WNP454 - Adrianne Vincent
Nicole: [00:00:00] It's Outside Lands San Francisco, podcast of the Western Neighborhoods Project. I'm Nicole Meldahl. Okay. Hello, dear listeners. I am Nicole Meldahl and I am on my own for another special podcast in which I interview a badass Outsidelander with some stories to tell. So, our guest today is Adrianne Vincent, a fabulous woman of the West side, with whom I was lucky enough to meet at a dinner party before the world went into a pandemic. And I have to say, she reached out after our last podcast on the SNACK concert to tell us that she was there and that she did have a photograph of Marlon Brando's gigantic tummy. And I have to say, the conversation got better from there. So, Adrianne, welcome to the podcast.
Adrianne: Thanks so much Nicole. [00:01:00] Happy to be here.
Nicole: I know you were a little nervous about being the primary subject of this podcast, but it's gonna be okay. Our listeners are with you. I'm with you, and this is gonna be a fun evening. Let's start with the SNACK concert, right? Because you grew up here on the West side and you were at SNACK, but you don't remember SNACK, which is how we know that you actually enjoyed SNACK.
Adrianne: You know, what I remember was having to get up so early that morning and take the bus over to Kezar. And I pretty much am sure I didn't tell my parents. I think it was one of those things of 15, sneaking out of the house, gonna do a concert. So, yeah.
Nicole: If I had a list of every concert I snuck out of the house to see without my dad knowing, it would be a very long list, and my mom actually helped me. So, God bless, God rest her soul for helping me with that.
Adrianne: Right, right, right. Yeah.
Nicole: Okay.
Adrianne: So Nicole, what I mostly remember from that day is fabulous music. And being up at the front. Somehow, I [00:02:00] got the assignment from my school to be the photographer for whatever school newspaper. I had my little, not so little, Nikon SLR.
Nicole: Yeah!
Adrianne: And I was down at the front of the stage photographing up, which was when I saw Marlon Brando in all his glory. But I do have fabulous pictures of Bob Dylan, Neil Young; of other things that were going on up on stage. So, it was a great day of music.
Nicole: I'm gonna track those pictures down at some point. But so, let's maybe take a step back from SNACK, cause that's your teen years. Give us a picture of how you came to live on the West side, what your roots are here. Just sort of paint the picture for our listeners of how you came to be in the West side.
Adrianne: My family got to San Francisco before 1850. So, we got here in 1849, one part, and even earlier, another part. Those parts of my family were down on Clay [00:03:00] Street. And, the West side wasn’t, it was sand dunes.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: So, my parents' family ended up moving further and further west as those Avenues were developed. And my parents were neighbors on 23rd Avenue and 22nd Avenue. Their moms were friends and played cards. And my parents met through their moms when they were little, little kids. They both went to school out on the West side; grammar school. And then my dad went to high school at Lowell. My mom was still on our side of the Park. And, and we lived in my dad's home that his parents built in 1918. And that house is still there on 19th Avenue. Not far from where we ended up growing up in a, at the age of four, my parents moved us a little further west where it was foggy, foggy, foggy. Back in the day!
Nicole: Yeah. Not as foggy [00:04:00] anymore. Thanks, global warming?
Adrianne: Right, right. I know. We knew that. We knew if it ever got beautiful and there was less fog, it would be harder to live in San Francisco. It's so beautiful. So, we grew up, I grew up near Baker Beach and I spent a lot of time on Baker Beach. That was where we went as kids. We walked our dogs and it ended up that if you were a kid who liked to spend time staring at the waves, sitting on rocks, there were San Franciscans in the ‘60s who loved to talk to people who were hanging around. And as a young kid, I was introduced to a lot of amazing beat poetry and bohemian ways by just sittin’ on the beach, staring at a sunset. And somebody'd sit down with their dog and the conversation would go. So, I was really young and being exposed to Aldous Huxley, being exposed to local poets. By 15, I had figured out how to take the bus from the West side to [00:05:00] North Beach, where I would go on Sundays and listen to opera. Things that my parents didn't really do, I got to do. It’s sitting at Cafe Trieste. But I think a lot of it was about being outdoors for me. I love Lands End. Spent a lot of time there. Went up to the Legion of Honor. On Sundays they had free organ concerts. You could sit outside or inside you could hear.
Nicole: The building?
Adrianne: Yeah. Beautiful. So, walking, lots of walking, lots of beach and San Francisco was so friendly. People were really friendly. This was the era of coffee houses.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: So, I learned to drink coffee, really young. So, I could hang out and listen to conversations. It was all going on, and I was young. That was not the conversation in my home whatsoever.
Nicole: Maybe, when we met at that dinner party, I knew, I was like I feel like, I feel like we could get along even though we didn't get to speak a lot, because there was a lot [00:06:00] of conversation happening that night. But I, you know, I moved here to be a beatnik in 2002. Right, right in the thick of the beatnik movement. Shakes head vigorously.
Adrianne: No.
Nicole: But I moved up here and I thought, oh gosh, okay, this is the epicenter for everything. And I went to North Beach and I started like hanging out at Cafe Trieste and hanging out with all the coffee shops. And turns out I missed it by a few decades. But, but I'm totally with you in that. So, what kind of, what kind of poetry were you reading? What kind of poets were you meeting? Who were these people on Baker Beach?
Adrianne: Well, I was reading Diane DePrima.
Nicole: Oof, mind blown.
Adrianne: Of course, Alan Ginsburg, Howl. I mean, I have to say, I met the woman, she had a giant Great Dane that she walked on the beach. She was the woman who booked, this is random, she booked the acts for Mini's Can-Do Club, one of the last jazz clubs on Fillmore Street.
Nicole: What?
Adrianne: And she sat me down and said, if there’s [00:07:00] one thing when you grow up, you need to love it's jazz music. Now, the closest I got to music in my life, in my home, it was like the dentist's office, elevator music, or I don't know, maybe in the car they had some music on? There was no music going on in my house. Mini's Can-Do Club. Are you kidding me? Icon of mid jazz. And this would've been then before the Fillmore was leveled and Yoshi's is the only club we've got left over there. Yeah.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: So, and there was another Great Dane. Well, go ahead, please.
Nicole: No, please. Tell me about the other Great Dane!
Adrianne: I think it's, I think it's a little too randy. Well, we'll go on.
Nicole: There's nothing too randy for this podcast. I just wanna, I just wanna put that out there before we go any further. Like you speak your truth here.
Adrianne: Okay. We’ll circle back, but it involves a TV show, Weeds, and these two sisters, and [00:08:00] their Great Danes. They live on the Panhandle. It is the whole thing. But we'll get back there.
Nicole: So, you're growing up here in a really pivotal time for San Francisco, right? You've got jazz, you've got, it's the ‘60s, you're moving into the ‘70s. There’s, there's so much happening in San Francisco. How did you experience that beyond Baker Beach?
Adrianne: If, what's really important to me were two other things. One was, of course, we were moving into the Vietnam War. And, and I was a really dedicated student. So, Saturday mornings, I'd go down to the main library, study for a few hours. Again, the bus, my brothers were all athletes. They were being driven around by my mom in the station wagon without seat belts. I know.
Nicole: With the backwards facing seats?
Adrianne: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Nicole: They’re the best.
Adrianne: That's the way back. Yeah, but the bench seats everywhere else. And the peace marches would come down Market Street and end up at Civic Center Plaza. So, I could see from [00:09:00] the stacks where I was studying when the groups would get there and that's when the speakers would come on stage. Once the, once the crowds got there, speakers would come on stage and really great music. So, I'd go down the stairs and back outside. So, that's one thing I did that was really important to me in the ‘60s and ended up being something that, I mean, I marched down Market Street for, against the, the wars in the ‘90s. Help me: The Gulf War.
Nicole: Gulf War. Yeah.
Adrianne: With my baby strapped in the front of me with a group, Buddhists for Peace. I did the, I was marching Dan White riots. I was marching for gay pride. I was doing, that became a place where politics happened. And then, because I had this very interior, introverted side, I could balance that by going to the beach. So, I had the West side, which kept me sane. We would swim when we could at Baker Beach, when the waves weren't too crazy. Dangerous idea. Don't include [00:10:00] that in your podcast. But I could spend a lot of time there on the cliffs and then go do political activism on the other side of town. And I felt accessible to the, the city felt accessible to people who live further in. It seemed like we were in the suburbs.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: The West side’s always seem like the suburbs to most people. Same with Sunset. And I live in the Outer Sunset now.
Nicole: Yeah, we are, we live in the same neighborhood now, and I have to say, it is beautifully quiet here. And I have never thought about it before as this being a space to recharge and like allow us to live our lives more, more fully. The quiet here is something I've never experienced in the city before and I'm so fortunate to have this. Only thing that really gets in my way are raccoon fights in the evening. Drives my cat nuts. But I love that. I love that, Adrianne.
Adrianne: And the coyotes. I'm right up against, I always, since I left, [00:11:00] living by the beach, I've lived proximal to Golden Gate Park on both sides. So, on 16th Avenue on the other side of the Park. Now I'm in the Outer Sunset, but. It's my passion is to be near Golden Gate Park because once you get inside the Park, you can walk to the beach.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: And I love to walk.
Nicole: Yeah. This now sounds like a tourism-like advertisement for the West side, but it's so true. This space is so special and so much has gone on out here, which people don't believe when we tell them. And maybe you can speak to some of that. One, we have to get into this right away. Jefferson Airplane, you have a connection to Jefferson Airplane and they have a connection to the West side. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that.
Adrianne: Yeah. I had the good fortune of growing up down the block from where Paul and Grace lived and raised their daughter. And so, we'd see them. They lived right next to the Legion of Honor. And, almost every evening after dinner, my father and I would take a walk before I started my homework. And he [00:12:00] was, he was a diligent scholar, even though that wasn't his job. He was a, he was a surgeon, but he was constantly reading. I was really reading, so we would take this long walk after dinner by Grace and Paul's house and up into the Legion of Honor. Take that loop and come back down the hill. We'd see them on the street walking around. And it was a given that you did not identify or be paparazzi behavior around, around famous people. Yeah. That's a little different. It's been turned on its head. Now we have Instagram, but…
Nicole: I know, right?
Adrianne: Back in the day we left people alone. Yeah.
Nicole: It's true. There have been a lot of famous people who've picked the West Side. Robin Williams lived in Sea Cliff.
Adrianne: He's around the corner from me.
Nicole: Yeah. Beep. Yep, there you go.
Adrianne: And Sharon Stone was down the block. I mean, all.
Nicole: Exactly. You know, there's something so special and rare about this place out here that like even people who [00:13:00] could live anywhere wanna live here. Even the Sunset District, which, oh gosh, I'm forgetting the musician off the top of my head from the ‘90s.
Adrianne: Oh, it’s Chris Isaak.
Nicole: Yes.
Adrianne: Now Chris Isaak lives in my old neighborhood. He's on the other side. He's in the Richmond.
Nicole: Really?
Adrianne: And I still see him at Baker Beach. I run into him there.
Nicole: If you run into him, be like, look, there's a West Side History podcast that you need to be on.
Adrianne: Great. He'd be great. He's lovely.
Nicole: Chris Isaak! If you're listening, which I doubt you are, you would make our board president very happy.
Adrianne: He had his first gigs on Haight Street next door to the bowling alley. What was the name of that club?
Nicole: It's an Amoeba now.
Adrianne: Yeah. I'll look it up. But they played every Monday night. Well, or they may have played Tuesday because I-Beam was Monday night. Every night, every Monday. They had bands from the East coast, so 10,000 Maniacs. Well, and not just East Coast, but anybody who was starting [00:14:00] out.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: A man who owned and booked at the I-Beam was brilliant. And Monday nights were where it was at. As much as the weekend shows were huge. You knew you were getting somebody unknown. I saw the Red, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the first time they played in San Francisco.
Nicole: Really?
Adrianne: Yeah. At the I-Beam and it was unbelievable. What are those guys doing climbing up the side? What are they wearing? They're not wearing anything. Those, that's a tube sock. Oh my God. Let me tell you.
Nicole: Please tell me you have those photos hanging around.
Adrianne: Oh yeah. No, no camera for that. I did see Patti Smith, her first, her first gig that she played at the Boarding House. That was pretty great.
Nicole: Oh my God. Where was the Boarding House?
Adrianne: The Boarding House was on Pine.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: And yeah, we were, it was ridiculous. We were in a table at the stage. We all came up from college. I went to UC Santa Cruz, and we dressed, we were the ridiculous people who dressed as Patti Smith.
Nicole: No!
Adrianne: So [00:15:00] we all look like private school boys. Even though it was three guys and me. I, we were all dressed the same. So, I was waiting for Jude and Lenny to come back, backstage to come find me in the green room. And I'm sitting in these plastic chairs. Bill Graham had, like, the backstage for visitors was really lame. I'm sure, hopefully the artist rooms were better. But I'm sitting there waiting and waiting to see if they're gonna come back and get me quietly. No big deal. And there's a very pregnant woman sitting a few seats down from me and she's dressed in clothes that Lucille Ball wore when she was pregnant.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: Like really dumb looking maternity stuff.
Nicole: Yeah
Adrianne: It turns out it's Patti's sister and it’s, it’s what's her name? That's the song on the album, Rebecca.
Nicole: Pop quiz.
Adrianne: Yeah. Pop quiz. We’ll get back there. It's on the Horse's album. She, Kimberly, it's her sister. [00:16:00] So Patti Smith's sister. Kimberly, unbeknownst to me, that's her sister. We're not talking cause both of us feel really geeky. Like we're not dressed like them and we don't look hipster and East Coast. She comes in and talks to Kimberly and Kimberly's like nine months pregnant and has to use the bathroom immediately. Right, because that's what you do when you're nine months pregnant.
Nicole: Yeah
Adrianne: She takes off and Patti sits next to me and I am thinking of her as God.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: Like she is the most important person in my world. She sits next to me and says, “what did you think of the show?”. I'm like, perfection. Do I have an opinion? Zero. And she said, “no, I really mean it”. And I'm one of those people who remembers set lists.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: I was like, well, actually, I really love the progression of this to this, and I love this. You played Debby Boone, You Light Up My Life as an encore? What? She was like “that song.” I mean, she really was honest. She [00:17:00] wanted to know, she's humble, kind. And Debby Boone, I mean, what was that in 1978? ‘88? Something like that.
Nicole: Oh, okay. So, you were neighbors of Jefferson Airplane. You hung out with Patti Smith. You're already the coolest person we've ever had on this podcast. Sorry to every other podcast attendee. What other crazy stuff is happening on the West side, right? I think you mentioned Anton LaVey was in the neighborhood? So please for all our podcast listeners, who was Anton LaVey?
Adrianne: Anton LaVey in the ‘60s had the High Church of Satan, really not the most popular guy in the neighborhood. His house was painted black, his stairs, everything flat black. And he had, I kid you not, a lion.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: Between the house and the front gate. So, our school was kind of across the street, kitty corner to his house. So, kids would walk by, of course, you wanna see the lion, is the lion [00:18:00] outside. It's the…
Nicole: I wanna, I wanna just stop you. By lion, she means a live actual lion, not a statue. We've heard reports of this throughout our time.
Adrianne: Yeah. For reals! But when you're a little kid, Church of Satan doesn't really, I mean, he didn't have that much meaning. I don't know. It was that. We went to St. Monica's, we went to our church. They had their church. I mean, we were told we could never go there. But his kid was in my class.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: His son was in my class. His daughter was in one of my brother's classes. It wasn't a big deal. Yeah, it was weird. I guess a lion in the front yard. Yeah
Nicole: Yeah, I heard that he used to drive around with it.
Adrianne: Did not see that.
Nicole: And he would, one of the guys who comes into our office every Friday. Emiliano Echeverria. He, he has a lot of stories to tell, let me tell you. And he talks about how he, I think he ran across or he was in the car. I don't know, it changes [00:19:00] sometimes. Like this lion in just a regular car parked on the side of the street. Just very casual.
Adrianne: It's so San Francisco.
Nicole: I know.
Adrianne: So San Francisco. You just kinda tuck that in and on you go. I have to tell you a so San Francisco story.
Nicole: Yes, please.
Adrianne: So, my daughter and I, she used to stay at her father's house on one side of the Sunset, and her school was in the Richmond. So, I would pick her up early in the morning sometimes when she was at her father's house, drive along the Great Highway, and then up to her school. And, as we're, as I'm driving, her father was a rock and roll musician. She'd been to a bunch of shows. She and her brother. It was just a thing where he played on Haight Street. He played larger venues, smaller venues. You kind of don't remember the bands he played with. There were just bands that he played with.
Nicole: I hear that.
Adrianne: And we're driving along the [00:20:00] Great Highway and some guy’s running across the Great Highway, holding his surfboard, the, you know, the beautiful sunlight coming from the east, across the highway out to the ocean. And it's one of those beautiful morns, and I say to my daughter, this is why we live in San Francisco, honey. Is because we're seeing people who are using the ocean, being at the beach, carrying the, I mean, isn't that the most beautiful thing? And she was probably eight years old.
Nicole: And she’s like, I dunno?
Adrianne: She said, “yes, mommy”. “But we also live at, we live in San Francisco also cause we get to be with guys who wear dresses”. And I'm like, yeah, that too. We got it all. Yeah.
Nicole: Well, so you raised a great kid it sounds like.
Adrianne: Yeah, there was, yeah. I mean, nothing was too extreme and I really feel like my parents as conservative and they were very conservative politically. Socially, they were extremely even-keeled. They were not messing [00:21:00] with other people's decisions.
Nicole: Yeah
Adrianne: They were not, I have a story about that. So, we've all heard of redlining? Do I need to say what that is?
Nicole: Just for, just for yeah, go ahead and explain.
Adrianne: So, there was redlining, actually occurred even out in the Richmond district in the ‘60s. And when my father passed away, I found a newspaper article about a neighbor of ours, who a lovely family that I had no idea were redlined out of our neighborhood because they were Chinese-Ameri,can. And my father went to the Board of Supervisors to speak, as a professor at UCSF and you know, a valued member of the community that we should not deprive anyone of being able to live in San Francisco where they wanna live, because the neighborhood had started some kind of contingent, I dunno what is it when you…
Nicole: A petition?
Adrianne: A petition. There was pushback, let's use that word. It's better. There was pushback [00:22:00] against having this lovely family as neighbors. And the Board of Supervisors intervened and they have, were our neighbors from the ‘60s on. And still live there. And we recently sold.
Nicole: Pardon? What's the family's name?
Adrianne: The Louies
Nicole: Oh. So, we're in the process of kind of making public our Chinese in the Richmond project, but I'm gonna have to get their contact information.
Adrianne: Absolutely.
Nicole: Definitely really need to talk to them.
Adrianne: Absolutely. And Betty is a, is an absolutely lovely proponent of access to Chinatown, access to the ,all of San Francisco for everyone.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: Yeah. They've been, and they've been incredibly philanthropic as a family. Yeah. And they arrived with nothing. They're the typical San Francisco family, change in their pocket and built this, the seven ,they, at their height, they had seven stores along Grand Avenue. Yeah.
Nicole: Oh my gosh. Okay. Important, now for later [00:23:00] on another podcast,
Adrianne: Yeah.
Nicole: So, you grew up in the Richmond, you're hanging out with all these crazy people. You are at a Catholic school across the street from a Satanic church. Peak San Francisco. Where do you go from there? Like where does your life take you after your West side upbringing?
Adrianne: Because of the era I was going through high school in, there are, we were exposed to all kinds of music and literature and free thinking, and nobody taught grammar and nobody taught. I had to find a college that, that was as free thinking as my most brilliant art teachers. I had art teachers who were having be-ins and sit-ins, and I was…
Nicole: Really?
Adrianne: Meditating in high school.
Nicole: Really?
Adrianne: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Nicole: At St. Monica’s?
Adrianne: No, this was at Hamlin's. I ended up, I went to catechism at St. Monica's and went to church at St. [00:24:00] Monica's.
Nicole: Got it.
Adrianne: But my art teachers, my, we had art history even in high school. So I chose UC Santa Cruz because there were no grades.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: And I thought this is kind of an extension of what I've been doing. But what I didn't realize was that they were, Oxford University professors had all been brought to Santa Cruz, so it didn't make it any easier because there were no grades. It was just a break from San Francisco, but I could still be near a beach, live on the coast. Studied art history and did pre-med there. Ended up transferring up to Berkeley, because I wanted to be more politically engaged. I'm part of the LGBTQ community, as are many of my family members and ancestors. And we had had the Christopher Street riots, is it Christopher Street? I don’t know.. In 1969, the gay movement was beginning to take traction. And [00:25:00] I wanted to be near that that kind of political orientation. Mostly because when I came out to my parents, it was not a big deal.
Nicole: Really?
Adrianne: They, no, because in San Francisco, everybody knew somebody or they were…
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: People, lots of people were bi, there were lots of people who were married and had lovers of the same sex, were raising their kids, had them in the house. In my family, there were many stories. Stories on the West side, which, we’ll come back to another time when it’s appropriate. And I can name names. But because of that, I landed in Berkeley and ended up getting quite involved in pre-med, art history and gay politics. And…
Nicole: How? Okay. Art history I get, cause that's my jam. Pre-med, and politics? How do all these things go together?
Adrianne: It, the pre-med had to do with working in my father's office [00:26:00] as a kid. My father was a, an ophthalmologist and a surgeon, and I helped him in his office from the age of 15. Every summer I worked there. And I felt committed as a little kid to going into medicine so that the pre-med was obvious to me. The art history was because of my high school radical, leftist English teacher. I wanted to learn how to write an essay, and learn about history. The politics came as a, a way, how could we be fair in the world? It was really part of my spiritual path.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: And I ended up being involved in the Gay People's Union, which was what we called it. A little ostracized by the lesbian contingent because there wasn't a lot of mixing of men and women at that point in that kind of politics. But ended up becoming the gay senator at UC Berkeley. And that's when Dan White walked into, into Moscone’s office and shot him and went down the hall and shot Harvey Milk. Not long after I [00:27:00] became gay senator. And I'd been marching with Harvey in the years before that, we'd all been involved in the politics. But being a college student, I was on the other side of the Bay. So, when the White Night Riots hit, we were sending our people over to just bear witness. And the politics were obvious to me. I've never not understood that.
Nicole: I had a poli-sci professor at S.F. State who said, politics is everywhere humans interact.
Adrianne: Yeah. And, and for me, and I still believe this think local, think global, act local.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: So, we knew that what we were doing was cutting edge in terms of gay politics. We kind of knew that also about everything else we were doing, that it was gonna be important on a larger scale. I never took a poli-sci class. I didn't know the first thing about politics. Honestly. It was really, I knew how to grassroots.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: Get people moving and [00:28:00] line them up. But at the same time that I was doing that on the West side, I also opened a skate shop on Haight Street.
Nicole: What?
Adrianne: And my girlfriend and I ran a skate shop across the street from Skates on Haight. So, it wasn't all, it wasn't all politics and serious. Yeah.
Nicole: What? Okay, tell me more about this skate shop.
Adrianne: Okay, so I, no kidding. My girlfriend and I were riding our skates through Golden Gate Park. Not very many people had those neoprene, big neoprene skates.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: It really wasn't a thing. What year would that have been? I graduated in ‘80, so, oh no, I graduated. Yeah. Did I graduate from college? I did. Okay, so this is late ‘70s. Okay. So, there were no longer those, those hard, the hard wheels that skateboards had. We were moving into neoprene. They were getting bigger and bigger and softer. The boots were getting [00:29:00] really cool. The music was getting pretty good. And there was a lot going on around disco and roller skating. And we wanted to be in the middle of it just for fun. We would, every Sunday ride through Golden Gate Park. A VW Bug, yellow VW Bug pulls up next to us and one of the women leans out the window and says, “Do you guys have anything to do? Like, what are you guys doing?” And I said, “I'm still in college. She's already graduated.” They said, “will you run a skate shop for us? We'll set it up. We'll set it up.” They were from Santa Cruz. They had found a place that afternoon on Haight Street they wanted to rent and they gave it to us. So, I was doing the window dressing, being the art historian. I was doing the windows and she was renting the skates. We had a totally great time. It was completely fun because we were blasting music on Saturdays and Sundays, dancing outside our skate shop and [00:30:00] in all the way in, through Golden Gate Park. And people were doing long rides out to the ocean. We were sending people with other people: West side rules. We were sending them off.
Nicole: I bet if you opened that up again now, cause, you know, during the pandemic everyone started skating again.
Adrianne: Oh yeah. Church of Eight Wheels is on Fillmore, right?
Nicole: Yeah. The skatin’ place. Out in Golden Gate Park is getting a total like makeover.
Adrianne: It's not inline skates, can we say?
Nicole: Yes.
Adrianne: No
Nicole: Not inline skates. I tried to take the hobby up during the pandemic, like every basic person on the West side. And my boyfriend was like, please don't do this. You are the clumsiest person I know. He's totally right, by the way. And he, and I have a bad back. He was like, “this is gonna be bad.”
Adrianne: Take it slow. But Eighth Avenue in Golden Gate Park, they still are blocking that off.
Nicole: Yep.
Adrianne: They're still dancing happening there.
Nicole: I'm gonna do it. I’m, boyfriend be damned. I'm sorry. [00:31:00] I’m gonna, I’m gonna do it and you're gonna help me, okay?
Adrianne: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Nicole: Do it together. Okay. So, you manage an incredible skate shop. Where do you go from there?
Adrianne: I, well I actually, we missed a part.
Nicole: We missed a part? Okay let's back it up. Let's get in our skates and back it up.
Adrianne: I was in college. I volunteered and created something called the Over-60 Clinic in Berkeley. We created a clinic, a free clinic for people over 60 who had no healthcare. We not only worked in Berkeley and we were down on San Pablo, but we were going into hotels in downtown Oakland, working with indigent people who weren't getting any medical care. And they need, it was, this was not this was non-invasive. So, this was basic, how are you eating well enough? How's your grooming going? That kind of medical care. It gave me a sense of working with one-on-one, with people around caring for their bodies, caring for [00:32:00] their, for their daily health.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: It was a, an early advocacy for wellness.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: So when, in 1980, when I graduated with a degree in art history with all my pre-med information, pre-med requisites, I was still meditating and I was still doing my Buddhist practices and somebody said you could go do a 10 day retreat. You could take some time. This is when you know this is a good time. You don't have a full-time job. I started doing meditation retreats and realized that if I could figure out a way to offer this, we didn't call it wellness in those days.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: We were doing body work and healing practices. That sounds so wimpy. That's so crunchy.
Nicole: No, you’re still ahead of your time though! That's, that’s the incredible thing.
Adrianne: Yeah. So, the meditation teachers I was studying with, Jack Cornfield, Robert Hall, were all working with [00:33:00] body work and raw thing had just come on the scene. Esalen had been working both with the mind and the body. As a dancer, that really appealed to me. I had been teaching yoga in high school. I started studying yoga with Magaña and Walt Baptiste, two West side people that are really important. We need to have a program with their kids.
Nicole: Love what you're saying.
Adrianne: Yeah. Yeah. And they were, he was like Mr. America as a weightlifter, but also understood that he had to lengthen his muscles. He and Jack LaLanne. It was that era in the ‘60s.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: I came in at the end of that, in the ‘70s. They were still teaching. She went on to teach belly dancing, but they had a yoga school. And so, I ended up doing one-on-one. I had a private practice. I was trained as a Rolfer and a body worker in my early twenties and started teaching with Jack Cornfield, started teaching yoga. And meditation at his meditation retreats. So, I moved to Marin because as one does [00:34:00] when you've gone deep into that, the West side can only hold you for so long, and then…
Nicole: Naturally
Adrianne: Then you have to you have to go a little bit north. So I bumped over to Mill Valley for a few years where, where all that was happening and, and ended up working, having a private practice, teaching meditation and teaching yoga right through the ‘80s and into the ‘90s.
Nicole: I mean, you say it sounds corny, cause this really has become a very commonplace part of our lives and our dialogue now, especially in San Francisco. But while you're doing all this, this is very cutting-edge stuff, you know, like this is on the edge of spirituality and rethinking how we approach ourselves and our bodies and our environment. So also, I won't allow you to call yourself corny.
Adrianne: Just edit it, where you want to. So, in the ‘90s, I was doing this private work [00:35:00] and got, actually not quite in, yeah, I guess into the ‘90s, I got an offer from California Pacific Medical Center to bring these different modalities, the meditation, yoga, body work, hands-on healing work, to patients in the hospital. So, we created from a program that had existed as a library, we created something called the Health and Healing Clinic. And still living on the West side because that's where I nourish myself. I would work over at California Pacific Medical Center. We built a fabulous clinic, which has been imitated all over the country. People have opened similar clinics. There are all kinds of healing retreats, but we were really at the forefront of understanding how much medicine needed to embody. And we needed to support a really big part of the program. I started, there was advocating for clinicians to heal and nourish themselves, which, you know, [00:36:00] we were just killing med students and killing our young doctors by pushing them so hard. And also, I taught a class called caring for caregivers, which at that point nobody was thinking about caregivers, but family members who were managing patients who were quite ill. That came up in the ‘90s. But my interest in doing that and caring for caregivers came directly from working with AIDS patients. And AIDS patients and their families, supporting them through not only the treatments, which were, pretty rough, and really similar to a lot of things we were doing in oncology, treating cancer. The families were being devastated by what was happening. And another sweet thing, my father was pretty amazing in working, willing to have clients who he knew we knew were HIV positive at the beginning of the pan, of that pandemic, what did we call it? The epidemic, whatever we call the AIDS crisis.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: A lot of doctors [00:37:00] refused to see patients. My father never backed up. And several of his, and mostly it was dangerous for him and for those of us who were working in his office, because it was, we only knew it was transmitted by fluids. We didn't know how that could happen. But needle pricks were a legitimate way of transferring that virus.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: He and I both got needle pricks. Neither of us ever have tested positive for HIV. We were lucky, but we weren't afraid. And my patients in my body work practice started coming in with lesions. The Kaposi Sarcoma, KS, showed up.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: On people's bodies before we had a name for it. Before we knew what was going on.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: People were getting sick and he, my father, really encouraged me not to turn away from my patients. I had not taken a Hippocratic oath. He had, but he felt strongly about that oath and that we were there to serve. Which really worked well [00:38:00] with my sense of service. In everything that I did. Which brings us to my book.
Nicole: Right! Yeah. Before we get to your book, I wanna remind our podcast listeners who might be even younger than me, although I think that's a pretty small percentage, but AIDS and HIV what, like that era, if you wanna get an idea of what that era was like on the medical end, watch ER, watch old episodes of ER, which I have started doing in my insomnia hours. It is prominent in every episode just about. That and how terrible the healthcare system is. But you really get a sense for how scary it was, how pro, how prolific it was. It's really interesting and it's hard to imagine today when we've largely got a control on this outbreak and it's anyways, that's a non-sequitur. But I wanna remind folks that this was a very scary time in American history, in worldwide history.
Adrianne: And I just found out yesterday that one of my one of my cousins told me yesterday that it was his uncle who, [00:39:00] when they shut down the bathhouses, there was a huge pushback in San Francisco.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: And he worked in the DA's office, or was the DA, but they brought these lawsuits saying that we, that they didn't wanna shut the bath houses.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: In San Francisco, it was understood that was the only way to begin to contain it. They could be opened later. And so, figuring out where you stood on these issues of autonomy and San Francisco being a place where you could do what you wanted. We wanted to leave people alone, to live how they wanted to live. And yet the exposure was really frightening.
Nicole: Yeah. And even beyond just the gay community, right? Like my mother, my mother had a rheumatoid arthritis from like the age of 32. And so, she had blood transfusions a lot and there was a scare where they thought that she had gotten an infected stash of blood. And it was a whole thing. I wasn't born yet, but my dad would talk about it a lot. And how scary that time was for her too. So, yeah.
Adrianne: And same, my mother was getting infusions and my father, because [00:40:00] he was in medicine in 1982, there was some talk within medical communities, not in the public.
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: On the East Coast, that whatever this gay flu was, because…
Nicole: Right.
Adrianne: Horrible, names for it.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: That it was being transmitted through blood. And so, her transfusions had to stop. They, everybody pulled back. But the rejection of these men makes me cry still.
Nicole: And the fear, the fear, the baseless fear. I mean, that's easy for us to say now that we understand how things are transmitted and things like that. But there was, I came across, when I was working with the Park Archives and Record Center, there was a plan to turn the public health service hospital there, which are now very fancy luxury condos, into an AIDS clinic. And the neighborhood rejected it. There was widespread pushback that they didn't want a bunch of, you know, infected people in their neighborhood. They thought they would get sick. All that kind of stuff. You know, this is in the ‘80s, the, I wanna say the late ‘80s. [00:41:00] And it's mind-boggling to read that now, but, but it was very much real.
Adrianne: And we have not seen something so different with this pandemic. And so having gone through the AIDS crisis, I was really able to guide my children and their friends who are all your age, millennials, about how to look at this and how not to reject and how not to point fingers. And we don't know. We have to sit in the not knowing until more is known. But people always have the first reaction is to blame, who can we blame for this? I know…
Nicole: Fear, fear is the most contagious and debilitating virus. Right? Like…
Adrianne: Yeah. So, it's been quite amazing to me how the, the locating, the tracking that we've done during, through this pandemic has been generally accepted. And people have been, as much as I can tell, have been very truthful about their exposure when they're sick, letting people know. Yeah, that's because not as many people are dying. You know, with AIDS, if you were infected, it was over. I mean, it was, we [00:42:00] didn't have treatments early on for a long time.
Nicole: No, I can't even imagine. So, you're working with CPMC and in the middle of the AIDS crisis, really trying to treat the whole patient. Where do you go from here?
Adrianne: Do you really wanna hear? This has nothing to do with the West side.
Nicole: I 100% wanna hear this, Adrianne.
Adrianne: Okay. Are people gonna hate me, cause I went to a fancy graduate school?
Nicole: No.
Adrianne: Did you Google me?
Nicole: No, I didn't Google you. I don't Google. I like the…
Adrianne: Alright, here we go. Deep breath.
Nicole: Okay, I'm ready. I mean, you've already blown me with Patti Smith, so…
Adrianne: Yeah. I mean, she wasn't my bestie. I met her at a show.
Nicole: I don't even care. I'm still awestruck.
Adrianne: Okay. Oh. And we, we, did we cover the enough of Anita Bryants and John Briggs and yeah. The whole Anita Bryant thing when I was a student at UC Berkeley. But let's move on to your question.
Nicole: Okay. Yeah. Wherever you wanna go.
Adrianne: So, so by great [00:43:00] good fortune, and because of the work I'd done at CPMC, and I continued to work, kind of focus in oncology and death and dying, I had at the age of 19, I'm gonna backtrack a little on this.
Nicole: Sure.
Adrianne: I had the great opportunity to work with a brilliant oncologist, very well-known oncologist in San Francisco, West side rules! Ernie Rosenbaum. Google the man. Ernie, Ernie Rosenbaum was a neighbor. He was a renowned and very successful and a cutting-edge oncologist, treating people, keeping people alive. He was amazing. I worked with him for a couple of summers in my late teens and early twenties. And Ernie, he drove around town and would take me to work in the mornings. On the mornings I didn't ride my bike, cause I always rode my bike to work. On the mornings he did take me and that I didn't ride my bike, [00:44:00] in a convertible, red leather interior convertible, white car, blasting opera. He was renowned. You could hear him blocks away. He had it cranked up. He was a very good friend of Pavarotti and would bring him to San Francisco to do events, to raise money for cancer awareness, for his very cutting-edge cancer research and for cancer treatments. So, it became a thing for me to work with these kind of innovative physicians. It just was the way I saw medicine. So, for me then to be 19 and doing a project with people in the last three months of their life, having them talk to their family, we did something called life tapes, where we'd gather families together. And have the person who is dying, speak about their life. I had a, prompts, not unlike your podcast, I had prompts to ask people, but mostly, and we'd make cassettes, [00:45:00] but mostly it was a way to facilitate conversation in an era in the ‘80s, ‘70s, late ‘70s, early ‘80s, when people weren't talking about death.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: There was no Elizabeth Cooper Ross. The whole hospice movement was just beginning. We were at the forefront of that again, and that came in the form of the Zen Hospice, which we, the Buddhist community was part of bringing, bringing forward. It was the San Francisco Zen Buddhist community. So, my experiences in death and dying were a through, a through line because of the AIDS crisis, because I worked with Ernie, so that I was asked by an old family friend, West side born and raised. She and her family, her father was a physician with my father. They both went to Alamo School together.
Nicole: What was her name?
Adrianne: Paul Abram and her name's Janet Abram. She asked me to come back to Brigham and Women's Hospital, which is the teaching hospital [00:46:00] for Harvard, Medical School to bring the CPMC program that I've been working on, to the very beginnings of the palliative care educational system they were developing. So, they wanted to bring that broad-based sense of how to work with the whole body, both with the caregivers and with the clinicians, which has always been my focus, the clinicians and the patients. So, I ended up moving to Cambridge, working in Boston, and helping them develop their palliative care program. While I was there, I continue my Buddhist studies and so combined a, a graduate degree at Harvard Divinity School in with a Buddhist focus, pastoral care and counseling through a Buddhist lens. With the work I was doing with death and dying in, yeah, in the hospital back there and doing trainings. But it couldn't, that couldn't have happened. The complexity and the [00:47:00] forward thinking nature of that could not have happened without San Francisco and the medical leaps we were making. They asked me to come in and talk about: what is acupuncture?
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: And I said, I said it's 2010, like, “what is acupuncture”? No, we got to that 30 years ago in San Francisco. I'm sure there's someone on the East coast to do that. We're a really working mind, body, heart, spirit, in the work we're doing in medicine. Now let's move that forward. So, I ended up staying there for 10 years and working and developing those programs.
Nicole: I have to tell you, and I hope I'm not gonna get emotional when I say this to you, but my mother, my mother passed away from cancer in 2018 and I spent her last year and a half with her fighting, you know, tooth and nail. And we were really frustrated by the lack of holistic thinking that she received at a very good hospital. You know. And it wasn't the hospital's fault. They had a palliative care center, the whole thing. Right? But [00:48:00] her doctor just wasn't that guy who was into that kind of medicine. And we found out her cancer had come back and that her prognosis was not good and she ended up passing away. But I found notes that she, my we're all note takers, like we're just writers in my family, professional or otherwise. Like we just have to put stuff on paper. And I, after she passed away, I found this yellow notepad that she wrote all of her notes down. And it was when she had gotten her diagnosis that her doctor just looked at her and said, “you're on your own. Nothing more we can do for you.” And she wrote, what am I supposed to do now? I feel abandoned. And knowing that there was this robust palliative care program that people like you had tried, had built from the ground up, knowing that it was there and no one had told her about it, it just, I was so upset. I was so angry and so mad. And anyways, the work that you do is so incredibly important and it's, it has such a far-reaching impact. Like I'm just so grateful to work for the [00:49:00] work that you've done.
Adrianne: Yeah. And all of us in palliative care were so easily dedicated to making this be a time in life to stay awake and care for one another. Because we all had been taught to run. I mean, that physician
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: Just didn't know that they had support.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: We didn't give them that in medical school but that's changing.
Nicole: Yeah
Adrianne: It’s changing. And doctors are amazing. I'm so sorry that happened.
Nicole: Oh no, I didn’t…
Adrianne: I mean, that's the last time, that's not when you wanna get abandoned, it's like on your way. And the complex grief, the complex grief that comes from that is what I'm more involved with right now. I'm still working, doing grief work with people. Of course, it's over Zoom, but I'm teaching classes, working with complex grief.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: Resolving grief, learning to live with it. Yeah.
Nicole: So much about history, work and storytelling and sharing where you're from and who [00:50:00] you are with the people around you is, is woven into that kind of practice. And I'm very I'm very mindful of doing that in what I do now. You know, like we're only here for a short time. All of us, even if it's 85, 95 years, it's still a really short time. I already can't believe I'm 37 years old, you know, like I, the last time I turned around I was 15?
Adrianne: Right, right.
Nicole: And like, there's so much similarity between the work that you do and history work, and I don't think we talk about that enough.
Adrianne: Yeah. Yeah. Well, interestingly, this question of history and healing and politics, when I was at Harvard, I helped support and create the LGBTQ Coalition at the Divinity School, which I think we called simply Queer Spirituality because that was a short, shorter name for it. And when it came to gay week in 2016, [00:51:00] I think 2015, 2017, somewhere in there, you'll edit that out. The university came to the Divinity School and asked if: we could choose five people to give sermons at Memorial Church. So I, being the elder of the community by many years, they invited me, I think it was it was a couple of different genders and then a couple of in-betweens, and everybody spoke from their experience. And I called one of my second cousins that I didn't know well, and I said, I've been asked to give a sermon. And I think because of, because I'm an elder of the LGBTQ community, I wanna speak to the historical element of this. What do you know about my family? What happened with us? Who were we in San Francisco? And all you have to do is scratch around a little and find that there [00:52:00] is a historical, I was able to tell stories about my family of origin and how we had LGBTQ people for the last 150 years in San Francisco living happily.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: And I can, there's specifics, and that was one sermon and it was 25 minutes. After that, people came up weeping and crying, having no idea there was a history to this movement. There's so much isolation that comes with being queer in our culture, because we're talking about 10% of the culture being missed. The isolation and othering that we do with people and hear these professors in their eighties, seventies, in the eighties holding me and saying thank you for bringing me some sense of ongoingness. That is just another thing.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: I don't identify in any particular way in my [00:53:00] life and I feel like the activism I've done has come from just knowing that my heart and love is what's gonna pull us through. And the history proves that. And I was lucky, and my family was lucky to be here in San Francisco, possibly be here on the West side where we were safe. Nothing happened to us.
Nicole: I think that every day, just the dumb luck of being born in California and then ending up in San Francisco, it's we're very fortunate people to be here. And this feels like a good segue into your forthcoming book. Can we talk about that?
Adrianne: Yes, I'd love to. So, I'm working on a book. I have a project going where I wanna contextualize for young people the historic nature and ease with which people can live LGBTQ. And I'm very concerned, I'm very upset about suicidality in adolescent, and not just adolescent, but in adolescent and adult LGBTQ. I have [00:54:00] been working with this issue for years at Harvard. I did as much as I could, speaking out, being in context where I could demonstrate I'm just a gal. I have a kid. I have several kids. We're just Cali people. We go on with our life. Don't kill yourself because you feel isolated. There is support here for you. So, my book is going to look at my family's history in the context of the political movements that have occurred. And we also are alive and having fun. It's not a depressing story.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: It's not a terrible life that I've had. I was lucky enough again to be West side beach, healthy, blessed with our wonderful communities. But kids in Iowa don't know about us. So, finding a way to have access to people across the nation. And particularly as we know now, Texas and Florida have [00:55:00] come down in ways against families and children who are questioning exactly who they are. Nobody needs to find answers as young people.
Nicole: Yeah.
Adrianne: These questions can exist and people can go on with their lives. Everything doesn't have to be figured out. It's not an Instagram moment. It doesn't need to be a TikTok diss, you know, declarative statement. We're growing and discovering ourselves. And the book will address both my history and ways that young people can find support and see themselves in other people's history. So, it won't just be about my family. But I have a lot of other young people and adults who wanna talk about their experiences.
Nicole: See, I knew you would be the perfect podcast guest. That’s exactly how I feel about history in general. You know, like, if you tell your story and it resonates with somebody else who lives in your neighborhood, then you have a shared connection and that's how you build community. And when we're situated within [00:56:00] a community, then we feel together. And when we feel together, we don't feel alone. And we don't feel alone, we feel like we can take on anything. In a nutshell, that is my, that’s my mantra. Histories at the root of everything. It's what can make us feel alive and part of this world. And I'm so thrilled you agreed to be part of this podcast, Adrianne.
Adrianne: Can I tell one like no, one more gut-wrenching thing about kids.
Nicole: Do it.
Adrianne: And just the context of this. So, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, I needed money. I had a young kid. I was trying to teach as much as I could and take classes and raise my kid. So, I was teaching yoga in, in the context of restorative yoga for these very panicked freshman kids. Right? So, I was going into the dorms, working with kids in the evenings. The classes were beautifully attended, very sweet. Within the first three months of one of the years I [00:57:00] was teaching, a student of mine took her life. So, the next week when we have class, they're doing the memorial service in the room next to where I am teaching. The rest of the class, who's trying to continue forward, and simply put, it was too much stress for her to be there. The pressure she felt 18 years old. I mean, every time this happens, I don't know where it comes from for me, but I cannot on my watch, let another kid feel like there's no choice but that. So, I'm very driven by this.
Nicole: That’s incredible.
Adrianne: In the best of ways. I mean, it's full of love. I am here to hold those kids. So, they don't go over the cliff. Yeah.
Nicole: And the West side gave birth to you?
Adrianne: Yeah
Nicole: The world. We have you in this world because the West side gave birth to you. I will forever be grateful for the Richmond District because of that.
Adrianne: Mother and father from the West side. [00:58:00]
Nicole: Incredible.
Adrianne: Born and raised. Yeah.
Nicole: Incredible. Well, I feel like we could record 12 more podcasts with you. But I think for now we should we should pause it for now. So, TBD to the to-be-continued next session. Or maybe we'll do an in-person event. I don't know. Sky's the limit, right? Like that's what we've learned on this podcast today with you.
Adrianne: Book signing.
Nicole: Book signing! Oh, I'm here for that. A hundred percent here for that. And I will bring wine to it because that's what I do at book signings. Well, thank you again, I, a million times thank you. We're gonna move into the, the performative part of the podcast. Feel free to stick around, but right now it's time for listener mail. So, remember, you can send us listener mail or requests for future interview subjects, or any kind of questions you might have for Adrianne, because I'm sure you [00:59:00] have a handful you’ve been writing down this entire podcast. Send all of those to podcasts@outsidelands.org.
And I am incredibly honored to say that after episode number 451, in remembrance of Bill Hickey, we heard from his grandson Shane, who said, and I quote: “I'm so, so thankful for listening to this podcast. I've been lucky enough to hear my grandpa's stories over and over, and they never get old. By the way, the ones that one gentleman said he can't tell on the podcast are the best.” He thinks, that we should be able to tell them because Bill won't care. So, I hope we can have everybody back on to tell the illicit stories that they couldn't share on air. Shane also said that if we could get him the full version of the podcast so he can so he can listen to the uncut version. We're gonna try to get that over to him as well. And he finished by saying, “I love hearing all the stories. Most of the ones I know are from him personally. So, getting a [01:00:00] different perspective is pretty cool.” This is the best of the podcast. Thank you so much, Shane, for writing in, and I'm so glad that this meant something to you.
And now I'm gonna run through the benefits of membership and donating. So, I really hate doing these on my own, but, so if you clickety, clickety, clack the big orange button at the top of every page on either one of our websites, that's outsidelands.org or OpenSFHistory.org and become a member or just give us some money, you will get the quarterly membership magazine. I know you want that. It's bright and glossy, it has tons of history inside. So, you become a member today. And every donation that comes our way, it supports all the incredible work that we do, including this free podcast, OpenSFHistory, which is a free treasure trove of historic photos. And, of course, the Cliff House collection. [01:01:00] Oh boy. And it's care and collection. So, sign up today.
And now we have a few announcements: So first and foremost, I have to say that The Museum at The Cliff is only open for one more day. The last day of our first six month run ends tomorrow, Sunday, April 10th. But don't worry, because super breaking news that I just got into my inbox today. We've been asked to extend our time and expand into the Cliff House restaurant. So, we will still close, but we'll be reopening at the end of May, maybe early June, with brand new exhibitions. New contemporary art installations curated by John Lindsay of the Great Highway Gallery. So, much more fun, so much more history, and we'll be there through the end of August. So, thank you to the National Park Service for allowing us to extend our stay.
And of course, we have a couple more events [01:02:00] coming. There's Gala. Gala is happening! They let us delay for two years, but it's finally happening on Sunday, May 15th. It will be at the Presidio Golf Club again with a Playland-at-the-Beach theme. Because why not this year? The tickets are the low, low price of $225, and that gets you appetizers, wine, dinner, a dessert buffet, a show, performances by the Golden Gate Park Band, and the presentation of our first ever Founders Award given to Woody LaBounty and our History Hero Award, which will be given to Palma Yu and Steve Haines of the Chinese Historical Society of America. So, go to outsidelands.org/gala and get your ticket today. We're down to only four tables left.
And then finally we have one more event for you. We have Saving the San Francisco Earthquake Shacks. This is a Zoom event online, Thursday, April 14th from 6:00 to 7:30 PM. And this is to commemorate the [01:03:00] 116th anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. And we have an all-star panel for you. Woody LaBounty will be with us to explain how Western Neighborhoods Project saved several earthquake shacks on Kirkham Street, and had them relocated. We have the cottage lady herself, Jane Cryan, who you have to meet to believe. She is incredible. She's been the champion of refugee shacks above all else. And then, we also have Melanie Bishop from the planning department who has spearheaded a survey of all of the surviving earthquake shacks. So, you're gonna get a little bit from everybody here. This event is free, but, of course, donations are appreciated and you do need to register in advance to receive your Zoom link. So, head on over to our events page on the website for your tickets today. And that brings us to the end of this podcast, which means, it's time for a preview for next week. [01:04:00] So, without further ado, we are getting weird. Eadweard that is, because my partner in crime, Michael Marie Lang, is back for an episode on Eadweard Muybridge, the famous San Francisco photographer with a life story that feels made up, but absolutely is not. So, we'll see you then. Thank you again, Adrianne. This has been an amazing podcast, and we'll see you next week.
Adrianne: Thank you.
Ian: Outside Lands San Francisco is recorded by Ian Hadley. Content creation and media production at ihadley.com.
Nicole: To learn more about the Western Neighborhoods Project and more on San Francisco history, go to Outsidelands.org. You can also find us on social media at Facebook, which is outsidelands with an S, at Twitter, which is outsidelandz with a Z, and on Instagram, which is outsidelandz, also with a Z. And check out our historic San Francisco images website at OpenSFHistory.org.
The Outside Lands San Francisco podcast is also available as a subscription via iTunes and by RSS feed.