Check out my conversation with previous guest Lincoln Mitchell as we chat about Lincoln’s new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco.

Look for Lincoln at the following events for his new book:

• April 29: He will be in conversation with Bill Issel discussing the book and what it can teach us about San Francisco today. Hosted by the Phoenix Project at the Roar Shack, 34 7th Street, from 6–8 p.m.

• May 1: He will be in conversation at the University Club with Corey Busch, who served on Moscone’s senate staff, was a senior member of Moscone’s mayoral campaign staff, press secretary and chief spokesman for Mayor Moscone, and was Moscone’s chief speech writer. This event will begin at 6 p.m.

• May 13: As part of the San Francisco Historical Society’s History Live! program, he will be discussing the book at 6:30. The event will be free in-person or online.

• May 15: He will be in conversation with writer and scholar George Hammond about the book at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco at 5:30 p.m.

• May 28: The Savoy Tivoli in North Beach will be hosting a book party, which will feature a brief discussion of the book as well as an exhibit of the works of noted San Francisco photographer Dave Glass.

For more information about these events, including how to RSVP and buy tickets, go to LincolnMitchell.com.

We recorded this episode over Zoom in March 2025.

Listen in as SFFILM Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks and I discuss this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. Topics include:

• SFFILM’s THE HORROR! festival spotlight

• Festival Talk: Filming in San Francisco

• The film Outerlands

• A Tribute to Chris Columbus + Rent

Please visit SFFILM’s website for more info, including where to RSVP for free events and where to get tickets for ticketed events.

We recorded this episode over Zoom in April 2025.

It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan.

Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show:

• Kundan Baidwan's Oral History of Aub Zam Zam Bar (2018)

• Rootstock Arts' Color Your Mind Festival (2024)

Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself.

We begin Part 1 with Kundan’s birth (on Dolly Parton’s birthday) in January 1978. She was born in San Jose, but her family soon relocated up the East Bay to Fremont. Her dad had come to the U.S. for college. He went to school in Reno at UNR. When he and his first wife split up, he went back to Punjab, India, to find a new partner. One of his sisters introduced him to the young woman who would become Kundan’s mom.

Kundan’s dad had already graduated and moved to the Bay Area by the time he found his new wife. In fact, he had lived in The City—on Haight and in South of Market—in the late Sixties. He brought Kundan’s mom back to The Bay after they got married.

The young couple moved around San Jose a couple times, with her dad doing what he could to buy housing for himself and his family. This included their move to Fremont when Kundan was around 2.

All of Kundan’s early memories are set in the East Bay—Fremont specifically. They spent time there and at relatives’ places in San Jose. As a young kid, she enjoyed things like playing dress-up, singing songs in the mirror, hanging out with adults, and asking for recipes. She had visions of being a “culinary genius,” she says now.

Kundan has 26 first cousins, and she keeps up with every single one of them. She’s on the younger end of her generation in her family, but most of her cousins around her age don’t live nearby. In the Bay Area, Kundan was usually the youngest. Owing to this, she feels she benefited from constantly being exposed to culture through her older relatives.

Around middle school, Kundan says she became a “bad student.” What she means by that is school got harder and she didn’t feel up to the challenge. Other kids also began teasing and taunting her, which didn’t help.

When it comes to her own creativity, Kundan is quick to credit her mom, who, she says, was pretty much always drawing or illustrating. Her mom’s mom was a painter. Creativity ran through her and her siblings’ DNA—her brother and sister both wrote at various points in their lives.

She went to Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, where she found her people—the “weird kids,” meaning artists and musicians and theater people. High school wasn’t too cliquey, but as much as groups mixed, you knew who your people were. At this point, Kundan and I go on a sidebar about the movie Didi, Sean Wang’s 2024 film set in Kundan’s hometown of Fremont in the early 2000s.

Her parents were on board for Kundan’s to major in psychology in college. She’d taken art classes in high school, and found a strong art program at UC San Diego. But that’s not what she intended to study.

Kundan shares some of her early memories of visiting San Francisco from across The Bay. And we end Part 1 with her decision to leave the Bay Area and go to college in San Diego.

Check back next week for Part 2.

We recorded this episode at Mini Bar in April 2025.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

The Tenderloin Museum turns 10 years old this summer, and I for one am here to celebrate that.

We first visited TLM early last year, when we talked with museum Executive Director Katie Conry. This bonus episode is all about the many, many programs going on as they approach a milestone anniversary.

To start us off, we hear from Program Director Alex Spotto. Alex shares many (but not all) of the upcoming events Tenderloin Museum is either producing or affiliated with. They include:

• a new production of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play (opens tomorrow, April 11!)

• an art show by Lady Harriet Sebastian (up through May)

• Monumentalizing Community (film screening and discussion on April 17)

• Club 181 Live at Great American Music Hall (April 23)

• McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers Issue Release Party in Myrtle Alley (May 1, 6 to 8 p.m.)

• Tenderloin Music and Arts Festival, by Psyched! Radio (May 16–17)

• Panel discussion about the book Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, Whore (May 22)

• Matthew G. Lasner talk about transforming apartments in the post-war era (May 29)

Visit TLM’s Programming page for more events and more info, including tickets.

Then, Katie and I go on a walking tour of the new space into which the Tenderloin Museum will be expanding. The new spot will triple the size of the current museum and provide, among other things, a permanent home for the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play. They’ll break ground this July, coinciding with the museum’s 10th anniversary.

The current space where their permanent collection lives will become the SF Neon Museum.

They hope to open the new areas of the museum in 2026.

And so, to put it mildly, exciting times at San Francisco’s Tenderloin Museum.

We recorded this episode at The Tenderloin Museum in March 2025.

Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group.

Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of We Players, a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can.

While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as throwing banners off the clock tower and tying bodies to sculptures around campus. She discovered that art would be her life’s work, not just a hobby.

One idea she had while in Palo Alto was to do a production of Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet held all around the Stanford campus. It was a success, as the audience grew and grew as it moved around, picking up more and more people along the way. Ava was able to turn this type of theater into an independently designed major.

After graduating, she moved to the East Bay and started doing theater productions there and in The City. She started partnering with the National Park Service (NPS) in 2008 and then with SF Recreation and Parks in 2018.

Ava’s first production at Fort Point, the Civil War-era fort under the southern base of the Golden Gate Bridge, was in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, she had a three-year residency on Alcatraz, further deepening her relationship with the NPS. In 2013, she kicked off Macbeth at Fort Point. But a funny thing happened—a government shutdown that year effectively ended that run under the bridge.

Fast-forward nearly a decade, and the NPS reached out to see whether Ava and We Players were interested in trying again to produce Macbeth at Fort Point. That brings us to the present day.

Ava’s friend Ann had left theater and had been working in movies. She’d also been taking epic walks—as in hundreds of miles at a time, all over the world. She was on one of these walks when she and Ava connected over Zoom and Ann offered to play the part of Lady Macbeth to Ava’s Macbeth in We Players’ upcoming production.

Ann would not only play one of the two major roles in the play, but she would also be there for Ava to help with various aspects of putting it all together, including casting. It was somewhere in this time that the decision was made for this to be an all female-identifying and non-binary cast. We Players is run and was founded by women, but they hadn’t done a production with a cast like this before. It was 2024, before the election. It just felt right.

Ann and Ava talk about the themes of Macbeth and how they relate to the current times we’re in, no matter who we are. Ava touches on how important it is for her to foster a caring, kind, nurturing environment among her cast members, and how poignant that is for such a violent play like Macbeth.

Then we pivot to talk about how times have changed, 10 years removed from the last time they did this at Fort Point, and how they have not. Ava also describes what it’s like inside of Fort Point, something we in San Francisco might not all know about. One point they want to emphasize for anyone who comes to see their show—it’s cold as hell, even by SF standards.

We Players’ production of Macbeth at Fort Point opens on April 11 and runs through May 18. All shows start at 6 p.m., Thursday through Sunday (with a few exceptions), rain or wind (duh) or shine. Tiered tickets (for equitable access) are available at the We Players website.

We recorded this episode in the Gramercy Towers in March 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850.

In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of SF Heritage. But he’s so, so much more than that.

He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco.

On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His dad’s mom was single and fell on hard times in Texas. She came to San Francisco, where she had a step-brother.

Woody’s parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard (where Boudin Bakery is today). Donut Bowl was a combination donut shop/hot dog joint. At the time the two met, his dad worked as a cook there and his mom was in high school. His mom and her friends went to nearby Washington High and would hang out at the donut shop after school. The next year or so, his parents had their first kid—Woody.

They came from different sides of the track, as it were. Woody’s mom’s family wasn’t crazy about her dating his working-class dad, who didn’t finish high school. But once his mom became pregnant with Woody, everything changed.

The couple had two more sons after Woody. One of his brothers played for the 49ers in the Nineties and lives in Oregon today. His other brother works with underserved high school kids in New Jersey, helping them get into college.

Woody shares some impressions of his first 10 years or so of life by describing The City in the mid-Seventies. Yes, kids played in the streets and rode Muni to Candlestick Park and The Tenderloin to go bowling. It was also the era of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jonestown, and the Moscone/Milk murders. But for 10-year-old Woody, it was home. It felt safe, like a village.

Because I’m a dork, I ask Woody to share his memories of when Star Wars came out. Obliging me, he goes on a sidebar about how the cinematic phenomenon came into his world in San Francisco. He did, in fact, see Star Wars in its first run at the Coronet.

He attended Sacred Heart on Cathedral Hill when it was an all-boys high school. He grew up Catholic, although you didn’t have to be to go to one of SF’s three Catholic boys’ high schools. Woody describes, in broad terms, the types of families that sent their boys to the three schools. Sacred Heart was generally for kids of working-class folks.

After school, if they didn’t take Muni back home to the Richmond District, Woody and his friends might head over to Fisherman’s Wharf to play early era video games. Or, most likely, they’d head over to any number of high schools to talk to girls.

Because parental supervision was lacking, let’s say, Woody and his buddies also frequently went to several 18+ and 21+ spots. The I-Beam in the Haight, The Triangle in the Marina, The Pierce Street Annex, Enrico’s in North Beach, Mabuhay Gardens. There, he saw bands like The Tubes and The Dead Kennedy’s, although punk wasn’t really his thing. Woody was more into jazz, RnB, and late-disco.

We chat a little about café culture in San Francisco, something that didn’t really exist until the Eighties. To this day, Woody still spends his Friday mornings at Simple Pleasures Cafe.

And we end Part 1 with Woody’s brief time at UC Berkeley (one year) and the real reason he even bothered to try college.

Check back next week for Part 2 with Woody LaBounty. And this Thursday, look for a bonus episode all about We Players and their upcoming production of Macbeth at Fort Point.

We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt