A Year-End Chat with Friend-of-the-Show Vandor Hill of Whack Donuts (S8 bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
Listen in as my friend Vandor Hill and I wrap up his second year of Whack Donuts’ brick-and-mortar location. This is Vandor’s third appearance on Storied: SF. Here are the other two episode’s we’ve done with him: We recorded this podcast at in Embarcadero 4 in December 2025. Photo by Jeff Hunt
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Lex Sloan, Henry S. Rosenthal, and The Roxie, Part 2 (S8E8)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up right where we left off in Part 1. Continuing her history of 3117 16th Street, Lex notes that “The Roxie has lived many lifetimes.” She describes the Eighties and Nineties as busy times for the theater. They ran a series of Werner Hertzog films in that era. Akira Kurisawa visited for some of his movies. Many local films and film festivals took place at The Roxie. Frameline was set there. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area were becoming something of a cinema mecca. The aforementioned Roxie Releasing ended up helping the business in times when ticket sales weren’t...
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Lex Sloan, Henry S. Rosenthal, and The Roxie, Part 1 (S8E8)
Storied: San Francisco
When you tell friends you’re going to see a movie at The Roxie, there’s an almost palpable envy that sets in for them. In this episode, meet Lex Sloan and Henry S. Rosenthal. Lex is ’s executive director and Henry is on its Board of Directors and the chair of the theater’s capital campaign, which we’ll get to. In the meantime, if you’d like to help keep a bona fide San Francisco landmark in its rightful home until the end of time (they’d sure love you to, and so would I), donate to the Forever Roxie fund . We start with Henry, who lets us know that the “S” in his name stands...
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Neighborhood Basic Bitch: The Mission District, w/H.P. Mendoza and Bitch Talk (S8 bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
Listen in as I join and of to chat with about all things Mission District. We wax poetic about H.P.’s home hood, spinning yarns about the infamous neighborhoo'd’s past, present, and future. We recorded this podcast at in (duh) The Mission in November 2025. Photo by
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Randall Ann Homan and Al Barna of SF Neon, Part 2 (S8E7)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up more or less where we left off in Part 1, hearing the story of how Randall and Al came to love all things neon. Their enthusiasm kicked into high gear when they started noticing neon signs coming down, and they decided to try to do something about it. That something started with documenting the signs. And with that came a bit of a learning curve, especially around photographing artificial lights at night. Over the next five years, they captured and captured and captured, getting as many extant signs as they could find. Randall had some book design experience under her...
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Randall Ann Homan and Al Barna of SF Neon, Part 1 (S8E7)
Storied: San Francisco
The story of how Randall Ann Homan got her name is a unique one. In this episode, meet and get to know Randall and her partner, in life and in neon, Al Barna. Today, the couple are all about all things . But we’ll get to that. When Randall’s dad was a teenager, he saved a young girl named Randall from drowning. After saving the little girl, he taught her to swim. Years later, when he had his own daughter, he carried the name forward. Randall Homan grew up in Goodyear, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. The town was named for the tire company, and it was where, back in the day, the eponymous...
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Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 2 (S8E6)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with that fateful visit Saikat took to The Mission. He and friends worked a lot, but didn’t have a lot of money (sound familiar?). To learn The City and have some fun, they signed up for as many walking tours as they could find. After a few months living in Park Merced, Saikat relocated to The Mission—16th and Hoff, specifically. Esta Noche was nearby, and it’s where he saw his first drag show. A buddy worked with Saikat to build a web wireframing tool (think the basics of web design, the skeleton of sites, so to speak). They knew some...
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Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 1 (S8E6)
Storied: San Francisco
The story of begins in a time when his parents’ and ancestors’ country was being torn apart, almost literally. In this episode, meet and get to know Saikat. These days, he’s busy knocking on doors and otherwise hitting the ground in a bid to represent San Francisco in the US Congress. As I write this, just last week, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not run for a 20th term. Timing! Let’s go back to mid-Nineteenth Century India. Because his dad’s family is Hindu, they were forced to relocate after Indian/Pakistani partition, fleeing their home country of...
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Schools at Doc Stories 2025 (S8 Bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
Listen in as I chat with SFFILM’s Soph Schultz Rocha and Keith Zwolfer all about this year’s Schools at Doc Stories program, which runs Nov. 6–10. Learn more about this year’s film festival at . We recorded this podcast at SFFILM’s Filmhouse in South of Market in October 2025.
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Artist Ian Paratore/Break Fake Rules, Part 2 (S8E5)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Ian and I talk about how big baseball was in his life in his high school and early college years. He was a left-handed pitcher, which made him attractive to coaches. By the time he transferred to UC Berkeley, though, sports receded and academics took over. He played what’s called club ball, which Ian explains is something between varsity high school-level and community college. At Berkeley, Ian majored in renewable energy, a topic that shows up in the art he does today. He minored in education, something that shows up in his coaching of kids...
info_outlineListen in as I chat with Broke-Ass Stuart about, well, a lot of stuff. But we also talk about Stuart’s new book, The Worst of Broke-Ass Stuart: 20 Years of Love, Death, and Dive Bars.
The book is available at your favorite local indie bookstore and also at Bookshop.org. And get very affordable tickets for next Friday’s (Oct. 17, 2025) book-launch party at Kilowatt here.
We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton’s Boozeland in September 2025.
Photos of Stuart by Jeff Hunt