Storied: San Francisco

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet Josiah Luis Alderete 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 City Lights Bookstore 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 Tongo Eisen-Martin. 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, Speaking Axolotl, 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, Kate Razo. 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 Medicine for Nightmares 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 Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery in February 2025. Photography by Mason J.

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 Ask Me SF. 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 Ask Me SF and follow them on Instagram for more info and inspiration. We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira

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 Ask Me SF, 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 Ocean Ale House in February 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira

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...

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...

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 Fisch and Flore) 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 Bayview Opera House, 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 Bayview Underground Food Scene 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, Gratta Wines and Market 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...

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 Gratta Wines 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 Gratta Wines in the Bayview in December 2024. Photography by Dan Hernandez

It's been a damn year, y'all. In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show Vandor Hill, owner and creator of Whack Donuts. His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead. This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event: 5x5 crewbreaking battle$1,000donutsline dancingfree giveaways Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram for more info. And if you're able to, please donate to help offset some of the costs of putting on this event. We'll see you there! ​We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in January 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We'd just learned of the call Ashley received from The Fillmore while she was working in Seattle. She'd visited San Francisco once to visit a cousin, but that stay lasted a mere 48 hours. She had one friend here at the time. Up in Seattle, the shows she helped produce were huge acts like Beyoncé and Rihanna. What especially excited Ashley about this opportunity at The Fillmore was the potential to work on smaller shows with groups and people more on their way up, so to speak. For fans and showgoers, it was more about music discovery, as she puts it. It was June 2012. Ashley's move to San Francisco was more or less sight-unseen. The City immediately felt like a "bigger" place for her, its music ... just a bigger city all-around. It was big, "but not that big." She landed in the Mission, moving in with a friend of that one friend she had in SF. Ashley lived at 24th and Potrero for nine years, until just three years ago. We shift to talk about Ashley's time at The Fillmore. She shares conversations among staff there about the history of the place and placing that at the forefront. The venue partnered with the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation this past fall to reintroduce the public to the place and its long history, as well as really getting Bill Graham's story out there. Ashley then shares that life story of Bill Graham. It was Graham who put The Fillmore on the map. His first show there was in December 1965. He had fled the Holocaust as a kid, went with family to New York, then ended up in San Francisco. He wanted to be an actor and found the San Francisco Mime Troupe. That first show at The Fillmore was a benefit for the Mime Troupe, in fact. The place had been a dance hall and a roller rink previously. Graham might have had a hunch, but when he took over putting on music shows, it was right at an inflection point for rock music in The City. Bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin frequently played there. Bill Graham had a gift for pairing musicians from different genres together in such a way that shows attracted different groups of people. Ashley points out, though, that first and foremost, Bill was a businessman. He followed and created opportunities to make money. A few years after taking over at Fillmore and Geary, he opened The Fillmore West at Van Ness and Market. There's a fun tidbit about Bill Graham appearing on David Letterman back in the Eighties—which just speaks to how big a personality he'd become. Our conversation then shifts to two questions I had for Ashley. I wanted her to talk about the red apples that are always found in a bucket at the top of the stairs when you enter The Fillmore. That, and the posters handed out to showgoers on their way out of sold-out events. No one really knows how the apples got started, she says. There are versions of the story. One holds that Bill Graham gave them out as a simple gesture of hospitality. Another was that putting a little food in your belly after a night out can't hurt anything. A rather elaborate telling is that, as part of an exhibit on Bill Graham at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, someone who'd been in France with him when they were kids shared the story of sneaking out at night to go to an apple orchard. As for the posters, Ashley talks about their origins, when they were simply advertisements for shows at The Fillmore. The posters eventually took on a life of their own, though—for many of the early ones, the style of lettering worked better as a memento than an ad. It almost seems quaint at this point that the posters were anything but keepsakes. I ask Ashley what it's like to now have her name appear on these iconic pieces of art (in her role as art director). "It's strange ... but cool." She speaks to how much work goes into each poster. And then Ashley talks about the logistics of making posters for. "At this point, we have a pretty good idea of which...

Ashley Graham will be the first tell you, "There's no relation (to Bill Graham)." In Part 1 of this episode, meet Ashley. Today, she holds the titles of marketing manager and art director at The Fillmore, a San Francisco institution. But let's learn how she got here. ​Ashley comes to us from Spokane, Washington. Her mom is originally from there, too, but her dad's family moved around the Rocky Mountain West, from Colorado to Montana, and eventually, eastern Washington State. Her dad was a senior in high school when his family moved to Spokane. Her parents met a few years later and got married after knowing each other for a whopping five months (they're still married today). Ashley's mom worked at Bimbo's, a local Spokane burger joint. Her dad frequented the place ... with his first wife. At a certain point, he started to come in solo. And eventually, he asked her mom out. "The rest is history," Ashley says. Ashley's sister, Erin, is two years older than her. Growing up, the two had what Ashley calls "a classic older sister/younger sister vibe." They're close today, but it wasn't always that way. Ashley had severe asthma when she was young, and she thinks she was a drag to be around. Ashley is an Eighties kid. She was born in 1983 and grew up without cellphones and computers. At this point in the recording, we reminisce about those days and what it was like not having those things. She spent a lot of her early years playing Barbie with a cousin. She listened to a lot of music, too. She loved Michael Jackson, but it was his sister Janet who really stole Ashley's heart. Janet Jackson was her first concert, in fact. There's a good story about Ashley refusing to get on the school bus and her mom taking her home. After this incident, when she would take the bus to school, she'd receive a sticker. Once she accumulated enough of those, Ashley bought herself a copy of Rhythm Nation on cassette. Her high school years saw Ashley really, really dive into music. The Jacksons gave way to bands like Kiss (thanks to the movie Detroit Rock City), Aerosmith, and Poison. Then, in 1999, Ashley and her sister won tickets to see Sammy Hagar. "It was so good. So good," she says now. Looking back, she says that it was the relationship Hagar had with his fans that drew her in. The next day, she went out and bought a Sammy Hagar CD. A week later, she bought more CDs. She got a Hagar shirt on Ebay. Around this time, she also discovered Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She found the show thanks to her love of Stone Temple Pilots. Her, her mom, and her sister went to Seattle to see Stevie Nicks and Ashley seized the opportunity while there to see the Hedwig movie. Some in the theater were clutching their pearls, but the movie had a profound effect on Ashley. It "opened my heart and filled it with ... emotional intelligence," she says. ​Hedwig also helped open Ashley up to the wider world and the idea of possibility. This was all right before her senior year in high school. Despite her friends not really getting it, she took that inspiration and turned it into her drive to become a screen writer. And her senior English teacher encouraged those dreams. She read scripts while also writing her own. She graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles to attend Loyola Marymount. A year later, she came back to Washington to go to Seattle University and pursue a degree in "something between journalism and communications." But she says that about halfway through college, she decided that the old-school model of journalism school (think: hard news) wasn't a good fit. During her time in Seattle, though, music had started to take over her life. Ashley had gotten into The Strokes in her brief time in LA. "They felt like a band you could be friends with," the first time that had happened to her. At shows in Seattle, she started befriending bands. Eventually, she started a music site, and that blew up to the point that she cashed that in for...

San Francisco has such a rich history of comedy. No one can argue against that. In this bonus episode, meet SF Sketchfest co-founder and co-director Cole Stratton. I chatted with Cole about: his early days in Michigan and his and his mom's move to Davis, CAgoing to SF State, moving to The Citymeeting folks (David Owen and Janet Varney) with whom he later helped create Sketchfesthow his desire to act drove him to Los Angeles, where he lives todaythe sketch crew he was in, which lead to the festivalthe 2002 launch of SF Sketchfestthis year's 18-day event, which kicks off tonight! Go to SFSketchfest.com for tickets and more info. We recorded this podcast on Zoom in January 2025.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. The siblings use which school they were going to estimate the date of the family's move to Valencia Street to live above Puerto Alegre. Just one example: When Amparo was set to attend Mission High, they moved the school to Poly out near Kezar Stadium while Mission was retrofitted. Then we turn to noteworthy things that have happened at Puerto Alegre in the 50-plus years that it's been open. Amparo shares how their dad, Ildefonso Vigil, brought pinball machines and a pool table into the restaurant. At one point, because Willy, Lorenzo, and one of their cousins got into fish, a 55-gallon tank went up in the front window. Their dad was also known to rescue dying plants he found around the neighborhood. Amparo got married when she was 16 and had a kid the next year. By 19, she had divorced and moved back in with her family. She got a day job at an insurance company, which gave her access to a typewriter. With that, she was able to create the first typed menu for the restaurant. Prior to that, the menu had been written by hand. The brothers being boys and all, they started to get into cars. They built cars and did some (probably illegal) racing. Other siblings would go watch, but at least one always stayed behind to help out at the restaurant. Over the years, the menu evolved. The neighborhood was changing. The clientele in the restaurant needed to pivot. Their parents introduced fried chicken and milkshakes at one point, a carryover from the Mexico Lindo days. Their mom, Maria Refugio Vigil, also made fresh flour tortillas. Willy and Lorenzo were big, big fans of those. They'd grab them as soon as they were ready, slap some refried beans on them, roll 'em up, and eat away. At this point, Amparo tells the story of El Faro taqueria. Going back to the Mexico Lindo days, El Faro was just down the block. Kitty-corner to that was a place called Johnny's. The owner of El Faro would ask the siblings, "What'd ya get over there?" Johnny's eventually made poboy sandwiches, and the Vigils ate those up, literally. Those poboys inspired the owner of El Faro to create burritos. This story is, quite possibly, the burrito origin story. Getting back to the topic of other immigrants from Ayutla in San Francisco, Amparo tells us about a club in the Mission where folks from that small town in Mexico would get together. The wife of the owner of La Rondalla (RIP) was from Ayutla. The owners of Don Ramon's and Taqueria La Cumbre were from there, as well. Back to Puerto over the years, Amparo talks about how their dad always wanted a liquor license. He'd served beer and wine since they opened, but he wanted to expand. The owner of Vic's next-door (where Blondie's is today) was retiring and selling his license, and Ildefonso bought it. That changed everything. Willy tells us about the learning curve to running a bar. This was around 1982 or so. Their liquor sales rep helped teach them how to set up a bar. Most importantly—he taught them how to make margaritas. Willy says he brought friends in to help "test" his new concoctions. It didn't take him long to get it down ... with ample feedback, of course. One casualty of the liquor license, unfortunately, was the fishtank. Next was the pool table. A familiar site around The City today, but rarer back then, they started to experience folks lining up for a table or a seat at the bar. We spend some time talking about a specific host from Puerto's past—Tirso, who has been beloved by me and my friends for decades now. We all talk about how much we love Debbie Horn (former server at Puerto, current co-owner of Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge). Amparo tells us about the art on the walls inside Puerto Alegre. It's not just for decoration. Rather, the restaurant serves as a community art gallery. What began as mostly neon beer company signs adorning the space turned into regular art shows and events that add to the magic that is Puerto...

Puerto Alegre has been one of my favorite places in San Francisco since around the time I moved here in 2000. I'm finally able to share their story here, and I'm humbled and honored to do so. In Part 1, we meet the Vigil siblings—Amparo, Lorenzo, Willy, and Pattye. Their parents opened Puerto Alegre around 1970, and these four continue their family's legacy on Valencia to this day. ​To start things off, we travel to Ayutla, Jalisco, Mexico, which is where the Vigil family came from. Their dad was one of five boys and several sisters in his own family. They were working class folks who didn't have a lot of money, and so they decided to leave. Following a couple of his older brothers, their dad came to California when he was 14. He started in the southern part of the state and made his way north, working mostly in fields. The brothers from this older generation all ended up in San Francisco, where they lived together and eventually brought their wives up to join them. The Vigil siblings' dad had known their mom back in Mexico, and brought her to The City around 1957. At this point in the recording, we go on a sidebar about the size of Ayutla and how much it's grown over the years. The Vigil siblings do visit their family back in Mexico from time to time. Before their parents got started in the restaurant business, their dad worked at a laundromat here in SF on 17th Street. They had their first baby, an older sister who isn't affiliated with the restaurant at all, and made ends meet to support her. Their mom stayed home to care for their sister, and it was around this time that she started cooking. The parents lived in a shared space with family around 14th and Folsom before a move south to 24th and Folsom when one of the uncles bought a house there. More and more members of their dad's family moved to San Francisco, and the Puerto Alegre Vigils bounced around the Mission from home to home during this time. Their dad's idea was to save up enough to move back to Mexico (ed. note: The idea of saving money in San Francisco today is a different story). But eventually, the opportunity to buy an entire building, which came with a restaurant on the ground floor, arose, and their dad seized on that. That spot was between 19th and 20th streets on Folsom. And so the family moved again. Several members of their parents' generation worked at that first restaurant, which was known as Mexico Lindo. (The space is still a Mexican restaurant today—Chuy's Fiestas.) Various members of the family, including the Vigil siblings when they were young, took turns working at Mexico Lindo. Eventually, that worked out to different families taking over the restaurant for yearlong stints, while others went and worked other jobs. Two uncles branched out to open Vigil's Club, in the spot that today is Asiento, 21st and Bryant. The siblings' dad and one of his brothers stayed back at Mexico Lindo. In one of those years "off," 1968 or '69, the siblings' dad decided he didn't want to be away from the restaurant business for such a long period of time. He went looking and found the spot on Valencia between 16th and 17th where Puerto Alegre is today. The building's street-level space had been a second-hand store. The Vigils' dad built it out as a restaurant. Back then, Valencia was known as "auto row" and "funeral row." It was much different than it is today. The space next door, where Blondie's is today, was a bar called Vic's. We go on a quick sidebar about how, many years ago, it was common for kids to go into bars in San Francisco. It's something that comes up from time to time on this podcast. ​Then Amparo lets us know how good their dad was, even at his first restaurant, about creating spaces where people would want to hang out. Among other touches, he placed pinball machines and a jukebox in the eatery on Folsom. On the weekends, they served birria and menudo, which didn't hurt the operation at all. Getting back to their...

This bonus episode is presented in collaboration with the Chronicle Season of Sharing Fund. ​Season of Sharing Fund gave some peace of mind to aspiring boxing champ Keoni Washington, who became parent and breadwinner to his brothers after their mother passed away early in the pandemic. We meet him at the East Bay apartment he shares with three of his brothers. Keoni received rental assistance from Season of Sharing Fund in 2023, which has allowed him and his brothers to stay in their home. If you want to hear more profiles of help and hope, go to https://podfollow.com/1781750916. And if you want to find out how you can help neighbors in crisis, go to SeasonofSharing.org/podcast

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Allegra was bartending at Second City in Chicago. The day of her graduation ceremony, at Columbia College Chicago, she packed up all her belongings and drove to LA with a friend. Allegra really wanted to be in California. Not yet totally sure about what she was gonna do, she took the plunge, so to speak. She'd realized that she wasn't going to pursue art. But she figured, correctly, that in addition to the warmer climate, there would be opportunities to seize in Los Angeles. But Allegra soon found that the challenges of a pre-smartphone Southern California were overwhelming. But she gave it a go. Allegra managed to get what she refers to today as "the worst job she's ever had in her life"—taking school photos of kids. On September 11, 2001, as planes hit the Twin Towers on the other side of the continent, Allegra was at a school in LA taking photos of schoolchildren. Later that day, she had a job interview that, of course, required driving. The freeways were empty, which is an eerie sight. But she got that job. And that's the story of how Allegra Madsen became an art handler. Following a couple of years hanging art (Warhol's Mao and Brillo Boxes among the art Allegra handled), she dabbled in freelance work, putting art up on walls in the homes of Los Angeles billionaires among them. Several years into that, Allegra started to feel that energy—this time, pushing her away from LA. She packed up her red sports car again (a 1988 Porsche, by the way) and headed to The Bay. Going back to the time in her life when she immersed herself in books, Beat writers caught Allegra's imagination. She recounts her first visit to San Francisco and her eventual move north. Like me, she had no idea that she'd still be here all these decades later. It took Allegra some time to "unpack," so to speak. She moved around The Bay a little, before eventually settling back a block from her first spot in Oakland, where she lives today. She went to school at CCA (then known as CCAC) and studied curatorial practice. It's where she discovered and got really into social art practices, which she goes into in our talk. "Using art to build community," essentially. Her thesis project took place on Third Street, just as the light rail was being built along that corridor. Her thesis exhibition took place at the Bayview Opera House. A few years after getting her Master's degree, Allegra opened a cafe in Temescal in Oakland. The neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying at the time, and she wanted to have a space where folks from many different walks of life could visit and have a good experience. Allegra sold the café after about five years. She pivoted back to art and event planning. Most of her work took the form of events in the Bayview. And part of that event planning involved movie programming. This led to a role at the BVOH, where she did more movie showings. During her time at the opera house, she began to partner with Frameline. In 2021, she joined the film fest org as programming director. It was the first year since the pandemic started, and Allegra believes part of why she was hired is that she had proven that she could program movies in "weird" places. They hosted a movie as part of Pride that summer at Oracle Park and did some drive-ins (remember those?). In late 2023, Allegra became interim executive director of Frameline. She assumed the permanent job this February. Follow Frameline on Instagram and other social media to stay up to date on everything they do. We end the podcast with Allegra's take on our theme this season: Keep it local. We recorded this podcast in the Frameline office in South of Market in November 2024. Photography by Dan Hernandez

Allegra Madsen has a Polaroid photo of her birth. In this episode, meet and get to know Allegra. Today, she's the executive director of Frameline film fest, the biggest LGBTQIA+ movie event in the world. She might disagree, but Allegra is a big deal. (Quick side note: As we kicked off our recording, Allegra expertly solved a Rubik's Cube. No bigs.) We begin with the story of how her parents met. Allegra's dad is from Chicago originally. He taught transcendental meditation (TM) and moved all over the world. Eventually, he landed in Virginia, where he met Allegra's mom, who is from there and was just beginning to practice TM. The two met and settled down, and soon enough, they had a baby—Allegra. She was born in Virginia Beach, VA, to, as she puts it, "two hippies who were trying to change the world by sitting quietly." A lot of Allegra's family is still in Virginia, from which, as she points out, the Supreme Court's Loving case originated. That was when the high court ruled unanimously that interracial marriages are, in fact, protected under the Constitution. Her parents are of different races, and not everyone in the family looked on approvingly. Her parents never did get married. But they raised their biracial kid together. She was a fairly typical latch-key kid growing up in the Eighties, though she split her time between her parents' families. Schools were mostly segregated, too. By the time Allegra got to high school, though, local governments and school boards did what they could to integrate, at that level at least. But, she says, that meant that the students themselves segregated within the schools. Going between the worlds of her mom's family and her dad's, Allegra says she felt at home in both, however differently. She was the only mixed-race kid though, and so, as much as she strived to fit in with any one group, it was difficult. Allegra has been tall for a while, and she was urged to play basketball, which she did. She says she liked it, but her passion for the game outweighed her skill. As a teenager, she read a lot. She says that it was probably the main way that she discovered a broader world beyond her hometown. Books gave way to movies, and they all helped form in Allegra a curiosity about how people relate to one another and share space in the world. This was around the time that VCRs really took off. In addition to local video rental shops, the expansion of Blockbuster stores nationwide made it easier to rent movies. Her mom had a job at a cable company, and when young Allegra would visit her at work, she had access to cable movies that many of her friends went without. At this point in the recording, Allegra and I go on a sidebar about movies we used to love that don't hold up well nowadays. But at the time, movies and books were ways for her to escape The South. Soon enough, something started calling Allegra to leave where she's from. She graduated high school after only three years and got a job in the office of the construction company her dad worked for, helping her earn a little money. She saved and funded a fledgeling scuba career. Yes, scuba diving. Her dream was to move to the Florida Keys to work as a dive instructor. But that dream never came true. Instead, she spent the year that would've been her senior year in high school working at a music store. Her work provided Allegra with easy access to so much music. There was also a Ticketmaster counter inside the store. Being an employee, she and her coworkers were able to pull tickets for themselves before they went on sale to the public. I go on a tangent here about what a pain it used to be to buy concert tickets over landline phones. Allegra rattles off an impressive list of bands she saw back then—one that includes Missy Elliott and Bob Dylan. When she figured out that the diving dream was dead, Allegra moved to Chicago to go to college. She had family there—aunts, uncles, grandparents. But they weren't...

Jacob Rosenberg had a front-row seat to some rad SF/Bay Area history. In this bonus episode, the filmmaker/storyteller shares some of that history, especially as it relates to his upcoming book, Right Before My Eyes. Jacob was born and raised in Palo Alto. He grew up in the Seventies and Eighties. His parents moved there from the East Coast and Midwest to raise kids in an environment that matched their liberal values more. He started skating in the Eighties and would visit Justin Herman Plaza/EMB in The City with his skateboard but also his camera. He was one of the first to capture the skateboarding going on at EMB who was a peer of the skaters he was documenting. He soon found enough success with photography that he dropped out of high school and moved to San Diego to do that work full-time. Two years or so later, he went to film school at Emerson College in Boston, where he met his mentor. That mentor passed away while Jacob was still in school, but he finished a movie that guy had been working on at the time of his death. After college, Jacob moved to Los Angeles, where he's lived ever since. At this point in the episode, I share with Jacob the draw that SF had on me from about age 12, thanks to skateboarding, Bones Brigade, and especially, Tommy Guerrero. I never got to visit The City when I skated, but it was always fresh in my imagination. Jacob then goes on a sidebar about Tommy. Jacob goes on to talk about the time frame covered in his book—1988 to 1998. His life changed at skate camp in the summer of 1988 (if my math is correct, this would be Jacob's last summer before high school). He met pro skateboarders that summer. Suddenly, unrelatedly, he was in Hawaii making a video for Hieroglypics. He cites 1988 as a pinnacle year for hip-hop. And he says that '91–'93 were the same for street skating. 1993 was also important for hip-hop. The conversation then shifts to what the two cultures—hip-hop and skateboarding—had in common. He cites his childhood hero, Chuck D. (who wrote the afterword for his book) who noted that members of both subcultures were disenfranchised youth who found a way to express themselves. Well-put. In the early Nineties, the dominance of ramp skating waned and gave way to street skating. With easier and more affordable access to video cameras, the scene got documented and documented well. Similarly, sampling and other recording equipment was getting cheaper and cheaper, and DIY hip-hop songs and videos flourished. And in a very specific way, a video that Jacob created and put Hieroglyphics' music in helped to unite the two groups in the Bay Area. Jacob says that his self-published book, Right Before My Eyes, is meant to be a coffee table book. He intends for people to see the world he was documenting all those years ago through his eyes. There are photos, of course, but the book also contains screengrabs from videos he made as well as ephemera from that time—stuff like photos of photos, the cameras he used to shoot, and more. Follow Jacob Rosenberg on Instagram to see his work. And visit Jacob's website to buy Right Before My Eyes, available now. Photo by Stephen Vanaso We recorded this episode over Zoom in November 2024.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Nicole's move to New York. She didn't necessarily have a plan for this cross-country relocation, but she dove in head-first nonetheless. Nicole of course turned to Craigslist to help her find a roommate. But she also hopped on FB Marketplace, which is where she eventually found someone. She moved in with an old friend from theater to an apartment in East Harlem on 125th Street. She considers her time in NYC "epic." She learned a lot, she grew up, she did laundry in the snow ... character-building, all of it. She came to hate winter, being a California girl and all. But she auditioned, worked as a waitress and bartender, and had a few other jobs. She made it onto New Amsterdam and Law and Order. At this point in the recording, thanks to my dorking about Nicole being the first guest of this podcast to have also appeared on Law and Order, we talk about that long-running TV show. There was also an "industrial sitcom" where Nicole played a lead character. Today, it is used to teach people around the world to speak English. Thanks to this and her own world travels, she gets recognized abroad. After nearly 10 years, she returned to The Bay, around the time of the pandemic. Part of it was COVID, but also, she feels that the Hollywood myth had been demystified. Nicole arrived at a new perspective on the industry, one that felt exploitative. And so she came home. Because Nicole and I recorded before Election Day, we go on a sidebar about what we thought might happen if you-know-who won. It's interesting to hear our chat about that from here. But I left it in for posterity, if for no other reason. Nicole's husband got COVID while they were still in New York. It was early in the pandemic, and NYC got hit hard. He wasn't able to go to the hospital, and so Nicole masked the fuck up and took care of her partner. She avoided contracting the new disease. He recovered, but it made her think of what could happen if one of their parents got it. That informed their decision to return to California. They were able to get on one of the last flights out of New York in April 2020. Once she got back home, she regrouped. It was still early during the shutdown and no one was shooting anything. She meditated, hiked, and cleaned her mom's house. In doing so, Nicole found a file cabinet full of her grandma's letters, including those from her time spent living in a San Francisco brothel. Her grandmother, Estrella Chavez, wrote about that time as well as her own ancestors, and Nicole was blown away. She discovered that the California State Assembly had named her grandma the first Filipina-American to do activism and cultural work in San Francisco. She was also recognized by Willie Brown when he was mayor. Around this time, she was also learning more about the uncle who gave her that camera—Patrick Salaver—and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Patrick was involved with the Third World Liberation Front that brought together many different ethnic student groups at SF State, including Filipinos. Discovering all this family heritage made Nicole focus on her own legacy. She had gotten into producing events for the Filipino community in South of Market. She was rolling. But then, she got pregnant. With a kid on the way, Nicole realized she needed a job. And that's how she got work as program manager at Balay Kreative. One idea she brought to her new job was starting a podcast to help amplify the stories of her community. Cultural Kultivators podcast serves to share Southeast Asian voices and stories and push the culture forward. Find it on Instagram and on all the podcast platforms. Also, please follow Kindred Kapwa, Nicole's production company. Learn more about her "Patrick Salaver Project," the life story of her uncle. We end the podcast with Nicole's take on this season's theme: Keep It Local. Photography by Mason J.

​Nicole Salaver is the kind of person I wish I had met long before that happened. In this episode, meet Nicole. She's the program manager at Balay Kreative these days. But her San Francisco roots go way, way back. Her maternal grandfather came to the US in the 1920s. He was one of the first Filipinos to own a restaurant and pool hall in Manilatown (please see our episode on Manilatown Heritage Foundation). He was a manong who lived at the International Hotel. Stories that Nicole's mom has told her were that he was more or less a mobster, paying off cops to keep his place safe. Nicole's maternal grandmother came to the states in the Fifties with her first husband. But he was an abusive alcoholic, and so her grandmother divorced him. She turned to the government for help for her and her four kids. They sent the single mother and her family to live at what turned out to be a brothel. But she wasn't aware of that at the time. The two met at the I-Hotel, where Nicole's grandmother helped the manongs with anything involving English—paperwork for green cards, lawyers, visas, etc. It was just a side hustle to her job at the US Postal Service. She knew all the manongs, but fell in love with Nicole's grandfather. They married and had three kids, including Nicole's mom. Her mom was born in the Sixities and grew up in the Seventies in San Francisco. Her dad's parents arrived in the US in the Fifties, after World War II. Her paternal grandfather was a merchant marine who cooked on a Navy ship. He met Nicole's grandmother on one of his voyages back to the Philippines and brought her back to the US. They had two boys—Nicole's dad and her uncle. Nicole says that her dad grew up a hippie in Sixties San Francisco, and retained that sensibility throughout his life. He worked for SF Recreation and Parks, smoked weed, and made art. He met Nicole's mother at a collage party while playing guitar in his brother's band. More on Patrick Salaver, Nicole's uncle, later. Nicole, an only child, was born at St. Luke's hospital in 1980. Her mom and dad lived in the Excelsior, where Nicole grew up. She went to Guadalupe Elementary. Her parents were agnostic, but her Catholic grandmother enrolled her in a Catholic school without telling them. Nicole's mom pulled her out on Day 1 and got her into public schools. She was supposed to go to Balboa High School, but it was the Nineties and that school was going through a rough time (see our episode with Rudy Corpuz from United Playas for more on that story). And so the family moved down to South San Francisco. From here, we sidebar to talk about The City of Nicole's youth, in the late-Eighties and early Nineties. She laments the massive loss of art and community that tech money wiped out. And she reminisces about taking Muni all over town. They went to film festivals, galleries, museums, restaurants. In her high school years, Nicole and her friends came to the Haight a lot. She'd also attend as many Filipino events as she could—Pistahan, Barrio Fiesta, and more. Her mom was a dancer and her dad a musician. They pushed her to do one of those two things or visual art. Of them, she gravitated toward art, but as she got to her teen years, she decided that acting and writing were more her jam. That all started when her uncle, Patrick Salaver, gave her a video camera when Nicole was 12. Nicole was and is a fan of "Weird" Al Yankovic. She says she digs quirky humor. She watched lots of SNL, In Living Color, Golden Girls. Using the camera her uncle gave her, she and her cousin created soap operas, commercials, talk shows, SNL-type sketches, and more. But despite loving creating that stuff, she saw that her parents' art was just a hobby. It didn't seem possible that it could be a career. It wasn't until her dad passed away suddenly that Nicole decided to pursue her art. She shares that story with us. She'd been performing a one-woman show about her grandmother, who had Alzheimer's, at...

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Jackie considers it an honor to have worked for Lateefah Simon, who's running for Congress in the East Bay for the seat currently held by Barbara Lee. Jackie was tasked with writing memos, and she took that job and ran with it, digging deeply into the weeds of policy. What she found in the existing systems of that time piqued her curiosity around what it might mean if she herself were to enter the fray. Her life up to that point formed her world views, as these things tend to do. But the policies, she says, ticked her off. She had been studying to take the LSAT, with the idea that she would go to law school ... all while volunteering for the campaign to get Lateefah Simon elected to the BART Board. But that November, in 2016, the 45th president was elected, and everything changed ... for a lot of us, but especially for Jackie. It all threw Jackie for a loop. Standing Rock and protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP) were also happening, which further disillusioned her. She traveled east to join the resistance. She met folks and had deep conversations with her Native American brothers and sisters. She spent time in Minnesota doing more work with indigenous folks. It all created a sense of hope despite the doom seemingly all around. She also noticed the protests in Seattle demanding Wall Street disinvestment. In February 2017, Jackie was back home, full of "let's do it" energy, ready to tackle issues in The Bay. She had moved to The City and started digging further into the weeds of policy in San Francisco. In 2018, she decided that she wanted to make a difference here at home. She helped found the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition. She was tapped to lead the campaign against the Police Officers Association's use of force measure. For that, she worked with Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco and the ACLU of Northern California. She also worked on the No on H campaign, which succeeded. Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, asked Jackie to teach her class at SF State, and Jackie seized that opportunity. At State, she taught Race, Women, and Class, where she talked with students about DAP and indigenous rights, among other topics. While teaching, she also worked restaurant jobs, mostly on the Peninsula. When 2019 came around, Jackie wasn't sure what to do. Looking back, she was experiencing undiagnosed ADHD. She had a nagging feeling that year, though, that she should run for office. Someone pointed out to her that State Sen. Scott Wiener was running for election unopposed. She thought of the successful ballot measure campaigns she'd been part of. She had spent time living in her van. She'd bounced around between apartments. She decided to go for it. The Jackie Fielder for State Senate campaign was off to a good start. Then lockdown happened in March 2020. Everything about the campaign turned virutal—Zoom speeches and meetings, phone banking on another level, social media like never before. She centered issues like affordable housing, climate change, renters' rights, homelessness, education. She got the backing of teachers, iron workers, electricians, tenants' rights groups, affordable housing groups, and various progressive cultural affinity groups in SF. Jackie didn't win that race, though. She took a step back and got into therapy, where she learned about self-care and self-compassion. She got to a point where she could take better care of herself so that she could then take care of others. Jackie also started a PAC in the time between the 2020 election and now. The Daybreak PAC's main purpose is to support candidates and ballot measures that reject corporate money. Also, Stop the Money Pipeline hired her to be its communications manager in 2021. Through that work, she was able to reconnect with many folks she met years earlier in her Dakota stays. By early 2023, Jackie was co-director of the organization. This...