Storied: San Francisco

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

Listen in as I talk all things off-season and the upcoming eighth season of Storied. Topics include: The 2025 Listener Survey, which is up until 9/1/25. Take the survey and you could win a Storied: SF zip hoodie! The “Every Kinda People” art show at Mini Bar. Opening night is 9/4/25. What’s new about the podcast? New music by Otis McDonald, shorter episodes, an even sharper focus on artists, activists, and working people I share my thoughts on these hella messed-up times we’ve all been enduring and how this project flies in the face of everything terrible. Next week’s Episode 1 with Marga Gomez The second and third episodes, one with an Every Kinda People artist and the other with the woman foreperson of the Golden Gate Bridge iron workers.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Carolyn and I talk about making decisions and intentionality vs. circumstance, need, and necessity. We then go on to talk more about Carolyn’s lifelong love of sports. She shares the story of her maternal grandmother coming from The Philippines to live with them and how they’d watch games together. It was the days when, in much of the country, if you wanted to watch Major League Baseball, it was all Atlanta Braves, all the time (thanks to TBS, of course). Carolyn became a Braves fan, especially a fan of Dale Murphy. She watched football, too. She didn’t watch the Giants on TV much, because every game wasn’t televised in those days. But she could easily hop on Muni to see a game at Candlestick Park. Her dad often picked them up, showing up at the ballpark around the seventh inning, getting in free, and watching the end of the game with Carolyn and her friends and/or sisters. We go on a short sidebar about bundling up in San Francisco—at Candlestick and if you just wanted to go to the beach. In addition to Candlestick, she went to Warriors games a bit and also various sporting events at Cow Palace. Her dad learned how to bowl and would take his kids with him. We fast-forward a bit to hear about Carolyn’s years in high school, when she went to the all-girl school Mercy High (which is now closed). Later, she took the same bus, the 29, to SF State that she had taken to Mercy. State was the only college she applied to. We talk a little about her decision not to leave San Francisco for school. In high school, she had decided that she wanted to be a sports writer. In fact, she aimed to become the first woman anchor at ESPN. We rewind a bit to talk about some of the journalism Carolyn did in high school. She had her own column in the school paper called “Off the Bench.” She shares a fun story of calling the Braves’ front office to arrange for an interview with her favorite player—Murphy—the next time Atlanta rolled into town. In her third semester at SF State, Carolyn got pregnant. Around this time, she also took her first Asian-American Studies class, something that kicked in for her and stays with her to this day. She dove in head-first. I ask Carolyn whether and how much of that history her parents were aware of. She says that, for them, much of it was just things going on in their lives in the city they came to—things like the strike at SF State or the demonstrations at the I-Hotel in Manilatown. Learning more and more about the history of her people in the US lead Carolyn to confront her dad. “Why did you bring us here?” she’d ask. She ended up raising her first child, a mixed-race kid, as a single parent around this time in her life. She had figured that her son’s dad would bring the kid the Blackness in his life, and she’d bring the Filipino-ness. Her own ideas of how best to raise the kid had to evolve, and they did, she says. She eventually returned to State and graduated. She lived in South City for a hot minute, held three jobs, and raised her son. She never felt that she couldn’t leave The Bay. It was more, “Why would I?” Then, because if you know Carolyn Sideco, well, you know … then we talk about New Orleans. New Orleans is why and how Carolyn came into my life. My wife is borderline obsessed with The Crescent City. I’d been there some earlier in my life, growing up not too far away and having some Louisiana relatives. Erin and I spent three weeks in fall 2022 in a sublet in Bywater, Ninth Ward. That NOLA fever caught on for me then, and I’m hooked. Back home sometime after that, Carolyn came across Erin’s radar. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who seems to love New Orleans as much as I do and she has a house there!” Erin would tell me. In 2024, at a vegan Filipina pop-up at Victory Hall, we finally met this enigmatic woman. We ended up spending Mardi Gras this year at Carolyn’s house in New Orleans—Kapwa Blue. “New Orleans has been calling me for about 20 years,” Carolyn says. One of her younger sisters lived there awhile. Her oldest son served in AmeriCorps there for three years and kept living in New Orleans four more. Carolyn and other members of her family visited often. This was around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit and devastated Southern Louisiana. A little more than a decade ago, Carolyn learned of the historical markers in the area that told the stories of Filipinos being the first Asians to settle in that part of the world. (Longtime listeners of Storied: SF might recall that Brenda Buenviaje hails from just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.) As Carolyn learned more and more of the Filipino history in the region, that calling started to make more and more sense. Three years ago or so, her oldest son got married in New Orleans. That visit told Carolyn that she, too, could live there. Her husband devised a plan, and with some of Carolyn’s cousins, they bought a house in the Musician’s Village part of town, near the Ninth Ward—the aforementioned Kapwa Blue. They intended to bring that same sense of community her parents found and participated in back in San Francisco all those decades ago to their new neighborhood New Orleans. In addition to the house, Carolyn helped found tours of Filipino history in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Find them Bayou Barkada Instagram at @bayoubarkada Back in The City these days, Carolyn has her own sports consultancy called Coaching Kapwa (IG). “I call myself ‘Your sports relationship coach,’” she says. This means that she provides comfort and advice to anyone interacting with any of the various sports ecosystems. She aims to apply the idea of kapwa to an otherwise competition-driven sports landscape. We end the podcast (and the season) with Carolyn’s interpretation of the theme of Storied: San Francisco, Season 7: Keep it local. She shares what that idea means for her here as well as how it pertains to her time in New Orleans. We’ll be taking August off as far as new episodes go. I’ll be busy putting together the first episodes of Season 8 and getting ready for the season launch party/art opening. “Every Kinda People” kicks off at Mini Bar on Sept. 4. That’s also the theme of the next 20 or so episodes of this show. As always, thank you deeply and sincerely for listening/reading/sharing/liking/commenting/DMing/emailing/subscribing/rating/showing up and really any type of interaction you do with this passion project of mine. If you’re not already, please sign up for our monthly newsletter over on the About page. See you in September!

Carolyn Sideco’s story begins in The Philippines. Her dad, Tony Sideco, was born on the island of Cebu in 1938. Her mom, Linda, was born in Paniqui in 1942. By the time Carolyn’s mom was born, the Japanese occupied The Philippines. Young Tony worked for the electric company, which sent him to Paniqui. He soon met his wife-to-be there when he boarded at Carolyn’s grandmother’s house. It wasn’t an overnight romance. The way Tony (who joined his wife in the room with me and Carolyn as we recorded) tells it, he had eyed Linda for so long that he went cross-eyed. Linda was her parents’ first daughter, and she came after five older brothers. So she was always afforded chaperones. After Linda, her parents had three more girls. One of those girls, Carolyn’s aunt, lives next-door to where we recorded, a tradition of intergenerationality the family carried with them when they migrated to the US. Tony came to the United States first in the late Sixties, shortly after Carolyn and her twin sister were born. His migration was motivated by the so-called “American dream.” Carolyn’s version is different, though. She thinks it had more to do with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which effectively did away with nationality quotas. By the time Tony arrived, several members of both his and his wife’s family were already here, many of them in the Outer Sunset. When baby Carolyn, her sister, and their mom arrived, they first lived on 45th Avenue in The Sunset with her aunt and uncle. Then the family moved to 39th Avenue to be on their own. This was the house that Carolyn grew up in, and the one we recorded this podcast in. A community of Paniquieños already existed all around them. In hindsight, Carolyn thinks it was a lot easier for folks like her parents to move halfway around the world because they landed, in essence, in an expat community. Her mom didn’t have to learn English so urgently when she arrived, to cite just one example. Several of those families are still around, spread around the North Peninsula. Some also still live in San Francisco, like Carolyn. Carolyn talks about various aspects of her life that now, in hindsight as an adult, meant she rarely felt different from those around her. She says that in her adult life, meeting folks her parents’ age who didn’t have the same accent as her parents really opened her eyes. Today, Carolyn is the president of Paniquieñans USA, an organization as old as she is. Then we get back to Carolyn’s personal story. Her and her twin, Rosalyn, joined their mom to go to the US when they were two. She shares a cute story of how their mom loved a party so much that she would celebrate their birthday every second day of the month (their birthday is Feb. 2). Because of this, Carolyn grew up thinking that birthdays happen every month. She was five when her family moved out of her uncle and aunt’s place on 45th and into their childhood home on 39th Avenue, and Carolyn remembers it well. We talk briefly about the real estate agent who sold them the house and how little they paid (“$24,000,” Tony Sideco, who was in the room with us that day, chimes in—that’s the equivalent of roughly $173K today). Linda Sideco found work at Little Sisters of the Poor Convalescent Home on Lake Street, where Carolyn would sometimes visit her. Both of Carolyn’s parents worked graveyard shifts. The young couple were able to save for a year for the down payment on their new home. We take a sidebar for Carolyn to talk about the difference in how service and healthcare work are valued in The Philippines vs. how they’re valued in the US. Carolyn then shares a story of how, when she was in the fourth grade, she and her twin sister started going to a new school in their neighborhood. Prior to this, they were bussed. At her new school, they asked Carolyn if she wanted to play volleyball. But to join the team, she needed to pay five dollars. She ran four blocks home to ask her mom for the money, but turns out she wouldn’t give it to young Carolyn, who was so upset that she cried until her mom relented. She did well at volleyball and even made friends through her new sport. She felt so good about it all that she thought, ‘This is why dad brought us here.’ It was the beginning of what would become a lifelong involvement with sports. We end Part 1 with Carolyn’s foray into many different sports and all the women along the way who inspired her. Check back next week for Part 2 and the official last episode of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco. We recorded this podcast at Carolyn’s childhood home in The Sunset in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Dregs shares the story of the day he started doing graffiti. It was also when he began experimenting with rapping. Dregs talks about all the “cool shit in The City” back then, the early 2000s. From sports and music to the aforementioned underworld of San Francisco, SF was lit. It was a time when you could simply step outside your home and find something or someone or some people. You could take a random Muni ride and let stuff happen. And it happened all over town, with creativity pouring out of so many corners. For Dregs, tagging happened first. He started hanging out more in The Sunset, which was quieter than his own hood. He and his buddies would tag, hang out in the park with their boomboxes, drink 40s, and freestyle. One of those buddies had a computer audio-editing program and a cheap mic (RIP Radio Shack). That friend sent him a track over AIM and it blew young Dregs away. Then he learned that two other guys wanted to battle. Dregs hopped on a bus to Lawton Park to join in. It was his first rap battle. The crew that battled that day ended up uniting and making more and more music together. They formed a tagging crew called GMC (Gas Mask Colony), which didn’t last long as as a tagging crew, but they kept the name for their rap group. But the group splintered. As mentioned, Dregs ended up at ISA in Potrero. He got into a DJ program and honed his skills. Soon, it was time to get into a studio to lay down some tracks. They recorded their first song and people liked it. The crew of four included several different ethnicities and neighborhoods across San Francisco, so they had widespread reach. We take a sidebar to discuss how Dregs got his name. It’s a story that involves the movie Scarface. Because of time, I ask Dregs to walk us quickly through the years between getting underway with hip-hop and starting his show, History of The Bay. He did music with his GMC posse as well as some solo projects. Days of hanging out and drinking 40s gave way to adult-life realities—jobs and such. They hadn’t figured out a way to make money off their art. Dregs went to City College and then spent two years at UC Riverside. He came back and worked as a youth counselor in the Tenderloin. At another job in TL, a woman in supportive housing where Dregs worked had a psychotic breakdown. He was the only employee around, and even though he was about to leave for the day, he helped her out. The next day, a boss type thanked Dregs, but told him he’d never get properly compensated for what he did until or unless he had a bachelor’s degree. And so he enrolled at SF State. He was in his late-twenties at this point, and did better in school than he had ever done. He was a straight-A student, in fact. He took a heavy courseload. It was the first time he’d had Black teachers. One of them advised Dregs to go to graduate school. He looked through the graduate-level programs available and decided that law was his best fit. And so off he went, to law school in Davis. He did well at this level, also. He graduated, passed the California bar, and got hired by a firm. He was making good money and thought about saying good-bye to making music. But then the folks he worked with at the law firm convinced him not to. One of the first cuts he did in that era was a collaboration with Andre Nikatina called “Fog Mode.” When the song dropped, it was the pandemic. Dregs had been doing his law work from home. It “sucked,” he tells me. But the track took on a life of its own. He realized amid it all that it was time to go for it with his art. One of the first steps was to get his social media ramped up. Some people suggested TikTok, but Dregs wasn’t sure what content to throw up on that app. Others said, “Talk about you, talk about your interests.” He looked around and realized that no one out there was really talking about the SF/Bay hip-hop Dregs grew up on, or the prolific taggers he ran with. Around this time, in December 2021, his dad passed away. In the early stages of his grief, Dregs figured it was once again time to quit art and turn his energy and attention to taking care of his mom. But then something happened, something that some of us who’ve experienced loss can possibly relate to. In March 2022, Dregs launched History of The Bay on TikTok. With his music and social media popping, his law work took a back seat. Folks in his firm took notice and laid Dregs off. It was for the best. Find Dregs online at his website or on social media @dregs_one. Get History of The Bay on any podcast app. We end the podcast with Dregs’ take on our theme this season—keep it local.

Listen in as I chat with Gaelan McKeown (director of the SF Art Book Fair) and Lisa Ellsworth (director of Development and Strategy at Minnesota Street Project Foundation) as talk all things 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair. We recorded this podcast at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in The Dog Patch in June 2025.

Dregs One is a lot of things, including a podcast host. In this episode, meet and get to know this prolific AF graffiti writer, hip-hop artist, and Bay historian. Dregs starts us off with the story of his parents. His paternal grandmother was abandoned as a child. Her mother, a Black woman, was raped by a white doctor. She moved to Chicago, where she met Dregs’ grandfather, who was from Jamaica and, as Dregs puts, was a player. He, too, left the family, abandoning his grandmother after his dad was born. She tried ways of getting help to raise her son (Dregs’ dad, who was 13), but ended up dropping him at an orphanage. Dregs’ dad experienced racism in the Catholic orphanage in Chicago where he spent his teen years. Education helped him emerge from that darkness, though. He eventually became a police officer in Chicago, but left that job after experiencing more racism and rampant corruption. After that, his dad went on a spiritual quest that landed him in San Francisco. His parents met in The City, in fact, but we need to share Dregs’ mom story. Her family was from Massachusetts. Her dad got into trouble when he was young, but managed to become a chemist. He helped develop the chemical process that went into Polaroid film, in fact. He later served in the Korean War before becoming an anti-war activist. He hosted the Boston Black Panthers in his home, in fact. His mom mostly rejected her white culture, owing to many things, including alcoholism. She hung out with Black folks and listened to Black music. She’d be one of or the only white folks in these circles. She went on her own spiritual journey that also ended up here. It was the Eighties in San Francisco when his parents met. Dregs is their only child, though he has some step-siblings through his dad. He says that despite his parents’ turbulent relationship, they provided a nice environment for him to grow up in. Because both parents worked, and because he was effectively an only child, Dregs spent a lot of time alone when he was young. His dad got a master’s degree and started counseling AIDS patients in The Castro. His mom worked a pediatric intensive care nurse. Though Dregs and I were both young at the time, we go on a sidebar to talk about how devastating the AIDS epidemic must’ve been. Dregs was born in the late-Eighties and did most of his growing up in the Nineties and 2000s in the Lakeview. Make no mistake, he says—it was the hood. Although he lived on “the best block of the worst street,” he saw a lot as a kid. His mom often got him out of their neighborhood, boarding the nearby M train to go downtown or to Golden Gate Park. His dad wasn’t around a lot, so Dregs spent a lot of time hanging out with his mom. They went to The Mission, Chinatown, The Sunset, all over, really. Around fifth grade or so, when he started riding Muni solo, Dregs also got into comic books. He read a lot. He drew a lot. He played a little bit of sports, mostly pick-up basketball. As a born-and-raised San Franciscan, Dregs rattles off the schools he went to—Jose Ortega, Lakeshore Elementary, A.P. Giannini, and Lincoln. But when Dregs got into some trouble in high school, he was taken out and put back in. It was a turbulent period. He eventually graduated from International Studies Academy (ISA) in Potrero Hill. One of the adults’ issues with young Dregs was his graffiti writing. For him, it was a natural extension of drawing. He remembered specific graffiti from roll-downs on Market Street he spotted when he was young. He says he was always attracted to the SF underworld. “It was everywhere you went.” Going back to those Muni trips around town with his mom, he’d look out the windows when they went through the tunnels and see all the graffiti, good art, stuff that he later learned that made SF graffiti well-regarded worldwide. While at A.P. Giannini, a friend of his was a tagger. In ninth grade, Dregs broke his fingers and had a cast. One friend tagged his cast, and it dawned on Dregs—he, too, could have a tag. After his first tagging adventure, Dregs ended up at his friend’s house. The guy had two Technics turntables. He was in ninth grade, but his friend was already DJing. Among the music in his buddy’s rotation was some local artists. “Whoa, this is San Francisco?” young Dregs asked. His mind was blown and his world was opening up. Check back next week for Part 2 with Dregs One. And look for a bonus episode on the San Francisco Art Book Fair later this week. We recorded this podcast in the Inner Richmond in June 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira

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 The Social Study, 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 The Village Well. 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 @villagewellparenting. 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 The Social Study in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as Megan Rohrer and I reconnect after nearly four years to talk all about their new book, San Francisco’s Transgender District. Look for it on Arcadia Publishing in August at your local bookstore. We recorded this bonus episode outside the front door of the Golden Gate Theater in the Transgender District in June 2025.

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 The Social Study, where we recorded this episode and where my wife, Erin Lim, 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 The Village Well Parenting. 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 Megan Rohrer 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 The Social Study in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

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 podcast on Katie and TLM. 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 comptonscafeteriariot.com. And follow the production on Instagram @comptonscafeteriariot. We recorded this episode in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play space in the Tenderloin in May 2025. Photography by Mason J.

I joined Erin and Ange of Bitch Talk Podcast for another sit-down with Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen to talk all things Frameline49. If it weren’t obvious from that moniker, this year’s is the 49th annual Frameline film festival, the largest and longest-running LGBTQIA fest in the world. After listening to this bonus episode, please browse the Frameline49 program, buy tickets, get your butt in a theater seat, and let’s continue to uplift the LGBTQIA community through art! We recorded this bonus episode at the Frameline offices in South of Marked in June 2025.

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 Oaksterdam University. 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 The Stud. 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 Pop-up Drag Queen, 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 Vanguard (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 here. 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

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 San Francisco Drag Story Hour 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/Panda Dulce on Instagram and her Kyle Casey Chu website. We recorded this bonus episode during SFFILM fest in The Presidio in April 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

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 Emmy Kaplan 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 Check Please! Bay Area 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

Welcome to this bonus episode about Homeless Children’s Network (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 HCN website 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 United Playaz 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 HCN’s website to learn more. Follow them on social media @hcnkidssf. We recorded this episode at Homeless Children’s Network offices in The Fillmore in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

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—Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. 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 Emmy Kaplan, 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 KQED’s Check Please! Bay Area 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, Mike Irish 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

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 “Keep It Local” 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

Misstencil was born on a mountain in China. In this episode, we meet artist Misstencil and she shares the story of her life. Before we get to that, be sure to RSVP to our Keep It Local show 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

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 Hunt and Gather 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 415 Zine 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 Madrone Art Bar, 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.