A meteorological miracle occurred last Sunday when the fog disappeared after a month of unrelenting grey gloom and the sun shone down on Stern Grove for a free concert by Michael Franti and Spearhead.
I had won tickets in the lottery and even managed to find a patch of ground to sit on, where I was joined by this woman...
...and her dog whose ears were protected by headphones, though the sound system was actually at a pleasing volume.
With three days of Grateful Dead concerts taking place nearby in Golden Gate Park, we thought Stern Grove might not be too crowded which was an incorrect assumption. The place was packed to the top of the hillside.
The 59-year-old Franti is a local musical hero who started out as a politically progressive rapper and hip-hop musician in the 1980s and moved into a more mellow, reggae-influenced sound in the 1990s and beyond.
Between the weather, Franti's lyrics that reference sunshine repeatedly, and an extraordinarily happy crowd, the afternoon concert felt like a love-saturated oasis.
As concert buddy Craig Minich put it, "The earnest joy of the performers was something I needed to experience in these dire times."
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