For Christmas, I had pulled off a gift-giving victory, finding and purchasing the first six "Tales of the City" novels on-line with nary a scribble in the margins. Mauricio was thrilled. Armistead Maupin, I assured him, provides the only introduction to local, literary allusions and his writing is marvelous and accessible for non-native English speakers. His protagonist is Mary Ann Singleton, a plucky gal from Cleveland, Ohio who becomes mesmerized by Baghdad-by-the-Bay and moves there suddenly. Throughout the series, she has these "Mary Ann Moments;" San Francisco situations that shatter her sense of manners, reality and expectations. Mary Ann is tested, annoyed, delighted, creeped out and horrified. She finds a world that cannot be contained in any neat box and it frustrates her midlander sense of decorum. Likewise, I've had a strange, San Francisco week in which I quoted the Joker with "This town needs an enema." In no particular order, the ...
Upon moving to Fog City, an older gay man told me that most guys who move here stick to a 3-mile-radius within the Castro, Mission, Lower Haight and Hayes Valley and, in effect, never get to see the bountiful beauty of the Bay Area. It's true that people often get stuck in the San Francisco isolation tank, viewing BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) as if it's an intergalactic vehicle that (yawn) we just don't have the gumption to take. That all changed with me last weekend when Mauricio and I took a day trip to Berkeley, California, boarding our bikes onto one of BART's roomy Richmond-bound trains. Berkeley, California. Hearing the name, I immediately conjure Cambridge, Massachusetts in my mind but Berkeley seems even more unruly, the scourge of the political right and the place where they burn bras and demand free speech . We ventured there on a misty day (Thank the Goddess, we need the moisture) when th...
With its temperate clime and ocean-kissing caresses, Hawaii has always called me. Having been raised on the East Coast, the lush archipelago felt remote and fantastical as the only reference I had of Hawaii as a kid was when the Brady Bunch, in 1972, jumped the shark and encountered a lot of bad juju there. Still I appreciated the fact that our youngest U.S. state is the most geographically isolated string of rock on the globe and has a cultural and racial diversity that gives most alpha cities reason to pause. I just could not foresee going to one of the most beautiful places in the world in a state of shock, more like one of suspended belief, following my dad's death. Baldwin Beach on Maui's North Coast Dennis Kilduff died on March 2nd and I flew home the next morning and was thrown into the heady whirlwinds of funeral planning, greeting family, friends and guests and "catching up." As anyone who has been through this before, this ...
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