I'm a member of the Neo-Futurists, a performance company that puts on a weekly show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. At the beginning of the show, we start a darkroom timer for 60 minutes and try to perform 30 plays before the timer runs out. The show – which takes place every Friday and Saturday at the Boxcar Playhouse – inspired me to collect 30 60-word San Francisco stories made up of city facts and legends, overheard tidbits, random thoughts and observations, and shared personal experiences. I hope you enjoy them.
1. Bike Karma: Last year, the SF Bike Coalition handed out chocolate to bikers who stopped at red lights on Market. Next year, they plan to “expand our Bike Polite campaign to even more locations…. It may not be chocolate, but people we catch biking politely and yielding to pedestrians will certainly get some kind of treat as thanks.”
2. Bees live on the roof at a fair number of San Francisco restaurants and cafés, including Nopa, Bi-Rite, the Fairmont Hotel, Flour + Water, Mission Beach Cafe, Farm:Table, Quince, and Cotogna.
3. The bear on our state flag is Monarch, a California grizzly captured and brought to San Francisco by William Randolph Hearst. While in captivity, Monarch lived in what is now the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. Today, he lives inside a freezer in California Academy of Sciences.
4. My mother, remembering St. Patrick’s Day 1974: “Someone slipped me a mickey at Fisherman’s Wharf. I went home on the lap of a policeman who dropped me off right at my apartment door. He even put the siren on.”
5. Urban legend says that when the Transbay tube and BART first opened, a BART inspector showed up for the first run wearing scuba gear.
6. Math, overheard on Haight Street: “E equals MC shut up and die.”
7. To Vanessa Evers, growing up in San Francisco meant “weekly hikes to Tennessee Valley [in Marin], thinking fireflies are a made-up thing, and having keggers in the Presidio.”
8. Yes, palm trees aren’t native to San Francisco. But barely any tree is. According to the 2013 San Francisco Tree Census, less than 0.1% of the trees in the city are native to the region. Ninety-two percent of these trees are found in the Outer Sunset, along the Sunset Parkway.
9. The Clipper Card’s name is rooted in San Francisco history. In the mid-nineteenth century, the height of the Gold Rush, the fastest way to get from the East Coast to San Francisco was on a clipper ship. These ships would advertise their speed to potential passengers and cargo shippers with clipper cards – small postcard-sized advertisements.
10. Filmmaker Alice Wu has traveled all over the world discussing her work, but she maintains that the strangest questions she gets are from home sweet home: SF “was the only place where people were very concerned that one of my (adult) characters smoked in a couple of scenes.”
11. A crew of night herons creeps en masse in the trees at the Palace of Fine Arts.
12. How to clean your compost bin: Mix white vinegar and baking soda together in the bin. Scrub! Add in more vinegar and baking soda, let it soak, and then rinse with a garden hose. Celebrate that you’re not attracting raccoons anymore.
13. Siyu Song, growing up gay on the peninsula: “My family would visit the City to run errands and I desperately wanted to see gay people. Once, I caught a glimpse of a couple holding hands as we drove past. I remember an intense longing but also relief because it existed and would be there for me in San Francisco."
14. If you look at the front window of Dog Eared Books on Valencia, you’ll see postcard-sized memorial drawings by Veronica De Jesus. She draws a new piece every week, choosing to honor an individual who recently died. These postcards are small testaments to the beautiful achievements of everyday people, inspiring those who walk by.
15. Robot Dance Party! (aka Chris Hirst): “[The robot] communicates feelings, things that can’t be reduced to words. It’s about jump-starting people’s imaginations and reminding them how fun it is to dance to music without any inhibitions or sense of awkwardness. I’m not a robotic person that dances and plays music, I am the dancing and the music brought to life.”
16. The bestselling item at my local liquor store is wine, but the owner drinks beer. Sometimes with “a shot of Hennessy.” Or “two shots of tequila.”
17. The secret to Philz coffee? Manufacturing cream. (Around 40% milk fat.)
18. One day's worth of lost things reported on Craigslist: Samsung phone, lovebird, black wallet, Totoro the cat, keys with bottle opener, blue jewelry box with salt-and-pepper shakers inside, black wallet, silver broccoli-shaped pin, black wallet, keys with little wrench, Surly bike, black wallet, white Maltese, Himalayan cat, black wallet, Cannondale bike, Samsung phone, Eddy Merckx bike, orange Giants bag.
19. Locations where lost items were last seen: Winfield St., District Bar, Badlands, 16th and Van Ness, Golden Gate Park, 7th and Judah, Castro and 17th, the deYoung, Clement St., Inner Richmond, Vallejo and Octavia, Buckshot Bar, Sutter and Lyon, Reno (Nevada), AT&T Park Section 313, North Beach, Bryant McDonald’s, Zeitgeist, SOMA.
20. Sighted in the Tenderloin: a man trying to deliver two crates of strawberries to a massage parlor.
21. A dreamer: “When I become King of San Francisco, I shall climb up to Grandview Park and watch the fog roll in. I shall bring my Queen and we shall wear deep mahogany smoking jackets. We shall bring our royal velvet chairs and wear smoking jackets and smoke on big gnarly pipes and watch the fog roll in.”
22. How to tell if your neighbor has recently moved to San Francisco: They call the fire department because they smell burning sage.
23. Katharine Chin on finally, finally moving in together: “On a whim, we trawled through Things Lucky on Haight searching for a talisman for our new(ish) apartment and came home with Evangeline the Hippo. She stands guard by our window now, with our love orchid to keep her company.”
24. WORST OF SF: The Civic Center BART escalator! The T after a Giants game! Van Ness at rush hour! Fisherman’s Wharf after you’ve just dropped a piece of sourdough! AutoReturn! Getting to Golden Gate Park and realizing you’ve dressed for the Mission! A coffee shop with outlets! A coffee shop without outlets! The SPCA at closing time!
25. Allison Page of Killing My Lobster is working on a production ofThe Three Musketeers with high school students. The hardest part of working with high schoolers? “Constantly yelling, ‘HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR BODY!’”
26. Number of universities in San Francisco: 25; number of coding boot camps: 15; number of cabdriver schools: 2.
27. “The other day I saw a pigeon, a seagull, and a parrot fighting over a piece of bread and I thought to myself, ‘What a perfect metaphor for living in San Francisco.’ I don’t really know what that metaphor is, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a variety of creatures fighting over limited resources.” – Will Caldwell
28. Dolores Park used to be a Jewish cemetery.
29 .San Francisco loves to LARP. Rebecca Power, Game Designer: “For Journey to the End of the Night, 1,100 people had to confess their sins and then repent by kneeling in a chapel and reciting bureaucratically altered prayers. Number of legitimately religious people who were offended? One. Number of atheists offended that we made them pray? Significantly more than one.”
30. Don’t panic. There’s a map that will tell you if you’re parked in a street sweeping spot.
Thanks to Chelsea Larsson, Margaret McCarthy, Chris Hirst, Vanessa Evers, Rebecca Power, Siyu Song, Veronica De Jesus, Allison Page, Alice Wu, Katharine Chin, Micael Bogar, Will Caldwell, Meg Napoli, and my mother, for lots of things, of course.