A bag full of wheres

Tuesday evenings I have improv class, a highlight of my week.*

Last night was no exception. The plan was to drill scenes one after another for the three-hour class so that we can get more experience doing the improv and spend less time talking about it (this is a challenge for my teacher, who looooooves to talk talk talk!).

To facilitate quick and easy starts to scenes we each wrote down 10-15 "wheres" on scraps of paper and put them in a bag. The improvisers starting a new scene choose a scrap from the bag and that location is where the scene takes place.

From what folks wrote down, you would think it had not occurred to us that we were in fact the same people who were going to have to deal with these locations. We all sat there gleefully writing down absurdly challenging locations imagining someone else's horror at having to do an entire scene under water during in the 19th century, or in a dark cave with no flashlight, or in a torture dungeon, or on a Bollywood movie set, or at Sea World leading a tour of mute children.

Even as I try to complain about these ridiculous locations, I can't help but be delighted with the possibility that each one holds. Because of course, there are no bad locations - only bad improvisers. Except for "in a cat's ear," which is just stupid.


*Other highlights of the usual week include salsa lessons on Wednesdays, live bluegrass at Atlas Cafe on Thursdays and usually something else fun on Fridays if we aren't heading off skiing.

Next time I'll skip the suit and wear sweatpants like everyone else

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Employment Development Department's cheery offices on Turk St. for my "personalized career coaching" session, a requirement of receiving unemployment benefits.

Personalized, it turns out, no longer means "one-on-one;" the days of George Costanza dating the EDD officer's hideous daughter to keep the government cheese coming are long gone. There were about 40 of us packed into the Mission Dolores room where Karen, who has long wavy silver hair and has been with EDD for 41 years, reassured us by telling us that, in her tenure with the department, this is the worst it has ever been.

The crowd was colorful and very engaged. When Karen opened the floor up to questions, it was open season.

"I'll tell you it's crazy out there! People be living in their cars, they can't get no job. It ain't never been like this before," shared a curvaceous woman in an Obama sweatshirt up front.

"You're right," Karen affirmed enthusiastically, as did many other members of the group. Excellent question.

"I applied to a hospital the other day and there were thousands of other applicants for just one job," offered a middle-aged man sitting towards the back.

"Yes," responded Karen emphatically. "That's right."

It went on like this for a while. There were a few actual questions sprinkled in, but mostly the people just wanted to be heard. Karen clearly understood this.

Perhaps my favorite moment, though, was when Karen asked if anyone had had trouble getting through to the EDD call center. As the room started to erupt with frustrated indignation, she laughed and waved her arms to show she was joking, and then passed around a handout.

The EDD call center is hiring.

Go that way really fast. If something gets in your way...turn

Eric and I hit the slopes again this past weekend in Tahoe. We managed, on several occasions, to cavalierly disregard signs marked with skull and crossbones and dire warnings about Experts Only and got ourselves into plenty of trouble. There's nothing like standing on the top of a nearly sheer cliff wondering how you will negotiate the boulder-field on the way down. Except then having to jump off it and hope for the best.

One example of a no-way-but-through exit was this steep chute between large boulders. Eric went down first and captured my not-so-graceful exit. Not pictured here is the rock wall which I am headed straight towards at approximately 800mph.

We were lucky enough that the worst that happened to either of us was a few somersaults down the mountain and getting snow down our pants. I was particularly proud of one tumble which prompted a woman nearby to shout "Holy shit are you OK?" If you're not falling, you're not skiing hard enough.

No wonder it took them so long to get their government together

February is Strong Beer Month in San Francisco.

Here's what happens during Strong Beer Month:

Some evening in February you innocently go to your local microbrewpub, say 21st Amendment, and you order a harmless sounding beer like "Monk's Blood" which you may or may not notice is 11.2% alcohol.

You will notice a warm, pleasant sensation all through your body and decide to try another intriguing sounding beer. "Oh look! The Hop Crisis Triple IPA! I'll have one!" you say. And then after just a few swigs of this 11.8% tonic, you will find yourself under the table curled up in fetal position.

If you are hardy enough to drink all 12 beers during February you get a commemorative glass and a commemorative beer belly to go with it. Neither glass nor belly is available for purchase separately and both prove that you are awesome.

Jamaica launched her campaign for her very own 2009 strong beer glass on Tuesday and had this to say:
"I made the mistake of ordering a third strong beer. I woke up at 4 am feeling like the crappiest of all crap, and spent most of Wednesday angry Belgium exists."

With silver bells and cockle shells

I'm making a garden! I am going to grow edibles rather than ornamentals because then I can eat them. Given the way the economy is looking, I think that having the knowledge and materials to grow one's own food may prove to be a useful survival skill when supermarkets are empty and people are rioting in the streets.

I spent most of the day yesterday gathering my supplies. I went to not one but two Home Depots because the first one I went to turned out to be the only Home Depot that doesn't cut wood. At the second one, I procured the wood for the frame plus other necessary structural components. After that, I went to Sloat Garden Center which is a longtime San Francisco gardening institution where I got lots of helpful, if sometimes contradictory, advice about how to set up my garden. I also got lots of seeds though I discovered to my great dismay that somehow I forgot to get spinach, which apparently grows very well in San Francisco.

I'm roughly following Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening method and building two 2x4 foot garden boxes up on my roof, and I'll be growing some herbs in other planters, too. Check it out! This is just one of the boxes that I built today as it went from empty box to covered wagon garden.

Coming or going

My aunt Susan left me a wonderful collection of photos. I've been particularly enjoying them today and thought I would share a few of my favorites.

Apologies for the reflection on the glass but my camera, the light and the glass were not cooperating. This is Leela. The photograph is by Edouard Boubat. The question here: is she coming or going?

This one is Edward Steichen and his Dog, Tripod by Hans Hammarskiold.

This is Simiane La Rotonde by Henri Cartier-Bresson. One of my very most favorites. It just drips lazy Italian summer.

This one is Chez Modrian by Andre Kertesz.

And finally, this one: Two Brothers. Robert Doisneau.

Duck tales

My aunt Barbara, Eric and I spent Saturday morning making quacks on the Bay Quackers SF Duck Tour. We need out of town visitors to provide excuses for us to do this sort of thing, which I had been looking forward to for a long time.

The tour is about an hour and a half and has a land-based portion which goes through North Beach, Chinatown, and SOMA, and then it has an aquatic portion where the "duck" vehicle launches into the water near China Basin and cruises around by the ballpark at about 3 nauts, also known as pretty much standing still. This allows the Captain to invite any children on board to drive the duck in the water, which several of them did. The youngest of them, who looked to be about 4, repeatedly ignored the instructions to just hold the wheel steady and turned us in a pretty aggressive 720 degree spin before the Captain plucked him out of the seat and handed him back to his father.

The tour included a wealth of information about San Francisco's history, notable people and places, and even some colorful nuggets about the present day. I would guess about 40% of it was true or close to true and the rest was greatly exaggerated or just completely made up. Was Columbus Street really created in response to Italian fishermen's demands for a shortcut from their North Beach enclave to the wharves? Did the Chinese really have an underground tunnel network snaking around under Chinatown until it was shut down by the city post WWII? Did the Bush Man really put two children through college by scaring tourists at Fisherman's Wharf? Is Riceroni really made in Chicago??

In addition to a lot of information of dubious accuracy, we also got to keep our "quackers," the yellow beak-shaped noisemakers we had gleefully honked during the tour. Walking home last night from a local bar where we caught the last few minutes of the Super Bowl, Eric re-discovered his quacker in his pocket and made some quacks at the corner while we waited for the light to change. A young gentleman leaning against the light post smoking chortled in our direction.

"Y'all tryin' to call ducks...in San Francisco?" he drawled, and then guffawed loudly. "Well I never."