Soleil Ho, Part 1 (S8E15)
Storied: San Francisco
The story of Soleil Ho starts with their grandparents. In this episode, meet and get to know the food writer and member who’s been on my radar since they replaced longtime Chronicle food writer and mysterious human Michael Bauer. In Part 1, we dive into Soleil’s family story. It begins two generations back, when their grandparents came to the US from Vietnam in the Seventies. They were refugees from the US war in their homeland. On Soleil’s mom side, the grandparents brought Soleil’s mom and seven other children from Vũng Tàu to Freeport, Illinois. They had first ended up in a...
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Rae Alexandra and “Unsung Heroines,” Part 2 (S8E13)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We’re talking about Mission bars, and I share a story about the backroom at Delirium. Rae brings up similar stories of her own at places like Thee Parkside, and we agree that Parkside owner is the best. Rae shares a story that confirms it. She looks back on the years before she got her SSN grateful that Kerrang! allowed her to work. She says and I agree—those jobs don’t really exist anymore. The industry itself was misogynistic, but there was also a freedom to the job. They flew her to shows all over the place. And they paid her enough...
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Rae Alexandra and “Unsung Heroines,” Part 1 (S8E14)
Storied: San Francisco
Rae Alexandra has 35 stories to share with you, plus her own. In this Women’s History Month episode, meet and get to know Rae. She recently published a book with City Lights Publishing called Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area. It’s of course available at City Lights, but you can also find it at your local independent bookstore. I read the book and could not put it down. Only toward the end of the 35 essays did I start to recognize the women Rae features. I love history and I love learning and I have mixed feelings about the fact that there are so many rad women whose...
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What a Creep’s Sonia Mansfield, Part 3 (S8E13)
Storied: San Francisco
Part 3 picks up right where we left off in Part 2. While she was still working that real estate job, Sonia was treating dating like a part-time job. She signed up on several dating sites (this was before swipe apps like Bumble). She went on many awkward coffee dates. Then a friend introduced her to a guy, and the two hit it off right away. They were inseparable from the moment they met, in 2008. They moved in a couple months later. In 2010, they got married, and had a kid shortly after that. But in the middle of all this amazing life shit, Sonia was smacked with a breast cancer diagnosis. She...
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What a Creep’s Sonia Mansfield, Part 2 (S8E13)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Sonia’s life right after her stint at community college. She left the Bay Area to attend college up north at Chico State. Widely known as a party school (perhaps rightly so?), they also had a reputable journalism department and an award-winning newspaper. This attracted Sonia, of course. But some friends also attended, and that didn’t hurt. Once in Chico, Sonia joined said college paper and got a job (where else?) at a movie theater. It was her first time to move out of her parents’ house. She lived with a couple of roommates in...
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What a Creep’s Sonia Mansfield, Part 1 (S8E13)
Storied: San Francisco
The story of Sonia Mansfield has roots in The Bay. In this episode, we meet and get to know my friend Sonia. She and I worked together at the Fangs’ Examiner back in the mid-2000s, and have been friends since. I loved her presence in the newsroom. I’d often listen to her make us all laugh from her A&E desk across the room. We’ve been through weddings, births, illness, divorces, and many, many beers together. These days, she hosts the , and I’m so glad you get to meet her now. We begin Part 1 with the story of Sonia’s parents. Her dad is from Richmond, California, and her mom is...
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Sad Francisco’s Toshio Meronek, Part 2 (S8E12)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Toshio talks about those chess players at Powell and Market and other early impressions of The City before they moved here. Having grown up in Orange County, with its underfunded public transit system, Toshio always wanted to live somewhere that had a subway. Being able to walk was important, too, in contrast with SoCal, where you pretty much need a vehicle to get anywhere. SF and The Bay checked those boxes. Like Part 1, this episode is rife with sidebars. I guess that’s just what happens when you get two people together who both like to...
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Sad Francisco’s Toshio Meronek, Part 1 (S8E12)
Storied: San Francisco
Toshio Meronek’s parents met at a bar. In this episode, meet and get to know Toshio. Today, they do , a really fucking amazing project that reports on and holds truth to power around here. I first became aware of Sad Francisco a few years ago and right away, I was struck by the deep reporting on and understanding of the many complex relationships and goings on in San Francisco and The Bay. And so I sat down with my fellow podcaster to get to know the human behind those efforts. Toshio’s story starts with their parents. That bar where they met was in Los Angeles. Shortly after meeting, the...
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Danielle Thoe, Sara Yergovich, and Rikki's, Part 2 (S8E11)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we hear the story of how Danielle and Sara met and eventually acted on the totally bananas (but shouldn’t be) idea of opening a women’s sports bar. Sara and her partner had just landed in San Francisco and fell right into a supportive community. Not that they didn’t have that back in the UK. But their friends there were starting to settle down and have kids, and that life wasn’t for them. Then we turn to the story of how Danielle and Sara met, on a soccer field, of course. An soccer field to be exact. Danielle was a leader in the queer nonprofit organization at the time, a...
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Danielle Thoe, Sara Yergovich, and Rikki’s, Part 1 (S8E11)
Storied: San Francisco
San Francisco has a women’s sports bar! In this episode, meet Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich. Together, they own and operate , a women’s sports bar on Market in the Castro. We’ll hear from Danielle and Sara about their early lives and how they made their way to San Francisco and became friends. We’ll also hear the story of why and how they opened The City’s first women’s sports bar, as well as the incredible woman they named it for. Most importantly, both Sara and Danielle (and me, Jeff) are Libras 😉. We start with Danielle. She grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of...
info_outlineRisa Iwasaki Culbertson was born in Japan.
In this episode, meet and get to know Risa, one of the 12 artists in Every Kinda People, our group show at Mini Bar. Please join us this Sunday, Oct. 19, from 4–7 p.m. at Mini Bar for our Closing Party happy hour. Some of the artists will be on hand, as will friendly bartenders and me (Jeff).
Back to Risa, though. Her mom is Japanese and her dad is from Ventura County in Southern California. Risa spent her first five or six years in Japan before her parents moved to California. She has memories of life in Japan before they moved. And after the move, Risa often went back to visit her grandmother. Risa says that, as a kid, she loved going back and forth between two very different cultures
Her dad was in the military, which is what brought him to Japan, where he met his wife. Risa is their only child, something she and I go on a bit of a sidebar about. I’m not an only child, but I’ve met and befriended my fair share of well-adjusted only children. Hell, I married one.
Risa found creativity early, and ran with it. Her parents were older, and being half-American, half-Japanese, she didn’t feel like she fully belonged in either culture. Risa might’ve gotten her creativity from her mom, who did pottery, quilting, and other artistic things. Her dad was “a mad scientist of sorts,” she says. He was into taking things apart and repurposing found objects.
In Southern California, Risa spent time with other Hapa kids. Her mom was part of a large Japanese community, and there were plenty of mixed-race kids among that group.
She’s very much a product of the Eighties and Nineties and Southern California. She remembers the beginning of grunge and flannels. Risa remembers vividly when Kurt Cobain died (1994). Middle school for her happened in Orange County.
Risa did hula dancing and tap dancing for many years, always while also painting and drawing. In high school, her art teacher was switched out and replaced with a nun who told the kids they couldn’t use black inks. It felt to young Risa like too religious of a message, and it instilled in her an attitude of not wanting anyone to tell her what she can and cannot do with her art. She never took another art class.
She was also something of a social butterfly in her high school years. Risa had different friend groups and in hindsight, feels like they were constantly getting together and doing things.
Then we turn to what got Risa out of Southern California. One friend she met in college moved back to San Francisco, and another friend from down south wanted to move here. She visited The City and remembers sitting in a cafe talking to strangers. She felt then and there that the friendliness was right for her, and something she wasn’t getting in Orange County.
I share a quick story of being in Orange County and getting phone directions to a bar. Unbeknownst to me and my friends that night, the map put us on a highway … on foot. Yep.
We rewind a little to chat about Risa’s time in college. She always wanted to be at least art-adjacent, and so she took classes on manufacturing and even calculus. Thing is, she ended up liking calculus.
Earlier in life, she sold stuff she made through catalogs she also created. That early entrepreneurship informed some business classes she later took in college, including business law. It all lead to Risa’s getting a business degree. Right away, she started recognizing a disconnect between art and business.
Back to her first impression of San Francisco, that day in that Haight Street cafe made The City feel like a place where she could get to know people. Risa shares a story that happened right before her move here. It involves a man boarding a BART train she and her friends were on. He had a broken guitar. They’d made googly eyes at each other, but she and her friends were too scared to talk with him. When he got off the train, he looked back and waved. Risa figured she’d never see this guy again.
Three months later, she was back to visit her friend who lived here. She’d thought about him, but figured there was no way to actually find him. Then, as you can guess, it happened. Risa says she’s still friends with that guy to this day.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Risa, which includes the story of her move to San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Risa’s studio in the Inner Richmond in August 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt