The fairly new Tenderloin Elementary School on Golden Gate and Van Ness Avenues was built after years of pleas and organizing by inner-city parents, and the structure turned out to be one of the prettiest and most useful structures that have gone up San Francisco over the last decade.
It even has a large library where the Junior ROTC can plot its comeback after being banished recently by the San Francisco School Board.
On Friday evening, the large auditorium was packed to the walls with friends, family, and politicos for an "installation" of three new school board members.
Mayor Gavin Newsom had almost as ugly an election last November as George Dubya, with the local voters repudiating virtually all of his candidates and positions. His one successful endorsement was for a woman who works in his office, Hydra Mendoza (what a name!), who won one of the three school board seats.
So Mayor Newsom showed up for her installation, and was seated next to his archenemy, Supervisor Chris Daly, who was there for the installation of his friend Jane Kim. (The third new board member, Kim Shree-Maufus, is on the right.)
The event was slated to begin at 6PM, but a high school band was still playing music at 6:30, and the ceremonies hadn't even started.
Daly was hosting a party for Jane Kim at his offices in City Hall after the installation, but I wasn't able to attend since duty called in the form of a "Chinese New Year Spectacular" at the San Francisco Opera House.
The SFist blog had provided myself and M.C- (whose music blog can be found by clicking here) with $168 press tickets for the New Tang Dynasty TV 2007 Spectacular in exchange for an article about the event.
Little did we know that the Spectacular was actually Falun Gong propaganda, and easily the most demented piece of entertainment I have encountered since walking into a Mexican wresting arena (Lucha Libre) in Acapulco 30 years ago. When M.C-'s undoubtedly brilliant article is finished, with photos by yours truly, you will be alerted.
4 comments:
DAMN!! You sure live an interesting life. WHY isn't a major newspaper hiring you to do a column?? You could be the next Herb Caen, only WITH photos... Rock on-- great shots and great dialog.
A falun gong propaganda piece! Excellent! I'm glad to see you could make it since Rita had asked me to help locating the PR guys, which she did without me anyway. I guess she just looked up the little red phone book.
Those JROTC kids seems to show a lot of pride in their uniforms. They sure look like good kids.
What a shame they're being dumped on.
I gotta learn more about Falun Gong. Is the last picture typical of Falun Gong art? If so, the sect may have trouble catching fire in the west. Even sub-morons have some sense of cultural appropriateness.
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