In a small miracle, the usually claustrophobic Castro Street Fair was uncrowded this year, thanks to all the many scheduled events in San Francisco last weekend which siphoned off the hordes.
We found a perfect location at the junction of Market, Castro and 17th and indulged in major people watching with the Curry Girl above, a very funny, seemingly overeducated Indian (or Pakistani) lesbian and her posse of friends.
Instead of drinking expensive beers at the fair, they were discreetly buying twelve-packs at the liquor store across the street, and pouring them into plastic cups, a surreptitious practice we joined.
For three straight hours, we leaned against a concrete planter and watched the world pass by.
There were plenty of young people...
...old people...
...drag queens...
...and even a blind guy in the middle of the sidewalk.
Every ethnic group imaginable was represented, and nobody felt scary...
...even the political activists dissing the Puritanical Undertaker, Supervisor Scott Weiner, who represents the neighborhood.
The whole afternoon was so unexpectedly charming that I managed to fall in love with San Francisco all over again.
On Sunday morning, we breezed through the big calligraphy special exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, which is only for the initiated, meaning that it probably helps immensely to be able to read Chinese, and even more so to write it. The most interesting sight at the exhibit was watching a middle-aged man standing in front of a huge scroll air-guitaring what the strokes might be to create a particular character.
Though it was a Target Free First Sunday, the museum was fairly empty, which allowed us to comfortably watch the opening processional for a Filipino-American History Celebration.
The acronym ANAK means child in Tagalog, and is the title of Filipino folk musician Freddie Aguilar's biggest hit, one of the most popular songs in the world.
The old marble stairway left over from the building's former role as the Main Library is a beautiful place to stage a ritual, and it's surprising to think I have never seen that done before.
The little girl dancers were shy, graceful and colorful...
...and they acquitted themselves nicely...
...even with the fussy gentleman above in white, who we took to be the choreographer, gesturing them forward.
He need not have worried, because his young troupe used the space well.
The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was started in the middle of Golden Gate Park in 2001 by the billionaire Warren Hellman as a vanity project where he could play his banjo with professional musicians, and it quickly grew into a massive event with five different stages in adjoining locations.
Along one chain link fence, there was a fifty-foot cloth printed with photos and quotes from Hellman, who died last year of leukemia at the age of 77. Born in New York City with inherited wealth from Wells Fargo among other capitalist dynasties, he went to Harvard Business School and then became seriously wealthy while working for the now-defunct Lehman Brothers. The quote above reads, "No one would have believed down in the bowels of Lehman Brothers doing IPOs that I'd ever be up here on stage with Jimmie Dale Gilmore."
After becoming president of Lehman Brothers, he eventually moved on to his own venture capital firm in San Francisco in the 1980s. He was a Republican who treated San Francisco very much like his own Sim City, as you can note by the quote above: "I always say, 'Monet or a festival?' If you had the money, which would you rather own?" That final word is telling.
Wealthy people seem to be used to owning other humans.
The crowd was mostly white and mostly charming.
The problem was that there were too many of them, packed in small to medium sized dales, where there was not an inch of grass to be seen between the tarps, blankets, and humans. My New York friend became claustrophobic, mentioning that it felt a bit like 42nd Street at rush hour.
We wandered forlornly looking for a section that wasn't in the pathways or packed to the gills, and chanced upon the smallest Porch Stage, where the British folk artist Robyn Hitchcock below was performing a lovely, funny set.
"Robyn Hitchcock?" My young neighbor Ella exclaimed, while we chatted during a rush hour Monday morning Muni bus trip to downtown. "He was huge in the 80s. Now he's playing the Porch Stage? I guess we all have our ups and downs."
Hosting a tourist in San Francisco is a good spur to attending public events that you usually avoid for one reason or another, and this last weekend was a doozy. My friend from New York and I walked from Civic Center to the Marina Saturday morning for the Fleet Week Air Show, and should have bought souvenir Blue Angel earplugs, if only to protect ourselves from a random Air Force bomber that just about pierced an eardrum.
The keen fascination with military flying machines seems to be mostly a guy thing...
...with fathers and sons bonding over bombers.
An emcee was keeping up an inane patter over the speakers, including, "We honor the two greatest countries in the world, the United States, and [pause, pause, pause, while everyone in the crowd started guessing who was supposed to be #2] our neighbor to the north, Canada." We were then treated to a teen choir singing O Canada and The Star Spangled Banner, followed by the opening act, none other than the B-2 Stealth Bomber.
The emcee boasted about the gigantic "unit cost" of hundreds of millions for each of these secret planes that were only unveiled to the public in 1997. "How many people have they murdered over the years?" was the statistic I was curious about, but the emcee wasn't indulging in any of that kind of negativity.
We left for a rooftop party at Lombardi's Sports on Polk Street to watch the Blue Angels show at 3PM, but the party wasn't being given this year, so we jumped in a bus and went to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park instead. More to come.
