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Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8)

Storied: San Francisco

Release Date: 02/18/2025

Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus) show art Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Check out my conversation with previous guest 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 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...

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Storied: San Francisco

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Storied: San Francisco

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Storied: San Francisco

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: (2018) (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...

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Storied: San Francisco

The Tenderloin Museum turns 10 years old this summer, and I for one am here to celebrate that. We first visited 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 (opens tomorrow, April 11!) an art show by (up through May) (film screening and...

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Storied: San Francisco

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 . 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...

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Storied: San Francisco

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Storied: San Francisco

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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