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Listen in as I chat with German Gonzalez, musical conductor and principal director of the Golden Gate Park Band, now in its 144th year.
We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.
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In Part 3, we hear from Keiko and Michael about the history of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
In the late-1950s, a San Franciscan named R.G. Davis taught a class in movement—mime, dance, physical interpretation of stories … that sort of thing. A performing troupe sprang out of that class, and it was known as the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe. It was the era of the early Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, and the troupe became more and more political, basing much of their work around social issues of the day. The group started off doing silent mime work, but shifted later.
Michael offers us the definition of mime at this point—"the exaggeration of everyday life in story and song." Not all mime is silent. As the audiences kept getting bigger and bigger, Davis's troupe realized that they needed to abandon the silent style. They dived into doing commedia dell'arte with more and more masks and colorful decorations. Classic commedia almost always involved stories around class—think servants vs. rich assholes. The Davis troupe started writing mimes about civil rights, women's rights, workers' struggles. And they realized that changing their name to "San Francisco Mime Troupe" was a wise move.
The newly named SF Mime Troupe played around California. They went to the Midwest and East Coast. They were getting bigger and bigger and getting more and more attention. In the early 1970s, they decided to become a collective. R.G. Davis left at this point. But the troupe wanted to practice what it was "preaching" on stage. I ask Michael to tell us the difference between a collective and a co-op—basically, a co-op is shared ownership of an entity. A collective is simply the way of running the thing. It doesn't necessarily speak to ownership.
Keiko joined the collective as an actor. Soon after that, she helped to build props and design costumes and sets.
I ask Keiko and Michael to explain the "why" part of getting involved and staying with SF Mime Troupe.
Keiko takes us back to her childhood, when her parents took her to anti-war protests regularly. She cites that as a foundation for why she was attracted to the work that the SF Mime Troupe had been engaged in already for so long. She believes in the power of the people to come together and overcome whatever is thrown at us. And the fact that there's a theater company, where she could combine all her passions, didn't hurt at all.
For Michael, it goes back to the first SFMT show he saw. It was Factwino vs. the Moral Majority. It's a show about free speech and manipulation. He was hooked. He'd be a fan forever. Then, he got that audition. He agrees with Keiko about the mime troupe community, but Michael goes a step further—he points to that camaraderie he finds with audiences. He appreciates being able to express his passion for politics regularly.
The Mime Troupe aims to be topical and newsworthy with whatever is going on at the time. But some things just keep repeating themselves. War, capitalism, the continued deterioration of a livable climate. Michael talks about taking pride in the collective's diversity—race, age, economic levels. And this sets the SF Mime Troupe apart from other theater companies.
Then we start talking about what going to a Mime Troupe show can do for audiences. It can inspire and empower showgoers. It can also help them feel less alone in dark times like the present. Michael talks about how, as a performer, they need to leave the audience wanting to take action, that the revolution can't only happen on stage.
Because Storied is my show, I assert that San Francisco isn't the liberal bastion that many here (and away from here) believe it to be. Michael takes that idea a step further to talk about the difference between being a social liberal and an economic liberal. This town is full of social progressives. On economics, not so much. He feels, and I agree, that many folks here hold conservative economic opinions and hide that in their social progressivism. We end this segment of the recording with my assertion that the only reason our local politicians don't admit that they're Republicans is because you can't win that way here. Michael agrees, and goes off on that point, much to my delight.
Keiko speaks to the sacrifices that artists living and working in San Francisco have to make. And Michael describes SF as a suburb of Silicon Valley, with many here espousing the belief that tech can solve everything. For the record: I do not believe that tech can solve everything.
We wrap with Keiko talking about the Mime Troupe's new season, which kicks off this Friday, July 3, and runs through Sept. 7. The show is called Wreckage, a musical tragicomedy. Keiko is busy learning roles and making costumes for her castmates. Michael steps in to talk about the show in more depth. We're in a time where people feel like everything is falling apart—economics, the environment, relationships, hope. What's gonna be left when it's all over? The show asks us all, "What do you have to let go of to move on?"
Find out more and donate at the San Francisco Mime Troupe website. Follow them on Instagram @sftroupers.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Both sides of Michael Gene Sullivan's family are from Detroit. In Part 2, we get to know Keiko's fellow SFMT collective member.
Michael was born in Livonia, Michigan, a small town outside of Detroit. His parents met at a summer camp, but we need to rewind a bit before we get to that.
When his dad was a boy, he was kidnapped. Yes, really. He and his brothers, all Black boys, were taken from Detroit to work on a plantation in Louisiana. One day, three years later, a car pulled up to the plantation. Some people got out of the car, grabbed Michael's dad and uncles, and threw them into the car (not minding the trauma these boys had already been through or might be experiencing in the moment). Much to the boys' relief, their mom was in that car. She'd been looking for her sons the entire time.
They made it back to Michigan, but the effect of having been kidnapped and missing key years with his family stayed with Michael's dad. Michael characterizes his dad's side of the family as old-school gangsters.
His mom's family were upper-working-class, many of them with jobs at Ford. The aforementioned camp was in Detroit and it was designed to bring kids from all different economic levels together. The camp held a dance, and his dad found himself with all the boys on one side of the room—on the other side, the girls, of course. No one had started dancing when one of the girls suddenly got up (on a dare from a friend), walked over to the boys, and sat in Michael's dad's lap. That girl was his mom, of course. They danced, talked a little, then had to separate.
The next summer, at the next camp, the two met again. Then it happened again the following year. Eventually, they started dating and fell in love. Michael's mom's family wasn't too pleased, given the criminal aspect of his dad's family. But his mom was a bit of a rebel and went with love.
The new couple settled in Detroit. They had three children—two girls and a boy, Michael, their youngest. His dad did radio work in the Army and his mom studied art. When dad got out of the service, he parlayed the tech work he'd learned into the infant industry. He got a job with National Cash Register, who relocated the family to Los Angeles.
Michael was three when his family moved to California, so he doesn't have distinct memories of that. With the move to LA, his mom started doing more and more art, sculpting and painting. His dad worked a lot, but the couple also started getting involved in politics. They went to protests, rallies, Black Panther meetings. Michael shares his family's story of being at a protest against LBJ's visit to Los Angeles. It involves a family of five plus their pet rabbit climbing a tree.
The next year, 1968, was a presidential election year, and Michael's mom worked for the Bobby Kennedy campaign. She was there on primary night, June 5, when RFK was assassinated. She was in the same room, even. Soon after that, the FBI showed up at their house looking for witnesses. To make up for known failings around the JFK assassination, the agency moved to protect witnesses around this tragedy. They sent his mom back to Detroit.
The rest of Michael's family stayed behind. The FBI gave Michael rides to school in that time period. Two weeks later, when his mom returned, his parents decided to move the family to San Francisco. It was originally planned as a temporary visit, but they never left.
The first place his family landed was The Sunset District. He was seven, and started school in San Francisco. From there, the family moved to Bayview, Western Addition, back to The Sunset, over to The Richmond District, and back to Western Addition. I ask Michael to list his SF schools, and he obliges.
Now settling into the Bay Area, Michael's family kept their political interests. He recalls his parents taking him with them to a Black Panthers meeting. His dad was now working in Silicon Valley as a diagnostic engineer. Michael's mom had given up creating her own art and shifted to film publicity work.
Michael has always been a passionate person. When he was a kid, he and his sister got into film. He was also deeply interested in history. He wanted to be a history teacher when he grew up. They planned to make movies together. They wanted to remake Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but recast as two Black kids.
At school, the kids considered Michael shy. When he got to Marina Junior High, he decided on the first day of school that it wasn't for him. And it wasn't difficult for him to transfer, because his family had that habit of moving around The City. Michael asked his mom to drive him around town, and when he saw Roosevelt Middle School, he loved the building's architecture. So, he transferred there. He shares the story of another transfer student, who arrived in his last year at Roosevelt, a girl so pretty he developed a crippling crush on her right away. We'll get back to that.
He and his crush ended up going to Washington High the next year. He still wouldn't/couldn't talk to her, but they were both in band. She ended up in a theater group called Street of Dreams Theater Company. Michael's best friend was also in the group, so he was around them a lot.
Michael still had his sights set on being a history professor. That, or he would write horror short stories. One day, a teacher more or less forced him to sing in choir. His crush was also in choir. And he ended up joining Street of Dreams in order to be closer to her. They graduated, and within the following year, Michael was artistic director of the company.
He started doing more and more with Street of Dreams, eventually directing shows. Both Michael and his crush, whom he could at least talk with now, if not look in the eyes, were at City College and also joined a group of friends singing at the Renaissance Faire. By then, she'd had a couple boyfriends and he a couple girlfriends. Then the two decided to go on a "test date." They even shared a "test kiss" that night. A year later, they were dating. And today, they're married and have three children.
Around this time, Michael's dad took him to see a show by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Theater was still fairly new to both of them, and Michael was blown away. He even saw Keiko performing in a show back in the day. Because he'd had some acting experience, once there was an opening, he auditioned. But they told him he was too young. Eventually, they had an actor call in sick and asked Michael to sub. And so he stepped in.
It was 1988, and Michael toured with SF Mime Troupe. And he and his wife have been with them ever since.
Check tomorrow for Part 3, when Keiko and Michael will share the history and legacy of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
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Keiko Shimosato Carreiro was born in the Bay Area … the Boston Bay Area.
In Part 1 of this episode, meet Keiko. Today, she's a longtime member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe collective. But her story goes back to her parents' migration to the US from Japan after World War II.
Keiko's dad got a Fulbright scholarship to come to this country. He studied medicine. Her mom came to visit the US for one year, but in that time, met Keiko's dad at a Japan Society picnic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two weeks after they met, her dad proposed, and roughly a year later, they had their first child—Keiko, named thusly because she was conceived on Cape Cod.
Because her dad was doing his residency in Boston, Keiko was born in Cambridge, just across the Charles River. She spent the first 15 years of her life in the Boston area, frequently going to protests of the war in Vietnam with her parents. Keiko also attended "Burn Your Bra" rallies in Harvard Square.
Her family comprised the only Asians in Lexington, where they lived. Keiko and her sister were the only Japanese school kids in the district. Perhaps because of that dubious distinction, reporters approached Keiko when she was very young to ask her what she thought of the US war in Vietnam.
On the other hand, there were white Americans who welcomed Keiko and her family. Her mom had a sponsor, an American woman who had been a journalist in Japan during WWII. And her dad came here on a Fulbright scholarship, after all. Both had plans to return to their home country, but meeting and considering that Japan was still something of a war-torn country, they decided to settle in Massachusetts. Before they knew it, they had three daughters.
We shift the conversation to talk about Keiko and her sisters and their sibling relationships. Keiko sees the demands from her parents on her, as the oldest child, being the highest. Going younger in age among her sisters, the demands lessen. I know this all too well, being the youngest of three boys myself.
Keiko and her youngest sister didn't get along when they were young. Maybe it was the seven-year gap in age. But through the experience of Keiko caring for her aging and dying parents, and then losing their middle sister after their parents' passing, the two became and remain close as adults.
Midway through her time in high school, Keiko's dad moved his family from the Boston area to Iowa. There was a job opportunity there, but the main reason to leave went back to racism. Her dad didn't feel that he was appreciated at the Boston area hospital where he worked.
Going from afternoons in Harvard Square to her parents' new house amid corn fields and barns was a shock, to put it mildly. Keiko also had to say goodbye to her boyfriend back home, which, at 15, was of course devastating.
In her new city, the only place Keiko felt comfortable and welcomed was in high school band. She'd been playing flute for some time and wanted to go on to study music in college.
There were no Asian grocery stores in Iowa City at the time. Keiko's parents helped to open the first of those. Later, folks from Vietnam, Korea, and some Southeast Asian countries arrived. And when they got there, there were food shopping options available to them.
Keiko graduated high school a year early and went to the University of Iowa. Fueled by a desire to escape a cruel world in school, she also started taking college-level courses before graduating high school. The university gave Keiko a full music scholarship to study there, in fact.
For fun, she took an acting class amid her music studies at UI. That acting class flipped a switch for Keiko. It felt more like what she wanted to do, more than music did. Eventually, she changed her major to interdisciplinary arts, which freed her up to take classes like dance and creative writing.
I take us on a sidebar here, mentioning that I believe it's more important to find something you enjoy doing than it is being quote/unquote good at it.
Then Keiko shares the story of how she transported herself from the corn fields of Iowa to the best city in the world—San Francisco.
It involves a theater company in Canada. Keiko had married her clown teacher while still in college. He was Canadian, and the theater company called for him. But he wasn't home and so they asked about her. They told her they didn't like to separate couples, so they invited both of them to join.
Keiko and her now-ex met this horse-drawn theater company in the middle of its tour (where else?) in California. For the next year-and-a-half, she and her husband traveled with this theater company doing shows of a political nature, mostly around climate issues.
That caravan stage company ended up staying in the Bay Area. For Keiko, the thought of returning to Iowa to finish her master's program, especially in the winter, was not attractive at all. She got a job here as an actor in a children's theater company and decided to stay in The City. In 1986, the San Francisco Mime Troupe held auditions for The Dragon Lady's Revenge. Keiko tried out and joined the collective that year.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of our SF Mime Troupe episode. In it, you'll meet Keiko's friend and fellow collective member Michael Gene Sullivan.
We recorded this podcast at the SF Mime Troupe studio in the The Mission in June 2026.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
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In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. While in college at Marymount, Theo ran the Boys and Girls Club program with Phillip Redd. He liked the connections and impact he had made in SoCal, and wondered whether he could do the same at home. This was back when Barack Obama was first running for president, and there was a prevailing sense of hope and possibility pervading life for a lot of folks.
And so Theo moved back home. He transferred to Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont after his sophomore year, and got a degree there three years later. Upon his arrival in The City and concurrent with his time in college in The Bay, he got involved in SF politics serving on commissions and boards. It helped him really dig in to living here.
Then-mayor Newsom appointed Theo to the Youth Commission. He had done yet another documentary in high school, this time on homelessness in The City. That got the mayor's attention. "The Homeless Orchestra" compared the crisis of the unhoused population to the inner workings of an orchestra. The mayor took that doc to Davos, Switzerland, and showed it at the World Economic Forum there. Young Theo talked with folks like Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez for his movie.
He lived near his transfer college, Notre Dame de Namur, in Belmont on the Peninsula. After class, he'd hurry back to San Francisco for Youth Commission meetings. He also sat on the Southeast Community Facility (SCF) Commission. Theo and I go on a sidebar here about how we use the tools at our disposal—tech, government—for better and for worse.
From his place on the SCF Commission, Theo joined the commission on community investment and infrastructure. They oversaw the development of Hunter's Point Shipyard, Mission Bay, the Transbay Terminal, as well as a few other spots around The City. They worked on housing in those areas and approved 3,000 units, one-third of which were affordable and 250 that were set aside for formerly houseless families.
Theo, his mom, and his brother had moved to Third and Newcomb, near the opera house where we recorded. With that move, Theo saw BVOH as a community fixture. The opera house has been there since 1888 (which we learned in our episode with them). Theo took classes there when he was a kid. Around 2010, he walked in and asked how he could get involved. He joined the board and took over years later as interim executive director after a shakeup.
In his tenure as interim ED, he helped get a $250K grant for lighting and sound. They were able to give grants to artists and they launched their SF Sounds series: an artist is actually on the floor with eventgoers for those events.
I ask Theo about friend of this show Allegra Madsen and her time at BVOH. After stating the obvious, that Allegra is awesome, Theo says that the opera house wants to bring back Frameline and other film fests. "You shouldn't have to leave your neighborhood to catch a film," he says.
We also talk about the Hey, Auntie! gumbo contest, which I helped judge, back in 2025 and which took place at the Bayview Opera house.
Then we talk about Theo's run for D10 supervisor. The campaign's premise: We can do better in the Southeast. He ran back in 2018, but he's running again because of the potential he sees for the area to dictate the kind of community it wants to become. San Francisco obviously has equitable differences among different parts of our city. Theo cites better transit, housing, and support for small businesses among the most important issues he wants to tackle.
Visit his website for more info: https://www.theoellington.com/.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Today, Theo Ellington is the secretary at the Ruth Williams Opera House. This born-and-raised San Franciscan is also running to be the next D10 supervisor.
In Part 1 of this episode, meet Theo. His maternal grandfather, Clifton Weeks, came to SF because his sister, Marie Weeks (Theo's great-aunt), had come here. Clifton and his sister had grown up in rural Natchez, Mississippi, but they came out West during the Great Migration. Their first landing spot was The Fillmore.
Clifton found work as a laborer, where he helped build roads and bridges. He also did a little work at the shipyard back when it was still in The City. He had three daughters and made enough money to be able to buy a house in Bayview. Theo grew up in that house with his aunts and cousins.
Theo's dad, Grant Ellington, a veteran, came here from Cleveland as an adult. While Theo isn't 100 percent sure what the story is, his parents say that they met at a party … in the Eighties, no less. Grant was a big dude, 6'5", and he commanded a presence.
Grant would come by the house, Theo says, and seemed overly concerned with whether his son had a girlfriend. Theo would get that question as young as 6. His dad passed away when Theo was in high school.
Theo has two brothers—one older and one younger. He was the third-youngest among the 10 cousins living in his house at Third and Palou. They grew up pre-internet, and so, like a lot of us, went out and made up their own games. He and his cousins and their friends would stay out until the streetlights came on. Theo goes an aside about one of the games they invented—"baserunner." They rode bikes and skateboards, as well.
He was born in 1988 and went to a lot of school all in The Bayview. Because he's born-and-raised, I ask Theo to rattle off the schools he attended: Charles Drew Elementary, afterschool at Leola Havard, and Gloria R. Davis Middle School, where he helped make a documentary on a grant from Salesforce about the 24-Divisadero called Bus 24 "The Diversity Bus." It's very much worth watching.
That experience really helped to shape Theo's perspective. He started to see his neighborhood, The Bayview, in a different light. And he saw the rest of The City. It sparked a curiosity in him—why was his own hood living in such poverty while other parts of SF thrived?
Theo was in the top of his class at Davis Middle School. He began high school at Sacred Heart, and suddenly found himself at the bottom of his class. Drawing from his experience making the Muni documentary, for his junior year, he transferred to School of the Arts (SOTA), where he could focus less on academics and more on filmmaking and documentaries.
When he was a kid, Theo had done some acting with American Conservatory Theater (ACT) and WB TV, back when they had a studio in The Bayview. He spent two years in SoCal at Marymount College. One aspect he appreciated as a young freshman was the townhouse dorms, which felt less like typical college dorms and more like adult homes. The move served two goals—go to college, but also, pursue his dream of working in the film industry.
While at Marymount, Theo worked at the local Boys and Girls Club, where he and others helped young boys who lacked role models. The experience allowed him to see how life in Southern California was different than life in his hometown.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Theo Ellington's story.
We recorded this podcast at the Bayview Opera House in Bayview in November 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Listen in as I chat with Frameline50 Associate Director of Programs Kate Bove about this year's historic 50th annual LGBTQIA+ film festival, which runs June 17–27.
For more information, including this year's program and to buy tickets, please visit frameline.org. Follow Frameline on Instagram @framelinefest.
We recorded this podcast at the Frameline office in South of Market in June 2026.
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Painter George, aka George Harry Crampton-Glassanos, is fine if you wanna call him just "George."
In this episode, meet and get to know George. Both of his parents came to San Francisco early in their lives. His mom hails from the East Coast and her family were all working-class folks. His grandpa was a business agent for a machinist's union in Massachusetts. That grandfather shaped George's later involvement in organized labor. (Today, he's a member of the ILWU).
George never knew this grandparent who had an outsize impression on him. He died shortly after George was born. But in Massachusetts, in addition to his union involvement, he owned a store that sold records on one half and hats on the other.
His dad moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to attend school at the Art Institute (RIP). He got into that school and often slept overnight on a ledge on campus.
Both of George's parents were punk rockers in SF in the late-Seventies. Amazing. His dad even lived with the guitarist from The Avengers (Penelope Houston's punk band). Though they would meet later, both spent time at the famed Mabuhay Gardens back in the day.
George's dad was a painter as well, and that turned out to have a huge influence on George. His parents met when his mom got a job with his dad's construction working crew. This was around the mid-Eighties. George came along in 1989. After that, his parents had two more boys, making George the oldest of three.
His earliest memories are from around the mid-Nineties in The Mission. George spent time when he was a kid running around The Mission and pre-gentrification Dogpatch with his dad. They lived on 18th between San Carlos and Lexington (or, zooming out a bit, between Mission and Valencia). That's two blocks from where I lived from 2003 to 2017, incidentally.
But George's family got evicted from that apartment on 18th. The building sold and the new owners evicted tenants one by one, including families like George's. Both of his brothers were born in that apartment. His dad had made modifications there, handyman that he was. And George was old enough to remember all the awesome neighbors they had.
I ask George about his favorite restaurants when he was a kid. "I fuckin' ate burritos every night of the week," he answers. He'd hit up nearby La Cumbre or El Buen Sabor around 300 times a year. Whiz Burger also figured big in George's childhood diet. There was a diner across 16th from The Roxie called Aunt Mary's (George shows me a coin purse from the place while we're recording) that he loved as well.
Art was always encouraged at home. George's dad would bring home boxes of fax paper for him to draw on with ballpoint pens. He'd draw and draw and draw, often of things he saw. He remembers staring out the window of their place on 18th and watching cars go by, and he'd draw those. But it wasn't until high school at School of the Arts that George really started cranking it out.
At SOTA, teachers encouraged George to draw whatever the hell he wanted to. He remembers drawing a skeleton pushing a paleta cart. When George tells me he attended SOTA 2004–2008, I mention that a number of past guests of this show went there around that time. "[The school] churned out a lot of us," he says. Joe Talbot, who co-wrote, produced, and directed The Last Black Man in San Francisco, went to SOTA in that era.
George goes on a sidebar to share a story of getting caught smoking pot by a SOTA vice principal. I ask him to rattle off the SF schools he went to, and George obliges. Waldorf in The Mission for Kindergarten, then a Waldorf school in Pac Heights through eighth grade. They wanted him to attend their high school, but he chose SOTA instead.
The Waldorf schools also encouraged art, which George appreciated. The social dynamics could be strange, though. You'd have kids like him who got into that school thanks to financial aid being classmates with kids who lived in mansions. After eighth grade, he needed a change.
After he graduated from School of the Arts, George took some classes at City College. He'd been working summers painting houses for his dad, and eventually, college tailed off so he could work more.
It also gave George more time for his artistic painting. This was about 20 years ago, and since then, he's been painting murals, hanging out with graffiti painters, doing work on Clarion Alley, and working with Precita Eyes to paint various houses and walls in The Mission.
I ask whether George's art has evolved over the years. After thinking it over, he talks about the influence of cars and his mom and dad's comic book collections. He loved his mom's underground comics collections, and talks about going down to 23rd Street with them to Scott's Comics and Cards and SF Comic Book Co. next door.
George points to artists like Spain Rodriguez, R. Crumb, and the Hernandez Brothers as having shaped his art from a young age. He'd go to Avalon on Mission for iron-on old English letters to have put on hats. The cholo influence of his neighborhood was seeping in, and George ran with it. The gumball machines on Mission with their foil stickers also played a part.
He'd take those stickers home, many with images of cars on them, and draw from them. And of course the cars cruising Mission Street caught his artistic eye. George also touches on some of the violence he witnessed in The Mission in the Nineties, when he was a kid.
George and his friends got around on skateboards, beater bikes, and Muni. He's quick to point out how, back in the day, you could take the 26-Valencia if you wanted to avoid potential trouble on the 14-Mission.
I ask whether George got into any trouble himself. He says mostly harmless stuff like shoplifting. That was before his aforementioned time at School of the Arts.
George has mixed feelings about the art scene, and I get it. He's had his art in shows, but prefers bookstores or community-oriented spaces vs. white-walled galleries. He doesn't feel like the audience that goes to those spaces is his.
When he talks about painting at home after a long day at work, I ask George to talk about that work. He's currently part of a crew painting the new container cranes in the Port of Oakland. The ILWU is assembling the cranes and George and others use marine enamels to make the cranes look good.
We end the podcast with how you can find George and his art. "You can find me on 24th Street," he says. No website. He's on Instagram at @paintergeorge415.
We recorded this podcast at George's home in South San Francisco in April 2026.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
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Listen in as I chat with Circus Bella founder and performer Abigail Munn.
If you enjoy this podcast, you might also like the episode we did on Club Fugazi and Dear San Francisco.
We recorded this podcast at Abigail's home in the Mission in May 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Listen in as I chat with past guest Connie Chan about her run for US Congress. To learn more about Connie and her vision of representing San Francisco in DC, head to her website, ConnieChanSF.com.
Please consider this episode an endorsement of Connie's campaign. And please vote, by May 26 (today) if you're mailing in your ballot, or on June 2 if you're voting in person.
One of the most important ways to both advance our goals of a more just and inclusive society and to beat back billionaire/tech fascism is to vote. It's a privilege, and it matters.
We recorded this podcast at Connie Chan for Congress HQ on Cathedral Hill in April 2026.
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Ed. note: Please be advised that there's some very heavy subject matter discussed in this episode.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Jenny left San Francisco for college, heading east to go to school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Part of it was wanting a change of scenery. As she says, she "wanted to see snow." But all it took was a few winters before she realized how good the weather in SF is. She also wanted to return to help take care of her mom, who was getting older.
This was around the time that Jenny went to China and came back determined to spread the untold histories of what happened in her homeland during WWII. The nonprofit learning curve was steep, and it was almost certainly going to mean shifting gears lifestyle-wise, due to not having as much income.
During the first year of Pacific Atrocities Education's life, it was fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts, an SF-based arts nonprofit. Jenny enrolled in and went to as many workshops as she could. She felt generally well-respected and taken care of.
With her nascent nonprofit off and running, Jenny traveled to a part of China she had never been to before—Shanxi—to visit and talk with women who survived the war as so-called comfort women (think "sex slaves"). Jenny goes on a sidebar here to talk about some of the things the Japanese did to women during their occupation of China. It involved the Japanese not wanting their soldiers to pick up STDs while in a foreign country. If they could control the situation, i.e., enslave Chinese women to have sex with their soldiers, they could solve that "problem." So disgusting.
Hearing these women's stories wasn't easy for Jenny. One story involved one of the women being pregnant after the war ended. She went back to live with her mother, who helped her along. When the baby was born, they abandoned it. Just horrible all around. We sidebar, a little, to talk about the ripple effect of wars and how it's not just tanks and bombs and guns and soldiers fighting other soldiers. There are untold numbers of innocent folks caught up in the destruction, folks whose lives are forever upended, if they even survive.
Jenny says that the experience on that trip to China gave her perspective on her own childhood in the Tenderloin. She thought maybe it wasn't so bad after all.
It wasn't only women in China. She went and spoke with women in California's Central Coast area about their own experiences as "comfort women." These were Filipinas who relocated to the US after the war. Most of their families didn't know their stories. And it wasn't until the Obama era that light started to be shone on them and what they'd been through. Obama's administration was the first to recognize them, but it was complicated, to say the least.
Jenny talks about the delicacy of what she set out to do. Specifically, the difficulty of balancing the need to share these stories, but also to be respectful of the lives impacted by them. In addition to the research she was undertaking for Pacific Atrocities Education, Jenny was also writing a book on the topic. She was able to scan documents from the National Archives, documents the US has due to its occupation of Japan following World War II. One of the more alarming things she found in digging through archives was that the United States traded immunity with Japan's Unit 731 scientists, whose work involved developing biological weapons. Yikes.
She goes on to describe other atrocious acts the Japanese undertook in China, stuff so horrible and inhumane I have trouble enumerating it here. I ask Jenny how she handles learning about such terrible stuff. She chalks it up to its being mission-driven work. We chat a little about how the people doing bad things never get held accountable, something true to this day.
That immunity mentioned above was given to the Japanese scientists in exchange for the information contained in their research of biological weapons, naturally. You read that right: The US looked the other way while essentially poaching incredibly deadly weapons from its vanquished enemy.
Please visit pacificatrocities.org to learn more and get involved. Their YouTube channel is called Pacific Front Untold. Follow them on Instagram @pacificatrocitiesedu.
We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Ed. note: We recorded this episode outside on a windy day near The Bay. Apologies for the wind gusts you'll hear throughout.
Jenny Chan found Storied: San Francisco thanks to Toshio from Sad Francisco. Jenny and I kick off her episode talking about Toshio, in fact.
Jenny was born in Hong Kong. Growing up, her dad's mom babysat her a lot. Young Jenny really loved anime and would turn it on at grandma's house. When she did this, her Chinese grandmother would get upset, and Jenny didn't know why. She thought maybe her grandma was senile.
Later in Jenny's life, when her grandmother passed away and she helped clean and organize her home in China, she discovered items her grandma kept that pointed to a life spent under Japanese occupation before and during World War II.
We mentioned anime, but when Jenny was a kid, she just loved Japanese culture all around. She indulged in manga whenever she could save up enough money. As with the anime, her grandma didn't take kindly to these Japanese things in her home.
When she was 10, Jenny's parents split up. She and her older brother then joined their mom and moved to the US. When Jenny remarks that she's not sure how her mom did it, we go on a sidebar. Jenny shares that her mom grew up during the time of the US war in Vietnam, so she's a survivor. I add that, simply, women are amazing.
In US schools, Jenny learned about the Holocaust. She also learned about Pearl Harbor, but like most school-age kids in this country, it was in the context of what got the US into WWII. Japanese colonialism and dominance in east Asia never really came up.
Her family came straight from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 2000. Members of her mom's family had already been here, dating back to the Seventies and Eighties. Jenny and her mom and brother lived in the Tenderloin when they arrived. She saw the dirty streets in that hood and wondered why they traded Hong Kong skyscraper living for this. Her mom told her that for many reasons, including not having to buy school uniforms, life in SF was more affordable.
Jenny's run of schools in The City—Lafayette, Presidio, Washington High.
I ask her if she experienced culture shock moving halfway around the world. She says yes and points to knowing only people from Hong Kong when she lived there. Here, she quickly learned that there are folks from all over China and differences abound. She says also that Chinese people she met in San Francisco or The Bay were stuck in whatever era they moved here during, and that was sometimes startling.
We go on a sidebar here after Jenny asks me about my own move here from Texas in 2000.
Jenny spent a lot of time in the school library, including during lunches. She dedicated herself to learning from an early age. She recognized the hardships her family was going through and saw education as a way to climb out of that. She used her 45-minute Muni commutes from the Tenderloin to school in the Richmond to read and do homework.
Her mom worked in restaurants here in The City. Jenny would go with her mom to places like the bank to do the translation. Jenny was learning about life in the US in real time and for practical reasons.
At my prompting, Jenny and I rap about all the awesome food in the Little Saigon area of the Tenderloin. I share the story of coming home from my trip to Vietnam and eating at Turtle Tower right away because I missed the food of that incredible country.
Jenny lived in the Tenderloin through all her public school days in San Francisco. When her paternal grandmother passed away, she went back to China to clean out her home, as we've mentioned. And that's when Jenny and other members of her family started finding items—military yen, rice-rationing coupons—that pointed to life spent under occupation. Back home, Jenny had found a decent job after college, but was feeling stuck. The revelation of her grandmother's lived experience was a light bulb.
It was around this time that Jenny realized a massive hole in her US education. Why didn't she learn about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, for example? Most of the emphasis was on the war in Europe, with Pearl Harbor and later the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the main subjects of the history of war in the Asian theater. In her own words, Jenny went "into a deep rabbit hole" to learn those untold stories.
Her first stop was the library, where she discovered books like The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang and The Rising Sun by John Toland. The more she learned, the more she sought existing nonprofits she could join forces with to amplify the stories of the Japanese occupation of China. To her dismay, there weren't any.
It was around 2012 or 2013, and Jenny figured that she already knew how to live without much income. And so, she decided to start her own company—a nonprofit dedicated to getting those stories out to the world. Pacific Atrocities Education was born.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Jenny Chan.
We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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In Part 2, we pick up right where we left off in Part 1, with Gina's first official address in San Francisco.
In talking about finding a place to live in The City, Gina mentions that all her friends either live in rent-control apartments they've been in forever, or they're able to live in a place that someone in their family bought and has kept in the family. When she tells me where that first apartment in SF was, I let her know that my first place here, back in 2000, was less than a block away. As we're name-dropping hotspots on the block, I have a brain fart and can't remember the name of Cordon Bleu, the rad greasy-spoon Vietnamese joint still there on California near Polk.
From that first apartment, Gina would take Muni to her job over in Potrero Hill. Back then, in the days before smartphones, she'd read on her long, chill Muni rides. She'd come home, make dinner with her roommate, and maybe head out to Polk Street or for karaoke in the hood.
That AmeriCorp VISTA gig lead to a job doing literacy work. At that part-time job, Gina also started doing events. She also ran a non-profit dance company, and was trying her best to make both things work out for her.
We step back to talk about Funkanometry SF, Gina's dance company. It started in LA, moved north, and the founders handed Gina the keys, so to speak. That happened in Gina's senior year at Berkeley. Because the dancers she was directing were older and more experienced, and because she had literally no experience running a non-profit or a business, she went to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy of a book from the "For Dummies" series.
In Gina's time running it, Funkanometry took off. They received invitations to perform internationally, to places like the Philippines, the UK, and Colombia. On the back end, Gina figured out a way to pay herself $600 a month. She felt like she'd made it. Despite all those successes, though, the company didn't make money.
The low-paying, part-time job and non-profit dance company was fun, but it wasn't meant to last. She got hit up on LinkedIn by a recruiter for Google and got an interview. Gina had reservations and talked with her mom about them. Lillian told her to daughter to go and listen to what they have to say, and so that's what Gina did. After the interview, she still didn't know if it was a good fit, but she accepted the offer regardless. She was now a software engineering recruiting coordinator at Google.
To get to work, Gina took the infamous Google bus. As someone from The Bay who already had immense pride in her city, she felt ashamed. The money was good, but standing in line to wait for the hated busses felt bad. When cars or pedestrians passed by while she waited, she wanted to let them know that she wasn't "one of those people," that she's from here and runs a non-profit dance company. It didn't matter. Her internalized shame remained, but she says the job was fun enough to make up for it.
That Google contract job turned into full-time work, and Gina stayed at the company for seven years. During this time, Gina met and started dating a San Franciscan who grew up in the Inner Richmond. They got engaged and Gina moved to that hood. She still worked at Google and now waited for their corporate bus in a chiller area with fewer protests.
Then Gina's family suffered a tragic loss. One of her first cousins died by suicide. She says the experience "broke [her] family open," meaning it obviously hurt them all, but it also brought them closer. It made waiting for the Google bus that much more impossible for Gina, too. She'd moved into a new role at the company and was doing events for them. She decided it was time to branch out on her own and do what she loves.
She was able to go part-time while launching her own events company. She'd tried to quit, but Google asked her to stay on. It ended up serving her well, as it provided some needed income while she undertook all the stuff it takes to start a company from scratch. The first event she produced under her new moniker, Make It Mariko, was Undiscovered SF, which began in 2017 as the first Filipino night market in SOMA.
The first Undiscovered SF was such a success that it inspired Gina to transition Make It Mariko to her full-time work. The stories goes like this: A friend let her know about the nonprofit SOMA Pilipinas. She met with those folks and pitched a launch event. They applied for and received a $5K grant to do the event. A friend was able to wrangle $150K on top of that. That one launch event turned into six events, spaced out one per month.
In 2020, Undiscovered SF went virtual. Gina had her tech background, and they had plenty of time to transition. This allowed them to connect Filipinos across the diaspora, sitting on panels and interacting with one another. And of course, there were DJs from all over.
Prior to the pandemic, in addition to many other kinds of events, Make It Mariko had quite a lot of corporate event-planning business. Since COVID, though, a lot of that went away. Gina decided she wasn't gonna sit around and wait for big events to hire her company. She wanted to build on the success of self-produced events like Undiscovered. The seeds of what became POC Food and Wine were planted.
Gina loves wine. During the pandemic, she got a scholarship to join a wine program where she was able to dive into that world. One of the topics was pairing, and so she was able to take that knowledge and apply it to the POC Food and Wine Festival, pairing POC chefs with specific wines and other beverages. Attendees were encouraged, but not required, to navigate the space and its makers along the lines laid out for them by Gina and her staff. I'll just say: It was one of the best, most unique experiences I've had in my 26 years here in the Bay Area.
We end the episode with me letting Gina know how much I also enjoyed this year's Love Thy City event, which took place in February. It was to celebrate Make It Mariko's 10th anniversary and to establish a relationship with The Foundary space in South of Market. The love (right there in the name) that night was palpable—love of San Francisco, of community, of one another.
All of these events—Undiscovered, POC Food and Wine Festival, Love Thy City—for me show how dedicated Gina and her people are to uplifting real people doing extraordinary things.
Find Gina all over the place, really:
Brave New Spaces, whose goal is to help creatives eventually own their spaces
Make It Mariko, her events company
Photography Mason J.
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Chances are, you've been to one of Gina Mariko Rosales' events, even if you weren't aware.
In this episode, which kicks off our Asian-American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month programming, meet Gina. Born in Daly City, she's lived most of her life on the Peninsula and in San Francisco. But let's talk about how she got to where she is today.
Gina was born at Seton hospital in Daly City and her parents raised her in Pacifica. In her words, Gina "grew up with a bunch of skaters and surfers." Sounds fun. But she was one of only a few Filipinas in her hometown. She was also shaped from an early age by her time in Catholic school, which she went to beginning with her preschool days.
She also a performer, dancing specifically, but we'll get to that.
Gina is part of the first generation in her family to be born in the US. Her parents, Armando and Lillian, both came to this country from the Philippines for college in Ohio, where they met. Lillian's family moved around the Philippines because her dad was an engineer. Gina's dad is half-Filipino and half-Japanese—his Japanese lineage is from Okinawa.
Lillian came to The States to pursue international law. But life had other plans. She ended up getting married and having kids, and instead did consulting work. In starting to talk more about her dad, Gina goes on a tangent about how, in 2025, she was able to visit both her mom's homeland in the Philippines and her dad's in Okinawa.
Gina's mom was the first in her family to come to the US. Then one of Gina's aunts came. Then slowly, the family starting working on getting more and more members to relocate. Eventually, her grandparents and all her mom's siblings arrived in The Bay. Suddenly, Gina had hella cousins around.
Her mom's family has done quite a job tracing their own lineage. Gina says they've been able to trace the line back six or seven generations. And many living members of that clan get together every couple of years for massive family reunions. Think 250–300 folks. I love that.
Though she's not 100-percent certain, Gina believes that it was jobs that brought her parents the The Bay after they met at college in Ohio. Lillian worked at Levi's and Armando at Charles Schwab. They had their first child, Gina's older brother, out here. That was the early Eighties. Around mid-decade, Gina was born.
Her early memories are of her time in Catholic preschool. Her school was pre-K through eighth grade, so Gina says that once you're labeled by your peers, it sticks. And those students are with you for a minute. Ninth grade provided a chance for Gina to get out of that situation. She "busted out" and attended Sacred Heart here in The City.
She remembers being pretty little and visiting her mom at Levi's in San Francisco. She climbed on and ran around the now-defunct Vaillancourt Fountain. They'd go to Fisherman's Wharf. And they'd visit her grandfather's grave at the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio, followed by trips to Japantown for sushi.
We sidetrack here after Gina talks about how St. Mary's was their church and I mention that it's the "washing machine" and "city titty" church. Gina wasn't familiar with either term and I'll characterize her reaction as, simply, mind blown.
Because her school, Sacred Heart, was nearby, Gina describes the scarce parking available for students and a lottery system they all had to operate under. We go on another sidetrack here to talk about ways to get around DPT's trickery—chalk marks and all that.
At her school, Gina was in the choir and she was a member of the step team. She'd often stay around after a day of school to participate in both groups. She and her friends would frequent 1000 Van Ness movie theater and Venture Frogs, where they'd drink boba and eat popcorn chicken. I remember both spots from my early days in The City, around the year 2000.
Gina says starting at Sacred Heart after doing K–8th in Pacifica was refreshing. She made friends with people who looked like her, finally. She was part of an Asian girl crew, in fact. Most of those girls were also on the step team and so much bonding was happening. So was "parking lot pimpin'," whether it was in San Francisco or Daly City, after school or on the weekends.
She talks about the prevalence of unhoused folks around her school. Sacred Heart would have outreach days where students would make sandwiches to take to those people. Gina looks back fondly on that time.
She and her friends would also hang out in Japantown, taking the bus up Geary or just walking the few blocks down. They also went to hella under-18 parties that had names and themes. There were rave rooms and hip-hop rooms. Gina calls them "the early party days." These were the days before "face the DJ" parties.
For college, Gina went across The Bay to UC Berkeley. That meant moving out of her house in Pacifica for the first time. She lived in a dorm her first year, then moved into a co-op house and eventually into an apartment with friends.
Philosophy and education were Gina's majors. She intended to graduate and become an English teacher. We go on another sidetrack about studying philosophy (something we have in common) before Gina explains how grad school ended up not working out for her.
And we end Part 1 with Gina's story of graduating college in 2008 when the Great Recession hit. Her dreams were dashed and she moved back to Pacifica to live with her parents. She applied for countless jobs and ended up getting into AmeriCorps VISTA, a branch of the larger organization that focuses on alleviating poverty. The program wants its members to experience a level of poverty themselves. It paid just enough for Gina to move to San Francisco.
Check back Thursday to hear Part 2 and the rest of Gina's story.
We recorded this episode in the Brave New Spaces at Make It Mariko in South of Market/SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District in March 2026.
Photography Mason J.
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Listen in as I chat with guests at 415 Zine's 415 Day celebration at Madrone last week.
Find the guests of this bonus episode:
Mackenzie C Kirk
https://www.mck-film.com/
@m.c.k.film
Carrie Cotini
https://carrie-cottini.squarespace.com/about
@carrieann22
Mike Bruno
https://www.mbrunophoto.com/
@mbrunophoto
Allison/If n Wendy
@ifnwhendy
Stephanie
(no online presence)
Spike
https://madroneartbar.com/
@michaelspikekrouse
@madroneartbar
Fredo
https://www.fonzerelli415.com/
@fonzerelli415
Laine
https://www.teatimewithlaine.com/
@teatimewithlaine
Find 415 Zine on IG @415zine and https://www.415zine.com/.
We recorded this podcast at Madrone Art Bar in April 2026.
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In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Todd has just learned the process of importing automobiles into the US. He had one under his belt. He was ready for more.
He'd learned about older Japanese fire trucks and set his sights. He was still going to Japan frequently, and began to make "car friends" over there. As could be expected, there's quite a subculture around cars in many countries, and Todd had found his in his home away from home.
He found a tiny Japanese fire truck on an auction site, but the going price went out of his range of comfortableness. Normally, he'd need his family's backing to make a move for another automobile. But this time, they were let down that he didn't get the car. And with that, Todd decided to skip auction altogether and instead work with an importer in Sacramento.
We sidebar a little here for Todd to talk about how Japan incentivizes exporting its slightly used cars all over the world. He brings this up to mention that, when shopping for a Japanese car to import, thanks to a robust selling market, you have a good idea of what you're gonna get.
Working with that importer, there was another fire truck that caught Todd's eye at auction, but he let that one go, too. Then that same truck ended up on a Japanese used car site with much better photographs, and together with his importer, they pounced. Kiri had served a tiny mountain village, and despite being 30 years old at the time, had only a couple thousand miles on the odometer. And because it had served as a vital utility vehicle, it had been well-maintained. The asking price was well within Todd's comfort zone. Then began the process of getting Kiri to California, a whole other ballgame.
One snag was that the buying process got underway the first week of March 2020. Yep. The world shutdown and so, Todd thought, did getting his new red fire truck home. But in July that year, the importer called him one day and said, "Your truck is here." Kiri looked pretty much like it looks today—a signature red coat of paint, lights, sirens. But it didn't come with firefighting equipment. Todd supplied that on his own.
Emblazoned on the door of his new fire truck was the name of the Japanese town it had served before retirement—Kirigamine, a mountain town in Nagano prefecture. Todd, who's visited many times since buying the truck, compares the tiny town to Pescadero along the coast. Todd goes on a tangent here to explain why, as he himself learned along the way, Kiri the car is so small.
Then I share my reflection on that time in the world. I got married about a year later (in 2021), and my wedding took place outdoors and in the streets of San Francisco. I remember how happy it made people we passed, and ask whether Kiri, once it hit the streets, had a similar effect. Todd goes into some depth about the serendipity and sense of wonder Kiri evokes when he drives his fire truck around.
Todd says he gets a lot of requests to bring Kiri to birthday parties, but he isn't accepting those at the moment. (He jokes that when you start seeing him at parties, it means he isn't doing too well financially and has turned to his fire truck to help him through tough times.) He will, however, bring the truck to parades and other civic events. He says that since he first rolled Kiri out, it has served as a bridge between Japanese people and the Bay Area. In addition to Japanese and Chinese folks taking delight in seeing Kiri, Todd says that members of our local low rider community have been drawn in as well.
Kiri's flashing red lights work, but Todd is reluctant to use them, mostly because you're not supposed to. He says that in Japan, fire trucks like Kiri use their sirens/PA system to double as public service announcement speakers. To get their PSAs into Kiri's (and other trucks') system, an input jack was fitted. Todd is able to connect his own player through the same input, and has been loading various messages into Kiri's PA system, including what you heard in the intro to Part 1.
Thanks to Todd's partner working in publishing, they've been making Kiri calendars, which they sell to raise money for CalFire. Get yours on Kiri's website, teenytinyfiretruck.com. And follow Kiri @teenytinyfiretruck on Instagram.
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There's a little red Japanese fire truck rolling around all over San Francisco. But instead of putting out fires, Kiri the Japanese Fire Truck is spreading joy and inspiring smiles.
In this episode, meet and get to know Todd Lappin, the human being who brought Kiri from Japan to the US—Bernal Heights specifically.
We start with Todd's life story in Part 1. He has lived in the 94110 ZIP code for 34 years. But he's originally from New Jersey. "Even after 34 years, New Jersey is like a stain that doesn't wash out," he says. He grew up in what he calls the "Ohio part" of the state. I call it "the pretty part," meaning not New York City-adjacent.
Todd is a self-described Gen Xer—growing up mostly in the Eighties, latch-key kid, etc. Most of the growing up happened in Hackettstown, NJ, one of the places where M&M's are made. It's not far from the eastern end of I-80, also. NYC was an hour away and Todd spent plenty of time there as a kid. In addition to being born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Todd spent one year in Oakland as a kid when his navy dad got stationed in Alameda.
He's long held a fascination with cars, specifically what are known as "working vehicles." Think of them as cars people use for jobs. He appreciates the aesthetic honesty of such automobiles.
Though it was and still is small, Hackettstown served as a hub for surrounding farmland and even smaller nearby towns. When Todd was in high school, one of those surrounding towns' volunteer fire department sold a Cadillac ambulance for $600. He didn't buy it, and regrets that to this day. It's his "Rosebud," so to speak.
When he was young, he also started getting deep into Asian culture. For Todd, this fascination stemmed from diving more into the US war in Vietnam. He learned about Confucianism. He ended up going to Brown University for college and getting even deeper into Asian history and culture—focusing first on Chinese, then moving onto Japanese.
Todd did a semester abroad in Japan, in fact. He didn't love the school part of his time there, but ended up traveling around the country on his own. Those travels eventually led him into China. After this, he pivoted from studying modern Japan to digging into ancient China, with a specific focus on Daoism. He ended up with a degree in Chinese intellectual history.
Going back to Todd's Bay Area connections, besides that one year in Oakland when he was little, he'd visited with his parents when he was a teenager. When he graduated from Brown, he was dating a woman from here. But it was a high school spring break visit that really cemented it for him—this is where he wanted to be eventually.
For young Todd in the Eighties, San Francisco felt urban in a way that reminded him of his time in NYC. After that, it was the beauty, the thoughtfulness, as he puts it, that hooked him. Six years or so after that spring break visit, Todd put down roots in SF.
The two of us digress to talk in some depth about differences between SF and NYC. One way that Todd characterizes it is: The East Coast anoints. The West Coast creates. I can see what he means.
Todd still loves Providence, RI, where Brown is. But a year after graduating and staying there, that SF "hook" pulled him here. When he landed in early-Nineties Mission (1991), it felt like Providence, so there was a familiarity to his new hometown.
Zine culture was still big at the time, and Todd did a little writing, much of it journalistic. One of those gigs was to edit a book by one of his mentors—Orville Schell, who was once the dean of the UC Berkeley journalism school. Like Todd, Schell studied Chinese history and culture.
So, that was 34 years ago. Todd doesn't think the 94110 has changed, or, as he puts it, hasn't changed enough. The City has grown, but the Mission and Bernal for him are mostly the same. He eventually got a job at and worked for Wired for a while. Years later, he launched Bernalwood, a blog about his neighborhood. This is where Todd's and my worlds first intersected. Todd sees blogs as a natural progression from zines—both have low barriers to entry and so foster a more-independent spirit than established or corporate news orgs. I agree, having been part of the blogging world myself.
At this point, we turn to the topic of this episode—Kiri, the tiny Japanese fire truck. Todd shares that story with us all here.
Going back to his pivot from studying Japanese to studying Chinese culture, Todd says at that point, he felt he was done with Japan. But in 2004, a friend who was going through a divorce mentioned wanting to visit Japan and Todd accompanied him. This trip brought it all back for him. He had enough of the language stored in his brain to be able to function and had a terrific time.
With that flame reignited, Todd has visited Japan "nonstop" since then. On one of those trips, he met someone who'd become something of a "car creator," meaning he was making content around cars and publishing it on YouTube. Todd had been driving Jeeps and SUVs back in the US, automobiles that he'd outfitted to look like company trucks. This is where Telstar Logistics—a fictitious company he created—comes in. But that new friend who made videos about cars introduced him to a Nissan Skyline R32 while he was in Japan. Todd was so taken by the car that he bought and imported one back to California.
Through that importation process, he learned that any car that was 25 years or older could be brought to the US from another country. There were some other California-specific hoops he had to jump through, metaphorically, but he had learned what it took.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 to hear how Todd locked sights on the automobile that became known as Kiri.
We recorded this episode at Pinhole Coffee in Bernal Heights in February 2026.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
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For Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Soleil was working in restaurants in Minneapolis, both front-of-house and back, and also starting writing about food around this time.
There was a new food publication in Minneapolis at the time called Heavy Table, and Soleil offered to intern for them. At first, it was a lot of looking around for events for the publication to cover. Eventually, there were opportunities to do some writing, and Soleil pounced. That led to other chances to write, and the proverbial ball was rolling. They were also on food stamps at the time, which doesn't surprise me too much.
Rewinding a bit, Soleil talks about the food blog they had around 2007. It was mostly for recipes, but it was theirs and theirs alone. They looked up to the big food bloggers of the time, people who are still around and still writing about food.
From Minneapolis, Soleil moved to Portland. After they, tried New Orleans with the idea of going to grad school there, but fell back to restaurant work. And then they went to Puerto Vallarta to help their mom open a restaurant there. After Soleil's sister went off to college, their mom had moved to Mexico City. She worked for a restaurant group for a while, then moved to PV to be with friends. Before Soleil arrived in Mexico to help their mom, their mom had opened a bar that later became a restaurant.
During their time in Puerto Vallerta, Soleil was still writing about food, and they did a podcast with friends, too. Racist Sandwich had started in Portland, and Soleil kept it going from Mexico. The show was a reaction to blatant white supremacy in the food and restaurant worlds, a problem that, though it's eased some, is still with us today.
Juggling the many responsibilities that came with being in their mom's restaurant in Mexico, along with podcasting when they could, it all eventually gave way to Soleil deciding to move back to the US to try being a full-time food writer. So they went back to Minneapolis and stayed for about six months. (Honey the dog chimed in here again, and you'll have to use your imagination to guess what she had to say.)
It was 2018, and longtime SF Chronicle food writer Michael Bauer was retiring. Soleil picked up on that from Minnesota and it piqued their interest. The Washington Post was writing about the retirement, and asking folks out here in the Bay Area what they wanted the Chronicle do next. They published a slate of candidates to take over after Bauer, and it included Soleil. Shocked, they applied for the job. They got a phone call shortly after that, and here we are.
Soleil's only prior visit to The Bay came in 2011, when they stayed at their friend's apartment in the Tenderloin for a while. They visited Western Addition a lot, went to Zuni (such a good restaurant, though it's mostly for special occasions for my family), and finally had good coffee at Phil's.
I ask them whether San Francisco and the Bay Area stood out for them among the many, many places they've called home. They cite the history of the place as being quite the magnet. Then we get to the story of the approach Soleil wanted to bring to writing for the Chronicle, which, in their words, was to give more context to the art of food preparation.
After writing on staff for a bit, Soleil got one note from their bosses: They were writing about too many Asian restaurants. We both agree, though: DUH. There are hella Asian restaurants here, and it's part of what a lot of us love about the place. Still, Soleil feels that the paper gave them enough freedom to write about what they wanted to write about.
I share the context of my own life and the world around me back in 2018 when I first learned about Soleil, letting them know that I, among many others I'm sure, welcomed them after such a long tenure of their predecessor. We start talking about doing their work during the pandemic, and they mention that they feel they were predisposed to talking about labor and other social aspects of the restaurant business.
Eventually, though, it was time to move on. One reason they cite for leaving the Chronicle is that they got tired of being so visible. A significant number of readers were hostile to Soleil, and it got to feel like a mismatch. The rightward political drift of the paper didn't sit well either. They left in 2025.
That year, Soleil joined with some friends to launch COYOTE, a worker-owned media outlet. Those friends include: Nuala Bishari, Emma Silvers, Danny Lavery, Rahawa Haile, Estefany Gonzalez, and Cecilia Lei (visit the COYOTE Staff page to learn about a couple other folks who are involved). While still working at The Chronicle and in their off-time, they'd enroll in seminars on what cooperatives are and how to start and run them. They note that existing co-ops are very generous with their years and decades of knowledge, singling out Rainbow Grocery and Oakland's Sustainable Economies Law Center.
COYOTE launched last September. Soleil says it's going well, six months in.
Follow Soleil on IG @soleil_ho. Follow COYOTE Media Collective @coyotemediacollective.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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The story of Soleil Ho starts with their grandparents.
In this episode, meet and get to know the food writer and COYOTE Media Collective member who's been on my radar since they replaced longtime Chronicle food writer and mysterious human Michael Bauer. In Part 1, we dive into Soleil's family story.
It begins two generations back, when their grandparents came to the US from Vietnam in the Seventies. They were refugees from the US war in their homeland. On Soleil's mom side, the grandparents brought Soleil's mom and seven other children from Vũng Tàu to Freeport, Illinois. They had first ended up in a refugee camp in Arkansas. It wasn't easy finding a new home for such a large family, but an older refugee from Nazi Germany who lived in Freeport took them in. Soleil's mom was around 10 years old when she got to Freeport.
Soleil's dad's family comes from Central Vietnam. After the Viet Cong took over, they put his dad (Soleil's paternal grandfather) in a re-education camp, where he remained for around 10 years. After that, he was released and was able to flee his homeland for the US to join his family (also a large one). They also ended up in Illinois, where Soleil's parents eventually met.
The story of how their parents met goes something like this: The Illinois Vietnamese scene was relatively small, and folks mostly knew one another. By Soleil's description, their maternal grandfather was "the guy," meaning he threw parties and made connections. So their parents' families just hung together, sometimes at big parties like at Lunar New Year, and there was always a lot of food.
It was a shotgun wedding, with Soleil present in fetal form. They have a younger sister and their parents are now divorced.
Soleil was born in 1987 in Illinois. Their mom had moved to Chicago to go to school there. Their earliest memories take place in Chicago, in fact. With two young parents working a lot to support their family, Soleil and their sister spent a lot of time with their maternal grandparents. They remember learning to make sandwiches in their grandparents' kitchen.
Another early memory that I find fascinating and a little funny is of Michael Jordan individually wrapped hot dogs. It was Chicagoland in the Nineties, so it makes perfect sense that Bulls merch was everywhere. And that extended to food, remarkably.
There's one memory from preschool involving contraband Gummy Bears. Fun stuff. As Soleil got a little older, they developed a love of vampires. In art classes, when asked to draw hand turkeys or Santas, Soleil would do so, but they would add fangs and bloody teeth.
Fast-forwarding a bit, Soleil says that around the time they went off to college, they realized that the family had moved around 20 times. They moved to New York City when Soleil was eight. Their mom worked in fashion and lived on the east side of Manhattan. From there, they moved to Brooklyn.
When I express awe at living in NYC in the Nineties, Soleil is quick to point out that this was Giuliani's New York. Policies of that administration transformed much of the city, especially Manhattan. We'll just leave it at that.
It was around this time that Soleil started to develop a "taste in food," as they say. Their mom was now a single mom, working a lot, and like many families, they had the drawer full of take-out menus. Through this, Soleil learned about various Chinese cuisines, Indian food, and dishes from many other cultures, all represented right there in the kitchen.
After Brooklyn came a short stint in Long Island before returning to Brooklyn, where Soleil went to high school. They compare that school to Lowell here, where you have to test to get in and "all the smart kids" go.
With a quick, feeble calculation in my head, I ask whether Soleil starting high school around 9/11. They confirm and share their story of that day—suffice to say that they saw the whole thing happen in real time.
I ask whether they're scarred from 9/11. Soleil says that, yes they are, but mostly existentially. Then they pivot to talking about how it brought about an end to illusion about the world, which is a net good thing. But seeing 9/11 in the greater context of conflict around the world really opened their eyes.
(Our second guest that day, Honey, seen in the first photo with Soleil above, took issue with a canine passer-by, which I've left in the recording because duh.)
September 11 led to Soleil's becoming an activist anti-war person, starting in 2003 with Iraq. Rather than being scarred by 9/11, it allowed them to put their own life into context. As a Vietnamese person with a French first name, they started questioning things like: Why was it so easy for the US to go to war after 9/11, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq?
When it came time for college, Soleil says that they wanted to "get as far the fuck away from New York as" they could, which for them meant Iowa and Grinnell College. They chose the school to be closer to their grandparents, who still lived in nearby Illinois, and because Grinnell essentially billed itself as a place for folks to figure it out, so to speak.
By the time Soleil graduated college four years later, the sub-prime crash had happened and the subsequent recession had begun. They worked on a farm, which was hard but helped them better understand food systems. And then they moved to Minneapolis and began working in a restaurant, where we wrap up Part 1.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the rest of Soleil Ho's story, including how they helped found COYOTE Media Collective.
We recorded this episode at Strawberry Creek Park in Berkeley in March 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We're talking about Mission bars, and I share a story about the backroom at Delirium. Rae brings up similar stories of her own at places like Thee Parkside, and we agree that Parkside owner Malia Spanyol is the best. Rae shares a story that confirms it.
She looks back on the years before she got her SSN grateful that Kerrang! allowed her to work. She says and I agree—those jobs don't really exist anymore. The industry itself was misogynistic, but there was also a freedom to the job. They flew her to shows all over the place. And they paid her enough to live in San Francisco.
After Rae recounts a couple of specific incidents of mistreatment she got, we go on a sidebar about the music industry specifically and entertainment industry more generally and how riddled with misogyny they are. Rae managed to get out of music journalism, but it took some time and effort. She says that when folks ask her to write about music nowadays, she recoils.
Then we talk about Rae's new book. I share how it all came to me, and that originally it was supposed to be a bonus episode where we talked "only" about Unsung Heroines. After reading the book, I decided it needed to be a feature about this incredible woman who herself should possibly be in her own book.
Rae says that if she'd stayed in the UK, the history she'd know and would hear about constantly would revolve around royals and their lives and their wars. So she dropped history. But upon moving to San Francisco, she became curious about everything she saw and heard and read. It felt natural that at some point, she'd spend her curiosity and mental energies writing some sort of history or another. We go on a sidebar here about Emperor Norton and what a troublesome character he was.
She was working at KQED writing about pop culture. After about a year, she found herself, as she puts it, "being insufferable in bars to strangers about the fact that women had been written out of history." Writing about history would be a new hat for Rae at KQED, but in 2018, she persuaded her editors to let her write five essays for Women's History Month. The series was a hit.
In 2019, her department, Pop Culture, folded and she moved into KQED Arts. She'd written a couple more essays in the interim, but once in the Arts department, she really picked up the pace. In January 2020, Rae decided to turn the essays into a monthly series, upping the pace. The series had come to be known as "Rebel Girls," a Bikini Kill reference. But that March, all the libraries closed when COVID shutdown hit.
She pivoted to library websites, but then I prompt Rae to shout out all the libraries she frequented to research her book. The SFPL History Center and the California Historical Society stand out. When I ask about women she researched who didn't make it into the book, she points out that the series, which again predates the book, includes essays about 55 women. City Lights Publishing, who put Unsung Heroines out, settled on 35 for their edition. They wanted a digestible book, and for teen readers, they felt they needed to remove women with … let's just say more risqué stories.
I ask Rae to pick three of her favorite essay subjects, and while she's thinking it over, I offer some of my own. I start with Judy Heumann, the disability rights advocate who did so, so much to guarantee the rights of other disabled folks in our country. Rae mentions Judy, whom she'd been researching well before her unfortunate passing in 2023; Ruth Beckford, who figured big in Black Panther history; and Abby Fisher, a formerly enslaved woman who couldn't read or write but, with the help of others, published a cookbook.
We take a slight detour as Rae begins to describe how they went about illustrating Abby Fisher and others, for whom there was no photographic or other visual reference. The Unsung Heroines publisher, City Lights, asked her about imagery, and when Rae told them that it's been difficult for her, she suggested illustrations. But City Lights doesn't do illustrated books and told Rae as much. Then City Lights' publisher struck up a conversation with another swimmer at the pool one day. That other swimmer was Adrienne Simms. Following that talk, the publisher found Adrienne's art, brought it to Rae, and the rest of history. Adrienne illustrated Unsung Heroines.
I ask Rae not who her favorite heroines are, but of the 35, which one or ones she'd want to join us at Vesuvio that day we recorded. Without hesitation (in fact, I believe she says the name before I finish asking), Rae offers Pat Maginnis, an incredible champion and fighter for women's reproductive rights.
Unsung Heroines is available wherever you get books (but please, don't use that one horrible fucking website). City Lights is one obvious choice, but most Bay Area independent bookstores should carry it. If not, ask them to order it for you. More people need to know about and read this book.
Follow Rae on Instagram @rae_alexandra_writing. She's on Threads @rae_alexandra3.
We end with final thoughts from Rae, specifically her feelings about all those ubiquitous dumb fucking AI billboards.
- Visa fler
