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...
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Kathy Fang, Part 2 (S8E10)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Kathy left her hometown of San Francisco for the first time to go to college at USC. Originally, she wanted to major in science. There was and perhaps still is a prevailing expectation in her culture to go into some sort of lucrative career. Surely, no one would want to go into the food business intentionally, so the trope goes. So Kathy set out to make her parents proud. Soon enough, though, she realized she doesn’t like science, and switched to becoming a business major. She earned a bachelor’s in entrepreneurship and operations and soon...
info_outlineWe’re baaaaaaack! Happy New Year, y’all!
In this first episode of 2026, meet and get to know San Francisco artist Hollis Callas. Hollis first came across my radar a few years ago when she won a contest to design our city’s new “I voted” stickers. I soon learned that she’s something of an artistic fixture in one of my adopted neighborhoods—The Inner Richmond. So I sat down with her one afternoon in November to learn more about her life.
In Part 1, Hollis, an artist, illustrator, and designer, begins sharing her life story, which started in Atlanta. She grew up in the same Georgia house where her dad was also raised. Her grandpa lived there when Hollis was young, and her parents still live in the house today.
Both of Hollis’s parents are creatives. Her mom studied fabric design and textiles and weaves quilts these days. Her dad is a carpenter and “builds everything.” Along with her crafty dad, Hollis often found herself making big changes in her house when she was little.
Her parents met when they were both at the University of Georgia, in Athens. When the two moved in together, Hollis’s mom was friends with members of the B-52s. That now well-known band played one of its early shows at her parents house, in fact. Hollis met the band when she was a kid, but doesn’t really remember it.
After they each graduated college, Hollis’s parents moved back to Atlanta to that ancestral home we talked about earlier to take care of her dad’s dad, who had fallen ill. First, her older sister was born. And then, in 1987, along came baby Hollis.
Life in Atlanta in the Nineties for Hollis meant lots of time outdoors. There’s an acre of land with the house she grew up in, space for lots of trees and a bird sanctuary. It was still a time of latch-key kids, and she was definitely one. Hollis roamed her parents’ land, wading in creeks and running through the forest. Her parents eventually got a second home up in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she also spent a lot of time.
Hollis went to public school the whole way. Her mom went back to school to become an elementary school librarian, and her dad taught at her high school what we used to call woodshop and coached the boys cross-country team (Hollis was part of the girls team). Kids at her high school loved Coach Griffith, she says.
Art didn’t necessarily “enter” Hollis’ life. It was always just there. She answered that dreaded question some adults ask kids of “what do you wanna be when you grow up?” with “an artist or a vet.” But then she stared getting good grades in art and didn’t do so well in math. The Universe spoke, and Hollis listened.
Sports remained a big part of Hollis’s life up to and through college, where she played intramural soccer. There was an art school in a small North Carolina town she'd had her eye on, but she ended up getting a scholarship to stay in-state, and landed at UGA in Athens, where she studied art.
UGA is one of those intense Greek life schools (I relate, having gone to UT Austin), and Hollis found out quickly that it wasn’t for her. She found her art school homies right away.
At this point in the recording, Hollis and I go on a sidebar about recurring end-of-semester nightmares.
Hollis graduated from UGA with two degrees—ceramics and art education. She student taught one year and got out in five total. After that, she and her boyfriend (now husband) applied for teaching jobs in Spain. They heard back almost a year later, and found themselves living in Zamora and staying for two years.
We chat about her time in Spain. They had such a good time the first year and got really embedded, making friends, working, learning Spanish, and joining a bicycling group that they decided to double-up and stay one more year. At the end of that run, though, pressures started to mount for them to return to the US.
They came back to Atlanta and Hollis got a job teaching ceramics at a high school. Not even 30 yet herself, she found it difficult to lead a group of kids who weren’t that much younger than she was. And they were going through their own hard times.
After one year teaching, when colleges came to recruit the teenagers, The Creative Circus ended up picking Hollis. It was a two-year “bootcamp” type of learning environment, geared toward careers in advertising. But before her two years were up, Hollis got a job in San Francisco.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with artist Hollis Callas.
We recorded this podcast at Hollis’s studio inside of Chloe Jackman Photography in The Inner Richmond in November 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt