Storied: San Francisco

Weekly podcasts about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.

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

The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 2 (S7E17) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Young Ed was studying at UC Davis and exploring his sexuality. He didn’t consider himself bisexual, and instead thought that everyone was fluid. But he thought he had made a choice—that is, to be heterosexual. Part of that decision is that Ed always wanted a family of his own, and therefore, partnering with a woman was the only way to achieve that. But between relationships with women, Ed would visit “cruise-y bathrooms,” places known for their hookup potential. This was before the internet and smartphones. Stuff like this was word-of-mouth and need-to-know. But during his visits, Ed never hooked up with anyone. He says that he merely wanted to be adjacent to that world. After he graduated, Ed stayed in Davis. One day over coffee with a female friend at a lesbian cafe, his friend told him that she might be bi. He said he might be, too. She suggested that they “go to this club in San Francisco” where they could scratch that itch, so to speak. Ed says that The Box remains the most diverse array of folks in the LGBTQIA+ community he has ever been part of. And it wasn’t diverse only on the sexuality spectrum. There were folks from all over the gender spectrum, too, he says. Ed watched men of various ethnic backgrounds dancing with one another and thought, ‘Why are those straight guys dancing with each other? Wait, they’re not straight. Wait, I’m not straight.’ So now he knew. But the question of whether and how to come out was a totally separate question. It was the mid-Nineties. Coming out was, in Ed’s words, “really fucking scary.” He remembered that his dad, who has since come around and is loving and accepting of who his son is, often used homophobic slurs casually when Ed was a kid. Still, Ed summoned the courage and started telling folks. His mom was cool. His dad and brother were cool, too, but also probably confused. His friends shrugged him off in a very “no duh” kinda way. But there was that one member of his friend group for whom the news seemed not to sit well. Brad had been Ed’s friend since seventh grade back in Hawaii. Three months after coming out to his friends, Brad let Ed know that he, too, wanted to come out of the closet, but that Ed had stolen his thunder. Laughs all around. Going back to that night at The Box, Ed met someone and they started dating. His new partner lived in Berkeley and Ed moved in (they had a roommate). Then Ed and that first boyfriend moved to the Tenderloin together, followed by a move to the Mission. Ed got a job teaching at Balboa High School in The City. He says he was so young (23) and blended in with students enough that on his first day, the principal at Balboa told him to get to class. Again, belly laughs. Ed loved teaching and did well at it. He lasted at Balboa from 1996 to 2001, teaching English as a second language to students from all over the world. The conversation shifts to the moment when Ed realized that San Francisco was home. Despite being here so long (since the mid-Nineties), Ed feels that SF is one of several places for him. Hawaii will always hold a place in his heart. He says that his sense of adventure and curiosity have him roaming around to other cultures regularly. But being married and having kids of his own grounds him in The City. One of his two children experiences mental health challenges, so that makes leaving tricky. All of that and community. Community keeps him here. I get it. One space Ed finds community is at , where we recorded. It’s his neighborhood bar, the place where bartenders know his drink without him ordering it. The spot where other regulars and semi-regulars ask him details about his life. Sure, he could find that in another part of town or in another city altogether. But right now, that community is his. And he relishes it. There’s also his work. Aside from classroom teaching, Ed did some after-school work, education philanthropy work, and some other education-related jobs. Early in the pandemic, his non-binary older kid struggled. Ed says that in hindsight, he wished he had taken his child out of “Zoom school.” He wanted the kid to pick one topic, whatever they wanted, and learn that. They would spend time outside and hang out together. But that’s not what happened. The teacher in Ed pushed his kid, over and over. Ed and his partner were able to find support groups around SF and the Bay Area that work with children who exhibit mental health issues. That helped, but he eventually realized that his own parenting needed help and support, because it wasn’t meeting the moment. He sought that help, but wasn’t impressed. He says it was mostly folks telling him what he was doing wrong, instead of being supportive and uplifting and actually teaching him. He found a couple of tools that served as Band-Aid solutions, but he was left looking and looking and looking for answers. He needed help that acknowledged and addressed his own traumas. And so he began working more or less on his own. One of his first discoveries was recognizing a moment, however short and fleeting, between his kid’s stimulating action or words and Ed’s reaction. If he could interrupt that automatic reaction and gain control of his own emotions, it would serve both himself and his kid. He worked on stretching out that time … from one second to two seconds and eventually to five. Once he got there, he could respond thoughtfully and lovingly vs. reacting. Realizing that he was able to overcome his shortcomings as a parent all on his own lead to Ed’s founding of . He’d met others who were aligned with his parenting experiences. He knew that if they created a space where folks in their situations could come for comfort and sharing and advice, they’d be doing the right thing. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Village Well’s website and follow them on social media . As we do at Storied: San Francisco, we end this podcast with Ed Center’s take on our theme this season—keep it local. We recorded this podcast at in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37225845

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

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

The Village Well’s Ed Center, Part 1 (S7E17) Ed Center and I begin this podcast with a toast. I’m proud to call Ed my friend. I met him a couple years at , where we recorded this episode and where my wife, , bartends. From the first time I spoke with Ed, I knew I liked him. His energy and humor and intellect and heart are all boundless. I’m hella drawn to people like Ed. His story begins in Cebu in the Philippines, with his maternal grandmother. Her family was poor and her parents died in the Spanish Flu of the 1910s. That loss plunged the surviving family members into what Ed describes as destitute poverty. Following that tragedy, her older brother signed up to work for the Dole company in Hawaii. Ed’s grandmother was 13 at this time, but still, it was decided that she would accompany her brother to the islands to help care for him while he worked the pineapple fields and earned a wage. Ed points out that the Dole Food Company (as it was known at the time) intended these migrant workers to honor their contracts and then go back to their home countries. To that end, the company only hired young men. But Ed’s family paid a stranger on their boat $20 to marry his grandmother so that she could join her brother in Hawaii. Ed goes on a sidebar here about the tendency in his family to exaggerate their own history. “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” or so the family saying goes. He returns to the story of his maternal grandmother to share the tale of her younger sister being so distraught about the departure, she hugged her so hard that her flip-flop broke. It was her only pair of shoes. In the Filipino community on Oahu at the time, there was an outsize number of men in relation to women. When Ed’s grandfather first set eyes on his grandma, he began to court her. A year later, they asked her older brother if they could get married, and he said no, that she was too young (14 at the time). But they got married anyway, with the understanding that they would wait two more years to live together. They moved in and Ed’s grandmother had a new baby, including his mom, every other year for the next 20 years. Like her brother, his grandmother’s new husband worked in the pineapple fields for Dole, doing incredibly hard labor. His grandma washed clothes for bachelor workers. The two saved their money and bought plantation property from Dole. The property was affordable enough that they were able to build multiple shacks for the kids to eventually live in. At this point, Ed launches into what he calls “the shadow story” of his family. He learned that shadow story when he was a kid and his mom and aunties were cooking in the kitchen. He’d sit just outside the room pretending to read a book, eavesdropping. There, he learned things like which family members were smoking pot or getting into trouble. But there are more serious elements, which prompts Ed to issue a trigger warning to readers and listeners. His grandmother didn’t quite agree to go to Hawaii. When she told her brother no to the idea, he beat her. He did this repeatedly until she acquiesced. But it was in one of these violent melees that his grandmother’s flip-flop broke. All this to say that Ed’s grandmother didn’t have much agency in her life decisions. The last two of her 10 children almost killed her. After number 10, the doctor gave Ed’s grandfather an involuntary vasectomy. Ed shares the story of how, on plantation payday, the women and children would hide in the fields with the men guarding them. It was a way to try to protect them from workers in the next village getting drunk and coming in to cause trouble. He summarizes the family history to this point by pointing out the incredible amount of resilience his ancestors carried. Also strength and love. But also, violence. All of those qualities manifested in their and their children’s parenting practices. Ed’s mom raised her kids in this way. The severity of the abuse waned over generations, but it was there nonetheless. Ed says he was ultimately responsible for his mother’s emotions. For many of these reasons, in his adult life, Ed founded . We’ll get more into that in Part 2. We back up for Ed to tell the story of how his mom and dad met each other. His dad was in the Army during the war in Vietnam. On a voyage to Asia, his boat took a detour and ended up in Hawaii, where he remained for the next five years. His parents got together and had Ed and his younger brother. They grew up among a much larger Filipino extended family, but Ed didn’t really know his dad’s Caucasian family, who lived on the East Coast. He’s gotten to know them more in his adult life. Ed grew up on Oahu in the Seventies and Eighties. His family was between working class and middle class, and there was always stress about money. But in hindsight, they lived well. We share versions of a similar story—that of parents telling kids that Christmas would be lean, that they didn’t have a lot of money (probably true), but that never ended up actually being the case. Both of our recollections was mountains of gifts on December 25. Growing up, Ed was always feminine. He was also athletic. It was a time before Ellen, before Will and Grace, when “athletic” also meant “not gay.” Ed says he wanted to be “not gay,” but he couldn’t help who he was. That led to his getting bullied. Moving to the mainland for college meant escape—from his own torment and from that of his peers back on the island. Ed went to UC Davis. He had played competitive soccer in middle school and high school, and because his teams were good, they came to the mainland a couple times. But Davis was a whole other world by the time he arrived to go to college. It was the early Nineties. He took what we call a gap year before coming to California. For him, that meant working. In one of his jobs, he served tables at CPK in Hawaii, where Carol Burnett was one of his regulars. We end Part 1 with Ed’s story of his time at UC Davis and not yet accepting his queerness. This Thursday on the podcast, I talk with about their new book on the Transgender District in San Francisco. And check back next week for Part 2 with Ed Center. We recorded this podcast at in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37118920

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

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 2 (S7E16) In Part 2, we start off talking about the underground nature of trans and drag safe spaces such as Compton’s back in the Sixities, and well before that. Because of this, precise records of places and events are often hard to come by. Saoirse also speaks to the human psychology of needing other people to act in order to justify joining an action. Of course, everyone’s threshold for this varies. Shane joins in to talk about how queer history is the story of fighting back against hate when there’s nothing left to lose. Folks on the frontlines of these battles don’t always plan the fights that end up happening. Case in point—the events at Compton’s Cafeteria that form the basis of the play. Then we shift the conversation to talk about Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and how the play came about. Mark Nassar (Tony and Tina’s Wedding) saw the Tenderloin Museum’s (TLM) exhibition on the riot at Compton’s and soon got in touch with Donna Personna and Collette LeGrande through a project the two were working on at the time—Beautiful by Night, a short documentary about their lives as trans people and drag queens. Over the course of about a year of periodic meetings at Mark’s house, where Donna and Collette shared their stories of Compton’s and the riot, the three weaved together enough personal stories to create an immersive play. Katie Conry at the Tenderloin Museum told the group that if something ever came out of what they’re doing, to let her know. Shane shares her story of the first time she saw Donna Personna perform. Prior to that, Shane thought that drag was a young person’s thing. She’d never seen someone of Donna’s age do drag. But she was blown away and was able to meet Donna. That night, Donna hinted to Shane about the project she was working on with Mark Nassar and Collette LeGrande. She told Shane that when the time came, when they had something ready, she’d let her know. About a year later, Shane was at Mark’s house reading for the role of Rusty, the character based on Donna. Some of this story has already appeared on Storied: SF, in the . The museum helped bring the play to life by getting a space for the production. It was 2018. They were doing it. The first run of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot lasted several months. It was deemed a success and the plan was to bring it back in 2020. But the universe had different ideas. Prior to the pandemic, the biggest challenge was securing a space. But then, Shane says she was at Piano Fight in February 2020 for an event to sign a lease on a new spot. Just a few weeks later, the first shelter-in-place orders were handed down. Shane speaks to what it means, now more than five years down the road and in a very different political and social environment, to get the play staged. And Saoirse talks about how honored she is and how personal it is for her to portray an actual living legend (Collette LeGrande). I ask Shane and Saoirse to respond to this season’s theme on Storied—”keep it local.” Saorise then shares the story of being targeted and harassed by right-wing bigots (is there any other kind?) right here in San Francisco. She tells this story to emphasize that, even in The City, trans people are not safe from fascist transphobia and violence that are spreading across the nation and the world. She also speaks to the massive wealth disparity here in SF and The Bay. All of this to say that for Saoirse, keeping it local requires engaging with all of these truths. Shane begins by riffing off of Saoirse’s response. She works for The City and County of San Francisco and wonders whether some of her coworkers know what’s at risk. She points to right-wing groups coming to SF to hold “de-transition” events. She then ends the episode by cataloging the many reasons she loves The City and wants us all to fight for it. For more information and to buy tickets for Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, please go to . And follow the production on Instagram . We recorded this episode in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play space in the Tenderloin in May 2025. Photography by Mason J. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/37032440

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Irish of Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, Part 2 (S7E15) 06/03/2025

Mike Irish of Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, Part 2 (S7E15) Part 2 picks up right where we left off in Part 1, with Mike’s move to The City. It was 2021, around the brief lull in COVID cases before Omicron hit. Full disclosure: This part of my episode on Mike has way more content about me than most of what I publish here on Storied. I guess you’ll just have to deal. Mike knew he could fall back on bartending here while he figured out his next gig in his new city. He’d taken one of what he calls a “big swing” with his move to New York City when he was 18. Now was time for another big swing, this one in San Francisco. He worked briefly at a mezcal bar on Valencia and a month at a cocktail bar in Emeryville. Then, fate wanted a word with Mike Irish. Someone he met at a memorial for a friend grew up with and mentioned the restaurant to Mike, suggesting he try to work there. He started off with one or two shifts a week, mostly filling in. And then Emmy offered Mike more shifts. This is one of several points in the podcast where I go on and on about myself. I share the story of my own decades-long experiences with Emmy’s, but for good reason. It culminates with my first time eating inside since the pandemic, when Erin and I sat at the bar and met Mike. Back to Mike’s story, Emmy had just got her liquor license and needed a bartender who could do that. Mike was the guy. He became “bar lead” (they couldn’t call the role “manager” and have Mike still receive tips) and created the cocktail menu for the place. He left the hiring of bartenders to Emmy, but Mike eventually took over ordering. He says he’s always had a mind for the business side of things, something not all bartenders carry with them. That possibly stemmed from Mike’s time making movies. He says film production is “the exact same thing” as running a restaurant. Then we get to the elephant in the room—how Mike ended up owning his boss’s restaurant. Emmy had told Mike that a neighborhood bar near her restaurant might be up for sale, and that he should look into buying it. She brought a broker into Emmy’s and he sat at Mike’s bar and chatted with him about what Mike thought was that bar for sale. It turned it he was talking about Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack being on the market. It was roughly early spring 2024, and by summer, the deal was done. Emmy and Mike kept that broker, but ultimately worked it all out themselves. He does share the story of how the deal almost fell through. Obviously, it didn’t. But you just gotta hear this one. He says most of their agreement is verbal/handshake, which speaks to how cool Emmy is. I prompt Mike to do something he says he hadn’t really done at the time of the recording—reflect on the massive life changes he’s been through just in the last five years. He moved across the continent, got engaged (and since married), had his first kid, bought a car, bought a business. That’s a lot. Mike says that, after the first day of operation with him as the owner of Emmy’s, it all hit him—how hard it was and was going to be moving forward. He couldn’t take a day off or call in sick. After about a week or so of mental anguish, though, it all started to click for him. And then we get to the part of this episode where my life and Mike’s really got intertwined—when I went on last summer, right around the time that Mike took over Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. In our recording, Mike did something that I don’t think anyone who’s been on this podcast has done over the eight years we’ve been around—he turned the mic around and asked me some questions. I was happy to oblige, since he was unaware of how applying to and being on Check Please! works. This part of the podcast is essential Check Please! Behind the Scenes. We end the podcast with Mike’s take on our theme this season—Keep it local. We recorded this podcast at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in April 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36823585

Homeless Children’s Network (S7 bonus) 05/29/2025

Homeless Children’s Network (S7 bonus) Welcome to this bonus episode about (HCN). Malik Parker is the director of the Jabali Substance Use Disorder (SUD) program at HCN. He is originally from Fayetteville, North Carolina, but his mom is from Oakland. He left NC for The Bay the day after he graduated high school in 2011. Cameron Smith is HCN’s director of Afrocentric programs. He is from Columbus, Ohio, but has been in SF for more than 10 years now. Cameron came here on a whim; he had a friend who needed a roommate. His first job in The Bay was in San Jose at the YMCA as a basketball ref. He knew then that he wanted to serve, to give back. Cameron shares the origin story of Homeless Children’s Network. HCN was founded in 1992 with the intent to serve as a connection between six different shelters in The City. Their CEO today, Dr. April Silas, has been with HCN since the beginning. The idea was that folks experiencing homelessness were transitory, and it would be best if services they received in one shelter followed them. Nowadays, they serve more than 2,500 clients per year. They have around 60 partnerships with other service organizations in The City. Please visit the for more info. They are currently in the middle of their Jabali awareness campaign, a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Public Health that provides services around the fentanyl crisis. Cameron points to the Black population in The City being about 4–5 percent of the total, while Black folks experiencing fentanyl overdose deaths range from 30 to 40 percent of the overall number in SF. The Jabali campaign aims to bring awareness to treatment as well as warning folks of the dangers of the deadly drug. HCN runs ads on social media and YouTube as well as billboards around town. They aim through these ad campaigns to be as ubiquitous as, say, a Sweet James or Ann Phuong. The goal is to make folks aware of HCN and its services before they might realize they need it. A big part of Malik’s job also involves meeting people where they are, bringing those same messages as HCN’s ads. He says that this aspect of his role with HCN is perhaps the most rewarding for him. Malik has learned a lot in his time with HCN, including in their work with SFDPH. He’s uncovered his own biases, which is part of what he works so hard to help others see. He emphasizes for folks the “us” aspect of it all. He says he relishes the give-and-take of seminars, the things he hears people say to one another. When I mention the motto, “It takes the hood to save the hood,” we go on a bit of a sidebar about communities looking internally to solve their own issues. HCN has workforce development programs, and I ask whether anyone who’s been through their programs has come back to work with them. That has indeed happened. Then our conversation shifts to ways that The City has adopted a “tough on crime” approach in the last couple of years to several areas that HCN deals with (see the recall of Chesa Boudin and shift rightward of our Board of Supervisors, among other signs). No one in the room the day we recorded agrees with that approach. We end this bonus episode with ways that you can get involved with HCN, whether it’s donating, volunteering, attending a seminar, or something else. Please visit to learn more. Follow them on social media . We recorded this episode at Homeless Children’s Network offices in The Fillmore in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36770705

Mike Irish, Owner of Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, Part 1 (S7E15) 05/27/2025

Mike Irish, Owner of Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, Part 1 (S7E15) Mike Irish is his actual name. Welcome to my episode with the current (it no longer works to say “new”) owner of one of my favorite places in San Francisco—. I’m not sure where to begin, but I suppose a sprinkle of backstory can’t hurt. Back in 2022, I recorded an episode with , then the owner and forever the founder of Emmy’s. It was a fun interview, and through that chat with Emmy, we discovered that we had been across-the-street neighbors in the Mission back in the early 2000s. Fast-forward to summer 2024 when I applied to be on and rated Emmy’s as my No. 1 pick among the three spots I proposed. Then a funny thing happened—before we shot the Check Please episode, Emmy sold her restaurant to one of the bartenders at the place—Mike Irish. That brings us to this episode. From the first time Erin and I met Mike at the bar at Emmy’s, I knew I liked the dude. Now let’s get to know Mike together as he approaches the one-year mark of owning his first restaurant, an SF institution. Mike was born in Houston, but he didn’t stay there long. His dad ran catering trucks for restaurants, and soon moved around bit before settling in Arizona, in the Phoenix area, where Mike mostly grew up. He came of age in the late-Nineties/early 2000s. Being in Arizona, Mike tells us some of the things about life there that he just considered normal, things like wearing oven mitts to get into your car in the summer. It was hot, but swimming pools were easy to find. Sports was pretty central to young Mike’s life. He played basketball, baseball, soccer, and other sports. His dad coached some of the teams he was on. He was a good kid. Basketball took over, eventually. He looked up to local players, especially Charles Barkley, whose number Mike shaved into his head. But after a couple years playing in high school, basketball started to fade and was replaced by theater and drama. Looking back, he calls it a “hard turn,” but we both recognize the plasticity of that age—the teen years. In his drama classes, Mike gravitated toward writing. He played guitar and wrote songs. He wrote a play for his school. All that young talent and creativity led to Mike and his friends making movies. He was also in bands playing mostly folk music. With all this going on, he met his first girlfriend. They dated briefly, didn’t talk for 20 years years, and today are married. But we’ll get to that later. Mike graduated from high school and went to New York City for college pretty much right away. He had visited NYC once before and liked it. He got into film school there, beginning a journey that lasted until three years ago or so. And so, for nearly 20 years, existed as a filmmaker in New York City. The school and his place were both in Manhattan. When he first arrived, he knew one guy from a band they’d both been in, and Mike was grateful for that. But of course they didn’t become close in their new hometown, as they attended different schools and made new friends. Mike made student films, and kept going after he graduated. To survive and pay rent, he started bartending, something that, later in life, would prove crucial to where he is today. I ask him to name-drop some of the bars in New York where he worked. He rattles off several, then summarizes by saying he worked at possibly 50 different sports in NYC. We talk about the films he made over that almost two-decade span. Some won awards, both domestically and internationally. The most highly acclaimed of his movies was The Life of Significant Soil, which Mike says he’s seen being played on airplanes. Another movie, Permanent Collection, premiered in San Francisco at the Roxie. Mike came out here for that and stayed for a week. That was February 2020, weeks before COVID shut The City and the world down. Going back to his first girlfriend, whom Mike had met in high school, she already lived in San Francisco. They had lost touch over the years. But she noticed his name on a movie showing at The Roxie and came out to the premiere. A reconnection was made, but Mike returned home to New York after that week. Still, the two kept in touch. Once it was possible, one would fly out to be with the other, either in New York or here in San Francisco. That eventually gave way to Mike’s decision to move to The City. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode about Mike Irish. We recorded this podcast at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36717940

Misstencil, Part 2 (S7E14) 05/20/2025

Misstencil, Part 2 (S7E14) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Misstencil at a new school half a world away from her home in China. Her time in Switzerland started off in business school, a topic that she admits she’s not the best at today. Aside from school, she visited other parts of Europe. She got a job in Switzerland, but called her family back home as much as she could afford to. One call she had with them around the new year one year had her feeling like family members were passing the phone and no one wanted to talk with her. She then learned that her grandfather, the one who had raised her, had passed away days before this call. The family had kept the news of his illness from Misstencil, ostensibly to protect her. Her grandfather’s death took her about a decade to get over. She was left with a sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose. Going back home felt out of the question, and she liked Switzerland. But her school there had a joint program with a school in the US, and so she applied for a visa. That school was in South Carolina. When her time in South Carolina came to an end, she had a choice—New York or San Francisco. She (correctly) chose The City. Misstencil had friends in SF already, and they let her stay with her. Those friends told her about a website, then only in the Bay Area, that she could use to find her own place. That site was Craigslist, and they were right. She soon found a place of her own. The year was 2000, and little did she know that she was beginning what would be a decades-long stay here. Her first job in The City was for a big company, one that had a dress code that put her in high heels. Looking back, Misstencil is so far removed from that corporate world that she cannot imagine wearing those shoes, or painting her nails, or other things that go along with corporate culture. But we’ll get to that. She found herself meeting and befriending older hippies who encouraged her to pursue her art. She was broke, and they put her up. They helped her get art supplies. She had previously set aside any artistic ambitions while going to school and beginning what she thought would be a career. But summoning inspiration from the art her dad used to do and accepting the help of her friends in her new city, she decided to go for it. Misstencil (not known by that name just yet) began to show her art. She recounts the first time she sold a piece, and how that felt. She walked by the gallery and saw that red dot and knew she had to tell everybody about it. She says that art and San Francisco and those early friends she made here saved her. Looking back on her life and the emotional struggles she had endured, Misstencil came to realize that, as an adult and survivor of depression, she wanted to help kids going through that. She lived with roommates in a rent-controlled spot, thus allowing her to do side work of that nature. The person who today is Misstencil of course wasn’t always known by that name. That started in 2022. She shares the origin story of her pseudonym. It all began with her simply wanting to beautify parts of The City that had lost their luster, so to speak—boarded-up storefronts and the like. She found herself all over town, talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing how much neighborhoods meant to people. This led Misstencil to conceive of her “San Francisco Lonely Hearts” project, which is how my life intersected with hers. It’s a way for her to show her deep love for and appreciation of San Francisco. She shares how she settled on stencil art for her method lately. She never had any formal training or went to art school. She says that because she didn’t have a very happy childhood, she wanted her art to help her feel like a kid again. Misstencil goes on a side story about the time she connected with SF icon Frank Chu and invited him to do Bay to Breakers with her. We also talk about the day we met, when she showed her SF Lonely Hearts work-in-progress canvas outside of Vesuvio. In addition to the 2D art that day in Jack Kerouac Alley, she had Frank Chu on a Roomba holding his infamous “12 Galaxies” sign, and a Golden Gate Bridge bench placed in front of the canvas. Before we wrap, I ask Misstencil about upcoming shows she has, and she humors me by plugging our “” show, which she’s in. We end the episode with Misstencil’s thoughts about our theme this season and the theme of the show this week: Keep it local. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36632295

Misstencil, Part 1 (S7E14) 05/13/2025

Misstencil, Part 1 (S7E14) Misstencil was born on a mountain in China. In this episode, we meet artist and she shares the story of her life. Before we get to that, be sure to on May 23. Misstencil will be one of the six artists featured that evening, and for a very good reason. But we’ll get to that. As the Communist Party came to power in China, her dad and his family found themselves on the unfortunate side of things. His side of the family had a history as successful business people, which was suddenly frowned upon. Her mom came from a family of professors, also not favorable in the “new China.” Her dad was from Hunan Province, where her mom’s family later moved. When her dad was young, his family gave him up to a foster mother and foster sister. That foster family, capitalists like her dad’s family, was ostracized and became homeless. Misstencil’s dad was smart and talented, but because of his family’s background, was denied the opportunity to go to college. He also had tough luck with women. When it came time to meet their parents, once it became obvious what his family’s political background was, they would end the relationship. This happened on more than one occasion. Despite being attractive and talented (at art and engineering), he was still single at 30. Then someone introduced him to the woman who would become Misstencil’s mom. On their first date, he wasted no time letting her know his background. And it landed. She told him about her own background, and said she wanted to give him a chance. After the two got married, the government sent them to work hard jobs in the mountains. The reality of life there meant that children went to day care while the parents worked. And after work, those adults had to attend political meetings. There was little to no time to raise kids. This was the situation in which Misstencil would grow up. Because of this, her parents sent Misstencil to live with her mom’s parents when she was eight months old. She saw her parents only once a year until she was around 12. Growing up with her grandparents was traumatizing for Misstencil, despite how good they were to her. And that led to depression. All the kids around her had parents, but she effectively did not. It also affected her performance in school. She didn’t do well in any subject except art. Her depression made it hard for her to be interested or to take school seriously. Misstencil’s parents took her out of school eventually, out of fear that they would lose her, and were able to get her into an education program that was not goal-oriented. In that time, she started to change, which she attributes to the lack of pressure. “I no longer had this pressure of doing stuff I don’t like to do,” she says. When she graduated, that school sent Misstencil and one other young woman to Shanghai for college. She says that it was an especially optimistic time in China, and she embraced her time in the country’s largest city. Misstencil shares a fun sidebar about the first time she saw and went into a McDonald’s. Because she was totally unfamiliar with the menu, she ended up ordering a bunch of desserts. Then she tells us about seeing an advertisement for a meeting about a school in Switzerland. More importantly, cookies would be served at this meeting. That was enough for young Misstencil. Like many people in China, she was familiar with Switzerland and its amazing mountain scenery. Calendars depicting the Swiss Alps were common. But Misstencil never imagined that she’d have the opportunity to go there. As we’ve mentioned, the Chinese government exploited people like her dad. He was never really compensated for the incredible contributions he gave to his society. But then he found himself with a little bit of money, and told his daughter that they could use it to send her to Europe for school, at least for a year. She jumped on that chance to get out of her home country. Misstencil shares the detailed story of her journey to Switzerland. It involves large amounts of paper currency, some of which ended up in her shoes. Arriving was tricky, too. It was the middle of the night and there was a train to catch. And she needed to go to the bathroom, but didn’t have the coins needed to do that. A further complication was that she didn’t speak the language (German or French). A friendly fellow train passenger offered help finding her stop. But then he fell asleep. Eventually, she made it … in the middle of the night. There was no one around. So she walked. When she arrived at her new school, she was told that because school started the next day, she’d have to pay to stay there that night (which was already half over). Misstencil notes the contrast between this and what she was used to at home. She says she wondered if she had made a mistake. But she paid, and the next morning after she woke up, she opened her window. It was like being inside of a calendar, she says. Check back next week for Part 2 and the rest of Misstencil’s story. We recorded this episode near Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park in May 2025. Photography by Alfredo Becerra /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36541165

415 Zine's Fredo and Laine, Part 2 (S7E13) 05/06/2025

415 Zine's Fredo and Laine, Part 2 (S7E13) Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Fredo and Laine had worked for the same company for a minute, but both left eventually. That social group they’d formed with a few other artists they worked with kept in touch. Some years went by. Fredo attended a workshop for artists at in the Sunset, and let Laine know about it. She says that he asked her to be his “accountability buddy.” He says it wasn’t a question, but more a half-joking demand. Fredo shares what an “accountability buddy” is, in this sense. At the workshop, each attendee set up goals for the next year. Your accountability buddy helps you stay on-target for achieving those goals. For Fredo and his buddy (Laine), part of that meant meeting almost once a week to go over what Fredo had been able to cross off his list and what was ahead. One vital area he felt he needed her help with was networking. With Laine holding him to task, Fredo knocked out most of his 20 goals for 2023 by August of that year. But, because his networking goal didn’t have a metric, per se, it proved trickier. And so they got together for coffee and sat in the parklet outside of Gus’s on Haight. Fredo brought a newspaper with him that day. He’d noticed that he kept hearing about art shows after the fact. Because he wasn’t really part of a larger scene (yet), he wondered how people found out about these events. His idea was to create a publication to do just that, and more. And then a funny thing happened. Laine had had the idea to make an art magazine that very same week. Kismet! They took that as an obvious sign that this was something they had to do. And so they started hanging out even more, talking and talking and talking about what they wanted their publication to be. What kind of paper? What would it look like? How do we make it free for artists to be featured? Do we want advertising? They answered those questions with several notebooks and a lot of caffeine. The first issue of took them seven months to make. Over that time, Laine came up with the idea of tying the title back to the structure of the publication—it could be four of something, one of something, and five of something. They did their due diligence when it came to researching the media landscape, especially when it came to art journalism. They settled on having their boundary be a geographic one, rather than having an artistic-genre focus. The “4” would be short features on artists—two pages of full-color examples of their work accompanied by brief write-ups about them. The “1” would be an in-depth interview with a single artist, with several samples of their art to go with the interview. And the “5” would be spots around San Francisco for folks to go experience art. Places like , where we recorded this episode. I ask Laine and Fredo to talk about those seven months, from conception to the first publication, and the ups and downs they experienced in that time. Laine says she was in “no looking back” mode, and Fredo concurs. The only questions that popped up were around content. They were in it, and nothing would stop them. Though that first issue took them a little more than half a year, they quickly decided that 415 Zine would be quarterly. Most of the heavy lifting of creating something from scratch had been done. And though putting together a publication like this is no small feat, they felt they had it down. As we recorded that day in April 2025, Fredo and Laine were about to celebrate the first birthday of their creation. That party fell before this podcast was ready to go out, but I asked them to talk about the anniversary and what it means to have a full year and now five issues behind them. We end the episode with Fredo and Laine’s thoughts about our theme this season—Keep it local. Photography by Mason J. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36445465

415 Zine’s Laine and Alfredo, Part 1 (S7E13) 04/29/2025

415 Zine’s Laine and Alfredo, Part 1 (S7E13) Alfredo Sainz’s grandfather came to US from Chihuahua, Mexico, in the during World War II. That family then migrated from El Paso, Texas, through New Mexico and Southern California, then as far north as San Francisco. In this episode, get to know Fredo and his co-founder and co-publisher, Laine Wiesemann. We begin Part 1 with Fredo. Fredo and his brother were his family’s first US-born members, making them both Chicanos. Most of his mom’s family immigrated to the US, but many family members on his dad’s side still live in Mexico, mostly in Guadalajara. His grandfather followed the work, which lead him to San Francisco in 1946. He worked in construction, eventually bringing his wife and children, including Fredo’s mom, to live with him. Fredo’s family settled in Excelsior near Crocker-Amazon Park. He attended Sacred Heart. After high school, he moved to Daly City and then the Sunset, where he lives today. Many of his high school classmates are still in SF. He’s never lived anywhere else, though his family did spend summers in Mexico, something Fredo remembers fondly. His grandfather still had a ranch there where they would stay. They’d set out right when the school year ended, and return right before the fall semester began, with a side trip to K-Mart for school clothes, of course. I ask Fredo if he’s ever been tempted to live somewhere else. He expounds on an emphatic “No!” Then he talks about a BBQ spot out near the ocean close to Doggie Diner where he was introduced to peach cobbler. Next, we turn to Laine and her story. She’s from the Central Valley—Sanger, California, near Fresno. The family later moved north to Linden, near Stockton. Both her parents were train engineers. Her mom was one of the first women engineers, in fact. Laine visited San Francisco a lot during her high school years. She remembers crossing the Bay Bridge and being awed. She has memories of her dad taking her and a friend to Amoeba Records. She’d been doing art since she was little, but really started getting into it when she was in high school. In her freshman year, she did commissions. After graduation, she moved to Chico, where she says she “learned how to party.” A friend of hers had moved to The City and her boss was coming here, so, with those things in mind, Laine decided it was time. She moved to San Francisco in 2008. That boss ended up not moving here after all, so Laine had to find work upon her arrival here. She was able to do that relatively easily. Though she’d worked at Trader Joe’s in Chico doing her store’s art, by the time she got to San Francisco, she took a break from art. She worked for a caterer doing special events. And it was at that job that Alfredo and Laine met. I ask them what year that connection was made, and the fact that they both struggled to remember says a lot. Deep friendships can do that. They ballpark it as 2009 or 2010, before the Giants won their first World Series in SF. A small subset of their coworkers were artists, and they all formed a tight social circle. Fredo and others urged Laine to get back to painting. And, inspired by her and others in the group, he decided to pick something up also. He channeled the graffiti he’d done when he was younger. Soon enough, that work crew had a group art show and they asked Fredo to be part of it. That show led to another with the same artists. They had their own art, of course, but the four also contributed to a single collaborate piece. Me, Laine, and Fredo struggle to remember the name of the game with plastic monkeys that Laine compared the piece to. “Barrel of Monkeys,” Fredo eventually recalls. Yep. It was 2016 and with those shows behind him, Fredo decided to run with “above-ground” art. He says that, especially in those days, Laine helped him out a lot with the technical side of creating art. Fredo also credits her with being good at the business side of being an artist—promotion and sales and such. Since she started doing art again, Laine hasn’t stopped. She shares how that got going again. She was visiting her girlfriend’s relatives in Tamales, where many members of that family paint. Laine was inspired. But when it came to subject matter, she felt she had two options—the surrounding natural beauty (specifically, a nearby creek), or a shiny red teapot. She settled on a mashup of sorts—the teapot pouring into the creek. She had a lot of fun with that little painting. And so, she picked that up and ran with it. Check back next week for Part 2 with Laine and Fredo. We recorded this episode at in April 2025. Photography by /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36344335

Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus) 04/24/2025

Kundan Baidwan, Part 2 (S7E12) 04/22/2025

Kundan Baidwan, Part 2 (S7E12) In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school. What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she made in San Diego, one was set on living in New York and going to NYU. And then 9/11 happened, and everything changed. She’d had dreams of moving to New York and becoming an artist, but those plans were put on hold. After a short stint in Paris, in early 2002, Kundan moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. We take a brief detour to talk about Kundan’s time in Paris, a city, she says, that will always be a part of her soul. It was in New York that Kundan says she really came into her own. She’d graduated college and was diving into the abyss of early adulthood, finding jobs, paying rent, etc. She also learned how to have fun. This meant, through her work at a music venue, absorbing all the acts that came through. She made lots of friends, too, through serving and bartending at the venue. It was in this job that she became friends with the one and only B.B. King. That was Kundan’s first bartending job, at the club. She also did some “cater waitering” with a catering company in New York. But we’ll get back to that. After New York, she pondered a couple different places to start the next chapter of her life. Her sister had quit practicing law and was writing for television in LA, so that was a possibility. But Kundan chose to be closer to her childhood home. Her adult life in The Bay began at a friend’s house in Palo Alto while she “figured out how to get her way into San Francisco.” It was 2007, and she got a 9-to-5er as a receptionist at an engineering firm near the North Point Shopping Center. Then the bottom fell out of the economy and Kundan got laid off in 2008. We go on a bit of a sidebar about that shopping center (I worked nearby back then). Kundan used time after her layoff to travel. One of the first places she went was Memphis and Graceland, where she took her mom. There was a family trip to Spain. Then she traveled all over India with a friend for what turned out to be three months. Kundan talks at some length about the ups and downs and rewards of traveling. When she came back to The City, she needed to find a new place to live. A friend had told her about a bar in the Haight that might be a little intimidating, but Kundan didn’t mind that. That bar was . Right away, she loved the place and made friends, including one woman she felt she knew from somewhere. Eventually, they figured out that she was Kundan’s bartender back in New York. Small world, SF-style. That woman is responsible for Kundan’s job at Zam Zam. What started out as her filling in has turned into 14 years or so behind the bar at one of my favorite San Francisco spots—Zam Zam. She found a place to live nearby and loved that she could walk to her new beloved bar, whether to work or connect with a friend or meet a stranger. We fast-forward a few years to when my life intersected with Kundan’s. I was on a “Bourdain Crawl” with shortly after the renowned chef and author passed away in 2018. When we got to Zam Zam that weekday in June, we lucked out that Kundan was behind the bar. Shortly into the recording of Kundan’s retelling of Zam Zam’s history, Erin of Bitch Talk turned to me and said, “This would be good for Storied.” And that’s how our came to be. Based on that first meeting, Kundan talks about learning the history of the bar she works at. It happened thanks to many factors—her own love of history, the bar’s unique story, visitors’ consistent questions about the place, and the current owner’s knowledge of his business. She goes on to talk about working at the bar the day that Bourdain died. Like a lot of people, he had meant a lot to Kundan. She had even considered culinary school after getting laid off. She worried that the day would be difficult, but it turned out to be the exact opposite—folks were there to honor the man. Then we back up a bit chronologically to talk about art coming back into Kundan’s life. She’d never really stopped, but it wasn’t front-and-center for her like it is today. A cousin (one of 26) commissioned her to make paintings for his new office. Soon after that, she got the job at Zam Zam, which allowed her the time and freedom to paint more, and so she did. A friend tapped her to be in a show, her first, in the Mission. And when Kundan and I recorded, the show that she curated (her first) was still up at . She shares a little more about how much Mini Bar means to Kundan. Kundan talks in some depth about the subject of her —, the arts nonprofit she started with her childhood friend, Sameer Gupta. For her, all the hassle and trouble and stress of doing an art show is nothing compared to the rewards, which are many. I have to agree, 100 percent. We end the episode with Kundan’s thoughts on this season’s theme (also the theme of next month’s art show in South of Market): Keep it local. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36255910

The 68th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival (S7 bonus) 04/16/2025

Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12) 04/15/2025

Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12) It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan. Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show: (2018) (2024) Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself. We begin Part 1 with Kundan’s birth (on Dolly Parton’s birthday) in January 1978. She was born in San Jose, but her family soon relocated up the East Bay to Fremont. Her dad had come to the U.S. for college. He went to school in Reno at UNR. When he and his first wife split up, he went back to Punjab, India, to find a new partner. One of his sisters introduced him to the young woman who would become Kundan’s mom. Kundan’s dad had already graduated and moved to the Bay Area by the time he found his new wife. In fact, he had lived in The City—on Haight and in South of Market—in the late Sixties. He brought Kundan’s mom back to The Bay after they got married. The young couple moved around San Jose a couple times, with her dad doing what he could to buy housing for himself and his family. This included their move to Fremont when Kundan was around 2. All of Kundan’s early memories are set in the East Bay—Fremont specifically. They spent time there and at relatives’ places in San Jose. As a young kid, she enjoyed things like playing dress-up, singing songs in the mirror, hanging out with adults, and asking for recipes. She had visions of being a “culinary genius,” she says now. Kundan has 26 first cousins, and she keeps up with every single one of them. She’s on the younger end of her generation in her family, but most of her cousins around her age don’t live nearby. In the Bay Area, Kundan was usually the youngest. Owing to this, she feels she benefited from constantly being exposed to culture through her older relatives. Around middle school, Kundan says she became a “bad student.” What she means by that is school got harder and she didn’t feel up to the challenge. Other kids also began teasing and taunting her, which didn’t help. When it comes to her own creativity, Kundan is quick to credit her mom, who, she says, was pretty much always drawing or illustrating. Her mom’s mom was a painter. Creativity ran through her and her siblings’ DNA—her brother and sister both wrote at various points in their lives. She went to Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, where she found her people—the “weird kids,” meaning artists and musicians and theater people. High school wasn’t too cliquey, but as much as groups mixed, you knew who your people were. At this point, Kundan and I go on a sidebar about the movie Didi, Sean Wang’s 2024 film set in Kundan’s hometown of Fremont in the early 2000s. Her parents were on board for Kundan’s to major in psychology in college. She’d taken art classes in high school, and found a strong art program at UC San Diego. But that’s not what she intended to study. Kundan shares some of her early memories of visiting San Francisco from across The Bay. And we end Part 1 with her decision to leave the Bay Area and go to college in San Diego. Check back next week for Part 2. We recorded this episode at in April 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36130035

The Tenderloin Museum Turns 10 (S7 bonus) 04/10/2025

Woody LaBounty, Part 2 (S7E11) 04/08/2025

Woody LaBounty, Part 2 (S7E11) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin. In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it wasn't a fit for young Woody. A decade or so later, now married and with a kid, Woody and his wife moved to Durham, North Carolina, for nine months. It was yet another not-San Francisco town that provided a contrast with his hometown and reminded him how much he wanted to be here. After that brief stint in college, Woody decided he wanted to entertain, and so he enrolled in a clown school run by Ringling Brothers in Florida. He got work with the back in The City. He did a lot of vaudeville with them and even went to Japan and on other tours. It was during his time in the circus that Woody met his wife. Nancy had a boyfriend at the time and was headed to Spain to teach English. Two years later, she returned to The Bay and Woody was single. Their first date was at Rock and Bowl, the spot on Haight Street where Amoeba is today. They walked down Haight after that to Mad Dog in the Fog. When they left Mad Dog, Woody knew it was love when Nancy asked him, "Where can we go play video games?" In 1997, they had a baby, their daughter Miranda. That effectively ended the Performer chapter of Woody's life. Nancy is a midwife, and he needed to be flexible enough that he could watch his daughter while his wife was working. After that stint in North Carolina, Woody came back with a renewed purpose—he decided to devote his life to letting people know how great San Francisco is. It would start with The City's past, and how that history informs the present and helps chart a path to our future. This led to the establishment of the . David Gallagher was married to a woman who Woody had performed with. David and Woody formed a board with a couple friends also interested in SF history. They settled on being a nonprofit and built a website, something that was pretty novel at the time. They interviewed folks and shared stories of the west side of town. They also had (and still have) a podcast. Woody was with WNP for 20 years, until just recently. He talks about how the main objective of WNP was to gather as much forgotten history of the west side of San Francisco as possible, and then to make that available to as many folks as possible so that they might understand what came before and what could be possible in the here and now. We take a sidebar to talk about the so-called Doom Loop, especially as it relates to hearing from friends and family who aren't in San Francisco, but will ask us things like, "What the hell is going on out there?" Not to diminish the real problems facing our and other cities, bu that media trope is tired and was always nonsense. We talk briefly about the , which started way back in early 2013. Woody is no longer directly involved, but it's in good hands with WNP Executive Director Nicole Meldahl. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. From WNP, Woody joined , where he works today. SF Heritage's mission is "to preserve and enhance San Francisco’s unique architectural and cultural identity." Nowadays, Woody is the CEO and president of the nonprofit, and he says that in that role, he "doesn't get to do a lot of the fun stuff," being more on the business side as he is. Still, he of course believes wholeheartedly in the organization's mission—it was what drew him to SF Heritage, in fact. We end the podcast with Woody's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local. We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/36052745

We Players’ “Macbeth” at Fort Point (S7 bonus) 04/03/2025

We Players’ “Macbeth” at Fort Point (S7 bonus) Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group. Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of , a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can. While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as throwing banners off the clock tower and tying bodies to sculptures around campus. She discovered that art would be her life’s work, not just a hobby. One idea she had while in Palo Alto was to do a production of Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet held all around the Stanford campus. It was a success, as the audience grew and grew as it moved around, picking up more and more people along the way. Ava was able to turn this type of theater into an independently designed major. After graduating, she moved to the East Bay and started doing theater productions there and in The City. She started partnering with the National Park Service (NPS) in 2008 and then with SF Recreation and Parks in 2018. Ava’s first production at Fort Point, the Civil War-era fort under the southern base of the Golden Gate Bridge, was in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, she had a three-year residency on Alcatraz, further deepening her relationship with the NPS. In 2013, she kicked off Macbeth at Fort Point. But a funny thing happened—a government shutdown that year effectively ended that run under the bridge. Fast-forward nearly a decade, and the NPS reached out to see whether Ava and We Players were interested in trying again to produce Macbeth at Fort Point. That brings us to the present day. Ava’s friend Ann had left theater and had been working in movies. She’d also been taking epic walks—as in hundreds of miles at a time, all over the world. She was on one of these walks when she and Ava connected over Zoom and Ann offered to play the part of Lady Macbeth to Ava’s Macbeth in We Players’ upcoming production. Ann would not only play one of the two major roles in the play, but she would also be there for Ava to help with various aspects of putting it all together, including casting. It was somewhere in this time that the decision was made for this to be an all female-identifying and non-binary cast. We Players is run and was founded by women, but they hadn’t done a production with a cast like this before. It was 2024, before the election. It just felt right. Ann and Ava talk about the themes of Macbeth and how they relate to the current times we’re in, no matter who we are. Ava touches on how important it is for her to foster a caring, kind, nurturing environment among her cast members, and how poignant that is for such a violent play like Macbeth. Then we pivot to talk about how times have changed, 10 years removed from the last time they did this at Fort Point, and how they have not. Ava also describes what it’s like inside of Fort Point, something we in San Francisco might not all know about. One point they want to emphasize for anyone who comes to see their show—it’s cold as hell, even by SF standards. We Players’ production of Macbeth at Fort Point opens on April 11 and runs through May 18. All shows start at 6 p.m., Thursday through Sunday (with a few exceptions), rain or wind (duh) or shine. Tiered tickets (for equitable access) are available at the . We recorded this episode in the Gramercy Towers in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35978130

Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11) 04/01/2025

Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11) On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His dad’s mom was single and fell on hard times in Texas. She came to San Francisco, where she had a step-brother. Woody’s parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard (where Boudin Bakery is today). Donut Bowl was a combination donut shop/hot dog joint. At the time the two met, his dad worked as a cook there and his mom was in high school. His mom and her friends went to nearby Washington High and would hang out at the donut shop after school. The next year or so, his parents had their first kid—Woody. They came from different sides of the track, as it were. Woody’s mom’s family wasn’t crazy about her dating his working-class dad, who didn’t finish high school. But once his mom became pregnant with Woody, everything changed. The couple had two more sons after Woody. One of his brothers played for the 49ers in the Nineties and lives in Oregon today. His other brother works with underserved high school kids in New Jersey, helping them get into college. Woody shares some impressions of his first 10 years or so of life by describing The City in the mid-Seventies. Yes, kids played in the streets and rode Muni to Candlestick Park and The Tenderloin to go bowling. It was also the era of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jonestown, and the Moscone/Milk murders. But for 10-year-old Woody, it was home. It felt safe, like a village. Because I’m a dork, I ask Woody to share his memories of when Star Wars came out. Obliging me, he goes on a sidebar about how the cinematic phenomenon came into his world in San Francisco. He did, in fact, see Star Wars in its first run at the Coronet. He attended Sacred Heart on Cathedral Hill when it was an all-boys high school. He grew up Catholic, although you didn’t have to be to go to one of SF’s three Catholic boys’ high schools. Woody describes, in broad terms, the types of families that sent their boys to the three schools. Sacred Heart was generally for kids of working-class folks. After school, if they didn’t take Muni back home to the Richmond District, Woody and his friends might head over to Fisherman’s Wharf to play early era video games. Or, most likely, they’d head over to any number of high schools to talk to girls. Because parental supervision was lacking, let’s say, Woody and his buddies also frequently went to several 18+ and 21+ spots. The I-Beam in the Haight, The Triangle in the Marina, The Pierce Street Annex, Enrico’s in North Beach, Mabuhay Gardens. There, he saw bands like The Tubes and The Dead Kennedy’s, although punk wasn’t really his thing. Woody was more into jazz, RnB, and late-disco. We chat a little about café culture in San Francisco, something that didn’t really exist until the Eighties. To this day, Woody still spends his Friday mornings at . And we end Part 1 with Woody’s brief time at UC Berkeley (one year) and the real reason he even bothered to try college. Check back next week for Part 2 with Woody LaBounty. And this Thursday, look for a bonus episode all about and their upcoming production of Macbeth at Fort Point. We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35950795

Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10) 03/25/2025

Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10) In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street. The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events in the gallery. To couch our discussion of how they choose which books to sell at Medicine for Nightmares, Josiah points out that the last time he checked, something like 75 or 80 percent of bookstores in the US are white-owned. He shares stories of sneaking out of his home in Marin when he was a teenager, driving to The City, and going to City Lights, which was open until midnight in those days. It was there, though, that Josiah discovered Latinx poets, writers who spoke his language, literally. For him and his business partner, Tân Khánh Cao, it was always about wanting to see themselves reflected on the shelves. Josiah mentions a long-held, racist belief by publishers that Black and brown folks don't read. That, of course, is nonsense, and the bookstore stands with others in direct defiance and opposition to that mindset. On their first day of business, Josiah says that a young mom came in with her kid and went to the children's books section of the store. He and Tân noticed that she was crying, so they went over to see if everything was OK. "I've never been in a bookstore before and seen a kids' book that looks like my kid," she told them. That was the first day. We then turn to the story of how they came up with the name of the store. Joshia and Tân were throwing out potential names to each other out front on the sidewalk one day before they opened. "Each one of us was coming up with a worse name than the other," he says, half-jokingly. One of them suggested looking at titles from , a musician they both like. One of his songs is called "Medicine for a Nightmare." It clicked for them instantly. Then we talk about the growing call to ban books in the US. In my opinion, simply opening for business and turning the lights on is an act of defiance for Josiah and Tân. He goes on to state that they're well aware that they could be shut down and/or arrested every day. He says they get harassing phone calls from time to time, in fact. We end the episode with Josiah's thoughts about our theme on Storied: San Francisco this season—Keep It Local. 3036 24th Street Sunday 12-9pm / Monday 12:30-9 pm Tuesday–Thursday 12:30-10pm Friday 12:30-11pm Saturday 12-11pm (415) 824-1761 Photography by Mason J. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35840725

Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 1 (S7E10) 03/18/2025

Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 1 (S7E10) This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One of his coworkers at City Lights came up with the idea of doing poetry out the window onto Columbus Avenue. The first poet to read up there was . Josiah says that the reaction from passersby, the looks of joy on their faces, is one of his favorite memories from this time. Then we talk about Josiah’s monthly Latinx reading series, , which has been going strong for more than six years now. It started pre-pandemic in Oakland, pivoted to Zoom from early in the pandemic, and resumed in-person in the Mission once that was possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves now. Josiah reminds us that he was evicted from his home in the Mission back during the first dotcom wave of the Nineties, and that he hadn’t been able to move back until recently. Before getting the job at City Lights, he owned and ran a taco shop up in Marin for 20 years. He told himself toward the end of that long run that he never wanted to own a business again. But then he went into Alley Cat Books one day and was talking with that store’s owner, . Josiah had been putting on events at Alley Cat for his friend for years, but now, Kate mentioned that she was considering selling the bookstore. To explain his reaction, Josiah begins to talk about how much the Mission means to him. Having given so much to him, his life and his poetry, Josiah felt he owed the neighborhood. He knew that if he didn’t step up and take over the space as a book store, it would be prone to whatever trendy gentrifying business happened to move in. But he also knew that it would take a lot of work and a lot of money to do what he felt had to be done. And so he assembled a group of folks and they approached Kate Razo with an offer. That was in August. They opened a few months later, in November. He originally envisioned keeping his job at City Lights while helping to open the new store in the Mission. But the enormity of the task had other ideas. Some of those folks he’d gathered to do the work also fell off, which seems natural in hindsight. Nonetheless, defying odds and perhaps expectations, the new book store opened. Originally, after having gone through the Alley Cat book inventory and given much of that back to Kate, they opened “bare bones.” Around Day 2 or Day 3 of being open, Josiah realized that he couldn’t be both there and City Lights. It was obvious that he needed to quit his job in North Beach, a tearful process he describes. We end Part 1 with Josiah taking listeners through the space that Medicine for Nightmares inherited from Alley Cat Books. Check back next week for Part 2 with Josiah Luis Alderete. We recorded this podcast at in February 2025. Photography by /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35739140

Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9) 03/11/2025

Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9) In Part 2, we pick up with Ellen's life after she graduated from Washington University. Next up was a move to New York City. In the Big City, she consulted for a financial services company. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis of those years. She found the job market tight, so she got a job in Washington, DC, where she lived for four years. Ellen says that during her time in the nation's capital, she behaved like a New York snob, never really giving DC a chance. She'd go back to NYC just about every weekend. Some of her New York friends didn't realize that she'd moved, in fact. Her return to NYC four years later was perhaps overdue. Ellen spent the next four years in New York, and she still loves going back to visit friends there. But it was time for a move across the country. Ellen's then-boyfriend/now-husband got a job in San Francisco, a city she'd visited before that move. She hadn't spent significant time here and was somewhat reluctant to leave New York. But she saw what a good opportunity the move was, especially for her partner. She approached her move out West setting aside her own reservations, and decided to embrace her new hometown. She wasn't able to keep her East Coast job out here, so that meant looking for work. It was 2016, and Ellen was able to find folks here whom she'd known in New York, and that of course helped her transition to SF life. Ellen goes into some detail about the adjustments that New York City transplants make in San Francisco. Parks, brunches before noon, exercise, just being outside a lot. She also noticed people complaining about the weather a lot, which we do. We're spoiled AF, right? We take a short conversational detour to talk about what all attracts us and draws us to SF, including when we leave on vacation and come back. Then we pivot to talk about . Ellen lays the background for us, describing what folks who don't live here kept saying about her new city. She felt offended. "How dare you?" she often asked herself. She might not have had this term in mind, but Ellen was experiencing folks on the Doom Loop. But she felt differently about San Francisco. And so she set out to provide a service for people, a collection of resources meant to help experience all the good that is here. Like Storied: SF for me, she wanted to promote the things about living here that she finds joy in, to get word out so that others, too, might experience the wonder that's so woven into life here. We end the episode with Ellen's thoughts on our theme this season: Keep it local. Visit and follow them on for more info and inspiration. We recorded this episode at in February 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35494070

Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9) 03/04/2025

Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9) One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in. In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs , a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode. We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed. Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town, and so she found it hard to relate fully to folks around her. Her family was in North Carolina, and Alabama before Ellen was born, because her dad, who’s a doctor, went to school but also wanted to go to small towns in the US to run his practice. He did well in that sense, but his American-born Chinese kids not so much. The family moved to Taiwan when Ellen was 10, and that presented new challenges because of her decade in the US. Before that move, she had taken up violin and piano (“like a good Asian kid,” she says) and dabbled in visual art. She drew and did some painting at home and at school, back when schools had art classes. She kept that going in Taiwan. But she experienced culture shock just the same. Remember: She arrived when she was 10, and so she spent those very formative early teen years in a familiar but also not familiar part of the world. Other kids at the American school she attended were mostly relatable. But Taiwanese folks who’d never left their homeland presented some friction for folks like Ellen. When it came time to choose a college, her parents encouraged her to do a pre-med program, but left room for that track not to stick with their daughter. She chose Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and ended up minoring in Visual Communication. We go on a short sidebar here about Ellen’s older sister, Helen. Despite the age difference and their varied experiences back in Taiwan, the two have always been close. [There’s a brief pause in the recording at this point. We relocated to the backyard at Ocean Ale House when the band began to play.] Nowadays, in hindsight and with some life lived between then and now, Ellen has come to appreciate her ancestral homeland. She says it was never a question whether to come back to the US for college. A counselor helped her choose a school that was both good for pre-med and had a solid art program. She chose Washington University sight-unseen. She did pre-med, but only for the first two years. Then she switched, with her sister’s encouragement, to business with a vis-com minor. Ellen graduated in four years and set off for the East Coast. Check back next week for Part 2 and Ellen’s move to San Francisco. We recorded this episode at in February 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35417160

Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8) 02/25/2025

Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8) In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco. The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact. As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an understatement. "It's the closest I've ever come to literally shitting my pants." Nato then does a rendition of his first joke that night. Audible growls are heard in our recording. Nevertheless, he did a few more open-mics at that spot in Seattle. He liked it enough. But after graduating from college and moving back to The City, he dedicated his life to being a union organizer. As a history student at Reed, he'd written a thesis about the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco in the 1870s. Nato then explains how the series Warrior is based on this time in SF. There's bits in the story about the incredibly racist and anti-union human for which Kearny Street is sometimes attributed to. That thesis is what got Nato interested in doing labor work. He resumed going to comedy shows, but not getting up on stage. Around the time he turned 30, he found himself laboring over the jokes he'd tell at all the weddings he'd go to. He was also asked to give talks at labor conferences, which doubled as canvasses for Nato to deliver more of his own comedy material. All of these comedic sprinklings led him back to the stage. His first regular spot back in SF was the BrainWash (RIP) on Folsom Street. Once again, the jokes bombed, though his pants fared better this go-round. He offers up another telling of a joke from that era of his. You've been warned. As he left the BrainWash one of those nights, local comedy legend Tony Sparks asked him to come back the next week, and he did. Eventually, Nato invited his friends to come see him perform. He'd moved back to San Francisco in 1997 to do union organizing, as we've mentioned. Two years before that, John Sweeney had been elected president of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney pushed to "organize the unorganized" and bring young people into the labor movement. Nato was part of this wave. He got a job at Noah's Bagels and organized a union there. He went to anything he heard about that interested him. He and his then-girlfriend/now wife would attend talks and rallies together. Nato would sometimes find himself that only ally at, say, LGBTQIA union meetings. This was well before we even used words like "ally." Nato was approached to organize workers at the Real Foods on 24th Street. Then the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was beginning to organize bike and car messengers in San Francisco. Nato worked as a car messenger, which he did for three years, and helped organize his coworkers. We go on a short sidebar about bike messenger culture in The City in the late-Nineties. It was huge. A few moves from union to union here and there, and Nato found himself raising money and helping to open a low-wage workers' center for young and immigrant folks in the service industry. That center is still around today. The second time Nato left San Francisco was in 2012. This flight took him to New York City, where he relocated to write for his friend W. Kamau Bell's first TV show, Totally Biased. As Nato puts it, he "got the chance to be a Jewish comedy writer living in Brooklyn for six months." Then, in 2018, he and his family moved to Havana, Cuba, for six months while his wife worked on her PhD research. Nato says that the only time he was tempted to relocate permanently was during his time in NYC. His kids liked it there. They looked at different neighborhoods and even schools. But Nato wasn't all that happy in New York. The experience took a toll on his friendship with Kamau (they've since moved on and are tight once again). And then the show got canceled. The universe had spoken. That center he'd helped to found back in San Francisco had passed the nation's first minimum-wage municipal law. In 2006, they helped pass paid sick days here in The City. Nato had left the organization just before that to join the California Nurses' Association (CNA). Through that org, he was part of the ultimately successful effort to keep St. Luke's hospital open. It was after his time with the CNA, 2011 or so, that Nato returned to doing stand-up. He recorded his first comedy album and went on his first comedy tour (with Kamau). In 2014, he returned to organized labor, joining Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1021. He works there today, as head of collective bargaining. We return to comedy and Nato lists off some more folks doing open-mics with him a decade or so ago who've moved on to various levels of fame and recognition—Ali Wong, Chris Garcia, Shang Wang, Kevin Camia, Moshe Kasher, and Brent Weinbach, to name a few. Nato takes us on yet another sidebar, but it's a good one. It's all about the "Punchline Pipeline," the system by which local comics can test their chops for a while until they're ready (or not) to move on to bigger and better things. It took Nato three years to work up to the level of paid host at The Punchline. Around 2006, to go back, he and Kamau started doing political comedy shows together. This was during the George W. Bush years, when "leftist," "liberal" comedy was big. Then Obama got elected and that type of comedy cooled off considerably. Nato started to host shows at The Make-Out Room monthly. He credits that stint as the time that he "figured it out." Nato still does stand-up, though not with the intensity with which he performed in his Thirties. Today, he contributes regularly to . He works with Francesca Fiorintini and her show. He's also trying to find time to write a book—a funny take on union organizing. And he's kicking around the idea of another comedy album, which would be his third. Follow Nato on and . His two albums are available to stream or buy on . We end the podcast with Nato's thoughts on our theme this season: Keep It Local. We recorded this episode at Nato's home on Bernal Hill in January 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35414905

Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8) 02/18/2025

Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8) Nato Green started hanging out at San Francisco comedy clubs when he was in eighth grade. Nato’s parents met when they both still lived in the suburbs of Chicago. They got married in 1968 and moved to San Francisco soon after that. Nato says that they “were in the counter-culture, but bad at it.” What he means by that is they didn’t take their subversive lifestyles all the way like many of their peers did. But they were definitely left-leaning folks. They settled in Noe Valley, which was quite a different neighborhood back then. It was much more working-class than it is today. Think: blue-collar Irish- and Italian-American families. They had their first kid, Nato, and five years later, their second, his younger brother. When Nato was in middle school, his parents split up. He went with his dad to live at 22nd Street and Dolores, and then up to Bernal Hill. He split time between there and his mom’s house in Noe Valley. Nato is quick to point out that Bernal Heights was also very different back then. There were even unpaved roads on the hill when he was a kid in the Seventies. Today, Nato uses history and some pop-culture references to date his own memories here in San Francisco. He remembers things like the Mosone/Milk murders and ensuing “White Night” riots, to name just one. The Forty-Niners’ string of Super Bowl wins in the Eighties are another. Nato admits that he wasn’t the best big brother. He lists off some of the SF schools he attended—Rooftop Elementary, MLK Middle School, and Lick-Wilmerding High School, where he went on a scholarship. His dad worked to the SFUSD for 35 years and worked on desegregation, among other things. He also taught in SF public schools. Nato says he was a “sensitive, depressed kid.” He read a lot, especially comic books. He graduated from high school in 1993, when the local music scene was overtaken by thrash/funk. Bands of that genre were plenty. Nato went to those shows, where he was able to, anyway. He wasn’t yet 21. The first indie comic book store in The City was on 23rd Street in the Mission—The SF Comic Company, and two doors down was Scott’s Comics and Cards. Nato became a Scott’s regular. Others who hung out there a lot became his buddies. The SF band Limbomaniacs lived next to Scott’s. Nato goes on a sidebar here about how bands in the thrash/funk scene never really blew up, mostly owing to what a uniquely live experience the music was. In 1990, when the Niners won the Super Bowl in a blowout, the Limbomanics played with guitar amps at the windows of their Victorian on 23rd Street, facing out. As Nato tells it, skater kids poured out of that house, and other neighborhood kids flocked to the scene. A mosh pit soon emerged, of course, on the asphalt. Nato goes on another quick sidebar here about all the different neighborhoods and scenes interacting on a regular basis. At least when he grew up, they did. Nato’s main modes of transportation in San Francisco were his feet and Muni. The main bus lines were the 24, the 49, and the 67. His high school was on Ocean Avenue, but he mostly hung out in the Mission. One of his good friends lived in Lower Haight and had a car, so Nato would sometimes take Muni over there. That buddy with a car would also swing by and pick up Nato and his friends. They’d often go to the west side of town and hang out in coffeeshops. Nato rattles off several of those shops, also letting us what occupies those spaces today—Farley’s (still there), Higher Grounds in Glen Park (still there), Higher Grounds in The Mission (closed), Café Macondo (Gestalt today), Blue Danube (still there), and the Horse Shoe (empty today). There’s another sidebar about Jello Biafra. Nato says, “Don’t meet your heroes.” As mentioned up top, he started hanging out at comedy clubs in The City when he was in eighth grade. There was a show on KQED called Comedy Tonight that featured local comics. Originally, the show was shot at Wolfgang’s (now Cobb’s), but it later moved to Great American Music Hall. Alex Bennet was on Live 105 in the morning and Comedy in the Park was drawing 50,000 people to the Polo Fields. There were five seven-nights-a-week clubs in SF, and at least five more around the Bay. People made a living as regional headliners. Around this time, Nato’s eighth grade science teacher’s roommate was the doorman at Cobb’s. Word got around to that guy that a kid was into comedy, and so he started taking him to that club. He saw comedians such as Greg Proops, Dana Gould, Paula Poundstone, Mark Pitta, Johnny Steele, Will Durst, Greg Behrendt, and Margaret Cho. He watched these folks, some of them anyway, become headliners. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode on Nato Green. We recorded this episode at Nato’s home on Bernal Hill in January 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35316045

Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 2 (S7E7) 02/11/2025

Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 2 (S7E7) Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Barbara had just really become settled in San Francisco and was in what would become a decades-long process of learning the place (I can totally relate, btw). She hung out in the Castro more than the Mission, which in those days was a lesbian mecca. Café Flore (nowadays known as ) was a favorite. Eventually, though, Barbara moved to the Mission. The company she had been contracting with hired her and that provided the security she needed. She called an apartment at 19th Street and Dolores, across from Dolores Park, home. She's quick to point out how different the neighborhood was back then. "You wouldn't wanna walk through that park at certain times of the night," she says. By the time Dolores Park Café and Bi-Rite opened and that area slowly gentrified, Barbara and her partner moved west to the Castro. They lived there for a few years before finally relocating to The Bayview, the neighborhood Barbara has called home since 1999. Barbara's foray into winemaking started, as many things do, as a hobby. A coworker's husband was making wine at home with friends, and he asked her why, as an Italian-American, she had never tried it. It was a "challenge accepted"-type of moment. 1997 was the first year Barbara made wine. That coworker's husband served as her mentor for about two years. Having grown up out east, part of her winemaking education involved learning to enjoy good California wines. The first wine she made was the first one she fell in love with: Zinfandel. The basement of her apartment on Dolores was a perfectly moldy, dank, dark space for making wine. They began with garbage-can-size containers of juice, and she and a friend took turns caring for the fermentation. They'd have bottling parties with their partners. They split the haul—six cases each. The next year, that friend bailed on her, and Barbara was solo. The year after that, 1999, she found a new grower. It was an all-Zin affair until 2009, when she added a Cabernet Sauvignon to her repertoire. For the first decade or so, the wine was shared with friends, at dinners, at parties, that sort of thing. Her friends loved her wine, but she wondered whether they were just being polite. Then opportunities arose for folks in The Bayview but outside of her circle of friends to try her wine. Art 94124 Gallery was one such opportunity. Barbara served wine at an art opening there and got excellent feedback. She'd already secured a permit for making wine at her home in The Bayview. We go into some depth discussing the permit process. After that, Barbara bumped her volume up to half a ton. She took her wines to a weekly market outside the , now known as the Ruth Williams Opera House. It was early in the time of pop-ups, 2012 or so, but that's what it was. The convened every Thursday at the opera house from 6 to 9 p.m. But when the opera house underwent renovations and the market moved to Pier 70, in Barbara's words, things "went downhill." Fewer people were willing or able to make the trek to The Bay. Eventually, it fizzled. But through that group, Barbara had met a baker. In 2015, the two decided to open up in the space where Gratta is today. At first, the wine bar was in back (where it still is today), but the front was her business partner's bakery. Today, that space is an Italian goods retail shop that Barbara runs. Seven years later, the bakery moved out. In 2017, Barbara had taken over the space just next door to the south, the idea being that it could serve as her winery. They moved everything from the garage in her home to the space where it is today (also the space where we recorded). Today, comprises a wine bar in back, groceries and a deli up front, and winery next door. They're located at 2022 Lane Street/5273 Third Street. And they're open Tuesday–Thursday 3 p.m.–9 p.m. and Friday–Saturday 12 p.m.–10 p.m. Barbara hopes to have the winery fully opened by this spring. Follow for updates. We end the podcast with Barbara's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local. Photography by We recorded this podcast at the Gratta Wines winery on Third Street in the Bayview in December 2024. /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35232380

Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 1 (S7E7) 02/04/2025

Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 1 (S7E7) One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari. In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners" (yum!). These involved aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as the older generation. Barbara and her immediate family lived upstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Because of this set-up, she says it was more like one big family. And every week culminated on Sundays, with as many as 30 people coming in and out of these get-togethers. The sauce was on the stove starting early in the morning. And if more people came, it simply meant more pasta. If, like me, you're thinking of the "Fishes" episode of The Bear, you're not far off. Saturdays were spent going "up the street," which meant shopping at places like Sears or Macy's. Maybe they'd stop at White Plains Diner for lunch. But they always ended up back at her grandmother's house for cake and coffee. Her mom's youngest brother went to school with Barbara's dad's youngest sister. They came from different towns, but all ran in the same circles. And thanks to this, as well as a tight-knit Italian-American community in the area, her parents met. They got married in 1958 and had their first kid, a son, in 1959. Then Barbara was born in 1960. The family is Catholic, but that manifested more in traditions than any religious sense. They went to church on big holidays, and Barbara shares a story about her grandmother giving her money for the Easter Sunday collection. But she and her cousins pocketed the money and spent the service on the church roof. After she was confirmed, around eighth grade, her parents gave her the choice whether to keep going or not. Barbara chose to hang up her career with Catholicism at that point. By the time Barbara was in high school, her immediate family moved to Florida, in the Sarasota area. She says it was a hard time for her, being torn from all the people and places she knew. There wasn't a lot of Italian culture in her new home. Her mom searched for ingredients to make the food she was accustomed to. She spotted a sausage truck one day and followed it. Only through this was she able to maintain some semblance of her cultural past. Barbara stuck around after high school down in Florida. She got a degree in physical therapy and worked for about 10 years on the west coast of the state. Still, neither she nor her two brothers (one older, one younger) loved it there. Barbara left Florida around 1989 or 1990 for California. Her first visit, before she moved to San Francisco, was a vacation with a coworker in the mid-Eighties. They stayed in a hotel on Van Ness near The Bay. They did what tourists do—Fisherman's Wharf, drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, that sort of thing—and didn't travel to any SF neighborhoods. The visit involved a quick drive down to Monterey to see a former coworker of theirs. The entire trip left her wanting to visit again someday. When the time came to move here, her job set her up with a place to live for a few months. Barbara kept renewing these contracts every three months. She started in the southwest corner of The City, within walking distance of Joe's of Westlake in Daly City. We end Part 1 with stories of Barbara's early friends in SF showing her around The City. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of my episode with Barbara Gratta. We recorded this podcast at in the Bayview in December 2024. Photography by /episode/index/show/storiedsf/id/35133480

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