Storied: San Francisco

Weekly podcasts about the artists, activists, and working people who make San Francisco so special.

Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 2 (S8E6) 11/13/2025

Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 2 (S8E6) 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 other folks in tech, naturally, and met the people who were launching Stripe, an e-payments then in startup mode. Stripe eventually hired Saikat and his friend. Saikat was the fledgling company’s second engineer. He started to see tech as a force for social good, but that didn’t really jell well with the work he did for Stripe. And so he quit a couple years in. The woman he was dating at the time (whom he later married) still lived in New York, and Saikat visited as often as he could. He didn’t yet consider himself political, but he was thinking about issues, specifically income inequality, poverty, and climate change. In early 2015, Bernie Sanders announced his run for president in the 2016 election. Saikat hadn’t heard of Sanders at that point, but he was addressing those very issues that had become important to Saikat. He signed up to be a Bernie volunteer and started on a sub-Reddit called “Coders for Sanders.” But Saikat wanted “in” in. And so he got in touch with someone working on the campaign. That someone was , whose political biography runs deep. Exley’s job with the Sanders campaign at the time Saikat got in touch was to organize all the volunteers wanting to work for Bernie but who didn’t live in the first four primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina). That effort needed tech solutions, which Saikat brought. But they weren’t hiring technologists at the time. Still, Exley “snuck” him on as an organizer. He expected the experience not to be a big deal. He’d work for about a year, maybe learn a thing or two. But the Bernie 2016 campaign had other ideas. “We were on the brink of actually doing these big, structural changes,” he says of his time on the campaign. Coming out of that experience, he and other organizers decided to take what they had learned and start applying it to folks running for Congress, starting with the 2018 midterms. Initially, they called their effort “Brand-New Congress,” and the goal was to recruit 400 people nationwide to run for office. They fell far short of that ambition, managing to get around a dozen folks to run. They wanted people from all walks of life, not just lawyers, which Congress was and is made up of primarily. And they got that, just not on the scale they had hoped. The group became , which is still in existence today. They didn’t have the money to spend heavily on most of their candidates, so they went all-in on someone named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out of The Bronx. Her brother had nominated her as part of Brand-New Congress, and Saikat had gotten to know her through the process. He saw early on what a powerful candidate she was. He moved to NYC to help run AOC’s first bid for Congress as a co-campaign manager. She won, of course, and Saikat had a front-row seat for AOC’s ascendancy to the national stage. He says she was her authentic self through it all. Saikat helped start a think tank coming out of the Sanders campaign as well, developing many policy positions and ideas, among them what came to be known as the Green New Deal. It was a policy platform as much as anything else. It called for a renewed and very much intensified effort to combat climate change while also creating and upgrading infrastructure. They approached every candidate running for president in 2020 asking them to sign on to a Green New Deal pledge. They all eventually did. (Biden’s “Build Back Better” platform was essentially a version of the Green New Deal.) Around this same time, Saikat had signed on to be AOC’s chief of staff. But Ocasio-Cortez wanted him to be her insider-type guy (I bring up Veep because, well, duh), and Saikat politely refused. He offered to help her staff up and get good people in place instead. By April 2019, having got the Green New Deal launched, so to speak, he let her know that he’d be leaving that summer, around the time his daughter was expected. That September, Saikat moved back to San Francisco. One of the first things he did was rejoin think tanks and work on filling out gaps in the Green New Deal. The pandemic hit and he dug his heels in on policy. By the time the 2024 election approached, they were ready to hand something to Kamala Harris if she were to win. Obviously, that didn’t happen. He believed those who warned that a Trump victory had bad implications for democracy. But then he watched his own rep in DC, Nancy Pelosi, shrug the 2024 loss off in a “You win some, you lose some” way. He launched his campaign for that seat in Congress “by tweet” in February 2025. Turning from the national to the local, I ask Saikat what San Francisco issues are top of mind for him. He starts with the idea of meeting with and listening to San Franciscans, his would-be constituents: town halls, office hours, mass Zoom meetings … he’s already doing a lot of that work. Saikat believes that to begin to effectively address issues at the local level—ICE kidnappings, healthcare, housing, transit—big changes are needed nationally. The California primary election takes place on June 2, 2026. The candidates who come in first and second place in that election will go on to compete in the Midterm election next November. To learn more and get involved, head to Saikat’s website—. Follow the campaign on and . /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/39011220

Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 1 (S8E6) 11/11/2025

Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 1 (S8E6) 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 Bangladesh for Kolkata (Calcutta) in India. Folks had warned Saikat’s grandfather, a school teacher, to leave, and they did. Once in Kolkata, his grandfather opened a school largely for the kids of other refugees living in the area. Owing to the school’s success, he was able to secure a one-bedroom apartment for his family of 12—he, his wife (Saikat’s grandmother), and 10 kids, including Saikat’s father. Saikat has been back to that apartment. He says that, walking around that neighborhood all these years later, folks still recognize his dad, Samir, thanks to what his grandfather did for them and their family. His mom, Sima, had it better than his dad. But still, she went to a school with dirt floors. Saikat looks to his ancestors’ struggles—the communities they were part of, and how those communities came together to address issues the government neglected—for inspiration today. When his dad was young, a friend took him to an office where he was pitched to come to the United States. There was a whole set-up. The sell was simply the so-called American Dream. Saikat’s parents met in India through an arrangement. Their respective parents knew someone who set it all up. They met and got married about a week later in a field. The visa his dad had applied for at that office came through after he’d been married, making it a bigger decision than it would’ve been if he were still single. He was also the primary earner in his own family, and they didn’t want him to leave. He decided to take that leap regardless. His dad showed up in the US with $8 in his pocket and no job yet secured. He slept on a friends’ couch in Manhattan and hit the pavement, résumé in hand. And it worked. He got a job. Saikat’s dad had studied civil engineering in college. His first job in his new country was with a company that built skyscrapers … NYC skyscrapers. It was 1979. Saikat’s mom came to join her husband soon after, and they had their first kid, Saikat’s older sister, Urmi, while living in Queens. His dad and his mom also experienced their first cold-weather winter that year. After a stint in New York, Samir moved his family to Pittsburgh. He had visited there in the summer, liked it, got a job offer, but relocated in the winter. Once again, the weather got the better of the young family. Seeking a warmer climate, they moved to Texas, first to Houston, and then to Fort Worth. At this point in the podcast, I decided to do something I’ve never done in the eight years since Storied: San Francisco began. And that’s because I’ve never had any guests on the show who are from where I’m from. I chose to dork out with Saikat about my hometown. Thank you for indulging us (me, really). The first question I had for Saikat is: What hospital were you born in? Harris Methodist. Holy shit, same! He asked me my age (52), what schools I went to (Bruce Shulkey Elementary, Wedgwood Middle School [Saikat went there for one year], and Southwest High School). What a fun turn on this podcast, me rattling off the schools I went to like born-and-raised San Franciscans do. Heh. I digress into a sidebar about the race riot that happened at my high school during my junior year. You’ll have to listen, or you can read a little more about it . Then we get to hear about Saikat’s experience growing up in the same city. His family lived in a suburb (apparently not far from where my parents still live), and he describes his early life as fairly standard—hanging out with friends, going to the mall (the same mall I was a regular at a decade or so before). But, being an Indian-American, Saikat experienced racism I was privileged enough to avoid. Saikat makes a distinction, though, between intentional, malicious racism and what I’d call accidental or unintentional racism. It’s an important distinction, and he says most of what he experienced in Fort Worth was the less-harmful variety. He summarizes his childhood thusly—family, school, the Bengali-American community in Fort Worth. One member of that community, Saikat’s best friend from childhood, lives downstairs from him in San Francisco today. His whole world in high school was, as Saikat puts it: hip-hop, basketball, and math. He got into Harvard, which he says he didn’t expect. Many of his friends went to UT Austin (my alma mater), and he figured he’d go there, too. But he wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to attend one of the most highly regarded universities in the country. But Harvard was a culture shock for Saikat. The Fort Worth community he’d known all his life was working- and middle-class. The student body at Harvard was largely kids who came from money and had wildly different interests than he did. Saikat went into his shell his freshman year. As he emerged from that shell, he found his people at Harvard. In 2007, Saikat graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science. He’d spent a summer in San Francisco between his junior and senior years, and loved it. All his life, The City had been presented as this place where “cool shit happened.” Movies, music, TV shows, skateboarding, the LGBTQIA and civil rights movements … and of course, the fledgling internet. Tech and social justice—both existed in a cutting-edge environment here. He lived in New York City for one year immediately after he graduated. We riff on life in NYC vs. life here, agreeing on most aspects. When it was time for Saikat to find a new place to live, San Francisco was the obvious choice. The woman he was dating (his wife and mother of his child today) went to school at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, where he visited often. But even her friends told Saikat that he was much more a NorCal-type. Unable to find housing anywhere else in SF, Saikat first landed in Park Merced. He was happy to have a San Francisco address, but didn’t feel like he was living in The City. A trip to The Mission changed that quickly. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Saikat. We recorded this podcast at in October 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38986845

Schools at Doc Stories 2025 (S8 Bonus) 11/05/2025

Artist Ian Paratore/Break Fake Rules, Part 2 (S8E5) 10/30/2025

Artist Ian Paratore/Break Fake Rules, Part 2 (S8E5) 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 these days. He lived in Berkeley while going to school there, and speaks to that experience. Ian moved back to The City after he graduated, in 2014. But, as he puts it, since then, he’s “left and come back many times.” First was Seattle for a summer. Then Portland for a year and a half. We go on a bit of a sidebar after I offer up my opinion that some folks in the Pacific Northwest can come across as friendly, but they can also be rather passive-aggressive. After Portland was New York City, where Ian lived for half a year. Then Nashville for three months. And after that, he got into a teaching program in Madrid, Spain, which I express my jealousy of. (Barcelona is one of my favorite places on Earth.) He was in Madrid right as the COVID pandemic hit, in fact. The teaching program he was in allowed him plenty of downtime—he worked essentially four days a week, four hours per day. And a lot of that time on his hands was filled with a rediscovery of doing art. His plan had been to leave at the end of a school year, and that happened to coincide with the onset of COVID. His return to his hometown, and his time here since 2020, has been spent trying to do art full-time. And that’s where Ian’s and my life intersect. It happened one day in the very location where we recorded this podcast: 540 Bar. was born when Ian lived in Spain. It started with stickers. He handed them out—to friends, to strangers. He came up with the phrase and liked it, among other reasons, for its openendedness. He feels “Break Fake Rules” requires participation, something he sees as going against the way technology is leading us. But BFR isn’t the only artistic endeavor in Ian’s life. Ian does a lot of collage work. Lately, he’s been cutting up vinyl from discarded billboard signs. He’d tried working with paper and glue to make murals, but the elements always got the better of his outdoor art. Old billboard vinyl is the solution he’s been looking for. Those of you who follow might have recently noticed a few collaboration reels between us and . Ian approached me a couple months ago about being on a series he produces called “People Should Know,” where someone—an artist, a small-business owner, a podcaster—comes on and speaks with a fencing-masked interviewer to talk about what they do and what folks should know about what they do. You can check out full-length videos of everyone who’s been on . It was a lot of fun to do, so thanks, Ian! In asking Ian to let people know how to find him, we decided to start off with our favorite platform—in real life! He’s currently selling furniture at . He’s got Break Fake Rules stuff there, too, as well as some of his 2D and 3D art. His website is . Find and his personal account, , on Instagram. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38839975

The Divisadero Halloween House (S8 bonus) 10/29/2025

Artist Ian Paratore/Break Fake Rules, Part 1 (S8E5) 10/28/2025

Artist Ian Paratore/Break Fake Rules, Part 1 (S8E5) This one starts out a little differently. was born and raised in San Francisco, but he’s moving away. This week. To Oakland. Ian’s dad, Vince Paratore, moved into a Victorian in The Haight in the late-Seventies/early Eighties, and is still there. That’s the house Ian grew up in starting roughly 10 years later. Both of his parents are artists and teachers. His dad came to San Francisco from Syracuse, New York, to study photography at SF State. And his mom, Valerie O’Riordan, is from Long Beach in Southern California. She moved to The City to work with ACT (). The house at Page and Clayton is the only place Ian’s dad has lived in SF. I asked Ian whether he knows any stories from that house before he was born in the early Nineties. Both his parents being “natural hosts,” there were many parties. Nowadays, when his dad is out of town, Ian will sometimes have parties of his own at his dad’s place. When he does, he says his dad often offers up stories from back in the day. One involves a party with so many people already inside cramming a hallway, folks had to come and go via the first escape. Back in the day, his dad was a general manager at restaurants like Stars, Donatello, Garibaldi’s, and Beach Chalet, which he helped open. Both his parents were big in the San Francisco restaurant scene. We turn to Ian’s early life, which he experienced in the mid-Nineties to early 2000s. As a kid, and a kid without a backyard, he spent a lot of time in Golden Gate Park and The Panhandle. He hung out on playgrounds and basketball courts. He adds that “the craziness of Haight Street was just … normal.” I ask Ian about Skates on Haight, which I knew from my Eighties/Nineties skateboarding days from ads in magazines like Thrasher. (Marcella, who took photos for this episode and was with us at the table, chimes in at this point.) Ian rattles off some spots from his childhood in The Haight—places like Gus’s before it was known as Gus’s, an Ethiopian restaurant, and a musical instrument store. In high school, Ian got into visual arts and playing sports—mainly baseball and basketball. By the time he got to college, he played baseball “at a high level,” and art fell more or less by the wayside. More on that in Part 2. But during high school, though he took art classes, sports dominated his life. We end Part 1 with Ian rattling off the San Francisco schools he went to. He did a stint at College of San Mateo (CSM) before getting into UC Berkeley, which was the first time he lived outside his childhood home. He had flirted with college on the East Coast before deciding to stay closer to home. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Ian. And join us tomorrow for a very special, timely bonus episode. Follow Ian and . We recorded this podcast at in the Inner Richmond in October 2025. Photography by /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38798285

Artist Risa Iwasaki Culbertson, Part 2 (S8E4) 10/16/2025

Artist Risa Iwasaki Culbertson, Part 2 (S8E4) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. It was 2010, and seeing that guy with the broken guitar on Risa’s next visit to SF was the nail in the coffin, so to speak. She was moving here. One of her friends who already lived here found a spot in The Sunset for her. She packed up a car and drove north with her dad. She didn’t necessarily have a plan back then, but Risa and I share how The City just got both of us and hasn’t let go. Risa tells the story of how her parents moved to Japan briefly when she was 18. She asked her mom, “So, why did you come back (to California)?” And her mom told her (paraphrasing), “Because you wouldn’t be able to do what you’re doing there, you wouldn’t have the same opportunities.” It further affirmed for Risa her decision to move to San Francisco and pursue art. I ask Risa to catch us up on the last 15 years of her life. Generally speaking, she’s been working to find her voice as an artist. She got into letterpress-printing, which she did for more than 10 years. She started a company with a friend and worked there for three years before branching out on her own. Doing so wasn’t easy, but in hindsight, it made Risa stronger. She talks about a specific strain of misogyny that presented itself to women printmakers as well as how Risa handled that nonsense. That solo venture started off as a stationery company. She reached back to childhood memories, of a time when she witnessed letters coming to her mom from Japan as well her mom’s messages back to her homeland. Risa saw those as lifelines to her mom’s people back home, and wanted to preserve those memories and emotions and help others to do the same. was born. Before we talk about another fun thing Risa is up to, I need to express my newish-found love for 540 Bar on Clement. It’s where Risa holds monthly “Drink and Draw” events, and it’s quickly become one of my new favorite spots in The City. Risa started her monthly art events at the bar in 2022. The idea came from her letterpress days, when she’d do frequent “Letter-Writing Saturdays.” She told her friend Leejay, one of 540’s owners, about it, and they decided to bring that same idea to the bar. Shortly after they hatched the plan, though, Risa’s dad passed away. The first drink and draw was a month later, and so many of Risa’s friends turned out for her. What started out as every second Thursday of the month now takes place at 540 Bar on the third Thursdays of every month. Risa speaks in a little more detail of the care and intention she puts into her Drink and Draw events. For me, it’s an extension of her art as well as her love of community. But it’s also just her being a good host. The next Drink and Draw takes place the same day that this podcast drops—October 16, 2025. See ya there! The conversation shifts to Risa talking about taking part in our Every Kinda People show at Mini Bar. And we end the podcast with Risa sharing all the ways to find her, both online and in real life. Follow her on Instagram . Her website is . Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38599440

Artist Risa Iwasaki Culbertson, Part 1 (S8E4) 10/14/2025

Artist Risa Iwasaki Culbertson, Part 1 (S8E4) was born in Japan. In this episode, meet and get to know Risa, one of the 12 artists in , 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 /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38571350

The Worst of Broke-Ass Stuart (S8 bonus) 10/09/2025

Ironworker Lisa Davidson, Part 2 (S8E3) 10/02/2025

Ironworker Lisa Davidson, Part 2 (S8E3) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. To get us caught up to what Lisa is doing these days, we go back to her arrival in The Bay. Her work at the prop shop led to some other jobs, but competition was fierce and she sought a way to integrate art into the labor she undertook. She found it when the production of James and the Giant Peach hired her to do puppet fabrication. The work took place in a warehouse in South of Market and it wasn’t quite as glamorous as people think. In fact, it was grueling, but rewarding. Her boss on that job was a woman named Kat. That was 30 years ago, and the two are good friends today. In fact, Kat is shooting a documentary about Lisa’s incredible life called Made of Iron. More on that below. Lisa wanted to stick with animation, but was never able to get an art director job. She considered moving to LA, but shut that down pretty quickly. And so she decided to learn a trade—something her dad did back in the day. She went to a job fair and asked what the hardest trade represented there that day was. Lisa’s trade became ironwork. Her introduction to the folks who did ironwork was a little rough. She was required to visit job sites and get an ironworker to sponsor her. It took her six months to get hired. She met a guy named Danny Prince who helped her get work in The City making precasts (think parking garages). She’d work during the week and go to classes for ironworking on Saturdays. Ironwork has, quite possibly since its inception, been very much a “man’s” world. Lisa ran head-first into bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination from the get-go. But a combination of her own drive and the advice of a few mentors helped her get through it. There might have even been some “Go fuck yourself”s along the way, too. That said, the highs were high and the lows were low. “I never cried on the job,” Lisa told me. But the tears would come once she was home in the evenings. Still, she persevered, and things got better and better for her. One of her early favorite jobs was on the then-new California Academy of Sciences. Besides it just being a really cool building, Lisa got to do many different jobs all around the place. She says it was incredible watching it all come together. Another job highlight was Lisa’s work on the arena that came to be known as Chase Center (and for Valkyries fans, “Ballhalla”). Photos of Lisa helping build Chase can be seen in the gallery to the left here. Another was Marin General Hospital. And then there was the Golden Gate Bridge. After Chase Center and another, lesser job (and a divorce), Lisa got offered a job working on the on my favorite bridge. But it wasn’t just any job. She would be foreperson. She didn’t think she could do it because she didn’t know bridge work (despite working a little on the new Bay Bridge). After being told it was foreperson or nothing, she decided to take the job. Of course the crew she would oversee comprised all bridge-work veterans. Her approach was to be respectful of that. And her crew respected her back for it. The job entails taking out old pieces and beefing up the infrastructure of the bridge, which was finished back in 1933. Lisa talks at some length about a societal need for us all to have more respect for labor. I’m with her 100 percent. There’s a lot that we take for granted every day, all over the place. Many people worked and still do work hard as hell so that we can have shit like roads and sidewalks, transit tunnels, housing, and so much more. We should recognize and respect that work. We end the episode with Lisa’s thoughts about life, her work, and what she loves about San Francisco and the Bay Area. You can donate to help fund Kat’s documentary at the . And follow that adventure on Instagram . /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38436325

Ironworker Lisa Davidson, Part 1 (S8E3) 09/30/2025

Ironworker Lisa Davidson, Part 1 (S8E3) Lisa Davidson is an ironworker with Local 377 San Francisco. Her team currently does ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we’ll get to that. In this episode, S8 E3, meet and get to know Lisa. I first did that back in May at our art show at Babylon Burning (thanks, Mike and Judy!). Someone at the party that night approached me to let me know that there was a person there who works on the best bridge in the world (fact) and that I should meet them. I love when people really get me. Right away, I was drawn in by Lisa’s warmth, charm, and sense of humor. And so we sat down outside in Fort Mason in early August and Lisa shared her life story. She was raised feeling like she had complete freedom. It was something Lisa didn’t realize at the time, but looking back, it became clear to her. She was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a liberal household. Her grandparents lived in Boston itself, and she loved visiting them when she was a kid. Her grandfather ran a tchotchke store in town called House of Hurwitz, and Lisa says that the place had a big influence on her outlook. It was located on the edge of what they call, to this day, the “Combat Zone” (think: red-light district). Her “wheelin’ and dealin’” grandpa sold mylar balloons to the Boston Gardens for events held there. He told young Lisa that she could blow up balloons and that that could be her future. Lisa has a brother four years younger than she is. Her dad was an electrician. One of his clients was a lithograph press in Boston. He’d sometimes get paged for a job and have to leave his family, although Lisa now wonders whether he just wanted to get away from time to time. When she was a senior in high school, her parents divorced, despite being a very loving couple up to that point. She says her mom was “crazy in an I Love Lucy way. She was raised in the Fifties the way many young women at that time were, in a way that did its best to stifle any creativity. Suffice to say that her mom had fun decorating the house Lisa grew up in. Despite her and her family’s Jewishness, Lisa revolted and wanted to go to Catholic school or just become a preppy L.L. Bean-type kid. She of course regrets rejecting the norms of her family nowadays. It was what it was. The family was more culturally Jewish than religious, though, something Lisa says was a huge influence on who she’s become as an adult. She graduated high school and went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn’t Ivy League, but it was (and is) something of a preppy school. Where Lisa grew up, there was an expectation that kids would go to college, and so she went. It wasn’t super far from home, but it wasn’t close either. Her parents did suggest that Lisa maybe go to art school. But in her family, it was the kid dismissing that idea. “That’s a not real school,” young Lisa told them. She liked sports. At Amherst, she joined the crew team. She liked the competition and how good of shape it got you in. She liked it, but it was a lot of pressure. She graduated, took a year off working odd jobs, then dove into art school. So next up was Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was surprised she got in, and even navigated a bit of impostor syndrome. Surprised by the school’s acceptance of her and feeling somewhat intimidated by other artist students, Lisa ended up doing printmaking. Rather than aiming for a master’s degree, she sought a second bachelor’s. Her studies had her spending a lot of time in the school’s foundry, where she discovered welding. She loved it. During her time back in Amherst, she’d heard of a guy who was going to Alaska. (Lisa and I go off-topic into our shared distaste for camping at this point in the conversation.) Back to the Alaska story, her mom was fully supportive and even took her shopping at an Army Navy store. She went there and worked in canneries through the summer between her junior and senior years at Amherst. While she was up north, doing jobs all over the state, she met folks from California. From the stories they told her, it became a place she wanted to go. But first, RISD. In Rhode Island, she met a guy from Danville in the East Bay. When his family learned of her interest in our state, they invited Lisa to spend a summer with them, which she did. And she and her friend came to The City as often as they could. After those few months, she knew that California—and specifically, The Bay—was for her. She needed to go back and finish that second round of college in Rhode Island, and she did. After that, Lisa “beelined it” back to Oakland. She found work in a prop shop making sculptures out of foam with a chainsaw. Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Lisa Davidson. We recorded this podcast at in Fort Mason in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38400385

The New Mabuhay Gardens (S8 bonus) 09/25/2025

David Gonzales: The 2025 San Francisco Lowrider Parade Grand Marshal (S8 bonus) 09/19/2025

Artist Shrey Purohit, Part 2 (S8E2) 09/18/2025

Artist Shrey Purohit, Part 2 (S8E2) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Although it made all kinds of sense for Shrey to move halfway around the world to go to art school, he says it was "an uphill battle” convincing his parents of the plan. Still, his mom was and is a champion of her son and his art. It was 2018 and Shrey was 20. We talk about his experience of arriving in San Francisco, a city that was “such a beacon of hope” for him. He dedicated himself to his studies at . He also paid serious attention to the news, and even attempted political art. When that didn’t pan out financially, a professor at CCA strongly encouraged Shrey to stay with painting, that it was his lane. This was just before the pandemic. When he got his first stimulus check, Shrey bought an easel and began going out and painting . He did this so much and promoted his art so well that, by the time he graduated, he had started getting commissions. He was able to become a full-time artist—a dream of his. Shrey is such an artist, through and through, that he even has an art job. Like, a job-job. Four days a week, Shrey works for —a local arts nonprofit possibly best-known for Open Studios. Shrey shares the history of ArtSpan and OpenStudios. What began in 1975 in South of Market as a way for artists shunned by galleries to show their art and sell it today sees around 600 artists opening their studio doors all over The City. Shrey manages the Arts and Neighborhoods program for ArtSpan. That group helps organize exhibitions during Open Studios at non-studio locations. is one such location. In fact, Shrey got his first art show after graduation through help from ArtSpan. It’s a beautiful full-circle story. That first show led to other shows. And Shrey credits his entrepreneurial brain for recognizing an opportunity in all of this—if a cafe has suitable walls, you can talk with the owner about hanging art by local artists, promote an opening, and make things happen. And so that’s what he did. Partly because putting on one art show, not to mention doing multiple shows at the same, is what the kids refer to as a lot, Shrey focussed his efforts at one location. Ballast Coffee on West Portal became the home of . The first art show at his gallery brought in more than $10,000 in sales. I have to insert some editorial here, so thanks for indulging me. Shrey and I recorded this podcast before our Every Kinda People show. I won’t pretend that my own art curation is anywhere close to the level that he (and my friend Anita of and countless others around SF, The Bay, and the world) operates on. But Shrey does speak to the nature of both the volume and the intensity of the work that goes into putting on an art show. In my own way, I relate. Back to my and Shrey’s conversation, I ask him to talk about how our lives intersected. It was earlier this year after I recorded with of Ask Me SF. I needed to drop off a for Ellen, so she asked me to meet her one Saturday morning on Ocean Avenue. She and some friends and community members would be out there painting a mural over a dilapidated street wall in front of a PG&E substation. Sign me up! After politely declining to add my own (attempted) artistic touch to their creation that day, Ellen introduced me to a friend of hers. Right away, I got a sense of that exuberance Shrey embodies, a trait I am now very familiar with. We end the episode with thoughts about the Every Kinda People show, up at Mini Bar through October 19. Follow Shrey on Instagram and . /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38257265

Artist Shrey Purohit, Part 1 (S8E2) 09/16/2025

Artist Shrey Purohit, Part 1 (S8E2) is the kind of person everyone should know. Not know about (although obviously that’s what this podcast aims to do), but know personally. In this podcast, Episode 2 of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco, meet and get to know Shrey. A few of his art pieces are up at Mini Bar through Oct. 19 in our show. And at the risk of being hyperbolic, through the experience of putting that show together, I am very happy that I’ve come to know Shrey. We begin with Shrey’s birth, which happened in Mumbai, India, in 1997. Both his parents are doctors. Shrey’s mom comes from a family of doctors going back four generations. Her dad (Shrey’s grandfather) was driven out of what is now Pakistan and went to Mumbai with his possessions in hand to start a new life at just 15 years old. Shrey speaks of how fond he was of that grandfather, even describing some of his hobbies and wardrobe choices (bow ties because regular ties would get in the way of his medical duties). Shrey’s family was rooted in the Sindhi culture in India. It’s a community steeped in entrepreneurship, and his grandfather was one of the first in his area to be a male gynecologist. His wife was an anesthesiologist and worked with her husband. Shrey jumps ahead to note that his parents, too, worked together in the medical field. His dad specializes in diabetes treatment. The two met when Shrey’s dad was treating his mom’s aunt. It was what Shrey calls a “semi-arranged marriage,” but to my understanding, more like a “hey, here’s someone who might be good for you” type of situation. He says his parents’ coming together had some love to it, which is probably more than most arranged marriages. They built a medical practice that became very successful, he says. So successful, in fact, that it allowed both of their children—Shrey and his younger sister—to live abroad. Because his sister was born when he was three or so, he got to help name her. “It was my first creative project,” Shrey says. Shrey lived in Mumbai until he finished school. His formative memories take place in his neighborhood of Colaba in South Mumbai, near the water and the Gateway of India. He says it has “big-town energy with a small-town vibe.” Everyone knows everyone else, and Shrey has brought that same spirit with him halfway around the world. We go on a sidebar about how San Francisco can have that big city/small town feel. Shrey got started doing graphic design while still living in India. He even went to school for it over there. He did well in it, so well that he hired a few employees. But he soon found that people don’t take kindly to being bossed around by a 17-year-old. He pivoted from design to art, something he’d always wanted to do. A formative experience for Shrey was going to an event a in Mumbai, where he met . Jas, who’s originally from Napa, helped open Kulture Shop to support Indian artists. He was 15 and had found a mentor in Jas. Shrey has an uncle in Millbrae whom he had visited with family a few years before. His uncle took them to several spots around town, including to AT&T Park for a Giants game. His Indian school credits transferred, and so, when Shrey was 19, he moved to The Bay to attend California College of the Arts and study comics, illustration, and painting. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Shrey. And on Friday, look for a bonus episode with the Grand Marshal, . This episode is brought to you by . We recorded this podcast at in South of Market in August 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38231570

Marga Gomez, Part 2 (S8E1) 09/04/2025

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 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 . 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 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 , please visit . Follow her on Instagram to keep up with everything she does and says. This episode is brought to you by . We recorded this podcast at in Noe Valley in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38075095

Marga Gomez, Part 1 (S8E1) 09/02/2025

Marga Gomez, Part 1 (S8E1) Marga Gomez grew up in Washington Heights, New York City, immersed in a family of Spanish-language entertainers. Welcome to Season 8, Episode 1 of Storied: San Francisco. I first learned of more than a decade ago, through comedy and performance circles I was adjacent to. Because I don’t have the world’s best memory, I cannot recall exactly where or when I saw her perform, but I do remember feeling an immediate pull to her work. In this episode, Marga shares the story of her parents, growing up in NYC, and coming to San Francisco. We begin in Manhattan, where Marga was born to a comedian/producer/screenwriter Cuban-American dad and a dancer/aspiring actor Puerto Rican mom. Marga went to Catholic school as a youngster, which she says was every bit as harsh as folks say. Looking back, Marga thinks the only discipline she got when she was a kid was through school. Her parents, she says, were narcissists. The two met when Marga’s mom danced in a show produced by her dad. The shows were varietal in nature, and took place on stages live at theaters showing Spanish-language Mexican movies. Her dad had danced in shows in Havana pre-Castro. Some white American show producer-types with Johnny Walker, the Scotch company, brought him to New York, unaware that he didn’t speak English. It was the Fifties—the height of a Spanish entertainment craze (think Ricky Ricardo). Many folks from Latin America were also immigrating to the US, and New York especially, in those days. And they, too, wanted entertainment. Marga’s dad found work in that world, first as a performer, then as a producer. Growing up with locally well-known/borderline famous parents instilled in young Marga a sense that she could do anything she wanted. But when they split up, Marga went with her mom to live in a white neighborhood on Long Island. She was one of the only kids of color in an otherwise homogenous, affluent area. No longer in the Spanish-language community that raised her, she lost that sense of becoming a performer in her own right. She just wanted to graduate high school and get out. And that she did. She ended up at a New York State school on the border of Canada, in Oswego near Lake Ontario. It was still the same weather she used to, but it was time to explore—with pot, acid, and women. She got really into “storyteller” musicians around this time, some women, Dylan, that kind of thing. And she met a woman who later was the reason Marga came to San Francisco. Marga’s impression of San Francisco before she moved here was shaped by a magazine feature about the Hippies here at that time—the Seventies. She owes that attraction to her mom’s strict parenting style—it was a rebellion in every sense. She’d not made it through to graduation (too much acid, she says), but followed her girlfriend across country to this magical new city. It was 1976, the year of the US Bicentennial. Marga’s girlfriend did all the driving (she still doesn’t have a license), taking the scenic route along Route 66, through the heart of the United States during its 200th birthday celebration. They saw a lot of Americana—the good and the bad (racism, misogyny, homophobia). It made landing in SF all the more poignant. They came up the California coast, saw Big Sur, then arrived in The City. We end Part 1 with Marga’s story of the first place in San Francisco she and her then-girlfriend went—Castro Street. That story is also how her upcoming show, Spanish Stew, begins. More on that in Part 2, which drops this Thursday. That’s also the date of the Opening Night of Every Kinda People. We hope to see you at Mini Bar that night for an evening of community, art, drinks, laughter, and love. This episode is brought to you by . We recorded it at in Noe Valley in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/38052905

Welcome to Season 8! 08/26/2025

Carolyn Sideco, Part 2 (S7E19) 07/29/2025

Carolyn Sideco, Part 2 (S7E19) 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, too. She didn’t watch the Giants on TV much, because every game wasn’t televised in those days. But she could easily hop on Muni to see a game at Candlestick Park. Her dad often picked them up, showing up at the ballpark around the seventh inning, getting in free, and watching the end of the game with Carolyn and her friends and/or sisters. We go on a short sidebar about bundling up in San Francisco—at Candlestick and if you just wanted to go to the beach. In addition to Candlestick, she went to Warriors games a bit and also various sporting events at Cow Palace. Her dad learned how to bowl and would take his kids with him. We fast-forward a bit to hear about Carolyn’s years in high school, when she went to the all-girl school Mercy High (which is now closed). Later, she took the same bus, the 29, to SF State that she had taken to Mercy. State was the only college she applied to. We talk a little about her decision not to leave San Francisco for school. In high school, she had decided that she wanted to be a sports writer. In fact, she aimed to become the first woman anchor at ESPN. We rewind a bit to talk about some of the journalism Carolyn did in high school. She had her own column in the school paper called “Off the Bench.” She shares a fun story of calling the Braves’ front office to arrange for an interview with her favorite player—Murphy—the next time Atlanta rolled into town. In her third semester at SF State, Carolyn got pregnant. Around this time, she also took her first Asian-American Studies class, something that kicked in for her and stays with her to this day. She dove in head-first. I ask Carolyn whether and how much of that history her parents were aware of. She says that, for them, much of it was just things going on in their lives in the city they came to—things like the strike at SF State or the demonstrations at the . Learning more and more about the history of her people in the US lead Carolyn to confront her dad. “Why did you bring us here?” she’d ask. She ended up raising her first child, a mixed-race kid, as a single parent around this time in her life. She had figured that her son’s dad would bring the kid the Blackness in his life, and she’d bring the Filipino-ness. Her own ideas of how best to raise the kid had to evolve, and they did, she says. She eventually returned to State and graduated. She lived in South City for a hot minute, held three jobs, and raised her son. She never felt that she couldn’t leave The Bay. It was more, “Why would I?” Then, because if you know Carolyn Sideco, well, you know … then we talk about New Orleans. New Orleans is why and how Carolyn came into my life. My wife is borderline obsessed with The Crescent City. I’d been there some earlier in my life, growing up not too far away and having some Louisiana relatives. Erin and I spent three weeks in fall 2022 in a sublet in Bywater, Ninth Ward. That NOLA fever caught on for me then, and I’m hooked. Back home sometime after that, Carolyn came across Erin’s radar. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who seems to love New Orleans as much as I do and she has a house there!” Erin would tell me. In 2024, at a vegan Filipina pop-up at , we finally met this enigmatic woman. We ended up spending Mardi Gras this year at Carolyn’s house in New Orleans—Kapwa Blue. “New Orleans has been calling me for about 20 years,” Carolyn says. One of her younger sisters lived there awhile. Her oldest son served in AmeriCorps there for three years and kept living in New Orleans four more. Carolyn and other members of her family visited often. This was around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit and devastated Southern Louisiana. A little more than a decade ago, Carolyn learned of the historical markers in the area that told the stories of Filipinos being the first Asians to settle in that part of the world. (Longtime listeners of Storied: SF might recall that hails from just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.) As Carolyn learned more and more of the Filipino history in the region, that calling started to make more and more sense. Three years ago or so, her oldest son got married in New Orleans. That visit told Carolyn that she, too, could live there. Her husband devised a plan, and with some of Carolyn’s cousins, they bought a house in the Musician’s Village part of town, near the Ninth Ward—the aforementioned . They intended to bring that same sense of community her parents found and participated in back in San Francisco all those decades ago to their new neighborhood New Orleans. In addition to the house, Carolyn helped found tours of Filipino history in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Find them Bayou Barkada Instagram at Back in The City these days, Carolyn has her own sports consultancy called (). “I call myself ‘Your sports relationship coach,’” she says. This means that she provides comfort and advice to anyone interacting with any of the various sports ecosystems. She aims to apply the idea of kapwa to an otherwise competition-driven sports landscape. We end the podcast (and the season) with Carolyn’s interpretation of the theme of Storied: San Francisco, Season 7: Keep it local. She shares what that idea means for her here as well as how it pertains to her time in New Orleans. We’ll be taking August off as far as new episodes go. I’ll be busy putting together the first episodes of Season 8 and getting ready for the season launch party/art opening. “Every Kinda People” kicks off at on Sept. 4. That’s also the theme of the next 20 or so episodes of this show. As always, thank you deeply and sincerely for listening/reading/sharing/liking/commenting/DMing/emailing/subscribing/rating/showing up and really any type of interaction you do with this passion project of mine. If you’re not already, please sign up for our monthly newsletter over on the page. See you in September! /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37587775

Carolyn Sideco, Part 1 (S7E19) 07/22/2025

Carolyn Sideco, Part 1 (S7E19) 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’ first daughter, and she came after five older brothers. So she was always afforded chaperones. After Linda, her parents had three more girls. One of those girls, Carolyn’s aunt, lives next-door to where we recorded, a tradition of intergenerationality the family carried with them when they migrated to the US. Tony came to the United States first in the late Sixties, shortly after Carolyn and her twin sister were born. His migration was motivated by the so-called “American dream.” Carolyn’s version is different, though. She thinks it had more to do with the , which effectively did away with nationality quotas. By the time Tony arrived, several members of both his and his wife’s family were already here, many of them in the Outer Sunset. When baby Carolyn, her sister, and their mom arrived, they first lived on 45th Avenue in The Sunset with her aunt and uncle. Then the family moved to 39th Avenue to be on their own. This was the house that Carolyn grew up in, and the one we recorded this podcast in. A community of Paniquieños already existed all around them. In hindsight, Carolyn thinks it was a lot easier for folks like her parents to move halfway around the world because they landed, in essence, in an expat community. Her mom didn’t have to learn English so urgently when she arrived, to cite just one example. Several of those families are still around, spread around the North Peninsula. Some also still live in San Francisco, like Carolyn. Carolyn talks about various aspects of her life that now, in hindsight as an adult, meant she rarely felt different from those around her. She says that in her adult life, meeting folks her parents’ age who didn’t have the same accent as her parents really opened her eyes. Today, Carolyn is the president of , an organization as old as she is. Then we get back to Carolyn’s personal story. Her and her twin, Rosalyn, joined their mom to go to the US when they were two. She shares a cute story of how their mom loved a party so much that she would celebrate their birthday every second day of the month (their birthday is Feb. 2). Because of this, Carolyn grew up thinking that birthdays happen every month. She was five when her family moved out of her uncle and aunt’s place on 45th and into their childhood home on 39th Avenue, and Carolyn remembers it well. We talk briefly about the real estate agent who sold them the house and how little they paid (“$24,000,” Tony Sideco, who was in the room with us that day, chimes in—that’s the equivalent of roughly $173K today). Linda Sideco found work at Little Sisters of the Poor Convalescent Home on Lake Street, where Carolyn would sometimes visit her. Both of Carolyn’s parents worked graveyard shifts. The young couple were able to save for a year for the down payment on their new home. We take a sidebar for Carolyn to talk about the difference in how service and healthcare work are valued in The Philippines vs. how they’re valued in the US. Carolyn then shares a story of how, when she was in the fourth grade, she and her twin sister started going to a new school in their neighborhood. Prior to this, they were bussed. At her new school, they asked Carolyn if she wanted to play volleyball. But to join the team, she needed to pay five dollars. She ran four blocks home to ask her mom for the money, but turns out she wouldn’t give it to young Carolyn, who was so upset that she cried until her mom relented. She did well at volleyball and even made friends through her new sport. She felt so good about it all that she thought, ‘This is why dad brought us here.’ It was the beginning of what would become a lifelong involvement with sports. We end Part 1 with Carolyn’s foray into many different sports and all the women along the way who inspired her. Check back next week for Part 2 and the official last episode of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco. We recorded this podcast at Carolyn’s childhood home in The Sunset in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37487920

Dregs One, Part 2 (S7 E18) 07/15/2025

Dregs One, Part 2 (S7 E18) 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 first. He started hanging out more in The Sunset, which was quieter than his own hood. He and his buddies would tag, hang out in the park with their boomboxes, drink 40s, and freestyle. One of those buddies had a computer audio-editing program and a cheap mic (RIP Radio Shack). That friend sent him a track over AIM and it blew young Dregs away. Then he learned that two other guys wanted to battle. Dregs hopped on a bus to Lawton Park to join in. It was his first rap battle. The crew that battled that day ended up uniting and making more and more music together. They formed a tagging crew called GMC (Gas Mask Colony), which didn’t last long as as a tagging crew, but they kept the name for their rap group. But the group splintered. As mentioned, Dregs ended up at ISA in Potrero. He got into a DJ program and honed his skills. Soon, it was time to get into a studio to lay down some tracks. They recorded their first song and people liked it. The crew of four included several different ethnicities and neighborhoods across San Francisco, so they had widespread reach. We take a sidebar to discuss how Dregs got his name. It’s a story that involves the movie Scarface. Because of time, I ask Dregs to walk us quickly through the years between getting underway with hip-hop and starting his show, History of The Bay. He did music with his GMC posse as well as some solo projects. Days of hanging out and drinking 40s gave way to adult-life realities—jobs and such. They hadn’t figured out a way to make money off their art. Dregs went to City College and then spent two years at UC Riverside. He came back and worked as a youth counselor in the Tenderloin. At another job in TL, a woman in supportive housing where Dregs worked had a psychotic breakdown. He was the only employee around, and even though he was about to leave for the day, he helped her out. The next day, a boss type thanked Dregs, but told him he’d never get properly compensated for what he did until or unless he had a bachelor’s degree. And so he enrolled at SF State. He was in his late-twenties at this point, and did better in school than he had ever done. He was a straight-A student, in fact. He took a heavy courseload. It was the first time he’d had Black teachers. One of them advised Dregs to go to graduate school. He looked through the graduate-level programs available and decided that law was his best fit. And so off he went, to law school in Davis. He did well at this level, also. He graduated, passed the California bar, and got hired by a firm. He was making good money and thought about saying good-bye to making music. But then the folks he worked with at the law firm convinced him not to. One of the first cuts he did in that era was a collaboration with Andre Nikatina called “Fog Mode.” When the song dropped, it was the pandemic. Dregs had been doing his law work from home. It “sucked,” he tells me. But the track took on a life of its own. He realized amid it all that it was time to go for it with his art. One of the first steps was to get his social media ramped up. Some people suggested TikTok, but Dregs wasn’t sure what content to throw up on that app. Others said, “Talk about you, talk about your interests.” He looked around and realized that no one out there was really talking about the SF/Bay hip-hop Dregs grew up on, or the prolific taggers he ran with. Around this time, in December 2021, his dad passed away. In the early stages of his grief, Dregs figured it was once again time to quit art and turn his energy and attention to taking care of his mom. But then something happened, something that some of us who’ve experienced loss can possibly relate to. In March 2022, Dregs launched History of The Bay on TikTok. With his music and social media popping, his law work took a back seat. Folks in his firm took notice and laid Dregs off. It was for the best. Find Dregs online at his or on social media . Get History of The Bay on any podcast app. We end the podcast with Dregs’ take on our theme this season—keep it local. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37410690

The 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair 07/09/2025

Dregs One, Part 1 (S7E18) 07/08/2025

Dregs One, Part 1 (S7E18) 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 him at an orphanage. Dregs’ dad experienced racism in the Catholic orphanage in Chicago where he spent his teen years. Education helped him emerge from that darkness, though. He eventually became a police officer in Chicago, but left that job after experiencing more racism and rampant corruption. After that, his dad went on a spiritual quest that landed him in San Francisco. His parents met in The City, in fact, but we need to share Dregs’ mom story. Her family was from Massachusetts. Her dad got into trouble when he was young, but managed to become a chemist. He helped develop the chemical process that went into Polaroid film, in fact. He later served in the Korean War before becoming an anti-war activist. He hosted the Boston Black Panthers in his home, in fact. His mom mostly rejected her white culture, owing to many things, including alcoholism. She hung out with Black folks and listened to Black music. She’d be one of or the only white folks in these circles. She went on her own spiritual journey that also ended up here. It was the Eighties in San Francisco when his parents met. Dregs is their only child, though he has some step-siblings through his dad. He says that despite his parents’ turbulent relationship, they provided a nice environment for him to grow up in. Because both parents worked, and because he was effectively an only child, Dregs spent a lot of time alone when he was young. His dad got a master’s degree and started counseling AIDS patients in The Castro. His mom worked a pediatric intensive care nurse. Though Dregs and I were both young at the time, we go on a sidebar to talk about how devastating the AIDS epidemic must’ve been. Dregs was born in the late-Eighties and did most of his growing up in the Nineties and 2000s in the Lakeview. Make no mistake, he says—it was the hood. Although he lived on “the best block of the worst street,” he saw a lot as a kid. His mom often got him out of their neighborhood, boarding the nearby M train to go downtown or to Golden Gate Park. His dad wasn’t around a lot, so Dregs spent a lot of time hanging out with his mom. They went to The Mission, Chinatown, The Sunset, all over, really. Around fifth grade or so, when he started riding Muni solo, Dregs also got into comic books. He read a lot. He drew a lot. He played a little bit of sports, mostly pick-up basketball. As a born-and-raised San Franciscan, Dregs rattles off the schools he went to—Jose Ortega, Lakeshore Elementary, A.P. Giannini, and Lincoln. But when Dregs got into some trouble in high school, he was taken out and put back in. It was a turbulent period. He eventually graduated from International Studies Academy (ISA) in Potrero Hill. One of the adults’ issues with young Dregs was his graffiti writing. For him, it was a natural extension of drawing. He remembered specific graffiti from roll-downs on Market Street he spotted when he was young. He says he was always attracted to the SF underworld. “It was everywhere you went.” Going back to those Muni trips around town with his mom, he’d look out the windows when they went through the tunnels and see all the graffiti, good art, stuff that he later learned that made SF graffiti well-regarded worldwide. While at A.P. Giannini, a friend of his was a tagger. In ninth grade, Dregs broke his fingers and had a cast. One friend tagged his cast, and it dawned on Dregs—he, too, could have a tag. After his first tagging adventure, Dregs ended up at his friend’s house. The guy had two Technics turntables. He was in ninth grade, but his friend was already DJing. Among the music in his buddy’s rotation was some local artists. “Whoa, this is San Francisco?” young Dregs asked. His mind was blown and his world was opening up. Check back next week for Part 2 with Dregs One. And look for a bonus episode on the later this week. We recorded this podcast in the Inner Richmond in June 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37324035

The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 2 (S7E17) 07/01/2025

The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 2 (S7E17) 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 word-of-mouth and need-to-know. But during his visits, Ed never hooked up with anyone. He says that he merely wanted to be adjacent to that world. After he graduated, Ed stayed in Davis. One day over coffee with a female friend at a lesbian cafe, his friend told him that she might be bi. He said he might be, too. She suggested that they “go to this club in San Francisco” where they could scratch that itch, so to speak. Ed says that The Box remains the most diverse array of folks in the LGBTQIA+ community he has ever been part of. And it wasn’t diverse only on the sexuality spectrum. There were folks from all over the gender spectrum, too, he says. Ed watched men of various ethnic backgrounds dancing with one another and thought, ‘Why are those straight guys dancing with each other? Wait, they’re not straight. Wait, I’m not straight.’ So now he knew. But the question of whether and how to come out was a totally separate question. It was the mid-Nineties. Coming out was, in Ed’s words, “really fucking scary.” He remembered that his dad, who has since come around and is loving and accepting of who his son is, often used homophobic slurs casually when Ed was a kid. Still, Ed summoned the courage and started telling folks. His mom was cool. His dad and brother were cool, too, but also probably confused. His friends shrugged him off in a very “no duh” kinda way. But there was that one member of his friend group for whom the news seemed not to sit well. Brad had been Ed’s friend since seventh grade back in Hawaii. Three months after coming out to his friends, Brad let Ed know that he, too, wanted to come out of the closet, but that Ed had stolen his thunder. Laughs all around. Going back to that night at The Box, Ed met someone and they started dating. His new partner lived in Berkeley and Ed moved in (they had a roommate). Then Ed and that first boyfriend moved to the Tenderloin together, followed by a move to the Mission. Ed got a job teaching at Balboa High School in The City. He says he was so young (23) and blended in with students enough that on his first day, the principal at Balboa told him to get to class. Again, belly laughs. Ed loved teaching and did well at it. He lasted at Balboa from 1996 to 2001, teaching English as a second language to students from all over the world. The conversation shifts to the moment when Ed realized that San Francisco was home. Despite being here so long (since the mid-Nineties), Ed feels that SF is one of several places for him. Hawaii will always hold a place in his heart. He says that his sense of adventure and curiosity have him roaming around to other cultures regularly. But being married and having kids of his own grounds him in The City. One of his two children experiences mental health challenges, so that makes leaving tricky. All of that and community. Community keeps him here. I get it. One space Ed finds community is at , where we recorded. It’s his neighborhood bar, the place where bartenders know his drink without him ordering it. The spot where other regulars and semi-regulars ask him details about his life. Sure, he could find that in another part of town or in another city altogether. But right now, that community is his. And he relishes it. There’s also his work. Aside from classroom teaching, Ed did some after-school work, education philanthropy work, and some other education-related jobs. Early in the pandemic, his non-binary older kid struggled. Ed says that in hindsight, he wished he had taken his child out of “Zoom school.” He wanted the kid to pick one topic, whatever they wanted, and learn that. They would spend time outside and hang out together. But that’s not what happened. The teacher in Ed pushed his kid, over and over. Ed and his partner were able to find support groups around SF and the Bay Area that work with children who exhibit mental health issues. That helped, but he eventually realized that his own parenting needed help and support, because it wasn’t meeting the moment. He sought that help, but wasn’t impressed. He says it was mostly folks telling him what he was doing wrong, instead of being supportive and uplifting and actually teaching him. He found a couple of tools that served as Band-Aid solutions, but he was left looking and looking and looking for answers. He needed help that acknowledged and addressed his own traumas. And so he began working more or less on his own. One of his first discoveries was recognizing a moment, however short and fleeting, between his kid’s stimulating action or words and Ed’s reaction. If he could interrupt that automatic reaction and gain control of his own emotions, it would serve both himself and his kid. He worked on stretching out that time … from one second to two seconds and eventually to five. Once he got there, he could respond thoughtfully and lovingly vs. reacting. Realizing that he was able to overcome his shortcomings as a parent all on his own lead to Ed’s founding of . He’d met others who were aligned with his parenting experiences. He knew that if they created a space where folks in their situations could come for comfort and sharing and advice, they’d be doing the right thing. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Village Well’s website and follow them on social media . As we do at Storied: San Francisco, we end this podcast with Ed Center’s take on our theme this season—keep it local. We recorded this podcast at in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37225845

Megan Rohrer’s Book About San Francisco’s Transgender District (S7 bonus) 06/26/2025

The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 1 (S7E17) 06/24/2025

The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 1 (S7E17) 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, her older brother signed up to work for the Dole company in Hawaii. Ed’s grandmother was 13 at this time, but still, it was decided that she would accompany her brother to the islands to help care for him while he worked the pineapple fields and earned a wage. Ed points out that the Dole Food Company (as it was known at the time) intended these migrant workers to honor their contracts and then go back to their home countries. To that end, the company only hired young men. But Ed’s family paid a stranger on their boat $20 to marry his grandmother so that she could join her brother in Hawaii. Ed goes on a sidebar here about the tendency in his family to exaggerate their own history. “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” or so the family saying goes. He returns to the story of his maternal grandmother to share the tale of her younger sister being so distraught about the departure, she hugged her so hard that her flip-flop broke. It was her only pair of shoes. In the Filipino community on Oahu at the time, there was an outsize number of men in relation to women. When Ed’s grandfather first set eyes on his grandma, he began to court her. A year later, they asked her older brother if they could get married, and he said no, that she was too young (14 at the time). But they got married anyway, with the understanding that they would wait two more years to live together. They moved in and Ed’s grandmother had a new baby, including his mom, every other year for the next 20 years. Like her brother, his grandmother’s new husband worked in the pineapple fields for Dole, doing incredibly hard labor. His grandma washed clothes for bachelor workers. The two saved their money and bought plantation property from Dole. The property was affordable enough that they were able to build multiple shacks for the kids to eventually live in. At this point, Ed launches into what he calls “the shadow story” of his family. He learned that shadow story when he was a kid and his mom and aunties were cooking in the kitchen. He’d sit just outside the room pretending to read a book, eavesdropping. There, he learned things like which family members were smoking pot or getting into trouble. But there are more serious elements, which prompts Ed to issue a trigger warning to readers and listeners. His grandmother didn’t quite agree to go to Hawaii. When she told her brother no to the idea, he beat her. He did this repeatedly until she acquiesced. But it was in one of these violent melees that his grandmother’s flip-flop broke. All this to say that Ed’s grandmother didn’t have much agency in her life decisions. The last two of her 10 children almost killed her. After number 10, the doctor gave Ed’s grandfather an involuntary vasectomy. Ed shares the story of how, on plantation payday, the women and children would hide in the fields with the men guarding them. It was a way to try to protect them from workers in the next village getting drunk and coming in to cause trouble. He summarizes the family history to this point by pointing out the incredible amount of resilience his ancestors carried. Also strength and love. But also, violence. All of those qualities manifested in their and their children’s parenting practices. Ed’s mom raised her kids in this way. The severity of the abuse waned over generations, but it was there nonetheless. Ed says he was ultimately responsible for his mother’s emotions. For many of these reasons, in his adult life, Ed founded . We’ll get more into that in Part 2. We back up for Ed to tell the story of how his mom and dad met each other. His dad was in the Army during the war in Vietnam. On a voyage to Asia, his boat took a detour and ended up in Hawaii, where he remained for the next five years. His parents got together and had Ed and his younger brother. They grew up among a much larger Filipino extended family, but Ed didn’t really know his dad’s Caucasian family, who lived on the East Coast. He’s gotten to know them more in his adult life. Ed grew up on Oahu in the Seventies and Eighties. His family was between working class and middle class, and there was always stress about money. But in hindsight, they lived well. We share versions of a similar story—that of parents telling kids that Christmas would be lean, that they didn’t have a lot of money (probably true), but that never ended up actually being the case. Both of our recollections was mountains of gifts on December 25. Growing up, Ed was always feminine. He was also athletic. It was a time before Ellen, before Will and Grace, when “athletic” also meant “not gay.” Ed says he wanted to be “not gay,” but he couldn’t help who he was. That led to his getting bullied. Moving to the mainland for college meant escape—from his own torment and from that of his peers back on the island. Ed went to UC Davis. He had played competitive soccer in middle school and high school, and because his teams were good, they came to the mainland a couple times. But Davis was a whole other world by the time he arrived to go to college. It was the early Nineties. He took what we call a gap year before coming to California. For him, that meant working. In one of his jobs, he served tables at CPK in Hawaii, where Carol Burnett was one of his regulars. We end Part 1 with Ed’s story of his time at UC Davis and not yet accepting his queerness. This Thursday on the podcast, I talk with about their new book on the Transgender District in San Francisco. And check back next week for Part 2 with Ed Center. We recorded this podcast at in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37118920

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 2 (S7E16) 06/17/2025

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 2 (S7E16) 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 that end up happening. Case in point—the events at Compton’s Cafeteria that form the basis of the play. Then we shift the conversation to talk about Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and how the play came about. Mark Nassar (Tony and Tina’s Wedding) saw the Tenderloin Museum’s (TLM) exhibition on the riot at Compton’s and soon got in touch with Donna Personna and Collette LeGrande through a project the two were working on at the time—Beautiful by Night, a short documentary about their lives as trans people and drag queens. Over the course of about a year of periodic meetings at Mark’s house, where Donna and Collette shared their stories of Compton’s and the riot, the three weaved together enough personal stories to create an immersive play. Katie Conry at the Tenderloin Museum told the group that if something ever came out of what they’re doing, to let her know. Shane shares her story of the first time she saw Donna Personna perform. Prior to that, Shane thought that drag was a young person’s thing. She’d never seen someone of Donna’s age do drag. But she was blown away and was able to meet Donna. That night, Donna hinted to Shane about the project she was working on with Mark Nassar and Collette LeGrande. She told Shane that when the time came, when they had something ready, she’d let her know. About a year later, Shane was at Mark’s house reading for the role of Rusty, the character based on Donna. Some of this story has already appeared on Storied: SF, in the . The museum helped bring the play to life by getting a space for the production. It was 2018. They were doing it. The first run of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot lasted several months. It was deemed a success and the plan was to bring it back in 2020. But the universe had different ideas. Prior to the pandemic, the biggest challenge was securing a space. But then, Shane says she was at Piano Fight in February 2020 for an event to sign a lease on a new spot. Just a few weeks later, the first shelter-in-place orders were handed down. Shane speaks to what it means, now more than five years down the road and in a very different political and social environment, to get the play staged. And Saoirse talks about how honored she is and how personal it is for her to portray an actual living legend (Collette LeGrande). I ask Shane and Saoirse to respond to this season’s theme on Storied—”keep it local.” Saorise then shares the story of being targeted and harassed by right-wing bigots (is there any other kind?) right here in San Francisco. She tells this story to emphasize that, even in The City, trans people are not safe from fascist transphobia and violence that are spreading across the nation and the world. She also speaks to the massive wealth disparity here in SF and The Bay. All of this to say that for Saoirse, keeping it local requires engaging with all of these truths. Shane begins by riffing off of Saoirse’s response. She works for The City and County of San Francisco and wonders whether some of her coworkers know what’s at risk. She points to right-wing groups coming to SF to hold “de-transition” events. She then ends the episode by cataloging the many reasons she loves The City and wants us all to fight for it. For more information and to buy tickets for Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, please go to . And follow the production on Instagram . We recorded this episode in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play space in the Tenderloin in May 2025. Photography by Mason J. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37032440

Frameline49 with Allegra Madsen (S7 bonus) 06/12/2025

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 1 (S7E16) 06/10/2025

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 1 (S7E16) Saoirse Grace was one of the first successful in vitro pregnancies in Massachusetts. In this episode, Saoirse is joined by her Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play costar, Shane Zaldivar. The two share short versions of their respective life stories and how they got to the Bay Area and San Francisco. Then we dig into the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, followed by a conversation on the play about the riot, their roles in it, and the actual lived experiences of trans people today. Saoirse, who plays Collette in the play, was born in Boston and grew up a little there, and a little in San Diego. But she got into some trouble in school and was sent to reform school in Austria, near her ancestral homeland in the Dolomites. After high school, not exactly wanting to come back to the US, she went to France for college, where she studied Spanish language literature. This whole time, Saoirse was a professional actor. She started acting in third grade. By seventh grade or so, she knew that acting was something she loved to do. After about a decade of just acting, Saoirse joined an aerial circus, where she was a trapeze artist for a group in Texas called Sky Candy. After a few years in Austin, working and doing circus performances, Saoirse came to San Francisco to go to law school. She says, perhaps half-jokingly, that she still wanted to perform, but to do so in a way that made more money than acting. She went to USF and did some police accountability work, but ultimately, practicing law didn’t work out. And so, after a short time in Las Vegas doing porn and sex work, Saoirse came back to The Bay to do a PhD program to become a professor. It was another opportunity to have an audience, but to also make more money than other performing careers. But that also didn’t pan out. This run with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play is Saoirse’s first foray back into acting in more than a decade. Backing up a little, I ask Saoirse about her first move to San Francisco and what she thought of it. She shares the story of leaving Austin, packing up as much as she could fit on her bicycle in Seattle, and riding down the Pacific coast to get here. Wow. At the end of that roughly 1,000-mile ride, she arrived in The City during the Pride parade in 2013. The timing! She soon found work as a bicycle mechanic, something Saoirse still does more than a decade later. Then we get to know Shane Zaldivar, who plays Rusty in Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Shane was born and raised in Florida, where she spent time between there and Belize, where a lot of her family is from. Her mom had Shane when she was relatively young, and so she spent a lot of time with her mom’s family, both in Belize and in the US. Life in Florida was rough for Shane. She was bullied a lot early in life for her femininity. She says that when she visits now, she gets no joy out of the place except to be with family members. Belize was much more hospitable for her. She went to middle school and high school in the Central American country. But she ended up getting a scholarship to attend college at Florida International University, which she says is a diverse place. It was at college that Shane had several awakenings—her sexuality, her love of doing drag. But she says her biggest realization, the one that led her to the Bay Area, was around cannabis. Where she had previously bought into the idea that weed was this terrible thing, from the first time Shane tried it, it changed everything for her. Shane set out to learn everything she could about the plant and its medicinal, healing properties. She took a college class in Florida on hallucinogens and in that class learned about a school in Oakland called . That’s what led Shane to The Bay. She raised money for the flight and registration at her new school. Once here, she patched together a liberal arts degree in Oakland, studying such topics as hospitality, theater, and anthropology. It was 2014, and she lived in Oakland, too. But it dawned on her later that San Francisco was only a bridge away. After moving around from hostel to hostel, she found an affordable place of her own in The City. It didn’t take Shane long to fall in love with the Bay Area. She soon discovered events like Folsom Street Fair and spots like . She got a job in the Ferry Building and found a place to live, a place she still resides in 10 years later. She says that San Francisco is where she really got to explore her art and her activism. In addition to being in a band, Shane is the , a local fixture who performs al fresco, usually in front of the Ferry Building. Then we talk about her foray into acting, something that came about relatively recently in Shane’s life. From the first time she acted, back in Florida, she felt an intense joy that has stayed with her. It marked the first time she played with gender. Today, she identifies as a trans woman. The first run of Compton’s, back in 2018, was her return to the art and her first really serious acting gig. We wrap up Part 1 with the historical event behind the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, the basis of the play. It was August 1966, so nearly 60 years ago. No one is sure of the exact date, but it was a weekend. “The Tenderloin at the time was the Vegas of San Francisco,” Saoirse tells us. The neighborhood was also the only place that drag queens and trans women were allowed to exist. There was less of a distinction between the two back then—something important to understand, both in this conversation and also in the play. Similarly to the story of Stonewall in New York (which took place two years after Compton’s), police did their best not to let these folks exist. The cops commonly conducted raids and sweeps, both on the street and in otherwise safe spaces, which Compton’s Cafeteria was. But on that day in August 1966, a trans woman at Compton’s decided to fight back, throwing a mug of hot coffee on an officer. Her tight-knit community had her back, as did (a radical queer and trans youth organization), and the riot had begun. Check back next week for Part 2 with Shane and Saoirse. And find tickets to the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play . We recorded this podcast inside the performance space on Larkin in the Tenderloin where Compton’s Cafeteria Riot is having its 2025 run. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36930995

Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce, and “After What Happened at the Library” (S7 bonus) 06/05/2025

Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce, and “After What Happened at the Library” (S7 bonus) Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce is a fourth-generation Chinese-American. Her twin brother has autism, and the two went to Jefferson Elementary in the Sunset because the school had a good inclusive special education program. Kyle says that from an early age, she fought for her twin, all the way up to teaching classmates ASL to be able to communicate with her brother. After one year at Lick-Wilmerding High School, Kyle transferred to School of the Arts (now Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts) to major in music. She went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York after that, where she majored in ethnic studies and arts, followed by time at Columbia University for social work. Then Kyle Casey Chu came back to her hometown. She says she missed the calmness here, the Queer scene, and her family. We shift the conversation to the story of how got started. Michelle Tea founded Drag Story Hour after having a kid of her own and discovering how hard it was to find spaces for queer parents or parents of queer kids. Tea thought, ‘Why not bring the magic of drag to youth spaces?’ When she set out, Tea sought drag queens who had worked with youth before, something that proved not too easy. But Kyle and her drag persona, Panda Dulce, did in fact have youth work experience. Kyle had worked as a K–5 Spanish immersion teacher, a special ed. teacher, a music teacher, and a camp counselor. That plus her social work degree definitely qualified her for Drag Story Hour. She along with a handful of other queens joined the pilot program. Fast-forward to June 2022, when members of the so-called “Proud Boys” (ugh) stormed a Drag Story Hour in San Lorenzo in the East Bay that Panda Dulce had been asked to read at. After barging in uninvited and definitely unwanted, they shouted transphobic slurs and calling Panda a pedophile, a “tranny,” and an “it.” She was forced for her own safety to lock herself in a back room of the library until authorities arrived. When they did, they simply asked these horrible people to leave. No citations. Not even a slap on the wrist or taking of names. The goings on in San Lorenzo that day were awful enough. But starting soon after, the missteps by media were relentless for Kyle. Journalists seemed more interested in a preordained narrative than Kyle’s actual experience and associated trauma. It was like the story was being fed to her, rather than coming from her own words. But Kyle and her writing partner, Roisin Isner, were talking one day. They decided that they wanted to reclaim authorship of Kyle’s story, to add dimensionality and humanity to her experience. Isner had been through a traumatic event of her own years earlier and could easily relate to her friend. We talk at length about Kyle’s reliving her trauma to film the short film that came out of writing sessions with her friend. She says that she never really stopped living it, in fact, and that shooting the movie served as a sort of catharsis for her. Then we talk about her new book, The Queen Bees of Tybee County, which is out now wherever you buy books (except for that one place—never buy anything there yuck). When we recorded that day in April, the book had just been optioned and could become a movie in the near future. She’s also got another short coming soon, Betty, which just premiered in New York. Follow Kyle/ and her . We recorded this bonus episode during SFFILM fest in The Presidio in April 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36856015

Storied: San Francisco

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