Afleveringen
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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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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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.
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Rae Alexandra has 35 stories to share with you, plus her own.
In this Women's History Month episode, meet and get to know Rae. She recently published a book with City Lights Publishing called Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area. It's of course available at City Lights, but you can also find it at your local independent bookstore.
I read the book and could not put it down. Only toward the end of the 35 essays did I start to recognize the women Rae features. I love history and I love learning and I have mixed feelings about the fact that there are so many rad women whose stories are untold. Thank you, Rae Alexandra, for shining on a light on these incredible women.
These days, she's a staff writer at KQED. But Rae's story starts in Wales in the UK. She grew up in Cardiff, the capital of the country. (I learn in the conversation that Wales is a country. I also learn that "United Kingdom" and "Great Britain" are the same thing. Now, British vs. English we don't touch, for obvious reasons. But I digress …)
Ed. note: I'll describe my conversation with Rae as two Gen Ex journalist types with ADHD (is that redundant?) doing their best to be linear. To me, the meanderings of our talk are totally normal.
Rae says that Wales is delightful and has all the best castles, but that's because of the number times the country has been invaded and conquered. Close to where her mom lives today is a castle that boasts the world's largest crossbow. When I ask when Rae was born (1978), we discover that she's a horse as in Year of the Horse (aka 2026). Cool.
Rae continued to call Cardiff home up through her college years. She didn't go to another school outside of Wales that had accepted her because she was attached to a group of skateboarders in her hometown. After she graduated, though, she moved to London.
Music has been central for Rae as far back as she remembers (same). She shares stories of being maybe 5 and listening to the Top 40 with her cassette recorder ready to nab her favorite songs (same).
According to Rae, the English look down on the Welsh, and have for some time, based on classist generalizations. Wales is where the UK mines most of its coal. London-types consider their neighbors to the southwest feral, and in some regards, the Welsh are, she says.
In the Eighties, she remembers stories about IRA bombings appearing on the news nightly. Also, in Wales, miners went on strike and everyone knew about it. Rae says that Wales in the Eighties was essentially like listening to The Clash.
We go on a sidebar about siblings, birth order, and what it means to be the youngest, which Rae and I both are. Growing up, she was close with both her older sisters. Today, one lives in Australia and the other lives in the London suburbs.
Around age 10, Rae discovered metal. By 12, she decided that she would become a music journalist. In her teen years, she "snuck" her writing into local and college newspapers. The music journalism she consumed in those days included publications like Smash Hits, Kerrang!, NME, and Melody Maker. In fact, her first job out of college was at Kerrang!
We go on a sidebar on the whole idea of living somewhere vs. visiting, and how they're so totally different on every level. I use Chicago, where I lived for a full six months in the Nineties, as my example. Rae offers up a stay in Brooklyn as hers.
That job at Kerrang! is what brought Rae to London, another place she found impossible to live. I ask her to expound on what it was about the place, and she indulges me. She says that you have to be obscenely wealthy to live in Central London, so most folks are forced to the outskirts. But the jobs are in the middle of town, and so you end up spending around two or three hours a day commuting underground.
It was/is also gray—the weather, the architecture—and the people in London were, as Rae describes it, hostile. When she goes into detail about the ways in which they were hostile, we agree that only you get to shit on your own hometown. People who aren't from there aren't allowed. It's a rule. Look it up.
After a year working for the magazine in London, Rae met a guy from San Francisco. She'd been to The City and even spent significant time here working for Maximum Rock 'n' Roll. (At this point in the recording, I mistakenly call the BBQ place near Hayes and Divisadero until sometime in the early 2000s "Brothers." It was in fact called Brother in-law's. My apologies.)
She moved in with that guy she met, lived with him for six months in London, and then it was time for him to come home to SF. He asked her if she wanted to join him and she accepted. She had already transitioned to freelance writing for the magazine, because office life didn't suit her, so work wasn't so much a problem. But upon arrival, she soon discovered how difficult it was to do anything without a Social Security number.
That added an extra layer to moving here. But it wasn't the place itself or its people that made things hard. It was the system, so to speak. Also, while she was getting settled and learning how to survive in the US without an SSN, she started to see that the guy was, let's just say, not for her. She felt he'd been playing the long game when they lived together in London, but once back on his home turf, some of his sociopath tendencies emerged.
It was 2002 and she lived in Bernal Heights on Cortland. She spent most of her time in the Mission, just down the hill. After a short time, the guy convinced her that they needed to get married, so they moved back to London. The marriage lasted three months, and Rae returned to her new home—San Francisco.
When she came back, she experienced a stretch of housing instability. You could call it "couch surfing," but either way, it was dicey. Six months or so later, things settled. It was easier to live cheaply in the early 2000s, also. A $5 burrito could be a whole day's worth of food. And Rae had befriended enough bartenders that she rarely paid full-price for booze. She describes "The Blackout Triangle" of Killowatt, Delirium, and Dr. Bombay's. She also regularly visited Beauty Bar until that place went downhill.
Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Rae Alexandra.
We recorded this episode at Vesuvio in North Beach in February 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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Part 3 picks up right where we left off in Part 2. While she was still working that real estate job, Sonia was treating dating like a part-time job. She signed up on several dating sites (this was before swipe apps like Bumble). She went on many awkward coffee dates. Then a friend introduced her to a guy, and the two hit it off right away. They were inseparable from the moment they met, in 2008. They moved in a couple months later. In 2010, they got married, and had a kid shortly after that. But in the middle of all this amazing life shit, Sonia was smacked with a breast cancer diagnosis. She was 38.
Sonia had never necessarily wanted to be a mom. She was always happy for friends when they started having kids, but figured it just wasn't in her stars because she wanted a different kind of life. But her new partner and eventual husband told her it was a deal-breaker, and she figured, Why not? They moved from Dogpatch to Glen Park around this time, because they wanted to raise their kid in The City but needed more space to do that, and the options weren't great. Their son was born and they began raising him, eventually getting him into SF public schools.
When the kid was about two-and-a-half, Sonia and her husband started to wonder whether he was on the autism spectrum. A positive diagnosis was made eventually. Sonia praises The City and its programs for kids with special needs. And, like some kids on the spectrum, he's obsessed with public transportation, so he's in the right place. (If you listen all the way through to the end of this episode, you'll hear his recording of a BART announcement.)
Like most of us, the pandemic did a number on Sonia's little family. Their version went like this: The marriage did not survive.
Ed note: We had Sonia and her then-husband on for our Valentine's 2019 episode. After the break-up, at Sonia's request, we took that episode down.
She says that before the pandemic, she imagined that the relationship was as good as it gets. In hindsight, she thinks maybe her second breast cancer diagnosis, after her son was born, broke her husband. Up to that point, he'd been a great partner and excellent dad and solid caretaker for his wife through her first bout. The second diagnosis, coupled with a worldwide pandemic, inspired him to do not great things. Sonia tried to save the marriage, but some of her girlfriends took her down to the Madonna Inn and, as she puts it, "shook the shit out of" her.
Her new reality meant figuring out what to do every other weekend when she didn't have her son. It was a lot of going to movies solo and doing 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles while listening to podcasts. The road to healing involved early stints on dating apps, but usually only to wake up the next morning and immediately pull back. She's really learned to love her alone time.
We rewind back to 2015 to talk about the origins of a big part of Sonia's life today—podcasting. She and her now-ex-husband launched Old Movies, New Beer, a show where they'd drink a beer that was new to them while chatting about some film from the past. She enjoyed it, but he fell off quickly. A friend from her movie theater days hit her up to do a show about movies, and so Dorking Out was born. It also didn't last long, but in that time, Sonia started discovering podcasts she liked. There was F This Movie and Book vs. Movie. One of the Book vs. Movie hosts was Margo Donahue, and Sonia was a fan. She reached out and the two started following each other. The love was mutual.
Dorking Out had Margo on as a guest and she and Sonia gelled so well, her co-host essentially became a third wheel. When he left for unrelated reasons, she kept having Margo come back on the show. Margo slid in to become the show's new co-host. The two became as close as you can living across the continent from each other.
One day, Margo shared an idea she had for a new show. She wanted to call it Seriously, Fuck That Guy. It was amid the Me Too Movement, and they'd talk about whatever piece of shit man they wanted (think: Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein). But every episode would end with someone who's not an asshole. Sonia was in, no question, but she thought maybe they needed a different name. It was early 2017, and What a Creep was born.
Early episode creeps included Lance Armstrong and Newt Gingrich, someone Sonia considers an OG creep. When Sonia and her ex split up, Margo was her main support. They continued doing What a Creep until 2025, when Margo suddenly passed away. They were supposed to record one day last year and Margo didn't show up. Sonia called and texted mutual friends and eventually called NYC police. Sonia had to decide whether to keep What a Creep going. She settled on having rotating guest hosts on (Erin of Bitch Talk Podcast was on recently to talk about Dick Cheney; we're in talks to have me on soon as well, which I'd be stoked to do). She appreciates the community that has developed over the years around the show. She loves it so much that it's what keeps up her presence on Facebook.
I ask Sonia whether there are any San Francisco creeps we might hear more about in the future. She mentions our mayor and our governor while saying that the show leaves space for so-called roads to redemption. I like that. But I also suggest doing episodes on AI or the stupid-ass billboards all over The City.
In contrast to that, we end the episode with Sonia talking about the kind of tech we do want.
We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Sonia's life right after her stint at community college. She left the Bay Area to attend college up north at Chico State. Widely known as a party school (perhaps rightly so?), they also had a reputable journalism department and an award-winning newspaper. This attracted Sonia, of course. But some friends also attended, and that didn't hurt. Once in Chico, Sonia joined said college paper and got a job (where else?) at a movie theater.
It was her first time to move out of her parents' house. She lived with a couple of roommates in Chico. That was one culture shock. Another was that, well, Chico isn't The Bay. And then there's those foothills winters. It also gets hotter in the summer there than it does in Concord.
Sonia wrote for every section of the school paper, and even did some online writing, thanks to Chico State's early adoption of the internet. She even developed a little campus fan base. Sometimes walking around, she'd get shout-outs. There was even a Sonia character in one of the local comic strips.
It was another phase of finding her people. She thinks that because all her roommates in Chico were men, she got really exciting to hang out with young women.
She graduated after three years, in 1996. That Bay Area magnet snatched her back after that, and she moved in with her parents again in Concord. That gave way to an apartment she shared with her sister. Sonia got a job at the Martinez News-Gazette around this time, a three-day-a-week paper where she earned $213 per week. Anywhere she could find free food, she pounced.
At the newspaper, she more or less did it all—cops, local and community news, school board meetings, and, of course, a humor column. I ask Sonia who her humor influences and inspirations are, and she immediately cites George Carlin (this is probably a big part of why we're friends). Her dad loved Carlin, too, and Sonia says the old man also has a wicked sense of humor that rubbed off on her. Another source of jokes was none other than Bugs Bunny. And lastly, Alan Alda's Hawkeye in M•A•S•H is another humor muse.
That newspaper job led to her time at the San Francisco Independent, a paper owned by the Fang family. Sonia did a neighborhood beat on that job, reporting on school board, planning commission, and other community meetings.
We rewind for a minute so Sonia can share early memories and impressions of San Francisco, having grown up across The Bay. When she was a kid, her grandma would take her to see The Nutcracker. She'd visit on other special occasions, but it wasn't until she was an adult that The City really grabbed hold of her heart. There's a hilarious story about showing up to dance at The Palladium wearing a "Ross Perot for President" T-shirt.
Years later, with that job at the Independent, Sonia found herself in San Francisco most days. Though she had to write only three stories, the money was better and the circulation bigger than her previous job in Martinez. The beat was familiar—school board and planning commission meetings. She and her sister had bought a house for themselves in Concord, where they lived with her young niece. Eventually, the paper transferred Sonia to its Burlingame office, but it was to start writing movie reviews. Eventually, she even convinced the Independent to let her write TV show reviews.
When the Fangs bought the San Francisco Examiner, they kept Sonia on to be their TV critic and moved her back to The City, to an office above the Warfield. She'll be the first to admit that when you're getting paid to watch TV, it's not so fun anymore. The paper cut Sonia, but brought her back three weeks later, this time to be the A&E editor.
The Examiner was a slimmed-down, tabloid version of its former self. That's how it was a few years later when, fresh out of journalism school at SF State, I got a job there as a copy editor. I distinctly remember one of my favorite daily tasks was editing Sonia's celebrity gossip column—Scoop, which happened early in my shifts, around 4 p.m. or so. In the episode, I riff about how much I loved reading Scoop every day, even though I've never been good at or cared much for celebrity news. I also let Sonia know that I also appreciated her presence off the page, in the newsroom.
She describes her time at The Examiner as something she loved, but it was also hard. She shares that, after working long days for little pay, she'd go home and play The Sims. Once, around 3 a.m., playing the game, her character was going to a party. And it clicked: Sonia couldn't remember the last time she went to a party. She needed to make some changes, and one was leaving The Examiner.
First up was an HR temp job where her mom worked, in Vallejo. Next was a job writing press releases for a real estate company. Then she found work at a printing company in Oakland called PS Print. (Our lives intersected again around this time, but that's another story.) She helped them create a social media presence. Outside of work, Sonia had a blog (which she still has) called The Sonia Show.
Check back tomorrow for Part 3 with Sonia.
We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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The story of Sonia Mansfield has roots in The Bay.
In this episode, we meet and get to know my friend Sonia. She and I worked together at the Fangs' Examiner back in the mid-2000s, and have been friends since. I loved her presence in the newsroom. I'd often listen to her make us all laugh from her A&E desk across the room. We've been through weddings, births, illness, divorces, and many, many beers together. These days, she hosts the What a Creep podcast, and I'm so glad you get to meet her now.
We begin Part 1 with the story of Sonia's parents. Her dad is from Richmond, California, and her mom is from Concord. Her dad eventually moved to Concord, where he went to Mt. Diablo High and dated a girl who turned out to be Sonia's mom's best friend. After her dad got his heart broken by that friend, Sonia's mom jumped right in. They were high school sweethearts who got married right after graduation, and have been together ever since.
The young couple had their first kid—Sonia—a couple years later, when they were 21. Another girl came around about three years later, followed by a boy five years after that.
Sonia was born and grew up in Concord. She recalls the East Bay town before BART, with plenty of wide-open fields and other undeveloped spaces. She rollerskated a lot (hey, it was the Seventies, after all) at local roller rinks. The Concord Pavilion (now known as Toyota Pavilion at Concord—barf) was where big touring acts played, and Sonia went to her share of concerts there.
Her childhood and early adulthood were, in her words, "so Gen X." She and her siblings and their neighborhood friends ran wild, like feral animals. Anyone from this generation, including me, can relate. Looking back as an adult with a kid now, Sonia figures her parents just wanted them out of the house. What's the worst that could happen?
The only "surveillance" would be: If the family dog, a Dachshund named Oscar, was sitting outside a nearby house, you could bet that Sonia was inside. He got there by chasing his favorite person while she rode her bike. No leash. Why would you?
It was so laissez-faire, in fact, that Sonia says she would walk into strangers' houses. "You're watching cartoons. I like cartoons." Cool. Her sister was always part of her crew, her and other kids from the neighborhood. They also had hella cousins. Sonia's mom is one of eight kids in her family.
We go on a little sidebar about all the crazy, dangerous shit we all did as kids. In Texas, there was a certain kind of injury, where some part of your body scraped across cement or asphalt. We called it "getting skinned," and it hurt like hell. But it was just part of the game.
The conversation turns to Sonia's earliest days loving TV and movies. She's loved them as long as she remembers, thanks to her dad. He used to love going to theaters to watch movies. Now, he prefers seeing them from the comfort of his own home, but it speaks to his love of the medium. And Sonia says she got that from her old man.
Her mom also loves movies, and kept going to theaters longer than her husband. She took her eldest daughter with her almost always. The movies they saw were never age-appropriate, but she got in because she was with her mom. Young Sonia also loved TV Guide, and would read the magazine from front-to-back, word-for-word. She says that before the internet, before Google, her dad would call Sonia and ask her about movies.
The TV was always on, something else I relate to (my parents, both in their mid-eighties, still do this). Sonia was an early MTV adopter. Probably because her parents were younger than most, they liked cool music and Sonia heard a lot of it.
That whole "walk into neighbors' houses, everyone's my friend" ran head-first into seventh grade, when Sonia learned the hard way that it just can't be true. One day, on the bus she rode every day, one kid started teasing her and then got other kids on the bus to join in. And it happened again the next day. And the next. The torture lasted for months. And it wasn't just the bus—the dude kept up the torment in the classroom.
She says that the bullying changed her chemically. She went from open and outgoing to shy and afraid. She started spending more and more time in the school library during lunch. She didn't share her shame with anyone—not friends, not her parents. She internalized it.
Part of turning inward for Sonia meant watching more and more TV. She'd go see movies alone. But it's not like she had zero friends. Sonia found her weirdos, the nerds and theater kids, and kept her circle small.
She got even more into writing during this time in her life. In middle school, she'd write "really shitty short stories." She asked her parents for and they bought her an electric typewriter. In high school, she took a creative writing class and joined the school paper staff, for whom she wrote movie reviews (duh). Siskel and Ebert were huge influences, and she regularly read the Contra Costa Times' A&E section.
When her family would go off on camping/hunting trips and leave Sonia behind because she wasn't into that kinda thing, she'd take the $20 they left her and go rent movies at her local indie video store. She'd browse the aisles and read the backs of every tape. She credits this with why she has so much useless knowledge around movies in her brain all these years later.
After she graduated from high school, Sonia got a job at the local movie theater. And at that job, she started making friends with other movie nerds. Because her coworkers were new in her life and not privy to the BS she put up with in middle and high school, she could start fresh with them. And she was getting attention … from boys.
Some of the folks she met at that theater job and another that followed have remained lifelong friends, in fact. Sonia was really finding herself as a young adult.
We wrap up Part 1 with her decision to stay close to home and go to community college, vs. moving away and going to a four-year school.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2.
We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Toshio talks about those chess players at Powell and Market and other early impressions of The City before they moved here.
Having grown up in Orange County, with its underfunded public transit system, Toshio always wanted to live somewhere that had a subway. Being able to walk was important, too, in contrast with SoCal, where you pretty much need a vehicle to get anywhere. SF and The Bay checked those boxes.
Like Part 1, this episode is rife with sidebars. I guess that's just what happens when you get two people together who both like to talk. The first one in Part 2 is about running any sort of independent media within the larger framework of late-stage capitalism, especially when the content you create is inherently anti-capitalist. You know, light stuff.
I try to get us back to Toshio's story of moving to San Francisco, then I can't help myself—another sidebar, this time about Craigslist, which of course Toshio used to help find a place to live in San Francisco. They were able to get work, as we've mentioned, but finding housing was much harder. Their first two places were in the Mission. They left the first one after only one month, thanks to a fire. Their next spot was at 24th and Bartlett, close to BART. Toshio splinters off to talk about some of the other spots they looked at and open houses they went to. "Oof," they say.
In 2013, they were able to move into a below-market-rate apartment near Civic Center (the very home where we recorded this episode, in fact). Toshio is their own landlord, something I congratulate them on. Sometime after they moved in, they met their boyfriend. They also got exposed to more and more leftist politics in SF during this time. They talk about coming to terms with the fact that the world they want to see will probably not come about in their lifetime. That's a hard pill to swallow, but it's probably best to accept that and then fight like hell to overcome it.
Toshio's light-green living magazine job afforded them the opportunity to write for further left-leaning publications like Truthout. When Al Jazeera opened its US office in The City, they got work there. They've also written for Them and Vice. It all served as background for Toshio to launch their own outlet—Sad Francisco.
We go on a sidebar about the corporate takeover of the news, and how local outlets and indie operations like our own have stepped in to try to fill that void. Toshio mentions some newer publications that they're excited about, including Bay Area Current, The Phoenix Project, and Coyote Media. (Ed. note: Look for an upcoming episode with Coyote Collective founding member Soleil Ho.)
Sad Francisco started (and continues) as an effort to fill the massive gaps left by said corporate media in the Bay Area. Toshio was curious about the podcast medium, and kicked things off reading and riffing on versions of 2,000-word pieces they had already written for traditional media. They mention that we're at a point now where every journalist, no matter the medium or the employer, should probably be diversifying the distribution of their work. I couldn't agree more.
Sidenote: I've been witnessing Toshio's move to self-facing camera reels, with them laying out whatever issue is on their mind, then expounding on it. It's a delivery mechanism I see more and more of, in my limited social media consumption. My wife, Erin (of Bitch Talk Podcast), has begun doing more of these as well, and they seem to resonate with folks. I haven't yet decided whether or when to do them myself for Storied. But I digress …
Toshio feels that in 2026, people are looking for authenticity. They don't care so much if your media product is polished. They're more interested in substance, which would be a gain for society, if true.
When I ask them how folks can find, follow, and support Sad Francisco, Toshio mentions the podcast's Patreon page. Follow them on Instagram @sadfrancis.co. And check out their website, sadfrancis.co. They're also available on most podcast apps and YouTube. Another sidebar here about how much I used to love Twitter (RIP).
We end the episode with my asking Toshio how they do it, how they report so well and so relentlessly on the vast amounts of sketchy shit going down in San Francisco and The Bay. Their answer involves their various journalistic jobs and gigs over the years, and how that work trained them to package up complex ideas and explain incredibly complicated scenarios in a simple, easy-to-understand way. Then Toshio and I indulge in a lovefest for 48Hills.org before wrapping.
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Toshio Meronek's parents met at a bar.
In this episode, meet and get to know Toshio. Today, they do Sad Francisco, a really fucking amazing project that reports on and holds truth to power around here. I first became aware of Sad Francisco a few years ago and right away, I was struck by the deep reporting on and understanding of the many complex relationships and goings on in San Francisco and The Bay. And so I sat down with my fellow podcaster to get to know the human behind those efforts.
Toshio's story starts with their parents. That bar where they met was in Los Angeles. Shortly after meeting, the couple moved to Germany, where Toshio's dad had found work at a major German tech company. But after getting pregnant with Toshio, the young couple came back to Southern California—Orange County to be exact, where Toshio was born.
Some of Toshio's earliest memories involve not really digging that infamous SoCal heat. We'll get into this more later in Part 1, but Toshio picked Portland for college in part because of its more temperate, albeit wetter, climate.
Born in 1982, Toshio did most of their growing up in the Nineties. When I ask them what kinds of things they were into as a kid, they immediately say, "zines." Making zines, collecting zines, living and breathing zines. We hop on a short sidebar about Riot Grrrl, a Nineties feminist punk-adjacent movement that seeped into both our lives at different points—mine early in the decade, and Toshio's toward the end of the Nineties.
Riot Grrrl arrived in the typically and generally conservative Orange County later than a lot of other parts of the country and the world. But arrive it did, and it had an outsize impact on Toshio's young life. Zines were huge in that subculture, too. To expound on their interests as a kid, Toshio was generally into media, curious about how others live, and also sci-fi and fantasy (think D&D). Toshio was around 13 or 14 when they started writing their own zines.
Here we go on a sidebar about one of my favorite pet topics—Kinko's (RIP). IYKYK.
Eventually, Toshio eschewed the ubiquitous copy+print shop and had their zines printed on newsprint paper. It was part of a deliberate attempt to appear legitimate, more like "the establishment," something I find fascinating. They wanted people to take them seriously, and that just makes a lot of damn sense.
Music was very much a part of the Riot Grrrl movement Punk rock music to be specific. And Toshio's early publications covered that. In fact, topics ran the gamut from music and politics to culture and community.
We turn to the topic of Toshio's surroundings when they were a teenager. Record stores, zine shops, cafes that also had live music. They dabbled in the SoCal rave scene as well. They settled into the Candy Kids rave subculture and talk a little about that.
There's another short sidebar where we talk about how amazing youth activism is, and how much we always need it.
As much as young Toshio was part of these communities and subcultures, they also describe this time in terms of being a loner. They also experienced a lack of self-confidence, lots of acne, therapy to work through their being Japanese and white, or hafu (another term for "hapa"), being gay. Though Toshio has grown past those struggles, they consider them powerfully formative.
Then came time to relocate and go to college. Besides Portland having more desirable weather, Toshio chose it in part because of the Northwest's grunge legacy. College life started right around 9/11, and they started going to protests. Lots of protests.
College lasted four years, and after that, Toshio stayed behind in Portland. They got work at a magazine covering ecology for K–12 kids. They were also in bands (they play guitar, ish, sing, and play tambourine). "It felt like everybody was in an alt-country band," they say.
And then, in 2006, they left Portland for … San Francisco.
An editing job brought Toshio here. The publication was a so-called "light-green living" outfit, targeted, as it said, to yoga moms who drive their hybrid SUVs to Whole Foods. I ask Toshio if the job was editing words, and then mention that it's been my profession for a long-ass time. And we go on a sidebar about how important the work is. I'll add that everyone (including editors!) needs an editor. Sorry (not sorry), AI.
That leads to yet another sidebar (can you tell we're both podcasters?)—this one from Toshio about the nature of the "yoga mom" publication. They grew disillusioned with their work there, suffice to say.
We end Part 1 with Toshio's early memories of visiting San Francisco, before they moved here. They involve the older men who used to be found daily playing chess off Powell and Market.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Toshio Meronek.
We recorded this episode at Toshio's home at the confluence of The Transgender District, Tenderloin, UN Plaza, and Civic Center in January 2026.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
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