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_outlineIn 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