Storied: San Francisco
Weekly podcasts about the artists, activists, and working people who make San Francisco so special.
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Sunny Angulo, Part 2 (S9E3)
10/15/2026
Sunny Angulo, Part 2 (S9E3)
Trigger warning: Part 2 contains a story of domestic abuse. In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Sunny arrived anew in her hometown of San Francisco. After that “talk” with her dad about her tattoo, she peaced out on her parents and went to stay with a friend in El Paso ahead of her move back to SF. Before leaving, when she went back home to get the rest of her stuff, Sunny ran into her mom, who was upset. Sunny told her, directly, that she would make mistakes in her life, and that moving away was not one of them. She reminded her mom that her dad, Sunny’s grandpa, disowned her years before. She and her parents were eventually able to close that chapter of their relationship. Now in SF and going to school at USF, it was the era of the dotcom boom (in 2000, around the time I moved here). With everything going on around tech, Sunny found community as a founding member of the SF Indie Media Collective. She aligned herself with many women around here interested in an alternative to the onslaught of tech in The City (in hindsight, I wanna say, “Just you wait …”). It was also a time of warehouse parties. People who went to Burning Man were artists, not tech douches. It was peak bike messenger days. Toward the end of her time in college, Sunny became more and more engaged in activism. I ask whether the school (USF) had an impact on her activism, or if it was The City, or a combination of the two. She points to the time when she was 8 and wanted to design fashion that would fight deforestation in Madagascar. All to say, she’s had an eye for social and environmental justice since she was a kid. USF and San Francisco served to solidify that for her as a young adult. Sunny speaks to two times in her life that she missed out: 1) being taken away from most of her high school years, and 2) having left San Francisco when she was young, despite visiting regularly, there was a lot of The City she needed to reacquaint herself with. She reminisces about some of the spots, especially around USF, that she and her friends would frequent. Around this time, Sunny was involved in an organization called . The group stood against the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, which trained paramilitary for dictatorships. That’s an easy thing to oppose theoretically. But SOAW did the work on the ground. For Sunny, that meant traveling back to Georgia. School of the Americas had existed long before 9/11. But after that, security ramped up. Before she shares that story, Sunny retells her own Sept. 11 story. She was USF student body vice president at that time. Living off-campus, she ran back still in her pajamas when she knew something was going on that morning. She met with the student body president and they went to the Board of Trustees to try to secure protections for Arab and Muslim students. They tried, but the board wasn’t too into that. Back to School of the Americas, there was an annual protest there. 2001 shouldn’t have been different, but it was. Prior to that point, there was no fencing. Celebrities would show up. The protest was always peaceful. Post-9/11, a chain-link fence went up. Little did protestors know, but leadership that year planned to make an example of them. The protestors decided to cut a hole in the fence nonetheless. A group that included Sunny was arrested and kept over the weekend. There’s a side story here about her witnessing prison racism first-hand. The end result of all that nonsense was that Sunny was released, but was told to come back to Georgia for arraignment. The judge told her to issue a written apology to earn “only” a year of federal probation. A Mission High teacher friend of Sunny’s refused and served time in Dublin, California. Sunny, meanwhile, had lost her job and still had a pay a hefty fine. Trigger warning: At this point in the conversation, Sunny shares the story of dating another member of the media collective, a man who turned out to be abusive toward her. It’s a tough story to hear, and I’m sure tougher to have lived through. But it’s an important story to share. She moved into an anarchist co-op in Oakland with that guy. After putting her in the hospital following an assault, Sunny did what she knew would be the hardest thing—she told her parents what was going on. She did that and moved out to stay with a friend. Soon enough, someone told Sunny to apply to be part of a new journalism school. She got in. That took her to Merida in the Mexican Yucután. Through the school, she was in Bolivia when Evo Morales was elected. Eventually, she came back, moved to The Mission, and got a job at Balazo Galleria. Their landlord was an immigration lawyer who eventually basically evicted them when she threatened to expose a roommate who was here on a visa. Ugh. From there, Sunny moved to South of Market near Howard and Sixth Streets. She lived with fellow activists and a professor at New College. Another roommate was a tenant organizer in the Tenderloin and there were plenty of bike messengers. Sunny became the lead tenant after enough roommates moved out. She recounts various stories from that apartment. She had a detour of sorts when she worked for a children’s furniture-maker. A woman she nannied for opened a store and Sunny designed furniture. She also managed the store on Polk. Things were going well, especially when FAO Schwartz placed an order. But then, with the 2008 recession, the company filed for bankruptcy. From here on out, the episode is very “inside San Francisco politics” that covers a time span from about 2003 to the present day. I consider it very important context for how we got to the point we’re at, mere weeks before an election that could further erode the working and middle classes in The City. Sunny had been volunteering for a friend she knew from the SFUSD School Board, board president Mark Sanchez. He was running for D9 supervisor. Sanchez asked Sunny to be his campaign manager, and she accepted. It ended up being what got her into SF electoral politics. Her candidate didn’t win, but she was in. Going back to 2003, when Matt Gonzalez ran for mayor and energized young voters (including me), Sunny learned about the Green Party. Sanchez was also a Green. This is when Sunny met Jane Kim, another Green Party member. Kim was on the School Board with Mark Sanchez at the time. When 2010 rolled around, Jane decided to run for D6 (where Sunny lived) supervisor, and tapped Sunny to be her campaign manager. It was a tough fight, but despite being an upstart campaign with few or no endorsements, Jane won. Sunny stayed on to work in Jane’s City Hall office. She lists other folks who worked in that office and with whom she grew close. From Day 1, the job was rough. Homicides, dissolved redevelopment agencies, the SF mayor becoming California lieutenant governor, and a new mayor (Ed Lee) coming in. Before leaving the Mayor’s Office, Gavin Newsom cut a deal with Twitter, the so-called “Twitter Tax Break.” (Sunny points out that it was actually Twitter’s Market Street landlord, Shorenstein, who got the break.) Ed. note: For years, I was under the assumption that Jane Kim was involved in crafting and being integral to the incentive to bring Twitter to SOMA. Please listen to Sunny’s insider story of how that all went down for a more nuanced account of how events transpired. In short, it’s complicated, as many things are. Then the conversation turns to when David Chiu, then the D3 (Chinatown, North Beach) supervisor, ran for and won a seat in the California Legislature, vacating the D3 seat. Mayor Ed Lee appointed a woman named Julie Christensen to Chiu’s vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors. This enraged Chinatown political boss Rose Pak, who felt Ed Lee had betrayed his community. And so Pak set aside her differences with ex-Supervisor and convinced him to run. Peskin had a campaign manager that no one really liked. By “no one,” I mean Chinatown. It’s not 100 percent clear how this came about, but for Sunny, it was her boss, Jane Kim, telling her that people wanted Sunny to step in and run Peskin’s campaign. She was reluctant for several reasons. Then two folks in Chinatown who worked on the Peskin campaign told Sunny that they were walking away unless she took over. It was that bad. She got a meeting with Peskin and laid out her rules. He brought her on. At first, Sunny thought she would be co-managing with the guy no one liked. Then the guy took offense and quit. Problem solved. Sunny found a good friend in the Peskin campaign right away. She felt they ran a good race, but despite that, didn’t think that they would win. She didn’t go to the 2015 Election Night party at . She stayed in the campaign office alone. Then a political consultant who was at the party called Sunny to let her know that they won. Sunny picked herself up and walked a few blocks to the party. On stage with Peskin, right there and then, he asked her to be his chief of staff. She said she needed to talk to her boss, Jane Kim. Once she moved from one office to another at City Hall, it was like the two supervisors and their staff were a team. A journalist called them “the Splash Sisters,” and folks in the offices joked that they were District 36 or 63, depending. Peskin and Kim were tight, indeed. Sunny has a story of Peskin wanting to skip the ceremonial part of rejoining the Board, and instead wanting to get straight to business. It was something of a wake-up call for Sunny, who wasn’t used to working this way. We go on a bit of a sidebar here to talk about how Kim and Peskin approached their overlapping time on the Board. Sunny describes both as “land-use nerds” and I throw in “policy wonks.” Theirs was a progressiveness rooted in pragmatism. In 2018, Jane Kim ran against fellow Supervisor Scott Wiener for California Senate. Sunny didn’t work on the campaign officially, but considered herself a “super volunteer.” She and some other women penned an and his campaign for a pro-Wiener super PAC’s hit pieces on Kim, portraying her as a homewrecker (read: “whore”). The campaign itself, Sunny says, ran sexist/racist/misogynistic ads against their female Asian opponent. It was and is deplorable behavior, and Sunny and others felt a need to speak out against it. To both Sunny’s and my mind, there’s a through line to the current race Wiener is in, against another Asian woman, , in which the campaign created an AI chatbot that generated racist responses. AI and big tech companies overwhelmingly support Wiener against Chan. At the very least, it’s a bad look. At worst, it’s despicable. Sunny is pretty quick to give Wiener credit for being an incredibly hard worker inside halls of power. She simply disagrees with his tactics. I second that. And of course there are major policy differences. I breeze through Aaron Peskin’s 2024 run for mayor, which Sunny also managed, partly for time but also because it’s been covered on this show. Then I ask Sunny what she’s been up to since then, because Peskin was termed out of his seat on the Board of Supervisors. She says she spent time thinking about movements change and how communities reorganize themselves. She started to believe that there are people who are progressive and don’t know it. She points to many California Democratic elected officials’ being overwhelmingly corporate, meaning beholden to powerful corporate interests rather than their constituents. Out of that inward examination of the outer world, Sunny arrived at the idea to start her own nonprofit progressive policy think tank and media lab. That entity’s name is . They develop policy proposals and create explainer-type videos (that I really love) to help folks understand a true progressive approach to the problems of our time. That includes everything from affordability to truly uplifting art and artists, actually regulating tech, and holding government accountable. SF Propel was Sunny’s brainchild, but with some seed money she obtained, she brought in some really skilled people to help her build it. They work with her to develop policy ideas and issue stances, as well as to make those videos and plan and hold events. For more info and to get involved yourself, head to . We recorded this episode in the Tenderloin Community Benefit District space in the Warfield Commons building in September 2026.
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Sunny Angulo, Part 1 (S9E3)
10/13/2026
Sunny Angulo, Part 1 (S9E3)
Sunny Angulo has one helluva life story. In this episode, meet and get to know Sunny. Today, she does , a group promoting progressive policies rooted in pragmatism and effectiveness. In Part 1, Sunny begins her own story with that of her maternal grandparents. Her mom’s mom, Amparo Espinoza (née Cruz), was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. Amparo’s dad worked on the railroad, meaning she lived a nomadic life when she was young. Eventually, her family made it to Northern California in is now Stockton. Amparo’s husband was younger than she was. He was a gangster back in the day. Both came from big families. He grew up in poverty. He later did fieldwork. Amparo was already an independent young lady. She helped take care of her mom (Sunny’s great-grandmother). She worked, which wasn’t common for women of that era to do. She had a car. The two met at a dance hall social. Parents served as chaperones at these events, of course. He asked Amparo to dance, but had been so nervous to do so that he got drunk to muster the courage. Instead of dancing, Amparo helped her future husband back to his friend’s car. As they carted him away, he told Amparo that he’d call her. “No you won’t,” Sunny’s grandma said. Sunny describes her grandpa as a handsome man, but full of pride and machismo. He asked Amparo out a few more times, and got more no’s. Then came the Korean war, and he got drafted to fight. War changed Sunny’s grandad, as it often does. He had never left California. He returned from combat and was hanging out with friends in downtown Stockton when Amparo caught his eye. His friend assured him that she wasn’t married. This time she accepted his offer, not to dance, but to get married. They had two kids—Sunny’s mom, Susie, and her tia Helen. Then we turn to Sunny’s paternal grandparents. Her dad’s dad is from Bogota, Colombia. Papi Angulo was orphaned when he was 16. He took a banana boat to New York City looking for his two older brothers. They had already enlisted in the military at that point. He wanted to join as well, but he was too young. To pass the two years until Alfredo was eligible, he ran errands for a pharmacy and worked in an actual sausage factory. Across the country at the time, unbeknown to him, in a little town called Shingle Springs in El Dorado County, Sunny’s grandma, Eleanor, lived on a cattle ranch. She was the youngest of three daughters in her family. Her lineage was Swiss. Eleanor would be taken out of school to help her family herd hundreds of cattle from El Dorado to Upper Bassie hundreds of miles away. It was a three-day journey by horseback, which is how Sunny’s grandma made the trek. They’d spent the winter there, and months would go by when they didn’t see a human being who wasn’t a member of their family. With her older sisters married and out of the house, Eleanor decided that marriage wasn’t for her. She went to Oregon to get a college degree in home economics. After that failed to grab her interest, she joined something called The Secretary Corps, which sent her to Italy. It was just after World War II, and there were still active military bases in the region. Alfredo had enrolled and been sent to Italy. Where he was stationed, they had bowling competitions. Alfredo and Eleanor got partnered up and ended up winning and getting a huge trophy. The family lore goes like this: Alfredo told Eleanor, “Either we split this down the middle, or you marry me.” And so they got married. When Eleanor called him, trans-Atlantic, to let her family know, she realized that she didn’t know her new husband’s name. Classic. Alfredo got stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato in the North Bay. Now we turn back to Sunny’s parents. Raised in Stockton, her mom, Susan, came to San Francisco to go to college at USF on a scholarship. At that time, the school wasn’t integrated along gender lines. Women were separate from men. Her dad, Sam, also went to USF, on the men’s side. He came here to do ROTC, something he’d been involved with since high school. Both of Sunny’s parents were resident assistants (RA) at USF. Susan also helped give campus tours to prospective students. And she worked in the school cafeteria. Sam would go there early in the day, owing to his ROTC schedule. He went on a date with Susan’s roommate, who told her that he wasn’t for her, but that Susan should try him out. They hit it off. Some months later, but before they planned to get married, they had their first child—Sunny. The wedding was moved up before she was born. I ask Sunny whether she figured out the math on that when she was an adult, and she says that it was her sister who actually uncovered that truth. Sunny was born in Letterman Hospital in the Presidio, where Susan and Sam lived at the time. After having their first kid, they moved over to Parnassus, where Sam was attending dentistry school at UCSF. After that, and following the arrival of her sister, the family moved to the Inner Sunset. Sunny goes on a sidebar here about how little her parents paid back in the Eighties vs. what folks paid 10 years ago or so. Of course, it’s even more exorbitant now. Years later, when Susan was pregnant with Sunny’s brother, the US military stationed Sam in Germany. He went over ahead of his family, which meant that Susan traveled with two young girls (Sunny was 4 or 5, her sister was 3 or 4) while pregnant with her third child. She had never really left Northern California, to boot. Sunny thinks it was her first trip on an airplane, also. The family lived in Aschaffenburg, Germany, but the nearest hospital was in Frankfurt. So that’s where Sunny’s brother was born. They stayed in Germany for a couple of years before returning to the US. Sunny had started school in Europe. Susan was happy to be back. First, they went to Tacoma, Washington. But when they were in the US, no matter where they lived, the family always came to San Francisco for the summers, because duh. Visits to The City back then included the traditions of eating at Viking Subs (RIP) and going to a Giants game. They’d have birthday dinners at . They’d of course visit . And they went to and Ocean Beach. Sunny talks about a cousin, years later, when she was a teenager and having a hard time, who lived in San Francisco. Sunny idolized her cousin. She lived in Dolores Heights and to young Sunny, was oh so glamorous. She was artsy and confident. Sunny remembers a San Francisco where Crissy Field was still an airstrip. Even though she didn’t live here consistently until much later in her life, those frequent visits allowed Sunny to see how The City has changed over time. When I ask Sunny to list her schools, still unaware of the rest of her life story, things get … interesting. The story is anything but straight-forward. For her high school freshman year, her family was in Augusta, Georgia. Her sister assimilated well, but Sunny not so much. She says she hated it there. For their next move, the military gave her dad the option of a base in Louisiana or one in El Paso, Texas. He chose Texas, and it didn’t help Sunny’s discomfort. She started researching how to emancipate yourself from your parents. She was 15. Life had changed for Sunny when she started high school. Self-esteem was low. She thought she was fat. She didn’t like her hair or her glasses or her skin. She developed an eating disorder. She and her parents fought a lot. She did some not-hardcore drugs. By the time her sophomore year rolled around, Sunny and her parents were, as she describes it, “at war.” She was dating an older guy. Enough was enough. She wanted to free herself and move to Atlanta or San Francisco to be an artist. But before that could happen … Sunny shares the incredible story of how her parents had her abducted and taken to Utah. Yes, you read that right. It’s really too much to go into detail about here, so please listen to this segment. After a little more than two years at a facility in Utah, Sunny rejoined her family, who had moved to El Paso by then. It was Sunny’s first time in that Texas/Mexico border town. And it came on the heels of a family tragedy. A cousin of hers had passed away right before Sunny’s release from the facility in Utah. It was a complicated time, to say the least. But she enrolled in the second semester of her senior year of high school nonetheless. She didn’t have any friends in her new hometown, but, she thought, at least she knew her sister. Turns out that her sister had told all her friends that Sunny was dead. A contingency of Sunny’s rejoining her family was that there were rules, a contract of sorts. It meant she couldn’t go to prom. She couldn’t get a tattoo (we’ll get to that). She was counting down the days until graduation, and had already been accepted and even gotten a scholarship to go to USF, just like her mom did all those decades ago. Sunny’s parents suggested a trip to San Francisco to check out the campus. Following that, they’d join other family for a summer vacation in Upper Bassie. But before they left El Paso on that trip, along with a friend from Georgia, Sunny got her first tattoo—of her zodiac sign, Leo. Back home in El Paso, only a couple weeks until she was supposed to move to San Francisco to start college, Sunny’s dad wanted a word with her. Back on that summer vacation, an unknown family member had seen her tattoo. Her dad let Sunny know that, in getting the tattoo, she had broken the home contract (see above). He had scheduled an appointment to have the tattoo removed. She refused, and her dad told her that it meant she wasn’t going to San Francisco. And so Sunny resolved to return to her hometown on her own, using money she’d saved up from working. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Sunny Angulo. Photography by
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Z Space’s New Program: Assimilation (S9 Bonus)
10/08/2026
Z Space’s New Program: Assimilation (S9 Bonus)
Listen in as I talk with JoAnne Winter and Vanessa Flores Chacko of . We chat about the theater production group. Their program Word for Word’s next production, , includes two short stories, one by E.L. Doctorow and another by Tatyana Tolstaya. For more information and to buy tickets for Assimilation, which runs Oct. 14 through Nov. 8, visit . We recorded this podcast on Zoom in October 2026.
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Intersections SF: Chris Ryan's 'not really a realtor' story at Broderick & Hayes (Episode 3)
10/07/2026
Intersections SF: Chris Ryan's 'not really a realtor' story at Broderick & Hayes (Episode 3)
is the New York Times bestselling author of and , which have each been translated into over twenty languages. Chris’ long running podcast, includes more than 800 episodes, has been downloaded over 30 million times and has featured guests such as Rick Beato, Theo Von, Johann Hari, and Neil Strass. is also a friend, and a neighbor in the rare, remote, strange, and very beautiful settlement of Crestone, Colorado. Chris’s somewhat apocalyptic SF love story takes place at 454 Broderick near Hayes in 1989.
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Vanessa + Raina/Valkyries, Say Less, Part 2 (S9E2)
10/01/2026
Vanessa + Raina/Valkyries, Say Less, Part 2 (S9E2)
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with the origin story of Raina and Vanessa’s show, Valkyries, Say Less. It goes something like this … The two went to the first-ever Valkyries game, technically a preseason game, at Chase Center, in 2025. Once she discovered discounted tickets, Vanessa got about 20 friends and fellow teachers to join in. Then folks from the Valkyries cme to Vanessa’s school, Roosevelt Middle School in the Richmond, for a career fair day. She was decked out in Valkyries merch that she’d already made and had been selling. Vanessa told the team reps how she’d gotten 20 people to buy tickets for the preseason opener. The reps replied, asking whether she’d ever considered season tickets. Once the info was on the table, Vanessa realized that it might be a possibility, even on a public schoolteacher’s salary. She convinced the group going to the preseason opener to go in on season tickets with her. Game day came, and Vanessa compares it to her wedding day. Excitement was all around her. After the game, Vanessa connected with Raina to talk about the experience. Raina shared that, during the game itself, inside what would later become known as Ballhalla, they were scrambling to find information about the players, most of whom were completely new to them. Vanessa knew of the French players (there were three on the team then), of course, but that’s about it. Vanessa remembers Raina having the idea for a podcast, based on their simple desire to learn more about the players and share that info. Raina’s story is a little different. They grew up on men’s basketball and were skeptical that the WNBA could bring it. Unlike their friend Vanessa, they weren’t a “founding guard” (early season ticketholder). And so that preseason game was a massive wake-up call for Raina. They were in shock. The experience was profound, and she needed to better understand and process it. That’s where Vanessa came in. On Mother’s Day 2025 (May 11 that year), Raina went to Vanessa’s house and the two recorded an intro in the basement. They started with that idea of researching Valkyries players. They wanted to use their roles as educators to teach themselves and other fans who might be hungry for that information. It was casual. They quickly realized that they have different voices and approaches, but excellent chemistry. They published that immediately. It was an introduction episode. Then came time for a second episode, and that meant work. They decided that each episode would be dedicated entirely to a single player. All good teachers know the value of games as learning tools, and so they integrated playfulness into their new show. At this point in our recording, Raina casually mentions that their dad, , played in the (M)NBA back in the day. What? Raina expounds on that to explain that for them, learning player stats was a ritual growing up. It meant going to games vs. not going in those days. All to say that player stats and info come second-nature for Raina. Vanessa and Raina soon found out from their new side hustle that, every episode, they fell in love with a new player, having researched that player thoroughly. We shift the conversation to talking about the inaugural Valkyries season in 2025, which we all agree was bananas. Vanessa recalls being at Ballhalla when Golden State clinched the playoffs. She went home and booked a hotel in San Jose (because of a scheduling conflict, the first and only playoff game last year took place down there). She talks about the high highs and the immense joy surrounding our WNBA team. She’d just come out of three months plagued by severe back pain right around the time of that preseason game last year. She relishes the community that came together immediately, and is excited that kids and young people get to experience it, too. I ask Vanessa and Raina whether, like I do, they ever challenge folks in their lives to watch or go to a Valkyries, folks who might otherwise not be into basketball specifically or sports in general. They both say they have. I’ll echo what we all say: If you’re able, go to a game at Ballhalla. I challenge you not to have a smile on your face. It’s so much more than what’s happening on the court, though lately, that part doesn’t take anything away. It’s seeing all generations, all ethnicities, all gender expressions, and everyone is fucking happy. It’s really something. An added bonus for Vanessa and Raina is, of course, getting to know each other better and becoming better and better friends. For the Valkyries second season this year, Vanessa and Raina decided to add video to their show. They started media partnerships with friend of this show and , a local online media org. They got press passes, meaning they can sit in the media section (alongside our contributing producer and my wife, ) and attend pregame and post-game press conferences. They’ve hosted watch parties at Rikki’s (and had another one last night at Richmond Republic) and have done community trash cleanups around Chase Center. Raina speaks to the beauty of collaboration, and how they couldn’t do this alone. And they talk about watching their friend Vanessa blossom beyond being a mom and a teacher. They give a shoutout to and Sara Yergovich, who bartended the day we recorded. Rikki’s had only recently celebrated their first anniversary when last season started, which is amazing. I’m proud to call Sara and Danielle friends of Storied: SF. I mention , the rise of women’s sports, from KALW (shameless plug as Erin hosts that show). Vanessa and Raina drop Eric Apricot’s name. He’s the author of , my own go-to publication around anything WNBA. Valkyries, Say Less and Valkyrie Nation are now collaborating on a book they’re calling Love Letters to Ballhalla. And Vanessa mentions Maya Goldberg-Safir, author of on Substack, and all-around cool person. I go on a sidebar here about talking to random people all over The Bay about the Valkyries, how infectious it all is, and how easy it is to get swept up by everything Valkyries. It also transcends generations and race. I love it. When we recorded, in late-August, the Valkyries were in second place, behind the Minnesota Lynx. They ended the season there, barely, after a franchise-historic comeback win in LA against the Sparks. As of this writing, Minnesota has been eliminated in Round 1 by the New York Liberty, making the Valkyries the de facto No. 1 seed in the playoffs. I ask Vanessa and Raina to talk about this incredible season, only the second in team history. I ask, straight-up: Is it Gabby Williams? Yes, but that’s not the entirety of it. Raina talks about how Gabby has thrived here, and done so in a leadership role. They also mention the bond among all the players, something that’s grown stronger over the course of this season. And they point to how the coaching staff is respecting player health differently and better this year. Maybe I’m giving our city and metro area too much credit, but I bring up a quote, recent at the time, from head coach Natalie Nakase. She talked about the love among Valkyries players. For me, that’s a very SF/Bay Area thing. I’ll take it. There are many ways to find Vanessa and Raina and Valkyries, Say Less. Their website is , and it’s a great place to learn about events they’re either putting on or are a part of. Follow Valkyries, Say Less on Instagram and Threads . Having met their goals for Season 2 (press passes, interviewing players), Vanessa states her Season 3 goal of offering her meditation workshops to the team, in French and in English. Rad.
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Vanessa + Raina/Valkyries, Say Less, Part 1 (S9E2)
09/29/2026
Vanessa + Raina/Valkyries, Say Less, Part 1 (S9E2)
When Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely and Raina Mast aren’t going bananas about the Golden State Valkyries, they’re teaching kids in San Francisco. In this episode, meet and get to know Vanessa and Raina, cohosts of the . We begin with Vanessa. Her parents met in San Francisco in 1970. Her mom came here the year before from her home country, France. In her mom’s first month in The City, she met the man who became Vanessa’s dad. She had just finished photography school back home, and planned to return to France. But fate wanted a word with her. Vanessa’s dad grew up on the East Coast. Before he settled on creating stain-glass works, getting to know his own artistic bent, he came to San Francisco to explore that side of himself. He met Vanessa’s mom. They were young artists, they were in love, and the rest is history. About a decade later, in 1979, they had a kid—Vanessa, their only child. She talks about being on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial, but considers herself mostly Californian/French. With her parents, Vanessa spent (and still often spends) summers in the French Alps. Both being artists, Vanessa’s mom realized that between herself and her husband, one of them needed a job that offered health insurance. And so she went to a temp agency. That allowed her dad to pursue his stained-glass art. He later designed the stained glass in the Mrs. Doubtfire house. A lot of his glass art still exists around North Beach. Vanessa grew up amid all that art here in SF. But at the time, she might not have appreciated it like she does today. Eventually, she moved to New York City for college. She was drawn in by the romantic version of NYC depicted in movies and shows. After her time at Columbia University, Vanessa moved to LA to teach. She always knew she would come home, but wasn’t sure when. After 11 years away (four in New York and seven in Los Angeles), she came back. She was 30 and had met the man she would later marry. It was time. Riffing off her seven years of teaching middle school in LA, which she started when she was 22, Vanessa came back and found work with the SFUSD, where she’s been since 2008. We go on a sidebar about raising kids in San Francisco, something I didn’t do but Vanessa did and wants more people to do. She and her Valkyries, Say Less cohost, Raina, met through a mutual friend. Vanessa’s version of their meeting 10 years ago is that they were both invited to a party at that mutual friend’s house. Vanessa saw Raina and thought, Damn, that is one cool-looking person. We’ll hear Raina’s version of that story later in Part 1. We end Vanessa’s segment by hearing about her SF schools, a must for born-and-raised folks. She’s quick to note that she only went to one school for K through 12—the . Then we turn to Raina. They grew up in Pennsylvania Amish country, where they played basketball and ran track. They’re from Easton, the town where Crayola crayons are made. Raina says the company would often survey town folks to help name new colors. Easton is 1.5 hours away from both New York City and Philadelphia. Both cities called to them, they say. They lived in New York City, Puerto Rico, and Upstate New York. Then they joined friends on a cross-country road trip, looking for a place to call home. After 13 years of Catholic school, they never really felt like the fit in back home. I ask if, like me, Raina is a recovering Catholic. They say they are fully recovered, in fact. Remarkable, especially for a queer woman. Brava! Being one of five kids in their family, with three brothers, was another challenge. Raina’s oldest brother was the artist among them. Eventually, they took another trip across the US. New Orleans tried to grab Raina, and possibly almost did. The other choice was San Francisco, but they didn’t move here right away. When it came time to move here, their family was shocked not at all. The first visit happened in 2001. There’s a really funny story they share about driving through SF and ending up in Sacramento before they realized it. With no GPS and only paper maps, they circled back and this time, exited off the bridge to San Francisco. A few years later, now pregnant, they started thinking, Where do I wanna raise this kid? That’s when SF really drew them in. Their younger brother lived here already, with an apartment in the Marina. There are stories about getting bested by The City’s hills and wearing sandals and wondering why they were so cold—classic newcomer to San Francisco stuff. Despite all that, they loved it. In 2014, they made the leap. Since arriving to live here, they’ve lived in the Mission, the Haight, and nowadays, they call the Richmond home. Before their move here, they applied for art school and teaching fellowships at the same time. The teaching gigs they got offered health insurance and more stability, so they chose that path. Today, they are able to walk parallel paths of art and education. They’ve taught art, but these days, it’s Spanish classes. Going back to their meeting story, Raina and Vanessa are both creative folks who also teach. As creative people with not a lot of money, a DIY mindset set in for them individually and together. It’s what propelled and inspired them to start their podcast—Valkyries, Say Less. Vanessa speaks to being on the same “teacher rhythm,” meaning time off at the same time, stuff like that. Raina adds that, both being Gen Xers, they grew up without women’s sports being what it is today. We end Part 1 with Raina’s version of meeting Vanessa, who would later be their podcasting partner. Right away, Raina thought Vanessa was very stylish, mostly owing to her French heritage, as they later learned. In May 2025, channeling Raina’s music-recording background, Vanessa’s podcasting knowledge (she has a meditation show), and both of their love of women’s sports, and with the kickoff of the first WNBA team in The Bay, Valkyries, Say Less was born. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Raina and Vanessa. We recorded this podcast in August 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Kate Campbell/WhoDidWhat? (S9 Bonus)
09/24/2026
Kate Campbell/WhoDidWhat? (S9 Bonus)
Listen in as I talk with Kate Campbell, cofounder of , a congressional accountability tracker. Their website goes live October 12. Once it’s up, folks all over the country will be able to access their congressperson’s voting recording, committees they serve on, any petitions with their names on it, and a score that the site gives them. It will launch covering a single topic, but an important one—how members score on the Epstein Files. Please register to vote or check your registration by October 19, the last possible day to do so in California. Follow Who Did What on Instagram . And donate to this nonprofit’s Kickstarter, up through Oct. 3, . We recorded this podcast at in the Inner Richmond in September 2026.
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Intersections SF: Maria Finn's "I saw a fin" story at Fort Point (Episode 2)
09/23/2026
Intersections SF: Maria Finn's "I saw a fin" story at Fort Point (Episode 2)
is a forager, chef, event producer, author of a fantastic cookbook called and fellow Lagotto Romagnolo dog parent who also happens to be a neighbor of mine on the houseboats in Sausalito. She is founder of The Institute for Ecosystem Based Living and . You can find her on the web at and . Maria’s Intersections story about swimming in San Francisco Bay—and getting more comfortable with being uncomfortable—takes place at Fort Point in 2019.
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SF Lowrider Council Founder Roberto Hernandez (S9 Bonus)
09/17/2026
SF Lowrider Council Founder Roberto Hernandez (S9 Bonus)
Listen in as I talk with Roberto Hernandez, founder of the . The council is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. And their Lowrider Parade and car-hopping contest will take place in the Mission this Saturday, Sept. 19. We recorded this podcast at Roberto’s home in the Mission in August 2026. Photography by Tyrone Malow Diaz
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Photographer Dave Glass, Part 2 (S9S1)
09/16/2026
Photographer Dave Glass, Part 2 (S9S1)
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Dave’s time in Europe to get away from being drafted to fight in Vietnam. By that time, with a couple years at City College taking photo classes under his belt, Dave had built a portfolio. He took all his gear with him because he didn’t know whether he was ever coming back. His French cousin had a friend whose mom worked at the US Embassy in Paris. Dave got about a dozen photos into a group show at the American Culture Center there, his first public showing. Through another connection, he was able to print photos for the show at the Sorbonne. The National Library of Paris ended up acquiring all of Dave’s photos from that show, and they’re still there today. Lodgings with his French family were barely adequate, and definitely crowded. He had a friend, also a draft dodger, living in Scotland. And so Dave decided to move to the UK. He and his cousin had bought a car together, and he ended up taking that car to Leeds in northern England. Locals there took Dave in, and so he stayed there, rather than Scotland, for another half-year. We go on a sidebar thanks to my out-of-left-field question about Dave smoking cigarettes when he lived in Europe. We also talk about partying as a young person over there. At the end of 1971, Dave returned to The Bay. It was safe by then, he says, because there were so many other draft dodgers. He shares a tidbit about how, before he left, if you had gone to the intersection of 19th Avenue and Lincoln, you would see at least half a dozen young men holding hitchhiking signs that said, “Canada.” A few years down the road after Dave’s return, Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to all the draft dodgers. At our live event, he next showed a photo from Mission and 18th Street that shows, among other things, Lakeside Liquors, Dave’s family’s business back then. His dad and a partner owned and ran the place, and Dave worked there. His dad also owned a laundromat on the block. His dad claimed that his was the first full-service, coin-op laundromat in The City. It was 1957, and we’ll just go ahead and take his dad’s word for it. As a young man, Dave learned to fix those washing machines and dryers, which he says “were always breaking down.” And that’s how he got his first taste of appliance repair, a career he spent 25 years in. When his dad retired in the Eighties, Dave opened his own joint—Little Hollywood Launderette on Market near Laguna. But by the time he opened Little Hollywood, unattended laundromats were fading in popularity, for various reasons. So Dave included attendants and wash-and-fold service at his place, as well as a dry cleaner next door. He ran Little Hollywood from 1989 until 2007. Dave shares the story of a music video that was shot mostly inside Little Hollywood. A then somewhat up-and-coming artist called Del the Funky Homosapien shot the video for his song “Made in America,” directed by Michael Lucero, in a funky laundry spot on Market. Read all about that in this . Dave’s behind-the-scenes story of that video shoot is fun. Back in his repairman days, Dave would travel from the Mission to the Western Addition regularly, as well as trips out to the Sunset and Richmond districts. He got to know his city even better. He knew all the laundromats, including the spot that would eventually be his own. In 2007, Dave decided to retire. That gave him more time with his cameras. Three years later, his parents really started aging and needed more and more care. To help out, Dave took over running his dad’s businesses when he was no longer able to. He did continue taking photos during this time, though. In fact, he’d been taking photos since his return from Europe back in the early Seventies. Photographers from Dave’s era didn’t commonly show their work. They had boxes full of negatives instead. Eventually, though, someone turned Dave on to a photo-sharing site, and he acquired a scanner and went to work. He enjoyed it, and leveled up on the scanner. He set out to scan all of his negatives. He spent the next roughly 10 years scanning (in fact, he adds, he’s still scanning to this day). Through those early photo-sharing websites, Dave started to make connections in the SF photo community. Eventually, reached out and asked Dave to be in a photo show at Cha Cha Cha, back when the Mission Street location was still open. A year later, he met at ’s open studio in the Richmond District. Adrian, Troy, and Dave formed the . He figured he could serve as a mentor to the many younger members of the group. But it turned out the other way around. Dave points to the young photographers in the club that came from punk rock and skateboarding backgrounds (communities that are near and dear to my heart, as I spent countless years of my childhood and early adulthood in both). Dave considered their art to be edgy and good. It reminded him of work by , who in the Eighties published Hip Shot. Those young photographers’ style wore off on Dave, and point-and-shoot street photography is what he mostly does today. At this point in the conversation, Dave points to the inspiration of , a photo magazine founded by Ray Potes in San Francisco in 2001. There’s an exhibit up at the through Sept. 24 celebrating a quarter-century of this amazing publication’s work. Dave has one photo in that exhibition. Dave talks about another of the photos he shared that evening, which is also available in the gallery on this page. It’s a photo he took of the moving of a Victorian house out of the Western Addition during the so-called redevelopment (read: gentrification) of that neighborhood. The next photo he showed was from Candlestick Park in 1989. Next is an example of Dave’s street photography—a photo from a Nineties Pride Parade, taken near City Hall. I ask Dave whether he ever shoots color photos, because everything of his I see is black-and-white. He says that in the early days of digital cameras, he shot some color. He ended up shooting about 10 years of digital color, and he liked it. But the lure of film and black and white was too strong. Dave sold all his digital cameras. He says that, nowadays, smartphones do just as well as or better than cameras did back then. Today, he uses vintage cameras, vintages lenses, and black-and-white film, a combination that gives you a look and feel that you just cannot recreate with a digital camera. The last photo Dave shared that night at Warfield Commons is the most recent one. It’s of folks and their cars at Ocean Beach, near to where Dave lives today. He says that his love of cars and car culture dates back to the Sixties. Back then, there were no stoplights on the Great Highway. It was like a drag strip (something you’ll also hear about in our bonus episode on SF lowrider culture tomorrow). He shares fun stories of taking his mom’s car, picking up friends, and joining the racers out near the ocean. They’d stay until cops chased them away, at which point they would head to Daly City and go to Pip’s, a drive-in that existed back in the day. Please follow Dave on Instagram . Special thanks to Mel Baker and the team at for hosting and producing the live event where we recorded this episode. Look for Dave’s exhibit at the San Francisco Historical Society next summer. It should stay up through the rest of 2027. Photography by Nate Oliveira/Shoot First SF
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Photographer Dave Glass, Part 1 (S9E1)
09/15/2026
Photographer Dave Glass, Part 1 (S9E1)
Dave Glass’s Polish parents met at a displaced persons camp in Europe after World War II. In this Season 9 inaugural episode, meet and get to know Dave. A born-and-raised San Francisco, Dave joined me back in August in the office/studio at Warfield Commons to record the first-ever Storied: San Francisco live episode. Our talk that night comprises this episode. Dave’s mom and dad got married at that camp in Germany and had their first kid, Dave’s sister, there. The young couple wanted to come to the US, but had to wait another five years in Europe for that to materialize. Finally, they made it, via the port of New Orleans. Their American sponsor lived in Stockton, which they made their way to by trains and buses. Dave’s dad later told him that when they arrived in California, Stockton looked to him like all cowboys and Mexicans. The family’s sponsor owned a ranch, and the arrangement was that Dave’s mom and dad would work there. One day, his dad’s boss sent him to San Francisco, an hour or so away, for supplies. One taste of The City, and his dad knew he had to move his family here. It was early 1951 and Dave’s mom was already pregnant with him. The family made the move to the big city regardless. They settled in the Western Addition on the corner of Webster and Fulton. This was before redevelopment, mind you. In addition to its sizable Black population, there were also a significant number of European refugees in the neighborhood, too. Dave fondly remembers being a little boy and going to the Ukrainian bakery at the corner of Webster and McAllister. Other memories from Dave’s early days include vague visions of the Acme beer brewery across from his house. Dave lets us know that today, there are remnants of that building still standing. Around the time Dave started school, his family moved to the Sunset District. This is when his memories really get going. He went to Parkside Elementary, which is today known as Dianne Feinstein. Dave rewinds a little to share the story of when Eisenhower visited SF as president. Dave’s mom got him, his sister, and herself dressed up. They walked down to Van Ness, where the presidential motorcade was set to pass by. He recalls the president sitting, not in the car’s seat, but above it, in open air, riding down the avenue waving at folks. So much about this would never happen today. When he was 10, Dave got his first camera. At our live event, he shared a photo he took with that camera at his sister’s birthday party, seen in a gallery on this page. It’s one of the oldest photos he has that he took himself. At that time, Dave was just a “kid with a camera,” not serious about the art whatsoever. But his dad had a Leica camera and did take photography more seriously, at least when it came to family photos. He had bartered for the camera when he lived in the displaced persons camp in Europe, and had photos from that time. Dave still has some of those pictures. We go on a bit of a sidebar here, thanks to my question about how folks got their camera film developed back in the day. We also chat about the nature of film vs. digital. When he was in high school, Dave joined the photo club and developed in a darkroom for his first time. He says it was around this time that he started to have an affection for photography. We have to mention that he went to Lowell, which came after time at Herbert Hoover Junior High School. Dave points out that, even back then, “smart” kids went to Lowell, including his sister. Dave says he more or less got in on legacy, not good grades. He brought that with him through high school, and chose to go to City College when he wasn’t able to get into four-year schools. In 1969, City College’s photography program was a serious one. Dave considers it blue-collar, in fact, aimed at turning students into professional photographers. Dave ended up taking photos for the school paper, something he loved doing. I ask Dave about the late-Sixties in SF, and he obliges. He was 16 when the Summer of Love happened, and living just a few neighborhoods away from the Haight/Ashbury, his eyes were opened. He and his friends would visit the Haight every couple of days. He says it got so crowded with tourist buses and people that The City made Haight a one-way street. Still, they saw bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and the Fish at small venues or outdoors in the park. We go on a sidebar here to talk about back in the day. Dave’s first job, which he had while still in high school, was selling shoes at (IYKYK) at Serramonte, which had just opened. Dave shares a family photo and talks a little about it, also available here in the gallery. Eventually, relatives moved to San Francisco and lived nearby Dave’s family, so he grew up with cousins and aunts and uncles. Dave confirms that it was the case that he and his friends, like many folks I talk with who grew up back then, pretty much did whatever they wanted after school, with the understanding that you go home when it gets dark out. His stories include building skateboards out of wooden 2×4s and roller skates. Then we talk about a significant turn in Dave’s life. It was the late-Sixties and the war in Vietnam was heating up. The draft was in effect, and the number of units Dave was taking at City College had fallen below the threshold for deferment. That year, 1969, had seen more US casualties than any year prior. His parents, having escaped war-torn Europe earlier in their lives, did not want their son serving in the military in any capacity. Some of his dad’s relatives had settled in Paris after WWII. They helped arrange for Dave to live there for about six months starting in the fall of 1970. Check back tomorrow for Part 2 and the rest of Dave Glass’s life story. Follow Dave on Instagram . We recorded this podcast in the studio at in August 2026. Photography by Nate Oliveira
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Intersections SF: Mani Niall's 'a nice man' story at Fell & Stanyan (Episode 1)
09/09/2026
Intersections SF: Mani Niall's 'a nice man' story at Fell & Stanyan (Episode 1)
is a chef, baker, author of and other cookbooks, a food business advisor—and he was ! Mani’s very SF love story takes place at near Fell and Stanyan in 2002. He writes on Substack at —here’s the he mentions in his episode.
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Season 9 Intro: Intersections SF + "This Is the Place"
09/01/2026
Season 9 Intro: Intersections SF + "This Is the Place"
Listen in as Jeff talks about the coming Season 9: This Is the Place. Then Jeff is joined by Intersections SF host to talk Bowen's new show. Intersections will be part of the Storied universe beginning Sept. 9.
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Top Chefs, Part 2 (S8E23)
07/30/2026
Top Chefs, Part 2 (S8E23)
In Part 2, Aft joins us to chat about the band—Top Chefs. We start with the story of how TJ met Aft. A mutual friend of his and Loveberry’s, Lucas Hanson, put on a show at DNA Lounge called “Liam Berry and Friends.” TJ was just getting out of high school at the time. They asked him to join them on stage, something he’d never really done before. TJ had been playing smaller sets in restaurants, but joining a band at a bona fide venue was new for him. Loveberry (Liam) had met Aft at something called a “sound gig” for a set they would play as part of the effort to keep People’s Park in Berkeley from being closed. They called Loveberry because he had a PA and they needed someone to run sound. Loveberry didn’t really know what that meant at the time, and he might’ve been mistaken for a guy named Jeff whom they’d been expecting. Nevertheless, Aft was one of the few people who was nice to Loveberry that day in Berkeley. The band ended up needing a guitar player, and so a mutual friend told Aft that he should have this guy, Loveberry, play guitar with him. They agreed and ending up borrowing a guitar from a member of the crowd. Aft later invited Loveberry to a rehearsal back in SF. Afterthough, aka Aft, joins the conversation at this point. He recounts his version of that day in Berkeley. It was still early pandemic enough that folks were wearing masks. He liked Loveberry’s playing that day enough to ask him over. They played a couple of shows as “Aft and His Band” or “Aft … backed up by (various musicians.)” Aft was also asked to play with “Liam Berry and Friends.” At that DNA Lounge show, Aft met TJ and the trombone player Will, who’s also in Top Chefs now. Aft had played in bands for years, including with a set of twins who played piano and bass. But those guys moved to New York around the time he connected with Loveberry. And soon after that, TJ and other members of today’s Top Chefs. There’s some collective fuzziness around when this all went down, but that doesn’t matter. It was the beginning of coming out of a worldwide pandemic when time began to get totally skewed for everyone. But also, they were just busy playing music and making friends. I ask the three of them who came up with the idea to play shows on the stoop of Aft’s childhood home on Scott Street. Loveberry and TJ credit Aft with the idea. Liam talks about arrangements that Aft was putting together with complex horn sections. And in those sessions, one of the musicians started a habit of saying, “Yes, chef” to Aft when he was asked to do something. That came from watching cooking competition shows. The dude was messing with Aft, so at the end of a show one night, when Aft was introducing band members, he called this guy “the top chef” to get him back. The name stuck for the entire band after that. There’s a story about TJ’s Filipina grandma, who lives near DNA Lounge, making Filipino BBQ on a stick and madeleine cookies for the band. TJ wasn’t sure what to do with the food, so he set it out in the crowd while they played a song called, “Everybody Eats.” It was a whole thing, and something Aft says he wants to bring back. I ask the fellas whether anyone has ever compared their Stoop Sessions to NPR’s Tiny Desk music series. There’s a resounding “yes” from all three. Then Aft shares that Top Chefs actually shot a Tiny Desk audition video on the stoop. It was early 2024, and despite not making it onto the hit public media show, they realized that they had something in shows on the stoop. In 2025, thanks to a fundraiser show, the band went to South by Southwest in Austin. After that, they played in the Haight, Hunters Point, Bernal Heights, downtown. Then Top Chefs started ramping up the quality of the videos. In late 2025, just before they planned to take a break from the band, Aft called a media day. The video of that performance went viral. Top Chefs’ Stoop Sessions had arrived. It must’ve been around that time that my wife and I discovered them and immediately knew we’d found something special. And it was basically in our backyard. This coming Sunday, Aug. 2, they’ll be at in Berkeley. If you’re in the South Bay next weekend, they’re playing on Friday, Aug. 7. There’s a show in Levi’s Plaza in The City on Saturday, Sept. 12. And for more shows and info, and to lose yourself in videos of past Stoop Sessions, follow . The band account is . Their website is . Sign up for their email list to learn about upcoming Stoop Sessions. That’s the only space they share that info with folks. That’s a wrap on Season 8: Every Kinda People. Thank you for listening and supporting our effort to uplift and share the stories of artists, activists, and working people who make San Francisco what it is. Photography by
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TJ, Loveberry and The Top Chefs Band, Part 1 (S8E23)
07/28/2026
TJ, Loveberry and The Top Chefs Band, Part 1 (S8E23)
There’s a band in San Francisco comprising musicians from The City and whom I discovered on social media playing shows on a stoop here in SF. I can’t quite be sure when I discovered them, or whether it was me or my wife, but either way, right from the start, we knew we’d stumbled upon something special. Something truly unique. Something joyful, beautiful, free … something for the people. People could gather around with neighbors, some they know, some they might be meeting for the first time. Community is something of a buzz word lately, especially in light of things like gentrification, neo-tech fascism, and just plain ol’ fascism. But for good reason—it’s one of the most powerful tools we have not only to resist all the nonsense being forced on us, but also to overcome that crap and move on toward creating a world of inclusion, equity, diversity … and good tunes. The band’s name is . This last episode of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco is, not by accident, all about them and the magic they create. We start things off with TJ Milan, lead arranger for Top Chefs and co-editor of what they call “Stoop Sessions.” TJ was born and raised in San Francisco. His dad came out here from Connecticut, and his mom is from The Philippines. His parents lived in South of Market, and TJ lives in that neighborhood today. TJ’s mom came to The City with her parents when she was young. She later joined the Army, serving with a support group for the Green Berets. His dad had moved to New York first for work. Then he got offered a job in San Francisco in the late Eighties and took it. In the mid-Nineties, the two met at a law firm where they both worked. In 2002, they had TJ, the youngest of their three kids—he has an older sister and an older brother. His dad is an amateur saxophone player. More on that in a bit. The family lore goes that his sax stylings played a part in his parents’ union, because duh. I give TJ the opportunity to rattle off his SF schools, something he’s proud to do—Clarendon Elementary, Hoover Middle School, and School of the Arts (SOTA). He describes his time at SOTA as “very chaotic.” There was beef between the SOTA kids and the Academy kids in his days. Academy is sort of a school-within-a-school for SOTA, a majority/minority arrangement. Despite that situation, though, TJ met the person who’s still his significant other to this day. The only time TJ left San Francisco for any significant time was to go to college at The New School in New York City, where he studied jazz. But he credits most of his education with . The entire time TJ spent in NYC, he felt in his heart that he would return to his hometown. He played out a lot while he lived in New York, but the market for saxophonists was saturated. He came back to SF around September 2024. It started off rough, as he puts it. He started busking to make ends meet. Then we turn to Liam Berry, aka Loveberry, the head of audio production and guitar player in Top Chefs and co-editor of Stoop Sessions. His mom came here from San Diego. Her mom came to the US from Ecuador, where she was raised. His mom’s dad is from Illinois. Loveberry’s grandfather was on a work trip in South America when he met his grandmother. That couple went to Philadelphia before landing in San Diego. Their daughter, Loveberry’s mom, moved to The Bay to go to UC Berkeley to study biology. I take us on a sidebar about how San Diego can be cool to visit for like two days, max. But there’s only so much that good Mexican food and nice weather can do for me before I need to get back home. His dad is from Cupertino. His dad’s dad is from Philadelphia and his dad’s mom is from Houston. They met when his grandfather worked for NASA and was stationed at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. His grandfather was transferred to the Ames facility on the Peninsula and brought his wife with him. Loveberry’s dad wanted to get out of the area where he grew up, but he didn’t want to go too far. So he got into SF State for meteorology. He ended up working in the data science field after discovering that meteorologists don'’t make great money. His parents met at a party through mutual Cupertino friends who’d moved up to Berkeley and Oakland. They were still together until a couple years ago, when Loveberry’s dad passed away. He was almost raised in Oakland. His dad worked a low-paying job at a tech company and his mom, back then at least, worked different admin jobs (today, she’s a librarian). They’d lived in the Inner Sunset and put bids in on a couple houses in Oakland, where they could afford to buy in the late Nineties/early 2000s. They also bid on one house here in The City, in The Castro. And that’s the one they got. That’s the house Loveberry grew up in, and when his parents first bought it, the house needed a lot of work. There are family stories about moving in and a mysterious tub of some sort of toxic goo. Schools he went to and music intertwine for Loveberry. He started at Rooftop K–8, where kids worked on a different art project every year. When he was in second grade there, Loveberry started to gravitate toward guitar and started taking lessons. He went to high school at Gateway, which didn’t have a music program at the time. So he and some friends started the school’s music club. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Loveberry smoked pot for the first time. He also did an internship at NASA over that same summer. Going back and forth between those two wildly different worlds, he preferred the community that came with smoking pot with friends. Music became more and more a thing, but so did partying. Shit got out of control. He got out of high school to get himself into rehab. After rehab, he wanted to go to music school in Los Angeles, but his parents nixed that idea. Instead, he stayed in The City and worked at a few different local eateries. So he never left. A guy he met playing open mics in SF offered Loveberry $1,000 a month to open a recording studio and music business. It didn’t work out, but it showed him that he could persue music and art as a lifestyle. He worked at some nonprofits and did visual art as well as music. He met Afterthough (Aft) in 2021. Top Chefs formed soon after that. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the final podcast of Season 8. We recorded this podcast on Scott Street near Alamo Square in June 2026. Photography by
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Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 2 (S8E22)
07/16/2026
Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 2 (S8E22)
In Part 2, we begin with Todd and me rapping about how much digital technology has changed just in our lifetimes. Even when he was in school in Colorado, San Francisco had been a goal for Todd, a destination. He got his impression of The City from skateboarding magazines and TV shows. But before moving here, Todd went to Europe, as he puts it, “chasing a girl.” He even tried living overseas. When that didn’t work out, he moved back to Grand Rapids to save money. In 2001, he made the big move west. When Todd arrived, he had a job already lined up for him. He just needed to find a place to live. He’d respond to Craigslist ads for apartments, but when he showed up to look at one of them, a roommate situation, it had turned into a party. He got the place, his first San Francisco apartment, at Waller and Masonic. Todd takes a moment to reminisce about living in that area, which he’s continued to do in the many years since he moved to San Francisco. His walk down memory lane leads us to the Lower Haight. Todd met a lot of cool people at that first SF job, a dotcom, naturally. One of those coworkers had a separate office space in the Lower Haight that served as an auxiliary pressing plant for a record-pressing company based in the Czech Republic. That coworker was bailing on their job and handed the space and the gig over to Todd. It put him face-to-face with musicians in need of vinyl to be pressed. He handled album art as well. His worlds of art and music were colliding in meaningful ways. He quit his dotcom job to do this new gig full-time under the name Circuit 73. More on that later. In addition to the record-pressing gig, Todd was doing flyer art for a friend’s monthly zine as well as other various flyer work. He also did album artwork. Two friends who were new at the time were looking for a space to open a music gear store. They ended up in the same space in the Lower Haight where Todd based himself. Todd’s graphic design work really started to take off around this time, the early 2000s. He’d only been in San Francisco a couple of years, but Todd felt like he was where he needed to be. I ask Todd whether, all those years ago, he had a plan for how long he would try his new city out. He says he didn’t, but back then, he felt like he wouldn’t be here the rest of his life. And yet, more than 20 years later, here we are. Then we turn to one of Todd’s alter egos/pseudonyms/whatever you wanna call its—Ink Letterman. That persona was born when Todd got his first Instagram account, around 2014 or so. He wanted an alias, and landed on that. It took off around 2020, when he started doing mural work in the early days of the pandemic. Rewinding a bit, Todd started DJing under the name Circuit 73 (another alias) around 2005 or so. He eventually took a lot of time off from music, though. His growing collection of physical media started to make him anxious, so he stopped buying records. He also started a family in this time. Eventually, digital music platforms more or less solidified, so that helped. He also started listening to KUSF/90.3 FM. Being in an office, sitting in front of a computer, it all led to burnout as well. His son was born in 2015 and he semi-retired from graphic design to focus on being a parent and leaning in more to his art (and away from design). Todd’s art is part of a group show curated by and that’s up now through August 24 at . Eventually, DJing came back into Todd’s life. He’s quick to give credit to KEXP/92.7 FM for roping him back in. Another source of inspiration is his son, Oscar. He loves music as much as his dad does, and the two listen together quite a lot. Todd points to both the quantity and the quality of new music in the recent past. He’s excited about a surge in old music being reissued as well. He’s got a monthly gig, last Friday of every month, as DJ Circuit 73 at 540 Bar on Clement. And his radio show, , is on KXSF/102.5 FM every Monday from 10 p.m. to midnight. We end the episode with Todd plugging himself. Follow him on Instagram . Find him on Soundcloud . Photography by
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Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 1 (S8E22)
07/14/2026
Todd Kurnat, aka Ink Letterman, aka DJ Circuit 73, Part 1 (S8E22)
Todd Kurnat is everywhere. In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he’s also known as for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan. Both sets of Todd’s grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so. Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done some college, and his dad had joined the US military to teach about weapons-grade rockets. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Todd says that engineering DNA in his dad runs through him, although Todd uses it for less destructive ends. Sometime after Todd came around, the family moved to Johnston Street, still in the inner-city part of Grand Rapids. The neighborhood had access to downtown. Todd spent a lot of time riding his BMX bike around the area with friends. Eventually, bikes gave way to skateboards, which he took all over his city. But we’ll get to that. His earliest memories on Johnston Street involve playing in the front yard—baseball and football with kids from the hood. In the backyard, they had a basketball hoop. Eventually, Todd was joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother. He remembers spending a lot of time with his sisters before his brother was born when Todd was 13. Another of Todd ‘s earliest memories involve listening to music. His dad had an 8-track player that Todd used a lot. Those tapes made him so happy that he’d run around the house doing laps. The radio was also on a lot in Todd’s house. Todd went to Catholic school until his early high school years. One day, his mom showed up at his private school, got him out, and said, “we’re leaving.” Both his parents worked to support themselves and their (at the time) three kids. But changes had to happen, and so they put their oldest kid in public high school. It proved to be a life-changing move for Todd. Right away, he made new friends, a few of which have proved to be life-long buddies. The common thread for them was music and movies. Bikes and skateboards, too. Speaking of bikes … Around age 12, Todd had a newspaper route. Because he already had a bike when the BMX craze really took off, around the mid-Eighties, he followed that. He and his friends eventually started riding their bikes on street ramps. They also built and rode on dirt tracks. BMX gave way to skateboarding when Todd was 13 or 14. For a minute, he did both, but then someone stole his bike. Like me, skate videos got him hooked—videos from Powell Peralta featuring pro skaters like San Francisco’s own Tommy Guerrero. And it wasn’t just the skating in the videos that impressed Todd—he also dug the music enough to record it from VHS to cassette tape. Toward the end of his high school days, Todd taught himself to play guitar. He bought a four-track Tascam recorder and started experimenting with it. He did stuff on his own, but also joined with some friends to form a band called Landis. They played for most of the rest of the Nineties. Relevant to who Todd would become years later, a lot of the existence of Landis involved him screwing around with different configurations and recording locations. Think: experimental, but not necessarily falling into the so-called experimental genre. After high school, Todd moved to Denver and kept playing music. He and two roommates called their Colorado group The Suspect. They played a couple shows. Todd and I go on a sidebar on playing live vs. recording vs. writing songs. Live was always my favorite, and Todd agrees. Moving to Denver was all about escaping Grand Rapids, seeing a little bit of the world, and going to art school. He studied illustration and graphic design. He’d been drawing and doodling about as far back as he could remember. In high school, at the public school his mom put him in, there was a counselor who had steered Todd in the direction of graphic design, and he’s grateful for that. Turns out he has spent the better part of the last 30 years doing graphic design. We end Part 1 with Todd looking back on how much technology has advanced since he got started in the digital art world. Check back this Thursday to hear all about Todd’s move to San Francisco and what he’s been up to since he got here. It’s a lot, and it’ll all be in Part 2 of this episode. We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026. Photography by
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The Golden Gate Park Band (S8 Bonus)
07/07/2026
The Golden Gate Park Band (S8 Bonus)
Listen in as I chat with German Gonzalez, musical conductor and principal director of the , now in its 144th year. We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.
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The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Part 3 (S8E21)
07/02/2026
The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Part 3 (S8E21)
In Part 3, we hear from Keiko and Michael about the history of the . In the late-1950s, a San Franciscan named R.G. Davis taught a class in movement—mime, dance, physical interpretation of stories … that sort of thing. A performing troupe sprang out of that class, and it was known as the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe. It was the era of the early Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, and the troupe became more and more political, basing much of their work around social issues of the day. The group started off doing silent mime work, but shifted later. Michael offers us the definition of mime at this point—”the exaggeration of everyday life in story and song.” Not all mime is silent. As the audiences kept getting bigger and bigger, Davis’s troupe realized that they needed to abandon the silent style. They dived into doing commedia dell'arte with more and more masks and colorful decorations. Classic commedia almost always involved stories around class—think servants vs. rich assholes. The Davis troupe started writing mimes about civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ struggles. And they realized that changing their name to “San Francisco Mime Troupe” was a wise move. The newly named SF Mime Troupe played around California. They went to the Midwest and East Coast. They were getting bigger and bigger and getting more and more attention. In the early 1970s, they decided to become a collective. R.G. Davis left at this point. But the troupe wanted to practice what it was “preaching” on stage. I ask Michael to tell us the difference between a collective and a co-op—basically, a co-op is shared ownership of an entity. A collective is simply the way of running the thing. It doesn’t necessarily speak to ownership. Keiko joined the collective as an actor. Soon after that, she helped to build props and design costumes and sets. I ask Keiko and Michael to explain the “why” part of getting involved and staying with SF Mime Troupe. Keiko takes us back to her childhood, when her parents took her to anti-war protests regularly. She cites that as a foundation for why she was attracted to the work that the SF Mime Troupe had been engaged in already for so long. She believes in the power of the people to come together and overcome whatever is thrown at us. And the fact that there’s a theater company, where she could combine all her passions, didn’t hurt at all. For Michael, it goes back to the first SFMT show he saw. It was Factwino vs. the Moral Majority. It’s a show about free speech and manipulation. He was hooked. He’d be a fan forever. Then, he got that audition. He agrees with Keiko about the mime troupe community, but Michael goes a step further—he points to that camaraderie he finds with audiences. He appreciates being able to express his passion for politics regularly. The Mime Troupe aims to be topical and newsworthy with whatever is going on at the time. But some things just keep repeating themselves. War, capitalism, the continued deterioration of a livable climate. Michael talks about taking pride in the collective’s diversity—race, age, economic levels. And this sets the SF Mime Troupe apart from other theater companies. Then we start talking about what going to a Mime Troupe show can do for audiences. It can inspire and empower showgoers. It can also help them feel less alone in dark times like the present. Michael talks about how, as a performer, they need to leave the audience wanting to take action, that the revolution can’t only happen on stage. Because Storied is my show, I assert that San Francisco isn’t the liberal bastion that many here (and away from here) believe it to be. Michael takes that idea a step further to talk about the difference between being a social liberal and an economic liberal. This town is full of social progressives. On economics, not so much. He feels, and I agree, that many folks here hold conservative economic opinions and hide that in their social progressivism. We end this segment of the recording with my assertion that the only reason our local politicians don’t admit that they’re Republicans is because you can’t win that way here. Michael agrees, and goes off on that point, much to my delight. Keiko speaks to the sacrifices that artists living and working in San Francisco have to make. And Michael describes SF as a suburb of Silicon Valley, with many here espousing the belief that tech can solve everything. For the record: I do not believe that tech can solve everything. We wrap with Keiko talking about the Mime Troupe’s new season, which kicks off this Friday, July 3, and runs through Sept. 7. The show is called , a musical tragicomedy. Keiko is busy learning roles and making costumes for her castmates. Michael steps in to talk about the show in more depth. We’re in a time where people feel like everything is falling apart—economics, the environment, relationships, hope. What’s gonna be left when it’s all over? The show asks us all, “What do you have to let go of to move on?” Find out more and donate at the . Follow them on Instagram .
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Michael Gene Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (8E21)
07/01/2026
Michael Gene Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (8E21)
Both sides of Michael Gene Sullivan’s family are from Detroit. In Part 2, we get to know Keiko’s fellow member. Michael was born in Livonia, Michigan, a small town outside of Detroit. His parents met at a summer camp, but we need to rewind a bit before we get to that. When his dad was a boy, he was kidnapped. Yes, really. He and his brothers, all Black boys, were taken from Detroit to work on a plantation in Louisiana. One day, three years later, a car pulled up to the plantation. Some people got out of the car, grabbed Michael’s dad and uncles, and threw them into the car (not minding the trauma these boys had already been through or might be experiencing in the moment). Much to the boys’ relief, their mom was in that car. She’d been looking for her sons the entire time. They made it back to Michigan, but the effect of having been kidnapped and missing key years with his family stayed with Michael’s dad. Michael characterizes his dad’s side of the family as old-school gangsters. His mom’s family were upper-working-class, many of them with jobs at Ford. The aforementioned camp was in Detroit and it was designed to bring kids from all different economic levels together. The camp held a dance, and his dad found himself with all the boys on one side of the room—on the other side, the girls, of course. No one had started dancing when one of the girls suddenly got up (on a dare from a friend), walked over to the boys, and sat in Michael’s dad’s lap. That girl was his mom, of course. They danced, talked a little, then had to separate. The next summer, at the next camp, the two met again. Then it happened again the following year. Eventually, they started dating and fell in love. Michael’s mom’s family wasn’t too pleased, given the criminal aspect of his dad’s family. But his mom was a bit of a rebel and went with love. The new couple settled in Detroit. They had three children—two girls and a boy, Michael, their youngest. His dad did radio work in the Army and his mom studied art. When dad got out of the service, he parlayed the tech work he’d learned into the infant industry. He got a job with National Cash Register, who relocated the family to Los Angeles. Michael was three when his family moved to California, so he doesn’t have distinct memories of that. With the move to LA, his mom started doing more and more art, sculpting and painting. His dad worked a lot, but the couple also started getting involved in politics. They went to protests, rallies, Black Panther meetings. Michael shares his family’s story of being at a protest against LBJ’s visit to Los Angeles. It involves a family of five plus their pet rabbit climbing a tree. The next year, 1968, was a presidential election year, and Michael’s mom worked for the Bobby Kennedy campaign. She was there on primary night, June 5, when RFK was assassinated. She was in the same room, even. Soon after that, the FBI showed up at their house looking for witnesses. To make up for known failings around the JFK assassination, the agency moved to protect witnesses around this tragedy. They sent his mom back to Detroit. The rest of Michael’s family stayed behind. The FBI gave Michael rides to school in that time period. Two weeks later, when his mom returned, his parents decided to move the family to San Francisco. It was originally planned as a temporary visit, but they never left. The first place his family landed was The Sunset District. He was seven, and started school in San Francisco. From there, the family moved to Bayview, Western Addition, back to The Sunset, over to The Richmond District, and back to Western Addition. I ask Michael to list his SF schools, and he obliges. Now settling into the Bay Area, Michael’s family kept their political interests. He recalls his parents taking him with them to a Black Panthers meeting. His dad was now working in Silicon Valley as a diagnostic engineer. Michael’s mom had given up creating her own art and shifted to film publicity work. Michael has always been a passionate person. When he was a kid, he and his sister got into film. He was also deeply interested in history. He wanted to be a history teacher when he grew up. They planned to make movies together. They wanted to remake Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but recast as two Black kids. At school, the kids considered Michael shy. When he got to Marina Junior High, he decided on the first day of school that it wasn’t for him. And it wasn’t difficult for him to transfer, because his family had that habit of moving around The City. Michael asked his mom to drive him around town, and when he saw Roosevelt Middle School, he loved the building’s architecture. So, he transferred there. He shares the story of another transfer student, who arrived in his last year at Roosevelt, a girl so pretty he developed a crippling crush on her right away. We’ll get back to that. He and his crush ended up going to Washington High the next year. He still wouldn’t/couldn’t talk to her, but they were both in band. She ended up in a theater group called Street of Dreams Theater Company. Michael’s best friend was also in the group, so he was around them a lot. Michael still had his sights set on being a history professor. That, or he would write horror short stories. One day, a teacher more or less forced him to sing in choir. His crush was also in choir. And he ended up joining Street of Dreams in order to be closer to her. They graduated, and within the following year, Michael was artistic director of the company. He started doing more and more with Street of Dreams, eventually directing shows. Both Michael and his crush, whom he could at least talk with now, if not look in the eyes, were at City College and also joined a group of friends singing at the Renaissance Faire. By then, she’d had a couple boyfriends and he a couple girlfriends. Then the two decided to go on a “test date.” They even shared a “test kiss” that night. A year later, they were dating. And today, they’re married and have three children. Around this time, Michael’s dad took him to see a show by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Theater was still fairly new to both of them, and Michael was blown away. He even saw Keiko performing in a show back in the day. Because he’d had some acting experience, once there was an opening, he auditioned. But they told him he was too young. Eventually, they had an actor call in sick and asked Michael to sub. And so he stepped in. It was 1988, and Michael toured with SF Mime Troupe. And he and his wife have been with them ever since. Check tomorrow for Part 3, when Keiko and Michael will share the history and legacy of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
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Keiko Shimosato Carreiro of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (S8E21)
06/30/2026
Keiko Shimosato Carreiro of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (S8E21)
Keiko Shimosato Carreiro was born in the Bay Area … the Boston Bay Area. In Part 1 of this episode, meet Keiko. Today, she’s a longtime member of the collective. But her story goes back to her parents’ migration to the US from Japan after World War II. Keiko’s dad got a Fulbright scholarship to come to this country. He studied medicine. Her mom came to visit the US for one year, but in that time, met Keiko’s dad at a Japan Society picnic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two weeks after they met, her dad proposed, and roughly a year later, they had their first child—Keiko, named thusly because she was conceived on Cape Cod. Because her dad was doing his residency in Boston, Keiko was born in Cambridge, just across the Charles River. She spent the first 15 years of her life in the Boston area, frequently going to protests of the war in Vietnam with her parents. Keiko also attended “Burn Your Bra” rallies in Harvard Square. Her family comprised the only Asians in Lexington, where they lived. Keiko and her sister were the only Japanese school kids in the district. Perhaps because of that dubious distinction, reporters approached Keiko when she was very young to ask her what she thought of the US war in Vietnam. On the other hand, there were white Americans who welcomed Keiko and her family. Her mom had a sponsor, an American woman who had been a journalist in Japan during WWII. And her dad came here on a Fulbright scholarship, after all. Both had plans to return to their home country, but meeting and considering that Japan was still something of a war-torn country, they decided to settle in Massachusetts. Before they knew it, they had three daughters. We shift the conversation to talk about Keiko and her sisters and their sibling relationships. Keiko sees the demands from her parents on her, as the oldest child, being the highest. Going younger in age among her sisters, the demands lessen. I know this all too well, being the youngest of three boys myself. Keiko and her youngest sister didn’t get along when they were young. Maybe it was the seven-year gap in age. But through the experience of Keiko caring for her aging and dying parents, and then losing their middle sister after their parents’ passing, the two became and remain close as adults. Midway through her time in high school, Keiko’s dad moved his family from the Boston area to Iowa. There was a job opportunity there, but the main reason to leave went back to racism. Her dad didn’t feel that he was appreciated at the Boston area hospital where he worked. Going from afternoons in Harvard Square to her parents’ new house amid corn fields and barns was a shock, to put it mildly. Keiko also had to say goodbye to her boyfriend back home, which, at 15, was of course devastating. In her new city, the only place Keiko felt comfortable and welcomed was in high school band. She’d been playing flute for some time and wanted to go on to study music in college. There were no Asian grocery stores in Iowa City at the time. Keiko’s parents helped to open the first of those. Later, folks from Vietnam, Korea, and some Southeast Asian countries arrived. And when they got there, there were food shopping options available to them. Keiko graduated high school a year early and went to the University of Iowa. Fueled by a desire to escape a cruel world in school, she also started taking college-level courses before graduating high school. The university gave Keiko a full music scholarship to study there, in fact. For fun, she took an acting class amid her music studies at UI. That acting class flipped a switch for Keiko. It felt more like what she wanted to do, more than music did. Eventually, she changed her major to interdisciplinary arts, which freed her up to take classes like dance and creative writing. I take us on a sidebar here, mentioning that I believe it’s more important to find something you enjoy doing than it is being quote/unquote good at it. Then Keiko shares the story of how she transported herself from the corn fields of Iowa to the best city in the world—San Francisco. It involves a theater company in Canada. Keiko had married her clown teacher while still in college. He was Canadian, and the theater company called for him. But he wasn’t home and so they asked about her. They told her they didn’t like to separate couples, so they invited both of them to join. Keiko and her now-ex met this horse-drawn theater company in the middle of its tour (where else?) in California. For the next year-and-a-half, she and her husband traveled with this theater company doing shows of a political nature, mostly around climate issues. That caravan stage company ended up staying in the Bay Area. For Keiko, the thought of returning to Iowa to finish her master’s program, especially in the winter, was not attractive at all. She got a job here as an actor in a children’s theater company and decided to stay in The City. In 1986, the San Francisco Mime Troupe held auditions for The Dragon Lady’s Revenge. Keiko tried out and joined the collective that year. Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of our SF Mime Troupe episode. In it, you’ll meet Keiko’s friend and fellow collective member Michael Gene Sullivan. We recorded this podcast at the SF Mime Troupe studio in the The Mission in June 2026. Photography by
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Frameline50 with Kate Bove (S8 Bonus)
06/12/2026
Frameline50 with Kate Bove (S8 Bonus)
Listen in as I chat with Frameline50 Associate Director of Programs Kate Bove about this year’s historic 50th annual LGBTQIA+ film festival, which runs June 17–27. For more information, including this year’s program and to buy tickets, please visit . Follow Frameline on Instagram . We recorded this podcast at the Frameline office in South of Market in June 2026.
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Painter George (S8E19)
06/03/2026
Painter George (S8E19)
Painter George, aka George Harry Crampton-Glassanos, is fine if you wanna call him just “George.” In this episode, meet and get to know George. Both of his parents came to San Francisco early in their lives. His mom hails from the East Coast and her family were all working-class folks. His grandpa was a business agent for a machinist’s union in Massachusetts. That grandfather shaped George’s later involvement in organized labor. (Today, he’s a member of the ILWU). George never knew this grandparent who had an outsize impression on him. He died shortly after George was born. But in Massachusetts, in addition to his union involvement, he owned a store that sold records on one half and hats on the other. His dad moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to attend school at the Art Institute (RIP). He got into that school and often slept overnight on a ledge on campus. Both of George’s parents were punk rockers in SF in the late-Seventies. Amazing. His dad even lived with the guitarist from The Avengers (’s punk band). Though they would meet later, both spent time at the famed Mabuhay Gardens back in the day. George’s dad was a painter as well, and that turned out to have a huge influence on George. His parents met when his mom got a job with his dad’s construction working crew. This was around the mid-Eighties. George came along in 1989. After that, his parents had two more boys, making George the oldest of three. His earliest memories are from around the mid-Nineties in The Mission. George spent time when he was a kid running around The Mission and pre-gentrification Dogpatch with his dad. They lived on 18th between San Carlos and Lexington (or, zooming out a bit, between Mission and Valencia). That’s two blocks from where I lived from 2003 to 2017, incidentally. But George’s family got evicted from that apartment on 18th. The building sold and the new owners evicted tenants one by one, including families like George’s. Both of his brothers were born in that apartment. His dad had made modifications there, handyman that he was. And George was old enough to remember all the awesome neighbors they had. I ask George about his favorite restaurants when he was a kid. “I fuckin’ ate burritos every night of the week,” he answers. He’d hit up nearby La Cumbre or El Buen Sabor around 300 times a year. Whiz Burger also figured big in George’s childhood diet. There was a diner across 16th from The Roxie called Aunt Mary’s (George shows me a coin purse from the place while we’re recording) that he loved as well. Art was always encouraged at home. George’s dad would bring home boxes of fax paper for him to draw on with ballpoint pens. He’d draw and draw and draw, often of things he saw. He remembers staring out the window of their place on 18th and watching cars go by, and he’d draw those. But it wasn’t until high school at School of the Arts that George really started cranking it out. At SOTA, teachers encouraged George to draw whatever the hell he wanted to. He remembers drawing a skeleton pushing a paleta cart. When George tells me he attended SOTA 2004–2008, I mention that a number of past guests of this show went there around that time. “[The school] churned out a lot of us,” he says. Joe Talbot, who co-wrote, produced, and directed The Last Black Man in San Francisco, went to SOTA in that era. George goes on a sidebar to share a story of getting caught smoking pot by a SOTA vice principal. I ask him to rattle off the SF schools he went to, and George obliges. Waldorf in The Mission for Kindergarten, then a Waldorf school in Pac Heights through eighth grade. They wanted him to attend their high school, but he chose SOTA instead. The Waldorf schools also encouraged art, which George appreciated. The social dynamics could be strange, though. You’d have kids like him who got into that school thanks to financial aid being classmates with kids who lived in mansions. After eighth grade, he needed a change. After he graduated from School of the Arts, George took some classes at City College. He’d been working summers painting houses for his dad, and eventually, college tailed off so he could work more. It also gave George more time for his artistic painting. This was about 20 years ago, and since then, he’s been painting murals, hanging out with graffiti painters, doing work on Clarion Alley, and working with Precita Eyes to paint various houses and walls in The Mission. I ask whether George’s art has evolved over the years. After thinking it over, he talks about the influence of cars and his mom and dad’s comic book collections. He loved his mom’s underground comics collections, and talks about going down to 23rd Street with them to Scott’s Comics and Cards and SF Comic Book Co. next door. George points to artists like Spain Rodriguez, R. Crumb, and the Hernandez Brothers as having shaped his art from a young age. He’d go to Avalon on Mission for iron-on old English letters to have put on hats. The cholo influence of his neighborhood was seeping in, and George ran with it. The gumball machines on Mission with their foil stickers also played a part. He’d take those stickers home, many with images of cars on them, and draw from them. And of course the cars cruising Mission Street caught his artistic eye. George also touches on some of the violence he witnessed in The Mission in the Nineties, when he was a kid. George and his friends got around on skateboards, beater bikes, and Muni. He’s quick to point out how, back in the day, you could take the 26-Valencia if you wanted to avoid potential trouble on the 14-Mission. I ask whether George got into any trouble himself. He says mostly harmless stuff like shoplifting. That was before his aforementioned time at School of the Arts. George has mixed feelings about the art scene, and I get it. He’s had his art in shows, but prefers bookstores or community-oriented spaces vs. white-walled galleries. He doesn’t feel like the audience that goes to those spaces is his. When he talks about painting at home after a long day at work, I ask George to talk about that work. He’s currently part of a crew painting the new container cranes in the Port of Oakland. The ILWU is assembling the cranes and George and others use marine enamels to make the cranes look good. We end the podcast with how you can find George and his art. “You can find me on 24th Street,” he says. No website. He’s on Instagram at . We recorded this podcast at George’s home in South San Francisco in April 2026. Photography by Nate Oliveira
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Abigail Munn and Circus Bella (S8 Bonus)
05/29/2026
Abigail Munn and Circus Bella (S8 Bonus)
Listen in as I chat with founder and performer . If you enjoy this podcast, you might also like the episode we did on . We recorded this podcast at Abigail’s home in the Mission in May 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Connie Chan’s 2026 Run for Congress (S8 Bonus)
05/26/2026
Connie Chan’s 2026 Run for Congress (S8 Bonus)
Listen in as I chat with past guest about her run for US Congress. To learn more about Connie and her vision of representing San Francisco in DC, head to her website, . Please consider this episode an endorsement of Connie’s campaign. And please vote, by May 26 (today) if you’re mailing in your ballot, or on June 2 if you’re voting in person. One of the most important ways to both advance our goals of a more just and inclusive society and to beat back billionaire/tech fascism is to vote. It’s a privilege, and it matters. We recorded this podcast at on Cathedral Hill in April 2026.
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Jenny Chan/Pacific Atrocities Education, Part 2 (S8E18)
05/21/2026
Jenny Chan/Pacific Atrocities Education, Part 2 (S8E18)
Ed. note: Please be advised that there’s some very heavy subject matter discussed in this episode. In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Jenny left San Francisco for college, heading east to go to school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Part of it was wanting a change of scenery. As she says, she “wanted to see snow.” But all it took was a few winters before she realized how good the weather in SF is. She also wanted to return to help take care of her mom, who was getting older. This was around the time that Jenny went to China and came back determined to spread the untold histories of what happened in her homeland during WWII. The nonprofit learning curve was steep, and it was almost certainly going to mean shifting gears lifestyle-wise, due to not having as much income. During the first year of Pacific Atrocities Education’s life, it was fiscally sponsored by , an SF-based arts nonprofit. Jenny enrolled in and went to as many workshops as she could. She felt generally well-respected and taken care of. With her nascent nonprofit off and running, Jenny traveled to a part of China she had never been to before—Shanxi—to visit and talk with women who survived the war as so-called comfort women (think “sex slaves”). Jenny goes on a sidebar here to talk about some of the things the Japanese did to women during their occupation of China. It involved the Japanese not wanting their soldiers to pick up STDs while in a foreign country. If they could control the situation, i.e., enslave Chinese women to have sex with their soldiers, they could solve that “problem.” So disgusting. Hearing these women’s stories wasn’t easy for Jenny. One story involved one of the women being pregnant after the war ended. She went back to live with her mother, who helped her along. When the baby was born, they abandoned it. Just horrible all around. We sidebar, a little, to talk about the ripple effect of wars and how it’s not just tanks and bombs and guns and soldiers fighting other soldiers. There are untold numbers of innocent folks caught up in the destruction, folks whose lives are forever upended, if they even survive. Jenny says that the experience on that trip to China gave her perspective on her own childhood in the Tenderloin. She thought maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. It wasn’t only women in China. She went and spoke with women in California’s Central Coast area about their own experiences as “comfort women.” These were Filipinas who relocated to the US after the war. Most of their families didn’t know their stories. And it wasn’t until the Obama era that light started to be shone on them and what they’d been through. Obama’s administration was the first to recognize them, but it was complicated, to say the least. Jenny talks about the delicacy of what she set out to do. Specifically, the difficulty of balancing the need to share these stories, but also to be respectful of the lives impacted by them. In addition to the research she was undertaking for Pacific Atrocities Education, Jenny was also writing a book on the topic. She was able to scan documents from the National Archives, documents the US has due to its occupation of Japan following World War II. One of the more alarming things she found in digging through archives was that the United States traded immunity with Japan’s Unit 731 scientists, whose work involved developing biological weapons. Yikes. She goes on to describe other atrocious acts the Japanese undertook in China, stuff so horrible and inhumane I have trouble enumerating it here. I ask Jenny how she handles learning about such terrible stuff. She chalks it up to its being mission-driven work. We chat a little about how the people doing bad things never get held accountable, something true to this day. That immunity mentioned above was given to the Japanese scientists in exchange for the information contained in their research of biological weapons, naturally. You read that right: The US looked the other way while essentially poaching incredibly deadly weapons from its vanquished enemy. Please visit to learn more and get involved. Their YouTube channel is called . Follow them on Instagram . We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Jenny Chan/Pacific Atrocities Education, Part 1 (S8E18)
05/19/2026
Jenny Chan/Pacific Atrocities Education, Part 1 (S8E18)
Ed. note: We recorded this episode outside on a windy day near The Bay. Apologies for the wind gusts you’ll hear throughout. Jenny Chan found Storied: San Francisco thanks to . Jenny and I kick off her episode talking about Toshio, in fact. Jenny was born in Hong Kong. Growing up, her dad’s mom babysat her a lot. Young Jenny really loved anime and would turn it on at grandma’s house. When she did this, her Chinese grandmother would get upset, and Jenny didn’t know why. She thought maybe her grandma was senile. Later in Jenny’s life, when her grandmother passed away and she helped clean and organize her home in China, she discovered items her grandma kept that pointed to a life spent under Japanese occupation before and during World War II. We mentioned anime, but when Jenny was a kid, she just loved Japanese culture all around. She indulged in manga whenever she could save up enough money. As with the anime, her grandma didn’t take kindly to these Japanese things in her home. When she was 10, Jenny’s parents split up. She and her older brother then joined their mom and moved to the US. When Jenny remarks that she’s not sure how her mom did it, we go on a sidebar. Jenny shares that her mom grew up during the time of the US war in Vietnam, so she’s a survivor. I add that, simply, women are amazing. In US schools, Jenny learned about the Holocaust. She also learned about Pearl Harbor, but like most school-age kids in this country, it was in the context of what got the US into WWII. Japanese colonialism and dominance in east Asia never really came up. Her family came straight from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 2000. Members of her mom’s family had already been here, dating back to the Seventies and Eighties. Jenny and her mom and brother lived in the Tenderloin when they arrived. She saw the dirty streets in that hood and wondered why they traded Hong Kong skyscraper living for this. Her mom told her that for many reasons, including not having to buy school uniforms, life in SF was more affordable. Jenny’s run of schools in The City—Lafayette, Presidio, Washington High. I ask her if she experienced culture shock moving halfway around the world. She says yes and points to knowing only people from Hong Kong when she lived there. Here, she quickly learned that there are folks from all over China and differences abound. She says also that Chinese people she met in San Francisco or The Bay were stuck in whatever era they moved here during, and that was sometimes startling. We go on a sidebar here after Jenny asks me about my own move here from Texas in 2000. Jenny spent a lot of time in the school library, including during lunches. She dedicated herself to learning from an early age. She recognized the hardships her family was going through and saw education as a way to climb out of that. She used her 45-minute Muni commutes from the Tenderloin to school in the Richmond to read and do homework. Her mom worked in restaurants here in The City. Jenny would go with her mom to places like the bank to do the translation. Jenny was learning about life in the US in real time and for practical reasons. At my prompting, Jenny and I rap about all the awesome food in the Little Saigon area of the Tenderloin. I share the story of coming home from my trip to Vietnam and eating at Turtle Tower right away because I missed the food of that incredible country. Jenny lived in the Tenderloin through all her public school days in San Francisco. When her paternal grandmother passed away, she went back to China to clean out her home, as we’ve mentioned. And that’s when Jenny and other members of her family started finding items—military yen, rice-rationing coupons—that pointed to life spent under occupation. Back home, Jenny had found a decent job after college, but was feeling stuck. The revelation of her grandmother’s lived experience was a light bulb. It was around this time that Jenny realized a massive hole in her US education. Why didn’t she learn about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, for example? Most of the emphasis was on the war in Europe, with Pearl Harbor and later the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the main subjects of the history of war in the Asian theater. In her own words, Jenny went “into a deep rabbit hole” to learn those untold stories. Her first stop was the library, where she discovered books like by Iris Chang and by John Toland. The more she learned, the more she sought existing nonprofits she could join forces with to amplify the stories of the Japanese occupation of China. To her dismay, there weren’t any. It was around 2012 or 2013, and Jenny figured that she already knew how to live without much income. And so, she decided to start her own company—a nonprofit dedicated to getting those stories out to the world. was born. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Jenny Chan. We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Gina Mariko Rosales, Part 2 (S8E17)
05/07/2026
Gina Mariko Rosales, Part 2 (S8E17)
In Part 2, we pick up right where we left off in Part 1, with Gina’s first official address in San Francisco. In talking about finding a place to live in The City, Gina mentions that all her friends either live in rent-control apartments they’ve been in forever, or they’re able to live in a place that someone in their family bought and has kept in the family. When she tells me where that first apartment in SF was, I let her know that my first place here, back in 2000, was less than a block away. As we’re name-dropping hotspots on the block, I have a brain fart and can’t remember the name of Cordon Bleu, the rad greasy-spoon Vietnamese joint still there on California near Polk. From that first apartment, Gina would take Muni to her job over in Potrero Hill. Back then, in the days before smartphones, she’d read on her long, chill Muni rides. She’d come home, make dinner with her roommate, and maybe head out to Polk Street or for karaoke in the hood. That AmeriCorp VISTA gig lead to a job doing literacy work. At that part-time job, Gina also started doing events. She also ran a non-profit dance company, and was trying her best to make both things work out for her. We step back to talk about , Gina’s dance company. It started in LA, moved north, and the founders handed Gina the keys, so to speak. That happened in Gina’s senior year at Berkeley. Because the dancers she was directing were older and more experienced, and because she had literally no experience running a non-profit or a business, she went to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy of a book from the “For Dummies” series. In Gina’s time running it, Funkanometry took off. They received invitations to perform internationally, to places like the Philippines, the UK, and Colombia. On the back end, Gina figured out a way to pay herself $600 a month. She felt like she’d made it. Despite all those successes, though, the company didn’t make money. The low-paying, part-time job and non-profit dance company was fun, but it wasn’t meant to last. She got hit up on LinkedIn by a recruiter for Google and got an interview. Gina had reservations and talked with her mom about them. Lillian told her to daughter to go and listen to what they have to say, and so that’s what Gina did. After the interview, she still didn’t know if it was a good fit, but she accepted the offer regardless. She was now a software engineering recruiting coordinator at Google. To get to work, Gina took the infamous Google bus. As someone from The Bay who already had immense pride in her city, she felt ashamed. The money was good, but standing in line to wait for the hated busses felt bad. When cars or pedestrians passed by while she waited, she wanted to let them know that she wasn’t “one of those people,” that she’s from here and runs a non-profit dance company. It didn’t matter. Her internalized shame remained, but she says the job was fun enough to make up for it. That Google contract job turned into full-time work, and Gina stayed at the company for seven years. During this time, Gina met and started dating a San Franciscan who grew up in the Inner Richmond. They got engaged and Gina moved to that hood. She still worked at Google and now waited for their corporate bus in a chiller area with fewer protests. Then Gina’s family suffered a tragic loss. One of her first cousins died by suicide. She says the experience “broke [her] family open,” meaning it obviously hurt them all, but it also brought them closer. It made waiting for the Google bus that much more impossible for Gina, too. She’d moved into a new role at the company and was doing events for them. She decided it was time to branch out on her own and do what she loves. She was able to go part-time while launching her own events company. She’d tried to quit, but Google asked her to stay on. It ended up serving her well, as it provided some needed income while she undertook all the stuff it takes to start a company from scratch. The first event she produced under her new moniker, Make It Mariko, was , which began in 2017 as the first Filipino night market in SOMA. The first Undiscovered SF was such a success that it inspired Gina to transition Make It Mariko to her full-time work. The stories goes like this: A friend let her know about the nonprofit . She met with those folks and pitched a launch event. They applied for and received a $5K grant to do the event. A friend was able to wrangle $150K on top of that. That one launch event turned into six events, spaced out one per month. In 2020, Undiscovered SF went virtual. Gina had her tech background, and they had plenty of time to transition. This allowed them to connect Filipinos across the diaspora, sitting on panels and interacting with one another. And of course, there were DJs from all over. Prior to the pandemic, in addition to many other kinds of events, Make It Mariko had quite a lot of corporate event-planning business. Since COVID, though, a lot of that went away. Gina decided she wasn’t gonna sit around and wait for big events to hire her company. She wanted to build on the success of self-produced events like Undiscovered. The seeds of what became were planted. Gina loves wine. During the pandemic, she got a scholarship to join a wine program where she was able to dive into that world. One of the topics was pairing, and so she was able to take that knowledge and apply it to the POC Food and Wine Festival, pairing POC chefs with specific wines and other beverages. Attendees were encouraged, but not required, to navigate the space and its makers along the lines laid out for them by Gina and her staff. I’ll just say: It was one of the best, most unique experiences I’ve had in my 26 years here in the Bay Area. We end the episode with me letting Gina know how much I also enjoyed this year’s event, which took place in February. It was to celebrate Make It Mariko’s 10th anniversary and to establish a relationship with space in South of Market. The love (right there in the name) that night was palpable—love of San Francisco, of community, of one another. All of these events—Undiscovered, POC Food and Wine Festival, Love Thy City—for me show how dedicated Gina and her people are to uplifting real people doing extraordinary things. Find Gina all over the place, really: , whose goal is to help creatives eventually own their spaces , her events company Photography
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Gina Mariko Rosales, Part 1 (S8E17)
05/05/2026
Gina Mariko Rosales, Part 1 (S8E17)
Chances are, you’ve been to one of Gina Mariko Rosales’ events, even if you weren’t aware. In this episode, which kicks off our Asian-American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month programming, meet Gina. Born in Daly City, she’s lived most of her life on the Peninsula and in San Francisco. But let’s talk about how she got to where she is today. Gina was born at Seton hospital in Daly City and her parents raised her in Pacifica. In her words, Gina “grew up with a bunch of skaters and surfers.” Sounds fun. But she was one of only a few Filipinas in her hometown. She was also shaped from an early age by her time in Catholic school, which she went to beginning with her preschool days. She also a performer, dancing specifically, but we’ll get to that. Gina is part of the first generation in her family to be born in the US. Her parents, Armando and Lillian, both came to this country from the Philippines for college in Ohio, where they met. Lillian’s family moved around the Philippines because her dad was an engineer. Gina’s dad is half-Filipino and half-Japanese—his Japanese lineage is from Okinawa. Lillian came to The States to pursue international law. But life had other plans. She ended up getting married and having kids, and instead did consulting work. In starting to talk more about her dad, Gina goes on a tangent about how, in 2025, she was able to visit both her mom’s homeland in the Philippines and her dad’s in Okinawa. Gina’s mom was the first in her family to come to the US. Then one of Gina’s aunts came. Then slowly, the family starting working on getting more and more members to relocate. Eventually, her grandparents and all her mom’s siblings arrived in The Bay. Suddenly, Gina had hella cousins around. Her mom’s family has done quite a job tracing their own lineage. Gina says they’ve been able to trace the line back six or seven generations. And many living members of that clan get together every couple of years for massive family reunions. Think 250–300 folks. I love that. Though she’s not 100-percent certain, Gina believes that it was jobs that brought her parents the The Bay after they met at college in Ohio. Lillian worked at Levi’s and Armando at Charles Schwab. They had their first child, Gina’s older brother, out here. That was the early Eighties. Around mid-decade, Gina was born. Her early memories are of her time in Catholic preschool. Her school was pre-K through eighth grade, so Gina says that once you’re labeled by your peers, it sticks. And those students are with you for a minute. Ninth grade provided a chance for Gina to get out of that situation. She “busted out” and attended Sacred Heart here in The City. She remembers being pretty little and visiting her mom at Levi’s in San Francisco. She climbed on and ran around the now-defunct Vaillancourt Fountain. They’d go to Fisherman’s Wharf. And they’d visit her grandfather’s grave at the in the Presidio, followed by trips to Japantown for sushi. We sidetrack here after Gina talks about how St. Mary’s was their church and I mention that it’s the “washing machine” and “city titty” church. Gina wasn’t familiar with either term and I’ll characterize her reaction as, simply, mind blown. Because her school, Sacred Heart, was nearby, Gina describes the scarce parking available for students and a lottery system they all had to operate under. We go on another sidetrack here to talk about ways to get around DPT’s trickery—chalk marks and all that. At her school, Gina was in the choir and she was a member of the step team. She’d often stay around after a day of school to participate in both groups. She and her friends would frequent 1000 Van Ness movie theater and Venture Frogs, where they’d drink boba and eat popcorn chicken. I remember both spots from my early days in The City, around the year 2000. Gina says starting at Sacred Heart after doing K–8th in Pacifica was refreshing. She made friends with people who looked like her, finally. She was part of an Asian girl crew, in fact. Most of those girls were also on the step team and so much bonding was happening. So was “parking lot pimpin’,” whether it was in San Francisco or Daly City, after school or on the weekends. She talks about the prevalence of unhoused folks around her school. Sacred Heart would have outreach days where students would make sandwiches to take to those people. Gina looks back fondly on that time. She and her friends would also hang out in Japantown, taking the bus up Geary or just walking the few blocks down. They also went to hella under-18 parties that had names and themes. There were rave rooms and hip-hop rooms. Gina calls them “the early party days.” These were the days before “face the DJ” parties. For college, Gina went across The Bay to UC Berkeley. That meant moving out of her house in Pacifica for the first time. She lived in a dorm her first year, then moved into a co-op house and eventually into an apartment with friends. Philosophy and education were Gina’s majors. She intended to graduate and become an English teacher. We go on another sidetrack about studying philosophy (something we have in common) before Gina explains how grad school ended up not working out for her. And we end Part 1 with Gina’s story of graduating college in 2008 when the Great Recession hit. Her dreams were dashed and she moved back to Pacifica to live with her parents. She applied for countless jobs and ended up getting into , a branch of the larger organization that focuses on alleviating poverty. The program wants its members to experience a level of poverty themselves. It paid just enough for Gina to move to San Francisco. Check back Thursday to hear Part 2 and the rest of Gina’s story. We recorded this episode in the at in South of Market/SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District in March 2026. Photography
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415 Day 2026 (S8 bonus)
04/21/2026
415 Day 2026 (S8 bonus)
Listen in as I chat with guests at 415 Zine’s 415 Day celebration at last week. Find the guests of this bonus episode: Mackenzie C Kirk Carrie Cotini Mike Bruno Allison/If n Wendy Stephanie (no online presence) Spike Fredo Laine Find 415 Zine on IG and . We recorded this podcast at Art Bar in April 2026.
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