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_outlineMisstencil 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