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, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Misstencil at a new school half a world away from her home in China.
Her time in Switzerland started off in business school, a topic that she admits she’s not the best at today. Aside from school, she visited other parts of Europe. She got a job in Switzerland, but called her family back home as much as she could afford to. One call she had with them around the new year one year had her feeling like family members were passing the phone and no one wanted to talk with her. She then learned that her grandfather, the one who had raised her, had passed away days before this call. The family had kept the news of his illness from Misstencil, ostensibly to protect her.
Her grandfather’s death took her about a decade to get over. She was left with a sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose. Going back home felt out of the question, and she liked Switzerland. But her school there had a joint program with a school in the US, and so she applied for a visa. That school was in South Carolina.
When her time in South Carolina came to an end, she had a choice—New York or San Francisco. She (correctly) chose The City.
Misstencil had friends in SF already, and they let her stay with her. Those friends told her about a website, then only in the Bay Area, that she could use to find her own place. That site was Craigslist, and they were right. She soon found a place of her own. The year was 2000, and little did she know that she was beginning what would be a decades-long stay here.
Her first job in The City was for a big company, one that had a dress code that put her in high heels. Looking back, Misstencil is so far removed from that corporate world that she cannot imagine wearing those shoes, or painting her nails, or other things that go along with corporate culture. But we’ll get to that.
She found herself meeting and befriending older hippies who encouraged her to pursue her art. She was broke, and they put her up. They helped her get art supplies. She had previously set aside any artistic ambitions while going to school and beginning what she thought would be a career. But summoning inspiration from the art her dad used to do and accepting the help of her friends in her new city, she decided to go for it.
Misstencil (not known by that name just yet) began to show her art. She recounts the first time she sold a piece, and how that felt. She walked by the gallery and saw that red dot and knew she had to tell everybody about it. She says that art and San Francisco and those early friends she made here saved her.
Looking back on her life and the emotional struggles she had endured, Misstencil came to realize that, as an adult and survivor of depression, she wanted to help kids going through that. She lived with roommates in a rent-controlled spot, thus allowing her to do side work of that nature.
The person who today is Misstencil of course wasn’t always known by that name. That started in 2022. She shares the origin story of her pseudonym.
It all began with her simply wanting to beautify parts of The City that had lost their luster, so to speak—boarded-up storefronts and the like. She found herself all over town, talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing how much neighborhoods meant to people. This led Misstencil to conceive of her “San Francisco Lonely Hearts” project, which is how my life intersected with hers. It’s a way for her to show her deep love for and appreciation of San Francisco.
She shares how she settled on stencil art for her method lately. She never had any formal training or went to art school. She says that because she didn’t have a very happy childhood, she wanted her art to help her feel like a kid again.
Misstencil goes on a side story about the time she connected with SF icon Frank Chu and invited him to do Bay to Breakers with her. We also talk about the day we met, when she showed her SF Lonely Hearts work-in-progress canvas outside of Vesuvio. In addition to the 2D art that day in Jack Kerouac Alley, she had Frank Chu on a Roomba holding his infamous “12 Galaxies” sign, and a Golden Gate Bridge bench placed in front of the canvas.
Before we wrap, I ask Misstencil about upcoming shows she has, and she humors me by plugging our “Keep It Local” show, which she’s in.
We end the episode with Misstencil’s thoughts about our theme this season and the theme of the show this week: Keep it local.
Photography by Nate Oliveira