An Open Letter to Stid Merkel after Reading His Final Column

Dear Stid Merkel,

I don't want a post-Stid world.  The only SF Chronicle writer I enjoy as much as you is Don Asmussen.

Sometimes I get the news first from him, and for a while I was getting really enlightening reviews from you.

There are so many plays I never had to see because I saw your column first--even though it was very hard to find.  (Why did they put it way in the back?)

 I've put "Harvey" on my Netflix list and will see that when I can no longer see your column way in the back of the Sunday paper.

Your fan, who has only one reason to live now instead of two, 

Tina Martin

Epic Musical Article Forwarded by My Son Jonathan

For several years my son Jonathan has sent me topical birthday and Mother Day greetings in the form of articles he says he's found in the New York Times, acknowledging me as The World's Best Mother.    This year, the New York Times made no such declaration, but they did have something on the epic musical I inspired!

November 15, 2017

Epic Musical Coming to Broadway

There are many long musicals. South Pacific lasts about three hours. Les Miserables, The Producers, and Mary Poppins are only slightly shorter. But now a musical is coming to Broadway that dwarfs them all: Dear Tina Martin will be 14 hours long and will be presented in seven parts over the course of a week.

The show is inspired by Tina Martin of San Francisco, who visited New York City this past fall and saw seven shows in seven days: Come From Away, Katie, Miss Saigon, Annie, Prince of Broadway, Dear Evan Hansen, and Groundhog Day. 

The story of Dear Tina Martin begins in Vietnam, where a woman named Kim has raised a baby named Tina in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, after Tina’s American soldier father evacuated from Saigon. Kim sings to Tina and Tina becomes addicted to show tunes.

Tragedy strikes when Kim takes her own life so that Tina can have a better life with her father in America, where there are more musical revivals.

Tina boards a plane to New York to meet her father, but her plane is diverted to Gander, New Foundland. There she receives such a warm welcome that she stays and becomes known as an orphan. She inspires the town with her optimism, befriending a stray dog and singing about her hopes for tomorrow.

Her hopes sour, however, when she starts to find that every tomorrow is another today. It is as though she is living the same day over and over again. But then she realizes: she awoke again and again on the same day only because of her segmented sleep.

A prince named Harold visits the town and offers her a role in a revue in New York City. She accepts. She loves her role in the musical and is taken in by the rest of the cast. But provocative questions about consent and going too far are raised when they respond to her love of musical theater by taking her to an opera. (It doesn’t help that the opera is Madame Butterfly.) She becomes distraught. But she begins writing to herself about the experience (“Dear Tina Martin”) and soon becomes enchanted with graphomania.

This is all in the first half hour. Highlights of the following hours include her years in the Peace Corps in Tonga, teaching abroad, having a son and a meque, and developing countless relationships with friends and family. The show, astonishingly full of interest and variety, is still being written. 

A very special bouquet from my meque

Javier has brought me hundreds of beautiful bouquets over the past 15 years; he even wrote  "will never cross threshold without flowers" into the bylaws of the Club Toruño-Martin back in 2002.

But maybe my favorite bouquet  is the one he created for me to keep the animalitos from devouring what is left of my bougainvillea.

It means even more that he had already granted my birthday wishes downtown, and we were back and  already in our "something more comfortable" clothes when Javier said he would get dressed again and get me protective netting at the hardware store right away instead of waiting until the next morning so that I wouldn't have to worry about the plant overnight.

As he worked on the screen--with minimal help from me--images of The Little Prince came to mind.





A bouquet from my very own prince, Meque Javier.

Anne Fadiman at Bookshop West Portal

Bookshop West Portal, my neighborhood bookstore, has a lot of good events.  Earlier this year it hosted "What We Do Now:  Standing Up for Our Values in Trump's America" and "Radical Hope."  Maybe my favorite ever was when they hosted Richard Russo, whose writing I like so much and who's taught composition and written about parents who had a very different way of responding to student writing.  I had the chance to ask him about his experience at the same time that I was responding to student (ESL student) writing.

When I found out that Anne Fadiman was going to be doing a reading, I started listening to The Wine-Lover's Daughter and then bought the book so I could mark favorite passages.  I also wrote her a fan letter and told her about the JoMama Book Club.

Before she spoke and read, Neal and Susan served us wine.

  A friend of hers had sat down next to me and was soon joined by his wife, who'd just gotten two "incredible salads" at Lemonade, just down the block on West Portal.  It turned out that they had brought Anne Fadiman to the reading, and he was mentioned in her book  as her companion trying wines in the chapter "Initiation."  I'd marked a section of page 49:

                        Peter and I were eighteen.  In those days, there was nothing out of the ordinary about spending a                          weekend alone with a boy with whom you     were not sleeping, though I knew Peter wished our                            platonic relationship were otherwise.  The previous yer, he had sent me a love letter--    the best                            one I have ever received--in which he wrote, "Every part of me loves every part of you."  He                                   would,  in fact, have made an excellent boyfriend, but I can see that only now, more than forty                                 years later.  We are still friends.  I was Best Human at his wedding.  He     was a bridesperson at                           mine.

He seemed very happy with the woman he married.

Anne Fadiman's father hosted the show "Information, Please" and got 10% of the American population listening.  She lamented that now readers just wanted to get instructions on how to get richer and do better on match.com  and said, "No one like my father could command the attention of 10% of Americans now."

She said that winning the National Book Award in 1997 completely took her by surprise.  "I"d written about an epileptic Hmong toddler!"  she said.  (Of course, we know she'd written about a whole culture, cultural insensitivity, the medical profession, etc., and she knows that too.)  She wanted to let her parents know she'd won the award, so someone handed her a cell phone--an enormous thing--and it was the first time she'd ever used one.  

She said when she was  recording her book, she thought, "Why does this writer use such long sentences!?" It turned out that I had heard her on Audible even before she did.  She hadn't even known that the Audible version was out!

Gophers Ate My Bougainvillea, Which Had Survived Highway Fumes for 23 Years

My bougainvillea had seasons.  Bougainvilleas do that.  So I wasn't alarmed when, after flourishing in August and the months before

, it went "dormant."  I knew it would bloom again soon, and it did.  In October I saw new flowers, and on October 28, I took a picture of the renewed bougainvillea blossoms on my balcony.

But I should have paid more attention to mounds of dirt around the wooden structure--call it an enormous pot-- the bougainvillea was sitting in. 

The newly-blooming bougainvillea stopped blooming and I saw this:

Yesterday a gardener came and confirmed the bad news.  Gophers had eaten the roots.  Only one vine was still living.  

Why after all these years--23!--did the gophers go for it? Were they particularly hungry this year?  Were they roaming into new-to-them territory like the cougars, mountain lions, and coyotes in San Francisco?

I think of those fairy tales, where Red Riding Hood's grandmother can be brought back whole from the belly of the wolf.  There's Jonah, swallowed by a whale.  I don't really want to split open a gopher to rescue my beloved plant, but why couldn't the gopher just  repent and regurgitate, bringing the bougainvillea roots back intact and ready to go again?

SF Chronicle's Bad Reporter Keeps Me Informed

When I see the Bad Reporter's headling:  NRA PROPOSES ALL RED FLAGS AT HALF STAFF/Beautiful gesture is a tribute to the victims," of course I understand it because the NRA always responds to  gun violence in the same sensitive way.

But I occasionally see allusions I don't understand, as was the case with CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER TO REPLACE ROY MOORE.  I hadn't yet learned about Roy Moore's alleged molestation of a 14-year-old a couple of decades ago.  But I guessed correctly that Christopher Plummer was replacing Kevin Spacey in something or other. 

The Tenderloin Times

Last week I went to a gathering at the Tenderloin Museum, where we "donors"  (sounds like an arm and a limb) were served drinks and hors d'oeuvres.  (Not sure there was any tender loin, but maybe...)  We had from 5:30 to 7:00 to look around the museum, where issues from The Tenderloin Times 1977-1994 were on display.

Then there was to be a panel of journalists on the topic "From Broadsheet to Broadband:  Community Media in the Digital Age."  They each spoke for five minutes about how technology is re-defining how we connect to media and the concept of community.

I got a good seat and eaves-dropped on the group I assumed would make up the panel.

I recognized Andrew Lam from the time I took my City College class to see him on the Ocean Campus.  But there was another man whose face I knew, but I didn't know from where.

Finally it dawned on me that he was Juan Gonzales, the chair of the CCSF Journalism Department as well as the founder of El Tecolote, a bilingual newspaper now 47-years old.  

The man on Juan's right in the photos here is Rob Waters, a former editor of The Tenderloin Times.  The man you see on the far right was the moderator, Brad Paul, housing advocate and former Cadillac Hotel tenant.

Below you can see them when Rob Waters was speaking and the others were seated for the panel.

Sara Colm, former editor; Andrew Lam, author; Carrie Sisto, Tenderloin Editor of Hoodline; Juan Gonzales, founder of El Tecolote and Chair of CCSF's Journalism Department.

David Talbot, co-founder of Salon, 48 Hills op-ed writer, former SF Examiner editor, former SF Chronicle columnist, and author, was a special speaker.

Here's Randy Shaw, director of the non-profit that runs the museum, The Tenderloin Housing Clinic,  and the author of  The Tenderloin:  Sex, Crime and Resitance in the Heart of San Francisco. 

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"Tip" for the San Francisco Chronicle on Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

I just sent the following "tip" to the San Francisco Chronicle:

So far, if I'm not mistaken, the SF Chronicle hasn't done its own reporting on those detained by King Salman and the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia.  Instead you've used reports from the New York Times, but there's a local angle and information I haven't seen reported.

The son of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the one so often mentioned in reports because he's the "Warren Buffett of the Middle East,"  has a son,  Khaled bin Alwaleed, who's been very active in the environmental movement away from fossil fuels.  He was instrumental in getting LED lights in Jordan.  He's even a vegan and has eaten at Chaya in San Francisco.  The emphasis in the reports I've read so far has been on the wealth of Alwaleed bin Talal and how his arrest has affected the stock market, not on  the progressive ideals and actions he and his son have championed.  Is there some way you could interview his son and do your own reporting?

I then sent a link, urging John Diaz/the Chronicle staff to read it:

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/02/10/news/meet-vegan-saudi-prince-whos-turning-lights-jordan

Andrew Ogus, Incredible Artist

Andrew Ogus, I learned back in the 1980's, designed books, but I had only an inkling of his talent and imagination until I joined the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and started receiving the Knight Letter, the members' magazine, for which he has been the publication designer since 2003.

I missed his September show, and now, looking online,  I see how many others I missed:

http://andrewogus.com/shows

I'm so glad I didn't miss yesterday's! 

His printmaking and drawing skills are awe-inspiring, and talking to him yesterday  I realized how similar his creative process is to what writers say about theirs.  He says he has something in mind after he prepares the paper, but the muses take over after that, so he can and usually does surprise himself. 

Muses,  the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts, seems like the right word for the work of an artist so inspired by Greek mythology.  Our conversation  made me aware of how much I've missed or forgotten about Greek mythology.  

He told me about the story of  Castor and Pollux, twins, but not identical ones because Pollux was immortal, and Castor was not.  When Castor was killed, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with Castor, and Zeus sent them both to heaven in the form of Gemini!

 The word "saucing" is new to me but something he said he learned to do at Fort Mason. 

When I come back I want to relate the funny story of a sale Andrew made yesterday and show some of his work on paper--including Madonna and Child.

Celebrating Friendship, Food, Freedom, and Art!

 Shehla and I had planned to devote the day to celebrating the November 4th birthday of a friend, Beth Ericson, but her time was limited, so after we had Mediterranean (Turkish) food at Bursa--a wonderful restaurant due to the servers as well as to the food--stopped at the West Portal Produce Market for persimmons and had a piece of the cake and Kahlua trifle I'd made for Beth, I had time to go downtown to see Andrew Ogus' incredible art at the studio open house at 759 Bryant.

On the way there I saw a protest march which said "#Nov4ItBegins," which I realized I could have used on a card for Beth had it been a few hours earlier--but the rest might not have fit quite so well:  "TrumpPenceMustGO.  RefuseFascism.org 

More on Andrew Ogus' art tomorrow!

A Belated Report on Halloween in the City!

When I shared my photos of Halloween on West Portal, Bill shared this picture of a pumpkin Melanie's grandson Matteo created--a pumpkin vomiting from having had too much Halloween candy.

Time flies!  The last time I saw the artist, he was just an infant sleeping through Tom and Bill's wedding vows!  Here he is with his mother and grandparents at City Hall, SF, in 2008.

Then at Greens we saw this, Pumpkins and gourds on the root end of the redwood burl.

Now that It's November 4, Time for Halloween!

I'm always behind, but I can't leave Halloween behind, so here it is on Vicente 2017.

For several days I admired this house every time I walked to West Portal.

So on Halloween night I waited until sunset to see it in the dark.

There were streams of costumed people on the sidewalk and in the streets, and some neighbors had even put up tents or canapes in their front yard to welcome the trick-or-treaters.