Welcome to Season 8!
Storied: San Francisco
Listen in as I talk all things off-season and the upcoming eighth season of Storied. Topics include: The , 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...
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Carolyn Sideco, Part 2 (S7E19)
Storied: San Francisco
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,...
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Carolyn Sideco, Part 1 (S7E19)
Storied: San Francisco
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’...
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Dregs One, Part 2 (S7 E18)
Storied: San Francisco
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...
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The 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair
Storied: San Francisco
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 . We recorded this podcast at the in The Dog Patch in June 2025.
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Dregs One, Part 1 (S7E18)
Storied: San Francisco
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...
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The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 2 (S7E17)
Storied: San Francisco
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...
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Megan Rohrer’s Book About San Francisco’s Transgender District (S7 bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
Listen in as and I reconnect after nearly four years to talk all about their new book, . 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.
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The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 1 (S7E17)
Storied: San Francisco
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 , where we recorded this episode and where my wife, , 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,...
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The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 2 (S7E16)
Storied: San Francisco
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...
info_outlineThe 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:
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a new production of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play (opens tomorrow, April 11!)
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an art show by Lady Harriet Sebastian (up through May)
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Monumentalizing Community (film screening and discussion on April 17)
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Club 181 Live at Great American Music Hall (April 23)
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McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers Issue Release Party in Myrtle Alley (May 1, 6 to 8 p.m.)
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Tenderloin Music and Arts Festival, by Psyched! Radio (May 16–17)
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Panel discussion about the book Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, Whore (May 22)
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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.