ramped way, way up after Sept. 11. That and her being the first to leave her house put a strain on her parents' relationship as well as her own life. She rejected the US-centric foreign policy ideas she was hearing and being taught at Tufts. She visited Lebanon and Syria in 2002, and when she returned to the US, she developed what she thought was a parasite. She couldn't eat. That affected her studies and her social life. It all coalesced and devolved into depression, and this further negatively affected her relationship with food. Reem quit college and made her way to California. At first, she considered her grandparents' place in Southern California. But she figured that LA would depress her further. An aunt, a white hippie from Humboldt, and an uncle who was an activist lived in Daly City, though, and felt more her speed. She didn't know much about the Bay Area other than an impression she got earlier in life when she came out for their wedding. They were the main attraction. She arrived in 2002, just as organizing around the then-proposed invasion of Iraq was taking place. Her aunt and uncle worked during the days and went to anti-war meetings at night. Reem went with them, and she cites these experiences as helping raise her out of that funk she'd been in—it lit a fire in the activist part of her life. While all this was going on, she'd also visit farmer's markets with her aunt and uncle. Fresh produce was somewhat foreign to Reem when she was growing up out East. Her relatives cooked a lot, and Reem would join them. It slowly brought the joy of cooking and eating back into her life. She spent a lot of time in the Mission in those days, and even helped found the AROC (Arab Resource and Organizing Center) on Valencia. When she wasn't organizing, Reem was heading north to Mendocino and Humboldt, discovering the natural beauty that surrounds the Bay Area. She went back to Tufts to finish getting her degree, then headed back to Northern California as soon as she could. In 2005, Reem got a job here with an activist group. After doing community organizing, she got into union organizing, eventually working with SFO workers. From there, she got into policy work. She also started playing soccer—with an anti-imperialist team, no less. It was more than just exercise for Reem—the people she played with were her "church." Check back next week for Part 2 and hear how Reem decided to make and sell and celebrate the food of her heritage. We recorded this episode at Reem's California in May 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we dive into the story of how The Stud Collective pulled out the seemingly impossible—they found a new home in South of Market.
After a quick history of the space at 1123 Folsom (a leather bar in the Seventies called The Stables, Julie's Supper Club, a sports bar, a restaurant called Radius, and a vegetarian restaurant called Wellspring Commune that was a front for a cult called The Tribal Thumb, who were affiliated with the Symbionese Liberation Army ... and that space is rumored to have been one of the places that the SLA kept Patty Hearst—oh, San Francisco), Rachel guides us on a tour of the original location of The Stud, which was opened by Alexis Muir (a trans woman) in 1966.
Muir ran the OG Stud, also on Folsom west of the current location, for several years. Originally, it was a kinky/leather/cowboy/Western bar. It was the same year, just months before, that the Compton's Cafeteria Riots took place. Just a few years after it opened, The Stud shifted themes to more of a queer hippie bar. But one thing that helped it stand out from the get-go was its inclusivity.
The Stud remained in that original spot on Folsom until 1987. After Muir, a group of Milwaukee hippies who were also affiliated with Hamburger Mary's took over ownership. After this group, toward the end of the Seventies, another group took over. In 1987, following a dispute with the landlord, The Stud had to move. They found a spot on Harrison at Ninth that had previously been a nightclub.
We fast-forward a bit to revisit Marke, Rachel, and Honey's introductions to The Stud, which all took place at the Harrison location. Keeping with that spirit of inclusivity that had been a hallmark of the place since its opening, they all feel that it was the one place at the time where any segment of the queer population could feel at home.
In 2016, over Fourth of July weekend, The Stud's then-owner, Michael McElheney (who'd owned the place since the late-Nineties), announced that he was selling the business. The building it was in had been sold, the new landlords tripled the rent, and McElheney was ready to retire. But, as mentioned in Part 1, Nate Albee already had a plan in place.
Within the first week of McElheney's announcement, the fledgling collective presented the plan and it was accepted immediately. The group was already around 20 members strong. Honey and Rachel talk about other SF collectives and worker-owned businesses that they turned to for guidance and inspiration—Rainbow Grocery, Arizmendi, and the now-closed Lusty Lady. Marke says that, from its origin, the collective also wanted to serve as a beacon for how to do this elsewhere in the queer nightlife space.
On New Year's Eve 2016, The Stud Collective threw its Grand Opening party. The place never shut down between the previous owner and the collective taking over, but it felt right to celebrate the takeover.
Then, a little more than three years later, COVID hit. The rent was already exorbitant and they had decided to try to find another place. Once it became obvious that the shutdown was going to last longer than we all thought, they got out of the lease at the spot on Harrison, and even threw a funeral online. It wasn't an easy decision, but it turned out to be a unanimous one for the collective.
The Grand Opening Night at the new location took place this year on April 20 (haha?) and was themed "Stud Timeline." The first hour, which began at 6 p.m., was Sixties, the second hour was the Seventies, and so on. The Cockettes were there. Queer elders showed up. There were also first-timers.
It was a big deal, and the night was emotional for them all.
I asked them to plug events at The Stud during Pride, and Rachel obliged on behalf of the group:
- Friday, June 28, "Forever" with (co-op member) Vivian Forevermore
- Saturday, June 29, "Les Femmes," a celebration of dolls, twinks, and bimbos
- Sunday, June 30, a "marathon party" with a drag show hosted by Princess Poppy
We end Part 2 with Marke, Honey, and Rachel responding to this season's theme on the podcast: We're all in it.
We recorded this episode at The Stud in South of Market in June 2024.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
I'm super-stoked to do a podcast all about The Stud and folks from the collective who run the place! In Part 1, we start with Marke B. Many longtime listeners will remember Marke from his Season 3 Storied episode. In this go-round, we get a condensed version of his life story and how he made his way to San Francisco. In his hometown of Detroit, Marke threw raves and made enough money on that to put himself through college. Sometime in those four years of school, he realized that his dream of writing for a local newspaper or weekly was damn near impossible. Also, it was the height of AIDS and Detroit didn't have much of an infrastructure around that. His best friend bought two train tickets and told Marke, "Pack your bags, we're leaving for San Francisco tomorrow." That didn't sit well with Marke at the time. He wasn't crazy about SF back then—he hated hippies, hated the Beats. He had visited with his family at 14, when he tried to run away from his parents and take a cable car to the Castro. That, of course, didn't work out so well (try the F-Market trains, kid). Despite his dislike of The City, his desire to get out of Detroit got him on that train. Two-and-a-half days and a couple bags of potato chips later, Marke arrived. It was the day after Pride 1994, and he's been here ever since. He saw a gay scene that was too white and mainstreamy. But he found his people—other people of color, into alternative music—at The End Up. His first time at The Stud was on a Monday hip-hop night. Immediately, he felt he had truly arrived. Years later, in 2016, Rachel Ryan and another co-op member asked Marke and his husband, David, to join their collective. They've both been members since then. Then we turn to Rachel Ryan. Rachel grew up in The City, Noe Valley specifically. Her parents put her in Live Oak School, back when it was located in the Castro. That experience helped to shape Rachel—her kindergarten teacher was young and gay and had bleach-blonde hair. He was an early role model for her. Her liberal family moved to Marin for that oh-so familiar reason: San Francisco became too expensive for them. But her dad's work was headquartered near The Eagle in South of Market, and Rachel spent some time with him in that area when she was young. She thinks back on her time in Marin fondly, from the access to nature to the freedoms her parents were able to grant her. But at the same time, her parents were protective of their daughter—she was free as long as she was with her older brother. Rachel got into swing dancing at a young age. She'd come to The City to go to swing clubs in the Nineties. But once her older brother and his friend graduated high school and went to college, that ended. College for her meant UC Santa Cruz. And after graduating there, she moved back to San Francisco right away. Today, she lives really close to where she grew up. Growing up, Rachel carried bisexual shame. She felt at times that she wasn't gay enough, but also found herself immersed in queer culture through friends. Then, in 2009, a trip to The Stud changed everything. "These are my people," she thought. Years later, Rachel and her people started noticing the closure of more and more queer bars and spaces around The City. Their friends were getting priced out of San Francisco more and more frequently, and they were fed up. The previous owner of The Stud, Michael McElheney, announced that he wanted to retire and sell the bar, and Rachel, Nate Albee, and some other of those friends seized the opportunity. The newly formed Stud Collective took over in 2016. Next up is Honey Mahogany. Honey's parents fled Ethiopia for San Francisco as refugees. She grew up in the Outer Sunset just off Taraval in the Eighties and Nineties. Her parents put her through Catholic school for K–12. It was a rather sheltered, quiet childhood, one where she could walk to aunts' and uncles' houses in the same neighborhood. For college, Honey moved to Los Angeles to attend USC. She came out down there around this time, and became, in her words, "super queer." She started doing drag in LA, in fact. She found her true self in those experiences and being away from home, where she was able to establish her identity apart from her family. But her family still didn't know about her queerness. One of her cousins outed her to her fairly conservative, Catholic parents, who reacted negatively. After she graduated college, they sent her to Ethiopia to "get away from negative influences." While in Africa, she interned for the UN. "I've always been involved in social justice," she says, and the UN was a natural fit ... or so she imagined. And so Honey came back to The Bay to study social work at UC Berkeley. Her dad became ill around this time, and so the move back doubled as a chance to help take care of him. She found social justice work in Contra Costa County, got a spot on Ru Paul's Drag Race, and joined the newly formed Stud Collective. The Stud was near where Honey worked in the late 2000s. A friendly bartender endeared her and a drag queen named Virginia Suicide hypnotized her. She was hooked. Please check back next week for Part 2 of my episode on The Stud. We recorded this episode at The Stud in South of Market in June 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this bonus episode, meet and get to know Frameline Film Festival's Executive Director Allegra Madsen. Allegra was born and grew up in southern Virginia. As she says, "It was hot, it was humid, it was Southern." From a young age, she fell in love with movies because it was so hot outside. She'd escape to theaters, where she could bask in the AC and watch movies all day long. She left that area as soon as she could. That meant Chicago for college. She wanted to be a writer. Columbia College in Chicago was known as more of a film school, which meant she was on the periphery of movies in her time there. After college, it was on to Los Angeles, "as everybody does." Allegra worked in some art galleries and museums, with the goal of trying to get to San Francisco always in the back of her mind. As a kid growing up, she read a lot of Beat Generation writers (where were the women of the Beat era?). CCA was the draw that got Allegra up to The Bay. She studied contemporary art curation, focusing on how you can use art to build community. That was 20 years ago, and she's been here ever since. Then our conversation shifts to Frameline and its nearly half-century of history. It is the largest and longest-running queer film festival in the world. It's also the largest film event in California (hear that, LA?). It all began in 1977 on a bedsheet in the Castro. It was a time when there were no prominent images of queer people in media. Frameline 48 will take place all over the Bay Area. Check their website for a complete lineup. Allegra goes through a few of the events that she's excited about. The one I'm perhaps most hyped up for is next week's Juneteenth Frameline kick-off block party. In addition to many other aspects of the evening, the Castro Theatre's blade will be re-lit for the first time since that building underwent renovations. See you all at Frameline 48! We recorded this podcast over Zoom in May 2024.
Image courtesy Frameline
Part 2 begins with a chat about how, when we were both younger and just arriving in San Francisco, neither Brett nor I had any idea that we'd be here so long.
After living on Market, Brett moved back to the Mission, where he's lived ever since. His great aunt passed away and left him some money. It proved to be enough for a down payment on a space on Capp Street just off 16th. 65 Capp Street is the address of the original location of The Lost Church, and happens to be where Brett and his family live today.
Then Brett shares the story of meeting his wife, Lost Church co-owner Lizzy. In 1997, he went to Burning Man for his first time, an experience he relates in detail. He went back in 1999 and that's when he met his future wife. Despite her being eight years younger than him, Brett noticed that Lizzy was much more mature than he was. Days after Burning Man, she visited Brett in San Francisco from her home in Sacramento. They eloped in Tahoe two months later and have been together ever since.
Lizzy went through quite an adjustment in her new home on Capp Street. Brett then goes on a sidebar about his many musical adventures. He started a band with people he had met in his time at SF State in the Music program. They played out, most regularly at The Rite Spot. But they broke up and Brett got sick. He joined the stagehands' union to get health insurance. It was around this time that he and Lizzy decided to start their own band, this time with the explicit intention to tour.
They cut up the Capp Street spot into multiple studio spaces to rent out to others. Lizzy and Brett lived and played music in one of the small spaces they had created. Juanita and the Rabbit was born. And they toured ... for most of the next two years.
When they got back, Lizzy and Brett decided to try to have a kid. Around that same time, Brett had been having a not-so-good time with the stagehands' union. Lizzy was working as a stylist for photo shoots, making good money. This all allowed Brett to build out his own theater at the Capp Street space. The plan was to do "ridiculous" rock 'n' roll musicals.
Then we get into how they came up with the name "Lost Church," which Brett says isn't as good a story as many people want to hear. Brett had his own record label, was doing sound design for video games, and wanted to get into sound for movies. His website was split into the two halves: half record label, half his sound design work. For that site and to encompass all that he was doing at the time, he had a few names he was kicking around—The Last School, The Lost School, The Last Church, and The Lost Church. He liked them all because of their community vibes. He's never been a religious person, but for him, the idea of church meant more. He settled on "The Lost Church."
At first, though, it was just for his own creative endeavors. Visiting his website, you were directed to either "The Lost Church of Light and Sound" or "The Lost Church of Rock 'n' Roll." When he and Lizzy decided to turn their space into a theater, the name was already there.
Brett talks about their intentionality of creating a theater-like environment for musicians, one with seats for the audience and the bar in a separate room. Then he shares stories of some of the first performances of the newly minted Lost Church. He says he's not sure how people found him, but shortly after those early shows, musicians started emailing him wanting to play there. (Brian Belknap came in early and Brett hired him to host shows).
Then Brett dives into the story of why The Lost Church had to uproot from its original location. They survived for years without permits, mostly because they never envisioned it lasting long. Once the Entertainment Commission visited and pointed out all the shortcomings, they started to realize how much it would take to get the space up to code.
By the time COVID hit, Brett and Lizzy had already started thinking about a new spot. They had opened their second location up in Santa Rosa when they were forced to shut both down. Relief money started piling in and they hired their Santa Rosa point person. They also used that money to get the new SF location secured, running, and up to code.
It took Brett around nine months to find the new spot. So many criteria went into it that the task became difficult. It took a last-chance, random look at Craigslist to find what became The Lost Church San Francisco on Columbus on the northern edge of North Beach. The doors opened in September 2022 and they've never looked back.
We end the podcast with Brett responding to this season's theme—We're all in it.
Visit The Lost Church online at their website, thelostchurch.org. Follow them on Instagram @thelostchurchsf
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Brett Cline is, as he puts it, from the "Deep South." But he's such a California kid that by that he means Southern California. In Part 1, get to know Brett, who for the past decade or so has run The Lost Church performing arts theater. His life began in Orange County, where his parents ended up after meeting at UCLA and traveling around the world when his dad was a pilot in the Navy. Brett was heavily into the punk rock scene in SoCal in the Eighties (think bands like Social Distortion and Suicidal Tendencies, among others). But his love of music started in fourth grade when he snuck into the bedroom of an older neighbor kid and found the first record from Oingo Boingo, a band that changed his life. They were his first brush with alternative art, and soon became a defining point of his early personality. He dabbled in the four pillars of life in SoCal: He skateboarded, surfed, listened to punk rock, and ate at Taco Bell. Brett started playing drums in sixth grade and his first band was called High Voltage. He would write lyrics and draw album covers, while his friend Mark made beats on snare drums only. His mom was always a community person. She is a christian, but not a book-burner, as he says. She started a community organization centered around school issues: Citizens Action to Save Education (CASE). She was later school board president and continued to be involved in local politics around school issues. When his Navy service ended, Brett's dad got into the corporate world. He started several aviation companies. Today, Brett sees aspects of both of his parents in the foundation of The Lost Church. As a kid, he often went with his parents to community theaters. Brett's dad plays organ, his mom plays piano, one of his two brothers played clarinet, and his sister went to NYU and became an actor and singer. In high school, Brett started playing more music and always wanted to tour, though that never really worked out. He started playing bass and singing more. In 1989, he graduated high school and went to UC Santa Barbara. His college band, St. Rusticus, had the local record for getting shut down by cops the fastest. "Three songs in, and the cops were there." Going to UCSB introduced Brett to Northern California, partly because the school paired kids from SoCal with kids from NorCal in the dorms. He'd visited SF with his family when he was a kid. It was different from where he's from, but he didn't immediately like it. In college, though, he took trips up here and fell in love. He'd come up, do mushrooms and acid, and listen to older, more-mainstream rock. He got heavily into the Grateful Dead, even touring with them, as many fans do. After college, the plan was to move to SF with his friend Davey Lyle. (Lyle did many of the paintings seen today all around The Lost Church). But in his senior year, Brett got a D in art and learned that the Spanish he took at junior college didn't transfer to the UC. And so he dropped out, got a loan from his parents, bought a computer, scanner, and Photoshop, and started making album covers for local bands. Then his dad got him an internship in London with a graphic arts company and he took it. He saw many shows there but came back after only nine months. And when he came back, he moved immediately to San Francisco. With no job and no prospects, Brett moved in with his friend Davey, who'd already made the move up. They lived in a warehouse in the Mission on 20th near Harrison, then moved to Sixth and Market. It was December 1993. Check back next week for Part 2 and the origin story of The Lost Church. We recorded this podcast at The Lost Church San Francisco in May 2024.
Hear the conversation I had in January with my favorite young Bay Area band, Peaboo and the Catz.
Follow them on Instagram @Peabooandthecatz
Subscribe to their YouTube channel: Peabooandthecatz
Photography by Paolo Asuncion
In Part 2, Mike, Paolo, and Rachel share the story of how TNT Traysikel came to be. We begin with Paolo, who describes the Mission art opening where he and Mike met. Besides having similar "falling in love with San Francisco" moments, they soon learned that back in the Philippines, their brothers had been friends. They hit it off pretty much right away. Mike learned that Paolo worked on films, including his Handsome Asians Motorcycle Club series on YouTube. In 2017, the year after SOMA Pilipinas came into existence, Mike was invited to join the nonprofits' arts and cultural group. They were looking to do a placemaking project and wanted to connect with artists to do so. At that time, Mike was already a professor at SF State. He ran the sculpture and expanded practice program there. He had done public art on his own before, and remembered Paolo and his motorcycle riding. Mike started thinking about jeepneys and the Philippines, which were relics left on the islands after years of war. These thoughts sparked the idea for a tricycle jeepney. And so Mike and Paolo applied for a grant. Originally, they planned to build it from scratch. Before Paolo's web series, he had made some documentaries. His first thought about TNT was that it, too, would make a cool web series. He didn't think of it as political in the beginning. But these were the years of the previous presidential administration (just before COVID), and in hindsight, he now sees a clearer picture of what it meant from Day One. They got the grant on the idea that that the traysikel signaled the presence of Filipinos. They wanted to take older Filipinos (manongs and manangs) to buy groceries in SOMA. And they somehow wanted to make the vehicle a roving sculpture. A friend of Mike's told them about a traysikel for sale in Modesto. They bought it, picked it up, and right away, realized that it needed a lot of work. Mike and Paolo took the whole thing apart, rewelded it, and added support. By the time the 2019 Parol Lantern Festival came around, it was ready to roll. They showed up, just Paolo and Mike, and started playing Tagalog music from Paolo's iPhone around the traysikel. People came over and sang along, which gave them the idea for karaoke. Michelle Nguyen, a vintage scooterist friend of Paolo's, designed the look of and painted the TNT Traysikel for them. Also at Parol 2019, Rachel learned about the project. As the karaoke was coming into being, Paolo and Michael thought, Rachel's an amazing singer—maybe she could be the karaoke host? She was in. And so they applied for a second grant, this time through the SF Arts Commission, to make a movie about the traysikel with a musical component. The three of them would become equal collaborators. Mobile karaoke came to be in the early days of COVID, when people really wanted to release, to be out and free and with other people. They say that to them, TNT encapsulates joy, grief (the grief of what you leave behind when you emigrate), and storytelling. Their Sidenotes project focuses on one or two people sitting in the sidecar telling stories. The TNT crew collects and archives those stories. Through this work and everything else, they recently were rewarded with a Rainin Arts Fellowship to do another film. In summer 2025, they're taking TNT Traysikel on the road. We end the podcast going around the room to hear Paolo, Mike, and Rachel's responses to this year's theme on the podcast—We're all in it. Follow TNT Traysikel on Instagram @TNT_traysikel and on YouTube: TNT_Traysikel. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this episode, we meet the humans behind the artistic and cultural project that is the TNT Traysikel. We start, in random order, with Mike Arceaga. Mike was born in the Philippines and moved to LA with his family when he was 10. He says that the transition from his homeland to LA was difficult. The family first landed in Highland Park, which Mike points out wasn't hip then. That's where he got started doing graffiti art. In the mid-to-late-Eighties, they moved, first to the Eagle Rock neighborhood in LA, then Pomona, where, by the time he moved there, he'd become a full-fledged graffiti artist. He says it's what got him into art In high school, Mike learned technical drawing. He went to junior college, had art school on his mind. He was in a hip-hop crew, tagged ramps, and was friends with skaters, but never skated himself. He also breakdanced, but says it never took. After high school, he just wanted to get out of his parents house, and so he signed up to join the Army. But when Mike's dad found out about that, he cried and urged him to go to school instead. And so he visited San Francisco to attend a summer program at the Academy of Art University. And he fell in love with The City almost immediately. He shares the moment of coming up the escalator at Powell BART and seeing the scene on the street as the moment SF got his heart. He loved walking around the hills before art class, where he was starting to meet artists from all over. And slowly, he discovered the rest of The City by hopping on Academy shuttles. Soon after this summer program, Mike came back to visit the Art Institute. When he and a friend saw the view from the roof at SFAI, he decided to try to get into school there. Next, we meet TNT Traysikel's Paolo Asuncion. Paolo came to the US from the Philippines when he was 14. Before that migration, he had found his first girlfriend as well as a friend group that wasn't bullying him. The move abroad disrupted that progress. Paolo's family first came to Ontario, California, just outside of LA and not far from where Mike and his family were. His mom had met a family in church and she and her three kids lived with them. A family of four crammed into a single bedroom. He went to high school all over LA, first in Echo Park (before it was hip), then in the Rampart District, and at Torrance High (think Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Then Paolo's mom put him in Marshall High in Las Feliz (think Grease). Paolo's dad was a fairly famous actor back in the Philippines. But when he moved to the US to be with family, he ended up managing the apartment building where they lived and did door-to-door sales. His parents soon got divorced and his dad went back to his home country. Paolo went to Diamond Bar High School his senior year (which he says was very Breakfast Club-ish). He started playing guitar, which he says got him in with the cool kids. He even formed a band, but after high school, he went back to the Philippines, where he got his girlfriend pregnant. Then Paolo moved back to Glendale in Southern California. He was still on a tourist visa and tried to get jobs that would sponsor his work visa, which was difficult. One day, his uncle in LA asked to help him move to SF and they left Glendale at 10 at night, drove up I-5 to 580, then crossed Bay Bridge at sunrise. Looking out the windshield at the scene in front of him, Paolo thought, WHAT IS THIS PLACE? He spent a week here on that trip, during which time he had the same Powell escalator experience as Mike. Heloved it so much that he decided to move here. A friend of his uncle's got him a graphic design job and in 1996, he moved here. Last but not least, we meet Rachel Lastimosa. Rachel was born and raised in San Diego, the kid of a Navy person, which is how her dad got his U.S. citizenship. Members of Rachel's family have been in SF since the Forties, and when she was a kid, they visited here a lot from San Diego. Rachel's first memories of San Francisco involve mostly touristy things. From a young age, 12 or so, she knew she wanted to live here. Rachel says she loved the culture here and felt a friendliness from strangers unlike what she experienced back home in San Diego. She grew up in a strict house and, because of that, was into extracurricular activities. Her parents expected her to cook and do laundry, but she escaped into music—playing, writing, and performing. Rachel wrote her first song when she was in first grade. Today, she plays piano, keyboards, and bass, and does vocals. And she produces and writes music. Rachel says she always wanted to build community. She helped put together the first culture night at her high school. But as soon as she could, after graduation, she came to San Francisco. In fact, SF State was the only school she applied to. Once here, she joined a band and majored in electronic music. This was the early 2000s and she's been here ever since. She writes scores for theater and films and has been in a few bands. A collaboration she did with the Filipino Center made her realize how art can bring communities together. Check back next week for Part 2 with Rachel, Paolo, and Mike. In it, they'll share the origin story for TNT Traysikel—the part motorcyle/sidecar, part karaoke machine, part mobile Filipino cultural pride project. We recorded this podcast at TNT HQ in South San Francisco in March 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. After getting his credentials, Danny bounced around, teaching at a couple of San Francisco public schools before landing at Live Oak (a K–8 school in Potrero Hill). He stayed teaching kindergarten and first grade there for a total of 11 years.
We shift gears in the recording to talk about how Danny met his wife. Full disclosure: I've known Erin Feher since around 2004 when we were both in the Journalism program at SF State. Back in 2020, Erin reached out to me on behalf of her new orgranization—REPCO, or Represent Collaborative. Periodically, our podcasts run on REPCO and it's been an honor to collaborate with them. Check them out and donate if you're able.
Danny and Erin met around the time I lost touch with Erin (2005, when I graduated from State). He was DJing and the night Erin and some friends walked in, Danny broke one of his own rules by talking to a woman at a bar he was deejaying. Their first date involved riding bikes around SF.
Years later, they had their first kid. Erin had to go back to work before Danny did, so he was able to stay home and take care of their infant. But after a year, he was both itching to do something and needed to when his wife got laid off. And this is how Butterfly Joint was founded. It married his two passions—woodworking and teaching.
The first location was on Mission Street and lasted there for years. But when Danny and his wife moved their little family to the Outer Richmond and found a new-to-them community there, he decided to bring the shop with him.
Danny shares the story of opening the café and learning to make vegan donuts. These days, the café is open every day. Donuts are now his No. 1 seller. They focus on hyper-local goods and like to do pop-up events once a month.
Follow Butterfly Joint and Café on Instagram. Visit them at 4411 Cabrillo. For those with kids who are interested, go to their website.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
The 42nd annual CAAMFest kicks off tomorrow, May 9, in The City. In this bonus episode, meet CAAM's Festival and Exhibitions Director, Thuy Tran. Hear about how Thuy ended up in San Francisco and working at CAAM, the history of this Asian-American media organization, and this year's film, food, and music festival, which runs through May 19. Visit the CAAMFest website for more details.
In this episode, meet and get to know Danny Montoya, who owns and operates Butterfly Joint and Café in the Outer Richmond. Danny starts his story by letting us know that, growing up, he had family in The City and visited a lot from his various homes in Southern California. He was born in Burbank and grew up in Santa Clarita Valley, where some of his friends still live. He was immersed in punk and skate cultures from a young age, and once he had friends who were old enough to do so, they drove "everywhere" to skate. His parents, both of whom are from Colombia and met in LA, divorced when Danny was 5. He and his older brother went to live most of the time with their mom in a trailer park. This was Danny's primary residence from age 5 to the beginning of ninth grade, and he says it shaped him deeply. He started skating at the trailer park when he was 8. At this point, Danny and I go on a sidebar about what skating and skate culture did for us as people. He did a lot of street skating and was one of the younger kids in his crew. He's quick to point out that he was also way into basketball. He skated until he was 10 and didn't pick it up again until high school. Thanks to a friend, he got into music when he was in junior high. His step dad and mom got married before Danny started high school, and he moved with them to Valencia, California. In his sophomore year, he started skating again and was going to hardcore shows in Hollywood and San Diego. Danny was the first person in his family to go to college. He says it wasn't a question of whether he'd go, but more of where. It boiled down to SD State vs. SF State, and he chose (wisely, I might add) to come up to The Bay. Danny's mom gave him and his brother lots of freedom, he says. They went on road trips up here unsupervised several times to visit a friend who lived in the dorms at SF State. And so by the time he entered college, at age 17, he already had friends here. He spent five years at SF State and graduated in 1994. After earning his bachelor's in Education, Danny worked on getting his teaching credentials. He taught for a couple years at public schools in The City. After that, he did preschool observation at Tule Elk Park Early Education School. The young woman he was dating at the time worked at Live Oak, a private school, and got Danny an after-school job there. Soon, he started subbing at Live Oak while also doing work-study at SF State. He got his credentials and ended up teaching for about a decade. Check back next week for Part 2 and Danny's story of leaving teaching to start his own woodworking and design studio for children grades kindergarten and up—The Butterfly Joint. We recorded this podcast at The Butterfly Joint and Café in the Outer Richmond in March 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1, with Nate's arrival at SF State and his counselor's suggestion that he switch his major from Business to Art. Nathan graduated from State in 1994. With airbrushing becoming popular around that time, he and his buddy E had opened an airbrush store in the Bayview that did quite well. Nathan wasn't even 20 yet.
The store on Third stayed open about a year and a half, he says. At this point in the conversation, Nathan and I go on a sidetrack about how we both approach life and big decisions. He says he tries to stay open to opportunities, to seize them when appropriate.
He still lived with his parents after graduation and didn't have a job lined up. At this point, we cycle through many jobs, good and bad, that he had over the years—Atari (game tester), American Design Intelligence Group (graphic designer), Mervyn's (graphic designer), Gymboree (boys' clothing designer), Zutopia (clothing designer), and Duty Free Stores (product/souvenir designer).
He still worked at DFS when 9/11 happened. The months and years following that event saw a decline in sales for the company. He was on paternity leave following the birth of his first son when he got a phone call—he had been let go.
But whatever pain that might have brought—after all, Nathan had an infant and a mortgage—it proved to be the impetus for him to start what this year is celebrating its 20th anniversary. New Skool Clothing and Accessories is his line of SF-inspired clothing for all ages.
We end Part 2 with Nathan's response to this season's theme on the podcast—We're All In It. He mentions the mentoring he's been doing at Hunt and Gather Gallery in the Inner Sunset. And he says he's at a point in his life where he wants to help and give back.
Follow New Skool on social media @newskoolSF and Nathan's personal accounts @nate1design.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 1, meet and get to know Nathan, who today owns and operates New Skool Clothing and Accessories. Nathan's parents are both from Myanmar, but fled their home country during years of political upheaval. They landed in England, where his mom's mom already lived and where Nathan was born in the early Seventies. He, his older sister, and their parents then moved to the Bay Area, where their dad had family, when Nathan was three. He attended preschool in The City, but then his parents moved their young family to Daly City, where they could afford to buy a house. His dad started his own business, and his mom worked at a bank, and that was enough to enable them to buy a famed Doelger home just south of San Francisco. Nathan went first to Peabody Elementary for one or two years, then to Westlake for second through sixth grades. After this, his parents enrolled him in a Catholic school to finish his junior high years. Around 1983, he started high school at St. Ignatius in The City and that ended up changing his life forever. He soon met Eustinove Smith, who was already a graffiti and hip-hop legend in SF. Nathan was just getting into hip-hop himself. He shares some insights on the genre's evolutions, from the East Coast to out West. Some kids were graffiti writers and DJs at his new school, and Nate (as he was starting to be known) started breakdancing and listening to the hip-hop.
Nate had dabbled in art as a young kid, but his art matured when he hit his teen years, especially after he met his new best friend, E (Eustinove). Nate imparts some wisdom about the evolution of graffiti-writing styles at this point. His buddy E got a crew together and they hit the streets. The new crew called itself Master Piece Creators (MPC). Nathan became Nate1, E was Omen2, and their buddy Rodney was Orco. Spots around SF they hit up include several "hall of fames," which are spaces where people paint both legally and illegally. MPC ended up doing many "productions" all over town. He says when he graduated high school, it was never a question of leaving The Bay. Nate got into SF State, where he majored in business at first. But it took a counselor's advice to get him to switch over to art. Check back next week for Part 2 and the continuation of Nate's story. Check out the goods over at New Skool. We recorded this podcast at Nate's home and studio in the Sunset in February 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this bonus episode, meet SFFILM Executive Director Anne Lai. Learn all about Anne's upbringing, what drew her to California, her stint with the Sundance Institute, and her arrival in 2020 in San Francisco at the famed San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).
Anne will walk listeners through the history of this 67-year-old festival, the oldest such event in North America. Then she touches on some highlights of this year's festival (April 24–28), including the Opening Night screening of Didi, the feature-length debut of Bay Area filmmaker Sean Wang.
Please visit sffilm.org for more info, including showtimes and tickets.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom in April 2024.
Part 2 is the story of how open-mindedness met opportunity. It's also an explanation for how an ice cream store opened by someone named Mitchell came to carry several flavors familiar to both the Filipino- and the Latin-American community. Brian shares the story: The Asian flavors started around 1965 when a customer and friend of Larry Mitchell's introduced Larry to the Gina Corporation in Philippines, who process and package the fruits Mitchell's uses to this day in many of its ice cream flavors. They started with mango puree, a fruit that his friend had to introduce Larry Mitchell to. He liked it and was open to the idea of incorporating it. After mango, it was ube (purple yam), macapuno (sweet coconut), buko (young coconut), langko (jackfruit), avocado (which I tried recently and is DELICIOUS), and mais y queso (a Filipino flavor). Many of these flavors were familiar to Marlon, who'd emigrated from the Philippines shortly before he began working at Mitchell's. He says that he was surprised and delighted to see those flavors in his new city. I share my own story of finding Mitchell's and we talk about those well-known, long-ass lines often seen running down San Jose Avenue. Marlon tells us that, in addition to standard flavors and the Asian and North and South American flavors, over the years, Brian has concocted some cool ice cream combinations that remain on the menu to this day. In the mid-Seventies, Mitchell's got its products into stores. And in the late-Seventies, they got into some local restaurants. Then, in the 2000s, several local Thai restaurants began using Mitchell's in desserts (fried banana with their coconut ice cream, for example). I ask the trio how they feel about Ben and Jerry's and other competition. The fact that Mitchell's is a family business and one that's been around so long leaves customers passionate about their local ice cream parlor. On that topic, it's worth mentioning that Marlon met his wife, Wanda, at Mitchell's when she started working there shortly after he did. They've been married 32 years and both continue working at Mitchell's to this day. We end the podcast going around the room to hear what Linda, Marlon, and Brian think about our theme this season: "We're all in it." Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this podcast at Mitchell's Ice Cream in February 2024.
This oh-so-San Francisco story begins with two brothers and a dairy farm at Noe and 29th Street. Larry Mitchell and his older brother Jack opened Mitchell's Ice Cream in 1953. Five years earlier, the building that now houses the well-known ice cream shop was going to be torn down for the widening of San Jose Avenue. The Mitchell family fought those efforts and a compromise was reached—The City would turn and move the building. The old liquor store that had been on San Jose was no more. That space sat empty for a couple years until Larry Mitchell decided that he wanted to do something with it. His parents had a small dairy farm on Noe and 29th Street. There was a parlor called Garrett's Ice Cream out on Ocean Avenue that was doing well. Larry and his brothers saw an opportunity. A salesman from Foremost Dairy taught them how to make ice cream, which they sourced from Foremost. Larry, his brothers, their dad, and some friends built the store out and it opened on June 6, 1953. Initially, it was a small operation. But in 1956, they built a bigger, newer freezer, and it just took off from there. Through the years, they've done their best to keep up with demand. The ice cream has always been made on-site. Larry Mitchell's oldest daughter was already alive when the shop opened. His second daughter, Linda, who joined us for this episode, was born in 1954, a year after the store began operations. His youngest kid, Brian, who also appears in this episode, was born in 1961. Today, Linda Mitchell and Brian Mitchell are co-owners of Mitchell's Ice Cream. Marlon Payumo, Mitchell's operations manager, is originally from the Philippines. He left his homeland with family in 1987, first landing in Guam, then on to San Francisco in 1988. Marlon had been in The City for two weeks when his friend came to visit him at his aunt's house, where he was staying. The friend brought some mango ice cream and a job application. Marlon interviewed, got the job, and has been with Mitchell's ever since. He was 19 when he started. Mitchell's was already popular when Marlon came on. Linda, Brian, and Marlon all agree: The long lines were even worse then! We talk about the frozen yogurt craze of the Eighties and how they dabbled in it but let it go to refocus on their crown product—the ice cream. Linda started working at the family business in 1991. By then, they were the only ice cream shop in the Mission, but their product wasn't in many stores just yet. Brian started back in 1979 after high school. He went to college on the Peninsula and worked at the shop on weekends. He got a degree in business management and came on full-time in the early Eighties. Linda's story of how she ended up at the family business is that their Aunt Alice, who had been Mitchell's bookkeeper/customer service rep for some time, was retiring. Linda had worked in banking for a while, and she'd lived in Florida and Texas, but it was time to come home. Linda took over their aunt's job. In the early Nineties, Mitchell's had about 30 employees. Today, that number isn't too much higher—they estimate it at around 40. They succumbed to the coffee/espresso craze of that decade. But that, too, didn't last long. Check back next week for Part 2 and more on the legacy and history of Mitchell's Ice Cream with Linda, Brian, and Marlon. We recorded this episode at Mitchell's Ice Cream in February 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we hear about Chloe's first photo show, which took place at The Bearded Lady. Chloe describes The Bearded Lady as a hub, a place to do and get everything you could possibly need. It and the Kiki Gallery next door were both on 14th Street near Guerrero. Another queer artist, Cathy, liked Chloe's show and suggested that she go to art school. And so Chloe got into San Francisco Art Institute. She had a darkroom at her home and sometimes printed at Harvey Milk Photo Center in Duboce Park. But she was able to do so much at her school. At this point in the podcast, Chloe and I talk about photo editing and what that process was like in the analog film days. I name-drop Photoworks and Chloe mentions the photo labs at Macy's, then we end with Chloe's acknowledgement that people are embracing film again. I ask Chloe about the 2000s. Her daughter was born and they left The City, finding a new home in the East Bay to raise her kid. With the shift from film to digital, Chloe struggled to keep up and her life priorities changed. We talk about so many places that were important to the queer, dyke, and lesbian scenes closing in the Millennium. People from that scene started having kids and some pursued careers in other cities. Many wanted more space and couldn't get it in The City. The Dotcom boom happened, and folks were bought out or got priced out. That leads to a sidebar on the recent resurgence we're seeing here in San Francisco. There's Mother Bar of course, where we recorded, and Chloe mentions other new queer art spaces like Schlomer Haus Gallery. We wonder whether the pandemic was a correction event. The conversation shifts to how Chloe's photo book, Renegades, came about. Early in the pandemic, when everyone stayed home, her daughter came back from college to live with her. Her daughter saw Chloe's photos and told her to start an Instagram account. She did, but of course her daughter set it all up. They scanned many, many photos and started to post. The reaction was endearing and intense and overwhelming, she says. Chloe says it was like a high school reunion, with so many of her friends from the Nineties reemerging in her life on social media. The aforementioned Schlomer Haus Gallery saw what was happening and reached out looking for queer artists to show in their new space on Market. And so Chloe got a solo show in 2022. That show, Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s, set the stage for her book of the same name. That 2022 experience was still so new to her. But at the show's opening, people reconnected with one another and the work took on a life of its own. Chloe says people were in tears. They took photos of their photos that were in the show. 300+ people attended the opening that night and many of those went to the after party at Mothership Bar on Mission. "We all just showed up like nothing ever happened," Chloe says. Younger people at the opening told her, "This is why I moved to San Francisco," speaking to the scenes depicted in Chloe's photos. Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s the book is available at local bookstores like City Lights, Fabulosa Books, SFMOMA, and Green Apple. It's also available online. Go to Chloe's website for more info. We end Part 2 with Chloe's interpretation of our theme this season: "We're all in it." There's a special shout-out to photobooths. Follow Chloe on Instagram to stay up to date on shows and book signings. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Chloe Sherman's eyes are intense, but not the way you might think.
Chloe, who's been taking photographs since she was young, was born in New York City. Her mom and her mom's mom were both New Yorkers, and her dad was from Chicago, with his family going back generations there. When she in was grade school, the family moved to Chicago, where Chloe was raised by aunts and grandparents as well as her parents, just like she had been in NYC. It was the Seventies and her parents were hippies. They soon headed west, taking their family to Portland, Oregon, where Chloe spent the rest of her grade school days. Chloe says the move was fine, but that she felt like more of a city kid, and so it took some adjusting. She and her brother visited back east a lot. He ended up going to college there, and Chloe started school in Connecticut and then Boston before realizing that she'd become a West Coaster. We talk about life in Portland, how it's easier to be collective-minded and communal because it's more affordable than bigger cities. This of course has an effect on who's drawn to cities like Portland. With an abundance of young people, folks tend to band together. Chloe ended up going to Portland State. One weekend, she took a trip to San Francisco after reading about our city in a zine she got at Powell's Books in her hometown. We take a conversational detour at this point to talk about zine culture back in the late-Eighties and early Nineties. In high school, she had dabbled in dance and music, but knew she didn't want to pursue either performing art. She says she loved art and did some photography, but got more serious about that after high school. In those aforementioned zines, she learned all about the bike messenger culture here in The City and was captivated by it. On that weekend trip down from Portland, she visited Lickety Split Couriers, which was Lynn Breedlove's bike messenger company. Chloe ended up working at another messenger for two weeks, but soon gave that up entirely. "San Francisco is instant death if you're not a pro," she says. We talk a bit about bike messenger culture in SF back in the Nineties. The service was essential to downtown during dotcom, but you'd hardly know it these days. Breedlove told Chloe, "Go to the Bearded Lady Cafe," which she did. And it changed her life forever. It was there that she found her community. Chloe moved to San Francisco right after that visit to the cafe on 14th Street in the Mission. She lived with friends until she finally got her own place in Lower Haight. After Chloe was established here, friends from Portland followed her to The City. Her world was expanding around her. She says that she looks at photos now from back then and sees concentric circles of friends. The SF Dyke scene flourished through the Nineties. But then people grew up, got priced out, and The City changed. Many businesses closed with those changes. Check back next week for Part 2 to hear more about that thriving, bustling, Mission lesbian scene that Chloe captures so well and so prolifically in her photography. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we pick up right where we left off in Part 1. Mark was walking around the Mission taking down numbers of places with "for rent" signs. A resident in one of those spots leaned out the window and invited Mark in to see the place. Mark reveals that he and his wife still live in that same apartment 20 years later. Paul Duatschek lived nearby in the Mission. He and Mark were introduced by a mutual friend at Bottom of the Hill. Soon enough, Paul was coming in regularly to Luna Park on Valencia, where Mark managed and bartended. His new friend kept urging Mark to carry his homebrew at the restaurant, something Paul most likely knew couldn't happen. The same thing happened when Mark opened his own place—Dr. Teeth (now simply "Teeth") on Mission. It was around the time of two major events—his 30th birthday and the dissolution of his band (see Part 1)—that Mark decided to branch out. He ended up opening several other alcoholic-beverage-heavy establishments around SF: joints like Wild Hare, Royal Tug Yacht Club, Soda Popinskis, Cease and Desist. But it was at Dr. Teeth that Paul, by now a pretty damn good homebrewer, would pressure his friend. The idea was that Paul knew beer and Mark knew how to open places. They hired a branding company to help come up with the name, while they also poured Paul's homebrew at parties. They got a good reaction to the product, but encountered challenges finding a spot. Eventually, Craigslist saved them. Today, Standard Deviant lives on 14th Street just off Mission in an old body shop. They signed the lease in 2015, built the place out, and opened in 2016. The brewery produces around 2,000 barrels a year. The conversation then turns to San Francisco craft brewing. When Mark and Paul decided to work together, there were about 10 craft breweries in SF (places like 21st Amendment and Magnolia, to name just a few). A year or so later, when Standard Deviant opened its doors, that number had doubled. Mark says of the entire operation that it's about the place as much as it is the beer. I for one can attest to that. We end the podcast with Mark's response to our theme this season: "We're all in it ..." PS: An exciting bit of news dropped since we recorded back in December. This fall, Standard Deviant is opening its second location in San Francisco’s Pier 70. For reference, we featured this exciting new area of the bayside waterfront back in Season 4 Episode 20. We recorded this podcast at Standard Deviant Brewing in the Mission in December 2023.
Mark DeVito, co-owner and COO of Standard Deviant Brewing, wouldn't last a day in a police lineup. But it might not be his curly handlebar mustache that gave him away. Mark has an outsize personality, to put it mildly. And back in December, I sat down with him and one of the SDB dogs, Beans, at the Mission brewery for what turned out to be quite the wild ride of a recording. In Part 1, we learn about Mark's upbringing in smalltown New Hampshire—Hopkinton, to be specific. It's still a town-with-no-stoplights small. The summers were hot and the winters cold and snowy. After hearing about two rather unfortunate stories from Mark's elementary school days, we move on to his teen years. He learned to play drums from a neighbor who taught music at his school. His parents placed him in a preparatory boarding school for high school, where he found an entire room full of instruments where he and his friends could play. And play they did. They formed a band that started playing around the area. We go back a little so Mark can share his Italian grandparents' story of migrating to the United States and landing in Boston, where his dad grew up and where Mark soon found himself after high school. The gigs, mostly Grateful Dead covers but eventually more like jazz improv with a Miles Davis influence, were stacking up for Great American (named after a grocery store chain and having nothing to do with 9/11). After his college years, some band members went their separate ways. But Mark and one of his buds decided to take a chance on San Francisco. Mark had visited and was blown away by the natural scenery and human creative energy here. Which, duh. And so, in 2004, he moved here. From 2005 to 2010, Mark would spend around five months a year touring the country from his new hometown. The story of how he found a place to live—where he's still at today with his wife—is remarkable only in the sense that it doesn't really happen that way anymore. He was walking around the Mission taking down phone numbers written on "for rent" signs in windows when someone leaned their head out one of those windows and asked Mark if he wanted to see the place. Check back next week for Part 2 with Mark and the story of Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Standard Deviant Brewing in the Mission in December 2023. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, we really get into the meat of what Huckleberry Youth is and how it got started. You know, I keep finding out ways in which our city pioneered things for the nation. I recently saw the upcoming Carol Doda documentary and learned that she was the first topless dancer in the US. And in this episode, we hear from Doug and Denise something very important that Huckleberry Youth did before anyone else. And of course, at the time they did it, it was illegal. 1967 is also known as the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco. And that meant young people from all over the country and world flocked to our city to find whatever it was they were looking for. Not all of them were lucky. Many faced hardship, having trouble finding shelter, making friends, and getting sick or addicted to drugs. A group of faith-based organizations and folks in the nonprofit world got together to do something about it, and Huckleberry House was born. But back then, both being a youth runaway was illegal, and, if you provided shelter for a runaway, it was considered aiding and abetting. Huckleberry House was the first such shelter for runaway youth in the country. But all it took was one complaint from a parent. SFPD raided the house and arrested youth and staff alike. Now they needed a lawyer, and they found one in a young man named Willie Brown. The future mayor got the charges dropped, and Huckleberry House reopened in February 1968. It has been in legal operation ever since. Denise and Doug talk about several programs that Huckleberry Youth has established over the years. One such program was HYPE, established in the 1980s to help young people with HIV/AIDS. They give thanks and respect to Huckleberry's own Danny Keenan—the first to say, in effect, "We need to have kids talking to kids" to address problems like young people who are sick. I bring up the fire at their Geary Boulevard administrative offices back in 2019 because I witnessed it (I live not too far from there). The office had been at Geary and Parker for more than 30 years. The fire in front of Hong Kong Lounge 2 destroyed memorabilia and photos at Huckleberry's office, but they were able to save a lot too. During COVID, Huckleberry House stayed open and even took in new youth. Partly because of the fire, they had been moving a lot of admin stuff online before the pandemic, so they were able to make that transition. The conversation then shifts to kids who come to them addicted. Huckleberry gets those youth into its justice program, known as CARC (Community Assessment and Resource Center). Denise tells this story, because she was at Delancey Street when the program started in 1998 (see Part 1 of this podcast). It turned out to be too much for that nonprofit, and so they handed it over to Huckleberry 2000. Doug and Denise estimate that the program has helped at least 7,000 individuals, and possibly as many as 10,000. We end this episode with Denise and Doug responding to our theme this season: "We're all in it." Go to Huckleberryyouth.org to donate and learn more about all that they do to help underserved youth in San Francisco. Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this podcast in December 2023 at Huckleberry Youth's administrative offices on Geary.
Huckleberry Youth, the non-profit providing care and housing for underserved youth, celebrated 50 years back in 2017. In Part 1 of this episode, we meet Huckleberry consultant/advisor Denise Coleman and the organization's CEO/executive director, Doug Styles. Denise was born at what is now Kaiser's French Campus on Geary. Denise, who is Black, shares the story of the hospital making her dad pay cash for their labor and delivery services, while it was obvious that white folks were allowed to make installment payments. Born and raised in the 1950s and Sixties, Denise and her family lived in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood, as it was known then (now we call it Cole Valley) on Belvedere Street. She has three sisters and a brother, her dad worked two jobs usually, and her mom stayed home. She describes a childhood that was fun, filled with activities like roller skating, skateboarding, and homemade roller coasters. Denise was a teenager during the Vietnam War and took part in protests. She describes a history of friction with her mom. When Denise was 16, one of her sisters OD'd on drugs. Still, despite the trauma that came with that, she graduated high school from St. Mary's in 1973. At this point in the podcast, Denise rattles off the San Francisco schools she went to. After high school, she joined some of her cousins and attended the College of San Mateo. Denise never thought about or wanted to leave the Bay Area, she says. In an apartment on the Peninsula, she and her cousins had "the best time." After obtaining a two-year associate's degree, Denise says she wanted to go to SF State, but didn't connect with it, and so she started working instead. For two years, she flew as a flight attendant for the now-defunct Western Airlines. After that, she collected debt for a jewelry store, then worked as a credit authorizer for Levitz Furniture in South San Francisco. Denise says she got hung up in the crack epidemic in the Eighties. She started with cocaine, and that led to crack. She was an addict for eight years. She got herself into a rehabilitation program at Delancey Street and stayed in the program for seven years. Her time started in SF, then took her to Santa Monica, North Carolina, and New York state. In 1998, Denise decided to leave Delancey Street. She got a call from Mimi Silbert, the Delancey founder, with an offer to work at their new juvenile justice program in San Francisco. Denise said no at first, partly because she wanted to stay in North Carolina. But after some persistence from Silbert, in 1999, she said yes and came back to her hometown. After seven years away, The City had changed. And so Denise helped to establish Delancey Street's Community Assessment and Referral Center (CARC). After its first year, the organization realized that they didn't have the capacity to run the program. Delancey Street asked Huckleberry Youth to take it over, and this is how Denise ended up at Huckleberry. Doug Styles was born and raised in the Richmond District. He was too young to remember the 1960s and mostly grew up in the Seventies. Doug says he had a lot of fun as a kid, describing riding his bike to the beach and back by himself. He shares the story of going to a late movie in the Mission, so late that when he got out, there were no buses. And so he walked home through the Mission, through the Fillmore, to his home in the Richmond. He also rattles off San Francisco schools he went to, including Lowell. Doug was in school when the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst. He was at Everett Middle School when Dan White assassinated George Moscone and Harvey Milk. He speaks to tensions in The City around this time, and Denise joins in to talk about the day of the assassinations. Doug graduated high school in 1983 and went to UC Santa Cruz, where he majored in theater. He moved to Massachusetts, where he found work in a theater. After a short time out east, he came back to San Francisco and tried unsuccessfully to get into grad school. So he enrolled in a masters program at CIIS for drama therapy. Following that degree, Doug went back east, this time to Connecticut to work at the VA's National Center for PTSD. After another return to the Bay Area, he got his doctorate in clinical psychology. At the VA, Doug had worked with adults, but the jobs he found here had him working with youth. He had a job on the Peninsula for 10 years, during which time he became a father to two kids, which he says changed him more than anything else. One day he saw that the Huckleberry Youth executive director was retiring. Doug applied and got the job, and has been with the non-profit ever since. Check back next week for Part 2 and more on the history of Huckleberry Youth. Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this podcast in December 2023 at Huckleberry Youth's administrative offices on Geary.
We begin Part 2 where we left off in Part 1. Anita had been away from their Arkansas college town and missed Lester. Upon her return, she went to see him and they soon shared their first kiss. Soon after that day, Anita had a pregnancy scare, and so Lester asked her, "Would you marry me if you are?" She said yes, but ended up not being pregnant. It didn't matter. They got married anyway. It was 1990 and they were both 22. Lester had a semester to go in college, which meant that the young couple couldn't live together or he'd get kicked out of the Christian school. He had started his first serious band—Cosmic Giggle Factory. Anita worked at Captain D's, a regional seafood chain fast-food joint, and then at a hotel. They moved to Little Rock a few years later. Eventually, she landed a job at Spectrum Weekly, an alternative paper in the Arkansas capital. Looking back, they say that they really loved their community there. After four years in Little Rock, and after Bill Clinton got elected, they decided to leave before they would begin to hate it. Spectrum Weekly closed and Lester's band broke up. They took these as signs to leave. Neither of them had ever been to San Francisco, but knew that they wanted to be in a city and many people they knew and trusted had good things to say about SF. Anita was working with an ESPN producer and through them met a person who lived here and offered them a place to live. So they packed up their Geo Prism, sold a lot of stuff, and maybe had $500 between them. It was November 1994. Upon arriving in the Bay, Lester worked at Tower Records and Anita found work at a temp agency. She had "toyed" with art while living in Little Rock and picked that up again in SF. But she says she didn't take it too seriously until around 2015. She worked several academic and corporate jobs that she didn't like until around that time, when Annie at Mini Bar gave her a show there. She ended up being in a show at Mini Bar every year for the next four years. One day in 2018 or so, Anita was at Fly Bar on Divisadero and learned that the owner needed someone to do art shows there. "I wanna do that!" she told them. Her first show at Fly was based on travel photography. Anita ended up curating shows at Fly until the pandemic, and had become involved in the Divisadero Art Walk. When COVID hit, the other Fly curator left town and Anita took over. She also did shows at Alamo Square Cafe, which stayed open during the pandemic. As other places started to open, she expanded her venues. When Annie left Mini Bar and Erin Kehoe took over, Anita reached out and they decided to alternate curating art shows at the bar (where we worked with Erin to do Hungry Ghosts in summer 2023). Anita has since added even more venues, including Bean Bag Cafe, and says she has moved around $50K of art in five years. This leads us to Anita's newest thing: KnownSF, which will officially launch later this year. For her shows, she likes to have one artist whose first show it is and one artist 50 or older. She says she wants to stick with the venues she's already showing at. Stay tuned and follow KnownSF on Instagram. Then we get to Lester's band, The Pine Box Boys, who recently celebrated 20 years of existence. When he first moved to The City, Lester had a hard time getting music going. He was dealing with confidence issues, which didn't make anything easier. He enrolled at SF State, got a degree, went into a teaching credential program, and started meeting people. Through some of these new teacher-to-be friends, he started playing with a band that was already established. He says he was stoked to play a show in San Francisco, but that band fizzled out and broke up. But Lester and another member kept playing together. It was a noisy, abstract band called Zag Men. As Lester tells us, the saying went, "If the Zagmen are playing, nobody's getting laid." He started creating soundtracks to silent films at ATA on Valencia. He was teaching and doing music on the side. Pine Box Boys started in the same studio space at Fulton and McAllister that we recorded this podcast in. Lester showed his buddies some blue grass stuff he'd picked up when he was younger. And we learn that his mom used to sing him to sleep with old British murder ballads when he was a kid. So, Lester taught these friends some of those darker songs. At first the band was a side project to his side project at ATA. But Lester points to the 2000 movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? which sparked a general societal interest in Americana and genres like blue grass. People began to want to hear Pine Box Boys more than Zag Men, so Lester went with it. They played Cafe du Nord a lot and eventually started touring, both the US and Europe. Lester quit his teaching job and from 2006-2009, the band kept touring. They started to put out records (look for a new one, their sixth, soon). Eventually, he started teaching again, and when he got into school admin work, it ate into his music, but not so much that he had to quit. During the pandemic, they did some streaming shows and online festivals. Eventually, when it was safe, they played a handful of parklet shows. He and Anita were regulars at Madrone already. Anita had an idea and asked Spike, who owns Madrone—what if Lester did a residency at the art bar? And so, the first Sunday of the month became "Apocalypse Sunday." November 2023 marked the two-year anniversary for the monthly show. Lester tries to always bring different genre bands in to play with his own. Mark your calendars! We've been to a few and they're a lot of fun! We end with Anita and Lester responding to this season's theme on the podcast: "We're All in It." Anita points to wanting to see neighborhoods, which are thriving, mingle more and get to know each other. Lester ends with a rather choice quote about casseroles. Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this episode at Antia's art studio on Divisadero on a rainy day in January 2024.
Anita Beshirs was born in Batesville, Mississippi, because the small Southern town her family lived in didn't have a hospital. Welcome to our Valentine's 2024 episode all about Anita and her husband, Lester Raww. In Part 1, we'll get to know Lester and Anita through the stories of their childhood and early adult years. Anita's dad was a Church of Christ minister who, along with her mom, never drank or even took medicinal drugs. Anita is the third child in her family (she has two older brothers) and when she just two years old, their parents moved them to the Cameroon jungle on missionary work. The family lived in Africa in a house made of concrete blocks and with a tin roof. Anita spent the first six years of her life with no TV or radio and so she was forced to make her own fun. She was home schooled by her mom because her dad was busy doing his church work. After four years, the family returned to Mississippi, now in the college town of Oxford, where Anita started grade school. She says she didn't want to go to college right away because she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. But her parents insisted that she go to Christian college, which meant a school called Harding University in Arkansas. This is where Lester and Anita met, but more on that after we hear the story of Lester's early life. His mom grew up in Florence, Alabama, near the Tennessee River and not far from Muscle Shoals. She moved to Florida and met his dad, who was a fighter pilot in the Navy. Lester has one older brother, born not long before him. Their dad was in and out of Navy and the family moved around, first to San Diego, then back to Flordia, and finally to Virginia, where Lester finished high school. Because his family was also in the Church of Christ and his brother had gone to Harding, Lester chose the school, mostly as a way to escape life in Virginia. He had grown apart from the church when he was 13 and a friend introduced him to things like books by Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs, marijuana, and prog rock. Lester started playing guitar around this time, but we'll get more into that in Part 2. Anita and Lester remember first meeting in their first year at college in the campus quad. Anita's first impression was, Oh god, this guy is such a freak. They didn't date for another four years, but hung out with a lot of the same people. Then, in her sophomore year, Anita spent a semester abroad in Florence. She came back a changed person. At this point in the conversation, we hear them each describe was they were like as young adults. Anita says she was a bit of a prankster, but Lester's stories take pranks to another level. Because of their respective shenanigans, they were each "dormed" at Harding, which was the school's form of detention punishment. We all share a hearty laugh over this. Anita says that at Harding, it was the first time in her life that she was popular. She was recruited into a social club (their version of Greek sororities) and was a rising star in Christian leadership. She liked it enough, but again, Italy changed her. Slowly, she stopped believing in god and Jesus. Lester shares stories of how they and others would sneak in drinking and smoking cigarettes while at Harding. Slowly, Anita was finding a new identity and crowd of friends, including Lester. She left Harding for Ole Miss but went back because she figured out that she could graduate faster at Harding. The couple really started hanging out regularly in their fourth years of college. Both had dated others and in fact, Anita set Lester up with some of her friends. Lester had never got serious with anyone at Harding, though. It was Anita's goal to get out of Harding unmarried. Her future husband wanted to move to New York to pursue a music career, and she was just ready to live a little, wherever. She broke up with her boyfriend in early 1990 and soon after this, the two got together. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our Valentine's 2024 episode. Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this episode at Antia's art studio on Divisadero on a rainy day in January 2024.
Something awesome happened near the Embarcadero.
In Season 4 of this show, back in 2022, we featured SF born-and-raised vegan donut maker Vandor Hill. His pop-up (at the time), Whack Donuts, was gaining some new fans and new spots for him to sell his delicious sweet treats.
But now ..
Now Whack Donuts occupies a corner spot of EMB 4, just across the walkway from Osha Thai and near the padel courts and water fountain of recently renamed Embarcadero Plaza. How did this happen?
Well, Vandor got himself into two city programs: Vacant to Vibrant and Ujamaa Kitchen. And it was his acceptance to Vacant to Vibrant that helped him to get and keep his nook in EMB 4. Vandor and I hung out one day in January to catch up on life since April 2022. This bonus episode comprises our conversation that day. Whack Donuts is open 8 a.m. - 2 p.m., Tues.-Sat. Vandor often does special drops and monthly flavors. But if you're looking for sweetness for your sweetie (or yourself, let's be real), he'll have a red velvet cake vegan donut for Valentine's as well as a special "Love in a Box" 3-pack or half-dozen. Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram. Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in the Embarcadero in January 2024.
Part 2 begins with how Melan thinks of herself as an artist. "Art is therapy," she says. It's how she knows herself. "If I cannot create, I cannot be myself." She's been creative her whole life. She wanted to be a tap dancer early on, pointing to Shirley Temple as inspiration (by the way, Temple was originally from Santa Monica, but died in Woodside). Melan even did drag for a while. But she found painting around four years ago and decided then that she's not doing anything else after that. She cites her mom's love of cooking and baking shows as another inspiration. Back in the day, before Food Network and competitive cooking shows, it was just PBS. Melan watched a lot of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and Martin Yan. She says that she watched these shows more than the Saturday morning cartoons most kids her age were glued to. She also loved cookbook illustrations and says they've been a big inspiration for her. Melan talks about the "Muni Raised Me" show at SomArts last year, which she was part of. In the podcast, she describes her Muni paintings that were part of the SomArts show ... they involved dim sum, burritos, and Irish coffees. Then our conversation evolves into a discussion of Muni and what it can mean to life in The City. Plans for 2024 include hibernating. She says she needs to paint, that travel in 2023 pulled her away from that. She's looking for new things to paint, so if you've got ideas, drop her a line. We end the podcast with Melan riffing on our theme: "We're All in It." Follow Melan on social media: Instagram/TikTok We recorded this podcast in Patricia's Green in Hayes Valley in December 2023. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Melan Allen is a third-generation San Franciscan. In this episode, we get to know this born-and-raised food artist whom I met last summer at Fillmore Jazz Festival.
Melan's grandparents moved here in the Sixties and lived in San Francisco until the 2000s. Her mom's mom came to SF from Texas and was part of a mass migration west, when her mom was very young. In our conversation, Melan says that she sometimes wonders what it would have been like if she had grown up in Texas instead of The City. Her dad was born here and raised in Western Addition/Hayes Valley. Her mom also grew up in that part of town. Perhaps naturally, when the two met and started to raise a family, they stayed in the area. Her family was there until Melan was 16, in fact. Even though she no longer lives there, Melan says that this hood is home, even though it has changed. "It's like your first love," Melan says of her hometown. "It feels like growing up in Oz." She left The City when she found herself complaining about changes. Rewinding a bit, Melan shares the story of her family getting evicted from her grandma's house in Ingleside when she was 19. She had wanted to move out on her own anyway, but wasn't sure how. And so, as it turns out, this unfortunate event forced her to become an adult. She's the middle kid of three, with one older sister and one younger brother. Melan says that she and her siblings are all different, that they did their own things, and that she is the only artist among them. Her dad is a playwright and her mom's a hard-core crafter. Melan says that she has always been creative, that creativity and expression were fostered in their home. Her mom collected/hoarded things, and Melan thinks that's where she got her own propensity to pick things up off the street. She feels like she can "McGuyver" anything. We end Part 1 with Melan explaining that she's consistently cookie-decorating at her home in the East Bay. At the time of our recording last December, she was also making fake cookies out of clay. She rattles off some of the other projects she's currently working on, and ends by proclaiming, "I have to have a lot of space." Follow Melan on Instagram @melanmadethat. Visit her website here. Photography by Jeff Hunt We recorded this podcast in Patricia's Green in Hayes Valley in December 2023.
Part 2 is a deep-dive into the history of the Tenderloin, which we began toward the end of Part 1. Katie digs into the infamous Compton's Cafeteria Riot and shares the background and what lead to that fateful event. After the moral crusaders successfully passed new laws essentially controlling the lives of women, the Tenderloin bounced right back thanks to Prohibition, when the neighborhood's nightlife effectively went underground. Katie says that in the 1920s and Thirties, the TL was the glitzy, seedy nightlife capital of the Bay Area, replete with bars and restaurants, some of which doubled as gambling halls and brothels. Then came the 1940s, and World War II impacted all of San Francisco, especially the Tenderloin. Many servicemen were housed in SROs in the TL before leaving for the Pacific. This situation allowed gay members to explore their sexuality. And it was this that established SF as a Gay Mecca. Interestingly, the Army gave servicemembers a list of places not to go in the Tenderloin, and the smarter ones took that as a map of where to go. Then-Mayor George Christopher had it out for the TL. His brother had gotten into some trouble in the hood, and the mayor blamed the Tenderloin itself, calling it a blight and generally scapegoating the area. He led a crack-down on gambling, removed the cable cars, and created one-way streets. By the time the Fifties rolled around, many came to see the TL as a hood to get away from. But just a short decade or so later, in the 1960s, a significant migration of young people to The City began. Many queer folks landed in the TL and soon found that churches in the neighborhood were a safe haven, especially Glide Memorial Church. From this point in the story, Katie shifts briefly to discuss the museum's work with Susan Stryker, a trans historian and director of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005). Stryker rediscovered and wrote a history of the riot. She described Glide as a "midwife" to LGBTQ history in San Francisco. In the early Sixties, sex workers didn't have legal means of employment. Many of them frequented Compton's because it was one of the few places in town that served them. The joint was frequented by trans women, sex workers, and activists on most days. Then, in 1966, SF cops raided the place. The story goes that a trans woman poured hot coffee in a cop's face, and all hell broke loose. It came to be seen as a militant response to police harassment. Screaming Queens was the first public program at TLM. In 2018, the museum produced an immersive play about the riot called Aunt Charlie's: San Francisco's Working Class Drag Bar. Katie takes us on a sidebar about Aunt Charlie's, the last gay bar in left in the Tenderloin. TLM's plan was to produce play again in 2020, and they've been hard at work since the pandemic to bring it back. They now have a space on Larkin to produce play year-round, so, stay tuned. We end the podcast with a discussion about the new neon sign outside the museum. Katie explains that TLM is a fiscal sponsor of SF Neon, a non-profit doing neon sign restoration, walking tours, and other events. We recorded this podcast at the Tenderloin Museum in November 2023 and January 2024. Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 1, we get to know Tenderloin Museum's executive director, Katie Conry. She's originally from Oceanside, California, just outside of LA, where her parents are from. They were both teachers but were priced out of the big city, a situation all too familiar around here. Katie left home as soon as she could—when she was 18 and it was time to go to college. She had felt lonely and alienated in her hometown. But almost from the moment she arrived in Berkeley, she loved it and felt connected. In the 20-plus years since, she hasn't left the Bay Area. She moved across the Bay to San Francisco after graduation in the mid-2000s, settling in the Mission, the neighborhood she's lived in ever since. Katie and Jeff reminisce about several Mission spots they both frequented around that time. In the early 2010s, Katie got a job at Adobe Books, helping the bookstore raise money to make the move from 16th Street to its current spot on 24th Street. In that fundraising process, the store was turned into a co-op and its art gallery a non-profit. This experience is how Katie started in events and working with artists. She later worked part-time at museums like the California Academy of Sciences, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and The Exploratorium, working on private events for those institutions. Katie was originally hired at the Tenderloin Museum as their program manager when the museum opened in 2015. The next year, she became its executive director (Alex Spoto does a lot of public programming now). From here, we dive into the history of TLM. It was the brainchild of journalist and activist Randy Shaw, who was inspired by what he saw at New York City's Tenement Museum. The non-profit that runs TLM was formed in 2009 and they opened their museum doors to the public in 2015. The permanent collection in their gallery spotlights stories of working-class resistance movements and marginalized communities. The museum was successful early, largely because of its public programming. They sponsored showings of the film Drugs in the Tenderloin (1967), which turned out to be very popular. From here, our discussion pivots to the history of the Tenderloin itself. Katie shares that it (not the Castro) was the first gay hood in San Francisco. It was a high-density neighborhood filled with affordable housing, a liminal space in an urban setting. Then we hear the story of the neighborhood after the 1906 earthquake, which destroyed just about everything except the Hibernia Bank building. The Tenderloin was rebuilt quickly, though. The Cadillac Hotel, where the museum is located today, opened in 1908 and was meant to house folks who were working to rebuild The City. The single room occupancies (SROs) left people hungry for entertainment, of which there was soon plenty. Women were living on their own in the Tenderloin, and in response, moral crusaders came after them. These high-and-mighty types had successfully shut down the sex-worker presence in San Francisco's Barbary Coast in 1913, forcing members of that industry to the Tenderloin. And so, perhaps naturally, those same crusaders came after sex-industry women in the Tenderloin. The first sex-worker protest in the US happened in the TL after Reggie Gamble stormed a church and gave an impromptu speech. But it wasn't enough. Those same self-righteous white men effectively shut down the Tenderloin in 1917, an occasion for which TLM did a centennial celebration in 2017. Check back next week for more Tenderloin History in Part 2 of this episode. We recorded this podcast at the Tenderloin Museum in November 2023. Photography by Jeff Hunt
We begin Part 2 with my asking the question everyone wants to know: Is "Meredith Edgar" her real name or a stage name? You'll have to listen in to find out. Then she shares the various day jobs she's had over the years, some worse than others. She worked a little retail, then got an esthetician's license and worked in dermatology. Meredith says that she's always wanted to help people. That work eventually drove her to go back to college, which she did at St. Edward's in Austin, where she earned a degree in psychology. While in Austin, she worked at the SIMS Foundation, a mental-health non-profit for musicians in the area. An internship there led to a job, one she describes as one of her favorites to this day. Then, thanks to my propensity for chatter, we dive into a sidebar on Austin and whether folks in that city do a good job of taking care of their own. Meredith is quick and correct in pointing out that, like here, Austin artists and musicians often get priced out of a city that's always becoming more expensive to live in. After that, Meredith tells us about her time in Italy for a stint, which inevitably leads to another sidebar, this time on Spain and Italy. And finally, after all that set up, I get to share my story of discovering Meredith. Meredith was married, but then divorced. She had lived in Venice, but after Italy, she moved back to The City she was born in ... just before COVID hit. She managed to find a job and an apartment just in time, though. When the pandemic did take hold, she started doing live streams on Instagram. She had really wanted to give her music a push, and like many musicians, took to streaming as a way to continue connecting with audiences. Once it was safe, Meredith started playing masked shows in outdoor places, something she says "really saved" her, both socially and creatively. She had been living alone and feeling that isolation that the pandemic exacerbated for so many of us. Now she says that she's got herself to a good point. She's summoning patience and has managed to find community here. Meredith recorded an album at Women's Audio Mission in 2021 and hopes to record again this year. She says that among writing, rehearsing, recording, and playing out, the latter is her favorite. We end Part 2 with Meredith's response to our theme this season: "We're all in it." The songs you hear after our conversation ends are: "Louisiana Rain" and "Blue." Catch Meredith at any of the following upcoming shows: Jan. 11 at Rite Spot (I'll be there!) Jan. 21 at Spec's Jan. 25 again at Rite Spot We recorded this episode at Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge in the Mission in November 2023. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Discovering Meredith Edgar is one of my best memories of 2023. In Part 1 of this episode, get to know this singer/songwriter who was born in San Francisco. Her parents had been here a while, but soon after giving birth to Meredith, the family moved around a bit, first to the South, then to the Northeast, and finally, back to the South Bay. "Silicon Valley" was vastly different than the other places Meredith spent her early life in. When her family moved there, she was in third grade and happy to be in a more diverse place. She ended up spending her middle and high school years in the South Bay, eventually spending more and more time in The City. Music was always an integral part of Meredith's life. As she puts it, her parents have "eclectic taste in music." She says that there was always music playing—at home, in the car. Her dad also played guitar. Meredith started playing violin at 4. Later, she joined her junior high choir. And by the time high school rolled around, she had started playing guitar, writing songs, and playing out. "Out" at that time meant open mics at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View, and Meredith shares the story of her first time doing that. She says that she's deeply grateful to have found music, fast-forwarding to tell the story of her dog's passing away in late September of this year and how playing helped her grieve. Then we go back again to her late-teen years. Meredith was ready to not be in the suburbs anymore. She and her friends came to SF to go to shows or go dancing at spots like Pop Scene (330 Ritch) and 1984 (Cat Club). When she made the leap north to live in The City, she didn't play out right away. But the South Bay band she was still a part of fizzled out. When she first got here, she was in a bad relationship that also eventually ended. After that, Meredith's music picked back up. She worked at Macy's in cosmetics and shares a fun sidebar about kittens and puppies up for adoption over the holidays at the department store. Around 2007 or so, she picked up music yet again, writing, playing out, doing solo shows, playing originals and covers. She preferred to be solo because of her desire to be self-sufficient. We end Part 1 with a chat about her siblings. Meredith's brother is six years younger than she is and is an artist here in The City. Her sister is a year older than her, but didn't grow up with the family. In fact, they didn't know about her until Meredith was 18. She says that they're good friends now. Check back next week for Part 2 and a bonus episode of Meredith playing a few songs just for you. Meredith's website Follow Meredith Edgar on Instagram We recorded this episode at Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge in November 2023.
Join in as Jeff talks about ...
- Our brand-new-ass Storied: SF hoodies! For a limited time, grab a hoodie at pre-sale prices (a $40 donation'll do it). Let us know your size (we have XS through XXL unisex) and address, and we'll send back our fleece-lined love and appreciation! Venmo/PayPal
- Updates on Michelle and her involvement in the project
- A look back at some of the more memorable, impactful episodes of the year (not to take anything away from those I didn't mention)
- A quick rundown of some of the exciting things coming up in the first few months of 2024!
Happy New Year, y'all!
We begin Part 2 with talk of how Bill and Susi’s love of the work needed to get SF Playhouse started really helped them overcome any fear that might’ve hindered them. Their first brick-and-mortar spot on Sutter Street was meant to be retrofitted. The landlords wouldn’t lease it to the new acting company, but they’d rent it cheaply one month at a time. To get themselves up and running, they staged a play they’d done before, one that was good for the holidays that were coming up.
The play was It Had to Be You by Joe Bologna and Renée Taylor. To drum up ticket sales, Bill and Susi would walk down to Union Square, where there used to be a spot folks could line up for discount theater tickets. They handed out SF Playhouse flyers and it taught them that they had sales acumen and hustle.
That original space had a hole in the ceiling, which made it cold. But Bill’s day job in these days was carpentry, which he learned doing set building. Susi came in with her business background, which we learned a little about in Part 1. She set up the books, but also acted in plays. Both of them directed and acted, in fact.
Susi still worked her day job as a CPA, but became an indie contractor, and then an HR professional. She did all this to support her theater work at night. Fast-forward four years and Bill had phased out of carpentry. Susi had so many ideas of what they could do with their space—she wanted real seats, not fold-ups. They painted, hung Christmas lights for ambience, and handed out blankets to theater-goers.
Their first “season,” which they now admit wasn’t a true season at all, ended with a staging of The Glory of Living by Rebecca Gilman, a popular play at the time. Bill describes it as a dark, difficult play, which he liked. He felt it challenged the audience. He says that the nature of the play required critics to come because no one in the Bay Area was staging it. Artistic directors came, probably wondering why SF Playhouse dared to do it.
As luck would have it, this all helped to put them on the map. The Chronicle called it an intriguing play and young theater company.
Susi had wanted to do Thrill of the Kill, a play about a group of suburban housewives whose husbands had locked themselves into a meat locker in the basement. The dilemma: To let the men out or not? This time, the Chronicle said: It’s good, better in fact than the New York production of the same play. Bill had wanted to play El Gallo in The Fantasticks, so they got another director and did it. They got some bigger Bay Area names to act in it, and it ran all summer.
They remained in that first location for three years, until the retrofit work finally happened. They were bummed to leave and were told they could come back once the work was completed. But when that day came, the landlords informed them that to move back in, they’d need to pay five times their previous rent and fork over $1 million up-front. They balked at such a ridiculous sum.
But as luck would have it, a spot became available across Sutter, and they moved in in 2006. They stayed on Sutter from then until 2012, when the space inside the Elks Lodge building on Post opened. They pounced and have been there ever since.
SF Playhouse was established as a non-profit theater from Day 1. Susi thought it was the way to go. Doing so meant that could get donors and subscribers and at least aim to break even.
The spot on Post opened as they were doing Fair Lady at their old location on Sutter. It was so popular that they were turning folks away. Time for a bigger theater, they decided. The space on Post had been empty for years. It was originally an Elk’s Lodge meeting hall, but had been converted to a 700-seat theater toward the end of the 20th century. Bill had always imagined 200-250 seats as the ideal capacity. He’d learned about non-profit theaters from various trips to New York.
Susi shares the story of what they encountered when they took over. The Elks had created it, but it had a bad energy when SF Playhouse came in. An Elks bartender told Susi that the place had ghosts … and they gave off bad juju. Susi connected with a friend of a friend who could look at the space. This person wanted to left alone there for two hours. She came back from that and told them some of the spirits were angry and others excited. And so this person invited those who weren’t happy to leave, while those creative ghosts who were happy could stay and help. Susi says that when she came back after this, the place felt great and has ever since.
Then we talk about the current run of Guys and Dolls at SF Playhouse (which my wife, Erin, and I saw and absolutely loved). Bill, who’s directing the show, describes it as a satire on black-and-white thinking and the polarization so prevalent in our world today. This leads us to discuss Bill’s idea of the theater as an “Empathy Gym.” Visitors come to see another point of view. Everything that SF Playhouse does comes out of that idea.
In addition to visiting their website for tickets and info, you can call 415-677-9596 or email info@sfplayhouse.org. They’re on Instagram and TikTok @sfplayhouse.
Susi Damilano was born in Germany and raised in the South Bay. Many of her German aunts married US servicemen, but Susi's mom married a German man and the family soon moved to Silicon Valley.
Susi shares a history of that area, noting thatnot too long ago, it was primarily orchards. Growing up, Susi would cut through those orchards to get to school. Now that area is housing.
She grew up in the 1970s and graduated high school then. As a young adult in the '70s and '80s, Susi visited SF often and says she always dreamed of living in "the big city." She would listen to her parents’ stories of racing down hills and being escorted home by cops, and got excited. Susi and her friend who had a car would drive up to The City and up and down Polk Street, cruising and people-watching.
Despite the allure of San Francisco, she ended up going to college in San Diego at SD State. She liked it there enough—the weather, the people. An accounting major, she says that the job market wasn't great in that area, and so she returned home to the South Bay and got a job at CPA firm in San Jose, where she worked a handful of years with clients like the fledgling Apple Computer.
Still, she couldn't shake wanting to live in SF. She found a job at another CPA firm, this time in The City. She lived in the Marina on Chestnut and was there during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Susi loved being here and got her taste for theater from reading Herb Caen columns. She started going to live theater and loved it. Around this same time, she was getting burnt out on her accounting job. A friend dared her to dream what else she could do. She decided that she wanted an Oscar, even though she didn’t act (yet). To get started, Susi took an acting class in Sunnyvale.
Then we meet Bill English, Susi's husband and cofounder of SF Playhouse. Originally from Evanston, Illinois, Bill spent his high school and college years in Tempe, Arizona. Then it was back to Illinois for grad school at Northwestern in Evanston.
Bill says that he was an instrumentalist earlier in his life and never thought much about theater. He played in orchestra his freshman year at ASU for a theater production, and it was here that he was “hit by lightning.” From the orchestra pit, he looked up and decided that he wanted to be on stage.
He tried out for and got some roles, first backing and then eventually, lead parts. He had always been a singer. Bill says that both his parents are musicians—his dad was a band director, in fact. He decided right away that he preferred the stage to playing music.
As a kid, Bill came to San Francisco from time to time with his family and loved it. He says that he always associated SF with theater. He didn’t end up pursuing theater after college, but instead played piano in rock and country bands. He moved around a bit, from Chicago and Phoenix to LA and eventually The City.
This was the early 1980s and he had just had a daughter, which meant he couldn’t do music anymore. In his limited spare time, Bill tried out for some plays. And he's been in it ever since.
At this point in Part 1, Bill and Susi share the story of their meeting. It was the late '90s, and Susi was taking an acting class at the Jean Shelton school here. Bill had studied there, too, and they had some friends in common. Their first meeting was on a street outside a theater. She was starstruck but figured he had no idea who she was. Susi volunteered to work concessions to get a theater ticket, which is where she first crossed paths with the young performer. She thought: That guy’s cute!
Over the next couple of years, she started seeing him at parties. Bill came to a show, and Susi was there with one of his friends. The friend asked if Susi wanted to join them (after the show) for a drink at a spot across the street from the Clift Hotel. At the bar, Bill was bemoaning the lack of new scripts, but a friend of Susi’s had one that needed producing. And so Susi told him as much. She recalls his reaction being something along the lines of: “Sure. I've heard this before.”
But Susi followed through and sent him the script in the mail. She got an answering machine message from him soon after this saying that the script she'd sent him was good. He also complimented her for following through. He asked her to dinner, and it turned out to be their first date ... sorta.
This was 1997, the same night that Princess Diana died (August 31, to be exact). They and a couple of friends were soon involved in a play that doubled as their courtship. They were married in 1999. After the run of the play, they were all still friends and decided to start a little theater company. They called it DreamStackers. And that company evolved into San Francisco Playhouse in 2003.
Check back this Thursday for Part 2 on SF Playhouse and Bill and Susi.
We recorded this podcast at SF Playhouse in November 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, Rudy picks up where he left off in Part 1, talking about the origin of United Playaz and a race riot at Balboa High School back in 1994.
Rudy gathered those students who'd been involved in the violence to talk and determine their own solutions. And that's exactly what they did. They told Rudy and other adults that there was nothing to do at the school, and out of that discovery, the school implemented many programs to better engage kids.
In 2005, Mauricio Vela gave Rudy the blessing to bring United Playaz to Rudy's home hood of South of Market. Rudy shares that story of first getting funding, then getting their building on Howard Street. They moved in around 2008/2009. And in 2015, UP bought the building.
We talk about the origin of UP's motto: “It takes the hood to save the hood …” That story starts in New Orleans post-Katrina, where Rudy saw what the people were doing for themselves to recover when officials at every level failed them. The phrase was inspired by what he saw there, including drug dealers, drug users, and "thugs" helping out in the community against unimaginable tragedy and stiff odds.
Today, UP has chapters all over the country, but their scope has evolved over time. Rudy shares a story of having talked with Stanley "Tookie" Williams, who was in San Quentin at the time. Tookie told Rudy to "work with the little kids," not just those at the high school level. Nowadays, as Rudy puts it, they work with every age group, “from the elementary to the penitentiary (their prison re-entry program).” Some in UP programs had been locked up for 30, 40, and 50 years. Some of them work with young kids today.
We end this podcast with talk of changes in the South of Market, the massive gentrification in that neighborhood that's occurred over the last several decades, and the relationships Rudy has built to counteract that.
We recorded this episode at the United Playaz Clubhouse in South of Market in November 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 1, we meet Rudy Corpuz, a born-and-raised San Franciscan who grew up in the South of Market. Rudy's parents came to the US from the Philippines before he was born.
His dad was in the army, which was his ticket to this country. And he brought his wife and some of Rudy's older siblings with him. They went first to Boston, then to Seattle, folllowed by San Pedro, California, and finally, to San Francisco.
The family's first landing spot in The City was Hunters-Point. The family then moved a little north to the South of Market. Rudy is the youngest of nine siblings.
His early days in SOMA took place in the 1970s and ‘80s. He recalls many other ethnicities and lots and lots of families living in SOMA back in those days, and says that he learned a lot from his neighborhood. He ran with a crew of kids that spent a lot of time on Market Street going to shops, arcades, and theaters.
He fondly recalls a South of Market community center called Canon Kip, where he'd go as a kid to play basketball, attend study halls, engage in other forms of recreation, and go on field trips. Rudy cites his time at Canon Kip as playing a role in his current work with United Playaz.
At this point in the recording, I asked Rudy to rattle off San Francisco schools he's attended. The list includes: Buena Vista and Patrick Henry elementary schools, Potrero Middle School, and Mission High School.
In addition to his native SOMA neighborhood, Rudy spent a lot of time in Potrero Hill, getting around mostly on Muni busses. This was the mid-'80s/early '90s, i.e., the crack era. Rudy shares that he both sold and used the drug. His usage got bad, to the point that he crashed. He points to the death of his dad in 1987 as a major contributor to his behavior. He didn’t know what to do with the pain of losing his dad, and so he turned to drugs.
Rudy got busted in 1988 and was sent to adult jail. For the next several years, he was In and out of trouble (and jail). It took him a while, but eventually, he figured out that he was broken. Around this time, an adult at the Canon Kip community center offered to get Rudy into City College. He was still in a low period, but when he got to CCSF, he was blown away by the abundance of "pretty women" he saw there. He and I had a hearty laugh about that.
He got a part-time job convincing other teenagers to go to CCSF, and discovered that he liked helping people. In 1994, while waiting for a job assignment, he spotted a posting on a job board. "Gang Prevention Counselor (Filipino)." A light bulb when off. He got the job, which was based in Bernal Heights.
In his new gig, Rudy was tasked with finding Filipino gangs in Bernal/District 11. This brought him to Balboa High School, where h saw plenty of fights and sideshows. The school's principal told him that she needed his help.
After a big riot between Filipinos and Blacks on Oct. 8, 1994, Rudy got the kids who had been involved to sit down together at a table. And they were the ones who came up with their own solutions.
They called it United Playaz.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the history of the non-profit.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
We recorded this episode at the United Playaz Clubhouse in the South of Market in November 2023.
In Part 2, Traci tells us that, after six months in Australia, during which she had put her things in storage here in The City, she came back and got those things right back out. She got a place to live and a job, both of which were relative easy back then.
But, she says, SF was getting weird and crowded. It was the late-‘90s, so the dotcom boom was well under way. She started working at different restaurants as a server. Then, after some shorter travels abroad and a cross-country road trip, she got an office job. That lasted four-and-a-half years. She wanted a house in San Francisco and was trying to save up for that. Then, another economic bottom fell out and she was out of work.
This was followed by a low period in her life, one that involved a lot of drinking and amassing debt. When she became too broke to travel, Traci got a job serving at Cha Cha Cha in the Mission and climbed her way out of debt.
At this point in the recording, Traci rattles off a handful SF bars she’s worked or filled in at.
Then I briefly share my own story of finding Boozenation, and Traci shares how she found us (how she found Bitch Talk, to be perfectly honest). Her story involved seeing us at The Saloon days before the shutdown in 2020. And it was the pandemic that inspired Traci to start her own podcast about bartenders and service industry workers.
Two years later, Boozenation is going strong. When I asked her what’s next, she told me that in 2024, she wants to dive into some of the darker issues around the service industry, things like wage theft, sexual harassment, sexual assaults that anyone who works in the industry is all too familiar with. Traci says that she wants to take her time in the New Year and do it right.
We end the podcast with Traci rattling off some of her favorite spots around town. They include, but are not limited to:
- Mission Bar
- Spec’s
- Riptide
- Little Shamrock
- Trad’r Sam’s (which has reopened since we recorded)
- Thee Parkside
Find Boozenation Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and traciramos.com.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1, we meet and get to know a bit about Traci's past. She grew up in Modesto. Her dad’s family is Puerto Rican and they arrived in the Central Valley from the East Bay. Traci's mom’s mom came to California via Mexico and Spain, while her mom’s dad is Native American, Cherokee to be exact. That man, Traci's grandpa, his mom had three sets of kids from three men, but grandpa didn’t talk about that.
Traci is an only child. She and her family visited the East Bay when she was a kid, but they didn’t really come to San Francisco. Traci says her impression of the East Bay is that it was like Modesto, but more crowded and noisier.
Sometime after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Traci came to The City to go to SF State, where she graduated from the school's BECA program around 4.5 years later. She says that the decision where to go to college ultimately came down to SF State or Sac State. But in the end, she wanted to be in SF.
She and friends had been coming to The City to see shows and concerts. Here, she rattles off quite an impressive list of bands she saw back then, including Duran Duran at The Fillmore.
At State, Traci lived in the dorms, which, after the quake, were showing obvious signs of damage. To her young mind, it didn't matter. She was where she wanted to be. She had always loved the fog, most likely owing to the intense summer heat in Modesto.
While in school, she worked around town in cafes and restaurants. After graduation, she had saved up enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Madrid. She travelled around Europe a bit for a year, then came back to SF and worked various jobs.
Then, a year later, Traci picked up again and went to Australia, this time on a round-trip ticket.
We end Part 1 with some of Traci's fondest memories of New Zealand and the ways that that island nation compare to California.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Part 4 starts off with me and Joanna doing the math trying to figure out how long she's worked at Vesuvio. Turns out it's right around 20 years.
She started out as a waitress. The woman who was supposed to train her ended up not showing up that day, and Joanna really didn’t know what she was doing. But she winged it. A customer saw her inexperience and helped her out with some sage advice.
The conversation moves on to cover many of the ins and outs of serving vs. bartending. She says that, back in the day, yelling matches happened at Vesuvio sometimes, but that it's much mellower these days.
Then we get to the pandemic and their eventual closure. Vesuvio was Joanna’s only job at the time, one that had her working five days a week. She says that many regulars, folks who live alone, weren’t sure what to do when the bar had to shut down. Like many of us, they thought it would be only a week.
So Joanna borrowed her parents’ car and drove up to Cloverdale to spend what she figured would be a short time with friends. She ended up staying there for four months.
Vesuvio reopened in late 2020, but closed again in December after a positive case from one of its staff. In January 2021, they opened for good. And when they did, Joanna says it was like starting over.
Now we get around to chatting about Wacky Wednesdays, the music shows in Kerouac Alley which effectively (and finally) prompted us to do an episode on one of our favorite spots in The City.
Joanna gives context to the situation that inspired her to create the music events. Bars weren’t busy. Things were weird. Everyone felt anxious. “Let’s do something fun,” she thought.
She had run an art fair in the alley pre-pandemic, for which she scheduled bands and vendors. She used that idea as a base for what became Wacky Wednesdays. She asked friends's bands to play. They said yes. She approached the bar about paying bands. They said yes. (These days, Vesuvio has sponsors for the events.)
In 2023, there were 13 shows and 29 bands. They're currently on hiatus for the winter, but will start up again next June.
It turns out that Chad, a bartender at Vesuvio, as well as some others she knows, knew how to do sound. The shows would be free—no tickets—and bands are OK to cancel if need be.
The shows were a hit right away. In fact, someone is making a zine about them and they've gotten good press.
Joanna assures us that Wacky Wednesdays are coming back in the summer of 2024 and says she already has a wishlist of bands she'll try to book for the alley. For more info, follow Joanna or Vesuvio on Instagram. Or just do yourself a favor and go meet a buddy for drink at the coolest bar in The City. Once they start again, calendars will appear at Vesuvio.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 3, we meet Vesuvio bartender Joanna Lioce. Originally from Newport, RI, where her dad was a rock critic, the family moved to LA when he got a job with the Times down there. They landed in Orange County, in fact, a place Joanna left as soon as she could.
In fact, the day after she graduated high school, Joanna went to Europe. While she was away, her dad got a job at the San Jose Mercury News and her mom, a pediatric nurse, worked as a public-health official in Berkeley. Joanna was in Europe shortly before Sept. 11, and though she had planned to stay overseas longer, the event made her wonder … but mom said “don’t come home.”
On a family trip to Ireland when Joanna was 8, she had decided that she wanted to be a bartender. Now it was 2002, and she dropped her bag at a hostel and got a bartending job at O’Shay’s Merchant, a pub across the street from the Brazen Head in Dublin. She stayed in Dublin until Christmas, then returned to SoCal, where she had fronted a Riot Grrrrl band called Julia Warhola. But by now, several band members had started doing heroin, so she quit the band and moved to the Bay Area where her family was.
Joanna first went to school in the Peralta System in the East Bay, then she got into SF State, where she eventually got her degree. She also finished college at Cambridge in England to study Shakespeare. While going to SF State, she moved to the Mission, specifically 18th and Linda near the Women’s Building. She found the place through a Craigslist ad and ending up with six roommates, none of whom she knew previously. Her room set her back only $400, but she wasn’t feeling it.
From the Mission, Joanna moved to Lower Haight. And 13 years ago, she settled in to her place on Nob Hill, where she lives today.
She had a job, hosting then bartending, at Stinking Rose in North Beach. She liked it all right, but when her boss gave credit for a makeover of the bar that she had done to a male co-worker, she knew she had to leave. She gave her two weeks’ notice and went for a drink at Vesuvio. While there, a bartender she had befriended offered her the job. She was 21. It was 2003. She’s been working at Vesuvio ever since.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2, we hear how Janet got a job cocktail waitressing at The Mab, that infamous old punk club on Broadway near Vesuvio. Mab owner Ness Aquino hired her for that and she dug it. She had been to many shows in LA when she lived there and loved the scene. She lived in the Basque Hotel at 15 Romolo, made good money, and stuff was cheap back in the late '70s.
Janet describes herself as a lightweight, which meant she couldn’t really hang out as late as most people around her. Eventually, she wanted to do more than cocktail, so she got a job bartending at Coffee Gallery on Grant … on the 6 a.m. shift, no less. The manager of Vesuvio saw her opening Coffee Gallery one day and asked her to open for them instead. This was 1979.
In addition to her 6 a.m. shift at Vesuvio, Janet worked a few other jobs. Then she started working more at Vesuvio and liking it more and more. Early morning patrons, many of them merchant seamen, often comprised the “Dawn Patrol,” guys coming in from nearby SROs that didn’t have heat. Cocktailing was hard, and it got old fast, so she switched back to bartending.
As we learned in Part 1, the Feins had taken over at Vesuvio around 1967 or 1968, and they brought in Shawn O’Shaughnessy around that time to establish the aesthetic of the place. Janet tells us that the place feels mostly the same today, though they’ve added stuff here and there over the years.
At this point in the conversation, we take a sidebar to talk about Ron Fein’s aesthetic and discipline. His intention was always to keep the joint looking and feeling more or less consistent, employing a discipline not to chase trends to that end.
Ron’s son and daughter eventually became more involved. But seeing an opportunity and acting on it, Janet and her family have co-owned Vesuvio with Fein family since 1997. She invokes the saying, “Sweep the floor to own the store.” Janet has also been Vesuvio’s principal manager since ’97.
The conversation shifts to talk of the pandemic, which she says was “almost an extinction event” for the bar. But Janet believes that Vesuvio was small enough to get control over the situation. She’s quick to point to federal, state, and even local help, describing it as “invaluable.” It was The City’s government that came through in letting them operate outside in the alley.
And that leads us to Whacky Wednesdays (a bit of a tease of next week’s episodes … stay tuned). Janet says the shows have been so much fun, but she of course wishes they had more space in Jack Kerouac Alley. They really helped to raise spirits during early days of the pandemic. In 2021, not much else was going on by way of live events. But more of that in Part 3 next week.
We end Part 2 with my asking Janet what it means to her to be part of a San Francisco institution like Vesuvio. Listen in for her answer, which I loved.
And check back Tuesday for Part 3, when we’ll meet longtime Vesuvio bartender and Whacky Wednesdays creator Joanna Lioce.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
This episode is six years overdue. That's because Storied: SF got started in a booth upstairs at one of our favorite spots in all The City: Vesuvio Café. In Part 1, we sit down in that same booth where it all began in 2017 to chat with Vesuvio co-owner Janet Clyde. We begin with a talk about what a great place for bars San Francisco is. Janet brings up touristic spots we love, as I had joined my wife for Irish coffees at the Buena Vista just before our recording in North Beach. Then Janet begins to lay out the history of Vesuvio. The location was originally an Italian bookstore called Cavalli Books, which moved first to the current City Lights spot, and then over to Stockton Street. Then, probably in the 1930s or early '40s, a woman known as Mrs. Mannetti opened Vesuvio as a restaurant. In 1948, Henry Lenoir bought the place from her and turned it into a bar.
Lenoir was a Swiss/French bon vivant. He ran it as Vesuvio through the end of the 40s and into the 50s. But by the early '60s, with the Korean War, the place changed as society changed, and Henri wasn’t feeling this generational shift at all. He sold the place to Ron Fein, who brought on Leo Riegler to run the bar. Riegler had run Coffee Gallery on Grant, which served beer and wine only. He was an Austrian bon vivant, and he came to Vesuvio and overhauled the bar. Ron Fein hired Shawn O’Shaughnessy to give the place the look and feel we're all familiar with to this day. O'Shaughnessy was inspired by Japanese art, aliens, and other worlds. Janet talks about the “I’m itching to get away from Portland, Oregon” sign, which hangs over the entrance to Vesuvio and which O'Shaughnessy derived from a postcard. We then shift the conversation a little to talk about Vesuvio and the Beat Movement. The bookstore across the alley became City Lights in 1954 when Lawrence Ferlinghetti took over. And that brought writers into the bar. Before that, according to Janet, Vesuvio was a Bohemian hang, really a cross-section of San Francisco. People who worked at the nearby Pacific Exchange (later known as the Pacific Stock Exchange), insurance salespeople, advertisers ... Janet describes the place as “suits and ties having a really good time …” When she arrived, in the late 1970s, the area was home to punk clubs, strip joints, bars, restaurants. Janet had hitchhiked from LA with the intention of landing in Seattle. She was born in Missouri but raised near Cape Canaveral, Florida. She left her family there and moved to LA but never really dug it much. A trip north in 1978 changed her life forever. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Janet Clyde. For more on the history of Vesuvio, read this article on Found SF. This podcast was recorded at Vesuvio Café in North Beach in October 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Earlier this year, I got to see a couple movies as part of the 66th annual San Francisco International Film Festival. It was awesome. SFFILM, the non-profit that puts the festival on each April, is kicking off its documentary mini-fest tonight. This bonus episode is a quick chat with Jessie Fairbanks, SFFILM's director of programming. Enjoy our talk and go see some killer documentaries this weekend! This episode was recorded over Zoom in October 2023.
In Part 3, we meet Mini Bar's Operations Manager, Erin Kehoe. Erin is a sixth-generation San Franciscan. Her uncle researched family history, which was complicated by the fact that her grandma was orphaned. When you consider time in the state of California, her family history goes back here to when it was part of Mexico.
Much like John, she was born at Kaiser on Geary. In fact, Erin says, John's mom could've delivered her and her twin sister. She comes from a lineage of twins, actually. Her mom was one of four sets of twins. Erin's dad was a firefighter with the SFFD, though the family lived down in South San Francisco when Erin was young. They did spend lots of time at her grandma's place in the Sunset, the same house her dad and his brothers grew up in and which the family sold only recently.
Erin remembers trips into The City when she young to go to places like Ghirardelli Square, the Emporium, and I. Magnin department store. They went to some football games at Candlestick, but not so much Giants games.
She says that she grew up somewhat sheltered until, as a teenager, she and her twin sister discovered goth and industrial music. She recalls stories of calling in to Live 105 for ticket giveaways and how her mom would drop her and sister off at places like Slim's. Around the time they turned 18, the sisters started going to clubs and places like the Trocadero. This got her into the SF nightlife scene, and she says she "never looked back."
But her job at Mini Bar is her first bartending gig. Erin did work in the service industry for 20+ years, at joints like the Peppermill in Daly City, B44 and Café Bastille on Belden Lane, and then at both the original and the current location of Bar Crudo. That restaurant's 2009 move to Divisadero is how Erin started coming to Mini Bar.
She met John quickly and right away, he wanted her to work at Mini Bar. Only problem was—she didn't bartend (yet). Fast-forward to 2021, when her friend Susan was bartending at Mini and asked Erin yet again to consider coming on, which she did. Four months later, they asked her to manage the bar.
Erin takes her work seriously, and she thinks that she was someone Mini Bar could count on. She picked up the bartending side quickly, but didn't know where to start with curating art shows. And so, she went through archived Mini Bar emails and found people she recognized. From there, she put together a show, and then things started rolling. Erin soon met Anita Beshirs (curator of the current show at Mini Bar), and the two are good friends now. She says she's honored to be part of art and community.
When the conversation shifts to our upcoming show, Hungry Ghosts, Erin mentions that she had wanted to branch out and try something different. Joining forces with a podcast feels for her like the beginning of something new at Mini Bar.
We end Part 3 with a chat about the current show at the bar, which Erin says "is very SF." "Around Town" features Jack Keating, Millie Kwong, Missstencil, Anne-Louise Petersson, and Danielle Bellantonio. "Anita crushed it," Erin says, congratulating her friend. We agree.
We hope to see you all at Mini Bar on August 17 at 6 p.m. for the opening of Hungry Ghosts. Thanks for listening throughout our fifth season, and we'll see you soon!
We open Part 2 with a discussion on the nature of neighborhood bars. An opportunity arose for John when he left the corporate world. His then-wife, Sommer Peterson, reminded him of his idea to open a bar when she also left the 9 to 5. Sommer researched spots in the general area of Divisadero and stood in lines at City Hall.
After scouting a couple other locations, they found the current spot, which looked like it would work. Sommer and John worked out an agreement with the landlord and they got to work building the space out to become a bar.
John's childhood friend, Nerius Mercado, asked to be part of this new adventure, and came on as a co-owner, which he remains to this day. Molly Bradshaw, whom you might remember from our episode this season about Mission Bowling Club, was a good friend of Sommer's growing up. Molly knew bartending and also wanted in. The four formed a partnership and signed the initial lease in early 2008.
John and I go on a sidebar on Divisadero neighborhood history at this point in the recording. We also delve a little into John's personal history. He lived at McAllister and Masonic as a kid before his family moved, first to the Inner Richmond and then to Anza Vista.
We trace some history of the Mini Bar location. When they signed the lease, there had most recently been an artist who lived there and effectively turned it into a live/work studio. Before that, it was a produce market. And before that, according to one patron, it used to be a Black video store run by her dad.
Sommer and John had talked about making it a community space and the importance of art that comes from the neighborhood. They talked with neighborhood groups about their plans to get feedback and share their plans.
Shortly after signing the lease and starting the build-out, they ran into issues. A neighbor wanted money to drop his protest of their opening, which put the approval of their liquor license on hold. They were forced to stop the build-out while they waited for an ABC hearing in Sacramento. At the time, Mark Leno was SF's rep in the state legislature, so John reached out to his brother to see whether they had any connections. Leno sat on the SF Nightlife Commission then.
The very next day, John got a call from ABC to let him know that they would issue a provisional license and work on the build-out could resume. A week later, on Friday, August 15, 2008, Mini Bar opened its doors to patrons.
They hadn't yet established a price list, a little hiccup in the face of the enormous task of building a bar from scratch. John asked his partners to call nearby bars and restaurants to see what the market rate was, which pushed the opening back by a whole hour. No bigs.
John ends the podcast talking about the importance he places on having clean bathrooms. That's where patrons spend alone time, after all. "Respect them in their alone time, and they'll respect you back," he says. Not a bad way to run a business.
Check back next week for Part 3 with Mini Bar's bar manager and one of its two art curators, Erin Kehoe.
Welcome to the final episode of Season 5! We saved a special one for last for a good reason.
Mini Bar is, of course, where we're having our first art show (Hungry Ghosts) in more than three years. But it's also a neighborhood bar, and neighborhood bars are such a great symbol of the beating heart of San Francisco. Our whole dang thing, Storied: SF, was founded in a neighborhood bar, in fact.
In Part 1, we meet Mini Bar co-owner John Ordoña. (Nerius Mercado is Mini's other co-owner.) John was born in the very maternity ward at Kaiser on Geary where his mom, a Filipina immigrant, worked. He was the third of three sons to his mom and dad, both from the Philippines. Born into a Catholic family, John attended school at Star of the Sea and then Sacred Heart, where he was part of the last boys-only class at that school.
He grew up in 1970s and 1980s San Francisco. John shares a funny story about being young and seeing TV ads for the Planet of the Apes show and news stories about the SLA's kidnapping of Patty Hearst. He'd hear the SLA described as "urban gorillas [sp]" and his parents would exploit this misunderstanding to get John to behave. Then John goes on a sidebar rattling off many of the notable incidents in San Francisco in the late-'70s.
John says he went to the "hat trick" of Catholic education in San Francisco, as he later attended USF for college. In grade school, he played some sports, and especially took to basketball and boxing. He shares stories of his dad taking him to Newman's Gym in the Tenderloin at Leavenworth and Turk. He loved it and eventually needed to get there without parental accompaniment. This meant riding the bus to, not through, the TL.
He spent some time at City College before getting into USF, working jobs including one at a fledgling company called Esprit, run by Susie and Doug Tompkins. He answered phones at Esprit's 900 Minnesota Street office in Potrero Hill and loved it. John said he still runs into Susie Tompkins Buell from time to time.
From right after high school until the end of college, John partied and went clubbing a lot. Over the years, he also worked at Dryer's and Levi's to help put himself through college. He got offers to move to New York City and thought about it, but never took the leap.
For a while, the idea of opening a bar was in the back of his head. John shares a story about his dad showing him and talking about drinking spots around The City when he was a kid. "Bars are a great business to open," the elder Ordoña told his son.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the story of opening a tiny neighborhood drinking hole and art bar on Divisadero.
We recorded this episode at Mini Bar on Divisadero in June 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 3, we pick up where we left off in Part 2, with Mike's story of arriving at Bluxome Street early in the morning on Dec. 4, 2022. His San Francisco legacy business, Babylon Burning, was on fire.
Mike recounts the SFFD firefighters taking care when breaking into the 63 Bluxome art gallery doors that led to Babylon Burning. It was Mike, his wife Judy, and his brother, Clam's, gallery, and it was special. Firefighters also saved finished orders that were just inside the doorway to the screenprinting shop. Some fire had trickled in, on the ceiling and in the back of the shop. But most of the damage came from water, as is the case in most fires.
They saved as much as they could and got to work getting that stuff to storage. Rains were on the way. But their friends, Balboa Theater owner Adam Bergeron and his wife, told them it was time to go home and sleep. They took their friends' advice, but Judy was already at work looking for a new spot.
They lucked out getting an insurance broker that Mike had an immediate connection with. Judy liked him, too. Meanwhile, the task of salvaging what there was to salvage and getting it into storage began in earnest. The heavy rains didn't stop them. The work was under way.
Once they got the main business computer out and back to their coworker, Seth's, apartment, they could really get things going again. Friends with much smaller shops offered their spaces. They now credit their team, their friends, and the community with helping them keep the big ship going. They also got a lot of help from the folks at San Francisco's Legacy Business Program.
Judy was working with the realtor and they began looking at spots around SoMA. They brought the broker to the old Babylon site so he could get an idea of who they were and what they were looking for. They ran through a checklist of things they needed—enough power, gas, walls that could be fashioned into a gallery. After only three weeks, they found 939 Howard Street.
It seemed too big at first. And the landlord's construction crews stored equipment there, so it was hella cluttered. But they liked the front room and could already envision a gallery there. There was a strange middle area that intrigued them. And the back provided ample space for their new shop. Mike and Judy brought Seth to see the space, and it lifted him out of a funk he'd been in since the fire.
They knew that they had to show some big-time love to everyone who got them out of the wilderness and into this new phase. In late-May, they threw a party with music, art, a taco truck, and filled with members of the community who love Babylon Burning. Jeff was there. It was magic.
Now that they're operational, they're planning more events, including a July 29 benefit for The Stud collective, as that group continues the search for a new permanent home. Follow Babylon Burning to stay up to date. And please consider them for any screenprinting needs you might have. Also follow Gallery 939 for updates on art shows and other events.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
When COVID hit, in March 2020, Babylon Burning kept working.
In Part 2 of our episode on San Francisco's oldest screenprinting ship and their new location on Howard Street, we talk with owners Mike Lynch and Judy Tam-Lynch about the several years of hardship that lead to their new location. It started with the worldwide shutdown back in 2020.
They were lucky enough to already have orders from essential businesses around The City. Two that Mike cites are Cheese Plus and Balboa Theater. Then they started to pick up schools around town. And then, the City and County of San Francisco. And so on, and so on.
We rewind slightly to establish the COVID timeline for Babylon Burning:
- Love Letters to The City (our show), Jan. 11 thru Feb. 14, 2020
- first citywide shutdown, initially for two weeks, March 17
- stay-at-home orders extended through May, March 31
Around the time that PPP loans started to disburse, they had been coasting in low gear, doing just enough business to pay their employees and their landlord. Those loans saved them, just barely.
Winter 2020 brought more shutdowns and hardship, but they weathered the storm. Vaccines started rolling out, and that provided another upswing. Toward the summer of 2021, they started doing outdoor shows and other events on Bluxome Street (Jeff went to one of these and they were awesome). These street parties made it feel like they had turned a corner.
The new clients—essential, small SF businesses and schools—came back for more. Thanks to the boom in business, they were able to retain or replace their staff, some of whom have been with Babylon Burning for more than 15 years. And the printing veterans are able to teach the rookies.
They were coasting along, recovering from the deepest impacts of the pandemic. And then, on December 4, 2022, a whole new tragedy struck. Early that morning, Bay Alarm called Mike. "You have an active fire at your shop. It's pretty bad." (Coincidentally, there had been a small arson fire outside the shop door about three months earlier, which prompted Mike and his crew to check up on their fire insurance.)
Mike raced down 280. As he approached the Sixth Street off-ramp, he could see the fire. It was bad. Really bad. As he turned the corner onto Bluxome, the small street was lit up with flashing SFFD lights. He was brought to tears seeing it all. The fire had run through the upper levels of the building and its roof. The fire department used 500,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames.
Mike ends Part 2 with a vivid description of firefighters' efforts atop ladders to put the fire out while also risking the entire roof's collapse.
Check back next week for Part 3 and the conclusion of our episode on the new Babylon Burning.
We recorded Part 2 of this episode at Babylon Burning on Howard Street in SOMA in June 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Welcome to the penultimate episode of Season 5!
We're revisiting our 2018 podcast with Babylon Burning's Mike Lynch in Part 1. Part 2 next week will be a talk with Mike and his wife, Judy, about their new location on Howard Street. We'll also chat about their new art space: Gallery 939.
We recorded Part 1 of this podcast at Babylon Burning in the South of Market in August 2018.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Part 2 catalogs Smiley's journey out of high school and into the world of jobs and being a young adult.
Then we get to her time at BVOH, which began about four years ago. It started with an entry-level job, which she didn't mind doing because it got her foot in the door. Built in 1888 by the Masons, the then-designated "South San Francisco Opera House" was a spot for them to meet and host performances. Acoustically, that intention shows to this day. The opera house also has dressing rooms with direct access to the stage (which Smiley told me is not a common feature in buildings of this kind).
With the Great Migration and its influx of Black shipyard workers here in San Francisco, the building became more of a community center. It also changed demographically, from white folks to members of that Black community. But, in Smiley's words, over the years, the building "wasn't loved on," and fell into some dilapidation. In the 1950s, The City wanted to tear the opera house down and build apartment buildings ... until Ruth Williams said "no."
Black Panther free breakfasts happened there. People met each other there. Performances like plays and dance classes happened on the regular. Voters cast ballots there.
In 1966, SFPD officers shot and killed a young Black boy named Matthew "Peanut" Johnson, sparking a riot. The opera house was hit with several hundred bullets in the ensuing melee. Things were so bad for Black folks in SF, James Baldwin filmed Take This Hammer just outside the opera house in 1964. As Smiley puts it, Bayview Opera House "has always been a place for history-making and Black culture."
In 1989, an organization was formed through the SF Arts Commission to manage programs at the building. The opera house was established as San Francisco Historical Landmark No. 8. Over the years, it changed hands several times, and in 2015, a multimillion dollar grant was secured to do much-needed renovations, including a new outdoor amphitheater that came in handy during the pandemic.
2023 has been all about re-inviting people inside. There are world premieres of operas and films. The calendar is full. See for yourself.
We end the podcast hearing from two folks who've been through BVOH's Tools of the Trade program: Joe Kool and Miss White, the First Lady of Frisco.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 1 of our episode on the Bayview Opera House, we sit down with opera house Programming Manager Ashley Smiley, (who goes by "Smiley"). Smiley shares how her family ended up in San Francisco. Her mom was born and raised in SF, but her mom's mom, a mixed-race woman, came from Texas. Her family was run out of that state by the KKK. That family landed in the Hunter's Point area and ended up in the Fillmore. Her maternal grandfather came here from Haiti via boat. Upon his arrival, he bought property in San Francisco, as that was possible at the time. Smiley's grandparents met each other at Polytechnical High School. Her grandfather was a longshoreman, but also a musician and songwriter. Her mom went to Galileo, then SF State, and now works for The City. Smiley was born at a rather conspicuous time in history — just a week after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Her mom says that there was a 5.4 aftershock at the time of Smiley's birth. Smiley grew up in Ingleside mostly, and remembers going to the Bayview Opera House a lot early in life. Her family moved around The City, and she rattles off a list of the different schools she went to. It was at Lafayette Elementary that she did her first theater show — Pirates of Penzance. She mentions her "Jewish momma" from this time, an early mentor. After attending her first major theater production, she became something like obsessed with the production aspects of live performance. She'd played instruments and was a cheerleader, but she found her passion in performing arts. She carried that passion into her middle school days, where she started doing spoken word and poetry. Work she'd done at her church gave her a background in writing, and she used that to springboard to performing words on stage for people. In high school, when she went to Lowell, she started doing bigger and bigger productions. It was during this time that she was immersed in Black culture and identity, and she learned that it was something she needed to lean into. She says that it was "super empowering." On the flip side, these experiences contradicted what she had previously believed about the world, namely, that racism had more or less been solved. She had wondered why older Black folks were so upset. And so, at the same time that she was discovering her own confidence and pride of being a Black woman, she was starting to see the complexities of racism in the US and San Francisco. Lowell, she says, had a lot to do with this realization. We end Part 1 with Smiley confessing to how much time she spent away from her high school, the bulk of it at the Brava Theater in the Mission. She did spoken word and hip-hop with the Colored Ink group. Meeting and witnessing performances by so many of her inspirations left her thinking, I gotta be in this world. And now, she is. Please join us for Part 2 next week, when we learn more about the Bayview Opera House and Smiley's time there. We'll also meet two performers involved in opera house programs. We recorded this episode at Bayview Opera House/Ruth Williams Memorial Theatre in June 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Hi!
This is a short bonus episode to fill you in on some recent stuff. Learn more about what we have planned as we wind down Season 5 and get ready for our first art show in more than three years!
And join us next week for an all-new episode about the Bayview Opera House.
In Part 2, Brian and Zeima start off with a discussion of "green gentrification" and how, being a community-based non-profit that plants trees, FUF aims to mitigate that. We hear all about how plantings work, starting with FUF's community engagement team identifying areas delineated by grants and specifically targeting disadvantaged parts of The City. Another criteria is simply areas that look like they could use trees. The team walks block to block, collecting addresses so that FUF can then send postcards to nearby residents. They do a site assessment, species consultations with residents, purchase trees, and choose a spot to host volunteers on planting days. We saw the last parts of this process on May 6 when Jeff attended a planting in Lower Nob Hill. FUF averages 18 plantings a year, putting 20–45 trees per planting into the ground. They planted around 1,120 trees last year, and they maintain 2,000+ trees annually from previous plantings. Maintenance lasts 3–5 years, depending on species. In its 40-plus years, FUF has planted around 65,000 trees, which is about half of all street trees in San Francisco. We discuss the various ways that "trees are essential infrastructure," from providing lower temperatures during extreme heat events to carbon dioxide offsetting and more. This past year, FUF planted 100 more trees than The City lost in total, and that was before this winter's storms, which brought the highest amount of precipitation in at least the last decade (probably longer). Harsh winds took down trees in soil oversaturated from all that rain over a relatively short period of time. This all makes FUF's work that much more important, now perhaps more than ever. Action items Friends of the Urban Forest would like you to take include:
- don't take street trees for granted
- volunteer
- donate
- talk to elected officials
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Friends of the Urban Forest exists on the premise that there are "no trees in San Francisco." That of course isn't the literal truth. But we'll get to that. In Part 1 of our episode on FUF, we sit down with Tree Planting Program Manager Zeima Kassahun and Executive Director Brian Wiedenmeier to chat about the non-profit's 42-year history of making San Francisco greener. We learn a little about Zeima and Brian's lives, where they're from, how they ended up moving to The City, and what brought them to FUF. Then Brian and Zeima talk about the history of Friends of the Urban Forest. This conversation includes the fact that, upon colonization of San Francisco, there were very few trees, most of which were located in and around the no-longer-existent Mission Bay. We work our way up through industrialization, urbanization, and the advent of car culture to set the stage for what a group of neighbors and friends were up against when they founded FUF in 1981. Please join us for Part 2 next week, when we'll dive deeper into San Francisco's need for more canopy cover and what Friends of the Urban Forest, with its 40-ish staffers and hundreds of volunteers, is doing to bring that about. We recorded this podcast in April 2023 at the FUF office in the Presidio.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2, Maria speaks about the many types of events that have taken place at the Women's Building over the years. This includes: poetry readings, quinceañeras, baptisms, weddings, even a Green Day show and other punk shows in the '90s. It's also served as a safe space. Many non-profit community groups have come out of the Women's Building. La Casa de las Madres and the Women's Foundation California are two examples. Then Kristen talks about what's happening at the Women's Building these days. Rooted in leftist/Marxist philosophy since Day 1, they respond to community needs and meet people where they are. This includes so many people, such as women just arriving in the US or San Francisco. Staff at TWB help these folks learn the landscape of The City and give them tools they might need for themselves and their families. There is an array of resource clinics offered at TWB, from help with legal and tax issues to a food program. They help undocumented women, who are the most vulnerable and susceptible to workplace abuse. They offer housing resources and also do advocacy on affordable housing issues. The conversation shifts to TWB's work since the election of 2016 ... this includes their immigration clinic and family reunification program. Last summer, after the US Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent and Roe v. Wade, the Women's Building joined the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom. They've been working on legislation, including 2022's Prop 1, which codified abortion access in the state. On issues around menstrual health, they co-sponsored SB 260 ($20 for menstrual health products), which is in committee now. Kristen and Maria speak to the need to think of issues around reproductive health holistically, whether it's birth control, menstrual health, menopause, abortion, or other topics. We end the podcast with a shout out to Women's Building volunteers as well as a call for more volunteers. Please follow and engage with the Women's Building online and over social media.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This episode is all about the Women's Building, a structure on 18th Street in the Mission that has served so many purposes for more than 50 years. In Part 1, we talk with two members of the Women's Building staff—Maria Arteaga, Women's Building content specialist/social media manager, and Kristen Acosta, their community engagement coordinator. Maria starts us off by sharing her life story. She was raised in Puebla, Mexico, and was there until she was 28. That's when she went for PhD in Barcelona for four years, followed by a stint in Zurich, Switzerland. After Maria's partner moved to San Francisco for work, she visited and loved it here. She arrived in March 2019, soon discovered the Women's Building, and the rest is history. Then we hear from Kristen. She's from El Paso, Texas, originally. She went to college in San Antonio, worked there a little after graduating, then made her way out west with her partner. Kristen volunteered at Glide and St. Anthony's before her arrival at the Women's Building. She first volunteered, became the receptionist after that, and then moved into her current role. Both guests share the history of the Women's Building, which goes back more than 50 years, when a group of activists formed the San Francisco Women's Centers. Soon in need of their own venue to hold events and generally be able to do more, they found their current home on 18th Street. Fun fact—back in the day, Valencia Street's Dovre Club lived in the corner of the building. We go through some of the intentions and accomplishments of the building. From the outset, the aim was to be collective and inclusive. Maria says that the founders were the "original intersectional feminists." The first Black lesbian conference in the US was held there in the 1980s. Over the years, there have been many programs at the Women's Building for the LGBTQ and Latinx community, in addition to poetry readings and other art events. Check back next week for Part 2 with Maria and Kristen all about the many things that go on at the Women's Building these days. We recorded this podcast at The Women's Building in April 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In Part 2 of our episode on Club Fugazi, we welcome guests we're not totally sure are human.
All kidding aside, Maya Kesselman Cruz and Dominic Cruz are two super-talented cast members of Dear San Francisco. Now a married couple, Maya and Dominic share the stories of their lives in circus arts, which go back to San Francisco's Circus Center. Maya started there when she was 10, roughly 20 years ago. Dominic hung around the place with his older siblings, as he was a little too young to get started.
Their life paths crisscrossed all over North America and Europe over the years. Based in Brussels, Maya and some other performers started a side circus company and invited Dominic to be part of it. Just before the pandemic, the two were getting ready to start a new show before having to scrap those plans to shelter in place.
When Gypsy Snider and Shana Carroll invited them to come back to their hometown and be part of a show paying homage to San Francisco, they couldn't believe their luck. They got married in 2021.
The entire cast of Dear San Francisco are so incredibly talented and passionate, about their work as well as the city they live in. Whether you think you need it or not, the show will energize something in you. Do yourself a favor and go see it.
Special thanks to Kayla Anchell, who did sound design on this episode.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When SF natives Gypsy Snider and Shana Carroll hatched their idea for a show in the space once occupied by Beach Blanket Babylon, they set out to pay homage to their hometown. The result was Dear San Francisco, a high-flying, loop-jumping, juggling, acrobatic love letter to The City. In Part 1 of our episode on Club Fugazi, where Dear San Francisco takes place seven times every week, we sit down with Co-producer and Executive Director David Dower. David shares the history of the space, going all the way back to its founding in 1914, up through its time as a dance hall and lecture hall, to its setting for Thelonious Monk's Alone in San Francisco (recorded there), and in 1974, its service as a home for Beach Blanket Babylon. Then David shares Gypsy and Shana's backgrounds in circus arts, which trace back to San Francisco's very own Pickle Family Circus. From there, we go to Montreal and Cirque du Soleil, out of which the 7 Fingers Creative Collective was born. Just before the pandemic, Beach Blanket Babylon wrapped up their 45-year run at Club Fugazi. When Gypsy and Shana heard about the now quiet and dark hall loved by so many all around the world, the idea for Dear San Francisco was born. Forget what you might think when you hear the word "circus." There are no rings or unicycling bears here. Instead, acrobats and trapeze artists literally hurl themselves through the air while also sharing personal stories and their deep, deep love for San Francisco. Go. See. This. Show. And check back next week, when we meet two current cast members of Dear San Francisco—Maya Kesselman Cruz and Dominic Cruz. Part 2 drops next Tuesday. We recorded this episode at Club Fugazi in North Beach in April 2023.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2, we begin with the decision to open MBC. Molly had known her friend Sommer Peterson since high school, and Sommer had a long history in her family with bowling. The idea was hatched in 2010, and on Jan. 1, 2011, the two signed their lease. Molly acknowledges help they got from joints like Albany Bowl and Serra Bowl and we pay homage to Sea Bowl in Pacifica, which had announced its closing the day before we recorded. They had looked at a couple other spots around The City before settling in the Mission. The location was formerly Centennial Electrical Distribution, and it needed lots of work right off the bat to get it ready to be a bowling alley. Molly is quick to acknowledge that the vision was there from the beginning, mostly from Sommer. From the outset, they paid special attention to service and detail, wanting people to feel that they didn't necessarily have to bowl to have a good time at MBC. The kitchen was another new aspect of running a business for Molly, and they got Anthony Myint of Mission Chinese Food as a food partner early on. They opened their doors in March 2012, 14 months after signing the lease. The conversation then touches on folks who've worked at MBC then gone on to open places of their own. The partial list includes: Victory Hall and Parlor, Casements (S3E47), Brass Tacks, North Light in Oakland, and Mothership. Then we talk about the pandemic. Molly's background in public health helped, and they used time when they had to close to the public to clean and paint. Because MBC needs all four elements—food, drink, bowling, and events—to operate, they didn't fully reopen until March 2021. Molly credits her crew, who she says were great through it all. We end this episode with a tease of something we're cooking up for late summer, and then Molly's thoughts on what a rebirth of San Francisco could look like.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
There's an awesome little six-lane bowling alley tucked into the heart of the Mission. In this episode, we get to know Molly Bradshaw, owner of Mission Bowling Club. Molly traces her steps from coastal Mendocino to Citrus Heights when she was in second grade. She spent the rest of her youth in the Sacramento area, eventually going to punk shows in Sacto and at Gilman in Berkeley. Molly's grandparents came to California in the Great Migration to work in Richmond. Some of her ancestors lived in Berkeley, some in East Oakland, and Molly would spend summers in the East Bay. After high school, she wanted to go to college and be independent. She lived in what was then known as Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe) for a summer, went to grad school from 1997 to 1999 in Seattle, then moved back to the Bay and started bartending. Around 2007/2008, Molly opened Mini Bar with some friends. In Part 1, she speaks fondly of Divisadero and its history. She and her fellow owners of Mini Bar did lots of community outreach before opening, and we think the fact that the bar continues to be a popular meeting spot 15 years later speaks to those efforts. Please join us for Part 2, when Molly will share the story of opening a bowling alley a little more than 10 years ago. That drops next Tuesday. We recorded this episode at Mission Bowling Club in March 2023.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We're rerunning this episode we did with Isaiah and Dani from Dragonspunk about a year ago for a good reason. These two are spearheading an effort to bring a farmer's market to the new Southeast Community Center in the Bayview.
To learn more or get involved, please go to the Dragonspunk site. And enjoy getting to know Dani and Isaiah!
In Part 2, Kavitha and Byron talk about the nonprofit’s relationship with and support of students from San Francisco public schools. We hear all about really cool projects that the kids engage in, from publishing books to producing podcasts.
Then we talk about the expansion that 826 Valencia has undergone over the years. In San Francisco, they’ve opened two new nonprofit learning centers that each have their own uniquely themed stores up front. And they’ve gone national, with spots in nearly 10 different cities around the US.
We end with some thoughts about the future of 826 Valencia.
They’ll be at Spark Social every Sunday next month starting on April 9.
And we all know the address of their Mission District location. But these are the addresses for their digs in the Tenderloin and Mission Bay:
- 180 Golden Gate Avenue at Leavenworth
- 1310 Fourth Street at China Basin
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We've been wanting to do this episode for years.
826 Valencia is a non-profit whose aim is to help young people write creatively. They’ve operated out of the space at the address in their name since the early 2000s. For Part 1, we sat down with 826’s Director of Volunteer Engagement Kavitha Lotun and Pirate Supply Store Manager Byron Weiss to discuss their respective stories of moving to San Francisco and the origins and mission of 826 Valencia.
Check back next week for Part 2 of our talk with Kavitha and Byron.
We recorded this podcast at 826 Valencia in March 2023.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
This story, as Caroline Cabading so elegantly frames it, is about the longevity of struggle.
Part 2 picks up with Caroline sharing the story of her grandfather moving her family out of Manilatown and into the Fillmore, where she grew up two generations later. To her, the neighborhood was family. This was post-"urban renewal," but she still found plenty of folks with makeshift music studios in places like garages. She credits the neighborhood with her own lifetime in music.
Then we do a deep dive into the history of the International Hotel. It was an SRO (single-room occupancy) hotel on Kearny at Jackson that was part of a de facto network of such spots running from wine country to the Central Valley. Seasonal, migrant workers (mostly immigrants) stayed in these SROs throughout the year. And at the I-Hotel, many FIlipinos eventually settled and made it their permanent home.
But as so often happens, especially around here, greedy developers wanted to raze the building to make way for ... a parking lot. After years of organizing and fighting the effort to displace them, scores of people were evicted in the middle of the night on August 4, 1977.
The group that tenants had formed to fight eviction stayed tight, gathering every August at Kearny and Jackson to commemorate. Nearly 20 years later, as an opportunity to rebuild on the site became more and more realistic, the group morphed into the Manilatown Heritage Foundation.
In 2005, the new building opened. Today, on the ground floor, there's a living museum dedicated to Manilatown and I-Hotel history. Above that is housing for low-income seniors. And this is where that longevity Caroline emphasizes comes into play.
We end the podcast with Caroline's telling us what all goes on in the space at 868 Kearny. In addition to the museum, she says that it's a space to learn Filipino art, music, and culture. The foundation invites the public to visit and share in the rich history that is Manilatown, San Francisco.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sound design by Kayla Anchell
Nearly 100 years ago, the stretch of Kearny Street from Jackson south all the way down to Market was filled with Filipino shops, restaurants, and SRO hotels. Perhaps most notably, the International Hotel (I-Hotel) was located at the intersection of Kearny and Jackson. Today, that space is occupied by a residence for older folks, some of whom have connections to the last of the mostly immigrant population who were evicted in the middle of the night from their homes at the I-Hotel in 1977. It's also home to the Manilatown Heritage Foundation. In Part 1 of our podcast, our guest, foundation Executive Director Caroline Julia Cabading, guides us through her own fourth-generation Filipina history in San Francisco. Caroline lays out the history of U.S. imperialism and capitalism that sought cheap Asian labor and therefore brought Filipinos, mostly men, to this country for migrant work in Northern California. As they aged, those young men later settled in the I-Hotel, forming a community and chosen families until they were unjustly thrust from their homes by a real estate developer (sound familiar?). Check back next week for Part 2 and more of our chat with Caroline Cabading. We recorded this episode at the Manilatown Heritage Foundation in February 2023.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sound design by Kayla Anchell
Welcome to this bonus episode! There was just way, way too much good stuff we cut for time out of Parts 1 and 2 to just let lie on the cutting room floor.
We begin with Jeff's suggestion about what Good Vibrations' mission is and Carol Queen's expounding on that. Carol discusses what Good Vibes stands for and against in this world. We chat about how the stores welcome folks of all sexual and gender expressions. And we end with topics like Masturbation Month (May) and how Carol is, indeed, in the Masturbation Hall of Fame.
"San Francisco is miraculous," according to Good Vibrations staff sexologist Carol Queen. We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
This episode picks up where Part 1 left off, with our chat with Carol. We cover topics like the founding of Good Vibes and its creator, Joani Blank. Blank, who appeared on several enemies lists for her feminism and activism (hello, good trouble), and started the tiny sex-toy shop in the Mission as a direct response to women learning more about their own sexuality and feeling more comfortable in their bodies. The business grew and grew and now has shops on both coasts.
The rest of Part 2 really has too many topics to cover here (keeping in mind your limited time), so please have a listen and enjoy!
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Happy Valentine's Day!
This episode is all about San Francisco’s Good Vibrations because, well, duh. It’s also about Good Vibes’ Antique Vibrator Museum.
To guide us, we meet Carol Queen. Carol is the staff sexologist, a title she earned with her PhD in the subject. Carol grew up in small-town Oregon, just south of Eugene. She says she was interested in sex as long as she can remember, despite what those in her community might have thought about that.
Childhood and early adult visits she made to the “big city” of Eugene helped her find community and solidify her outsider, activist status. Eventually, she went to college there, although she had graduated high school early and arrived in Eugene at 16 years, far too young to go to bars.
Despite that prohibition, Carol found her people, though it wasn’t always easy. She considered herself queer, but folks in LGBTQ circles cast her out, claiming her bisexuality meant she didn’t belong. It was another hurdle to work hard to overcome.
Eventually, she met likeminded folks who slowly branched out into different areas of study. But they all had one thing in common—a desire, through whatever avenues, to change minds and laws and bring about more acceptance and equality for their fellow LGBTQ folks. She credits the backlash to Anita Bryant as well as eventual mainstream acceptance of AIDS as a real threat to everyone with helping her and her friends win some early victories.
Carol and I do a short sidebar on some of the more recent efforts by the right in this country to ban books and legislate language, including so-called “don’t say gay” laws in places like Florida.
We return to the conversation to hear that enrolling at Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality is what brought Carol to San Francisco. And we end Part 1 with Carol's impressions of San Francisco, first upon visiting, and then later, when she went to IASHS, moving here.
We recorded this episode at the Good Vibrations/Vibrator Museum on Polk Street in January 2023.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2, we continue our talk with Dontaye. He dives into his own history of cooking and working in restaurants. It starts with a program he got into in high school that had him serving meals to non-English speakers in Burlingame and goes up through his time doing an externship at Delfina. Delfina happened while Dontaye went to City College, but the story of how he got connected is more direct than that. We talk in some depth about Delfina, including a nurturing environment that its owners, Craig and Annie Stoll, have created. Dontaye also was able to go to France as part of his program at City College, which happened during his externship at Delfina. He ended up being on the team that opened the first Pizzeria Delfina. Then we really dive into gumbo. Dontaye remembers the dish being made regularly at his house, and he describes lively scenes involving his grandmother as the conductor, working at a cast iron skillet slowly developing the roux. Many years later, Gumbo Social got its start when Dontaye wanted to do something food-centered to bring people together. He wanted something edgy and controversial but also appetizing. He started making gumbo for friends with shellfish allergies, for example, which had him tweaking the recipes a little depending on who would be eating it. Because the gumbo was being served at private gatherings with friends and loved ones, the social component was baked in. He was falling in love with it all. With pop-up days starting in the morning, they needed a breakfast item—the breakfast sandwich was born. Originally, it was meant to feed the farmers at the markets, but it was so popular that they added it to the menu. He never envisioned a restaurant. But he started to crunch the numbers for the pop-up, and around that time, an opportunity presented itself. It's pretty much as simple as that. Gumbo Social will open its doors on Third Street this spring. Follow them on social media or check back with us for an exact date.
Dontaye Ball has brought gumbo to San Francisco. Now, he's doing everything he can to make it this country's national dish. In this episode, we meet Dontaye. Born and raised in The City, Dontaye has lived with gumbo just about his entire life. Often served at big family meals, he remembers fondly that while gumbo might've been the center of the culinary realm, it was always more about being with family, friends, and those he loved. Started as a pop-up a few years back, in late-2022, Dontaye was able to secure a brick-and-mortar spot on Third Street near the neighborhood where he grew up. Gumbo Social is set to open this spring, and we can't wait. In Part 1, Dontaye talks about the importance of gumbo and what it means to him. He tells us all about the crew he's assembled to assist him on this mission, including his two sons. Until the spot on Third opens its doors, find Gumbo Social at the Sunset Mercantile market every Sunday. Tell 'em we sent ya! Check back next week for Part 2 and more from Dontaye Ball. Special thanks to Kayla Anchell, who did sound design for this episode. We recorded this episode at the future Gumbo Social on Third Street in the Bayview in December 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We start Part 2 talking, briefly, about the 2016 election. Then we move on to COVID and how the pandemic affected Thee Parkside. In a word, it was devastating, but Malia and her crew rose to the challenge. They had opened La Lucha coffee from the front window of the joint in 2015, and were able to keep that going. Because of Parkside's kitchen, they were considered essential and so were able to be open when other bars weren't. But, as Malia points out, it was a "constant state of pivoting." It wasn't only the always-changing federal, state, and local regulations around COVID, but she and crew trying out different things until they got to what worked. Even though they made it, COVID got Malia thinking about community. Her friend, photographer Chloe Sherman, had been posting photos of queer San Francisco through the years. The photography revealed for Malia what had been lost, not in the pandemic, but through gentrification over decades. This inspired her to start doing research on the history of lesbian bars in The City. At this point, Malia dives into some of that history, including the 40-some-odd lesbian bars that existed in San Francisco between World War II and the 1990s. She touches on the bigotry and discrimination of the lesbian community over the decades and what it meant to overcome that and operate a business, even here in The City. Seeing a void, Malia sought to re-establish a space in San Francisco for womxn and femme-centered queers. With a word in to her realtor, incredibly, the spot on 16th Street in the Mission that used to be Esta Noche was available. Signs? Signs. Opened in 1979 by gay Latinx men who were tired of going to predominantly white bars in the Castro, Esta Noche thrived for 35 years until 2014, when a new liquor licensing fee was imposed and they were unable to raise enough money to cover it. Bond bar opened soon after and ran until its owner sold to Malia earlier this month. Everything is set for Mother to open its doors on Thursday, Feb. 2. Malia speaks to the fears of doing what she's doing. Not one to seek the spotlight, she feels an intense pressure to get this right, to defy what seem like odds in these times. We applaud her efforts and look forward to seeing Mother thrive for many, many years. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather and Jeff Hunt
San Francisco is about to get its first new LGBTQ bar in a long, long time, y'all.
In this episode, we'll meet Malia Spanyol. Currently, Malia owns Thee Parkside. She was born in Honolulu and went to ASU in Tempe, Arizona. But she hated it and came to San Francisco in 1989 just before the big earthquake that year.
Malia was already out and was here looking for her people. She worked, went to school at SF State, made friends, and explored the town on her motorcycle. It was a "great time to be gay in SF," the early 1990s.
She was always going to music shows, art shows, poetry readings, and parties, mostly in the Mission. "Valencia Street was dirty" then, Malia says. She worked in a dildo factory and lived in Hayes Valley. On her way to work, she and friends would drive down Valencia in a t-top, out and proud as fuck.
At her job, Malia learned bookkeeping and helped friends and small businesses do taxes. She seized an opportunity to become a business owner herself when she bought Pop's Bar with friends in 2003. Lil Tuffy, who some of you might know from this podcast and his show posters, came in and became the manager at the bar.
Malia ran Pop's for 10 years, from 2003 to 2013. In 2007, she found out about an opportunity at Thee Parkside, a spot with more to offer—food, a stage, an outside area. And so she capitalized. As Malia notes, the area around Thee Parkside was very different then—more blue collar.
She learned Muay Thai around 2007 and fell in love with the sport. Her coach asked her to open a new gym and she did.
Check back next week to hear all about Malia's newest adventure—opening Mother, the newest queer and femme-centered bar in The City.
We recorded this episode at Thee Parkside in Potrero Hill in November 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2, we pick up our conversation with Cody about Rainbow's bulk section. There's even talk of "The Bulk Section at Rainbow" as a spinoff podcast. Then we move on to the cheese department. Gordon Edgar is a name you should know if you even remotely tolerate cheese. With Gordon at the helm, Rainbow has won many, many awards for its cheese department. If you're anything like me, you know exactly why this is true. The rest of the podcast includes our talk about how Cody worked at a health food store in Sacramento before moving to San Francisco in 2006. In 2007, he started at Rainbow in the package department. We go over what it takes for Rainbow employees to become worker/owners as well as the decision-making process at the 200-ish-employee store. As with Other Avenues and Arizmendi, Rainbow offers its worker/owners flexible time-off and vacations and generally a very positive work/life balance. Cody speaks to the idea of Rainbow expanding to other towns, but says the feeling is that communities should create the thing they need. To that end, Rainbow has been known to seed-fund new co-ops. We end with perhaps my favorite Cody quote, one that I believe sums up our series on co-ops in San Francisco: "Collective effort makes change."
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, we kick off the new year by resuming our series on San Francisco co-ops. This one is all about Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. To guide us, we'll meet Cody Frost, a marketing and creative strategist at Rainbow for the last three-and-a-half years. Cody has been a worker/owner at Rainbow for almost 16 years. He grew up in Carmichael, California, just outside of Sacramento, in the 1980s and '90s. He pursued art in his early twenties and had friends in Sacto, where he moved around 2004/2005. Then he heard about an effort to make a new art space in The City in 2005 and moved here in 2006. That space turned out to be the Secret Alley, a place near and dear to our hearts. Cody first got a job at Bi-Rite, where he worked for a year before landing the gig at Rainbow. At this point in the recording, we dive more deeply into Rainbow history. It starts with a faith-based group that used food for community support and political activism in 1970s, the People's Warehouse. Many co-ops, including some that are still around today, were created out of that group. Rainbow's original location, which first opened its doors in 1975, was on 16th Street between Guerrero and Valencia in the Mission. Back then, groceries and a general store were at separate addresses. They moved in the '80s to 15th and Mission and combined stores. Then, outgrowing that space, Rainbow found its current location in 1995 and opened the next year following renovations. We end Part 1 talking about the co-op's incredible bulk-food section. We recorded this episode at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative in November 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt and Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2 of our episode with Arizmendi Bakery, we hear from baker/owners Lizzy Harvey and Aeri Swendson. Lizzy shares her story of being born and raised in San Francisco, leaving for college and coming back, and what, besides baking, she's up to these days (namely, circus and aerial arts). After her return to The City, she was teaching here and got a grant to teach English for one year in Córdoba, Argentina, where she ended up cooking a lot, especially chocolate. Upon her return to the States, she looked for a job to help her pursue her new love. The collective/cooperative aspect of Arizmendi was a bonus. She was a candidate pre-pandemic, and ended up being voted in in March 2020. Timing, y'all. Aeri grew up outside of Seattle and moved to SF for college (SF State) in 2003. She lived in the Sunset during college and became a customer at Arizmendi. Aeri worked at Green Apple on Clement and taught gymnastics after graduation before getting the job at Arizmendi 11 years ago. She had baked virtually all her life and knew a little about co-ops before coming on. She speaks to, among other things, the incredible life/work balance that a job at Arizmendi allows its baker/owners.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Several of the worker/owners at Arizmendi Bakery on Ninth Avenue have been there since the place opened 22 years ago. Around half of them have worked there for two decades. Continuing our series on San Francisco co-ops, this time we travel to the Inner Sunset and this special place that serves up so many delicious treats. Whether it's a morning pastry, an evening vegetarian pizza, or an delicious cookie for dessert, Arizmendi has got you covered. In Part 1, Sue Lopez speaks to her own history as well as how the original spot in the East Bay, Berkeley's Cheese Board Collective, spawned what today is a Bay Area group of cooperative bakeries. The conversation covers such topics as: what it meant for a co-op to expand to more than one location; the differences among Arizmendi/Cheese Board locations; how the Ninth Avenue location brings about new menu items; the cooperative movement of the late-1960s/early 1970s; the meaning of the name "Arizmendi"; opening the spot on Ninth Avenue, which was the third in the collective group; and the Inner Sunset community. Check back next week to hear the stories of a couple other baker/owners of Arizmendi. If you missed it, please go back and check out our episode with Other Avenues Grocery Cooperative. Resources mentioned in the podcast: NOBAWC This episode was recorded at Arizmendi Bakery on Ninth Avenue in the inner Sunset in November 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this special episode, Jeff and Erin (Bitch Talk Podcast) talk about what it means (and costs) to run our respective shows, with a special shout-out to BFF. Then we plug all the wonderful non-profits we're supporting this year.
We want YOU to support us and all of them because none of us can do any of this without each other. Anything you can give is deeply appreciated.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2 of our episode on Other Avenues Grocery Cooperative, the conversation starts with food, food systems, and how humans can better steward the land and sea in our daily and collective lives.
Celia talks about how, with co-ops, money generally stays in the community. After a quick aside for Jeff's lasagna story, we discuss food preservation and distribution, the myth of food scarcity, and the idea of growing food in urban centers. Then Celia tells us about some other new co-ops opening in the Bay Area before sharing what it was like for her and Other Avenues during thepandemic. She says that the biggest challenge was the keeping up with and enforcing the ever-changing rules.
Resources
La Via Campesina
Regenerative Agriculture
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Celia LoBuono Gonzalez joins us on the show this episode to share her story and that of Other Avenues Grocery Cooperative. Part 1 starts off with Celia sharing the story of her life up to the point of getting a job at Other Avenues. From there, we pivot to the colorful and, we think, important story of food in San Francisco and the Bay Area starting in the 1960s.
From a collection of neighborhood clubs called the Food Conspiracy, whose motto was, "If you can't walk to Food Conspiracy, it's time for a new Food Conspiracy," to the People's Food System, which included Other Avenues, Rainbow Grocery, Veritable Vegetable, and other co-ops that don't exist anymore, there's proof all over today that cooperative models work. We like the sound of that, in fact, compared to competitive businesses.
Other Avenues' doors opened in 1974. By 1987, a hybrid system of worker and community management was adopted. And the worker-owned model that exists today started back in 1999.
Check back next week for Part 2 and more with Celia LoBuono Gonzalez.
Resources
US Federation of Worker Coops
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Celia LoBuono Gonzalez joins us on the show this episode to share her story and that of Other Avenues Grocery Cooperative. Part 1 starts off with Celia sharing the story of her life up to the point of getting a job at Other Avenues. From there, we pivot to the colorful and, we think, important story of food in San Francisco and the Bay Area starting in the 1960s.
From a collection of neighborhood clubs called the Food Conspiracy, whose motto was, "If you can't walk to Food Conspiracy, it's time for a new Food Conspiracy," to the People's Food System, which included Other Avenues, Rainbow Grocery, Veritable Vegetable, and other co-ops that don't exist anymore, there's proof all over today that cooperative models work. We like the sound of that, in fact, compared to competitive businesses.
Other Avenues' doors opened in 1974. By 1987, a hybrid system of worker and community management was adopted. And the worker-owned model that exists today started back in 1999.
Check back next week for Part 2 and more with Celia LoBuono Gonzalez.
Resources
US Federation of Worker Coops
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
There's wine grapes being grown in San Francisco.
In Part 2, Christopher tells us all about the 280 Project, a viticulture apprenticeship and wine school. He partnered with a winemaker from Napa, a professor at UC Davis, and others back at home to bring BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and people who feel marginalized and want to learn anything at all about wine together to do just that.
The 280 Project is a very hands-on adventure, with apprentices taking frequent field trips, learning how grapes are grown from the ground-up. They also cover winemaking as well as the financial side of things.
Then we take a walk through Alemany Farm, starting with their outdoor kitchen. Christopher talks about the importance of location for the farm and kitchen, situated as it is between a gentrifying and affluent neighborhood and a housing project. To the south and east, it's a virtual food desert, with corner stores and chain fast-food most abundant. Up the hill in Bernal Heights, it's quite a different story.
We chat about the idea of using parts of Golden Gate Park to cultivate the land and grow food for the people. It's what some call "food parks," and it's not as radical an idea as you might think.
Another project Christopher is working on is a Black indigenous seed bank, which he tells us about. Besides providing seeds, it would be a repository of people and their food stories and histories. Count us on board for that.
Then our tour takes us up to the vines, appropriately. We end our little journey at the greenhouse.
We want to thank Christopher for his time talking with us and showing us around. Shout out to Isaiah Powell of Dragonspunk GRO for introducing us to Christopher and the 280 Project.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
There's wine grapes being grown in San Francisco.
In Part 2, Christopher tells us all about the 280 Project, a viticulture apprenticeship and wine school. He partnered with a winemaker from Napa, a professor at UC Davis, and others back at home to bring BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and people who feel marginalized and want to learn anything at all about wine together to do just that.
The 280 Project is a very hands-on adventure, with apprentices taking frequent field trips, learning how grapes are grown from the ground-up. They also cover winemaking as well as the financial side of things.
Then we take a walk through Alemany Farm, starting with their outdoor kitchen. Christopher talks about the importance of location for the farm and kitchen, situated as it is between a gentrifying and affluent neighborhood and a housing project. To the south and east, it's a virtual food desert, with corner stores and chain fast-food most abundant. Up the hill in Bernal Heights, it's quite a different story.
We chat about the idea of using parts of Golden Gate Park to cultivate the land and grow food for the people. It's what some call "food parks," and it's not as radical an idea as you might think.
Another project Christopher is working on is a Black indigenous seed bank, which he tells us about. Besides providing seeds, it would be a repository of people and their food stories and histories. Count us on board for that.
Then our tour takes us up to the vines, appropriately. We end our little journey at the greenhouse.
We want to thank Christopher for his time talking with us and showing us around. Shout out to Isaiah Powell of Dragonspunk GRO for introducing us to Christopher and the 280 Project.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Christopher Renfro moved to San Francisco 16 years ago and ran into a lot of what some might call luck.
In this episode, we talk about Christopher's work with Alemany Farm. The largest agricultural site in The City, volunteers grow, harvest, and distribute vegetables and fruit from the 3.5-acre plot just below Bernal Hill. He also tells us about the work he and Haley Garabato began with the Feed the People Collective, which operates out of Alemany Farm and feeds unhoused folks around town.
Check back next week for Part 2, when we'll learn all about Christopher's work with the 280 Project. We'll also take a walk through Alemany Farm.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 4, we meet Rob Thompson, federal preservation officer at the Presidio Trust. Rob shares the history of San Francisco's pet cemetery, which dates back to 1952.
The pet cemetery sits in a part of the Presidio known as Cavalry Bowl, which for a century was dedicated to animal management when the Presidio was home to the U.S. Army. The cemetery was established by Army families during that time, until they left in the 1990s. Since then, the only burials there are what we decided to call "illicit" burials.
We end the episode with a walk-through, where we encounter the colorful names and epitaphs of a wide variety of around 420 animals.
This episode concludes our series on San Francisco cemeteries. Thank you for listening.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 3, Courtney tells us all about Alma deBretteville Spreckels, the San Francisco sugar baroness who built the Legion of Honor at Lincoln Park, the cemetery-turned-golf course in the northwest corner of The City. From there, we recount the history of the "Big Four" cemeteries, which were located in and around the intersection of Geary and Masonic.
Then we hand things over to Kathy McCall, director at the Presidio's San Francisco National Cemetery, one of two graveyards that remain in San Francisco today. Among notable burials there:
- 38 Medal of Honor recipients
- 450 Buffalo Soldiers
- Maj. Dana Crissy
- Lieut. John David Miley
- Pauline Cushman Fryer
- Phillip Burton
- Maj. Gen. Robert Tryon Frederick
- Maj. Gen. Frederick Funston
Check back next week for Part 4, the final podcast in this series. It will be all about the rich history of the pet cemetery, also located in the Presidio.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 2 of our four-part series, we first hear from Courtney Minick of Here Lies a Story about the parking lot just outside of Mission Dolores.
Then we meet Andy Galvan, the Mission's curator. He tells us all about his work and his Ohlone/Bay Miwok ancestral connection to the place, including the graveyard. We end this episode with a walking tour of the graveyard, which Andy guided us on. Among others, we encountered the graves of:
- Francisco Sánchez
- Charles Cora and Belle Ryan
- Bernals
- Tanforans
- De Haros
- Arguellos
- Mary Church Ellis
We wanted to let you know that, tomorrow afternoon (Oct. 12) at 12:30, there will be an online discussion of the history of City Cemetery at Lincoln Park and its recent city landmark designation. Register here.
Also, on the evenings of Oct. 28 and 29 and again on Nov. 4 and 5, Andy will lead flashlight tours of the Mission Cemetery.
Check back next week to hear the history of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco's Big Four cemeteries, and the National Cemetery in the Presidio, which still exists.
San Francisco's cemetery history is rich, to say the least. It goes something like this:
- Mission Dolores cemetery
- Yerba Buena cemetery
- San Francisco National Cemetery (in the Presidio)
- City Cemetery/Golden Gate Cemetery
- The Big 4—Calvary, Odd Fellows (including the Columbarium), Masonic, Laurel Hill
In Part 1 of the four-part series we're doing on San Francisco Cemeteries, we'll meet Courtney Minick of Here Lies a Story. Courtney will serve as our guide through this history.
Along the way, we'll meet folks who work with the cemeteries that are left over here in The City—the one at Mission Dolores and San Francisco National Cemetery. We'll take walking tours of the Mission and the pet cemetery in the Presidio.
Interestingly, as we were putting these episodes together, the Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee voted unanimously in favor of granting City Cemetery landmark status. Now the matter goes before the full board sometime this month. The timing!
Look for the remaining episodes in this series over the next several weeks.
Funny thing: Do a podcast like ours long enough, and the most random and randomly awesome tidbits will pop in and make the cut.
Last episode, it was the Doc Ellis "LSD" perfect game that MLB doesn't like to talk about. In Part 2 of this episode, it's New Orleans and P.T. Barnum.
Musée Mécanique owner Dan Zelinsky shares the story of how his dad, Ed, bought the collection of the original San Francisco owner, George Whitney, and ran the Cliff House location until around 2002. Ed Zelinsky found the spot at Pier 45 just before he passed away, in 2004.
Whitney inherited a collection that showman P.T. Barnum brought to San Francisco from New Orleans. Much of it lived at Playland at the Beach before moving to the Cliff House, where it remained until around the turn of the century.
Condemned building, fires, and pandemics later, Musée Mécanique thrives today at Pier 45 in Fisherman's Wharf. Part 2 concludes the history of the place and our episode all about it. Hear more from Dan as well as visitors Brian and Michael, from New Jersey and New York state, respectively.
Join us next week as we kick off a series on San Francisco cemeteries!
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It can get really loud inside Musée Méchanique.
Walk in the place and you're immediately transformed, in both time and space, to another world, another era. The magic almost slaps you in the face, hitting all five senses at the same time. And you can't help but feel the nostalgia coursing through your veins.
In Part 1 of this episode, meet the arcade's roller-skating owner, Dan Zelinsky. Dan traces the history of the place back to his dad, Ed Zelinsky. Ed started his penny-arcade machine collection in 1933, but the story is complicated, filled with twists and turns that involve New Orleans and P.T. Barnum.
We talk with a couple of tourist visitors to Musée Méchanique who found the place thanks to some cameos in The Princess Diaries. Then Dan shares the story of how he acquired the infamous "Laffing Sal."
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bear with us a moment. We're gonna go stats nerd on you.
As of the publication of this episode, the San Francisco Giants have played a total of 1,892 games at the stadium known these days as Oracle Park. Each of those games sees a minimum of 27 at-bats for Giants players. That leaves us with at least 51,057 chances for a hitter to send a home run ball into the waters of McCovey Cove. And it's happened a mere 97 times. That's something like a 0.19 percent chance that any batter will accomplish the feat.
And on the very day this July when we boarded the Canoecycle, lo and behold, we got a splash hit.
Hear all about it from the human in a kayak who got that Lamont Wade, Jr.'s, home run ball and more, as we present the second part of our podcast on McCovey Cove.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Here we go.
Our first episode of Season 5 was recorded out on the water. McCovey Cove is familiar to Giants fans, whether you've been in the water or not. It's that tiny waterway nestled between the ballpark (PacBell Park, SBC Park, AT&T Park, Oracle Park ...) and the strip of human-engineered land across the way. Baseball players sometimes hit baseballs out of the ballpark and into the water. Balls can land in the cove "on the fly" (directly from the air) or on a bounce.
When this happens, much like a group of koi racing for crumbs, humans in kayaks paddle and vie for the floating sports balls. It's a thing. A whole thing.
In this podcast, we first meet our captain on the water that day, Jay Broemmel. Jay introduces us to McCovey Cove Dave, perhaps the most famous of those vying for souvenirs six months a year.
In Part 2 next week, we'll meet some more people out in kayaks on the cove that day. And there will be a surprise ... something that doesn't happen at just every Giants home game. Thanks for listening.
Podcast transcript here.
We recorded this podcast in McCovey Cove in July 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Folks, we made it.
Welcome to the fifth season of Storied: San Francisco. For five years, we've highlighted humans—artists, doctors, teachers, small business owners—who make this place what it is. Now we turn our attention to places around The City that do exactly the same—help create the mystique around this complicated, beautiful, wondrous place we all call home.
In this prequel episode of sorts, Jeff will reminds everyone why we do this crazy show in the first place. He'll talk about the pivot from people to places, the updates we've made to our website, and let everyone in on why we chose to include an acknowlegement of the first humans in this area in every episode, including this one.
Check back next week when we present Episode 1: McCovey Cove.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Folks, we made it.
Welcome to the fifth season of Storied: San Francisco. For five years, we've highlighted humans—artists, doctors, teachers, small business owners—who make this place what it is. Now we turn our attention to places around The City that do exactly the same—help create the mystique around this complicated, beautiful, wondrous place we all call home.
In this prequel episode of sorts, Jeff will reminds everyone why we do this crazy show in the first place. He'll talk about the pivot from people to places, the updates we've made to our website, and let everyone in on why we chose to include an acknowlegement of the first humans in this area in every episode, including this one.
Check back next week when we present Episode 1: McCovey Cove.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The thing about houseboats is ... they sometimes sink. In Part 1, Sarah told us how the houseboat she and her brother grew up on with their dad sunk in Mission Creek. In this podcast, Sarah tells the story of how the three of them built a new houseboat, the one Sarah lives in today with her daughter down near the ballpark. She goes to describe efforts to get more active spaces built in the surrounding neighborhoods, areas that seemingly grow and change overnight.
In case you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast on Sarah's houseboat in Mission Creek in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sarah Davis grew up unlike most of us. After her parents split up when she was young, her dad eventually decided to live in a houseboat down on Mission Creek. He brought Sarah and her brother with him part-time.
In this podcast, Sarah describes growing up on that houseboat (she still lives in a houseboat, albeit a different one, on the creek today). She talks about some of the colorful characters who were her neighbors, and ends this episode on her parents, whose lives involved the art and music scenes of San Francisco in the '70s, '80s, and on.
Join us again Thursday, when Sarah will talk about building the houseboat she currently lives in and shares details on the city's houseboat community today.
We recorded this podcast on Sarah's Mission Creek houseboat in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Like many businesses, Secession Art and Design had to pivot in 2020.
In this special episode between seasons, Secession's founder, Eden Stein, shares stories of opening a gallery in the Mission/Bernal 15 years ago. Starting Aug. 4 and running through Aug. 7, Secession will celebrate 15 years of business with a four-day pop-up up the hill on Cortland. Details about the event can be found below and on Secession's site.
Eden grew up in Santa Rosa and moved to The City in 1999. In her hometown, she did a zine for many years called 7th Street. Her work on the zine helped her travel the country and to Europe.
When she moved to San Francisco, she ended up on Mission Street across from El Rio. She went to SF State and worked at The Drug Store, which back in the day was a vintage store. Eden rented a booth there and sold vintage jewelry. It was her first inspiration to working with artists as a business.
During this time, Eden became a teacher at a pre-school in The City. She got close with some of the parents, even nannying a little bit. One of the parents owned an architecture firm on Mission Street. He offered that space for Eden to do holiday art pop-ups. She was also selling jewelry, both vintage and some she made herself, at street fairs around town. These were the seeds of what would later become Secession.
The original location opened in 2007. Then, in 2014, Eden lost her lease and miraculously managed to find a new spot a little further north on Mission. There's a fun overlap with Season 4 guest of the show Emmy Kaplan in the story of Secession's move.
Earlier this year, after nearly two years of moving the gallery and events online, Eden gave up on her shift to things like 20-minute goat hugs in the gallery. The pandemic proved that her family's spot a few blocks from the gallery was too small, and an opportunity for them to move back to her hometown opened up.
But that wasn't the way she wanted Secession to go out.
As mentioned earlier, from August 4 through 7 on Cortland Street, Eden will be hosting a pop-up to celebrate 15 years of Secession Art and Design. Details:
Featured Artists: Amos Goldbaum, Andreina Davila, Dianne Hoffman, Heather Robinson, Hilary Williams, Jenny Feinberg, Joshua Coffy, Nate Tan, Nathalie Fabri, Olena McMurtrey, Phillip Hua, Rachel Znerold, Silvi Alcivar, Shannon Amidon, and Stephanie Steiner.
Hours:
Thursday, August 4: 12-8pm
Friday, August 5: 12-8pm - Anniversary Party 6-8pm
Saturday, August 6: 12-8pm
Sunday, August 7: 12-6pm
Address: 307 Cortland Ave (at Bocana), SF
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this postseason special episode, Jeff reflects on his 22 years in San Francisco. Looking back brings us to today, where there's still so much to love about The City, but there's also plenty of fuckery, including yet another right-wing–originated recall.
Here are some resources if you're still on the fence about how to vote by June 7. Hint: Only one SF media outlet is for the recall, and we won't bother mentioning who it is because they're terrible:
- 48 Hills
- Bold Italic
- SF Chronicle (paywall)
- SF Bayview
- Mission Local
- Bay Area Reporter
Please vote no on H. Peace, y'all.
In this, the last new episode of Season 4 of this podcast, Caitlyn picks up where she left off in Part 1. She and a friend she'd been gardening with started selling salad mix and herbs to places like Tartine and other nearby restaurants. They also established a small CSA for folks in the building where their garden was as well as a few neighbors. The success of this project had them thinking on a larger scale—they wanted to establish a commercial farm. Of course, that's not so easy if you intend to stay in a city like San Francisco, which they did. They also decided not to go the non-profit route, preferring rather to keep things manageable and adopting more of a co-op model. Around 2010, they found a plot of land in the Excelsior that had once been a creek and was surrounded on three sides by backyards. They tracked down the landlord, who lived in LA, and convinced him to lease the land to them for one and a half years.
Clearing the land and readying it for gardening took some time. But owing to the creek that used to flow through it, the land was fertile and nutrient-rich. But of course, there were challenges. Zoning was among the first. So they worked with The City to address issues around that.
Little City Gardens was born. Three years or so into the project, her partner left San Francisco, but Caitlyn stayed on, enlisting more folks to help out. They ran Little City for another nearly four years, growing and selling vegetables, flowers, and herbs. They sold to even more restaurants than before, had an ongoing presence at farmer's markets, and expanded their CSA.
When the lease ran out and the owner went to sell the land, they tried to get a trust to help buy it. But it didn't happen. A private school purchased the land in 2014, and LCG worked with them for two more years. Then Little City Gardens was no more.
It was 2016 and before Little City closed, Caitlyn found the Friends of 770 Woolsey, a group of Portola neighbors dedicated to gaining the rights and raising the money to purchase a square block in the neighborhood that, until the 1990s, was a working greenhouse.
Caitlyn shares a deeper version of the history of the lot than she laid out in Part 1. The greenhouses that today are relics were built in 1922 by the Garibaldi family. At the time, there were a couple dozen such locations in the Portola. The greenhouses shut down in the '90s, as we've mentioned, and the Garibaldis sold the property in 2017.
In 2021, the developers who bought the lot made an offer to the community to buy it. The offer is time-sensitive and expires this July. And so, the Friends of 770 Woolsey and the Greenhouse Project are raising money to that end. You can donate to that effort here. You can follow both groups on IG: Friends of 77 Woolsey and Greenhouse Project.
We end this episode and this season of Storied: San Francisco with Caitlyn's thoughts about what it means to still be here in The City, fighting not only to stay, but to make this seven-mile-by-seven-mile plot of Earth better for all the humans, plants, and animals who share this space.
We thank you for listening, this season and the three that came before. In the coming weeks, we'll be rerunning episodes from our archives, so be on the lookout for those. We'll also pop in from time to time with messages about whatever's on our minds. We encourage you now as we always have to share with us and fellow listeners what's on your mind as we move ahead to whatever's next for this city we all love to hate and hate to love. Peace.
We recorded this podcast at the Greenhouse Project in the Portola in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
There's an unused square block in the Portola District that's Ground Zero in the fight over land in San Francisco. In this podcast, we learn all about the Greenhouse Project. Volunteer Caitlyn Galloway shares some of the history of the block bordered by Woolsey, Bowdoin, Wayland, and Hamilton streets as well as the efforts underway to reclaim the area as a green space in The City's southeast side.
Then we hear about Caitlyn's life and how she got to this moment. She was born in Union City and raised there and in Livermore, where she went to high school. Her extended family has been in the East Bay for several generations.
Once she was old enough to ride BART without an adult, she and her cousin would come into San Francisco to go shopping around the Powell station. When it was time to go to college, she chose Santa Barbara. Despite a lot of what Caitlyn calls "sameness" there, she found pockets of people she could relate to, people who had different ways of living—punks, hippies, folks who worked at co-ops.
Caitlyn started working at a food co-op in Santa Barbara around the same time she began to garden there. She was still in school and all of these activities started to shape Caitlyn's worldview, especially around food and land.
After graduation, she moved to New York City, partly to get away and partly to ready herself for a move to San Francisco. She found work as a gardener at a landscaping company, where she worked on rich people's gardens around town. Caitlyn also worked on some green roofs in New York, well before the trend that would emerge later.
Two years into her time on the East Coast, she decided that it was time to come back to California. She missed a number of things—people, a smaller-city vibe. But perhaps more than anything else, California sagebrush drew Caitlyn back to her home state. There was no question of where in the state she'd be.
Upon landing in San Francisco in 2007, Caitlyn apprenticed at New Bohemia Signs, a hand-painted sign shop based in the South of Market neighborhood. Through her work there, she met and befriended someone who was gardening and growing vegetables in a backyard in the Mission. Caitlyn soon joined her new friend in gardening.
We end Part 1 with a detour of sorts, when Jeff and Caitlyn discover that they were neighbors 15 years ago or so.
Please join us for Part 2 and the final new episode of Season 4 this Thursday.
We recorded this podcast at the Greenhouse Project in the Portola in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this podcast, Doug picks up where he left off in Part 1. He shares stories of his Jewish family's escape from Nazi Germany and their journey to the U.S. His dad went to Basel, Switzerland, first. So many of his friends died in World War II that, after the war ended, he came to New York.
Being highly educated and speaking five or six languages, he got a job as an editor at the Academy of Sciences. An uncle had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s, landing in Minnesota first. An ambidextrous artist, he could draw with either hand. He was also a storyteller and puppeteer. Eventually, he made his way to North Beach.
Despite having eight or nine different names and honoraries, people knew him by the name Wolo. He did some work in the Central Valley for the WPA, caricatures here in The City, and was a fixture in his neighborhood in the '20s and '30s.
Wolo had a regular spot in the Chronicle pre-Herb Caen. "I Saw You There" was a caricature of the day from somewhere around town. Readers who spotted themselves in the art could go to the Chronicle and collect a prize. Wolo is perhaps most famous for his designs at the now-shuttered Van Ness restaurant Hippo Burger. His nephew (Doug's dad) came to join him here, and that's how the Salins arrived in San Francisco.
Doug considers his mom, who was born and raised in San Francisco, to have been a Bohemian. She was a poet and an artist herself. His dad was quite the dresser. Doug isn't sure of the exact story of how they met, but those factors make sense for the two of them to have connected in North Beach.
However they met, they got married and moved up to San Rafael, where Doug and his brother were born and raised. His dad was a printer and his mom came into San Francisco to the binderies that were here back in the day. Doug has fond memories of coming to The City and going to Playland at the Beach. He especially loved the enchiladas at the Hot House.
As a kid, Doug loved walking around with the postal-delivery guy and later got his own paper route. He hung out with a lot of adults whose jobs he was curious about. He went to college at Santa Clara University, as mentioned in Part 1. He shares a wild story of driving to The City from the South Bay in 1974 and almost running out of gas during the fuel crisis that year.
After his time at Macy's (also covered in Part 1), Doug went out on his own as a photographer, specializing in architectural lighting.
We end this podcast with Doug's thoughts on San Francisco losing its color and his hopefulness that it can get it back.
We recorded this episode at Doug's house in the Sunnyside in April 2022. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Doug Salin has trouble doing anything longer than one hour.
In this podcast, the career photographer shares his life story with us. We recorded in Doug's house in the Sunnyside, the same place we met and talked with ex-San Francisco poet laureate, Kim Shuck (Part 1 / Part 2). Kim is Doug's life partner, in fact.
These days, Doug works as a robotics mentor for high school students in The City. He's been doing photography since he was four. He began college studying physics, but that didn't excite him. Somewhat by accident, he fell into mechanical engineering instead. He soon became the photo editor of the college newspaper and yearbook.
Doug figured he was destined to work in journalism. But someone he knew mentioned heading up to San Francisco to see if there were any photo jobs for him. He wasn't planning to stay in San Jose, so he came up and met Paul Hoffman.
Hoffman connected Doug with Macy's in Union Square, where there was an opening in the store's in-house photo department. He had no experience in commercial photography, but figured what the hell?
He ended up getting the job and worked in the company's dark room, which was located inside the store. Then someone asked him to help with "paste-ups," which was more like the work he did for his college yearbook.
About a year later, the photo department was looking to remodel their area of Macy's. Doug took a look at the plans and suggested something different, more efficient. They ended up going with Doug's revisions. Shortly after the renovations were made, Macy's named Doug an assistant studio manager.
He still wasn't taking photos in that situation, though. But in his experience of managing photographers, he picked up what he needed along the way.
We rewind to hear a little about Doug's German and Austrian Jewish ancestors and how they ended up in California. Please join us Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Doug's story.
We recorded this podcast at Doug's home in the Sunnyside in April 2022. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Christopher picks up where he left off in Part 1. He tried college up north for a couple years, but that ended when he lost his scholarship. His dad knew a guy at the San Francisco Art Institute and encouraged Christopher to come see the school. The idea was that he would finish his education learning how to make movies.
On that visit, Christopher met George Kuchar, who would later become Christopher's mentor. He went on to get a BFA from SFAI. We chat about the various neighborhoods he lived in back in those days and the stories that came with them. Then Christopher tells us all about some of the fights he was in here in The City when he was a kid, one on a moving 22-Fillmore.
Christopher ended up graduating from SFAI, and the only person he had at the ceremony was his brother Nicolas (Cage). Afterward, the two went out on the town to celebrate.
We back up a bit to hear the story of how Christopher's parents ended up in Southern California. His mom's family came from Illinois. And his dad's ancestors came from southern Italy to the U.S. August came to UCLA, where he met Christopher's mom. Her family had an in-law house, and soon, August's brother Francis lived in it.
After graduating, Christopher made some films that he describes as "maybe pretentious," but Nicolas's agent liked them. They wanted him to come back to SoCal, but he wasn't interested. He got involved with producer Dino De Laurentis, and shares some of those stories with us. Christopher was able to navigate pressures from outside and get some of his more arty cinematic techniques into his early movies.
Next Christopher contrasts his lives in San Francisco and Los Angeles/Long Beach. Today, he lives mostly in the Bay Area and teaches at SFAI, which he talks about. Then he shares the story of how he and his sons made Sammy & Quinn, his most recent short.
We end this episode with Christopher's thoughts on what it means to still be in San Francisco.
We recorded this episode at the San Francisco Art Institute in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Christopher Coppola wants to tell you about his dad.
In this episode, the filmmaker from the very famous filmmaking family shares his life story with us. Born and raised in Long Beach, he and his brother, Nicolas, spent a lot of time in San Francisco with their uncle, Francis.
Christopher starts things off with his dad, August Coppola. According to him, August carried an old family tradition of creativity and "stick-to-it-iveness" into the modern era. His long career in education brought him to SF State, where he was the dean of Creative Arts for many years.
He takes us on a sidetrack into some of the possible reasons that there's so much creativity and passion running throughout his relatives as well as his ancestors who date back to southern Italy.
Then we head into another sidetrack, this time about Christopher growing up in Long Beach with an ill mother and a younger brother who later became a household name. The story involves the two youngsters misidentifying their own Chinese zodiac signs.
The next sidetrack involves stories of Christopher riding with motorcycle gangs. This leads to one of his movie ideas—Biker McBeth.
We talk about the origins of Coppolas in Northern California. It all started with "Uncle" Francis. Following the success of The Godfather, he moved to San Francisco. His brother (Christopher's dad), August, later followed suit. Because their mother was ill, when Christopher and his brother, Nicolas, were around 8 or 9, they were often sent up to The City to spend time with their aunt and uncle.
Christopher speaks fondly of his Aunt Eleanor. They called her "mother aunt." During their stays in SF, she would give the kids allowances and send them on their way around town. People would ask if they were "those" Coppolas, which of course they weren't. It bothered both brothers when they were young, but Christopher learned to let it go.
We end this episode with Christopher's tales of his and his brother's mischievous, creative lives in Long Beach and how San Francisco served as a sanctuary for them. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Christopher Coppola's life story.
We recorded this podcast at the San Francisco Art Institute in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this episode, Emmy picks up where she left off in Part 1, with the story of opening her own place. She'd been kicking around the idea of opening her own restaurant. Her classmates had more or less shot it down. Her dad, a restaurant-owner himself, wasn't crazy about the idea either. He couldn't see her raising the kind of money she'd need. But Emmy started saving. And saving. And saving. She worked on getting her credit score up. And in 2001, one of her dad's spots had an opening coming up. She decided to go for it.
Her partner at the time was a bartender and she asked him to collaborate. They menu planned, got their supplies, hired a chef, brought in decorations Emmy already had, and opened the doors. About a week before they opened, Emmy found out she was pregnant.
She waitressed well throughout her pregnancy, in fact. And after she had her kid, she'd serve tables carrying the child. Maybe some of you reading this will remember that unforgettable and awesome sight.
Emmy says that having her own child inspired her to make her restaurant kid-friendly. But she always wanted to also cater to late-night service industry workers—her friends, essentially. And so she'd bring in DJs in the later hours.
We talk a little about shopping at thrift stores back in the '80s and '90s. Emmy intentionally decorated the place with stuff she'd find at shops that used to exist in San Francisco back then.
Emmy's dad was a tough landlord. He noticed the clumps of folks waiting to get into the Spaghetti Shack and responded by raising his daughter's rent. This happened enough times to prompt Emmy to look for a new location. About eight years ago, she opened in a new space—this time on Mission Street in the former El Zocalo space. The story of how Emmy got the space is one you just gotta hear.
The bigger space meant shorter wait times for diners. In the move, they were closed only one day. We discuss the importance for Emmy of keeping the menu and the decor the same between spaces. Jeff will attest that they've been 100 percent successful at that. One difference is a much bigger kitchen, which has allowed them to expand the menu.
We talk about some of the folks who've worked at Emmy's over the years and then gone on to open restaurants of their own. Sarah and Josey of Front Porch and Jay of Farmer Brown's (among others) come to Emmy's mind.
The conversation inevitably ends up touching on the pandemic. Emmy goes into detail about the struggles that her and other restaurants continue to face. Things like mounting debt due to a lack of government assistance continue to take their toll. Emmy says she's able to retain staff and keep paying them and that's her take-away.
We end the episode with Emmy's thoughts on what it means to still be here in San Francisco running a business.
Follow Emmy's on Twitter and Instagram. Their current hours are Friday/Saturday, 5–9:30; Tues.-Thurs./Sunday 5–8:30; Monday takeout only.
We recorded this podcast at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Emmy Kaplan and her friends in the restaurant business just wanted somewhere to go after their shifts. In this podcast, Jeff fulfills a 20ish-year dream meeting and recording with Emmy, the namesake behind Emmy's Spaghetti Shack. Today located on Mission Street just below Cesar Chavez, the restaurant recently celebrated 21 years in business.
Emmy was born in San Francisco and shares her and family's stories with us. Her mom is from Alameda. That family goes back generations in the East Bay, coming from places like Germany, Scotland, and Ireland. Emmy's mom came to SF State in the '60s—"a real, bona fide hippie."
Her parents met at SF State. Later, her dad was a cable car driver. His family also went back a few generations here in The City. Both her parents were young free spirits, and didn't stay together for very long. After having Emmy and her brother, they split up. Then her mom took Emmy and her brother up to Sonoma, where Emmy grew up.
Later in life, her dad owned several restaurants in the Mission—Bruno's and Mission Villa, to name a couple. When she was a kid, Emmy would often join him at his restaurants. When she was 17, after splitting time between The City and Sonoma, Emmy moved back to her hometown.
As a teenager, she started working in restaurants, first in Sonoma, and later, in San Francisco. She realized that she needed to fend for herself at an early age. Without going into too much detail, Emmy says that her teen years were "wild." She and her friends were punk rockers—they went to shows and got into trouble, as you do. Her mom threatened her with either incarceration or joining her brother in Europe. She chose Europe.
Her time overseas taught her that the world is a big place. When she got back home, her priorities had shifted. She graduated high school early and worked a lot in The City. She toyed with art school, but that didn't stick. She took a business class at City College, where she pitched an idea that essentially was the restaurant she has today. The idea didn't go over well in class, though.
She worked at the Flying Saucer, a long-gone restaurant at 22nd and Guerrero. It was while Emmy worked there that the first location of Emmy's Spaghetti Shack opened.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and more stories from Emmy Kaplan.
We recorded this podcast at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Maggie picks up where she left off in Part 1, with her taking over programming duties at GFE 10 years ago. She dives into the story of how GFE was founded more than 30 years ago amid a historic drought in California. The intent was always to create a teaching space, something that distinguishes GFE from other gardens around The City. We talk about biodiversity and how that's such a motivator for the work they do at GFE. That coupled with things like native vegetation means that the garden itself, for passersby, might not always be what we tend to think of as "beautiful." But, as Maggie points out, the plants are doing exactly what they need to do—living in a symbiotic fashion with other plants, animals, and insects.
Maggie goes over how the garden has responded to the pandemic. They had to cancel (postpone?) a live event they had planned to commemorate 30 years and switched their education programs to Zoom. Needless to say, something was missing.
The upside was that they were able to reach more people virtually during the pandemic. In 2021, for the first time in three decades, they offered their "Get Up" program online. Maggie expresses her gratitude for the advances in technology that the pandemic forced onto GFE.
Garden for the Environment is open to the public every day from dawn until dusk. Follow them on Instagram.
We end this episode with Maggie's idea of what it means to still be here through it all.
We recorded this podcast at Garden for the Environment in the Inner Sunset in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Maggie Marks has deep roots in San Francisco, and that's not a gardening pun. In this episode, Maggie, who today is the director of Garden for the Environment (GFE) in the Inner Sunset, traces her family's history in The City. Her mom's side goes back at least two generations here; and her dad's side includes the family that owns Guerra Quality Meats. Her parents lived in various spots around town before settling in the Inner Sunset in the '90s. This is where Maggie grew up. She went to Rooftop School, where she indulged in art, theater, and gardening. By eighth grade, Maggie was head of the environmental club at school. Around this time, California was experiencing a major drought. Residents were constantly being made aware of steps to mitigate the water shortages, stuff we're very familiar with today—shorter and fewer showers, less watering of gardens, etc. Around this time and not too far from her childhood home, GFE was founded.
Maggie and her friends liked to create make-believe worlds. She also liked to read. She spent a lot of time in the nearby library. Once she was a little older, she rode Muni all over town. One of her (and her family's) favorite spots was the Mission, almost always to get burritos.
We talk a little about Maggie's time living away from her hometown. She went to college in Seattle and loved it, but the rain ultimately got to her. In 2008, she spent time in DC working for the Obama campaign in Northern Virginia.
Before the financial crisis really took hold that year, Maggie had been thinking of permanently relocating. But with the election over and the economy continuing its decline, she decided to come back home. She worked various jobs while trying to find her calling—farmers' markets, her family's shop, and other non-profit work. She got a great spot up in Bernal Heights, met the man she'd later marry, and sealed the deal on staying in her hometown.
Growing up in the Inner Sunset, Maggie remembered GFE being built. Through one of her non-profit jobs, she got reconnected with the garden after sharing an office with them. With GFE's director going on maternity leave, Maggie applied and got the job. That was 10 years ago.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and more about Maggie Marks and Garden for the Environment.
We recorded this podcast at Garden for the Environment in the Inner Sunset in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this podcast, Vandor picks up where he left off in Part 1. He traces his family history back to his grandfather, who moved from Mobile, Alabama, to San Francisco around the time of the Second Migration and met his wife (Vandor's grandma) here in The City. She was born and raised here; he was a quiet, strong man who learned how to dress from his new wife. When he was two, Vandor's dad left the family. But he was surrounded by relatives and loved ones, most of them living in the same Victorian in Lower Pac Heights, on the lip of the Fillmore. Because his mom was young when she had Vandor, her own parents took over raising the boy. Family gatherings in the house were common, and there was always a lot to eat. Vandor talks about those meals as well as some of the neighborhood spots they'd get their produce and meat from. They're places that aren't around anymore, but the owners were often friends of the family.
We turn to Vandor's teen years. He got into art, graffiti, and break-dancing in those days. He describes the contrast once he transferred from a private high school to Galileo, for him both socially and academically.
In his junior year, his sister was born, his parents were fighting, and he relocated to the East Bay because his mom and his grandma were on bad terms. He began to struggle in his schoolwork. He was working at the Exploratorium. The next year, his senior year in high school, he was told he was one credit short of what was needed to graduate.
He had befriended a photographer who also worked at the Exploratorium. They were set to attend and work at an event together, but Vandor got lost and missed it. It didn't matter, though. His friend had committed suicide.
Shortly after that, the family found out they were losing their house in Pac Heights over a family quarrel.
Despite all this, Vandor graduated high school.
We end this episode with Vandor's thoughts on what it means to still be here in San Francisco.
Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram.
Order Whack Donuts online.
We recorded this podcast at Abanico Coffee Roasters in the Mission in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
There's a dude in the Mission who makes vegan donuts and break-dances. In this episode, we meet Vandor Hill. Vandor was born and raised in The City. He recently turned 40. He shares the story of how he came to love baking. It starts in the predominantly female house he grew up in.
Surrounded by his grandma and aunt, Vandor says a lot of his baking went uncredited. No one believed that he was the one who made whatever delicious treat they were eating. Peach cobbler soon became his signature bake.
Vandor shares the story of why his company is called Whack Donuts. It involves a group of young kids getting jumped in the Mission and the quiet one (Vandor) basically fending off the attackers. His buddies called him "Whacko" from that point on.
As part of the story of starting his donut business, Vandor takes us back to a tough period in his life. Between 2017 and 2019, he lost his grandmother, his mom, his aunt, a mentor, and a friend. His dancing suffered. His work wasn't willing to adjust or allow him space to grieve. His living situation deteriorated. And then, the pandemic hit.
We get into the early days of Whack Donuts and talk about why Vandor decided to make his product without any dairy. The story goes back to an internship he had in high school at a local donut shop. Eventually, enough people asked if the donuts were vegan, which inspired Vandor to bake his treats rather than fry them.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Vandor shares stories about his family and his early days.
We recorded this podcast at Abanico Coffee Roasters in the Mission in April 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this podcast, Mason picks up where they left off in Part 1. We continue our conversation about Mason's background as a photographer.
In 2010, they were, as they say, dating someone out of their league. They were celebrating New Years at a joint in South of Market and needed to pee. Naturally, they went outside. When it was their partner's turn, she gave Mason her purse. An SFPD cop approached and questioned what Mason was doing with her. After the cops' condescending questions, they grabbed Mason and ended up dislocated their arm.
Meanwhile, one of their friends had been roofied inside (they didn't know this at the time) and was very ill. The cops left at the sight of the sick friend. But there happened to be an ambulance within eyesight, so they set off to catch it. But the EMTs were drunk (remember: it was NYE).
Everyone went home in the East Bay and Mason was left to walk to their SF home with their dislocated shoulder. This effectively ended their photography career. In 2011, the PTSD from the episode and the depression it caused inspired Mason to leave The City for Portland.
The anonymity they experienced in a new town allowed Mason to present however they felt comfortable doing so. When the question of renaming themselves comes up, Mason takes a sidetrack to talk about their Okinawan grandmother. It was her story of being exiled, first to Hawaii and then to San Francisco, that inspired Mason to delve into history while in Portland.
Alarmed at the prospect of not being able to move back to their hometown, Mason returned to San Francisco in 2013. Later that year, the residents at MidTown Park Apartments, where Mason had grown up and where their mom still lived, were served with rent-increase notices. (For more info on the ensuing rent strikes, which eventually fought back the increases, at this city-owned property, check out this Examiner article.)
The history of the place goes back to "redevelopment" in the 1960s. Its residents had been displaced and promised new city housing. Several of the older tenants buckled under the subsequent stress caused by proposed hikes and relocation (yet again). One of these was Mason's grandmother, who suffered a stroke around this time.
All of this gave Mason a new purpose, a new direction. They would devote their life to exposing wrongs and doing everything they could to right them. And they're uniquely positioned to effect change because they grew up immersed in tech.
We talk about Mason's being a member of Still Here SF, an intergenerational cultural preservation project amplifying the voices and creativity of LGBTQ2S+ Black, Indigenous, and people of color raised in San Francisco. Mason joined to help them heal from the trauma of growing up going to so many funerals of friends and relatives who died of AIDS. Their involvement with Still Here lead to their work with the Hormel Center, the SF Public Library's LGBTQIA archives.
Among other passions, Mason spends time finding and telling the stories of the queer people who were at Jonestown. We breeze through the last four years since we met Mason, and end this podcast with their thoughts on what it means to still be here in San Francisco.
You can buy Mason's book, Crossbones on My Life, over on the Nomadic Press website.
We recorded this podcast at Jefferson Square Park in March 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Note: Our guest this week raises issues, true stories from their own life, of sexual and gender-based violence. Listener discretion is advised. This story starts in 1978. A young San Francisco punk rock woman with two kids saw that many of her peers were getting hooked on drugs. Suddenly, there was an influx of abandoned children and she decided to do something about it. She established a foster home.
Fast-forward 10 years and newborn Mason (not known by that name at the time) comes around and ends up at said foster home. Born to drug addicts, Mason entered this world addicted themselves.
Mason ended up being raised in that one home, and only that one home. They've never been in a shelter system or homeless.
From a very early age (four or so), Mason was acting, doing voiceover work, and modeling. Around age eight, they noticed that things were starting to get gendered and that they didn't fit either mold—male or female. Producers also told Mason that they sounded "too white" (they're Black, indigenous, and Mexican) and that they should try sounding "more Black." But at home, Mason's mom supported their being gender non-conforming at that time.
Around 12, they were waiting for puberty and playing lots and lots of soccer. Other coaches were suspicious enough to investigate whether Mason's coach was disguising a boy as a girl on the girl's soccer team. That fizzled, but Mason kept playing. They were competitive and good enough to be scouted by some colleges while in eighth grade. But a torn ACL when they were 13 dashed those dreams.
They spent that summer recovering, lying in bed waiting to get their period so they could get surgery for the torn ACL. They went back to art and started writing and building up a portfolio, which helped them get into Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.
Mason thrived in high school. They talk about all the guest speakers and various programs and internships students at SOTA were involved in. They also mention, laughingly, some of the more savory elements of arts high school in San Francisco in the early 2000s. Inspired by teachers and an intentional immersion in The City's various art worlds, Mason left high school aimed toward an artist's life. But there were issues along the way, which they delve into in the podcast. Eventually, through that struggle, they landed on photography, opening their own photo company in 2007.
We end Part 1 with Mason struggling to find identity and purpose as they entered adulthood and their hometown was changing rapidly. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Mason's life story.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this podcast, we continue our visit at Sisterhood Gardens and our series on City Gardens.
Today, we meet Sisterhood volunteer Tim Wong. Tim shares his life story with us. He grew up on the Peninsula and moved to The City in 2016. This coincided with the founding of Sisterhood Gardens.
Tim grew up in an area replete with butterflies, something he was drawn to from a young age. He was interested in the insects and their relationship with plants. His earliest memories of coming to San Francisco involve his grandparents, who lived in the Sunset. His school took the kids to the California Academy of Sciences, which we'll get back to in a moment. Tim was in The City almost every weekend.
He never necessarily envisioned himself living in San Francisco. After high school, he moved to San Diego to go to UCSD, where he studied environmental systems, ecology, and evolution as well as marine science. He was aiming toward marine biology. Through school, he worked in an aquarium, which later led to his volunteering at Cal Academy of Sciences.
Today, Tim works at the academy in its rainforest exhibit. As we're discussing his various rolls at work, we take a detour to hear some of the places Tim has dived, including off the shore here in Northern California.
Tim says he's drawn to his work at the academy and the garden because of the sense of community and giving back. We end this podcast with Tim's thoughts on what it means to still be here.
If you'd like to volunteer at Sisterhood or get involved somehow, please visit their website.
We recorded this podcast at Sisterhood Gardens in Oceanview in March 2022. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Our City Gardens series continues with a visit to Sisterhood Gardens. Located on Brotherhood Way (get it?) in the OMI area of southwest San Francisco, the garden was established in 2016.
In this podcast, we meet master gardener and Sisterhood volunteer Jamie Chan. In addition to her work at Sisterhood, Jamie teaches at SF State, where she's also a doctoral student.
Jamie shares her story with us. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, she traces her family's history in The City back to the Gold Rush era. Over the years, her ancestors lived mostly in Chinatown, but eventually, they all moved to the Sunset and Richmond. Jamie grew up near Stern Grove and went to SFUSD schools.
Her parents grew up in Chinatown, where they knew each other growing up. The two reconnected while at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and got married after graduation.
Today, Jamie trains public school teachers (her husband happens to be a teacher, too). As a teenager, she went to School of the Arts and was interested in telling people's stories. She studied documentary film and made movies about ABC (American-born Chinese) identity. She went to art school at CalArts in SoCal but didn't like it. So she came back and went to SF State, where she studied biology.
After graduation, Jamie worked at California Academy of Sciences and became interested in education. She and her husband got their home through a city program—an acquisition that came with a yard bigger than the house.
She started gardening there after having kids and found herself wanting to connect with food and food systems as a mom. That led to a master gardener program at UC.
Jamie helped found Sisterhood Gardens in 2016, The land is owned by SF Department of Public Works, who landscaped the space and got water running before turning it over to neighborhood volunteers.
We end this episode with Jamie's thoughts about still being here in San Francisco.
For more information on Sisterhood Gardens, including how to get involved, please visit their website: https://sisterhoodgardens.org/.
We recorded this podcast at Sisterhood Gardens in Oceanview in March 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In our last episode, we met Danielle Fernandez briefly when she told us all about the 10-year vision she's realizing out at Calibird and Bee Pollinator Sanctuary. In this podcast, we get to know Danielle.
Danielle's parents were born and raised in San Francisco. They met at Sears and Roebuck on Geary and Masonic in the Sixties. After they were married and started having kids, the young couple moved down the Peninsula, but didn't stop coming to The City regularly for big family dinners. The Fernandez family would hit up spots like Bruno's, Caesar's, Green Valley, Spenger's (across the Bay). Danielle describes what these dinners were like for a young kid like her.
Her mom had a successful food-demonstration business in the Eighties. They made the stuff people would hand out as samples at grocery stores back in the day. And sometimes, Danielle would go with her mom on runs to the stores.
In her teens, Danielle and her friends came to San Francisco a lot, mostly to go to raves held all over town. Getting out of the house involved some creative trickery that many of you might relate to. She says other kids at school might've thought she was a druggie, but in fact, she was just having a good time sober. She describes some of the goofy stuff she and her friends did.
In high school, Danielle worked at a pet store, where she learned to work with animals. After graduation, she took a stab at vet tech school, but didn't stick with it. From there, she worked in bio-tech for a while, but she didn't like that much either. Then a friend was looking through an old book of Danielle's drawings. They knew nothing about her artistic past, and asked why she wasn't still pursuing that. For Danielle, it was an awakening.
But it was Project Runway that really kicked things into gear. She ended up going to Parsons in New York and lived there for many years after graduating. She did well with fashion, but shifted her focus to "fast fashion," with the idea that she wanted to create practical clothes for the masses. It wasn't long, though, before she discovered inadequacies and injustices of that industry.
All this coupled with homesickness was drawing Danielle back to the Bay. And so, after nearly 10 years in New York, in 2018, she decided to pack up and head out west. Her aunt's house in the Bayview suddenly was available to her and her partner, and she was able to get a job here. We rewind a little to hear Danielle's version of the story of her and Isaiah's meeting.
Isaiah recounts the story from his perspective. For a refresher, check out Isaiah's podcasts with us from 2020: Part 1/Part 2. Dani sent care packages to Isaiah while he worked in a dangerous situation in Santa Cruz county. We hear all about their whirlwind first day together all over the Bay Area.
We end the episode with Danielle and Isaiah's thoughts on what it means to still be here in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at the Calibird and Bee Pollinator Sanctuary in the Bayview in March 2022. Photo by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Isaiah Powell (Part 1/Part 2) catches us up with what's been going on since his Storied: SF episodes back in the summer of 2020. Between the land he and Danielle stewarded at Florence Fang Community Farm and today, they were at Adam Rogers Park. The philosophy behind Dragonspunk has always been that they go where the help is needed; it's never been about a single location. That brings us today and the place we recorded—Calibird and Bee Pollinator Sanctuary on Palou in the Bayview. The spot lies above a Caltrain tunnel in the southeast side of San Francisco. Looking north from this beautiful space, with The City's skyline as backdrop, multiple smokestacks, construction cranes, and the Bay Bridge pepper one's view. Isaiah talks a little about what he's been up to and their gaining access to the land where we talked. Then he hands the mic over to Danielle. She describes her vision of the space, which spawned from an idea she had 10 years ago when she lived in New York and would regularly visit gardens and green spaces around the city. She says her decade-long dream was to have a botanical garden of her own, one that begins the process of healing the damage humans have done to the natural environment.
Danielle takes us all on a tour of the sanctuary, listing off the mostly native plants, trees, bushes, and shrubs that live there. And we end this episode with Danielle's vision for the future of the space, which includes community gathering and events.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the story of Danielle's life.
We recorded this podcast at the Calibird and Bee Pollinator Sanctuary in the Bayview in March 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Connie picks up where she left off in Part 1. After living in San Francisco for about five years, she decided to go to UC Davis. While at college, she rode a bike for the first time, a story she shares with us. She majored in religious studies and classical Chinese. Both subjects were of interest for Connie; they didn't necessarily constitute a post-graduation or career plan. After her time in Davis, she came back to The City and spent some time trying to figure out her direction.
Initially, translation work drew her in. She found a volunteer gig translating for the SF Bar Association, and one of her first jobs was translating for a pro-bono tenants attorney. She shares the story of her work that day, and, as you'll see, it ended up setting her off on a purposeful path.
Having that experience of helping people bridge differences with the context of deeper cultural understanding, Connie now had a reason to wake up in the morning—in her own words, she "loves" to sleep.
Connie worked on a few campaigns here in town over the years—in 2007 to help get Kamala Harris re-elected district attorney; in 2015, she helped Aaron Peskin resume his old office of D3 supervisor, which is Chinatown, North Beach, and a few other neighborhoods.
She met her partner (they'd known each other since they were 16) when she was 26. He was a bartender at North Star and Connie lived next door. Today, they have an eight-year-old son.
Around the time then-D1 Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer was up for re-election, she called Connie. Connie thought Sandy was going to tell her that she was running for mayor. Instead, Sandy asked Connie if she wanted to run to replace her on the Board of Supervisors in District 1.
She talks about the process of deciding to go for it, all the people, friends, family, and community members she talked with, and the actual work of fighting a tough battle. Ultimately, she prevailed, narrowly, and assumed office in January 2021.
We end the podcast with Connie's thoughts on what it means to still be here.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Connie Chan used to love listening to music at Tower Records.
In this podcast, we get to know Connie, who's beginning her second year as supervisor of San Francisco's District 1 (more or less the Inner and Outer Richmond). She and her brother were born in Hong Kong and raised in Taiwan. Connie shares the story of how her parents met: Her dad was a Hong Kong cop who worked with youth; Connie's mom was a social worker who also spent a lot of time with kids. They met through their work.
When Connie was 5, the family moved to Taiwan. It was the Eighties and Connie and her brother were very much latch-key kids. Connie was exposed to plenty of pop culture, although it took some time for music and movies to reach eastern Asia.
She talks about how members of her family had various trades and interests in Asia (piano teacher, opera singer, university professor) that they had to give up when they immigrated to the US. An aunt and uncle came over before her own family, and they landed in San Francisco's Chinatown. Her aunt served dim sum and her uncle worked as a bookkeeper for the famed Empress of China restaurant.
Connie talks about the well-established immigrant and Chinese-American community in Chinatown and the role they played in her family's move there when she was 13. The networks that existed, the opportunities that opened to newcomers ... it all played a part in establishing a trust that was almost always paid forward. Her mom moved Connie and her brother there, where the three lived with her aunt and uncle in a not-very-big apartment.
But she got her first impression of San Francisco on a trip here the year before. Connie plays the mandolin and visited as part of a band that toured the US for two weeks, SF being one of the stops. It was also the beginning of her really learning English. Her family speaks Cantonese, but from an early age, Connie learned Mandarin in school.
She talks about some racism and bullying she experienced at school shortly after her arrival here. But Connie adjusted and made the most of her new circumstances. She would stop at Tower Records and visit their listening stations, where she would read along to the music and learn even more English.
As a teen, Connie felt she had everything she needed in Chinatown. But when she returned to San Francisco as a 21-year-old after college, The City really opened up for her.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the story of how Connie ended up running for and becoming a supervisor in San Francisco.
Related Episode
D9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen Part 1/Part 2
We recorded this podcast at San Francisco City Hall in February 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Trigger warning: Vincent's story is a difficult, painful, and traumatic one that involves several tales of violence, crime, and drug abuse. Please be warned that these episodes contain potentially triggering content. In this podcast, Vincent picks up where he left off in Part 1. He describes a week-long crime spree he went on when he was 15. As he fought sentencing and was holed up in Oakland juvenile hall, he got some visits. First, his sister and her baby came. Then, Vincent's mom visited him.
Initially, Vincent was upset. But then he allowed her to share her side of everything that had happened. She told her son that she was broken, that she had trusted her husband (Vincent's dad) and he had abused her. He didn't believe her, but a guard got the police report from that day, and for the first time, Vincent understood what happened. But he couldn't let go of guilt-tripping his mom.
Many years later, still not able to move on from that emotion, his mom put her foot down. She was ill and he realized that there was no one to take care of her. This kicked off a spiritual journey for Vincent. That was seven years ago, and he and his mom are tight today.
He says his whole life story, which you've been hearing and reading about, played a part in his starting Urban Compassion Project.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen. And if you'd like to donate or get involved with Urban Compassion Project, please visit their website today.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Trigger warning: We're extremely grateful to Vincent for sharing his life story. But it's a difficult, painful, and traumatic story that involves several tales of violence and abuse against women and children. Please be warned that these episodes with Vincent contain potentially triggering content.
Vincent Ray Williams's ancestors on both sides moved to the Bay Area for a better life.
In this podcast, we get to know Vincent, the founder and CEO of Urban Compassion Project, a nonprofit "committed to the health, welfare, and empowerment of the unhoused." His dad was Black and from the South; Vincent's mom is Puerto Rican. His dad was a Marine vet who brought trauma home with him and succumbed to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Vincent never knew him.
Vincent's mother also suffered from drug addiction. The couple met in Oakland and had Vincent's older brother. Eleven months later, in 1987, they had their second son: Vincent. His parents weren't only addicted; they also sold drugs. Big time.
An Oakland poet named Hershey Hill joined us by coincidence the day we recorded with Vincent. During the recording, Hershey asks Vincent if he speaks Spanish. He shares that, in fact, it's his first language, but, as he explains in the podcast, there's some trauma that comes along with that. His father had physically abused his mom so badly that she asked CPS to come and take Vincent and his brother. Now in a foster home, the two boys would be beaten and locked in a closet for speaking their native tongue. The situation was bad enough that Vincent ran away at age 8.
The police handed him over to CPS and CPS put him in a group home. He thought he had escaped the nightmarishness, but it turned out to be a facade. More physical abuse ensued, and so Vincent ran away from the group home. He'd do his best to alert teachers or even the police to what was happening, but to no avail. Because he was so often in trouble at school, Vincent didn't have many friends.
Despite all this, he graduated from high school in Oakland.
At this point in the conversation, Vincent takes us back to when he was 9 years old and started doing and selling drugs. Between the streets of San Francisco and the streets of his hometown of Oakland, he was also selling himself. He also started committing crimes.
Eventually, Vincent reconnected with brother, Willie. Around 2010, Willie inspired him to try Narcotics Anonymous and it worked. After a relapse, Vincent has been sober for more than nine years.
We end Part 1 with Vincent sharing what it was like living and walking around the streets of Oakland and San Francisco before he got clean.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Arabella picks up where she left off in Part 1. She was in New York working various journalism jobs but still not totally fulfilled. This is when her self-described "Goldilocks Era" began.
She shipped herself back out West to live with family again, this time in Santa Clarita. From there, it was down to Orange County. Summoning her experiences writing online, she cold-called the web editor at The Orange County Register and got a job there. But after a year-and-a-half, she felt lost again.
In 2007, Arabella started a webcasting company, producing content for non-profits and some government agencies. It blew up and she got the content onto early streaming sites like LiveStream. This work brought her up to San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area regularly.
At this point in the recording, Arabella briefly shares her first visit to The City when she was 14.
She moved to San Francisco and her company was doing really well. But then their biggest client pulled out and Arabella scrambled again. Her cousin convinced her to get back into spokesmodel work, which she did. This is how she met the man she'd later marry. She credits her husband with having made her fall in love with San Francisco.
Arabella shares the story of launching WeXL. It's the story of her no longer accepting seeing creators, especially creators of color, being manipulated by powerful media companies. To learn even more about the non-profit, please visit their website.
We end the podcast with Arabella's thoughts on what it means to still be here.
We recorded this podcast at the WeXL media lab in the Presidio in February 2022. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Arabella DeLucco was raised by a village. In this podcast, we get to know Arabella, beginning with the story of her Filipino family. Her grandfather fled to the hills outside Manila during World War II, a story Arabella learned shortly before he died.
When she was 5, Arabella came to Los Angeles to live with aunts and uncles who were already there. It was a cramped house, but she was a happy kid who immersed herself in school. She was especially drawn to science, but soon discovered that she enjoyed the writing of scientific reports more than the science itself.
When she was in fourth grade, she moved to a much smaller town in New Jersey than she had been used to in Southern California. Junior high was tough for Arabella, both schoolwork-wise and also in terms of the racism she encountered. She ended up going to a small private high school that was a 40-minute train ride away. She loved the journey as much as she did the schoolwork itself. Arabella ended up the school's valedictorian.
She went to Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and spent a lot of time in New York City after she turned 21. First, she was a spokesmodel for a beer company and later, she worked a journalism internship in the city. Arabella shares the story of seeing the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
She moved to NYC after college and worked various journalism jobs, searching for her true calling.
Join us for Part 2 on Thursday, when we'll hear about Arabella's move to San Francisco and founding of WeXL, the non-profit that empowers diverse creators to tell stories over many different media.
We recorded this podcast in Presidio at the WeXL media lab in February 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Alfredo Uribe and Lucia Ippolito-Gonzalez's love story revolves around milk. In this special episode of Storied: SF, we get to know Fredo and we reconnect with Lucia, our guest on Season 3, Episode 42 (Part 1 / Part 2). First, we hear from Fredo.
He was born in Oakland and grew up in Pinole. His neighbors there had a dairy delivery company and San Francisco was a big part of their route. Young Fredo and Robert Frangieh were pals, and Fredo soon found himself running routes in The City with his buddy Robert and Robert's dad's company. They'd head out in the dark to a mostly quiet, empty city. But Fredo was hooked.
Eventually, they gave him the Mission route. He felt like San Francisco, and specially, the Mission, had it all. Fredo talks about the changes he's seen in San Francisco over years, especially around the South of Market/Oracle Field area. He reminisces about going to Giants games back in the Barry Bonds days. He was falling in love with San Francisco.
From there, we hear the story of how Lucia and Fredo met. It's a charming AF city love story involving the two of them doing what they do: art and milk delivery.
(At this point in the recording, their very young daughter appears on screen and distracts Jeff with her infinite cuteness. Please excuse.)
Fredo obviously knew a little about Lucia. But on that first date, they walked through Balmy Alley and other areas around the Mission where Lucia's murals live vibrantly. He was blown away that much more.
We hear the story of how Fredo decided to start Los Lecheros, his label. He was teased by folks he delivered milk to, so he decided to own it by putting "Lechero" on a T-shirt. For Fredo (and Lucia), the lechero symbolizes the hard-working folks who got up way before everyone else and actually came to people's houses to deliver their goods. That connection and community is what they're going for with Los Lecheros. They have dreams of turning it into a place in the alley to get coffee.
We talk a little about the Balmy Alley event that took place on Feb. 12, 2022. It marked the official product launch for Los Lecheros. But "Lovers Lane" was so much more. There were vendors galore: face-painting, clothing, food, drinks, DJs, and more.
We end this podcast with Fredo's and Lucia's thoughts on what it means to still be here in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom in February 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Jim picks up where he left off in Part 1. He didn't care for grammar school much, but he enjoyed his time at Sacred Heart High School, where he spent a lot of time playing saxophone in band. He says that, being a musician, he was accepted by just about every clique. Jim's house was a serious one. His dad worked to support four kids going to private school while his mom stayed home to take care of them. But Jim didn't like that somber environment, and so, he would often be the one making everyone in the family laugh.
When Jim was going to college at SF State and still living with his parents, his dad passed away. He had never wanted to leave The City, and this furthered that notion for him. He ended up with two degrees from State and graduated in 1981. It was at SF State that Jim realized, as much as he loved playing, musician wasn't gonna be the career for him. Instead, he studied economics.
He spent some time in Italy during college and shares those stories. Jim also talks about experiencing the Jonestown Massacre and Milk/Moscone murders around the time that his dad abruptly passed away.
After college, he played sax around town in various venues and did some cooking in restaurants. He loved food, but soon realized that he didn't want to do that full-time. Around this time, a friend recommended mortgage brokery, and to Jim, it was a "Why not?" situation. He's been in the business now for 38 years.
Jim talks about grappling with the fact that the San Francisco he grew up in isn't the affordable city we call home today. We wrap up this two-parter with Jim's thoughts on what it means, both personally and professionally, to still be here.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to that now. If you'd like to get in touch with Jim, check out his website JamesArgo.com.
We recorded this podcast at the San Francisco Elk's Lodge #3 in January 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Jim Argo's family has deep San Francisco roots. In this podcast, we get to know Jim, a born-and-raised San Francisco mortgage broker. His grandparents on his mom's side met in the Marina, each a member of an immigrant family from Italy. Jim's grandfather played saxophone and met his grandmother at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. His great-grandfather on his dad's side took his children and left his wife in Tennessee after learning of her affair. His paternal grandmother's parents were immigrants from Italy and Bulgaria.
Jim's dad's dad was a railroad clerk, eventually working out of San Francisco. The family lived off of Waller Street in the Lower Fillmore area. Jim's mom grew up in the Outer Richmond (near where Jim lives today). Her dad was a grocer in the then-new neighborhood, and he did pretty well.
His parents met when Jim's dad and a buddy, both students at Poly High, went on a double date with girls from a Catholic school in another part of town. His parents weren't paired with each other that night, but they met and the rest is history. It was the mid-1930s, well into the Depression but before the US's involvement in World War II.
Jim's dad worked for SFFD as a firefighter. It was a stable job, and, coming out of the Depression, that was a big deal. The young, newly married couple rented a place not far from her parents in the Outer Richmond. They lived there with their three daughters.
And then Jim, their only son, was born. This meant it was time to move. The family bought a house on 29th Avenue and Fulton, near Golden Gate Park. This is the house where Jim did most of his growing up.
He went to Catholic schools and, eventually, around the time of the Jonestown Massacre and Milk/Moscone murders, SF State. (We'll get more into that in Part 2.) Early in his childhood, looking to his maternal grandfather and his own dad, both of whom played, Jim picked up the saxophone. Playing sax is something he does to this day.
We end Part 1 with the story of how, at Sacred Heart high school, Jim ended up being the de-facto student director of the band. This was necessitated by the fact that many of the music teachers were professionals who played out a lot and might've had a hard time making it to school the next morning at 8 a.m.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Jim Argo's life story.
We recorded this podcast at San Francisco Elk's Lodge #3 in January 2022.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Rachele picks up where she left off in Part 1. Her heart broke when she moved from San Francisco to Oakland, but it made sense given her new job as a reporter at the Tri-Valley Times. Oakland has changed a lot in Rachele's nearly 40 years there, but she came to love it nonetheless. The paper became the Contra Costa Times and her editors assigned Rachele to the medicine beat. She went to work for a paper in North Carolina for a few years, where she covered Duke and the University of North Carolina's medical schools. After that, it was back to California to work for the Oakland Tribune.
She had met and married her husband here, and he had traveled east and back with her. In 1995, with a one-year-old at home, she had the chance to teach a class in SF State's Journalism department, and she took it. Instantly, she loved it. It turned into a regular job (as a lecturer), while she was also working as a reporter and raising an infant.
She had another kid a few years later and decided to get her master's degree. That meant moving her family to New York City, because she got into Columbia's graduate journalism program. The family had just arrived when the 2001 attacks happened in lower Manhattan. Rachele shares what it was like to be in New York in the aftermath of 9/11.
After a brief detour at CSU Monterey Bay, Rachele landed back at SF State, in 2004. This time, she was on tenure track. This is where Rachele and Jeff's paths intersect, as he was in the journalism program at state from 2003–05. She was back right where she wanted to be, doing what she wanted to be doing. The legacy of activism at SF State played no small part in why Rachele felt at home there.
The Diversity Style Guide essentially came out of the Journalism Department's work (the Center for the Integration and Improvement of Journalism). The Center was losing funding for a variety of reasons. As interim chair of the Center, Rachele took an existing style guide that had been compiled from various sources and revitalized it from a PDF to a searchable website, as it exists today.
Most of Rachele's time as chair of the Journalism Department has been during COVID. She uses those experiences as a basis of talking about what it means to still be here—our show's theme this season.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen. And visit her website: Rachele Kanigel.
We recorded this podcast at Rachele's home in Oakland in January 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
Rachele Kanigel comes from a long line of readers. In this podcast, Rachele shares her life story with us. Today, she's the chair of the Journalism Department at SF State. She's published The Diversity Style Guide, among other books. She also was one of Jeff's teachers back in 2005 when he went to SF State, so there's that. Rachele was born in Brooklyn and raised in a suburb of New York City on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. Her mom did some substitute teaching, and at home, loved to read books and poetry. She also liked to play Scrabble. She passed that on in one way or another to Rachele and her two older brothers.
Her oldest brother was 15 when Rachele was born, so she didn't grow up with him around much. Fairlawn, NJ, a middle-class suburb, never resonated much with young Rachele. Nearby NYC provided the contrast and escape she needed. She'd visit museums, Broadway shows, off-Broadway shows, cafes, jazz clubs ... but what she loved most was simply walking the streets of the big city.
She was so anxious to get out of suburbia that she found a college that would accept high school juniors, and she bailed. After a year at school on Long Island, she got into McGill University in Montreal. Rachele loved it there—the cafes, the Québecois. But there was something pulling her west toward California.
One of her brothers was in San Francisco and somewhat estranged from the family. But Rachele wanted to reconnect by visiting him here. It was May 1980 and she was 19. The plan was to visit for two weeks. But that turned into three months.
It was a summer of meeting people, finding a boyfriend, going to the Gorilla Grotto ... John Law's (Part 1/Part 2) name comes up as someone in that scene whom Rachele met back in the day. That fall, she took a journalism class at SF State and was hooked. She worked on the student newspaper and graduated a few years later with a bachelor's in journalism. Now, it was time to work. She found a copy-editing job at a shopping paper called The San Francisco Progress. The paper eventually gave Rachele a reporting beat. She took it and ran and never looked back.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Rachele's story.
We recorded this podcast at Rachele's home in Oakland in January 2021.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this podcast, Alex picks up where he left off in Part 1, with his first trip to San Francisco.
He was with his dad and much older sister when she was scouting colleges. They ended up staying with family friends in Presidio Heights. He shares the stories of things they did and saw while here in the 1990s.
Alex spent a lot of time in New York City, where his sister wound up going to college. Later, he went into hospitality school at Cornell in upstate New York. After that, he dabbled in hotels in Detroit and Orlando before making the move West, where'd been drawn so many years prior.
He arrived in San Francisco in 2008, right as the bottom was coming out of the economy. But that wasn't what brought Alex here. His route to The City went, oddly, through Tokyo. The large Japanese metropolis told him that he could be anywhere he truly wanted to be. To reconcile that with Alex's belief that he needed to be around the right people, San Francisco was only logical.
He got work up in Napa in the wine industry pretty much right away, but only after a quick detour at Burning Man. He already had a place to live here, too. He shares his arrival story before we pivot to talking about Gillibus.
A friend was leaving SF to go back to New York and wanted to buy a vintage school bus for his journey. Alex went with him and was blown away by the beauty of the classic vehicle. Before his buddy's move, he and some other friends took the bus on epic road trips. His friend ended up leaving the bus in The City and bailing for NYC.
Alex kept that bus and learned to drive it. Soon, he was giving people rides and then it dawned on him: rent the bus out to folks.
We end the podcast with Alex's thoughts on what it means for him and for his bus company to still be here.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom in January 2022. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Both of Alex Maxa's parents are journalists. In this episode, we hear the life story of the founder of Gillibus, who "specialize in not only Bay Area day trips, nighttime cruises, and mobile performances but also stationary events and overnight camping." Alex's granddad on his dad's side was in the Army, and so his dad moved around a lot, but ended up in Washington, DC, for high school. He was the editor of his school paper in those days and ended up in journalism school at Ohio University.
His mom grew up in Toledo and also went to OU, where she met Alex's dad. The young couple skipped graduation, got married, and went to DC. His dad got a job at The Washington Post pretty quickly. Political gossip and scandal was his beat. It was the early 1970s. Nothing to see here, folks.
There was an opening on a DC radio station and they asked Alex's dad to step in and fill it. This was well before the internet, and so, when celebrities rolled into town, they'd call into programs like this to promote whatever it was they were doing in the nation's capital.
Alex's mom wanted to write feature stories. She was assigned and reluctantly ended up covering sports, something she knew little to nothing about. His parents split up earlier in his life, and his step-dad came into the picture around the time Alex was 6.
But his dad remained close. Alex split time between his parents' houses. He credits his sister, seven years older than him, with being the "glue that kept things together" between and among the two families.
Along with many friends, he played soccer from a young age. He shares the story of going to a rather unusual preschool in DC. But when he was out on the field, he could forget everything and just have fun.
We end Part 1 with stories of Alex hanging out with his dad in the early 1990s, when his dad had shifted out of political journalism and into travel writing and the adventures they had together. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Alex Maxa's story.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom in January 2022.
This is the final installment in our four-part series with Creativity Explored, whose mission is "to provide developmentally disabled people access to the human right of creative expression." Please listen to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you haven't already.
Vincent Jackson has been making art at Creativity Explored for more than half of his life.
In this podcast, Vincent shares his life story with us. He was born and raised in the Bayview. He had drawn some here and there before a social worker told him about the non-profit in the Mission. He used to spend a lot of time at the Bayview Opera House. That was 37 years ago.
He says that CE became family to him after his mom died.
Vincent has sold a lot of his art over the years. He's done commissioned pieces for folks and fashion where he gives another artist pieces to be quilted. He was once on a speaking panel with Paul Moshammer (featured in Part 3 of this series). His favorite thing about doing art at Creativity Explored, as he puts it, is: "It's no limit here."
Late last year, Vincent went to New York City to show his art. It was his first trip there and he enjoyed it. In fact, he wanted to stay longer, although he did miss home.
Vincent loves his hometown, but isn't happy with the changes in San Francisco. He feels like people used to be nicer to one another.
He plans to keep doing art and maintains an open mind about the future.
We recorded this podcast at Creativity Explored in the Mission in January 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
This is the third in a four-part series we're doing with Creativity Explored. CE's mission is "to provide developmentally disabled people access to the human right of creative expression." Please listen to Part 1 and Part 2 and check back next week for the final episode in this series, with artist Vincent Jackson. You'll hear Vincent a little in the background as he sat in with Jeff and Paul during the recording.
Paul Moshammer is the offspring of artists.
In this episode, we get to know the director of programs at Creativity Explored. Paul was born and raised in Vienna. His dad was an architect and his mom was a gold- and silversmith. They encouraged Paul's creative energy from a young age by sending him to various art schools. Around 19, he felt he already had a strong artistic voice, something schools weren't so much looking for.
He started to travel around this time, and ended up living and working on a kibbutz in Israel. He met his wife, a Cuban-American, there during this time. After three months on the kibbutz, the young couple started to travel together. Eventually, Maria went back to her home in the US while Paul stayed on in Kenya for five weeks.
Paul arrived in San Francisco in October 1989—two days before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Maria was already here and had discovered Creativity Explored before Paul's arrival. An art teacher from earlier in his life had talked about the art of children and folks who were institutionalized and it had left a strong impression on him.
He stuck around for four hours on his first visit and ended up volunteering in early 1990. He was soon hired as a substitute teacher, and when there was an opening, Paul got the job. Vincent Jackson was at the table Paul took over, and they've been working together ever since.
We chat a bit about Florence and Elias Katz, the cofounders of Creativity Explored. Paul never met Florence, but he knew Elias well. Vincent steps in to share stories of Florence with us.
Paul skims over some of the highlights of his 30-plus years with the organization. They were in crisis, as he puts it, when the original director left. The second director rescued them, so to speak, and one of her innovations was to open the front of the 16th Street space to the public in the form of a gallery for CE artists to show and sell their work. It was an instant success.
We wrap up this episode talking about what it means for Creativity Explored to still be here, especially in its role as an art space for folks with developmental disabilities.
We recorded this podcast at Creativity Explored in the Mission in January 2022.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
This episode is the second in a series we're doing with Creativity Explored. CE's mission is "to provide developmentally disabled people access to the human right of creative expression." Check back Thursday for the next episode in this series, where we meet Studio Director Paul Moshammer.
Joseph "JD" Green lives close enough to Creativity Explored on 16th Street that he walks to get there.
JD has been with Creativity Explored since just after he graduated from high school 10 years ago. He was doing art in the building where he lives, in Hayes Valley, when someone let him know about the organization serving people with developmental disabilities.
He's been making art nearly his whole life, inspired by TV shows, animation, and cartoons. Nickelodeon and Disney characters made up the bulk of figures he drew, but his favorite to this day is Spider-Man.
JD also does social and political art. He tells us all about a collaboration he did with other Creativity Explored artists looking at Black identity through the lens of "blackface" and flipping the script on white supremacy. In 2019, he was part of a show with other Black CE artists called "Blackiful" that looked at police violence against people of color.
JD recounts his first visit to CE for us. He was in awe of the large space filled with so many people "just doing art." He immediately loved it and started meeting other artists.
Today, he still draws cartoons, but his main jam is portraits. He's drawn Michael Jackson, Prince, and David Bowie, among other singers and celebrities. He also does ceramics in addition to painting and drawing.
We end this episode with what JD loves about San Francisco and who his favorite artists are, including fellow Creativity Explored artist and JD's friend, Gerald Wiggins.
If you missed it, Part 1 with CE's Executive Director, Linda Johnson, can be found here.
We recorded this podcast at Creativity Explored in the Mission in December 2021.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
This episode is the first in a series we're doing with Creativity Explored. CE's mission is "to provide developmentally disabled people access to the human right of creative expression." Check back next week for the next episode in this series.
In her own words, Linda Johnson "always had a passion for city life."
In this podcast, the executive director of Creativity Explored shares her life story with us. She grew up in Ohio, graduated college with degrees in English and creative writing, got her master's in Iowa in social work and poetry, and moved to San Francisco in the early Nineties on a hunch.
After working at a number of different places, Linda combined her loves of social work and the visual arts with a job at Creativity Explored. Before that, she had worked at Streetside Stories, a program that helps young people tell their life stories. From there, she worked for the city of Walnut Creek, what Linda describes as "an incredibly arts-focussed city." She managed arts programs there.
She shares the story of first falling in love with Creativity Explored, many years before working there. It was back in the day when you had to be somewhere, in person, to see and buy art. She remembers the big sales that CE would host and what enriching experiences they were. While at the City of Walnut Creek, Linda told herself, 'My dream job would be executive director of [Creativity Explored].'
When its then-ED was retiring, the person doing the outreach to find a replacement just happened to live in Walnut Creek and found Linda through her work there. It was like a dream come true.
Linda tells us in her own words what Creativity Explored is and what the non-profits vision and outlook are. A big part of CE's future is moving more deeply into a "community with" type of organization and away from an "in service to" operation.
She goes on to talk about how proud she is of CE's artists. Some have been collected or gone on to show in museums and galleries around the world.
Please visit Creativity Explored's website here, where you can sign up for their newsletter and never miss any of the things they're doing. You can also donate to the non-profit there.
Check back next week for another episode in our series with Creativity Explored.
We recorded this podcast at Creativity Explored in the Mission in December 2021.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
In this episode, Kim picks up where she left off in Part 1, with her decision in 1985 to stay in town and go to college at SF State.
She was, as she says, "deeply" into politics. She attended protests at the DNC in 1984, which took place in San Francisco. She felt pressures from the Red Power Movement, and talks about how tricky it was to be just the right amount of Indian. It was the middle of the Reagan era and Kim lived in the Castro, where AIDS was ravaging the gay community and the president infamously refused to even say the name of the disease.
As far as she and anyone in her life knows, Kim has always written. After college, a friend surprised her by asking Kim to read poetry live in front of people. She’s been doing that on and off since then. Kim talks about Murdered Missing, her book of poems on the large number of Indian women who disappear, even here in The City.
She spent many years teaching Native American arts, both at SF State and CCA. She taught origami arts at elementary schools all over The City. She has also written curriculum for The Exploratorium.
Kim shares the story of becoming San Francisco's seventh poet laureate, including how and where she was when she learned the news. She says she's incredibly honored to have been bestowed with the honor. (Tongo Eisen-Martin is the current poet laureate: Part 1 / Part 2).
We end this episode with Kim talking about what it means to still be here and her outlook for her hometown: San Francisco. If you're still listening at this point, keep going to hear Kim reading a couple of poems for us.
We recorded this podcast at Kim's partner's house in The Sunnyside in December 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Kim Shuck's parents met on Market Street in the late-1950s when her dad wrestled an ocelot away from its grips on her mom.
In this podcast, the San Francisco poet laureate emerita talks about the five generations of San Franciscans on her mom's side. Her dad joined the Navy partly to get out of Oklahoma. He was "career" for a while, but then left that to become an electronics engineer in Silicon Valley.
Her San Francisco grandparents (maternal) met at the Polish Hall in the Mission. Kim spent significant time with both sets of grandparents—both her in The City and in Oklahoma.
When she was young, Kim's mom started working as a special needs para at a school near their home. She was also a founder of Noe Valley Nursery School, one of the first such co-ops in The City and also where Kim went to nursery school. Kim tells stories of the no longer extant Noe Valley Street Fair, which was a fundraiser for the school.
Kim spent most of her years growing up in the Mission, Noe Valley, and the Castro. She lists the different public schools she went to. She reminisces about growing up in the Sixties and Seventies in San Francisco, with an emphasis on the way people used to paint houses in The City in vibrant color and with many hand-painted details (see our episode with Bob "Dr. Color" Buckter--Part 1 / Part 2)
We eventually get around to stories about outdoor music shows and her memories of seeing the San Francisco Mime Troupe when she was young. We also spend a good amount of time talking about her love of roller skating (see our podcasts last week with David Miles, Jr., of the Church of 8 Wheels—Part 1 / Part 2).
Ruth Asawa was a neighbor and (probably) Kim's first art teacher at Alvarado Elementary School. Later in her life, Kim did origami and became friends with Ruth again.
Like so many guests of this show, Kim went to college at SF State. She recounts all the academic and social movements that have origins at the school, including ethnic students, free speech, and the American Indian takeover of Alcatraz.
One theme Kim keeps coming back to is the cyclical nature of things, especially pertaining to creativity and art in San Francisco. "One step forward, one step back. We're cha-cha-ing."
We end Part 1 with Kim going into her Cherokee heritage and then more of the story of her decision to stay in town and go to college at SF State. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and our last podcast of 2021.
We recorded this podcast at Kim's house in the Sunnyside in December 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, David picks up where he left off in Part 1. He had just met Rose, whom he would eventually successfully woo. It was the heyday of roller skating, with thousands of skaters flooding Golden Gate Park on the regular. But there was a large and growing number of naysayers.
Early in his San Francisco skating days, David joined Skate Patrol at the park. It's a colorful story that he tells in this episode.
David and Rose got married in 1984. They were both managers at different Kentucky Fried Chicken locations around town. The company pressured managers intensely to raise profits and lower costs, which caused David to think of another way to make a living. In 1989, Rose told him to go for it with teaching skate lessons in the park.
They had three kids during this time. David tells the story of how his daughter Melanie won the Red Bull national skating championship in 1998. The next year, his other daughter, Tiffany, overtook her sister ... by one point. His son, David, came to roller skating by accident, winning a spot in a contest in down in Venice and coming in seventh overall.
David also shares the story of how the Church of 8 Wheels went from an ad-hoc location in Golden Gate Park to a brick-and-mortar actual former church on Fillmore Street. It started out as a one-off. Then it moved to weekly. That was eight years ago. Now, it's the Church's home and HQ.
According to David, there's no Church of 8 Wheels without Burning Man. David has been going to the party in the Nevada desert for 20 years. He's got his own group there called the Long Riders. The Critical Tits contingent had asked them to essentially run security for them.
We end the podcast with David reflecting on what it means to still be here in San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen. David is a treasure.
We recorded this podcast at the Church of 8 Wheels in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
David G. Miles, Jr., is the godfather of skate in San Francisco.
In this podcast, the founder of the Church of 8 Wheels joins us to share his life story. David came from a multi-ethnic family and grew up in Kansas City. On one side, his grandparents were Irish and Indian, while his dad's family hailed from the South. His single mom, a nurse, raised David and his sisters. The Black baseball legend Satchel Paige lived in their neighborhood.
His parents had divorced when David was 6 or 7 and he wasn't close with his dad at all. It was the Sixties and he didn't care much about differences in people. His mom eventually fell in love with her high school sweetheart and moved to San Francisco to marry him when David was 20.
"Kansas City is a place you leave," according to David. And so, after a bit of urging from his mom and a brutal winter in Kansas, he saved up bus fare and got a one-way ticket out west.
The bus dropped David and the other passengers at Seventh and Market, which was quite the contrast from anything he'd seen before. His new step-dad drove him around town as a welcome to San Francisco.
The family lived in Daly City at first and David was infatuated with BART. He recounts his first visit to Golden Gate Park shortly after his arrival here in February 1979. Folks lying on the grass in front of the Conservatory of Flowers didn't impress him much. But what did catch his eye was thousands of roller skaters in the park that day. He was hooked.
Roller skating was huge in those days, but there was a growing drumbeat of outrage and bans were being threatened. It was around this time that David met Rose, whom he courted and eventually married.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the story of the founding of the Church of 8 Wheels.
We recorded this podcast at the Church of 8 Wheels in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Hear Kitten on the Keys, our guest on the show this week, play tunes on the piano at Royal Cuckoo Market!
- "Twin Peaks Theme"
- "Just Like Heaven"
- "Get Out and Get Under the Moon"
If you missed them, here's Part 1 and Part 2 with Kitten.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Kitten picks up where she left off in Part 1. In 1981, she started going to school at SF State. It was her official move to The City.
She talks about dorm life, which involved lots of music and stereo wars. She kept going to see live shows, something she began doing as a teenager when she lived in the East Bay. Kitten catalogs bands she was in during her time in college, including one with someone who became a pretty infamous rocker.
After college, Kitten floated a bit. She looks back on a comparatively inexpensive city. She lived on Ninth Avenue in the Sunset and worked at Esprit as a phone operator until the young company shut down that department. Then she started working in vintage clothing and met many artists through that.
After a short time working in the world of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" at a club in South of Market, she got a job on Divisadero at a place called The Thirdhand Store, where she stayed for 17 years. Members of The Cockettes worked there and bought stuff from the store. Kitten lived above the store.
"Kitten on the Keys" was born in the late-90s inspired by her time working at The Thirdhand Store. The shop played vintage music and she became enamored with tunes from the 1920s. A neighbor gave her some vintage sheet music, and everything aligned.
We chat about how Kitten has navigated the pandemic, which for a long time, meant no live performances. And we end the podcast with her response to the idea of what it means to still be here in San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1, definitely go back and check that out to hear all about Kitten's parents and her early life.
Follow Kitten on Twitter, Instagram, or her website, and book her for your next event! She'll be playing at The Rite Spot next Tuesday, Dec. 14.
We recorded this podcast at Royal Cuckoo Market in the Mission District in December 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Kitten on the Keys's musician dad was born with crossed-eyes.
In this podcast, Kitten, a musician in her own right, traces her story back to her parents. Both were born and raised in southeastern Missouri. Her dad made his way out as a traveling musician when he was 14. Her mom took a job after college in Washington, DC.
Eventually, the two made their ways back to their shared hometown: East Prairie, MO. They got married and came to the Bay Area because her dad wanted to become a music teacher. Then they moved to Lafayette, where Kitten (née Suzanne) was born. She says her dad worked hard during the week and then gigged hard on the weekends. "He was always gone."
Thanks mostly to her mom, Kitten grew up singing in the Lutheran church. In her teen years, she went with the church on several trips to Mexico. She shares a pretty out-there story from those journeys south.
She was in a Christian dance troupe called "The Earthen Angels." But the group eventually got shut down because, with the A/C in the church cranked, their leotards were allegedly too revealing.
Kitten and her siblings all took music lessons, but she says she was never good at any instruments when she was young. In fact, she says, she's shocked that she's a musician today. Once she able to start choosing her own music (you gotta hear a great story about a switcheroo involving "Bohemian Rhapsody"), she enjoyed playing.
We end Part 1 with Kitten sharing stories of her earliest and fondest memories of visiting San Francisco, including taking classes at ACT and meeting all sort of punk kids and seeing some legendary bands.
Don't miss Part 2, which drops this Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
We recorded this podcast at Royal Cuckoo Market in the Mission District in December 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Matt picks up where he left off in Part 1. He talks about places in the US that his family traveled before Matt went to college in Santa Cruz. He shares what went into his decision to stay close to home for school. He graduated in five years and stayed one extra because he didn't want to leave.
Then he came back to what is essentially his hometown: San Francisco. His first place was at the top of Telegraph Hill and he loved living in North Beach. He worked in catering, and despite the recession that hit in 2008, never lost his job.
Matt still loves to travel, but like our host Jeff, he always loves coming home to San Francisco. He tells us about jobs he's had since his return to living here, including at the Edgewood Center for Children and Families. After Edgewood, Matt started working for Tonic Nightlife Group, which owns a few bars here in The City.
From here, we go on a sidetrack about what being from here means to Matt. He talks about his never-ending appreciation for all the sites and attractions in The City.
Hosting pub quizzes started for Matt at Tonic Bar in 2014. He shares that story for us. Matt wrote the San Francisco trivia we read and guests competed in at our first ever pub quiz. That was at "We're Still Here" back in September.
Pub quizzes went virtual when the pandemic began, and they remain online (and in person) today.
We end the podcast with Matt's response to our Season 4 theme: We're still here.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to Matt talk about his ancestors and his early life.
We recorded this podcast at Soda Popinski's on Nob Hill in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
One side of Matt Sterling's lineage is a big, Irish Catholic family.
In this podcast, the bartender and pub quiz host delves into his family's history in San Francisco. Three generations ago, great-grandparents came here from Ireland, established their roots, and had kids. Matt's maternal grandma was one of them.
She grew up in Ingleside and raised seven kids of her own, including Matt's mom. Matt says that on his mom's side, he's got 23 cousins and he knows them all pretty well. Through his mom and his aunts and uncles, Matt shares stories from the neighborhood back in the 1960s. He describes Thanksgiving dinners, first at his grandmother's house and then at his own home, where somewhere around 50 family guests showed up.
Matt's dad came to the US from the Philippines when he was 22. He got married and had three kids, but that marriage ended in divorce. Then Matt's parents met when they both worked for the SFPD. His dad was an officer and his mom worked a desk job. The couple had Matt and his sister for a total of five kids.
His dad worked many different beats around The City in the thirty-plus years he worked as a cop. As his family started to grow with the arrival of Matt and his sister, his dad found a larger home in Daly City. Matt tells us some of his earliest memories, including going to Catholic school in South San Francisco and later, Sacred Heart in SF. He ran cross country, which helped him get to know San Francisco really well.
Matt ends Part 1 talking about various excursions in The City that sealed the fate of his moving here for him. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Matt Sterling's life story.
We recorded this podcast at Soda Popinski's on Nob Hill in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Shizue picks up where she left off in Part 1. Her paternal grandmother, Shige, had just located her husband in Stockton. Shizue goes into more depth about her grandmother's life.
Her dad, Barry, grew up in Stockton and went to UC Berkeley. He was set to graduate in June 1942. But then Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941. The order to "relocate" Japanese-Americans to internment camps was issued in February 1942. Her mom's family had been in camp in Arizona.
At this point in the conversation, we springboard to a larger, broader talk about the dominant, northern European culture in this country and what it's like not to be part of it.
Shizue worked for many years at the J. Walter Thompson office in San Francisco. At first a fine arts student, she switched to commercial art at the Academy of Art here in The City and got the job in advertising. She describes a white, male-dominated work culture and how she navigated that.
We rewind to talk about Shizue's early life. Her parents met shortly after WWII, when Japanese-Americans who had been forced into internment camps were now free. Her dad joined the Army and so the family moved around. Shizue was born in Baltimore. Around the time she was 12, they moved back to California and eventually up from the Santa Clara Valley to San Francisco, where Shizue went to high school.
She describes being a shy, bookworm-ish kid who strove to fit into the "model minority" demographic. That ended when she was a teenager and had an existential crisis.
After her work in advertising, she ended up doing HIV prevention outreach to folks living in subsidized public housing. It was through this work that Shizue started to turn her attention toward people of color. She also started writing poetry.
We end the episode with Shizue's thoughts on our theme this this season: "We're still here."
Shizue's personal site is https://www.shizueseigel.com/.
Her creative writing for people of color website is https://www.writenowsf.com/.
We recorded this podcast at Shizue's apartment in the Outer Richmond in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This podcast is almost totally about Shizue Seigel's ancestors.
In the episode, the poet and author digs deep into her family's history, which goes back to Japan just two generations ago. Sakuichi Tsutsumi and Umematsu Yokote Tsutsumi were from Kyushu, a large island in the south of Japan. Irene Yoshiko Tsutsumi Saiki, Shizue's mom, was born in Hawaii. Her family moved there to work on sugar plantations, but the conditions were brutal and they weren't able to save money thanks to the sugar companies' "company store" operations. Also, conditions in the cane fields were dangerous. The family went back to Japan.
Sakuichi moved to San Luis Obispo on the central coast of California. He and his cousins bought some land and used their knowledge of irrigation to help them grow produce. Thanks to an oil boom in the area, the town of San Luis was growing and its population needed vegetables. Now successful, it was time to send for his wife back in Japan.
Shizue shares the incredible story of finding the tiny mountain village and home where Sakuichi's family lived. It's one of those "you have to hear to believe" tales.
Shizue's mom, Irene, was born in 1920. Shizue shares many stories of her mother's family and the Japanese community in and around San Luis Obispo where she mostly grew up, notably before World War II.
Her dad's family moved from Hiroshima to Hawaii with his two older brothers. Life was tough there for them as well, and so it was decided that her grandfather, Yasaburo, would go ahead to California while her grandmother, Shige Matsuoka, took their children back to Japan. Shige waited for two years with no word back from the US. She left her two kids with in-laws and decided to come over to track her husband down. Her journey east is another amazing tale you just have to hear.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 and the continuation of Shizue's life history.
We recorded this podcast in Shizue's Outer Richmond apartment in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Andrew picks up where he left off in Part 1. He starts with the different bands and music projects he took part in during high school. He got a guitar and started writing solo songs when he was 16.
Andrew shares the story of how he got his stage name. (Surprise! Andrew St. James isn't his real name.) It involves being totally smitten with a woman way, way older than he was at the time.
After high school, he moved to Boston to go to Berklee School of Music. The twist—he got in on the wrong instrument. Turns out, he didn't dig college life too much. He had just released a record, Doldrums, and it got wide critical praise. He went to New York to play a show and was immediately awestruck by the city. It all led to Andrew quitting college and recording another album: The Shakes.
In 2014, The Killers' manager called him and had him do a residency in North Beach. But San Francisco had changed so much in his short absence that Andrew moved to LA, a town that had been luring him. It turned out to be a wild but pretty brief stay, as the pull of San Francisco and family brought him back.
Once he returned to The City, Andrew started playing with a friend and touring. He hooked up with a producer to start putting on shows at Amnesia, and with that, the Fast Times Presents series was born. For Andrew, the aim was to bring together San Francisco's many segregated music cliques. He's the first to admit the messiness of the music events. They eventually relocated to The Chapel to accommodate a bigger audience, but then the pandemic hit and Andrew took his show to the streets, literally.
Starting in September this year, Fast Times Presents events have moved to Make-Out Room. The next show is tonight (Nov. 18).
We end this podcast with Andrew reflecting on our Season 4 theme: We're still here.
We recorded this podcast at Hyde Street Studios in the Tenderloin in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Andrew St. James's birth mom was a tour caterer for the Rolling Stones.
In this episode, the musician traces his lineage back to his being adopted by a young San Francisco couple. Carol moved to San Francisco in 1971. She worked at the Gap and what used to be Live 105 and KMEL. Nathan was born in Brooklyn to Holocaust survivor parents. After his New York marriage fizzled, he hopped on a motorcycle and rode to San Francisco in 1978. Nathan and some friends opened the original Captain Video stores. The two met when Nathan went to buy radio advertising from Carol.
The couple lived in Glen Park when they adopted Andrew, then they all moved to the Sunset District, where Andrew was raised. Andrew shares early memories from both neighborhoods.
He sang in the San Francisco Boys Choir for a number of years before getting jaded at a young age. He decided to branch out more on his own, and so he bought an organ. He soon began playing rock music with friends roughly his age—12.
Andrew got into Urban High School, which he shares the background and philosophy of for us. Andrew says that by the time he entered high school, in the late-2000s, that philosophy had more or less gone by the wayside.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Andrew's life story.
Shout out to Ashley Graham for connecting us with Andrew.
We recorded this podcast at Hyde Street Studios in the Tenderloin in November 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We start with the honeymoon, time away from The City. Jeff and Erin spent two weeks in northern New Mexico, bouncing around between Taos, Santa Fe, and the small town of Dixon (about halfway between Taos and Santa Fe), where old friends of Jeff have some land with a house, a casita, a tiny house, a large garden, and some chickens.
Then we back up to start chronicling Thursday, October 14, 2021. Jeff's wedding day started with some rather incredible news: Storied: San Francisco won Best Podcast in 48 Hills/SF Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay 2021!!!
The whole point of our recording us talking about the wedding is that we felt it needed to be memorialized. Yes, it was my wedding ... but I have no problem saying that it was fucking epic.
Please listen to the podcast for details of the day, but here, shout-outs are in order. As you'll see, many of the folks instrumental in making the day what it was have been on the podcast. Some will be soon. Here they are:
- Olivia Andreani: Wedding Director
- Belen: Olivia's Assistant
- Chloe Jackman (Part 1 / Part 2): Photographer
- Michaela: Photography Assistant
- Julie Dy: Makeup
- Gillian Fitzgerald (Part 1 / Part 2): Co-owner of Casements Bar
- Shawn: Co-owner of Casements Bar
- Aireene Espiritu (Part 1 / Part 2): Ceremony music
- Angela Tabora (Part 1 / Part 2): Officiant
- Alex: Owner of Gillibus
- Debbie and Paul: Owners of Royal Cuckoo
- Chris and Levay (Part 1 / Part 2): Amazing humans who are also musicians
- MJ's Brass Boppers: Second Line Brass Band
- Kevin Cline (Part 1 / Part 2) (and the amazing Front Porch/Rock Bar staff): Owner of Front Porch + Rock Bar
- Big Russ + CJ Flash: Dance Party DJs
It takes a village, y'all.
Check back next week for our first storyteller in almost two months: musician Andrew St. James!
We recorded this podcast at Shovels Cocktail and Whiskey Bar in the Tenderloin in November 2021.
Photo by Allison Tom
In this podcast, Yeva picks up where she left off in Part 1. She backs up from her time in Brazil to tell us about peace camps she went to as a kid, and how that took her to places like Tanzania. As the kids who went the camps got older, they started having reunions they dubbed "seminar camps." As a teen, Yeva went to one such reunion the French Alps. Years later, as a college student in Brazil, she was on staff as a seminar camp, coming full circle.
Back in Rhode Island, she went straight into medical school. Returned from her time abroad as a young adult, Yeva noted the material abundance found in US versus a place like Brazil. She says she almost quit med school because it was so intense, but she ended up sticking with it. Once her education really ramped up, things like writing for the newspaper and playing flute fell by the wayside.
Yeva explains that it was during her time in med school that HIV/AIDS started becoming known. But that wasn't necessarily what brought her west to San Francisco. She cites a spring break trip to The City while she was still in med school that sealed the deal for her—that, a brush with Armistead Maupin, and getting matched with a program at San Francisco General Hospital in family medicine serving underserved populations.
Just before her move here in 1990, she came out to help with Loma Prieta earthquake recovery efforts. She did her training, met a partner, had kids, and has worked a lot since her move. Yeva also discovered poetry and shares the story of how that happened.
We end this episode with Yeva's thoughts on San Francisco today as well as what could be in store for The City's future. And then she reads one of her poems: "Incantation for Black Lives to Remain in Focus After the Outrage Fades."
We recorded this podcast at Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park in September 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Yeva Johnson was born in Detroit by necessity.
In this podcast, we welcome Yeva back to the show. We first met her back in 2018 at Working With Death, the show we did that year with Reimagine End of Life.
Her family moved from Michigan to Washington, DC, when Yeva was young. She often joined her siblings and parents at various marches in the capital city—for the ERA, peace marches, etc.
As a student, Yeva liked to read. She talks about going to DC museums and the Library of Congress ("They had every book—almost!") when she was young. Her parents moved her to a new school, and so she had to adjust to a new environment and make new friends.
Music has always been a big part of Yeva's life. She has been playing the piano since she was five and the flute since she was in fourth grade. When she was young, she went to several jazz festivals in the DC area with her mom. She kept playing flute throughout her time in school and in fact, she still plays today.
She went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she immediately got into their medical program. In her third year of college, she spent time in Brazil, which we wrap this episode with.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Yeva's life story, including her move to San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast in the Shakespeare Garden at Golden Gate Park in September 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Bishop Megan talks about their trans identity. Through popular culture and with age, they knew they were queer around the time they went to college. Eventually, as the world and language evolved, "trans" became what they identify with.
One of their children is also trans, and Bishop Megan shares their perspective of what it's like to parent the kid.
Then they us about life after college. Deciding to pursue religious studies wasn't so obvious, as churches at that time refused to ordain LGBTQ people. They ended up at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley. Within the first year there, they started working with hungry and homeless folks on Polk Street in The City.
We pivot to the story of meeting their wife. It involves therapy homework and falling off a curb.
Needless to say, the two hit it off. Because they wanted to adopt children, they moved to the Sunset to a place with multiple bedrooms. They continue living there with their family today.
Next, Bishop Megan discusses the arduous process of becoming a bishop in the Lutheran Church. If you missed it, Megan is the first trans bishop of a major U.S. church.
We end this podcast with Megan talking about the current state of things in San Francisco as well as their vision for the next phase here in The City.
If you missed Part 1, please go back to hear the story of Bishop Megan's early life and their ancestors.
We recorded this podcast at Harvey's in the Castro in August 2021.
Photo by Vince Donovan
The Rev. Dr. Bishop Megan Rohrer's ancestors must've liked the cold.
In this podcast, Bishop Megan traces their South Dakota family lineage back to Switzerland, Germany, and Norway. In the new country, they lived in barns and farmed the land. Their great-grandmother carried a bucket of lard with a piece of bread in it when she went to school. Eventually, their family survived the Depression.
They discuss the culture in South Dakota as being one where grudges can't be held long. As they put it, "Your neighbor might be the one to pick you up when your car runs off the road and into a ditch."
Their mom grew up in a small town in the state and moved to Sioux Falls, where their dad grew up. Dad, a veteran, eventually turned to alcohol. Things got so bad that his restraining order meant he had to move out of state. He chose California—Visalia specifically.
On a visit to see their dad, Bishop Megan learned of some half-siblings in California. They also have a full brother and half-sister from back in South Dakota.
When it comes to growing up in Sioux Falls, Bishop Megan says the Eastern South Dakota town is more diverse than you might think. They go on to explain the politics and economics of the place, and point to the reason many of us might already know of the town. We also talk about the weather there.
After graduating from high school, they moved onto to the college campus in town to work there. Through that job, Bishop Megan got free tuition to college, which they finished in three years.
We end Part 1 with Megan's experiences following the death of Matthew Shepard, something that eventually led to their going to religious school.
Check back Thursday for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast at Harvey's in the Castro in August 2021.
Photo by Vince Donovan
In this podcast, Mike picks up where he left off in Part 1. He tells us about a comedy class he took at SF State that had a pretty profound effect on him.
From there, the conversation turns to how Mike discovered that he's funny. He shares the story of a secret show he put on for fellow college students that you just have to hear.
Around this time, Mike started doing comedy at Mutiny Radio (Pam Benjamin). Then he collaborated with Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails ("Joe and Jimmie") on a project that ended up being the movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
Through that, Mike met Joe's dad, David, author of Season of the Witch. David was hosting an event and invited Mike to do political comedy there. Mike says this was when his loves of comedy, politics, and movie-making all came together.
The success of Last Black Man, after five years of production, inspired Mike to write his own stories. He talks about the evolution of his show Rent Check Series. A preview is up on Youtube now, and the rest of the series drops this fall.
We end this episode with Mike's thoughts and feelings about still being here.
Mike will be part of the comedy lineup at our live event (!!!) next Thursday, Sept. 9, at Casements Bar in the Mission. We hope you can make it. We'd sure love to see your faces.
Event info here.
We recorded this podcast in Mike's home in August 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Mike Evans, Jr., is a funny guy.
In this podcast, the young comedian traces his family history back to his parents, who were both born in San Francisco and met here. They raised Mike and his two older sisters in Diamond Heights as long as they could before moving to Vallejo for more space. But the family still commuted back to work in The City and brought their young son with them to go to school here.
Mike stayed in San Francisco public schools as long as he could. When his cover of not living in The City was blown, his parents got him into Leadership High School—a charter school focused on social justice.
He shares the experience of being young and going through a racial identity crisis around how he talks. But talking ended up being central to Mike's life. He wound up on the speech and debate teams at SF State.
Mike talks about various sports he played—baseball, football, and basketball—and how he kept up with baseball to impress a girl he was crushing on.
We end Part 1 talking about how Mike got started "performing," something else he owes to his parents.
Mike will be one of the comedians at our live event next week: We're Still Here. Details coming soon.
Please join us for Part 2 with Mike Evans, Jr., this Thursday. Shout out to Larry Dorsey, Jr. (Part 1 / Part 2), for connecting us with Mike.
We recorded this podcast in Mike's home in August 2021.
In this episode, Midgett picks up where she left off in Part 1. She had just escaped an abusive relationship out east and decided to make her way to San Francisco.
One of her brothers was in the Navy and already in the Bay Area. Another had just moved out here, and so Midgett had people already in place. Her mom had left an apartment on Jones Street in The City that she was able to move into with her two kids. It was 1974 and the women's movement was well under way.
She met Roma Guy and got involved with opening the Women's Building, among other things LGBTQ and women's rights activists were engaged in at the time. It was there that Midgett started doing her workshops.
We rewind a little to discuss how Midgett got started teaching. It began with her agreeing to serve on a school board, then she got her daughter into that school, and others recognized how good she was with kids and suggested she teach. Her first job in San Francisco was at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center. She also taught fifth graders in after-school programs.
She retired at 70 in the face of petitions that she stay on. She went back as a substitute regardless. She's currently working with the Kai Ming Head Start program.
These days, Midgett is launching a subscription service to publish writings based on the workshops she did at the Women's Building for years. The topics include: parenting, friendships, relationships, sensuality, sexuality, and aging. Please go to her site, Midgett's Reading Room, and consider subscribing.
We end the episode with Midgett talking about what it means for an 85-year-old to still be here.
We recorded this podcast at Midgett's home in Bernal Heights in August 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ed note: I was off-mic for this one, so my part is a little ... quieter. I hope that doesn't take away from Midgett's incredible life story. -- Jeff
In this podcast, the 85-year-old ex-school teacher shares the story of her life with us. It starts in the British West Indies, where Midgett's mom was born. That family moved to Boston, where her mom met her dad. Midgett was the only girl in a family otherwise full of boys. Her mom was a strong woman, but, Midgett feels, overly protective. And so she spent a lot of time with "auntie."
She shares stories of her first sexual encounters, her lesbianism another source of strain in her relationship with her mom. After high school, her aunt convinced her to join the U.S. Army. It was there that her preferred name emerged—Midgett. She shares stories from her time as a young, Black lesbian in the service, including her first encounter with prejudice.
After a little bit of partying in New York City, the Army sent Midgett to Germany. It was her first time overseas, and through some experiences there, she came to see how good people have things here in the U.S.
In the early '60s, Midgett got back to the States and out of the Army. She wanted kids and made that happen. She and the father of her son moved around a bit, then she went out on her own. She married another man and had a daughter, but that didn't work out either. One of her brothers lived in San Francisco, and Midgett saw a way out.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the story of Midgett's move to The City. In the meantime, check out her site, Midgett's Reading Room, and subscribe.
We recorded this podcast in Midgett's home in Bernal Heights on her birthday in August 2021. Shout out to JoJo Depakakibo (Part 1 / Part 2) for connect us with Midgett.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1, you heard about Stuart Schuffman’s ancestors and his life up to the point when he moved to San Francisco. Now, in Part 2, Stuart picks up where he left off, chronicling jobs, zines, TV shows, books, and other stuff he’s started from the ground-up.
He ends with his vision for San Francisco post-pandemic.
- Broke-Ass Stuart's Goddam Website
- Broke-Ass Stuart's Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco
- When the Lights Go Up in The City
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Let's try this again.
Back in Season 1, we met our friend Stuart Schuffman, aka, Broke-Ass Stuart, for a recording at The Willows. We have to admit: What we did for the podcast back then is much different than what we do now. Let's just say that the episode is more about Stuart's whacky San Francisco stories than about his total being.
Fast-forward to this summer, and we sat down with this affable SF character at The Wooden Nickel to hear his life story.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and more from Broke-Ass Stuart.
We recorded this podcast at The Wooden Nickel in July 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Marcy picks up where she left off in Part 1. She came out to friends on a walk across the country, but then, when she returned to California, had to go through that process again with her parents. Turns out her mother had "met someone" too. Her dad didn't take the news so well.
Marcy made the move to San Francisco in 1994. She talks about what we now call the LGBTQ community in the Mission back then, and how special a time it was.
She left for the East Coast, where she lived briefly. But, because it was a much different place back then, was easily able to move back to The City.
Marcy ended up directing the Eat Real Food Festival in Oakland for a while, as well as other food and agriculture gigs. Then she ended up at CUESA, which runs the farmer's markets at the Ferry Building here in San Francisco. It was there that Marcy began to work on establishing "third places," which start with food and agriculture but go beyond that to create full experiences that are memorable and important. She levied her work with CUESA to get involved at Pier 70.
Shortly after joining Pier 70, lockdown happened. But Marcy is excited to be with them nonetheless.
As she talks about in the podcast, Pier 70 is a project that honors San Francisco's industrial and maritime history while also creating spaces for artists and makers and looking toward a more inclusive future.
We end the podcast with Marcy talking about the potential for what's next here in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Pier 70 in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The California Central Valley and its agriculture aren't too far from the Bay Area. But, as Marcy Coburn knows well, they're worlds apart.
Today, Marcy is the creative director at San Francisco's Pier 70, a mixed-use development just south of Oracle Park. Her mom's family moved west from Oklahoma and her dad migrated to California from his childhood home in Central Florida. The two met at Cal Poly Pomona near LA and moved to Visalia to raise a family.
Her folks split up and Marcy lived with her mom, who relocated to Stockton when Marcy was 13. She had dabbled in neon in punk before the move, but the kids in her hometown weren't ready for that. Stockton proved to be a better fit for the teenager.
Once they were 16, she and her friends started taking car trips to Berkeley and San Francisco. But Marcy's move to The City took quite a detour first.
She and a friend took a bus to New York City and walked across the country on a "peace walk" in solidarity with American Indians whose lands were being used for nuclear testing. That lasted nine months and ended with them at a test site outside of Las Vegas on Shoshone land.
It was on that walk that Marcy came out.
Please check back Thursday for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast in a construction trailer at Pier 70 in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Khafre picks up where he left off in Part 1, with the changes he underwent after taking part in the 2003 protest against the Iraq War in San Francisco. He was rapping with Richie Cunning and later with a group called B-Pos. He was also putting on shows and touring the country.
Khafre talks about the systemic racism coupled with capitalism that he experienced negatively when trying to do hip hop shows. It manifested in places like higher insurance rates based solely on the genre of music.
He went to City College for a handful of years and then to Mendocino Junior College and studied psychology. He also worked at some group homes up north teaching kids how to make hip hop.
After spending a few years there, Khafre returned to The City and got a job at Greenpeace, which put him on the streets of San Francisco raising money for the organization. He became the director of grassroots fundraising there. After a few years of that, in 2013, he married his love of education, hip hop, and his new experiences of canvassing and fundraising, and launched Hip Hop for Change.
The spot on KPOO started with Khafre going on a program there to advertise a show he was putting on. Hip Hop for Change on the radio evolved from there.
The non-profit exists to take back control over the genre from corporations. Its grassroots fundraising and work in the community to counter white supremacy has been going for more than eight years. Please visit their website and consider a donation.
Khafre ends the podcast with thoughts about surviving and coming out of the pandemic and a plea to support smaller, less well-known POC groups who need money.
We recorded this podcast at the Hip Hop for Change offices in Oakland in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Khafre Jay found his power through hip hop.
In this podcast, the founder and executive director of Hip Hop for Change shares his life story. His parents met in the Bayview when they were kids. They got together around age 11 or so and have been with each other since. Khafre tries to imagine what his parents went through as a young Black couple struggling to survive and raise a family in San Francisco.
Owing to his dad's being a singer and actor, Khafre got started singing in choir at a young age. In his teen years, he was influenced by hip hop artists who were getting bigger and bigger, including some local stars like E-40. He says he saw those artists taking their own power from a broken system.
After getting into trouble while at a public high school, Khafre moved to School of the Arts, then located on the campus at SF State. He met other artists and started to get inspired. He also taught the children of ESL students around this time.
Then, at an Iraq War protest in 2003, along with several other folks, Khafre got beat up by police. This incident sparked the activist in him, something that continues to this day.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Khafre's life story.
We recorded this podcast at the Hip Hop for Change offices in Oakland in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The story of Gus' Discount Tackle begins with skiing in the Alps.
In this podcast, Stephanie Scott, the current owner, shares with us the story of her life. Her dad, Gus, escaped his home in Austria when the Nazis began persecuting Jews. He arrived in New York but went west for a restaurant bussing job in San Francisco.
Gus met his wife (Stephanie's mom) in The City. She was a Sorbonne-educated lab doctor who immigrated here from Russia.
Gus opened a general merchandise shop on Clement Street, but the predatory landlord there kept raising Gus' rent. Through a handshake-type agreement, he got the funding to buy his own place—the spot on Balboa where the shop still exists today, around 60 years later.
Stephanie grew up on 17th Avenue on the northern side of the Richmond in the 1950s and '60s. She shares impressions of what San Francisco was like back then—a busy time with Beats, hippies, free-love advocates, and LSD, none of which the more square Stephanie took part in.
She met her husband when they were both at SF State. After post-graduate opportunities fizzled out, Stephanie started working in her dad's store. The rest, as she says, is history. She's been there 45 years.
Stephanie ends the podcast reflecting on the people she's watched grow up around Gus's, the changes that the store has seen, including transitioning from general merchandise to fishing supplies, and her hopes for the next phase of the only place she's ever lived—San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Gus' Discount Tackle in the Outer Richmond in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Blue Bear Executive Director Steven Savage starts this one off telling us all about Tennessee Mowrey's step-mom.
It's a story that involves three siblings (Bonnie Hayes and two of her brothers) who showed up at the fledgling music school in 1971 when it was located on Ocean Ave. Susie, Tennessee's step-mom, knew Bonnie from both of their touring gigs (possibly a Billy Idol tour), and Bonnie brought Susie to Blue Bear.
Tennessee joins in to give a little more context to his step-mom's story. Then Steve rewinds a bit to share the story of Blue Bear's opening.
Originally started as a way to make money while the band aimed for stardom, the school saw success in the first few years, with something like 60 students enrolled. But it started to founder a bit, and Steve had left. He got a phone call asking him to come back and save the operation, and he did.
There was a sizable debt to pay off. But in 1977, they made the decision to move to Fort Mason. And with that, the school started to grow. We talk about how they went about recruiting students back then, a common practice in those days that might surprise some of you.
These days, it's mostly word-of-mouth, and to a somewhat sobering effect: 40,000 students have enrolled at Blue Bear in its 50 years. We talk about how the school has evolved its teaching philosophy, especially with the advent of completely new genres of music. And then we hear about a few standout success stories coming out of Blue Bear.
We end this podcast with Steven and Tennessee talking about what it means for Blue Bear School of Music to still be here after 50 years.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and check that out. And for the Jack Black video that Steven mentions in the recording, watch here.
We recorded this podcast at Blue Bear School of Music in Fort Mason Center for the Arts and Culture in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Steven Savage came of age in Southern California in the 1960s.
In this podcast, the executive director of Blue Bear School of Music shares his life story with us. His first instrument to play was banjo, inspired by his love of folk music. But then he discovered rock 'n' roll, and soon after that, he picked up the drums.
He went to college in Ohio, where he met people and starting playing in bands. He came back to California and made his way up to Santa Cruz, playing in various bands along the way. Next was Palo Alto, where Steven lived in a garage and continued playing music.
And then a band here in The City needed a drummer and Steven got the call. Those folks he joined up here had already decided to start a music school while they played and worked toward stardom. That school ended up being Blue Bear School of Music. It was June 1971.
Then we hear from Tennessee Mowrey, Blue Bear's current Little Bears director. Born and raised in San Francisco, Tennessee traces his story back to his parents' meeting. Raised in a musical family, he took to playing from a very young. But he didn't like lessons.
His dad and step mom enrolled Tennessee in Blue Bear. Once in these rock band classes, he started playing several different instruments, and eventually began student teaching.
Please join us Thursday for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast at Blue Bear School of Music in Fort Mason Center in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Mama C. (Nola Curtis) picks up where she left off in Part 1, talking about finding confidence and a sense of self-worth through music and family.
Papa C. (Maestro Curtis) jumps in to express his admiration for his wife. Then we throw it over to the kids.
First, introductions. Zahara (16), Nile (15), Isis (14), Kiki (13), and Phoenix (11 as of Tuesday). Nile talks about how the band evolved over time. The kids had their own band (The C-Notes) and mom and dad had a separate band. Zahara got started in music during her time at Everett Middle School. But as that faded out, she picked up instruments lying around the house and asked her siblings to join her. The C-Notes were born.
When it came time for mom and dad to join forces with the kids, Papa C. tells us that they didn't want the spotlight to ever be on just one member, stressing the importance of family and the group dynamic.
At this point in the podcast, Erin Lim (Part 1 / Part 2) of Bitch Talk Podcast takes over hosting. We start off talking about the kids' fascination with physics. They each take a turn explaining how they got interested and what application of science pertains to their individual interests.
Then Erin asks the family to talk about the judges and host of America's Got Talent, the show on which the family is currently competing.
We end the episode by talking about the family's "special sauce."
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Uncle Damien (Part 1 / Part 2)
We recorded this podcast in collaboration with Bitch Talk Podcast at the Jones United Methodist Church in the Fillmore in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The Curtis Family C-Notes' star is on the rise, y'all.
In this episode, the San Francisco family shares their story with us. We dive into Papa C.'s past in Louisiana and San Francisco. Then we learn a little about Mama C.'s time growing up on the Peninsula.
Papa C. (Maestro Curtis) can't remember when he started playing musical instruments. He was asked to perform for family members from a very young age. He owes his lifelong work ethic to his growing up, as well. He spent time between Louisiana and San Francisco, but it was out here that he got involved in martial arts and positive social change.
After getting into some trouble in his high school years, Papa C. took a scholarship to Grambling State University in Louisiana. Then he spent seven years in the Army.
Mama C. (Nola Curtis) grew up a competitive ice skater. She's Tongan and grew up in San Mateo surrounded, essentially, by so many famous professional skaters. Looking back, she enjoyed performing, but not so much competing. Her father passed away when she was 14 and one of the effects of her grief was that she stopped skating.
She turned to books, especially reading stuff that wasn't assigned at school. To help her graduate on time, she took a history of jazz course at a community college, and that's where she first heard Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Billie Holiday. That class and those performers inspired her to start singing. Soon, she was asked to start a band with some folks, but she decided lessons were the first step.
Nola met her future husband in this context.
Be sure to check back Thursday for Part 2.
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We recorded this podcast in collaboration with Bitch Talk Podcast at Jones Memorial United Methodist Church in the Fillmore in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Pam Benjamin has lived in California her entire life.
In this podcast, the Mutiny Radio DJ and comedian shares the story of her life. She was born in Livermore and raised in Danville, not fully knowing that her family was well-off because there were always richer kids around.
From there, Pam talks about her religious upbringing (a story involving an invisible cat), her eating disorder at a young age, and being a varsity cheerleader ("reverse-stalking"). Pam shares early memories of SF (somehow, a nunnery and her dad's work downtown factor in here).
She left Danville for UC San Diego, where she did lots of acid but got good grades, as she attests. Pam lived in Davis after college and taught special ed there. She and her then-husband moved back to San Diego, where Pam started a theater company. Her ex-mother-in-law convinced her to get a corporate job, which she did. But she stopped taking birth control and wrote a novel in six weeks.
Pam got a DUI, quit her corporate job, and then had people at Burning Man telling her to move to The City, which she did in 2007. Now in San Francisco and going to SF State grad school, she started doing poetry readings all over SF, and then tried comedy in 2011.
At Pirate Cat Radio in 2008, she started reading stories after Common Thread with Diamond Dave Whitaker. In 2011, after the station's manager embezzled from them and the FTC started snooping around, they changed from Pirate Cat to Mutiny. A few years later, the board that ran Mutiny Radio bailed on her, but Pam stayed on and took over.
During the pandemic (or, as she refers to it, the "PAMdemic"), she stated doing comedy shows in parklets and at Mutiny in the Mission. Pam plans to bring Mutiny's comedy festival back this October 10–16.
We end the podcast with Pam's thoughts on where San Francisco goes from here.
We recorded this podcast at Mutiny Radio in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Joey picks up where he left off in Part 1. After high school, knowing that he wanted to continue learning how to make movies, he went to SF State. And then he entered a Justin Lin video contest, and, to his surprise, was one of the finalists.
Joey tells us about a career detour that came after that: He learned about a sleep-technology course, and got a job in that industry that required tough hours (7 p.m. to 7 a.m.). In 2014, a friend told him about a video-editing job at Kink.com that he ended up getting. He was there a couple years before moving over to CBS Interactive to work on gameplay videos.
From there, we pivot to when and how Joey figured out that he loves his hometown—San Francisco.
He ends the podcast talking about making movies about the Richmond District and how he got the "Uncle Fuz" nickname.
To see Joey's photo and video love letters to San Francisco, following him on Instagram and Twitter.
We recorded this podcast at Sutro Heights Park in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
So many San Francisco born-and-raised folks' stories go way, way back. That's certainly the case for Joey Yee.
Joey begins this episode telling us about his maternal grandfather, who was from Isleton and was a pilot in World War II. After he came back from war, he met Joey's grandma, who was born and raised in SF. He charmed his future wife by giving her the biggest tomatoes she'd ever seen. Joey's grandfather wanted to put roots down, and so he bought a building in San Francisco.
His dad's dad immigrated to the US from China. Joey's parents met ice skating and dated for eight years before getting married. After living in Daly City a short time, they moved back to the family house, the one his grandfather bought on Nob Hill. Joey was born during this time.
When he was 12, the family moved to the Richmond District. Joey regrets that he didn't explore Nob Hill when they lived there, but he goes on to share his early Giants memories and describes games at Candlestick.
He tells us about the public schools he went to, eventually ending up at Washington High in the Richmond. It was there that Joey started dabbling in video classes. That's when his love of video, film, and editing began.
Join us for Part 2 on Thursday, when Joey will share stories from life after high school.
We recorded this podcast at Sutro Heights Park in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Tara picks up where she left off in Part 1, talking about how to be in the world. The thoughts are related to her time in La Cañada, California, where she finished high school and took some college courses before deciding to move back to her hometown—San Francisco.
From there, Tara discusses sentimentality and having more diverse perspectives in life and art.
Tara picks up the story of her move back to The City, which involves handing over exact change—all she had left—to the toll-taker at the Bay Bridge. She talks about jobs she had, including at Tower Records.
Then we get into her history with singing. It started back when she lived in Maine (see Part 1). She played Eva Peron in Evita in Texas when she was 12. She reflects on art, passion, limitations, and collaboration. She talks about singing in Europe before coming back to San Francisco and singing mostly jazz and American Standards.
Tara ends the podcast with her vision of what San Francisco can be as we emerge from the pandemic.
Visit Tara's website, tarademoulin.com, and follow her on Instagram @tarademoulin.
We recorded this podcast at Vesuvio Cafe in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Tara DeMoulin grew up collecting eucalyptus buttons in the Panhandle with her mom.
In this podcast, the singer/songwriter, activist, and filmmaker shares the story of her life. It starts in San Francisco in the late-1980s, travels east to Maine and New York City (where she discovered and became obsessed with Broadway), starts to circle back west with a stop in Texas before scooting over to Southern California.
In the early 2000s, after some college, Tara decided to come back to her native home in San Francisco, which we'll get more into in Part 2.
The rest of this episode includes some of Tara's thoughts on living in such wildly different places in the U.S. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Tara's life story.
We recorded this podcast at Vesuvio in June 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Jaime picks up where he left off in Part 1, describing his evolution as an artist. Like a lot of kids his age, Saturday morning cartoons were a big influence. Comics in the newspaper also played their part.
We shift back to his return to SF after high school. He worked as a screen-printer at The Color Machine and Winterland. The music venue was closed, but Jaime shares stories of playing and seeing shows at The Mab back in the day.
Jaime dives into the street art scene in The City in the '80s, which he dabbled in. He also talks about his first publishing experiences. He took a brief break from his art and left San Francisco to raise a kid and go back to college. But his friend Harvey Pekar got him back into drawing about five years later.
He shares the story of starting Corn Tortilla Press (check out their About page for all the stuff in Jaime's life we didn't have time to talk about here).
Jaime ends the podcast reflecting on what's become of the city he used to call home and what's possible for the future of San Francisco.
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We recorded this podcast at Jaime's home in Alameda in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Jaime Crespo's first drawings were made on the blank pages in a Bible.
In this podcast, the cartoonist traces his lineage back to his mom, who was born in Northern Mexico and is Yaqui/Yoeme. She came to LA with her brother in the early 20th century. When their mom got deported back to Mexico, she moved up to run a cafe in Sacrament, where she ended up meeting Jaime's dad.
But his mom took Jaime to San Francisco when her husband became abusive. The kid was 4.
They made their way back to Sacramento to live with Jaime's widowed step-grandad and his new wife, a Black couple from Louisiana. He finished school up there and shortly after that, moved back to The City instead of New York, which he and his friends had dreamed about.
In the podcast, Jaime reflects on both stints in San Francisco—when he was 4 and then again when he was around 20. He reminisces about seeing hippies on Muni, his first Giants game and seeing Willie Mays, BBQ joints and bars that are long gone, and how he was moving away from sports like baseball and football, and more toward punk rock music and art.
He shares how he got started drawing at a young age with a story that's either charming or blasphemous, depending on how you look at it.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Jaime will continue the story of his life.
Meanwhile, check out more of his art at his website: corntortillapress.com. And follow Jaime on Instagram @the_real_comixvato.
We recorded this podcast at Jaime's home in Alameda in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, H.P. picks up where he left off in Part 1. He had moved with his mom to Daly City and starts off telling a story about the Colma Target. It involves a kid he met while hanging out at Radio Shack and Walden Soft at Serramonte Mall across the freeway.
From there, we go on to talk about H.P.'s first feature-length movie, Colma: The Musical. He shares how he went about writing the story that became the movie.
Next, we discuss H.P.’s time at College of San Mateo, where he went to study film. Following up on the success of Colma, H.P.'s directorial debut came with the movie Fruit Fly.
He pivots from there to address the hate and violence that Asian folks have experienced in recent years.
Then we talk about H.P.'s music and artists he's often compared to as well as younger musicians who've told him that he influences them.
H.P. wraps things up reflecting on what his hometown, San Francisco, means to him in 2021. He ends with his personal thoughts on our theme this season: "We're still here."
We recorded this episode at Casements Bar in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
So, we're doing something a little different here.
Way, way back in Season 1, on Episode 14 (Part 1 / Part 2), we had friend of the show H.P. Mendoza on. Back then, we were all about stories, not necessarily people's stories, like we are today. And so, we asked H.P. to come back on and share his personal history with you.
He starts off with his birth (St. Luke's in the Mission) and his childhood (on La Grande Avenue in the Excelsior). Then he backs up to go into some depth about his paternal grandmother, who taught English and adored H.P., her first grandchild born in the U.S. She had a piano and that's how H.P. learned to play.
A tangent leads to H.P. talking about his love of movies from an early age. He credits his brother Joe with that, as well as H.P.'s continued interest in storytelling, video games, cartoons, and more.
H.P. shares stories from his school days. Being the first U.S.-born kid in his family, there were higher expectations placed on him. His early curiosity about kids who were different from him and his family led to some pretty funny mischief. His parents pulled him out of public school and sent him to Epiphany Catholic School.
After skipping second grade, H.P. experienced ostracism from kids older than him and kids his age. Because of this, he added one year to his age well into his twenties.
He ends Part 1 rattling off different obscure, adult-ish movies he was into as a kid.
Join us for Part 2 on Thursday, when we'll hear the rest of H.P.'s story.
We recorded this podcast at Casements Bar in the Mission in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Wanika picks up where she left off in Part 1. After high school, her band Mystic Youth became more of a full-time gig, writing music, playing shows, recording. She shares the mischievous story of how she got started playing bass. Self-taught at first, she eventually took lessons, and that made her think that music school at City College was a good idea. She came to think of herself as a songwriter around this time.
Wanika talks about the influence that Father "Blue Water" Haven had on her relationship with music, as well as others she didn't know personally who affected her.
From there, Wanika talks about the history of "Uplift," a show on KPOOthat she took over and was the DJ on for two decades. And then she tells us how her parents founded the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church.
It all started with jazz "listening clinics" in the Bayview. The small but growing group began to investigate Coltrane and the message in his music. The church was born and became part of the AOC in 1982. And Wanika decided she wanted to be active in this new church—she became a deacon.
Wanika was the Uplift DJ for 19 years. She handed the show over to her nephew as Wanika sets out to launch her own show on Coltrane Consciousness Radio (Live 365) later this summer.
She wraps up this podcast with her thoughts and wishes for the future of San Francisco.
Shout out to Rev. Arnold Townsend (Part 1 / Part 2) for introducing us to Wanika.
We recorded this podcast at St. John Coltrane AOC in May 2021.
Photography byMichelle Kilfeather
Wanika King-Stephens' life is full of music and church.
In this episode, Wanika traces her life back to her parents' move to San Francisco from Los Angeles in the 1960s with their four-month-old daughter. Her dad's dad was an evangelist in the Pentecostal Church. It was a strict upbringing where, if her father as a young man wanted to listen to so-called music of the world, country music was the only acceptable genre.
Despite that, he grew up loving jazz and, especially, John Coltrane. And he raised his own children in that light.
Wanika's little sister sings, and the two were in a band when they were younger called Mystic Youth. Wanika played bass in the group and was the band leader. They wrote their own music but were too young to play clubs at first.
Her mother sang jazz and, along with Wanika's dad, joined with Alice Coltrane to help found the Vedantic Center, which was originally in San Francisco. Around this time, the family had moved to Visitacion Valley, a diverse, lively neighborhood that Wanika describes for us. From there, she shares stories of trips around town she took as a young girl.
Wanika wraps up Part 1 talking about her high school days in The City. And after that, as she puts it, she "was jammin' pretty hard with Mystic Youth."
Join us Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Wanika's life story.
We recorded this podcast at St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in May 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. After college out east, Modesto's Tomas Moreno moved to the Bay Area. His mom is a recently retired high school teacher who taught kids with disabilities, and Tomas feels that her work instilled in him a drive to serve others. That eventually led him to Maitri.
Tomas is joined by Maitri Executive Director, Rev. Fr. Rusty Smith, to share with us the history of the nonprofit, which was founded by Issan Dorsey in the Castro in 1987. Rusty tells us how he came to work at Maitri, explaining how a big part of its mission is to serve those with HIV/AIDS who also suffer from poverty.
Rusty and Tomas talk about how Maitri has fared over the past year of the pandemic. Stories include non-volunteers like these two stepping up to facilitate and play bingo with the residents.
We end this episode with Rusty and Tomas's hopes for San Francisco as it emerges from the pandemic.
We recorded this podcast at Maitri Compassionate Care in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Maitri Compassionate Care's Executive Director, Reverend Father Rusty Smith, shares stories of his youth. His very New Mexican mom was a powerful figure in his early life, shaping the liberal world view Rusty espouses to this day. Rusty traces his military family upbringing all over the country and the world. The family eventually settled in Texas for his high school years.
After that, Rusty became a priest in the Anglican Church, given that the church allowed openly gay priests. He began his adult life in his mother's home state, doing charitable work in Albuquerque.
While living in New Mexico, Rusty and his husband noticed that San Francisco had become a second home for them. When the opening at Maitri happened, they made the move.
Then we meet Maitri's Development Director, Tomas Moreno. Tomas shares his story of growing up in the Central Valley and making his way to San Francisco.
Check back for Part 2 on Thursday, when we'll hear more of Tomas's story as well as his and Rusty's discussion of what Maitri is and what it does for the community.
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We recorded this podcast at Maitri Compassionate Care in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ed. note: As with Part 1 of Larry's episode, a reminder that we recorded under the BART tracks, so we took pauses when trains passed by overhead. We left that audio in the final edit and we hope you enjoy.
In this podcast, Larry picks up where he left off in Part 1. He talks about going to Lowell High School in The City and then Academy of Art University, where he first got to know people very unlike himself.
In his high school days, Larry had started to question things he was into as well as stereotypes of Black young men such as himself. He took some acting and movies courses at AAU and then went on to actual theater school. But Larry didn't wanna be an actor.
A chance ride one day turned out to be fortuitous. He got an in at The Punchline.
As he was coming up in comedy, as he puts it, he "disappeared from the world" to hone his craft. It was around this time that he also got an internship at KMEL.
Larry traces his activism to his time at City College. He worked with Black Lives Matter, various Black student unions around The City, fed houseless folks. He makes light of his activist work, but ties it back to his comedy. He shares stories of some of his first times on the comedy stage.
He lets us know about his 101-year plan. 2020 being 2020 threw things off a little, but thanks to his week-by-week plan, Larry was able to pivot. And he ends the podcast sharing his hopes for San Francisco to get its soul back through culture and youth and how he wants to focus on reparations.
Follow Larry on social media @larrydorseyjr
We recorded this podcast at Cayuga Park under the BART tracks in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ed. note: This one is special for a couple reasons. First, Larry blew us away with his kindness, energy, and knowledge. Also, we recorded under the BART tracks, so we took pauses when trains passed by overhead. We decided to leave that audio in the final edit because, well, it was part of the experience that day. We hope you enjoy.
Larry Dorsey, Jr.**'s parents came to the Bay Area from the South and South America.
In this podcast, the SF born-and-raised comedian and radio personality shares the story of his parents' migration to San Francisco. His dad played football in the NFL before his move west; Larry's mom, a lawyer, left her home country of Colombia because of political reasons.
They arrived in Oakland separately and met at SF State. Larry is their first-born, one of two sons. Larry has vague memories of his first years on Earth, which he shares with us. One is a pretty hilarious (and hilariously cute) playground-type story.
Larry tells us what it was like to go to a "hippy" elementary, and then contrasts that with his time at Aptos Junior High. But he also spent many school lunchtimes in the library. His curiosity and pursuit of knowledge was just getting started. He ended up at Lowell, during a time when he started getting into "a lot of trouble."
Larry wraps up Part 1 sharing the first time he got in trouble with a cop.
Join us Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of Larry Dorsey, Jr.'s story.
Related Podcast
Arthur Gaus, Part 1 and Part 2
We recorded this podcast at Cayuga Park in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Marcia Gagliardi could've ended up in LA. In fact, if it weren't for the 1994 Northridge earthquake, there might be no Tablehopper.
In this podcast, Marcia picks up where she left off in Part 1. She came back to the Bay Area and found a place in the Western Addition (where she still lives today!). She chronicles various jobs at design firms before the 2000 "dotbomb." Not long after that, she started Tablehopper.
We asked Marcia to name three of her favorite San Francisco bars or restaurants in 2006 when she launched her newsletter.
Then Marcia tells us how she got started in 2018 doing My Milligram, a media brand featuring reviews of low-dose and high-quality cannabis products made in California.
She ends the podcast with her outlook on San Francisco in the near future.
We recorded this podcast at an apartment in the Western Addition in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Marcia Gagliardi's family used to own a pizzeria and Italian deli in the Sierra foothills.
In this podcast, the Tablehopper creator and author goes a couple generations back to trace her family's story and how they ended up in Northern California. Her Italian grandparents went back to their homeland shortly before Marcia was born, but we'll get back to that.
Marcia grew up on the Peninsula, one of two daughters for the Gagliardis. She recounts what that experience was like for her, and shares the story of the time she spent in Italy during college. It was at a Christmas dinner there that she discovered just how diligently her dad had kept up their Italian customs in California.
She talks about family's move to the foothills and back and shares how she and a friend would drive up to The City and arrange deals for their high school classmates, long before the internet. Marcia ends Part 1 with the story of her year in Venice and her return home to finish college at UCLA.
Please check back Thursday for Part 2, when Marcia will tell us how she got started doing Tablehopper, and later, MyMilligram.
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We recorded this podcast at an apartment in the Western Addition in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Matt picks up where he left off in Part 1, with his involuntary foray into placing temp workers. Turns out, he loved the job.
He moved around from job to job over the next few years, but returned to thank the person who pushed him into this new career.
A trip to Paris led, in a very roundabout way, to Matt starting his own French recruiting firm. With that, he moved to Europe and lived there for the next 11 years, while keeping his place (and job) here the Bay Area.
Jumping back a bit, Matt describes meeting Sister Roma shortly after he moved up to San Francisco. Then we fast-forward to Matt's return from Paris to Glendale to help care for his ailing father. After his dad passed away and his marriage broke up, Matt moved back to The City.
After trying unsuccessfully to buy an Italian restaurant in the Castro, he and his chef partner went in search of a new place of their own. Matt closed escrow on the spot where Roma's is on March 16, 2020.* He describes how, in light of the quarantine order, he shifted his business approach—he added an Italian market to the restaurant he had already established.
Matt is quick to point out what a communal effort it was to get the place off the ground. Please visit their website for more info, including their "Roma's Drag Deliveries" on Wednesdays.
He ends this podcast looking into the future, both for his business and for San Francisco.
- the date that San Francisco's shelter-in-place order went into effect.
We recorded this podcast at Roma's Ristorante Italiano in South of Market in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Matt Leum has more friends from his school days now than he did back then.
Matt grew up in Glendale, a suburb north of LA. His family's swimming pool was the only one on that block.
His dad owned a chain of supermarkets in the greater Los Angeles area. His parents met at the flagship store of that chain back when it was just a corner market. Matt grew up the youngest of six; his younger brother died at 4.
In the podcast, he shares stories of his mom's bad-assery as we dive into her history quite a bit, including her French and Inuit parents.
After college in Santa Barbara, Matt sent an unsolicited letter to a law firm in San Francisco asking about jobs, and got offered work as a response.
Please check back Thursday for Part 2, when Matt will tell us all about opening his restaurant in The City during the pandemic.
We recorded this podcast at Roma's Ristorante Italiano in South of Market in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Morris picks up where he left off in Part 1, sharing some of the pot edibles he was making with a friend. This was back when California had legalized medicinal marijuana, but not yet recreational. And the US government, as they still do to this day, more than frowned upon even this limited use.
Morris walks us through the evolution of his business, from a medicinal marijuana cultivation and delivery company known as "San Francisco Roots" through to what SF Roots is today—an equity cannabis company based right here in The City. He tells us about San Francisco's Cannabis Equity Program, whose stated goal is to "lower barriers to cannabis licensing to those hit hardest by the War on Drugs."
We chat about how COVID has impacted the business. And then Morris ends the episode with his take on the future of San Francisco.
Related PodcastsUncle Damien, Part 1 and Part 2
We recorded this podcast at SF Roots HQ in April 2021.
Photography by MIchelle Kilfeather
Morris Kelly's great-grandfather was a sharecropper who bought his own freedom.
In this podcast, Morris, who today owns SF Roots cannabis company, shares the story of how he came to grow up in The City. He chronicles the various schools he went to, talks about Muni rides to arcades and movie theaters all over town, and car rides with his grandparents on which they'd visit non-chain stores and restaurants.
He shares stories of leaving San Francisco—to visit family in Milwaukee, or to go to Baptist conventions in the South with his grandparents—and the lessons he learned on those trips.
Uninterested in conventional high school, Morris found Urban Pioneers—an outdoor program for students that got them out backpacking and exploring various spots around California.
Morris got out of high school and, as he puts it, went on to "goof off" at City College.
Related Podcast
Ricky Rat, Part 1 and Part 2
We recorded this podcast at SF Roots HQ in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Alia picks up where she left off in Part 1, sharing stories of joining her mom on pot-brownie runs in The City in the late-'70s. She pivots from there to just a few years later, when Alia witnessed the devastation of AIDS first-hand. She also speaks of communities coming together around the epidemic to provide support for those who needed it.
We fast-forward to around 2000, when Alia began traveling in Europe for many years. While walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, she began writing. She started a writing program but left that to spend some time in Cuba and later, different parts of South America.
She left her travels when her mom got ill. Spending time with her and recording would eventually lead to Alia's book, Home Baked, which she briefly discussed in Part 1 and which comes out on paperback next week. Look for it at your favorite local bookstore.
Alia shares the story of her and Kevin Hunsanger's (Season 2, Episode 10—links below) wedding, which is quite the San Francisco tale.
We end the podcast with Alia's thoughts on what's next for her hometown of San Francisco.
Related Podcasts
Kevin Hunsanger Part 1 and Part 2
We recorded this podcast in Alia's backyard in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It isn't every episode that we get to learn more about the main character in a book.
First of all, if you haven't already read Home Baked, Alia Volz's autobiography about her mom, her dad, and the pot brownie business they had in San Francisco in the 1970s, please do.
In this podcast, Alia, who was born and raised amid that booming business four decades ago, dives deeper into her parents' stories, both individually and as a couple. As she does in her book, she sets the stage for her eventual arrival, back when her parents lived and cooked baked goods in a warehouse in the Mission.
And then Alia wraps up Part 1 with the story of her birth.
Related Podcast
Alan Kaufman Part 1 and Part 2
We recorded this podcast outside of Alia's home in the Inner Richmond in April 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This one's pretty much all about San Francisco politics 20 years ago.
Matt talks about how it was that he ended up running for political office to begin with. He walks us through Tom Ammiano's write-in campaign for mayor in 1999 and Matt's eventual ascension to the Board of Supervisors the next year.
What brought him into my sphere was Matt's run for mayor in 2003 against Willie Brown heir-apparent, Gavin Newsom.
Other topics discussed in the podcast include:
- Matt's decision not to run for re-election to the Board of Supervisors
- his 2008 run for VP with Ralph Nader
- how he got started doing collage art
We end with Matt's thoughts and hopes for what comes next in San Francisco.
Related Podcast
Hillary Ronen, Part 1 / Part 2
We recorded this podcast over Zoom in March 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Matt Gonzalez's life could've turned out very different.
Born in McAllen, Texas, and raised there and across the river in Reynoso, Tamaulipas (Mexico), Matt recalls spending a lot of time camping and playing football when he was a kid. His family moved around a bit—Louisville, Baltimore, New Orleans—before returning to South Texas, where Matt finished school and played more football. The sport eventually took a back seat to debate class, and he decided to go to college at Columbia in New York City.
Matt talks about arriving wide-eyed in New York. He spent four years getting his undergrad, with summers in Maine and Minnesota leading camping expeditions. Then, he decided to come to California for law school.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Matt will share more memories from his roughly 30 years in San Francisco, which he begins to touch on here.
We recorded this podcast over Zoom in March 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Arthur Gaus came of age in the Golden Era of comedy in San Francisco.
Picking up where he left off in Part 1, Arthur sets the stage for his beginnings doing stand-up by describing the comedy scene in The City in the 1980s. He rattles off a list of funny folks who got their start here—Will Durst, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Greg Proops—and talks about comedy venues in San Francisco, some of which still exist today.
Arthur got started at open-mic nights around town and in Santa Cruz, where he ended up going to college. He got his SF break at Cobb's, but he extols the virtues of The Punchline, especially Sunday nights, where, in the before-times, the club features up to 10 local comedians.
He tells us about his comedy album, Nice Jokes for Smart People, which you can find on Spotify, Pandora, and other streaming services.
Arthur ends this podcast reflecting on changes in The City in last couple decades, culminating with where we are today.
We recorded this podcast over ZenCastr in March 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Arthur Gaus grew up on a famous block in The City.
In this podcast, the native San Francisco comedian traces his story back to his parents' choice to buy a house on Ashbury just off Haight Street in the late-'70s. Arthur shares stories of growing up in his family's Victorian and hanging out on Haight Street, in Golden Gate Park (despite how dangerous everyone said it was back then), and in his backyard.
His grade school was near the gate to Chinatown, a neighborhood he and his friends spent a lot of time exploring.
Arthur talks about his high school years and ends the podcast with a funny story about being one of the the only boys in a play at a girls' school.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when we'll hear all about how Arthur Gaus got started doing comedy.
Related Podcast
Dara Kosberg Part 1
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Renel grew up going to Giants games at Candlestick Park.
So when the team reached out to her in 1999 about the possibility of becoming the PA announcer in their brand-new stadium, she immediately thought of her family and the long line of baseball fans she's a part of.
Renel shares her experience auditioning for the job at Candlestick in November 1999 and takes us through her journey as she approaches her 22nd year in the PA booth. We do a lightning round of Giants World Series experiences and move on to talk about the pandemic and the movement for racial, social, and economic justice.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Renel has always enjoyed entertaining people.
Born in Oakland and raised there, in Berkeley, and in Richmond, Renel suffered when her family moved to Menlo Park on the Peninsula.
She went to Mills for college, where she studied classical voice and sang in a band with some guys who went to UC Berkeley. After college, she got an entry-level job at KCBS radio and worked her way to writing copy for on-air talent. Four years later, she got a sales job at KFRC, but ended up running the station's public affairs department, an opportunity that got Renel on the air while filling in for a colleague out on maternity leave.
She later got her own show on the station--Bayview: A Look at the Issues and Concerns of the Bay Area Black Community. That lead to Renel's first music set: She debuted as "Rockin' Renel" at midnight on a Friday in 1985.
After a format change at KFRC, she got in at KMEL. Renel was with KMEL when it became one of the first stations in the country to play hip-hop. She eventually got the morning show on the station, the job she held until helping to launch 98.1 KISS FM (now "The Breeze" ... ya keeping up?).
And then ... The San Francisco Giants came a-knockin'.
Tune in Thursday for Part 2 and the continuation of this amazing woman's journey.
Related Podcast: Fellow Bay Area radio personality Dayna Keyes: Part 1 and Part 2
We recorded this episode over Zoom in March 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
A couple days ago on this show, Chronicle journalist Kevin Fagan told you all about his latest project: the untold story of the Doodler, a new documentary podcast series from Ugly Duckling Films.
On his show, Kevin dives into the archive of his paper and the San Francisco Police Department in search of a serial killer known for drawing portraits of his victims. This killer, known as the Doodler, targeted his attacks against gay men in the Bay Area between 1974 and 1975.
He brutally beat and murdered at least five gay men and got away with it due to little evidence and lack of attention from the media and the police at the time.
SFPD re-opened the case in 2018 and it's still ongoing today. Police believe the Doodler is still alive and have released an age-progressed sketch of the suspect, which you can see in the image the accompanies this podcast.
Follow this new hunt for a forgotten serial killer and subscribe to The Doodler on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Take care, and we’ll see ya here on Storied: San Francisco next week.
Welcome to the soft launch of Storied: San Francisco, Season 4!
We love catching up with friends and past guests of the show. For Kevin Fagan (S1E13), we were kinda blown away by what he's been up to, though we probably shouldn't be surprised.
In San Francisco in 1974 and '75, there was a serial killer on the loose. His MO was to sketch or doodle his victims in public—in cafes, bars, and the like. The drawings then served as an "in" with his targets. Police believe he killed at least five men in the spree, with the potential for more.
Kevin shares with us how he came to the story of the Doodler, set to debut as an eight-part serial podcast hosted by Kevin today (Parts 1 and 2 should be available wherever you get your podcasts).
Check back here Thursday for an excerpt from "The Doodler" podcast.
We recorded this special podcast on Zoom in March 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this special episode of our podcast, Jeff reads three of our favorite love letters to San Francisco written in January 2020 at our event of the same name. You'll get a sample of our new Season 4 theme music, created and curated by Joe Bagale. And we're pretty sure that the third letter was written by Season 3 storyteller P Segal.
We hope you enjoy these as much as we do. They speak to the complexity of loving a city like ours, and they offer a glimmer of hope for what's next in San Francisco.
See you soon for Season 4 of Storied: San Francisco!
xoxo Michelle + Jeff
In this podcast, our very last of Season 3, Jesus and Randy pick up where they off in Part 1. They talk in more depth about the challenges that Gay American Indians (Randy's group) and Gay Latino Alliance (Jesus's) faced, despite the fact that San Francisco was already a more accepting place than most in the United States.
The two spend the remainder of the podcast reflecting on the evolution on the LGBTQIA community.
We want to thank Randy and Jesus for their time and for sharing their stories. We want to thank all the storytellers we've ridden with us over the course of our third season of this show. Last but certainly not least, we want to thank you for listening, reading, liking, commenting, signing up for our newsletter, coming to our shows (back when we could still have those safely), and sharing what we do with your friends and family.
We're taking a short break, but we aim to be back at it introducing you to more of your San Francisco neighbors in a few weeks. Until then—stay healthy, stay safe, wear a mask, Black lives matter, stay weird, and stay strong!
We recorded this podcast over Zoom in January 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
If you've been with us for a while, you already know Randy Burns (Part 1, Part 2). Randy is definitely a friend of the show. He introduced us to his friend, Jesus Barragan, whom we had on the show earlier this season (Part 1, Part 2).
To close out our third season, we wanted to have these two longtime friends talk about the POC gay rights movements they were each very much a part of back in the 1970s and '80s—Randy's Gay American Indians (GAI) and Jesus's Gay Latino Alliance(GALA).
It was the fall of 1975, and at that time, no such groups existed here. What would eventually become the Pride parade was in its infancy. But these two young queer activists and their allies organized, not only making their existence known, but fighting for basic rights some might take for granted today.
In Part 1 of this two-part podcast, Randy and Jesus each share the background stories of getting their groups started. Please check back Thursday for Part 2 (and the final new episode of Season 3!), when the two friends will talk about meeting each other and working together toward equality for the POC LGBTQIA+ community.
We recorded this podcast over Zoom in January 2021.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Tony Carracci picks up where he left off in Part 1, talking about closing his kitchen inside the Cat Club and using that space instead as a second dance floor. It was around this time that the '80s-themed night 1984 started.
But Tony wanted a live-music venue. He found a spot in Hunter's Point that happened to have a kitchen, and so, The Pound SF was born. After running that place for a few years, Tony left and, after not doing much "for a minute," he became a wedding planner. In his mind, it has a lot in common with running a restaurant or a club.
Fast-forward to 2017. He had been living in Marin since the mid-1990s, and, as a food person, was always making sauces. One day, he noticed an empty storefront and "inquired within." While he awaited permits to do food in the space, he acquired a food truck, and, inspired by David Bowie's last LP, named it Black Star Bakehouse and Smokery.
Tony's story of meeting his partner, Suzie Vasko, coincides with his discovery of Point San Pablo Harbor. Tony would take the Black Star truck to the harbor and he had just won best food truck in Marin when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In the summer of 2020, the harbormaster told Tony that Nobilis, a restaurant down on the water, was closing and that Tony's barbecue would be a perfect fit.
Suzie shares the story of their meeting, and the two end the podcast talking about opening Black Star Pirate BBQ.
The restaurant is open for takeout from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday through Sunday. They of course hope to reopen once it's safe and legal to do so. Please support them if you can—the food and location are truly special.
We recorded this podcast at Black Star Pirate BBQ in Point San Pablo Harbor in December 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Tony Carracci's life revolves around water.
Tony's parents met in Seattle, where his mom was from. His dad, who is from from New Orleans, met his mom up north during a stint in the Merchant Marines. When they were expecting their first child, Tony, the young couple decided to relocate to another port town: San Francisco, away from the cold and rain of Seattle and the heat and mugginess in New Orleans.
Tony did most of his growing up in the 1960s and early '70s in The City, and he shares some of his impressions of that era. He played baseball, football, and soccer, and excelled at sports in general. But because he had a hard time sitting still and focussing for a long time, school wasn't Tony's favorite.
He graduated and left home in the mid-'70s. He worked in the now-defunct SF shipyards but hated it. He moved up to Portland (yet another port town!) for a couple years, started working in kitchens, and started doing hair and make-up. Then he went farther north, to his mom's hometown of Seattle. But a girl he met there and started dating got a job back in The City, and Tony decided that it was his chance to come home.
After restaurant jobs here and there, Tony learned about a new restaurant in the Haight that needed an opening chef. That place was Cha Cha Cha.
Tony spends the last part of this episode talking about Haight Street and South of Market back in the day. He ends with the story of opening the Cat Club.
Join us Thursday for Part 2, when Tony will share the story of opening his BBQ joint in the East Bay.
We recorded this podcast at Black Star Pirate BBQ in Richmond, California, in December 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Gillian picks up where she left off in Part 1, with some bartending jobs she had while she went to college. After she graduated, she took up an offer to go to the Dominican Republic. What started off as a trip turned into four years on the island.
Next came her move to The City in 2005. Gillian shares some of her first impressions of San Francisco, contrasting those with ideas she had formed mostly from TV and movies growing up. Upon moving here, she immediately fell in love with the "artists and dreamers" she was lucky enough to meet.
Then Gillian shares the story of opening Casements. She met her eventual business partner, Séan O'Donovan, when they both worked at Nickie's in the Lower Haight. The two often talked about opening their own place back in the day. Gillian left Nickie's to help open Virgil's on Mission about 10 years ago, and she left Virgil's to go into business with a friend making Bloody Mary mix. She then helped Wes of Wesburger and also helped open a few other bars around town, but she always held onto the idea of opening her own Irish bar.
After getting support from Séan and another bar owner, Gillian asked the owners of Gas Light if they would sell. They did, and Séan and Gillian got the keys in early November 2019. They had a soft opening and ran for a couple of months, having their official opening on Jan. 19, 2020. Six weeks or so later, COVID-19 hit and they had to shut down.
Now that we're on Lockdown 2.0, Casements is offering food and drink for pick-up every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Please support this rad indy bar and help it ride out this storm so that it can open on the other side of the madness.
We recorded this podcast at Casements Bar in the Mission in December 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Gillian Fitzgerald was born in Hospital (a town in Ireland).
In this podcast, the owner of Casements Bar in the Mission traces her lineage back to when her Irish parents met. The family moved from County Limerick in the southwest to County Meade, just north of Dublin. That is where Gillian did most of her growing up, smalltown stories she shares in this episode.
In addition to playing many sports, Gillian also had her own horse: Flash Gordon. She tells us a wild story about Flash that you really have to hear to believe.
After talking about her time in high school and college, which brought her to Dublin, she ends this episode with some of the family bars and pubs she worked in as a young adult back in Ireland.
Please join us Thursday for Part 2, when Gillian will talk about leaving Ireland, her arrival in San Francisco, and her opening Casements just before the pandemic took hold.
We recorded this podcast outside of Casements Bar in the Mission in December 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Marcell picks up where he left off in Part 1. He talks about work he almost got before landing a dream job. Marcell shares the story of how he got started taking pictures when he was a kid.
He goes on to talk about people's reaction to his art over the years and the film he's in the process of making about his life as a Black father, photographer, father, and yes, filmmaker.
Please visit Marcell's site and be sure to check out all the photos and videos he's collected there, of the Bay Area and other parts of the country and the world.
He ends the podcast talking about why he left San Francisco to live in the East Bay and his hopes for The City moving forward.
We recorded this podcast in Yerba Buena Gardens in December 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Marcell Turner found his home in San Francisco.
In this podcast, the photographer shares the story of his childhood in Southern California. He skateboarded, loved punk rock music, and breakdanced in his teen years. Then, a road trip up north with a friend was all it took for Marcell to relocate up to the Bay Area.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Marcell will tell us all about his life in The City after he moved here.
We recorded this podcast in Yerba Buena Gardens in December 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Ike picks up where he left off in Part 1. After a short time in Davis, he came back to The City and found work in a market at 16th and Mission. He would make sandwiches for himself on the job, and one day, a customer who caught a whiff of what Ike was cooking up asked for a very specific type of sandwich. It was the origins of his now-famous "dirty sauce."
Fast-forward a few years through various odd jobs. Ike was at a personal crossroads when he decided to open a breakfast and ice cream place in the Castro that also happened to make sandwiches. Ike's Place was born.
Eventually, the sandwiches Ike sold eclipsed all the other products, and expansion was on the horizon. Ike now has more than 50 sandwich shops located in several states.
We end this episode with Ike sharing his thoughts on San Francisco in the near future.
We recorded this podcast at Ike's Love and Sandwiches in the Tenderloin in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ike Shehadeh has pretty much always made sandwiches.
In this podcast, the founder of Ike's Love and Sandwiches takes us back to 1968, when his dad arrived in San Francisco from Saudi Arabia. A decade or so later, his dad met his mom, and Ike, the first of a few kids for the couple, was born.
He describes what it was like to grow up going to various schools in The City, especially the parts involving playing sports. He enjoyed baseball and soccer, but to learn to take hits in football, Ike started martial arts classes in The Sunset.
We end this podcast with Ike explaining the unique living situation he had in college at UC Davis, and how that would later play a significant role in his business.
Check back Wednesday for Part 2, when Ike will share the story of his decision to open a little sandwich spot on 16th Street.
We recorded this podcast at Ike's Love and Sandwiches in the Tenderloin in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Brenda and Libby pick up right where they left off in Part 1, with the story of their meeting. It involves Delessio Market and Martuni's, two San Francisco spots we love.
The bulk of this episode is the story of opening a restaurant in San Francisco that was an almost-immediate smashing success. Brenda's French Soul Food (2007) begat Brenda's Meat and Three (2014) begat Brenda's Oakland (2019).
The couple discuss how they have pivoted all three of their restaurants during COVID-19. And we end the podcast with a mental-health check-up.
(As a sign of how quickly things took a downturn COVID-wise, there's talk in this episode of the then-recent shutting down of all indoor dining in The City, but outdoor was still allowed. Of course, at the time of publication, we're back to take-out and delivery only.)
- Brenda's French Soul Food, open for pickup or delivery every day 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- Brenda's Meat and Three, open for pickup or delivery every day, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
- Brenda's Oakland, open for pickup or delivery every day, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
We recorded this podcast at Brenda's Meat and Three on Divisadero in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Brenda Buenviaje grew up across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
In this podcast, we get to know Brenda and her life/business partner, Libby Truesdell. Brenda describes her mixed heritage (Filipino and Creole, mostly) and shares stories of growing up in southern Louisiana, fishing and foraging, among other things. Libby contrasts her Iowa upbringing with the multifaceted food and culture she was introduced to when she met Brenda. Libby left her home state for various spots on the West Coast when she was 18, eventually ending up in The City in 2005.
Brenda also shares the story of how she came to San Francisco.
Please join us for Part 2 this Thursday.
We recorded this podcast at Brenda's Meat and Three on Divisadero in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Rodrigo picks up where he left off in Part 1. He came back to the Mission to go to middle school at Horace Mann, where he met many of his lifelong friends. He ended up at Lowell High School near Lake Merced and temporarily lost touch with those friends.
From there, Rodrigo went to San Diego for college. He explains the influence on his life that came from Carlos Aceituno, a capoeira teacher he met at Mission Cultural Center, and how that affected his decision to go to UCSD. That move led to Rodrigo's time in Brazil, which he talks about extensively in this episode.
He ends this podcast with his return to The City and his involvement with Calle 24 and San Francisco's Carnaval and starting his latest project, Real City Ambassadors.
We recorded this podcast at the offices of Calle 24 Latino Cultural District in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Rodrigo Durán's parents come from very different backgrounds.
In this episode, the host of Real City Ambassadors shares the stories of his parents' respective moves from Mexico to San Francisco. His dad came to the U.S. from Mexico City after becoming disillusioned with the revolutionary movement in his homeland, ended up in The City, and fell in with low-riders and Central Americans here. Rodrigo's mom is from a small town in Jalisco, and her father came to the U.S. on the Bracero Program. The two met in San Francisco, where Rodrigo and his siblings were born.
After a brief time back with family in Mexico, Rodrigo returned to SF, went to school in Chinatown, and got involved in the Aztec dance community through his dad.
Rodrigo ends this podcast reflecting on the inclusion he felt from various communities in San Francisco.
Please join us for Part 2 this Thursday.
We recorded this podcast at the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District office in the Mission in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Lucia picks up where she left off in Part 1. She dives into her own personal art history, from always drawing as a kid and young adult to eventually attending college at the San Francisco Art Institute. Before that, while at City College, Lucia got her associates in child development and began teaching, something she continues to do to this day.
While at SFAI, she and some fellow students formed the SF Poster Syndicate, a group intended "to bring art and design to many different people’s movements in hopes that their message can be heard and seen more loudly."
The story of Lucia getting started painting murals intersects back with her activist mom and Balmy Alley in the Mission. She ends the podcast sharing the stories behind her first mural—"Mission Makeover," in Balmy Alley—and "Women of the Resistance," which she collaborated with the SF Poster Syndicate on. To see the murals, please visit our website.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Lucia Gonzalez-Ippolito is a Mission District fixture.
Her dad, a painter and welder, moved to San Francisco from Merida, Mexico. Her mom, an activist, came from Chicago and worked at China Books on 24th Street. They met in the mid-1980s and Lucia was born shortly after that. She was raised in the Mission mostly by her mother, always surrounded by her parents' activist and artist friends.
Lucia's mom sent her to a private high school up in Napa, which is where Lucia decided to dive into the world of art.
Oh, and there's a short tangent in this episode where we discussed the fabled and sadly extinct $3 burrito.
We recorded this podcast in a courtyard on Balmy Alley in November 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Jeremy picks up where he left off in Part 1, talking about the job he got at a skateboarding company that brought him back to San Francisco after a short time on the road. He goes on to catalog the various places in The City where he has lived, including North Beach, the neighborhood Jeremy calls home to this day. The story of his move to that neighborhood includes tips on how to crack the code of Craigslist apartments.
Fast-forward to, well, "now," and Jeremy recounts the stories behind his "Stay Strong" posters, which have been popping up on the fronts of boarded-up bars and also in people's windows all over town for the last eight months. It involves Anchor Brewing and the U.S. Bartenders Guild.
He ends this episode talking about the place he's been doing an artist's residency since September—the Doolan-Larson building in the Upper Haight. The residency was made possible with the help of SF Heritage, a rad non-profit working to preserve the history of The City.
As mentioned, we recorded this podcast at the Doolan-Larson building at Haight and Ashbury in October 2020. For more info on the building and SF Heritage, go here.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Hip-hop, hills, and art drew Jeremy Fish to San Francisco from 3,000 miles away.
In this episode, the prolific and iconic SF artist traces his family line back to both grandfathers. One worked with his hands to make art; the other was a salesman. Jeremy sees bits of himself in both ancestors.
He was born in Albany, New York, and spent most of his youth in Saratoga Springs. When it came time to go to college (in 1994), not only was The City less expensive than Boston and New York, but Jeremy also had one hell of a trip out here, which he retells in the podcast.
Follow Jeremy on Twitter and Instagram, and check out his website, Silly Pink Bunnies. And check back Thursday for Part 2 to hear more of Jeremy's story.
We recorded this podcast at the Doolan-Larson building at Haight and Ashbury in October 2020. To see some photos of the building, go to our website or follow us on social media.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We saved Part 2 of Ida McCray's podcast with us for a good reason. We didn't want her incredible story to get lost in the chaos and uncertainty that marked last week. And we suspect that you, like us, feel a little better heading into this week, so ...
Ida picks up where she left off in Part 1, with her release from prison when she was a teenager. She shares the story of when she helped hijacked a plane from San Francisco to Los Angeles and ended up in Cuba.
Fast-forward to 16 years later, when a member of her family turned her in. She served a little more than a decade in federal prison, and when she got out, she started working at the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, where she stayed for more than 20 years, as a rehabilitation coordinator. She also started teaching wellness for the formerly incarcerated at City College.
Ida ends this podcast talking about needing a break from The City she loves but doesn't recognize lately.
We recorded this podcast outside of Ida's home in the Excelsior in October 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ida McCray has left San Francisco.
In this podcast, Ida, who was born and raised in The City, takes us back to around the time of her birth. Her dad was in and out of trouble and her mom put Ida in Catholic school. An only child, she loved books but school never excited her. She got into her own trouble as a teenager, and found herself in and out of Juvenile Hall.
After graduating high school at 16, Ida got involved in the movement of those days and converted to Islam. This came after roughly a year and a half of her life locked up on a petty theft charge.
Please join us Thursday for Part 2, when Ida will continue sharing the story of her life.
We recorded this podcast outside of Ida's home in the Excelsior in October 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Alan tells us about his discovery of Israel. A friend told him all about the country, smashing Alan's preconceived ideas about the place, and so he went and lived there for a number of years.
He shares stories of his return to NYC, drunken addiction, and homelessness. He was in a downward spiral before a friend told him to snap out of it and get help. He did, and roughly a week later, he was headed for San Francisco.
He quickly got involved in the early '90s poetry scene here, and tells some great stories around that. He goes on to describe what it was like to get discovered as a writer as well as his work with "outlaw" artists here in The City. He also shares the story of a student strike he led while he taught at the Academy of Art University.
Alan ends this podcast comparing the San Francisco of today with the city he moved to 30 years ago, and tells us all about the poets strike he led back in the early '90s.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to learn about Alan's parents and his upbringing in New York City.
We recorded this podcast outside of Alan's home in Oakland in October 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Alan Kaufman is lucky to be alive.
In this podcast, the writer and poet traces his lineage back to his parents, who met in New York in the 1940s. His dad was a Jewish gangster, as Alan describes it, and his mom was a French Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Alan details a trip to Europe he took in 2014. His hosts in Zurich drove him to the mountains in Northern Italy where his mother and grandmother hid during World War II.
He fast-forwards to his parents' meeting and starting a family in the Bronx. When he was a teenager, he picked up a copy of On the Road, and the book ended up inspiring his move out west.
Please check back Thursday for the continuation of Alan's story.
We recorded this podcast outside of Alan's home in Oakland in October 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Temi picks up where she left off in Part 1, talking about founding Pembroke, her PR firm here in The City. She goes on to describe how the company transitioned during the onset of shelter-in-place earlier this year.
Then Temi pivots to her own experiences with racism and her awakening to racial and social justice. She ends the podcast talking about joining Represent Collaborative, for whom this podcast was produced. REP CO is a media hub for stories about under-represented folks, and we're honored to be part of that effort.
We recorded this podcast in Hayes Valley in October 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Temi Adamolekun moved to San Francisco sight unseen.
Temi was born in Lagos, Nigeria, but raised mostly in London. Her family visited their hometown often after their move to Europe, so Temi grew up with a good sense of where she was from despite her British upbringing.
After boarding school and university, she got a job at Condé Nast doing PR work. As a side hustle of sorts, she started making handbags, and through that, met the man she'd eventually marry.
The young couple had a chance to move to San Francisco and seized on it, sight unseen. That was a dozen or so years ago, and today, they're raising a child here in The City.
Please check back Thursday for Part 2, when Temi will talk about launching her own PR firm, her racial justice awakening, and the work she's been doing with REP CO.
We recorded this podcast in Hayes Valley in October 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Dale picks up where he left off in Part 1, with his college years in Santa Clara. After he graduated, he moved to LA where he worked in shipping. He had a few other jobs, mostly in data systems.
Dale was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, and his then-girlfriend/now wife was taking care of her father, who was ill, while also going to SF State. So, in 2010, Dale moved back to the Bay Area to help her out, and the couple has been living in Ingleside ever since.
He goes on to talk about discovering polo. All we'll say is that the story involves Argentina and boots. And if you wanna learn more about the sport, please listen in.
Dale ends his episode telling us about Heels Down, Fists Up, a Bay Area equestrian protest group that arose this summer after the murder of George Floyd.
Special thanks to Liz Beeson of Caring Cowgirl for connecting us with Dale and Sunny.
We recorded this podcast at Madonna Creek Ranch in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Dale Johnson is the descendent of Black cowboys.
In this podcast, Dale traces the history of his family, from New York state and a Black settlement in Texas called High Prairie to the Bay Area. His parents met at a park in the East Bay and Dale was born seven years later.
He grew up in "deep" East Oakland. He touches on some of the changes that he remembers, with industrial jobs being off-shored and drugs coming into previously prosperous, Black neighborhoods, comparing that to some of what has been happening in the so-called Rust Belt of the US and the different responses to each situation.
Special thanks to Liz Beeson of Caring Cowgirl for connecting us with Dale.
We recorded this podcast at Madonna Creek Ranch in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
There's a battle going on in the world of San Francisco street art.
In this episode, we get to know street artist Ricky Rat. Ricky's grandparents come from many different heritages. His parents moved to San Francisco, separately, in the '80s and met at a Halloween party in the Mission. Ricky spent some time with his dad (also a comic artist) in the Mission in the 1990s (fun fact—his dad took him to see Josiah Luis Alderete read poetry back in the day), but they moved up to Marin. In the podcast, Ricky shares what it was like to grow up there.
He went to UC Davis and graduated before returning to The City earlier this decade. Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Ricky will tell us how he took his cartoon art to the streets.
We recorded this podcast at Fly Bar on Divisadero in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Michelle and Alex pick up where they left off in Part 1, discussing how the sale of 111 Minna that left them as co-owners went down. The original owner, Ei Ming, left Michelle in charge, and there was a lot of stuff she had to figure out how to do. A few years down the road, she brought Alex in to help, and soon enough, the two ended up buying the place from Ei Ming.
111 Minna Gallery is still closed to the public due to COVID-19 restrictions. But they're fundraising and hosting virtual events from time to time. Please follow them on Twitter and Instagram and check their website for more info.
This episode concludes our Small Business September promotions. That doesn't mean we'll stop introducing you to small business owners all over The City. And please, do your part to ensure that these businesses survive these strange times.
We recorded this podcast at 111 Minna in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ready your SF bingo card: Michelle Delaney is a punk rock mom who runs an art gallery in The City.
In this podcast, we get to know Michelle and 111 Minna co-owner Alex Kivelstadt. The two talk about their lives leading up to the moment they purchased the art bar/cafe from its previous owner.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when we'll hear the story of Michelle and Alex taking over 111 Minna, and what they've been doing with the place since shelter-in-place took effect in March this year.
Sadly, the gallery is still closed due to the COVID-19 restrictions. But they're still fundraising and doing virtual shows from time to time. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram or check their website for details.
We recorded this podcast at 111 Minna Gallery in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
You got to know Marke Bieschke earlier this season (Part 1/Part 2). In this special episode, we catch up with him to hear what's gone on with 48 Hills and The Stud since the pandemic began. We also discuss Marke's book, Into the Streets: A Young Person's Visual History of Protest in the United States, which was published over the summer. Find the book at your local indy bookstore.
If you want to support local, independent journalism, 48 Hills is among the best we have in The City. Visit their site for details.
We recorded this special episode in the Panhandle in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This one is a little different from what we normally do, and what we've been doing during September. We haven't met Pop's Bar owners Tom or Spike, nor do we know bartender Charlie yet. But a mutual friend connected us and we couldn't pass up the chance to hear some history of the Mission drinking hole and also their experiences during the pandemic.
Spike (who also owns Madrone Art Bar) and Tom detail the history of Pop's. Then the two shift to discussing how they've managed the bar during quarantine. They end the episode discussing what they feel are inequities and other wrongs in how governments are responding when it comes to small businesses.
Pop's Bar is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays between 4 and 8 p.m. for social-distanced drinks and food. You can also support them by purchasing gift cards or donating to their Go Fund Me. Find more information at their website.
We recorded this special episode at Pop's Bar in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Catch up with Adam Bergeron, whom you met earlier this year (Part 1/Part 2). Adam fills us in on how the Balboa Theater has responded to the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders.
The Balboa Theater is open for "social distance popcorn pop-ups" every Friday and Saturday from 4–8 p.m. and Sundays from 2–6 p.m. Please visit their website for other ways to support them during the pandemic.
We recorded this special episode at the Balboa Theater in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Steph Miller got her first dog in New Orleans.
In this podcast, Steph picks up where she left off in Part 1. She returned home from New Orleans with her dog, Ruby, who joined two other dogs at Steph's parents' house. You could say that the pack ... got into some trouble. But luck related to Steph's adopting Ruby eventually led her to a career training and working with dogs.
She got a job at Mission Pet Hospital, and a vet there turned her on to a dog-training program at the SPCA. The rest is history.
Bernal Beast's shop is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. For info on their weekend puppy classes, follow them on Twitter and Instagram.
We recorded this podcast at Bernal Beast in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Steph Miller used to have dreams of playing professional baseball.
Her parents met out east, where they're from. But their families weren't so keen on their respective different backgrounds, so the young couple came to the West Coast. Steph's dad got a job in a San Francisco law firm while her mom taught French.
Steph talks about her childhood, and she and Jeff start to realize how much they have in common. She goes on to describe her life in Atherton in the 1980s, before tech really took over the Peninsula culture. She was a latchkey kid who played a lot of baseball.
She shares stories of her family dogs and going to Giants games at Candlestick Park. Then Steph ends this episode with a recount of her college days in New Orleans and eventual return to the Bay Area.
We're excited to announce the launch of the BFF.fm Podcast Network! Storied: SF joins a handful of excellent shows as inaugural podcasts. Please visit BFF.fm/podcasts to learn more.
We recorded this podcast at Bernal Beast in Bernal Heights in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Catch up with Babylon Burning's Mike Lynch in this special episode.
Mike talks about adjusting his business in the face of a major downturn, with many of his usual clients pulling back on T-shirt orders. While he normally keeps his screenprinting shop open, literally, to the public, his doors have been mostly closed during the pandemic. And 63 Bluxome Gallery, which is part of Babylon Burning, has been closed as well.
While the gallery isn't open, you can buy various merch that they make over at their Big Cartel site.
We recorded this special episode at Babylon Burning in South of Market in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Catch up with Dino Medardo Rosso, whom we featured in Season 2, Episode 19 (Part 1/Part 2).
After losing a lot of his business when restaurants shut down in March, and then getting laid off from his teaching job, Dino made a critical change. Learn more in this podcast.
In addition to hiring Dino for language services, you can donate to his GoFundMe to help fund his new business/adventure.
We recorded this special episode over Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Del Seymour's arrival in San Francisco was one wild ride.
In this podcast, Del describes his literal first hours in The City. He touches on nearly two decades of drug addiction and sets the scene at a park in the Tenderloin where he was inspired to sober up a little more than a decade ago.
Around that time, he started Tenderloin Walking Tours, inspired in part by Del's time driving cabs in San Francisco. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they've shifted their focus to developing a virtual version of the tour, which they hope to have ready for folks soon. Please see a clip on our website.
Del also talks about launching Code Tenderloin, and lets us know ways to get involved. He ends this episode with his love letter, not to San Francisco, but to the Tenderloin.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Del Seymour got interested in politics early in his life, in the 1960s in Chicago.
In this podcast, Del walks us through the early years of his life. He attended a Catholic school in Chicago and went to seminary to be a priest. But that didn't last long, and he soon joined the military as a medic.
After that, he moved to Los Angeles to get away from the snow and cold weather. Within his first year, he became a firefighter/paramedic with LAFD, one of the first several dozen in a program that was new at the time.
When he became a single parent, his sister in Oakland helped with his kids, and Del soon moved up to the Bay Area to be with them.
Del ends this episode with a strange twist, at least for this podcast.
Please join us Thursday for Part 2, when Del will describe his move to San Francisco and what he's done here since then, especially in and around the Tenderloin.
This podcast was produced in partnership with an exciting new project that launches today. It's called Represent Collaborative, and it's a storytelling platform that covers issues of racial and social justice.
We recorded this episode on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We first met and got to know Liz Beeson in 2019. At the time, she was raising money for a Caring Cowgirl minivan to cart around her therapy mini dwarf horse and mini donkey. (Please go back and listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of her podcast with us.)
Fast-forward to earlier this month, when we caught up with Liz to hear what's been going on in her and the minis's lives.
Among other stories in this special podcast, Liz talks about joining Brianna Noble's "Heels Down, Fists Up" equestrian demonstrations for racial justice.
We recorded this podcast outside of Thee Parkside in Potrero Hill in September 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Catch up with Season 2, Episode 41 storyteller (Part 1 and Part 2), Muttville founder and CEO Sherri Franklin. Sherri talks about everything her non-profit senior dog rescue has gone through during quarantine as well as some exciting plans for the near future.
We're excited to announce that tickets are now available for the Muttville Gala! This year's theme: Mutts on the Moon. Get your tickets today for this virtual event!
For more information on adopting from of fostering for Muttville, please visit their website.
We recorded this special episode over Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Yuka picks up where she left off in Part 1, with her and her husband Kris's arrival in San Francisco. She worked a number of bartending jobs in The City before the couple decided to open their own place in 2012.
She talks about lessons she learned at those bartending gigs. Those, along with observations she had made of how her parents ran in their business back in Japan, informed how she has worked hard to do things right at her own restaurant.
Yuka talks about shifting Cassava into what it is now, scaled back due to the pandemic. She ends the episode reflecting on what it is about San Francisco, and especially the Outer Richmond, that she loves.
Unfortunately, Cassava had to close temporarily, but they hope to reopen next week. They also hope to start taking reservations for their new parklet soon.
We recorded this podcast at Cassava in the Outer Richmond in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Yuka Ioroi's family name dates back to the 700s.
She grew up in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan with Mt. Fuji nearby. Her parents ran a business, and Yuka sees some of their ways of operating reflected in her own running of Cassava.
She moved to Los Angeles when she was 15. In the podcast, she describes some culture shock she experienced as well as a diversity she didn't see at home. After college, she worked an office job but got burnt out on that. From strip club bartending to waiting tables at a country club, she moved on to manager at a new restaurant. And that's where she met her future husband, Kris.
Yuka ends this episode talking about what brought the couple north to San Francisco in 2008.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Yuka will share the story of opening Cassava on Balboa.
Unfortunately, Cassava is closed temporarily. Please follow them on social media or check their website to learn about their reopening.
We recorded this podcast at Cassava in the Outer Richmond in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
You got to know Gordon Szeto in S1E42. Michelle and Jeff checked in with Gordon and Glass Key co-owner Matt Osborne for this special episode to see how they're handling all the changes that COVID-19 and the subsequent shelter-in-place have brought.
Glass Key Photo is open Mondays through Fridays from 2 to 4 p.m. You can browse their cameras for sale here.
We recorded this special podcast at Glass Key in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Eskender picks up where he left off in Part 1. After working for Joyce Goldstein at Square One, he went to Campton Place, where he worked with and learned a lot from chef Daniel Humm. He started doing an underground restaurant in his home, and that became his full-time gig starting in 2005. It was the birth of Radio Africa Kitchen.
The owner of Velo Rogue suggested that Eskender bring his food to her cafe as a pop-up. On the heels of success there, he moved over to a coffee shop near his home in the Mission, and that eventually led to opening his own restaurant on Third Street.
Eskender ends the podcast describing both his food and his philosophy of food.
Radio Africa Kitchen is open for pickup every Tuesday from noon to 3 p.m. If you've never eaten there, please consider it. There's really nothing quite like it in The City or the Bay Area.
We recorded this podcast at Radio Africa in July 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When he was a teenager, Eskender Aseged fled his home country on foot.
In this podcast, the Radio Africa owner shares the story of walking from Communist Ethiopia to Sudan in the early 1980s. He found work in Khartoum and learned English, and he and his brother eventually got refugee status from the U.S. They arrived in Newark, New Jersey in 1986, and Eskender soon moved to New York City, where he worked as a busboy at the UN building.
He first visited San Francisco in 1986, when he came out here with his girlfriend at the time. He fell in love with The City immediately, as it reminded him of his hometown of Gondar. His first San Francisco home was in Bernal Heights, but he started spending more and more time in the nearby Mission, mostly in coffee shops. He found work in various San Francisco restaurants, including Cafe Majestic, Jeremiah Tower's Stars, and Joyce Goldstein's Square One.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Eskender will take us on the journey of his own culinary adventures, leading up to the opening of Radio Africa on Third Street. The restaurant is open for pickup every Tuesday from noon to 3 p.m.
We recorded this podcast at Radio Africa in the Bayview in July 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
First it was punk rock. Then, dogs saved Pali Boucher's life.
In this podcast, Pali picks up where she left off in Part 1, with her return to San Francisco after a short time in LA. A teenager with bright red hair, she fell in with the SF punk scene, then in its very early days.
Pali describes a wild ride through addiction and eventually, getting sober. It was a rather circuitous route that led her back to dogs, but it happened, and out of that reconnection, Rocket Dog Rescue was born.
Like so many businesses these days, Rocket Dog could use your help. Please consider donating to this non-profit dog rescue today.
We recorded this podcast at Avedano's Meats in Bernal Heights in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Pali Boucher had what many would consider a wild childhood.
In this podcast, the Rocket Dog Rescue founder takes us on a colorful journey through her early years. Let's just say that her parents liked to party. Pali spent her first 10 years with her mom, moving all around the greater Bay Area (and even Mexico). After her mom died, she and her brother were separated when she went to live with her dad in Corte Madera. It was there that Pali started to realize her love of animals ... and especially, dogs.
She ends this episode talking about a short stint in LA, where she discovered punk rock and it saved her life.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Pali will talk about the nascent punk scene in San Francisco in the 1970s and starting her dog rescue non-profit.
We recorded this podcast at Avedano's Meats in Bernal Heights in August 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Tongo picks up where he left off in Part 1, describing the changes he saw in his hometown of San Francisco after spending a few years in New York. It was obvious that money had done its part to stifle, displace, and erase art and the working class.
He started teaching with SF YMCA's CARE program, which works with imprisoned youth in The City, but some shady goings on in the program spurred him to leave. He went to Jackson, Mississippi, to do some movement work for a couple years before returning once again to San Francisco in 2015. He began writing poetry while in Mississippi, and when he got back to the Bay Area, it took off after Chinaka Hodge asked him to read before her at City Lights.
To end the podcast, we asked Tongo to read one of his poems for us. He recited (not read) "The Course of Meal." For the words to the poem, please see our website.
We recorded this podcast in San Francisco during quarantine on Zoom in July 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Poet Tongo Eisen-Martin was born into a revolutionary home.
Tongo's parents met in Chicago but moved to San Francisco soon after. He was born and raised in an apartment at 25th and Valencia, part of a communal environment that taught him to question and analyze institutions from a young age.
He got started with poetry in elementary school doing a rap for Jesse Jackson when Jackson ran for president in 1988 (Tongo was 8 at the time).
Tongo started seeing poetry all around The City and the Bay Area before heading to New York City for college, where he soon discovered Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He ended up working in arts-based education with imprisoned youth at Rikers Island before returning to San Francisco to teach chronically truant kids through a YMCA program.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Tongo will tell us more about his teaching career and his poetry. He'll also recite for us his poem "The Course of Meal." You don't wanna miss this.
We recorded this podcast in San Francisco during quarantine on Zoom in July 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Mike Soracco has had the same job for 50 years.
In this podcast, Mike, who today owns Liguria Bakery in North Beach, takes us back to the founding of this neighborhood staple. Mike's grandfather came to the US in 1907 from near Genoa, Italy. He worked in bakeries in North Beach for a few years before opening his own at the location where Liguria operates to this day (that's 109 years, for those keeping track).
Mike describes the hard working environment he fell into when he started at the bakery as a teenager. Also, back then, the general public didn't know focaccia like we do today, and so Liguria was selling mostly to Italian-Americans in North Beach.
He ends the podcast talking about the adjustments they've made at Liguria during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We recorded this podcast in Washington Square Park in July 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The story of Dragonspunk Grows, the Black-owned organic farm in the Bayview, starts with the Chinese community.
In this episode, Isaiah, whom you got to know in Part 1, takes us on a tour of Florence Fang community garden. Isaiah's work at the garden inspired him to join forces with Faheem Carter, to carve out a large section of the existing land to establish Dragonspunk Grows. It started out with their wanting to grow food for themselves and their neighbors, due to the area's status as a food desert.
This June, Isaiah's fiancée, Danielle, suggested that they dedicate a row of vegetables to honor the life of George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis cops in May.
As for the future of Dragonspunk Grows, Isaiah and Danielle see their part in this as more of a service than a specific plot of land. They hope to replicate the model in other gardens, starting in the Bayview. You can help them reach their goals by donating to their Go Fund Me today.
We recorded this podcast at Dragonspunk Grows in July 2020. Special thanks to Erin Lim of Bitch Talk Podcast for letting us know about Isaiah and the garden.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
NYC hip-hop artist turned SF city gardener? Why the hell not?
In this podcast, Dragonspunk Grows gardener Isaiah Powell charts the early stories of his life's journey. His family moved all over the East Coast when he was young. He went to four different high schools, then got into the University of Miami immediately as a 17-year-old. At such a young age, Isaiah didn't take college seriously and he soon dropped out.
He went back to New York City and started to pursue a career in hip-hop. After eventually graduating from Columbia University and getting and losing a number of jobs, a fellow Columbia student friend recommended that Isaiah move to California to work on a farm near Santa Cruz. Toward the end of his stay there, he met Danielle online. And when he returned to New York, the two moved in together.
They decided to move to the Bay Area after learning they could live in a house that Danielle's family owned. Danielle moved first, then Isaiah came out a few months later. He soon started volunteering at the Florence Fang Asian Community Garden, which was just down the hill from his home. And that work was the inspiration for what eventually became Dragonspunk Grows, which Isaiah will talk more about in Part 2 on Thursday.
Meanwhile, you can help support Isaiah's work on the garden by donating to their GoFundMe.
We recorded this podcast at Dragonspunk Grows in the Bayview in July 2020. Special thanks to Erin Lim of Bitch Talk Podcast for letting us know about Isaiah and his farm.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Josiah picks up where he left off in Part 1, sharing stories from his time with Molotov Mouths, the touring poetry collective from the 1990s. He pivots to talking about the gentrification he saw happening first-hand in the Mission in the late-'90s/early-2000s.
Josiah has been working at City Lights Books in North Beach for the last several years, and he talks about his job at this iconic San Francisco business (which is open during the pandemic).
He ends this podcast with a hella powerful poem about gentrification in the Mission. Please visit our website to read the words to "Galeria de la Raza Blues."
Also, check out Josiah's reading series, Speaking Axolotl, on Facebook.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in July 2020. Special thanks to S3E1 storyteller Cassandra Dallett for introducing us to Josiah.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Josiah Luis Alderete's poetry speaks for a people devastated by gentrification and colonization.
In this podcast, Josiah traces his life back to his parents' union at a club in North Beach roughly 50 years ago. He moved around the Bay Area a bit, from various spots in the Mission to Marin and back. He tells stories from the back room at Cafe Babar, including his first time to read poetry in front of people, and the connections he made as a result. Josiah reflects on how he finds representation and expression in poetry. He and other poets formed a group called Molotov Mouths that toured the country doing readings, which he'll talk more about in Part 2.
Josiah ends this podcast describing the world of artists in the Mission in the late-'80s and early-'90s and the influence that Bucky Sinister had on him.
To hear more from Josiah, including some of his poetry, check back Thursday for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in July 2020. Special thanks to Cassandra Dallett (this season's Ep. 1 storyteller) for introducing us to Josiah.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Dave the Butcher picks up where he left off in Part 1. He started traveling to Europe every year, and eventually moved to Berlin. While living there, he traveled to Spain and then over to Morocco.
Dave came back to San Francisco and worked at Falletti Foods for a short time, then got a job as manager at Marina Meats in 2007, where he works to this day.
As butchery exploded, Dave started doing demo events at La Trappe in North Beach. Around that time, he got married again.
Dave talks about running his butchery during shelter-in-place and he ends with his love letter to San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Dave Budworth's great-grandfather, who trained in Allsace, had a butcher shop in San Francisco at Polk and Green more than a century ago.
In this episode, Dave the Butcher, as he's known, talks about growing up in Santa Rosa. His mom exposed him to culture, but also dog shows, which formed the backdrop of Dave's first impressions of San Francisco. Dave tells stories of a trip to Australia when he was a young man that contextualized his Western privilege.
He came back to The City and fell into butchery. He describes the old-school mentality of the trade that he learned from, and he ends the podcast reflecting on what that means.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Jesus Barragan is a fighter.
He left his job at the VA after he was victorious in suing them. From there, he went to Child Protective Services in The City, where he caught mistranslated material that discriminated against Spanish-speaking parents.
After he retired, Jesus met David Campos and started volunteering in Campos's office at City Hall, which is where he met Hillary Ronen. He stayed on when Ronen took over as District 9 supervisor in 2016.
After reflecting on what the coronavirus pandemic means for humanity, Jesus ends the podcast with a verbal love letter to San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to that.
We recorded this podcast at Jesus's apartment in South of Market in July 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Jesus Barragan was born in the segregated town of Glendale, Arizona, and grew up with bigotry all around him.
In this podcast, Jesus talks about his move to San Jose as a young boy and the education systems of Arizona vs. California, where he quickly encountered difficulties. He moved to San Francisco in 1975, but he ran into prejudice and discrimination at the jobs he got here, both directed at him and systemically. Among other fights he waged, Jesus helped file complaints to get The City to comply with federal employment guidelines.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Jesus will tell us how he ended up volunteering at City Hall.
We recorded this podcast at Jesus's apartment (with masks and distance) in South of Market in July 2020.
In this podcast, Kevin picks up where he left off in Part 1, talking about various bars he worked in all around San Francisco. He and his wife loved Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in Bernal Heights, and got to know Josey (host) and Sarah (chef). A few years later, Josey and Sarah asked Kevin to open a restaurant with them, and that's the story of how The Front Porch got started.
Kevin shares the history of the Front Porch location, tells us how they came to open Rock Bar across 29th Street, and talks about running a restaurant during the coronavirus shelter-in-place.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Kevin Cline grew up in Florida, but he got out just about as soon as he could.
In this podcast, Kevin, who co-owns Front Porch restaurant in Bernal Heights, shares stories of journeys that led him to San Francisco. First was a trip from Boston to Los Angeles, then from LA to San Francisco on bicycle. Then, based on what a good time he had in The City during that first visit, he decided to ride his motorcycle across the country to move here.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Kevin will tell us the story of how he and Josey White opened the Front Porch.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Nico picks up where she left off in Part 1, with some office jobs she had when she first moved here before switching to screenprinting full-time. She met the folks who run Workshop SF, and starting screenprinting and teaching classes there. Through Workshop, she also started connecting with more creative, "work hard, play hard" types, which whom she identified. She decided to open her own business in 2015. Originally known as Studio Nico, Fleet Wood hit the five-year mark this February, just before shelter-in-place began.
We recorded this episode nearly two months ago, but we checked in with Nico yesterday, and she wanted to share the following in light of the uprising for racial justice:
"We would like to announce that we are pledging $5,000 to support Black and underserved youth in San Francisco. A portion of our daily sales will go toward funds for @larkinstreetyouth and Third Street Youth Center & Clinic (Bayview). We stand with our Black brothers and sisters to actively fight back against systemic racism. Read more about what we’re doing at ⚡️fleetwoodsf.com ⚡️"
Nico ends the podcast talking about running a retail business during quarantine.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Coldwater, OH, has seven stoplights, by Nico Schwieterman's last count.
In this podcast, Nico, who opened and owns Fleet Wood in the Tenderloin, shares stories of growing up in the small town of Coldwater. Her dad ran a shop where, as a kid, she helped him print shirts. She was your fairly typical teenager, and ended up going to college in Cincinnati. A college internship in 2004 brought her to San Francisco, and she was in love in the first half hour of being here.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
San Francisco artist and poet Mason J. is a survivor. They were born in the city in the late 1980s into two epidemics that were wiping out entire communities—AIDS and crack.
In this podcast, Mason J. shares three poems and a story about their experiences with death, something that has surrounded them their entire lives. The first is a pantoum poem about dementia called "All of My Uncles Are Dead." The second is about the Ghostship fire in Oakland in 2016. The last poem is about Mason's personal experiences with death.
Mason ends the podcast with a story about their sister, who was born HIV-antibody-positive.
This episode was recorded at our first-ever live storytelling event: Working with Death, at Café du Nord in April 2018.
Photo by Anica Wu
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes for the rest of this week.
In this podcast, Stephen shares the serendipitous story of getting a job at Nopa. He talks about how his work there lead to his involvement with Alice Cravens's program Heat of the Kitchen at Ida B. Wells High School. Restaurants, food, gardens, education ... what's not to love about Stephen Satterfield?
We recorded this podcast at 4505 BBQ in May 2018. Check back Thursday for Part 2.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bernadine Sewell (aka, Pinky Winchester) opened her restaurant, Pinky and Red's, last summer in the UC Berkeley Student Union building. It was the culmination of a long journey—she and her daughter (Red) took courses with La Cocina, the San Francisco non-profit that cultivates "low-income food entrepreneurs as they formalize and grow their businesses."
In this podcast, Pinky talks about that first year running her restaurants. Highlights have included a student-led petition that got more than 1,200 signatures, helping Pinky and Red's to stay in the Student Union building after it was threatened with removal. She ends with her thoughts about following your dreams.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes the rest of this week.
Bernadine Sewell has an alter ego: Pinky Winchester. When you meet this incredibly colorful woman, you know why.
She and her daughter went through the La Cocina program and opened their restaurant, Pinky and Red's, in the Berkeley Student Union building last summer. This podcast is Pinky's story of growing up in Detroit, moving to California, going through La Cocina, and opening her own business, which, it turns out, is only the second black-owned business on UC Berkeley's campus since 1868.
Join us Thursday when Pinky will share stories from her first year running Pinky and Red's.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
One of Uncle Damien Posey's favorite things to tell people is that he's "not a role model, he's a real model."
We checked in with our Season 2, Episode 38 storyteller last week to see how he's doing and how he's feeling about the current uprising for racial justice.
In this special podcast, Damien shares some of his own experiences with racism in The City, his thoughts on the current uprising and his support role in it, and the many cultural differences that we should celebrate rather than fear. He ends the podcast talking about where he draws his strength from and what his hopes are for the near future.
If you missed our original podcasts with Unc, please go back and listen to Part 1 and Part 2.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in June 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this special episode, S2E49 storyteller Chloe Jackman shares her perspectives on race and the current uprising for racial justice. The daughter of a Black man and a white woman, she was often made to feel "not Black enough." But over time, she was able to defy those norms and embrace the entirety of her identity.
One of Chloe's main hopes coming out of the worldwide and ongoing protests is that we engage in conversations that up to now have been deemed "uncomfortable" and that, in whatever form, a more just world emerges for her one-year-old son.
If you missed Chloe's original podcasts with us, please go back and listen to Part 1 and Part 2.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in June 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Thea Matthews is a powerful poet.
In this podcast, Thea picks up where she left off in Part 1, talking about the early days of her writing and performing poetry. She helped established the Black Student Union at City College and later went to UC Berkeley, commuting the whole time from her home in The City.
Later in the episode, Thea reflects on the current uprising for racial and social justice. And she ends the podcast by reading four poems: "Gazonia," "Azalea Rhododendron," Fuchsia Fuchsia magellanica," and the prelude ("Praeludium") to her book of poems that comes out on June 20, Unearth [the Flowers], which you can buy at Green Apple Books, Bookshop.org, or your local bookstore.
You're invited to check out Thea's reading at her launch party for Unearth [the Flowers] on June 27 at 6 p.m. Here's the event link. The password is "Flowers".
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in June 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Poet, activist, and scholar Thea Matthews grew up in the Excelsior, which to this day is still a largely ungentrified, working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.
In this podcast, Thea talks about growing up as a Black/Mexican/Indigenous kid with a single mom in San Francisco in the 1990s. Most of her childhood experiences with her Blackness were negative, but they later formed a backdrop to her embracing that aspect of her life. Her views of the city, in all its complexity, inspire a lot of her poetry to this day.
Toward the middle of the podcast, Thea reads her poem "St. Francis." She ends the episode talking about embracing her Blackness and drawing strength from it.
Please visit Thea's website to learn more.
Join us tomorrow for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast during quarantine in San Francisco in June 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
Darnay McPherson likes to stress that, when he was a kid growing up in San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood in the 1960s, "no one locked their doors and police officers walked the beat." It was even more than that for the generation of Darnay's parents—a vibrant area full of black-owned businesses and some of the best jazz clubs in the country.
In this podcast, Darnay, who has lived his entire life in the Fillmore, talks about being a kid there, the community, the book Harlem of the West, musicians Bobby Webb, Roland Mitchell, Etta James, and Johnny Mathis, and more.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
Fernay McPherson grew up in the Fillmore of the '80s and '90s, learning to cook from and being inspired by her San Francisco family who had various Texas and Southern roots.
In this podcast, Fernay, who owns and operates Millie Bell's Soul Movement in Emeryville, talks about her childhood and the community she misses (she still lives in the Fillmore). Fernay is a graduate of La Cocina, "a nonprofit working to solve problems of equity in business ownership for women, immigrants and people of color."
We recorded this podcast at Public Market Emeryville in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
Yeva Johnson is a musician, a poet, and a physician. She works with patients at end of life, doing what she can make to make that transition as peaceful and harmonious as possible.
In this podcast, Yeva talks about medical school, including work she did with AIDS patients in Africa. She moved to San Francisco in 1990 and immediately began working with AIDS patients at General Hospital in Ward 5A. She relays a set of lessons she's learned throughout her career and ends by playing a song on the flute.
Yeva will be a featured poet at the Voz Sin Tinta bilingual poetry series tonight from 6:30 to 8:30. To catch this free event, go here: http://ow.ly/w1Q730qOQI9
This episode is taken from our first live event, Working with Death. It was recorded at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco in April 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this special episode, we listen to artist William Rhodes talk about his arrival in San Francisco back in 2008. It wasn't exactly the city he had imagined. Together with other Black artists here, he helped found the Three Point Nine Art Collective, and that helped William feel grounded in community and what he loves to do. But it of course didn't stop the racist micro-aggressions he experienced here on a daily basis.
William ends this episode offering a genuine sense of hope for the future, which he believes has to start with us all being true to ourselves.
In case you missed William's original podcasts with us, please go back to Season 2 Episode 33 (Part 1 and Part 2).
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in June 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
At our Two Storied Nights events in Nov. 2018, a funny thing happened. In this podcast, David Brooks and Bhautik Joshi talk about that night, which brought them together in a really unusual way.
We recorded this podcast at Connecticut Yankee in November 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
SF State Associate Professor of Journalism Venise Wagner loves ice skating. When she's not writing books like Love in the Time of Pinochet and Reporting Inequality: Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity, teaching journalism to a new generation, or spending time with her friends, family, and her dog, Cici, Venise likes to relieve all the pressures of life at the rink.
In this episode, Venise shares the story of one trip to the ice rink that went a little sideways. After her accident, many things came into perspective for her.
We recorded this podcast at Saul's in Berkeley in April 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
It's Oct. 17, 1989, and Yayne Abeba, fresh out of high school, living on her own, and working in the Marina, wants to step outside with a coworker to talk shit about their boss. In a few minutes, her life and the lives of everyone in the Bay Area will change forever.
This is the story of Yayne's day during the Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 quake that shook foundations, started fires, leveled freeways, and changed many things about life in the Bay Area.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we’ll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We’ll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit.
Our first rerun is our first-ever episode, from fall 2017. Robvell Smith tends bar at Tony's Pizza Napoletana in North Beach, which is where our paths first crossed nine or so years ago. We'll hear Robvell retell the story of how he got started behind the bar, some of his first bartending gigs (in SF, SoCal, and Hawaii), and his deep appreciation of and love for serving people at the bar.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez dove head-first into a career in journalism in his hometown of San Francisco.
In this podcast, the young veteran reporter takes us through the later days of his time in City College's journalism program. After a brief stint at SF State, Joe got hired to write for the SF Bay Guardian, and rode it out until that weekly folded. He soon found work as a reporter and opinion columnist at the Examiner, a job he held until just last month. These days, he's a producer/reporter for KQED News.
If you missed Part 1, please go back to hear all about Joe's parents and his upbringing in Cow Hollow.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez grew up in Cow Hollow, and he'd like you to know what that means.
In this podcast, the prolific San Francisco journalist tells the story of how his parents met (it involves his mom and uncle hitchhiking from Los Angeles to San Francisco). He talks about the neighborhood where he grew up and all the misconceptions that surround it. An influential neighbor he had back then led him to become a writer for his middle school newspaper.
Joe ends the podcast sharing stories from his time making documentary videos in high school, and how, in a roundabout way, that led him back to journalism at City College.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen picks up where she left off in Part 1, talking about her work at La Raza Centro Legal in the Mission. She goes on a verbal tour of places in the Mission she hung out (hello, margaritas at Latin American Club!). She applied for and got a job as a legislative aide to then-D9 Supervisor David Campos. Fast-forward to 2016, when she was tapped to run to replace Campos. She shares stories from a bittersweet Election Night that November, working with former Mayor Ed Lee, and what she hopes to accomplish if she wins reelection this year.
We recorded this podcast in Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April and May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen tells the story of how her parents, one from Israel, one from Milwaukee, met in Los Angeles, where she grew up. She went to college at UC San Diego and engaged in activism on the state level, fighting props 187 and 209. After graduation, she wanted to learn Spanish, and she spent a couple of years in Barcelona. She came back to the states to go to law school at UC Berkeley, where, after a couple of summers doing various legal work, she had a realization that landed her in the Mission District in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April and May 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, JoEllen goes into detail about her various roles at Blue Bottle, including a brief stint in New York City. When she returned to San Francisco in 2012, she started formulating a business plan. With the support of her bosses at Blue Bottle, that plan ended up being Pinhole Coffee, which opened in Bernal Heights in 2014.
Pinhole is open with reduced hours and a smaller menu during shelter-in-place. Check their website or follow them on social media for more info.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Remember when cafés had couches?
In this podcast, Pinhole Coffee owner Joellen Depakakibo walks us through her life growing up just outside of Chicago. She ended up going to college at DePaul and moving to Chicago, which lead to her first jobs in coffee shops.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Joellen will tell us all about her gig at Blue Bottle and then her eventual departure to open Pinhole up on Cortland in Bernal Heights. Pinhole is open specific days and hours during shelter-in-place. Check their website or social media for details.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Businesses often have contingency plans, but few if any could've prepared for COVID-19.
In this podcast, Ray Bair tells the story of how he came to own Cheese Plus, a beloved Russian Hill specialty food store that is open during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place. Leaving the job at Whole Foods that he had for nearly two decades, the store was a natural if difficult transition. In recent days, Ray, his wife, and some friends created the Six Foot Social Club as a way to raise money for small businesses. Ray ends the podcast talking about his hopes and fears for small businesses once the lockdown is lifted.
If you missed Part 1, when Ray told stories from his early days in Kansas, Dallas, and Austin, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
From Kansas farms to Austin bands, Cheese Plus owner Ray Bair's life experiences span quite a broad spectrum.
In this podcast, Ray takes us back to the early '70s, when he'd spend summers on his grandparents' farm in Kansas. He'd return for the school year to his hometown of Dallas, where he spent his high-school days and stuck around a few years after graduating. A job lured him to Austin, where he later found work at the nascent Whole Foods Market. That eventually helped him land in the Bay Area several years later.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Ray will talk about his time with Whole Foods around here and his eventually coming to own Cheese Plus (one of our favorite stores in San Francisco!). He'll also reflect on what the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent economic shutdown portends for small businesses like his.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Living in San Francisco was never a foregone conclusion for Robin Galante. But growing up on the Peninsula, the city always held a certain allure for her.
In this podcast, Robin talks about her life in the city. These days, in addition to doing original art for Nocturne podcast, she's been making paintings of the Balboa Theatre and other Outer Richmond businesses and donating proceeds from the sale of that art to businesses in the area affected by the coronavirus shelter-in-place.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photo by Michelle Kilfeather
Growing up, Robin Galante felt she didn't fit in with kids in her neighborhood, and so she turned to her imagination at an early age.
In this podcast, Robin, who grew up on the Peninsula in Los Altos, talks about her life there. Owing partly to her mom's creativity, she engaged in visual arts and never looked back. As a young girl and again as a teenager, she visited San Francisco and formed impressions of the big city up the way. She eventually moved here when she decided to attend SF State.
We recorded this episode on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Marke Bieschke arrived in San Francisco in the mid-'90s, got a place to live, and got the first of a couple of dotcom jobs. Those were the days ...
Today, Marke is the publisher and arts editor of 48 Hills (fundraiser here). He's also part of a collective that owns The Stud, San Francisco's oldest gay nightclub (fundraiser here). In this podcast, Marke shares the stories of his two-and-a-half decades in the city. He ends by reflecting on how the community has reacted in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
Marke Bieschke, who today is a member of the 17-person Stud Collective, which owns San Francisco's oldest gay nightclub, and is the publisher/arts editor of 48 Hills and legacy keeper of the SF Bay Guardian archives, was throwing raves back when they were a novel thing.
In this podcast, Marke traces his early life, from lower Ontario farms and inner-city Detroit abandoned buildings to early techno and house nightclubs. The episode ends with a rather auspicious tip from a friend.
We recorded this podcast via Zoom during quarantine in San Francisco in April 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
A girly magazine might've drawn Arnold Townsend to San Francisco, but what has kept him here for more than five decades goes much, much deeper than that.
In this podcast, Reverend Arnold tells the story of moving to the city in the late-'60s. At SF State (then known as "state college"), he quickly got involved with the Black Student Union (BSU), which led him to the work that's come to define his life: housing rights.
If you missed Part 1, when Arnold shared the story of his life before San Francisco, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at Arnold's office in the Fillmore in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we are rerunning this episode.
Born in Phoenix in 1943 and raised in the all-black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Arnold Townsend's family moved to Southern California when he was 6. He lived in Watts in LA on an integrated block. In this podcast, Arnold takes us through the early years of his life, with tales of racism, defiance, and, as he put it, a "Leave It to Beaver" neighborhood.
Look out for Part 2 on Thursday!
We recorded this podcast at Arnold's office in the Fillmore in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
In this episode, Josh talks all about what went into making the documentary Chinatown Rising, which he co-directed and produced. From his dad calling him about a bunch of video footage he was cleaning out of the garage to the opening of the CAAM Film Festival in 2019, the journey of making the movie is as remarkable as the documentary itself.
If you missed Part 1, when Josh talked about his Chinese-American ancestors and his own childhood, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at Cameron House in Chinatown in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
Chinatown in San Francisco is so much more than ornate streetlamps.
In this podcast, Josh Chuck, who co-directed and produced the documentary Chinatown Rising, traces his family's story back a few generations and explains how they ended up the city. His parents met at Cameron House, where Josh was raised mostly. He has stories of he and his teenage friends finding fun all over town in the nineties. He ends the podcast with his time at UC Davis, which is where Josh started getting into filmmaking.
We recorded this podcast at Cameron House in Chinatown in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
In this episode, Erin picks up where she left off in Part 1, talking about her final year interning with the Giants. From there, she worked in TV production, where she met friend and Bitch Talk Podcast co-host, Angela Tabora (whom you might remember from Season 2 of this podcast). It was a fortuitous encounter, as the two would go on to travel around the world, make a documentary movie, and do a podcast with more than 400 episodes.
Be sure to check out Bitch Talk's brand-new website!
Photo by Chloe Jackman
Erin Lim is a huge inspiration for our podcast.
In this episode, Erin shares her parents' back stories and how they met. She talks about growing up in San Leandro, ice skating, going to Giants games with her dad and step-great-grandpa, and the various internships she had while in college. Full disclosure: Erin and Jeff are engaged and live together.
Erin will talk about her podcast, Bitch Talk, in Part 2. But we wanted you to know that they've launched a new site and rebrand today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
We recorded this podcast on Lone Mountain during quarantine in March 2020.
Photo by Chloe Jackman
Aireene Espiritu took her calling to become a musician seriously.
In this podcast, Aireene takes us back through the story of her music. It started with open mics. Then she bought her first ukulele. From there, it's a winding journey across continents and back to the Bay Area, where Aireene established Color-Coded Symphony.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to hear Aireene's origin story.
We recorded this podcast at Pinhole Coffee in Bernal Heights in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
Since she was a little girl, Aireene Espiritu has searched for a place where she felt she belonged.
In this podcast, Aireene, who today is a musician, talks about her childhood in the Philippenes and on the East Coast. Her mom had to work three jobs to support her and her brother, and so Aireene came west to live with family in Milpitas. She eventually found her way to San Francisco, when she enrolled at SF State.
A few years later, she started going to open mics, first in the Sunset, then later at Hotel Utah. After being inspired by some of the folks she saw get up and perform, Aireene soon started to play music herself.
We recorded this podcast at Pinhole Coffee in Bernal Heights in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
In a way, Jan Yanehiro's career has come full circle.
In this podcast, Jan traces her work in Bay Area broadcast journalism, from humble beginnings in radio to hosting a nationally syndicated show for more than a decade. After leaving the field, the Academy of Art University asked Jan to establish and run its Multimedia Communications department, where she's been director for 12 years now.
If you missed Part 1, when Jan shared her story of leaving her home in Hawaii, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at the Urban Knights Studio in March 2020.
Jan Yanehiro defied familial pressures to follow her dream.
In this podcast, Jan traces her story back to Hawaii, where she grew up a third-generation Japanese-American. She braved upsetting her parents to go to college in California, and after a short stint as a flight attendant following graduation, she came to San Francisco and got a job at a local radio station.
We recorded this podcast at the Urban Knights Studio in South of Market in March 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
Sometimes, it's the whackier ideas that stick.
In this podcast, Adam picks up where he left off in Part 1, telling the story of how he came to own the Balboa Theater. Along with the theater's general manager, Chloe Ginnever, he tells some of the history of the building and the theater itself. Adam and Chloe talk about some of the programming they do at the Balboa, and Adam ends the episode looking into the future for the Outer Richmond theater.
We recorded this podcast at the Balboa Theater in the Outer Richmond in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Adam Bergeron's parents are awesome.
In this podcast, Adam, who today owns and operates the Balboa Theater, shares the story of a cross-country roadtrip his family took back in 1977, and how they ended up in San Francisco at a particularly important moment in cinematic history.
The family moved around quite a bit but ended up back on the East Coast, where Adam went to high school and college. He came out west with friends after graduating from Northeastern University. Then, after a brief stay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Adam ended up back in the Bay Area. He split his time between Santa Cruz and the city before opening 12 Galaxies in the Mission back around 2002.
We recorded this podcast at the Balboa Theater in the Outer Richmond in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This episode is a little different for us. For starters, it's a little longer than what you're used to. But for good cause.
In it, Dayna talks in some detail about the many cycles she's been through in her life of addiction-rehab-repeat. In between one of her cycles, she managed to get a degree in broadcasting, which helped her land jobs DJing at several Bay Area radio stations later. After her last stint in rehab, she launched Radio Rehab podcast, which is now in its fifth year.
We recorded this podcast at Caffe Trieste in North Beach in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Dayna Keyes never knew her real dad.
In this podcast, Dayna talks about growing up in Mississippi. Her mom soon met the man who ended up helping to raise Dayna, and the family soon moved to Southern California. Dayna's love of make-believe and escape hinted at her young adulthood of acting, voiceover work, and eventually, drugs.
We recorded this podcast at Caffe Trieste in North Beach in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Some people's trash is other people's art ... or, in George Rocha's case, their business.
In this episode, George tells the story of his cross-country move to San Francisco. He found his own place in the Outer Sunset, a rental where he eventually built a backyard pool to skate in. A few years later, he started taking his old skateboards and making new ones out of them, the inspiration for Iris Skateboards, which George owns and operates today.
If you missed the story of George's childhood and skateboarding in Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at George's home and workshop in the Outer Sunset in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Skating and building ramps consumed much of George Rocha's childhood.
In this podcast, George, who today owns and operates Iris Skateboards, recounts various tales from his childhood on four wheels. He took a roadtrip to Portland right out of high school, his first taste of the West Coast and a world he had been reading about and seeing pictures of in magazines and videos. He would end up moving to San Francisco just a few years later.
We recorded this episode at George's house and workshop in the Outer Sunset in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
P. Segal wants San Francisco to be a city full of culture again.
In this episode, P. charts her return to the city after college and a trip to Europe. She ran in art and intellectual circles in North Beach until her eviction from a place she lived there. She found an enormous house in the Western Addition and soon joined the Cacophony Society. Later, she opened Cafe Proust down the street.
These days, P. is working to establish a non-profit called Art House that would secure affordable housing for artists in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at P.'s home in the Western Addition in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When she was a teenager, P. Segal was held by her father under what she calls "house arrest."
In this podcast, P. talks about her Sicilian roots, her many warm memories of growing up in San Francisco, leaving for college in Los Angeles, and her eventual return to the city.
We recorded this podcast at P.'s home in the Western Addition in February 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In his book, San Francisco: Year Zero, Lincoln Mitchell ties together threads of the Giants, punk rock, and the political upheaval that hit the city in November 1978.
In this podcast, Lincoln talks at some length about those three topics: baseball, counterculture, and the assassinations and their aftermath of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and check that out.
We recorded this podcast at Blue Danube in the Inner Richmond in January 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
Lincoln Mitchell's family came to San Francisco from New York City in the 1970s.
In this podcast, Lincoln talks about growing up in the city and being a fan of the Yankees and the Giants. He discusses how he came to love baseball, his family's and his own sense of politics, schools he went to here, and both the differences and similarities between New York and our city.
We recorded this podcast at Blue Danube in the Inner Richmond in January 2020.
Photo by Jeff Hunt
There's the wrong way to move into a neighborhood, and then there's the Social Study.
In this podcast, Social Study owner and operator Harmony Fraga shares the story of opening her day and evening lounge in the Fillmore, picking up where she left off in Part 1 (please listen if you haven't already). She talks about the history she's learned of the neighborhood and, specifically, the spot her business occupies today. And she ends the episode reflecting on what the Social Study means to her.
We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in January 2020.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Harmony Fraga grew up mostly in the East Bay, with San Francisco always just a scenic drive over the Bay Bridge.
In this podcast, Harmony, who today owns and operates the Social Study in the Fillmore, talks about her early life, schools she went to, graduation and spending more and more time in the city, and eventually moving over after getting her first job here. That job lead to another, and then to her first business—a day and evening lounge in a neighborhood and city that needed something exactly like that.
We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bob Buckter's painting and color consulting business is responsible for the look and feel of more than 17,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco.
In this podcast, Bob picks up where he left off in Part 1. He talks about the early years of his painting business, the Colorist Movement, the history and meaning of the term "painted ladies," his brief early retirement, a failed marriage, the recent gray/blue (or what we call BORING) trend, and what he's up to next. Actually, that last link, to Annie Vainshtein's SF Chronicle article from October 2019, has some great history of Victorians and Edwardians in San Francisco. Check it out.
We recorded this podcast at Bob's home near Potrero Hill in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Some of us talk about making the world a better place. Bob Buckter, aka Dr. Color, has spent the last 50 years doing just that.
In this podcast, Bob, a born-and-raised San Franciscan, reflects on his childhood in the Excelsior and Outer Sunset Districts.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Bob will talk about how he got started painting historic Victorian houses, among other things.
We recorded this podcast at Bob's home near Potrero Hill in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
For 15 years, starting on the day he moved to the Mission, Sam was Jeff's corner-store guy. In this podcast, Sam talks about his move to the U.S. from Jordan as a teenager. He and his brother Joe ended up in Daly City, where Sam finished high school. Shortly after that, Sam had the opportunity to own a store on Mission just south of Army Street.
Then in the late-'80s, he bought Golden Eagle Market on Valencia at 20th St., where he still works today. He talks about how the neighborhood, and especially that corner, has evolved over the years.
We recorded this podcast at Golden Eagle Market in December 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1, Cassandra Dallett took us on one helluva ride, from Haight and Fillmore and over to North Beach and shows at the Mab.
In this podcast, she tells the story of enrolling in school and making some unlikely friends, a few relationships she had back in the late-'80s, and some friends from back east who she bumped into here in San Francisco. She closes the show out talking about her journey as a writer.
We recorded this podcast at Cassandra's home in Oakland in December 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When Cassandra Dallett moved to San Francisco in the mid-1980s, she hit the ground running ...
Welcome to Season 3 of Storied: San Francisco! It's good to be back at it, capturing the spirit of the people still here making this city one hell of a special place. Cassandra is the perfect person to get us started.
In this podcast, Cassandra talks about her early life in New England and what drew here to San Francisco as a teenager. She takes through adventures in a flat at Haight and Fillmore that sounds like something right out of Tales of the City. She started going to shows all over town, but the Mab in North Beach had the strongest attraction for her and her young punk rocker friends.
Today, Cassandra lives in Oakland and is an award-nominated poet with her own podcast and book club. She'll be reading her poetry live tonight at our Season 3 kickoff event—Love Letters to the City.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Cassandra will tell stories of some of the colorful characters she met when she enrolled in high school in SF.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this last podcast of Season 2, Chloe Jackman talks about various office and service jobs she had before she was inspired and able to pursue her photography full-time. She also talks about the realities of being a working artist in San Francisco, especially when it comes to renting.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
Michelle and Jeff will be taking a few weeks off as they prepare for Season 3. We'll be running some favorite episodes from Seasons 1 and 2 in the meantime. Season 3 will launch on Jan. 11, 2020 with a show and art opening in SoMA. Please save that date and stay tuned to Twitter and Instagram for more info coming out over the next several weeks.
We recorded this podcast at Chloe's studio in the Inner Richmond in October 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Chloe Jackman grew up all over San Francisco.
In this podcast, she takes us on a journey through several different neighborhoods she lived in and schools she went to. After high school, she lived in Santa Barbara long enough to graduate and realized how good we have it here in the Bay.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, our final podcast of Season 2.
We recorded this podcast at Chloe's studio in the Inner Richmond in October 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Brian Goggin created Defenestration in 1995. The idea originated when Brian was working with an artist in Paris, and it came to life on the corner of Sixth and Howard in San Francisco. In this podcast, Brian shares the story of how the full-building work of art came to be. He also talks about his large-scale work, currently up on Ninth Street between Mission and Market, called Caruso's Dream—several pianos suspended on the side of a building in South of Market. In the podcast, Brian tells a fascinating story of pianos, sinkholes, the 1906 earthquake, and why he named the piece what he named it.
If you're within a block or so of Caruso's Dream between 4:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. every day, tune your radio to 90.9 FM to hear Caruso's singing along with the light show emanating from the suspended pianos. Bravo!
Brian ends the podcast describing a couple of projects he's currently working on.
We recorded this podcast at Brian's studio at Project Artaud in the Mission in September and October 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Brian Goggin moved to San Francisco from Davis, California, in 1988. His first visits to the city came as a kid when his parents enrolled him in a class at the SFMoMA where he studied animation and sculpture.
In this episode, Brian reflects on his childhood, arriving in San Francisco, why he left and what it was like to return, his early art explorations, and how he began to fuse his interests of literature, painting, and performance into his three-dimensional art.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Brian will tell us all about two of his more prominent sculpture projects in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Brian's studio in Project Artaud in the Mission in September and October 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Dara charts her path from educational work to going back to grad school for non-profit program management. That led her to helping start The Dinner Party, a non-profit with the goal of bringing people who are experiencing loss together over potluck dinners. That served as a segue to Reimagine: End of Life, a festival that kicks off this week with 250+ events all over the city and Bay Area.
Dara also talks about the roots of one of her newest gigs: stand-up comedy. Her upcoming shows, both part of Reimagine, include Good Grief on Oct. 29 at Punchline (after the show, Bitch Talk Podcast will host a live Q&A with some of the featured comedians), and a Halloween show at Cal Academy of Sciences called Ghost Stories. Please visit those links for tickets and more info.
Our contribution to Reimagine this year is a show called Is San Francisco Dying? We ask you to ponder that question by hearing 20 diverse San Franciscans share stories of their lives here. Their photos (by Michelle) are on the wall for you to get to know them better. And we're inviting you to share your own memories with the community by writing them down and locating your stories somewhere on our giant map of San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1 of Dara's podcast, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at The Laundry in September 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
These days, Dara Kosberg is the program director for the non-profit Reimagine: End of Life, a 10-day gathering with more than 250 events all over SF and the Bay Area that explore topics around death, dying, grief, and living life to the fullest. But her journey to San Francisco was no straight line.
In this podcast, Dara talks about her life in Massachusetts and New Orleans before moving here in 2003. It involves ruby slippers and being an extra in a Ben Stiller movie, among other things.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Dara will go into more depth about her work with end-of-life issues.
We recorded this podcast at The Laundry in September 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Chris talks about "making" photographs with Polaroid cameras. He explains his method of shooting pictures then leaving his photos to marinate, as it were, in various mixtures of bleach, whiskey, and whatever other liquids he can think of.
He goes on to share aspects of his work at SFMoMA, which further satisfies many of his artistic expressions.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Photographer Chris Macias grew up in the Los Angeles area. He came to San Francisco to go to art school, and his school happened to be in the Tenderloin.
In this podcast, Chris talks about arriving in the city and coming to learn San Francisco on the streets of the Tenderloin.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Chris will go into depth about his art and his work at SFMoMA.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, recorded as part of an SF Cultural History Museum pop-up over the summer, TJ and Quiver talk more about the work they do with Street Sheet and the Coalition on Homelessness.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Street Sheet editors Quiver and TJ talk about their early lives and moving to the Bay Area. They go into how they each got started in thinking about, writing, and other ways of working on social justice issues.
Be sure to read the article TJ references, "Nonprofit Execs Get Rich Off Homelessness." And thanks to the San Francisco Cultural History Museum for asking us to host the panel with Quiver and TJ.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Ava starts off with more memories of Chinatown and the story of her mom growing up there. She talks about the two bands she's in at the moment--Preschool and The Gonks (w/Sonny of Sonny and the Sunsets). And she ends the episode sharing some of her favorite SF and Bay Area bands around right now.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ava Lynch just started college.
In this podcast, Ava (the daughter of S1E47 storyteller Mike Lynch) talks about growing up in Visitacion Valley, going to preschool and her grandma's house in Chinatown, feeling free to express herself at SF Waldorf School, and a show at San Francisco Rock Project that inspired her nine-year journey of playing drums and singing. She's currently in two bands, which she'll talk about in Part 2 on Thursday.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bowen Dwelle lives in his van.
In this podcast, Bowen talks about leaving his hometown of San Francisco after high school, what it was that brought him back, some jobs and businesses he's had, his love of the outdoors, and his latest venture: Second Sight coaching.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast on the Upper Sanchez steps in August 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bowen Dwelle is a San Francisco native writer, athlete, and life coach in-training.
In this podcast, Bowen talks about his paper route near the house he grew up in on Liberty Hill, being a young entrepreneur, the open-air "drug market" that was his high school, and the strange disappearance of a young friend.
Check back Thursday, when Bowen will talk about his life after high school.
We recorded this podcast on the upper Sanchez steps in August 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Taler Nicols wanted to paint.
In this podcast, Taler begins by rattling off bars and restaurants in San Francisco that she used to frequent. She then talks of leaving a job she'd been at for a decade to help open Let It Bleed Tattoo in the Tenderloin in 2009. She ends the episode reflecting on the changes in the city over the last decade, as well as some signs of hope she's seeing now.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at Vesuvio Cafe in August 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Taler Nicols is a fifth-generation San Franciscan. Her family here dates back to Potrero Hill when it was called Goat Hill.
In this podcast, Taler, who is a tattooer now, talks about growing up in bars and restaurants in North Beach, thanks to her man-about-town dad. She ends the episode talking about neighborhoods and the changes in San Francisco this decade, ending on a positive, hopeful note.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Taler will share the story of how she became a tattoo artist.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sherri Franklin loves animals.
This episode, she starts off talking about Heidi—an eight-year-old Bassett hound who inspired Sherri to do something about senior dog care. And so, she founded Muttvile Senior Dog Rescue in 2007. Today, Muttville has found forever homes for more than 7,000 senior dogs, and they place 1,110 dogs in homes every year.
If you're interested in fostering or adopting a senior dog, or you just wanna spend an afternoon among them, please go to Muttville's website for more information.
And if you missed Part 1, please go back to hear Sherri talk about moving to San Francisco, the '89 earthquake, and how she started volunteering at the SFSPCA.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
How do you go from being a successful hair stylist who uprooted herself to move to the Bay Area to founding a senior dog rescue non-profit? That's the story of Muttville Founder and CEO Sherri Franklin.
In this podcast, Sherri takes us on a journey from LA to the Bay Area. She shares her experiences in the 1989 earthquake. She ends this episode with her early volunteer work with the SFSPCA.
Check back Thursday, when Sherri will tell the story of how she started Muttville.
We recorded this podcast at Muttville in July 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This podcast picks up right where Part 1 left off: With Danny Mac telling us about Emperor Norton's dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, as well as Norton's currency system.
Danny goes on to talk about growing up in the Excelsior in the 1950s and '60s, the Vietnam War, his evolution as an artist and his dad's influence on it, and explorations of art theory.
We recorded this podcast at Macchiarini Creative Designs in North Beach in August 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Macchiarini Creative Designs has been in North Beach since 1948. Today, it enjoys legacy business status.
In this podcast, the studio's owner, Danny Mac as he's known to his friends and loved ones, talks about his father's involvement in the Bohemians (one of our city's early counter-culture groups) of the 1930s in San Francisco. He goes into detail about the group's plans to erect a giant statue of Emperor Norton to face the Pacific and welcome immigrants to San Francisco.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Danny will share more of his and his family's San Francisco story.
We recorded this podcast at Macchiarini Creative Designs in August 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
What if, in the early days of your new job, you were tasked with these two things: 1. Moving a fabled city's collection of thousands of historical records (official papers, photos, ephemera, etc.) to a new building, and 2. Essentially establishing and adding to that city's archives. That's what life was like for San Francisco city archivist Susan Goldstein back when the public library moved into its current building.
In this podcast, Susan talks in-depth about her work and our city's official archive. If you're half the history nerd that we are, get ready. And be sure to listen through to hear how you can experience the collection first-hand.
If you missed Part 1 with Susan, when she talked about her life leading up to the job at SFPL, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
San Francisco city archivist Susan Goldstein was drawn to history from a young age. She left her childhood home in Southern California to go to college out east. After a stint in Phoenix, she went to Austin where she worked in photo archiving at the University of Texas. In 1984, she came to the Bay Area to work on union archives at SF State.
In this podcast, she talks about her evolution as an archivist and historian. She goes into detail about her work at SF State, which brought her face to face with our city's rich labor union history.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Susan will tell us more about her work as San Francisco city archivist.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Uncle Damien is doing his part to make a positive difference in the world.
In this podcast, Uncle Damien (Damien Posey) talks about Uncle Damien Speaks, his motivational speaking work. He found inspiration through a stint in federal prison, Rudy Corpuz and United Playaz, and fellow motivational speaker Eric Thomas. Damien ends the podcast talking about his love of San Francisco and doing what he can to be a positive influence himself.
If you missed Part 1, when Damien walked us through his troubled youth, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Motivational speaker Uncle Damien went through a lot to get here.
In this podcast, Damien Posey, who was born and raised in San Francisco, talks about the journey that got him to where he is today. It's a story of a young man who had no positive male role models, who got shot at a young age, and who ended up in federal prison. But without those bad circumstances and decisions, he might never have become Uncle Damien, an inspiration for youth in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Damien will tell us all about his work and what it is he loves about San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Patrick played some songs for us when we recorded. Three of those songs are featured here (the fourth appears at the end of Part 2).
Patrick's album Welcome to the End of the Empire, is available from Bottom Feeder Records.
Enjoy!
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
For Patrick O'Malley, music and politics evolved side-by-side.
In this podcast, Patrick talks about how he came to understand housing policy, both in San Francisco and statewide in California, through his day job. He goes on to tell us about some public-transit advocacy work he's done in light of Google busses and ride share companies in the city. He ends the episode talking about the various music projects he's been part of, including his solo act, much of which involves political and social commentary.
Be sure to listen to the entire episode—after the outro, you can hear one of Patrick's songs.
If you missed Part 1, when Patrick talked about growing up in Southern California and coming to San Francisco in the late-1990s, please go back and check that out.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Patrick O'Malley started playing guitar at an early age. But it wasn't until his time in Santa Barbara that his music took on a new meaning for him—one of political activism.
In this podcast, Patrick talks about growing up in Southern California and his arrival in San Francisco in the late-1990s. Among other things, he points to the write-in mayoral candidacy of Tom Ammiano in 1999 that really sparked something in him.
Patrick will be playing tonight (Aug. 13) at Simple Pleasures Café. You can find his latest record, Welcome to the End of the Empire, on BandCamp.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Patrick will talk more about politics in San Francisco, the state, and the U.S.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Avengers vocalist Penelope Houston talks about the legendary Sex Pistols show at Winterland that the Avengers opened. It's a story that includes Sid Vicious ODing (but surviving) at the afterparty. She goes on to talk about her solo musical career and resurrecting the Avengers. She ends with her work at the SF Public Library putting together its punk rock collection.
If you missed Part 1, when Penelope talked about growing up and moving to San Francisco, please go back and listen.
Penelope will be playing a solo show Aug. 30 at the Ivy Room in Albany.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Penelope Houston's family moved around the country quite a bit when she was a kid, eventually settling up in Washington state long enough for her to go to high school. She came to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute for visual arts, but quickly started going to shows and became friends with other kids who wanted to be up on stage.
In this podcast, Penelope talks about the nascent San Francisco punk scene of 1977. The episode ends with her and her friends forming their own band—the now legendary Avengers. Go check out Penelope's solo show, Aug. 30 at the Ivy Room in Albany.
Check back Thursday, when Penelope will share the story of the Avengers and the show they played at Winterland with the Sex Pistols.
We recorded this podcast in June 2019 at the Rare Books Room at the San Francisco Public Library.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ken Walton grew up in Sacramento always considering San Francisco a special place. He got inspired to do street photography after watching a documentary about Vivian Maier. In 2016, he founded StreetFoto San Francisco, an annual international street photography festival. We caught up with Ken at this year's festival and chatted with him about San Francisco in 1990s and what street photography means to him.
Photo by Ken Walton
Specs is special. In a city with a history of providing safe harbor (literally and figuratively) to so many over the years, the bar encompasses the spirit of San Francisco perfectly.
In this podcast, Elly Simmons, whose parents Specs and Sonia opened the bar in 1968, talks about the documentary movie she's making about the place, its history, and her folks. If you love Specs and want its history documented for future generations, please consider donating to Elly's fundraiser for the film. Go to the Last Call: The Specs Film website and donate at whatever level you're able to.
If you missed Part 1 of this episode, go back to hear Elly talk about how her parents met and her own childhood in San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
North Beach is still alive. And one of its best and longest-lasting watering holes, Specs, is still a San Francisco treasure.
In this podcast, the current co-owner of the bar, Elly Simmons, tells the story of how her parents got together. Elly's dad, Richard "Specs" Simmons, and her mom, Sonia, met at Vesuvio across Columbus Street in 1952. It's a wild ride that takes us all over the neighborhood (and the country and city) in the 1950s.
Elly is raising money to help fund a documentary she's doing on her dad and the bar. To contribute, please head over to theGoFundMe page for Last Call: The Specs Film.
Join us Thursday for Part 2, when Elly will talk more about Specs and Sonia opening their bar, her childhood in San Francisco, and more.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, artist William Rhodes talks about the 3.9 Art Collective and how it influenced his latest show, Threaded Memories. The exhibition, up at the African-American Art and Culture Complex now through Aug. 2, celebrates the community that lived in the Fillmore during that neighborhood's "Harlem of the West" days. To kick off the show, William held a party called Juke City in which he invited folks to dress up in Jazz Era clothing, see a burlesque show, and be treated to a few numbers by none other than Fillmore Slim.
William will be giving an artist talk as part of the exhibition at the AAACC on July 25 at 6 p.m. You can check out the 3.9 Collective website and follow them on Facebook.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, artist William Rhodes talks about growing up in Baltimore, some similarities between there and San Francisco, moving to the city, the art of the Mission, and establishing his own art experience here.
Williams's show, Threaded Memories, is up at the African American Art and Culture Complex now through Aug. 2. He'll be giving an artist's talk there next Thursday, July 25, at 6 p.m. Through various media, the show celebrates the now-diminishing African American population of San Francisco.
Check back Thursday, when William will talk more about the ongoing exhibition as well as the party that launched it.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
At SF State, Joy Ng's senior thesis covered the history of hip-hop as resistance and using the art form to make something out of nothing. Since graduating, she has run a website of critical essays with the tagline, "Hip Hop x Asian America."
In this podcast, Joy discusses the cultural context that gave rise to hip-hop, the history of the genre, local artist Ruby Ibarra, and her deep dives into Asian-American identity, empowerment, history, and how they intersect with music.
If you missed Part 1, please listen to hear all about Joy's childhood being born and raised in San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Joy Ng is a born-and-raised San Franciscan. In this episode, Joy talks about her childhood, in Chinatown, North Beach, and a couple other neighborhoods. She ends with her time at SF State, where she changed her major and got involved in community organizing. A large influence in that shift was Curtis Choy's documentary, The Fall of the I-Hotel.
FoundSF has more info on the story of the International Hotel eviction and demolition.
Join us again Thursday, when Joy will talk about her work as a hip-hop blogger.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We're not quite sure how Joe Bagale keeps up with all the music he's created or been part of performing or recording. In this podcast, he takes us through his journey after arriving in San Francisco back in 2003. It involves several living situations with in-house studios, his first visit to the Boom Boom Room, a serendipitous date, playing and touring with Mickey Hart, joining Jazz Mafia, and eventually, creating his alter ego—Otis McDonald. Otis's music has been in this podcast since we launched two years ago.
Look for Joe's new record, People Music, coming out this fall.
And if you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to see the unusual way that Joe made the move to San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It's kinda fitting that this is the 80th episode overall for this podcast (49 in Season 1; 31 and counting in this current season, Season 2). Through all but two episodes so far, the intro and outro music has been by the subject of this episode.
Joe Bagale moved to San Francisco from New York State in 2003. In this episode, Joe talks about his life back east, which centered heavily around music. He tells the story of his first band, first show, first time to get paid to play music, and so much more. The podcast ends with Joe's truly unusual premise for moving here.
Check back Thursday, when Joe will pick up where he left off and tell stories of all the musical projects he's been a part of in San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1 of this podcast, Project Open Hand volunteer Dana Dawson took us through the history of the non-profit and told us all about what it does for the sick and dying of San Francisco and the Bay Area today.
In this episode, Dana is joined by four of her fellow volunteers who've become like a second family for one another. They talk about meeting through their volunteer work and what it means to them, as individuals and as a group.
We recorded this podcast in Bernal Heights in May 2019.
L–R: Jill Morrison, Lynn Wilkinson, Darryl Forman and Romo, Craig Smith, Dana Dawson, and Robert Pucci. Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Project Open Hand, which today feeds more than 2,500 sick and dying people, started in 1985 when Ruth Brinker made meals for her friends and neighbors who were "wasting" from AIDS. In this podcast, POH volunteer Dana Dawson takes us through that history, talking about how the operation that started in a residential home today serves healthy meals and groceries with the help of more than 125 volunteers like herself.
Join us Thursday, when Dana and a few of her fellow volunteers will talk about what working with Project Open Hand means to them.
We recorded this podcast in Bernal Heights in May 2019.
Since deciding to stay in San Francisco (see Part 1), Margaret Casey has done a lot—been a poet, worked for various event spaces and event production companies, and moved into a houseboat on Mission Creek.
In this podcast, Margaret fills us in on her life since she heard that saxophone in the Panhandle (also in Part 1).
We recorded this episode on Margaret's houseboat, the Battlestar Gloriana, in May 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The theft of a Picasso in Australia. Getting framed by an old teacher. Cocaine shipments from South America. San Francisco cults in the 1970s. And someone playing the saxophone in the Panhandle on a random night in the early 1990s ...
All of these things are involved in the story of why Mission Creek houseboat resident Margaret Casey came to San Francisco—and why she stayed.
In this podcast, Margaret, who has owned her boat for a little more than eight years, shares all of these stories and describes the more savory characters around 16th Street and Valencia when she arrived in the city back in the day.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Margaret will talk about moving down to the creek.
We recorded this podcast on Margaret's houseboat, Battlestar Gloriana, in May 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Originally known as "Last Gasp Eco-Funnies," the publishing company that Ron Turner and others founded celebrates 50 years next April.
In this podcast, Ron talks about starting Last Gasp with Slow Death, an underground comic that featured art by Greg Irons, among others. Over the years, he's worked other artists, including R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Trina Robbins, and more. Ron also shares stories of hanging out with Timothy Leary and Warren Hinckle.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen to Ron talk about growing up in the Central Valley and moving to San Francisco in 1967.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Before he moved to the Bay Area in the late-1960s, Ron Turner spent his life in the San Joaquin Valley of California. In this podcast, he talks about various experiences he had around the valley, including time at Fresno State working on an underground newspaper where he exposed corruption at the Peace Corps and at the DA's Office in Fresno. He moved to San Francisco to go to SF State, hung out at the Grateful Dead house, joined anti-war groups and participated in the student strike at SF State, and worked at various research labs before his life changed pretty dramatically.
Join us Thursday, when Ron will discuss launching Last Gasp Publishing with a couple of underground comix titles.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
La Cocina serves as a resource for women of color and lower-income women who want to start a food business. Rosie Ortiz sure could cook, but she needed to learn business and other kitchen skills she didn't already have in order to get Mission Boricua off the ground.
In this podcast, Rosie talks about her experience in the La Cocina program, which she began three years ago. She hopes to launch her food truck later this summer. Oh, and Rosie's pop-up restaurant is open every Wednesday from 11 to 1 at Homey, 2221 Mission Street near 18th.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at Rosie's home in Richmond, California, in April 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Born and raised in the Mission District, Rosie Ortiz learned to cook by watching her mother.
In this podcast, Rosie, the owner of Mission Boricua, talks about San Francisco back in the day. She says that, over the years, her love of cooking evolved to the point where she found herself making more and more Puerto Rican dishes (Rosie is half-Puerto Rican herself).
Join us Thursday, when Rosie will share stories about going through the La Cocina program and getting Mission Boricua off the ground.
We recorded this podcast at Rosie's home in Richmond, California in April 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
No living situation is permanent, especially in San Francisco. The residents of the houseboats on Mission Creek, which are nestled amid one of the hottest areas of development in the city, are always are aware of this.
In this podcast, Ginny Stearns and Bob Isaacson talk about their efforts to secure their homes on the water, the only such dwellings in San Francisco. Bob talks about a couple of books he's been a part of publishing that cover the history of Mission Bay and Mission Creek as well as efforts to preserve the environment in those areas. They talk about how they met and Ginny's move to their houseboat. And Bob ends the podcast declaring that the houseboat community has been beneficial to the area.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Before there was the ballpark where the Giants play ... before the elevated I-280 freeway ... before most of the northeastern half of what we call the Mission District ... before the Gold Rush, there was Mission Bay. It was fed by many sources, the biggest of which was Mission Creek, which flowed over waterfalls down from Twin Peaks, by Mission Dolores, and down into the bay. Today, all that's left of that creek is what some call McCovey Cove. But to the residents of a couple dozen houseboats, it's Mission Creek.
In this podcast, houseboat residents Ginny Stearns and Bob Isaacson talk about founding many of the preservation groups that have worked with the government and developers to protect their little corner of the city. Bob and Ginny talk about moving to San Francisco, the various work they did before moving into their houseboat, and how the area around Mission Creek has changed dramatically.
We recorded this podcast in Bob and Ginny's houseboat in April 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Stephanie Smith is a tattoo artist. It's an industry that, even in the Bay Area, is fairly male-dominated.
In this podcast, Stephanie talks about a life and a career with its share of misogynistic experiences. Through them, she says, her sense of feminism was formed. She prides herself today on the quality of her art and her group of clients in and around San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Stephanie Smith grew up on the East Coast, but never felt like she fit in with the general mindset out there. When it came time for her to (reluctantly) go to college, she picked the University of San Francisco in large part because of where it is.
In this episode, Stephanie talks about moving to San Francisco, getting a degree in fine arts at USF, and then pursuing both getting her body covered in tattoos and becoming a tattoo artist.
Join us Thursday for Part 2, when Stephanie will go into detail about being a woman tattoo artist today.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When we sat down to record with this week's podcast guest, John Law, he launched right into the research he did to get to know us better before meeting us. For the next seven minutes, we were delighted to hear John's telling of Ep. 15 storyteller and Mission Creek houseboat resident Sarah Davis's first LSD trip. Hold on tightly for this doozie of a meta-Storied podcast!
John Law grew up quite the mischievous kid. That naturally led him to the Suicide Club, which he talked about in Part 1.
In this podcast, John catches us up on what he's doing these days, which includes a lot of "urban exploration." The mindset he adopted with the Suicide Club informs a lot of his exploring these days, including to leave no trace at the sites you explore.
He ends the podcast reflecting on what it's like to live, work, and play in San Francisco today.
We recorded this podcast at Napper Tandy's in March 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
John Law hitchhiked his way to San Francisco.
His dad was a college professor, and so the family moved around quite a bit in John's youth. He started hanging out with the "fun kids," which meant breaking into houses and stealing cars. He ran away back to one of his previous hometowns, in Michigan, and then set out for the Bay Area with a friend.
In this episode, John (who, really, has done far too much to mention here, but, among other things, is one of the co-founders of Burning Man) talks about growing up and developing his sense of adventure. He tells the story of learning about Communiversity, and through it, becoming a member of the now-defunct Suicide Club.
Join us Thursday, when John will fast-forward to talk about what he's up to these days.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
As we learned in Part 1, Liz Beeson-Evans grew up around horses. After splitting her childhood between Northern California and Jalisco, Mexico, Liz moved around a bit before returning to San Francisco with her now-husband. Spending time with her cousin in LA who's a farrier inspired her to get back to horses.
In this episode, Liz talks about what being around horses can do for people. She founded a non-profit, Caring Cowgirl, that will offer therapeutic mini-equine visits to people in San Francisco.
To that end, Liz is raising money to buy a minivan (get it?) to transport the minis—Vanessa, the mini donkey, and Shakira, her dwarf mini horse. Please visit her website and donate.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
There are many ways to get to San Francisco. For Caring Cowgirl owner Liz Beeson-Evans, it went something like this:
She grew up between Northern California and Jalisco, Mexico, moving to the city in the late-2000s. After being far away from family a few years while living first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles, her fiancé-now-husband got a good job and they came back five years ago to a very different city.
In this episode, Liz goes into detail about how her childhood around horses and other farm animals steered her toward a career caring for animals. Join us Thursday for Part 2, when Liz will talk about starting her non-profit, Caring Cowgirl, which offers therapeutic mini-equine visits (one mini dwarf horse and one mini donkey) to people in San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Bay Area Ridge Riders Ranch in March 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Forty years is a long time. That the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will celebrate that milestone this weekend speaks to the charity, creativity, and sense of community that the group brings to San Francisco.
In this podcast, Sister Anni Coque l'Doo will continue the story of her work with the Sisters. When she moved to Oakland, she joined the Ducal Council of Alameda, essentially establishing the Sisters in the East Bay. She ends the episode reflecting on what it means for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as they celebrate their 40th anniversary this Sunday in Dolores Park.
Special thanks to Heather Jacks, through whom we were able to meet with and record three lovely drag nuns (if you missed our episodes with Sister Roma and Sister Mary Media, please go back and listen). Heather's book on the group, Sister Stories, comes out soon, and it's something that should be on every coffee table in the city.
We recorded this podcast at the Twin Peaks Tavern in March 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Born and raised in San Mateo, the young man who is Sister Anni Coque l'Doo went to the March on Washington in 1993 and came back inspired to become an activist. In this podcast, the third and final in our Sisters at 40 series (go back and listen to Sister Roma and Sister Mary Media if you missed them), Anni talks about her evolution as an activist. It culminated with her joining the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence a decade and a half ago.
Check back Thursday, when Anni will tell us all about the Ducal Council. She'll end reflecting on 40 years of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
We recorded this podcast in March 2019 at Twin Peaks Tavern.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When Dino Medardo Rosso was approached to help restaurant workers better communicate with, and thus better understand, one another, he was onto something.
In this podcast, Dino talks about expanding the work he does with Lingo, his language-instruction business. It's all about bringing groups of people closer together through language.
If you missed Part 1, when Dino talked about moving to San Francisco and getting started teaching high school and language, please go back and listen.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Dino Medardo Rosso studied 16 languages and he speaks five or six, depending on the day. He moved to San Francisco about a decade ago, and got work as a bicycle tour guide and then, a high school teacher.
In this podcast, Dino tells the story of how a restaurant owner approached him seeking to solve the problem of her kitchen staff not being able to communicate effectively with the front-of-house workers. This effectively spawned Dino's business—Lingo.
Check back Thursday, when Dino will share how Lingo expanded to a point where he's working with grocery stores and even the SFFD to bridge the language gap between various groups of people.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Michael McConnell owns a café and video store, but he's also an artist—one of a seemingly dying breed in San Francisco. In this podcast, he laments the loss of artists in the city over the last decade or so, adding that with their leaving, San Francisco is losing its character and its diversity.
Michael will be having open studio this weekend at 1980 Bryant, Suite 414. And the Social Sketch we talk about in the podcast will be on April 16 at Secret Alley in the Mission. Don't miss it!
If you missed Part 1, when Michael shared his story of moving to San Francisco and coming to own Fayes Coffee, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at Fayes Coffee in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It's one thing to be an artist and work in a café as a barista. It's another to be part owner of that café, and for it to double as one of the last video stores in San Francisco.
In this podcast, Fayes Coffee owner Michael McConnell talks about moving to San Francisco in the late '90s and landing a job at Fayes within a year or so. Fast-forward to today, and the little coffee shop serves an important role in the busy neighborhood that 18th Street between Guerrero and Dolores has become.
Join us again Thursday, when Michael will talk about being an artist in San Francisco. He'll also share a couple of stories about the area around Fayes.
We recorded this podcast at Fayes Coffee in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
One of the least interesting things about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is their name, but it's a damn good name.
In this podcast, Sister Mary Media tells the story of how a few young gay men decided to form a group based around performance, politics, charity, and spirituality. They came up with the memorable name, and the rest is history. Mary Media goes on to tell much of that history, a time spanning the last 40 years, including how she got her drag nun name.
If you missed Part 1 with Mary Media, please go back and listen. And for an even more in-depth history of the Sisters, go to their website.
Author Heather Jacks is publishing a book to commemorate the Sisters' 40th anniversary. The launch party for Sister Stories will be at Spark Arts in the Castro April 19–21. Check out the event page for more details.
And the Sisters will be back at Dolores Park on Easter (April 21) to celebrate their anniversary, bringing their annual Hunky Jesus contest back to where it started. This is something you do not wanna miss!
We recorded this podcast at Sister Mary Media's house in Upper Haight in March 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, like any good spiritual group, have an origin story. There are some minor quibbles, but Sister Mary Media was there.
In this podcast, Mary Media describes the political and social climate from which the Sisters came to life in 1979. She goes on to talk about how the work they did back then evolved over time to include educating the public on the dangers of STDs and AIDS before it was known as that.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Mary Media will take us through the nearly 40 years (it will be 40 on Easter Sunday next month) of the wonderful work that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do.
We recorded this podcast at Sister Mary Media's house in Upper Haight in March 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
On April 21 at Dolores Park, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will celebrate its 40th anniversary, bringing its Hunky Jesus contest back where it originated many years ago. There to emcee the event, as always, will be Sister Roma (Sister There's No Place Like Rome).
In this podcast, Sister Roma talks about finding out that her good friend was a Sister, getting made up for the first time (and looking "fucking amazing"), and many of the public awareness campaigns she's been involved with in her 30+ years with the organization.
If you missed Part 1, when Roma talked about her All-American, preppy young adult life before moving to San Francisco in the 1980s, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast at the Cinch Saloon in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Heather Jacks's introduction to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence was serendipitous and took place over a couple of decades. In Part 1, we learned of Heather's time with the Christian fundamentalist church in Sacramento. It turns out the Sisters protested Easter service in the capital city during Heather's time there. Fast-forward to this decade: Now back living in the city again, she learned of the amazing charity work that the drag nun group does, and was hooked.
In this podcast, Heather explains the inspiration behind her art book that celebrates 40 years of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In March and April, you'll hear more about the Sisters directly from three nuns.
We recorded this podcast at Heritage Restaurant and Bar in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
This April, Heather Jacks's art book about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who turn 40 this year, will hit the shelves. In this podcast, we get to know Heather before she got involved with the Sisters. You'll hear how she grew up on Indian land in Oregon, graduated high school at 16, moved to Australia, joined a fundamentalist Christian church, and eventually ended up in San Francisco about a decade ago.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Heather will talk about the inspiration for her Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence book.
We recorded this podcast at Heritage Restaurant and Bar in February 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It's fair to say that Pete likes sports. In this podcast, he talks about the Warriors' move to San Francisco later this year. In Pete's mind, Oakland has been great for the team, and with their recent run of championships (three of the last four seasons), he fears that diehard fans are being priced out.
In this podcast, Pete talks about the Warriors, the 49ers, and the Giants, including the Giants' move to Pac Bell Park and the loss of Candlestick as symbolic of our loss of other icons. He ends the podcast with some predictions on how Golden State will finish this season and the challenges ahead for the San Francisco baseball team.
We recorded this episode at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Pete's parents met in San Francisco. He was born in Upper Haight, but his family moved to SoCal soon after that. Around 21, Pete migrated north to the area and started to drink here before eventually moving back to the city.
In this podcast, Pete, who bartends these days at Zeitgeist and Emperor Norton's Boozeland, talks about SF now vs. how things were in the 1990s—people are softer now, more passive-aggressive, he says. He talks about opening Hemlock Tavern in the early 2000s and just how great of a place it was until it closed in 2018.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Pete will talk about Bay Area sports teams.
We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sonia and David paid their San Francisco dues. The moved in with each other in the Dogpatch about a year into dating. Shortly after that, Sonia was diagnosed with cancer. Given their young relationship, she feared the worst. To her surprise, David proposed and rose to the task of helping with whatever his fiancée needed.
In this second part of our Valentine's Day podcast, the couple shares stories from those early years of being together. They had a baby a year into their marriage and made the conscious choice to raise their son in San Francisco. In the podcast, they talk about their introduction to public schools in San Francisco.
By the way, Sonia co-hosts Dorking Out Podcast and the two host Old Movies, New Beer. Please subscribe and listen to both shows.
We recorded this podcast at Barebottle Brewing in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sonia Mansfield is the creator and co-host of Dorking Out Podcast. She grew up in Concord, but worked so much in San Francisco after college that she eventually decided to move here. She met David through mutual friends in 2008.
In this special Valentine's Day podcast, Sonia and David talk about growing up in the Bay Area. They describe their first date at The Broken Record, a bar in the Excelsior renowned for its strange and gut-busting food. The date went so well that they wanted to see each other again a few days later, and they talk about that second date, too.
Join us again Thursday to hear the story of getting married, Sonia's health, and the kid they decided to raise in the city.
We recorded this podcast at Barebottle Brewing in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Kevin Hunsanger was part-owner of Green Apple Books for more than 20 years. This January, he stepped away to pursue his latest dream—opening a San Francisco cultural history museum.
In this podcast, Kevin shares his inspiration for starting a museum from the ground-up. He speaks to what it is about San Francisco he wants museum visitors to experience—namely education, nostalgia, and a sense of community. Visit the museum's website to learn more and to make a donation.
We recorded this podcast at the San Francisco Elk's Lodge in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Green Apple Books is a San Francisco institution. Richard Savoy opened the store on Clement Street in 1967. In the early 1990s, Kevin Hunsanger moved to the city and got a job selling rare books there. A few years later, he found himself part of the shop's ownership group, a gig that would last more than 20 years.
In this podcast, Kevin talks about his move to San Francisco and his history of working at and owning Green Apple Books.
Check back Thursday, when Kevin will talk about what he's up to next—establishing a San Francisco cultural history museum.
We recorded this podcast at the San Francisco Elk's Lodge in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Angela Tabora does a lot ... podcast host, fire dancer, film maker. She got her start making documentaries while still at SF State. Her first subject was the house she was living in at the time and its inhabitants. The house was the San Francisco Morehouse, a place for communal living, sensuality classes, and charity.
In this episode, Ange talks about making that documentary. In the process, she ended up learning so much more about her roommates and eventually herself.
We recorded this podcast at North Star in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Angela Tabora grew up in LA and moved to San Francisco to go to SF State not knowing a whole lot about the city. After moving around her first couple of years in college, including a stint at a party house in the Sunset, she needed a new place where she could focus on graduating. That's how she ended up finding the San Francisco Morehouse.
In this podcast, Ange talks about some of the people she lived with there and ends the episode explaining the documentary movie she pitched about the place.
Check back Thursday to hear Ange talk about making that movie.
We recorded this podcast at the North Star in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
As a lifelong San Franciscan, Ariel Vitale has a unique perspective on the changes the city has undergone in recent years. In this podcast, the actor compares the city of today with how it was back in the 1980s, 1990s, and even the early 2000s.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and hear Ariel talk about growing up in the Tenderloin and going to ballet school at age 9.
We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in January 2019.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ariel Vitale was born at Mt. Zion hospital in the 1980s. He was raised in Tenderloin and started going to SF ballet school at age 9.
In this podcast, Ariel talks about growing up in San Francisco. His family was evicted when he was young, and he shares what it was like moving from home to home in one of the city's toughest neighborhoods.
Check back Thursday, when Ariel compares the San Francisco of today, with its widening income inequality and loss of famed venues, to the city back in the '80s and '90s.
We recorded this podcast in January 2019 at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in the Tenderloin.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Sloane Kanter loves the drag queen scene in San Francisco. In a city in the midst of rapid and drastic changes, she sees that community as holding out strongly.
In this podcast, Sloane talks about her passion for photographing drag queens. She mentions some of favorite venues and queens, and she ends the episode on a high note.
We recorded this podcast in the Tenderloin in October 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
You might not know it, but somewhere in your house/apartment/flat/garage lives at least one or two posters from shows you certainly remember. They're there with other show posters, but what makes these distinctive is the artist who created them.
In this podcast, Lil Tuffy shares how he got into the art of making show posters. He talks about the people he met and was influenced by, how his style changed over the years, and what he's up to these days.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and hear what moving to San Francisco in 1997 meant for Tuffy.
This podcast was recorded at Tuffy's studio in the Mission in December 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Prolific AF poster artist Lil Tuffy moved to San Francisco in the late-1990s, as the city was about to experience its first tech bust. He came mostly for the music, although the company he was working for in Pittsburgh decided to relocate here around the same time.
In this episode, Tuffy shares his story of moving to the city and immediately immersing himself in the music scene here. He goes on to talk about a couple of bartending gigs he's had in San Francisco (at Thee Parkside and Pop's)—his main gig until he gave that up to do what he does best—create show posters.
Check back Thursday, when Tuffy will talk more about his career in poster art.
We recorded this podcast at Tuffy's studio in the Mission in December 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bhautik Joshi (S1E3) and David Brooks live in the same neighborhood. They're both artists, but their lives couldn't be more different. Go back and listen to Part 1 to discover the odd way that they met.
In this episode, Bhautik and David talk about their neighborhood—Potrero Hill. For them, it's a microcosm of what's going on in the city as a whole lately. But they have one idea of how to make things better for all San Franciscans.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, K.R. shares what being a high school creative writing teacher means to her. She talks about the changes she’s seeing in San Francisco reflected in the students in her classes. Lastly, she describes how teaching kids to write gives them confidence that they can apply to any aspect of their lives.
If you missed Part 1, when K.R. talked about moving to San Francisco and learning to play drums, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast in November 2018 at Spec's.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
K.R. Morrison moved to San Francisco in 1997. In this podcast, she talks about the differences between people like her who came here in the late-'90s and those who've come over the past several years. She also describes what it was that drew her here and what's kept her calling San Francisco home for more than 20 years.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when K.R. will talk about what being a public school teacher in the city means to her.
We recorded this podcast at Spec's in November 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Maddy and I talk about various aspects of art, including Instagram "treasure hunts," putting on DIY art shows, and how artists are or are not surviving in today's economy.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast in Contra Costa County in November 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Painter Madeleine Tonzi moved to the Bay Area from Santa Barbara in 2007 to go to art school. She quickly fell in love with the drum 'n' bass scene in San Francisco and parties that featured underground musicians.
In this podcast, Maddy shares her story of moving here. For her, the underground party scene gave way to visual arts. She talks about coming to love street art and the murals in the Mission.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Maddy will share stories about Instagram treasure hunts and independent art shows she's helped put on. She ends by reflecting on what's happening to the arts, both in the Bay Area and nationwide.
We recorded this podcast in Contra Costa County in November 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Joe Aguirre got started taking photos thanks to his mother's being a packrat and his grandmother's love of photo albums.
In this podcast, Joe shares what he loves about photography and how that led to his involvement with the Burn My Eye Photo Collective. In the second half of the episode, he talks about his nostalgia for San Francisco and the things he still appreciates about this town.
We recorded this podcast in Potrero Hill in October 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Melinda Uno knows some bad-ass women. In 2015, they hatched a plan to ride motorcycles across Mexico, with Melinda joining in to document the adventure. This podcast is the story of that ride.
Melinda reflects on some of the lessons she learned on that trip and how they relate to what's going on here in San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1, please listen to that episode.
Photography by Melinda Uno
Welcome to Season 2 of Storied: San Francisco podcast. This season won't be too different from what you heard in Season 1. The changes are mostly cosmetic—new theme music, a new look for the website, that sort of thing. Michelle and I learned a lot the first year, and we hope to bring some fresh perspectives to this project.
Our theme this season is: What is it about this place? What draws people here, whether they visit, settle here, stay in the city for a time then pick up and move on, or are born and raised and stay ... there's something about this place, and through posing that question to another 49 storytellers, we hope to get to the heart of why we're all drawn to San Francisco.
Like many of us, Melinda Uno moved to San Francisco. She moved to the Tenderloin. And she loves it.
For Melinda, a big part of it is the idea that you can be your true self here. In this episode, she talks about moving to San Francisco and eventually being part of the effort behind opening the Tenderloin Museum and the ways in which they help educate the public and celebrate the neighborhood, especially its part in women's history.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2, when Melinda will talk about meeting a group of bad-ass women motorcyclists and setting out on a ride across Mexico.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It's been a minute. Michelle and Jeff take a break from their break to reflect on Season 1 and how Michelle got involved to begin with. We talk about getting ready for Season 2 and everything we're doing to set up our two-day event, Two Storied Nights, on Nov. 9 and 10.
We're so happy to have brought you 49 different storytellers in Season 1, and now, we want to meet you! Two Storied Nights is your chance to make good on the theme of Season 1: Get to know your neighbors. Plus, there'll be art, music, dance, and booze. Who could say no to that?
Get your tickets today (Friday is donation-based). And look out for S2E1 on Nov. 13!
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
As we learned in Part 1, Gary Weinstein moved to San Francisco in 1971 and started driving Muni buses right away. In this podcast, Gary shares some of the juicier stories from behind the wheel. He ends the episode talking about what prompted him to cover his body in tattoos.
That's it for Season 1 of Storied: San Francisco. We hope you've enjoyed it. We'll be back with Season 2 on Nov. 13, but in the meantime, scroll through our archives. We've now got 49 different storytellers spread out over 88 episodes. And don't miss us too much while we take a short break.
Also, don't forget to get your advance tickets to Two Storied Nights, our show on Nov. 9 and 10.
This episode was recorded at a home in Lone Mountain in September 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Gary Weinstein grew up in Buffalo, New York. He chose not to go to nursing school and decided instead, in 1971, to move to San Francisco. After a couple of short-lived gigs, he got a job driving Muni buses.
In this podcast, Gary talks about his time with Muni, from his adventures while training to his distaste for driving light-rail vehicles.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, the final podcast of Storied: San Francisco Season 1. It will feature some of Gary's more colorful adventures during his time driving for Muni. He'll also talk about his tattoos.
We recorded this podcast at a home in Lone Mountain in September 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bertha Fajardo has been with the Giants since 1997. In this podcast, she talks in more detail about the work she does with the Giants, which involves both current and former players, their families, and groups in the city and around the Bay Area.
In case you missed it, check out Part 1 of Bertha's episode.
We recorded this podcast at AT&T Park in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Bertha Fajardo grew up going to games at both Candlestick Park and the Oakland Coliseum. Her dad and uncles got her started, but her love of the game survived her teenage years, and in 1997, she got a job with the Giants. In her role as manager of Community and Family Programs, Bertha oversees much of the charitable work that current and former Giants players and their families are involved in.
In this episode, Bertha takes us through her life, both as a baseball fan, and more recently, as someone whose entire career has been with the sport.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Bertha will go into more detail about the work she's done with the San Francisco Giants.
We recorded this podcast at AT&T Park in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Mike Lynch paid his dues in San Francisco. His business, Babylon Burning, which he's owned since 1999 and which has been open since 1976, recently attained legacy status with the city.
In this podcast, Mike talks about what it means to own a small business here. He shares his aim to support other local businesses, reflects on how the city has changed over the years, and discusses the things he still loves about San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at 63 Bluxome Street in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Mike Lynch grew up in Maine. In the 1980s, so many of his New England friends had moved to San Francisco that he decided to give it a try. More than 30 years later, he owns a business and a home and has a family.
In this episode, Mike talks about the printing jobs he had, which eventually led him to the shop he owns today—Babylon Burning in SoMa.
Sidenote: Mike's shop made the Storied: SF T-shirts, hats, and koozies that we have for sale on our store page. Buy one today to support your favorite San Francisco podcast.
Check back Thursday for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast at 63 Bluxome Street in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Pepper Alexandria is a belly dancer and dance instructor these days. She puts on a big show every year called Carnival of Stars. She moved to San Francisco in 1968, in the heyday of the hippie movement.
In this podcast, Pepper talks about shows she went to, bands she knew, and venues they played at. She shares stories of underground comix and their parties, which she often danced at. She ends the show with a history of her belly dancing career, which includes studying for a time in Egypt.
We recorded this episode at Pepper's home in Berkeley in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Kevin DeMattia has bartended and barbacked at Big Heart City, the Black Cat, the Blind Tiger, and the Chi Chi Club. He eventually got introduced to Bender's in the Mission. From the first time he set foot in the bar, Kevin felt like he was home. He got a job there, and right as he felt he had hit his stride in San Francisco, Bender's burned down.
In this episode, Kevin walks us through his jobs in the city, leading up to his eventual co-ownership of Bender's and Emperor Norton's Boozeland in the Tenderloin. In the podcast, Kevin also shares some great history behind the spot that is now Zeitgeist.
We recored this podcast at Boozeland in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It's 2004. September 11 wasn't even three years removed yet. But Kevin DeMattia had a thing for climbing large buildings and structures, and Sutro Tower was calling his name.
In this podcast, Kevin, who co-owns Bender's Bar and Grill in the Mission and Emperor Norton's Boozeland in the Tenderloin, shares the story of conquering the 977-foot TV and radio antenna tower that has become quite the iconic symbol of San Francisco.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Kevin will trace his bartending history, which leads to his co-ownership of two bars in the city today.
We recored this podcast at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, San Francisco Giants Executive VP of Communications Staci Slaughter shares stories about opening the team's new stadium in China Basin—PacBell Park, as it was known back in 2000. She tells stories about Barry Bonds, playoff games, World Series wins, and parades down Market Street. She ends the podcast with some reflections on Giants fans.
We recorded this podcast at AT&T Park in June 2018.
Image courtesy PMell2293
Staci Slaughter grew up going to Giants games at Candlestick Park. In the 1990s, she got a job in Mayor Frank Jordan's office, where she helped with the effort to keep the baseball team in San Francisco. After Jordan left office, Staci found a job in the Giants' front office, where she's been for 22 years now. Today, she's the Executive VP of Communications for the ballclub.
In this podcast, Staci takes us through her career in baseball, leading up to the team's eventual move from Candlestick Park to a new stadium. Check back Thursday for Part 2.
We recorded this podcast at AT&T Park in June 2018.
Photo courtesy the San Francisco Giants
Darryl Lim grew up in San Francisco and saw first-hand the devastation that AIDS wrought on the city's gay community.
In this podcast, Part 2 of Darryl's story, he talks about what it was like to watch friends and loved ones die of the disease and suffer the stigma of having it. He talks about his own experience with AIDS and what it was like, after living in a few other cities, to come back home to San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast in Hayes Valley in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Darryl Lim was born in San Francisco and raised in North Beach. In this podcast, Darryl, who is a skin care professional these days, shares the great things about his childhood, including cafes, bookstores, clubs, and the schools he went to. He talks about going to Esalen when he was 12, and the influence that hippies had on him.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Darryl will talk about living with AIDS.
We recorded this podcast in Hayes Valley in August 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Gordon Szeto loves taking photographs. The San Francisco native found photography as a teenager, and after a run with his family business, he fell back in love with the art. These days, Gordon co-owns Glass Key Photo, a camera and film store located in the Polk Gulch.
In this podcast, Gordon talks about his love of photography—specifically, film photography. He shares thoughts on what makes San Francisco such a special place, to live, work, and take photos.
We recorded this podcast at Glass Key Photo in August 2018.
Film photography by Pedro Lange-Churión
Gordon Szeto grew up on the edge of Russian Hill, close to Chinatown, a neighborhood that, from a young age, captivated him. As a teenager, he got into photography, and Chinatown was a natural subject. These days, he and a few other photographers are documenting life in Chinatown—the people and businesses that have held out all these years.
In this episode, Gordon talks about growing up in San Francisco and learning to love photography. He shares what makes Chinatown so special, learning about other neighborhoods later in life, and even some of his favorite restaurants.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Gordon will talk about coming to own his photo store—Glass Key Photo.
We recorded this podcast at Glass Key Photo in August 2018.
Film photography by Vince Donavan
It was one thing for the San Francisco Giants to end the franchise's 56-year drought, winning the World Series in 2010. They went on to repeat as champions in 2012 and 2014.
In this podcast, the third part of three, staff photographer Andy Kuno shares stories from the second and third World Series victories for the San Francisco Giants.
We recorded this podcast at The Social Kitchen and Brewery in July 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Something happened in 2010 that had never taken place in San Francisco before—the Giants won a World Series. The team had been here for 52 years at that point. They had played in three different stadiums. Entire generations of families had been fans. But that season, it all came together and eventually culminated in a parade down Market Street in November.
In this podcast, the second part of three, Giants staff photographer Andy Kuno starts us off the year before, when some household names were getting their starts with the team's single-A affiliate in San Jose.
Come back tomorrow for Part 3, when Andy will share stories from the Giants' 2012 and 2014 World Series wins.
We recorded this podcast at the Social Kitchen and Brewery in July 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
For 24 years, photographer Andy Kuno has been on the field with the San Francisco Giants. He grew up going to games at Candlestick with his dad, a photo lab owner who helped out taking pictures of the ballclub. In the 1990s, Andy got the job, and he's been there, through thick and thin, ever since.
In this podcast, the first part of three, Andy talks about memories of the Giants in the 1989 and 2002 World Series. Check back tomorrow for Part 2, when Andy will share stories from the first World Series victory for the San Francisco Giants—in 2010.
We recorded this podcast at Social Kitchen and Brewery in July 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
After Anthony Bourdain passed away in June, our friends at Bitch Talk Podcast decided that the best way to honor him was to follow in his footsteps—literally. The second of three planned "Bourdain Crawls" brought them (and Jeff) to Upper Haight's Zam Zam, where we met and were treated to some amazing oral history from bartender Kundan Baidwan.
In this episode, which is shared by our podcast and Bitch Talk, Kundan walks us through some colorful stories surrounding this neighborhood drinking hole that still doesn't have any TVs.
We recorded this episode at Zam Zam in July 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Ed Wolf talks about moving here and feeling like he was part of a community. Shortly after his arrival in San Francisco, that community was upended by AIDS.
Ed tells stories of his own relationship with the disease and he talks about an old roommate who was sick but found hope in an unusual place.
Here's the poem Ed mentions having written in this podcast:
THE SKI MASK
When he's had a bad night
and there's nothing else to do
we talk about how
we could make it happen
sooner.
Bob was given a phone number -
a guy
wearing a ski mask
will come to your house
and help you
out.
We try to imagine:
placing the call
having a meal
changing the sheets
saying goodbye
leaving the front door ajar
going to separate rooms
hearing footsteps on the porch
in the hallway
passing by my room on the way to his
closing his door
opening a dark bag
setting him free.
Either way
we suppose
it will come like that.
With or without a mask.
Edward Wolf
September 17, 1994
If you missed them, please go back and listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of Ed's stories.
We recorded this episode at Ed's home in the Mission District in June 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ed Wolf worked for three years on San Francisco General Hospital's Ward 5A, where AIDS patients came when the epidemic first hit. Part 2 of Ed's podcast details two stories from his time in Ward 5A. One is a story of an unexpected kindness Ed experienced after crossing a line he wasn't supposed to cross. The second is a tale of survival and heroism that should surprise you.
Check back tomorrow for Part 3, when Ed will share the story of moving to San Francisco just before AIDS happened.
We recorded this podcast at Ed's house in the Mission District in June 2018. Listen to Part 1 here.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ed Wolf is an educator. He's a writer, a storyteller, and a trainer. And he loves public transportation.
Three rides on mass transit serve as the settings for Ed's first podcast. It was there that he learned about people and the city he lives in and loves—San Francisco.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of 3, when Ed will tell stories from San Francisco General Hospital's Ward 5A: The AIDS ward. They're tales of survival and kindness, and you don't want to miss them.
We recorded this episode at Ed's home in the Mission District in June 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Every podcast has an origin story. In this episode, Lily Sloane, the creator and producer of A Therapist Walks into a Bar, talks about how she got started and how podcasting came to be the first thing she tells people when they ask, "What do you do?"
If you missed Part 1, click here.
We recorded this podcast at The Sycamore in June 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Lily Sloane is a podcaster, a radio producer, a music composer, and a psychotherapist, in that order. But it hasn't always been that way.
Lily's family moved to Petaluma from the East Coast when she was 8. She moved herself to San Francisco to go to college. But, having never stayed anywhere too long, and despite being here for a reason, it took a little time for the city to become her home.
In this podcast, Part 1 of 2, Lily talks about coming to feel like San Francisco is where she needs to be. Some revelations along the way helped usher in that feeling.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Lily will share the story of starting her podcast, A Therapist Walks into a Bar.
We recorded this podcast at The Sycamore in June 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
George Downes is a San Francisco County Sheriff's deputy by day. Woo Woo Monroe is George's drag persona by night.
In this podcast, George shares the story of one of his first New Year's Eves in San Francisco. A walk down to the Embarcadero to see the fireworks gave way to a chance meeting he had with two San Francisco icons—the Brown Twins, Marian and Vivian.
In the second half of the podcast, George talks about taking a visiting friend to an SF leather bar for his birthday.
Photo by Ashlynn Danielsen
One-hundred-year-old Alyce Murphy walked across the Golden Gate Bridge when it opened in 1937. She worked as a toll taker on the Bay Bridge shortly after it opened.
In this podcast, Part 2 of 2, Alyce talks about the bridges, meeting her husband, raising her family, other jobs she had, and the 1989 earthquake. She also reflects on living all 100 of her years in San Francisco, and talks about why she never left.
We recorded this podcast at Alyce's home in Noe Valley in May 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Alyce Murphy turned 100 this May. The third-generation San Franciscan spent her early life in a tiny, crowded house behind St. Luke's Hospital with her grandmother after her mom died when she was very young. It was from that home that Alyce experienced the Great Depression and got into her fair share of mischief, as young kids tend to do.
In this very special podcast, Alyce talks about the Mission District back in the 1920s and 1930s, watching people go in and out of St. Luke's, and going to Playland and Sutro Baths (where her dad was a manager). Then she compares going out for a Saturday night walking down Mission Street to getting dressed up for a trip downtown to her favorite store—the Emporium.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Alyce will talk about meeting and marrying her husband, raising a family, and various jobs she had, including as a toll taker on the Bay Bridge shortly after it opened.
We recorded this podcast in Alyce's Noe Valley home in May 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1 of Adair Lara's podcast, she talked about moving to San Francisco from her childhood home in Marin. She has lived in the same beautiful Queen Anne Victorian house, at the corner of Waller and Scott in Duboce Triangle, since 1973.
In Part 2, Adair will take us through her experience as a young writer who ended up with a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, where she met many notable writers, including the legendary Herb Caen. Adair shares some stories about and quotes from Caen in this episode.
We recorded this podcast at Adair's home in Duboce Triangle in May 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Adair Lara moved to San Francisco from her childhood home in Marin in 1973. Today, she still lives in the same Victorian house she moved into back then, a beautiful and expansive Queen Anne in Duboce Park.
In this podcast, Adair, a writer and former columnist for the Chronicle, talks about that house, the living room of which we recorded in.
Check back Thursday, when Adair will share the story of writing her column in the newspaper.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1 of this episode, Stephen talked about working at Nopa restaurant and how that job led to his involvement with students at Ida B. Wells High School.
In Part 2, he shares the story of helping Nopa to tell their own stories through Nopalize. The work he did getting Nopalize going provided a framework for Stephen's current project—Whetstone Magazine.
Whetstone will be having an issue launch party a week from tonight (June 21) at Perish Trust on Dividadero. The party starts at 6:30.
We recorded this episode at 4505 BBQ in May 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1 of this podcast, entertainment lawyer Michael Aczon talked about growing up in the Bayview in the 1970s. In this episode, he'll share what it was like living next to a patron of the San Francisco jazz scene. He'll talk about his brother's band, H.P. Riot, and some old SF music venues. He'll end the podcast with his thoughts on what makes music in San Francisco so special.
We recorded this podcast at The Ramp in May 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Entertainment lawyer Michael Aczon has music running through his veins.
In this podcast, Michael will talk about his father's arrival in San Francisco in 1931 (including, he later found out, lots of time at the International Hotel), his family's return to San Francisco in the 1960s, growing up in the Bayview, and learning to navigate the city on Muni and his bicycle. He and his friend Marcos once rode their bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin, where Michael saw "separated houses" for the first time. You will hear and feel Michael's deep appreciation of the city in this episode.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Michael will really dig into his exposure to and involvement with music in SF and the Bay Area.
We recorded this podcast at The Ramp in May 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
After an on-again/off-again stint in New York City, Chris Ohnesorge came to San Francisco in 2003. Through people he knew via music boards, he quickly found friends and fellow musicians.
In this podcast, Chris talks about his first band in SF: The Ex-Boyfriends. The band was excited when local label Absolutely Kosher Records signed them to release two albums. The first one, Dear John, was a hit. The second album, In With, not so much. They ended up putting a third album, Line In/Line Out, out themselves, and it's Chris's favorite of the three.
Watch the video for "Situation," from In With, here.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Musician and hair stylist ChrisO moved to San Francisco in 2003. Among the odd jobs he had before he learned to style hair, he took a job at mayoral candidate, ex-supervisor, and ex-state senator Mark Leno's sign shop in the Castro.
In this episode, Chris will talk about working in that shop. Then he'll share observations on San Franciscans' odd relationship with their appearances.
We recorded this podcast in Chris's apartment in Lower Haight in April 2018. Check back Thursday for Part 2, when Chris will share his experiences being in San Francisco bands.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1 of this podcast, San Francisco Giants VP of Business Operations Mario Alioto shared stories from his days with the team when their home was Candlestick Park. In this episode, Mario talks about being part of the effort that moved the team north to the South of Market area. That new ballpark, which began its life at PacBell Park and is now known as AT&T Park, has already seen four World Series, an All-Star game, a handful of no-hitters, and the only perfect game in Giants history (including their time as the New York Giants).
We recorded this podcast at AT&T Park on a beautiful, sunny day in April 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In 1973, Mario Alioto got lucky. After his older brother moved on from being a bat boy for the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park, it was Mario's turn.
In this episode, Mario, now VP of Business Operations for the Giants, shares stories from his days with the team before they moved north to their current home. He talks about being a bat boy for visiting teams, managing the visiting clubhouse, the 1989 earthquake, and his role in the current bobblehead craze.
Check back Thursday for Mario's stories from the AT&T Park (aka PacBell Park and SBC Park) days.
We recorded this podcast at AT&T Park in April 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Photojournalist Jessica Christian got her start in the newsroom while she was still in journalism school at SF State. After graduation, she got a job at the SF Examiner, where she covered the separate stories of two homeless men. In this podcast, Jessica shares those stories, stories that have two very different endings.
We recorded this podcast at the Java Trading Company cafe in the Chronicle Building (where Jessica works now). Check back Thursday for Part 2.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1, SF Chronicle photographer Jessica Christian shared stories of two homeless men that had two very different endings.
In this episode, Jessica takes us through the early days of her career as a photojournalist, through protests, riots, and eventually the funeral of Stephon Clark. By her count, since 2013, she has had seven full days when she didn't have a job or internship.
We recorded this podcast at the Java Trading Company cafe in the Chronicle Building in April 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this episode, Misisipi Mike Wolf talks about old music venues as a set up to some stories about Jonathan Richman. He ends the podcast with a string of celebrity sightings he's had with a legendary San Francisco band. The voice you hear in the background is Episode 22 storyteller John Binder. We recorded this podcast as part of Tighten Up Your Wig, John's show on Radio Valencia.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Misisipi Mike Wolf has been making music and poster art in San Francisco for decades. In this episode, Mike talks about the Mission and tells the story of a gigantic statue he saw being built on Bartlett Street. We recorded this podcast on Ep. 22 storyteller John Binder's show, Tighten Up Your Wig in March 2018
Check back Thursday for Part 2.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Part 1, Josh talked about being there to shoot Barry Bonds's record-setting 73rd home of the 2001 baseball season. The baseball landed in the stands mere feet from where Josh was with his camera. And so he inadvertently captured what turned out to be a contentious event. Two fans argued over which one of them owned the home-run ball; they ended up going to court over the matter.
In this episode, Josh will talk about that court case and the documentary that he helped make about the whole thing.
We recorded this podcast in March 2018 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema lounge.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ed. note: This podcast is the first of a series of podcasts we'll do all throughout the Major League Baseball season to celebrate the Giants' 60th year in the San Francisco.
In this episode, cameraman Josh Keppel talks about the last game of the regular season for the San Francisco Giants in 2001. It was roughly a month after Sept. 11, and he and a reporter were sent to PacBell Park (now AT&T Park) to do a story on stadium security. But Josh, a lifelong Giants fan, knew there was a potentially much richer story to be had that day, and boy was he right.
We recorded this podcast in March 2018 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema lounge. Check back Thursday for Part 2 of Josh's story.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In this podcast, Brian will play the first song he ever heard Mike Coykendall, with whom Brian collaborates on several musical projects, play. It was a show at Bottom of the Hill. Brian found the show in the Guardian, a now-defunct weekly here in San Francisco. Mike played that night with his band The Old Joe Clarks. The song is called "Built Right on the Ground."
To wrap up Brian's three-part Storied: San Francisco episode, you'll hear a song he wrote after coming off a musical hiatus. He first played "Marie" at Hotel Utah. He ends the podcast talking about the need to support musicians and artists in San Francisco, a sentiment we at Storied: San Francisco agree with wholeheartedly.
Also, Brian will play a record-release party on May 11 at Brick and Mortar. Tickets and other info here.
Welcome to Episode 24, Part 2. In Part 1, Brian talked about arriving in San Francisco in the 1980s, playing music and sleeping on the streets, and some of the people he met back then. In this podcast, he'll talk about playing some open-mics, forming bands, and the importance of independent radio stations. The song he'll play in this episode is called "Makes Me Think of You."
If you missed Part 1:
Episode 24, Part 1: Brian Belknap's San Francisco Story in Song
Check back next Tuesday for another song and more stories from Brian.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In the 1980s, Brian Belknap landed in San Francisco after traveling around the Northeast. His first stop was Fisherman's Wharf, which wasn't as "Disneyfied" back in those days. Brian's hustle was playing music for tourists, then packing up and finding a place to sleep. Often, his bed was also on the street.
In this podcast, Brian will share stories about his early days in San Francisco. He'll talk about those days in the wharf, some characters he met along the way, and he'll play a song that, for him, captures those days. After a few stints in other towns, he came back to San Francisco in the '90s. He'll talk about his return and play another song from that era of his life.
Brian is having a record-release party at Brick and Mortar on May 11 with Sallie Ford and Mike Coykendal. Check his website for more details, and please, support local artists and musicians.
Check back Thursday for more of Brian's songs and stories.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Allison Biddinger is a disaster program specialist for the Red Cross. In this episode, Allison shares stories of her work in response to some of the more recent and notable residential fires in San Francisco.
If you missed Part 1, please listen here:
Allison Biddinger's Early San Francisco (Mis)Adventures
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Allison Biddinger moved to San Francisco from a small town in Idaho about 15 years ago. Back when everything in the city was shiny and new to her, she learned first-hand that things like "street fairs" often come with their own SF definition.
In this podcast, Allison, a disaster program specialist with the Red Cross, will share this and other tales of her early days living in San Francisco.
Check back for Part 2 on Thursday.
We recorded this podcast at the Red Cross training site in San Francisco in March 2018.
Though he works part-time at a hospital, music is a big part of John’s life. Whether it’s the venue calendars he constantly checks out, the hundreds of live shows he’s gone to over the years, or his show on Radio Valencia, Tighten Up Your Wig, music is, as he puts it, a good friend for John Binder.
Also, and this comes up about halfway through this episode, but if anyone listening does know when the Hemlock Tavern opened, please let us know.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
John Binder is an internet radio DJ at Radio Valencia. It's one of those oh-so-San Francisco gigs, one that springs from his love of music. But John also loves San Francisco, the city he's called home since the 1990s.
In this episode, John will share observations and stories about life in the city. His is a fresh take, because despite more than two decades here, he's not skeptical or curmudgeon-y.
Check back Thursday for Part 2, when John will talk more about music (live shows, recorded music, and his radio program, "Tighten Up Your Wig"). He'll also talk a little about his music/dance project: Gogo Ballet.
We recorded this podcast in March 2018 in John's apartment in downtown San Francisco.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In Episode 21, Part 1, Myla Ablog shared stories of moving to San Francisco and learning to navigate the dating scene here. That eventually lead her to try online dating.
In this podcast, she will talk about a relationship that started on the internet. Everything was roses with this guy who turned out to be quite a bit different from Myla, until dark aspects of his personality starting coming to light.
We're sharing this story on Storied: SF because we want to offer some sense of hope and recourse for those experiencing abuse of any sort. One resource Myla took advantage of was the Restraining Order Clinic at the Women's Building in San Francisco.
Thanks for listening.
Born and raised in Stockton, wetlands biologist Myla Ablog went to college in Humboldt. She enjoyed her experience, but the pull of the Bay Area was too much to resist. She moved here after graduation and soon after that, she joined the dating pool.
In Part 1 of Myla's episode, we'll hear some of those early adventures she had in the San Francisco dating scene of the 1990s and 2000s.
Check back Thursday for Part 2.
Sunny Haire moved to San Francisco in the 1990s. He quickly made friends, and they found plenty of places to drink, especially in the Mission. But something was missing.
In 1997, Sunny and Lila Thirkield opened the Lexington Club at the corner of 19th Street and Lexington. With its renovated original bar sign, the Lexington would go on to serve as a drinking spot for lesbians and queer women until its closing in 2015.
In this podcast, Sunny will share the story of opening the Lexington. He'll also touch on some ways that San Francisco has changed in his more than two decades here.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In the last episode, we left off with Randy Burns talking about how the AIDS crisis affected his group, Gay American Indians. In Part 2, Randy will tell us about trips he took to DC and New York in the '80s and '90s to raise awareness to LGBT issues. He'll end with the story of his trip from the East Coast back to San Francisco.
Randy Burns arrived in San Francisco from Nevada in 1974. He was here to go to SF State, but he soon connected with out gay and lesbian American Indians, with whom he would go on to found the organization Gay American Indians.
In this episode, Randy will talk about founding the group and how the AIDS epidemic affected them in the mid-1980s.
We recorded this episode in February 2018 at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in the Tenderloin.
You could say that John Scott has done it all. He's certainly done and seen a lot over the years, starting out as a radio DJ back in Iowa. His career has largely been in broadcasts of some sort, but he's also had quite a ride playing guitar in several rock bands.
In this episode, John will talk about the media scene and its history in San Francisco. He'll walk us through some of the highlights of his career in radio, and he ends the podcast with a story of a guest musician who played with his band at a Christmas party at Bimbo's.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Falling in love with San Francisco is like a snowflake. Whether you're born here or become a transplant, we all find our own way to the heart of the city.
For BFF.fm founder Amanda Guest, it was no different. In this podcast, Amanda will tell the story of a 2009 all-nighter in the Mission with her friend, Mission Mission's Allan Hough. Along the way, she discovered enough surprises and felt so at home that she decided to move here a few years later, eventually founding her internet community-based radio station.
BFF.fm founder Amanda Guest first visited San Francisco as a kid with her family from Massachusetts. Her first trip here as adult was in 2007, when she came as part of the Game Developers Conference.
For Part 1 of Amanda's podcast, she'll talk about some of those times spent in the city before she had the experience that ultimately inspired her to move here.
We recorded this episode in BFF's studio at Secret Alley in January 2018.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Ryan Akerberg had been in San Francisco for only a couple of weeks when his friend from Boulder, Colorado, tapped him on the shoulder in a cafe. That random meeting eventually resulted in Ryan's owning a company. He has now been washing windows with Intelligent Window Cleaning for nearly 11 years.
In this episode of Storied: San Francisco, Ryan talks about what it's like to be a small-business owner, specifically what it means to wash residential windows in houses all over the city.
In case you missed it, Part 1 is here.
We recorded this episode at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in January 2018.
Film photography by Ryan Akerberg
Ryan Akerberg moved to San Francisco 12 years ago from Colorado, and Iowa before that. Like many of us, he arrived without a job or a plan to make the gobs of money that are required for city living. With his background in bartending, he decided to try for a job in fine dining.
This episode of Storied: San Francisco is all about Ryan's first job in the city. Check back Thursday for Part 2.
Ryan and I recorded at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in January 2018. Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Broke-Ass Stuart does and has done a lot of things. He moved to San Francisco in 2003 and started his website, Broke-Ass Stuart's Goddamn Website, in 2004. He's had a national TV show, hosted a talk show, and in 2015, he ran for mayor of SF.
In this podcast, Stuart will tell a few different stories from around the time that he came to San Francisco from Santa Cruz. In addition to other things, sharts were involved. Yep.
We recorded this episode in January 2018 at The Willow's. Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
H.P. Mendoza makes music and movies. He's quite good at doing both. But video games are another love of his. Several years ago, he started an arcade. That's right, a video game arcade. In this podcast, H.P. will share the story of how Mission Arcade was born. We recorded at H.P.'s house in the Mission in December 2017. Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
H.P. Mendoza, director of Colma: The Musical, I Am a Ghost, and the upcoming Bitter Melon, loves video games. In addition to music and movies, they are a prominent fixture in his life.
In this episode of Storied: San Francisco, H.P. will talk about the origins of that love of video games. He and I also talked about a couple of the long-gone video game arcades in SF.
We recorded this podcast in December 2017 at H.P.'s house.
Film photograph by Michelle Kilfeather
It's fair to say that homelessness is Kevin Fagan's favorite beat. The veteran SF Chronicle reporter was the only beat reporter in the U.S. covering homelessness full-time from 2003 to 2006. It was during that time that he met Jill May.
Episode 13, Part 3 is all about Jill.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In 2003, San Francisco Chronicle editors put Kevin Fagan and a photographer on the streets, literally, to live among the homeless population in order to really capture what that life was like.
In this episode, Part 2 of a three-part podcast, Kevin will talk about life on the streets of San Francisco, specifically right around the time of Super Bowl 50, in early 2016. Around 350 homeless people moved from the foot of Market Street, where a makeshift party area was constructed for the football game, to the area under the 101 onramp, on Division Street. It was there that he and a photographer, Lea Suzuki, met Kathy Gray, a transgender Army veteran.
Today's episode is all about Kathy's journey. Here is Kevin and Lea's latest story about Kathy (and other homeless people from Division Street):
- No easy path to ending tent cities
Check back Thursday for Part 3 of Kevin's podcast.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
In October 2017, a series of wild fires swept through parts of Napa, Sonoma, Solano, and Mendocino counties, claiming the lives of many residents, leveling houses and business structures, displacing families, and killing livestock and other animals.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan, who had already covered many disasters in addition to writing prize-winning stories about the homeless population in the city, was sent to cover the conflagration up north.
In this episode of Storied: San Francisco, Kevin will describe what it was like to be on the front lines of that disaster. He will talk about being there to get a story, and how the same was true for a murder scene he once visited in the city.
Check back next week for parts 2 and 3 of Kevin's podcast, when he will talk about covering homeless people in the city.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Shortly after the 2016 election, Morgan Shidler got together with friend and former coworker Harmony Fraga, who owns The Social Study. Out of their conversation that night, That's What She Said, an all-women's monthly speaking event, was born.
In Part 2 of her Storied: San Francisco podcast, Morgan will talk about starting That's What She Said and the importance of having a space where women feel safe sharing stories about themselves and their experiences navigating a largely sexist society.
The next event will be next Monday, January 8, at 7 p.m. at The Social Study. The guest speaker that night will be Sarah McLeod. If you haven't yet, go back and listen to Part 1 of Morgan's episode.
Morgan Shidler grew up in Rohnert Park and moved to San Francisco in 2003, right around the time of the Iraq War.
For Part 1 of her episode of Storied: San Francisco, Morgan will talk about going to a protest of that war, and how it changed her life. After that, Morgan will tell a ghost story she shared with me that was just too good to leave out.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 of Morgan's podcast, when she will talk about how she and a friend started a monthly all-women speaking event.
This podcast was recorded at The Social Study in December 2017.
For Part 2 of Lavay and Chris's episode, they'll talk about an unusual business meeting they had, the time they played for Bill Clinton's Saxophone Club, and the time in 1992 when they went to see Solomon Burke at Slim's. Lavay will share the story of the Swing for Choice benefit show she did with Ledisi, and she'll lament further on how San Francisco nightclubs used to be run. If you haven't listened to Part 1 yet, click here. That's it for Storied: San Francisco in 2017. Thanks so much for listening and helping to spread the word. We have a lot of great new things planned for 2018, so please stay tuned. Happy New Year!
Lavay Smith and Chris Siebert have been making music in San Francisco for more than 20 years. Their band, Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, plays all around the Bay Area all the time. Chris and Lavay also do regular gigs at the Royal Cuckoo Lounge every Sunday. For this podcast, part one of two, Chris and Lavay discuss how the band got started, the SF music scene of the late-1980s, and some interesting experiences they've had in nightclub basements. We recorded at Royal Cuckoo in November 2017. Check back Thursday for Part 2.
For the majority of his professional career, Graham Cowley was a medical examiner. After a brief stint in his native England, he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, then to San Francisco in the 1980s. He retired in 2011.
In this episode of the podcast, Graham talks about a particular call he got for a man who died on the BART tracks. Later in the episode, he shares one of his last calls, and the emotional toll that his career had taken on him. Lastly, he hails the work of a group of people he considers real heroes.
Graham was one of the subjects of Peter Hartlaub's feature about the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office back in 1999. Peter talked about his experience riding along with Graham and his colleagues in Episode 4 of Storied: San Francisco, a three-part episode. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.
I was able to track Graham down thanks to a commenter on Peter's Twitter. They let us know that Graham was the subject of a documentary called Graham's Tales.
Photos for this episode were taken in Graham's apartment on the day we recorded the podcast, in November 2017, by Michelle Kilfeather.
Holly DeVille has been a fixture in the drag queen scene in San Francisco since the early 2000s. She got her start on Billy Priest's birthday at Aunt Charlie's. After becoming a regular performer there, she moved over in the Tenderloin to Deco Lounge, the spot that is now Emperor Norton's Boozeland. In this episode of Storied: San Francisco, Billy Priest describes what it was like getting started doing drag in San Francisco.
These days, Billy would like to ramp up his private ESL tutoring clientele. If you or someone you know is in need, email him at BillyTutorsESL@gmail.com. His Twitter is @billypriest. Queens in the Attic, a quarterly drag show at Boozeland, is this Saturday, Dec. 16, at 9 p.m. More information can be found here (Facebook event page). Please visit StoriedSF.com to see more photos and a video of Holly DeVille.
San Francisco street artist fnnch first caught my eye when I started seeing his honey bears on buildings and mailboxes around the Mission. I've always appreciated street art, but these bears were something special, with their precision and cheeky playfulness.
For this episode of Storied: San Francisco, fnnch describes what it was like to get started doing street art in Duboce Park. After gaining more confidence and beginning to paint in broad daylight, he ended up having a rather heart-warming run-in with some young students.
Be on the lookout for fnnch's beautiful art all over San Francisco. On the web, find him on his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
For Part 2 of Jim Murphy's Storied: San Francisco podcast, he talks about his brush with little-known acts such as Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, how he just missed getting a deferment from the Vietnam War, and what it was like to come back home from the war. He ended up going to school at California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he was brought face-to-face with an activist, politically aware and charged Bay Area.
Jim is a member of the non-profit Chance to Excel Foundation. They help support kids with learning differences in the arts and in sports.
Jim Murphy is a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose family originally arrived in the city in the 1850s in covered wagons. For this episode of Storied: San Francisco, hear Jim talk about the early days of Muni's "Man of the Month" program, life in and around Upper Noe Valley Playground, a.k.a., Day Street Park, and other San Francisco stories from the 1950s and '60s.
Jim is part of the Chance to Excel Foundation, a non-profit set up to support kids with learning differences in the arts and in sports.
Jim and I recorded this podcast in September 2017 at Il Fornaio in Burlingame, California.
For many of us in San Francisco and the Bay Area, the presidential election of 2016 was a deeply disturbing and even traumatic event. It wasn't any different for Cynthia and Jeremy Pollock, longtime members of the San Francisco League of Pissed-Off Voters.
On this episode of Storied: San Francisco, Cynthia and Jeremy recount that dark day. This episode was recorded at Virgil's Sea Room in September 2017, well before the elections earlier this month that offered the first sense of hope for millions across the country.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
Pizzaiola Laura Meyer loves to bake and she loves to compete. The winner of several domestic and international (think Italy) pizza contests, she has squared off against and prevailed over men many years her elder, and she has the trophies to prove it. But she's also a very chill and humble champ.
On this episode of Storied: San Francisco, Laura, who's moved out of the kitchen to be the regional corporate manager for all of Tony's restaurants in California (it's a seemingly always-expanding lineup), tells the story of the time that she and her crew served a meal to a group of ... well, very proud and confident Italian food reps. It was the week of the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, and matters got heated up like the 1000-degree oven she's used to baking pizzas in.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
When the pager went off inviting him to visit one more death scene, a warning from Medical Examiner's Office investigators came with it. Peter decided he was up for it. It was a short walk from his home, after all. But what he ended up seeing changed the course of his career in journalism.
This episode of Storied: San Francisco is the third and final part of SF Chronicle Pop Culture Critic Peter Hartlaub's story about his experiences with Medical Examiner's Office investigators back in 1999.
To read the story that Peter wrote about his ride-alongs, go here: "In City's brutal underside, death is still a delicate matter." Here is Part 1 and Part 2.
Photo by Mark Costantini
On the last episode of Storied: San Francisco, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic Peter Hartlaub told us how he ended up doing ride-alongs with the SF Medical Examiner's Office. On this podcast, Part 2 of a three-part episode, Peter describes the first time medical examiner's office investigators paged him to come to a "scene." It turned out to be not quite what Peter expected.
If you haven't yet, listen to Part 1 of this episode here. Check back next Tuesday for Part 3.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
We all pay our dues somehow. In 1999, budding reporter Peter Hartlaub needed to prove his mettle. He pitched and was assigned a feature story about the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office, which had been the subject of some bad press in recent months. The experience turned out to be enough for Peter to realize just what type of journalist he needed to be.
This is Part 1 of Peter's Storied: San Francisco podcast. It's about the origins and background of his ride-alongs with Medical Examiner's Office investigators Graham Cowley and Bill Tolliver, including Peter's first exposure to their work, and a Peter Rabbit reference.
Check back on Thursday for Part 2 of this three-part episode.
Film photography by Michelle Kilfeather
It's easy to overlook or forget, but for centuries now, San Francisco has been a military town. All around the Bay Area, in fact, from Forts Funston, Baker, Point, and Miley to the Presidio itself, the remnants of that era are very much with us today.
For Part 2 of Bhautik's story, he tells the story of the time he visited the Nike Missile Site, aka, SF 88, in the Marin Headlands to take pictures.
If you haven't already, be sure to listen to the first story Bhautik shared with me, Episode 3, Part 1: Bhautik Joshi's View of Bay Bridge Construction. And check out his photos of the Nike Missile Site on the Storied: San Francisco website.
Photographer Bhautik Joshi has seen a lot. He's originally from Sydney, Australia, moved to England as a young kid, and ended up in San Francisco with his wife about 10 years ago. He's always been interested in visual storytelling, and his Flickr page and Instagram account attest to that.
Here he is in his own words:
"Bhautik is a photo dork who lives in San Francisco. He focuses on capturing vignettes of the city's flavor in his street photography, and is involved with arts advocacy by organizing talks, photo-walks, and meetups. In his day job, Bhautik is a research engineer at Adobe, continuing 10 years of work in facilitating artistic discovery by building tools in where technology and art meet."
For Part 1 of his Storied: San Francisco episode, Bhautik told me about the time he took the bus over to Treasure Island, set up a time-lapse camera to capture a major bit of construction on the Bay Bridge, and then ... well, you'll have to listen to find out what happened next.
For a look at some other photos he got of the bridge work, check out this Flickr album.
Bhautik will be screening an experimental film: 2001: A Picasso Odyssey at the Another Hole in the Head event at SF Indiefest. That will take place at 7 p.m. on November 7. For more details, go here.
Bhautik had so many stories to share when we recorded in the back room at Pig and Whistle in San Francisco. We talked for nearly two hours. Check back later this week for another great story Bhautik shared with me.