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...
info_outline
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,...
info_outline
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’...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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.
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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.
info_outline
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,...
info_outline
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_outlineIt’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:
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