Asian Heritage Street Celebration 1: From Adobo to Anna Conda

The 6th Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration took place on Larkin Street Saturday afternoon, stretching from the Asian Art Museum at Civic Center to Ellis Street four blocks north in Little Saigon.



The street fair was started by the Fang family, which published AsianWeek before that free rag folded recently. The original idea was to hold the event at a different location in San Francisco each year during May, which was named Asian Pacific Heritage Month back in 1990 during the first Bush presidency.



This was the first time that the festival stayed put at the same location "to build upon the same footprint from the prior year to improve the fair," as the program put it, and the strategy obviously worked because the turnout was lively, and the range of entertainment amusing.



The street food was also great, including the Philippine pork adobo with rice we had for lunch.



There were lots of health booths set up, offering everything from free AIDS tests to Hepatitis B screening, which is statistically off the charts in urban Asian American communities. There was also a colon cancer interactive display you could walk through, above and below, that may have been the most graphically disgusting street fair prop ever encountered.



I was passing out literature for Michael Nava's Superior Court Judge election and ran into another candidate, Glendon "Anna Conda" Hyde (below left, with his partner), the brilliant, leftist drag queen who is running for Supervisor in District 6.



Along with Jim Meko and Debra Walker, Anna Conda is definitely one of my three ranked-choice votes this June.