Marga Gomez, Part 2 (S8E1)

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Marga had just arrived in San Francisco and lived in a collective house with a lesbian and two gay men ("of course, the decorations were fabulous"). It was a bit of a party house, known for throwing spectacular Halloween fests. Marga talks about collective living, chore charts and stuff like that. Eventually, the woman Marga drove across country with split from her, as so often happens (I certainly relate).

Everyone who lived in that first house, she says, was into rolfing and coffee enemas. Marga wasn’t too keen on any of it. The meals were vegetarian and bland, and perhaps most importantly for her, not Cuban. Her roommates gave painful hugs and held hands before they ate. It just wasn’t her scene.

And so she found work in a Hippie coffeehouse called Acme Cafe on 24th Street. All her coworkers there were performers. She was just happy to make omelettes. Underground celebrities like R. Crumb and John Waters came in regularly, and Marga loved it. Her fellow cafe employees, many of whom were artists, would ask her, “So, what do you do?” And she would answer, “I make omelettes.”

She also worked at a bath house on Market called Finilla’s Finnish Baths. Marga’s job there was to hand out towels to spa-goers. She later learned that the owner sexually abused and exploited workers there, mostly the masseuses. A perk of her job, though, was access to the steam sauna, and Marga took advantage of that as much as she could.

That sauna room also served as a meeting space for a group of older women. One of them, an older Mexican woman, would leave her Chihuahua in the lobby while she steamed, the idea being that Marga would take care of the dog. Eventually, Ms. Montoya got 86’d from the bathhouse for steaming flour tortillas in the sauna on the hot stones.

Another regular, a famous singer whom Marga won’t name, was kicked out for a different reason. Marga takes a sidebar to explain what a “primal scream” is. Then she takes us back to the sauna and the famous singer, who proceeded one day to launch into her own primal scream. Marga describes other women from the sauna running out frantically. Meanwhile, she says, over in the men’s sauna, “there was a different kind of screaming.”

She goes on another sidebar about the time she got crabs at the bathhouse. You just have to listen to that one. Marga also had a job as a gardener at a house in Pac Heights, despite not loving that kind of work. She shares a story of using the “servant’s bathroom” on that job and discovering that she had crabs.

Then the conversation shifts to Marga’s next show—Spanish Stew. It will be her 15th one-person show, which she began developing at The Marsh here in The City, where she did her first-ever one-person show back in the day. The New Conservatory Theater Center commissioned the show, which is set in 1976 San Francisco, the year that Marga landed here. It’s also about cooking, something near and dear to her heart.

Marga points out that the New Conservatory Theater Center recently lost its NEA funding thanks to the fascist US regime, but that the community is helping keep the theater afloat.

Please go see this show. I know I will. It opens October 17, 2025. For more info and to buy tickets, please visit Marga’s website. Follow her on Instagram @themargagomez to keep up with everything she does and says.

This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Noe Cafe in Noe Valley in August 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt