Listen in as I talk all things off-season and the upcoming eighth season of Storied. Topics include:

• The 2025 Listener Survey, which is up until 9/1/25. Take the survey and you could win a Storied: SF zip hoodie!
• The “Every Kinda People” art show at Mini Bar. Opening night is 9/4/25.
• What’s new about the podcast? New music by Otis McDonald, shorter episodes, an even sharper focus on artists, activists, and working people
• I share my thoughts on these hella messed-up times we’ve all been enduring and how this project flies in the face of everything terrible.
• Next week’s Episode 1 with Marga Gomez
• The second and third episodes, one with an Every Kinda People artist and the other with the woman foreperson of the Golden Gate Bridge iron workers.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Carolyn and I talk about making decisions and intentionality vs. circumstance, need, and necessity. We then go on to talk more about Carolyn’s lifelong love of sports.

She shares the story of her maternal grandmother coming from The Philippines to live with them and how they’d watch games together. It was the days when, in much of the country, if you wanted to watch Major League Baseball, it was all Atlanta Braves, all the time (thanks to TBS, of course). Carolyn became a Braves fan, especially a fan of Dale Murphy. She watched football, too. She didn’t watch the Giants on TV much, because every game wasn’t televised in those days. But she could easily hop on Muni to see a game at Candlestick Park. Her dad often picked them up, showing up at the ballpark around the seventh inning, getting in free, and watching the end of the game with Carolyn and her friends and/or sisters.

We go on a short sidebar about bundling up in San Francisco—at Candlestick and if you just wanted to go to the beach.

In addition to Candlestick, she went to Warriors games a bit and also various sporting events at Cow Palace. Her dad learned how to bowl and would take his kids with him.

We fast-forward a bit to hear about Carolyn’s years in high school, when she went to the all-girl school Mercy High (which is now closed). Later, she took the same bus, the 29, to SF State that she had taken to Mercy. State was the only college she applied to. We talk a little about her decision not to leave San Francisco for school. In high school, she had decided that she wanted to be a sports writer. In fact, she aimed to become the first woman anchor at ESPN.

We rewind a bit to talk about some of the journalism Carolyn did in high school. She had her own column in the school paper called “Off the Bench.” She shares a fun story of calling the Braves’ front office to arrange for an interview with her favorite player—Murphy—the next time Atlanta rolled into town.

In her third semester at SF State, Carolyn got pregnant. Around this time, she also took her first Asian-American Studies class, something that kicked in for her and stays with her to this day. She dove in head-first. I ask Carolyn whether and how much of that history her parents were aware of. She says that, for them, much of it was just things going on in their lives in the city they came to—things like the strike at SF State or the demonstrations at the I-Hotel in Manilatown. Learning more and more about the history of her people in the US lead Carolyn to confront her dad. “Why did you bring us here?” she’d ask.

She ended up raising her first child, a mixed-race kid, as a single parent around this time in her life. She had figured that her son’s dad would bring the kid the Blackness in his life, and she’d bring the Filipino-ness. Her own ideas of how best to raise the kid had to evolve, and they did, she says.

She eventually returned to State and graduated. She lived in South City for a hot minute, held three jobs, and raised her son. She never felt that she couldn’t leave The Bay. It was more, “Why would I?”

Then, because if you know Carolyn Sideco, well, you know … then we talk about New Orleans.

New Orleans is why and how Carolyn came into my life. My wife is borderline obsessed with The Crescent City. I’d been there some earlier in my life, growing up not too far away and having some Louisiana relatives. Erin and I spent three weeks in fall 2022 in a sublet in Bywater, Ninth Ward. That NOLA fever caught on for me then, and I’m hooked.

Back home sometime after that, Carolyn came across Erin’s radar. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who seems to love New Orleans as much as I do and she has a house there!” Erin would tell me. In 2024, at a vegan Filipina pop-up at Victory Hall, we finally met this enigmatic woman. We ended up spending Mardi Gras this year at Carolyn’s house in New Orleans—Kapwa Blue.

“New Orleans has been calling me for about 20 years,” Carolyn says. One of her younger sisters lived there awhile. Her oldest son served in AmeriCorps there for three years and kept living in New Orleans four more. Carolyn and other members of her family visited often. This was around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit and devastated Southern Louisiana. A little more than a decade ago, Carolyn learned of the historical markers in the area that told the stories of Filipinos being the first Asians to settle in that part of the world. (Longtime listeners of Storied: SF might recall that Brenda Buenviaje hails from just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.) As Carolyn learned more and more of the Filipino history in the region, that calling started to make more and more sense.

Three years ago or so, her oldest son got married in New Orleans. That visit told Carolyn that she, too, could live there. Her husband devised a plan, and with some of Carolyn’s cousins, they bought a house in the Musician’s Village part of town, near the Ninth Ward—the aforementioned Kapwa Blue. They intended to bring that same sense of community her parents found and participated in back in San Francisco all those decades ago to their new neighborhood New Orleans. In addition to the house, Carolyn helped found tours of Filipino history in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Find them Bayou Barkada Instagram at @bayoubarkada

Back in The City these days, Carolyn has her own sports consultancy called Coaching Kapwa (IG). “I call myself ‘Your sports relationship coach,’” she says. This means that she provides comfort and advice to anyone interacting with any of the various sports ecosystems. She aims to apply the idea of kapwa to an otherwise competition-driven sports landscape.

We end the podcast (and the season) with Carolyn’s interpretation of the theme of Storied: San Francisco, Season 7: Keep it local. She shares what that idea means for her here as well as how it pertains to her time in New Orleans.

We’ll be taking August off as far as new episodes go. I’ll be busy putting together the first episodes of Season 8 and getting ready for the season launch party/art opening. “Every Kinda People” kicks off at Mini Bar on Sept. 4. That’s also the theme of the next 20 or so episodes of this show.

As always, thank you deeply and sincerely for listening/reading/sharing/liking/commenting/DMing/emailing/subscribing/rating/showing up and really any type of interaction you do with this passion project of mine. If you’re not already, please sign up for our monthly newsletter over on the About page.

See you in September!

Carolyn Sideco’s story begins in The Philippines.

Her dad, Tony Sideco, was born on the island of Cebu in 1938. Her mom, Linda, was born in Paniqui in 1942. By the time Carolyn’s mom was born, the Japanese occupied The Philippines. Young Tony worked for the electric company, which sent him to Paniqui. He soon met his wife-to-be there when he boarded at Carolyn’s grandmother’s house.

It wasn’t an overnight romance. The way Tony (who joined his wife in the room with me and Carolyn as we recorded) tells it, he had eyed Linda for so long that he went cross-eyed.

Linda was her parents’ first daughter, and she came after five older brothers. So she was always afforded chaperones. After Linda, her parents had three more girls. One of those girls, Carolyn’s aunt, lives next-door to where we recorded, a tradition of intergenerationality the family carried with them when they migrated to the US.

Tony came to the United States first in the late Sixties, shortly after Carolyn and her twin sister were born. His migration was motivated by the so-called “American dream.” Carolyn’s version is different, though. She thinks it had more to do with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which effectively did away with nationality quotas. By the time Tony arrived, several members of both his and his wife’s family were already here, many of them in the Outer Sunset.

When baby Carolyn, her sister, and their mom arrived, they first lived on 45th Avenue in The Sunset with her aunt and uncle. Then the family moved to 39th Avenue to be on their own. This was the house that Carolyn grew up in, and the one we recorded this podcast in. A community of Paniquieños already existed all around them.

In hindsight, Carolyn thinks it was a lot easier for folks like her parents to move halfway around the world because they landed, in essence, in an expat community. Her mom didn’t have to learn English so urgently when she arrived, to cite just one example. Several of those families are still around, spread around the North Peninsula. Some also still live in San Francisco, like Carolyn.

Carolyn talks about various aspects of her life that now, in hindsight as an adult, meant she rarely felt different from those around her. She says that in her adult life, meeting folks her parents’ age who didn’t have the same accent as her parents really opened her eyes. Today, Carolyn is the president of Paniquieñans USA, an organization as old as she is.

Then we get back to Carolyn’s personal story. Her and her twin, Rosalyn, joined their mom to go to the US when they were two. She shares a cute story of how their mom loved a party so much that she would celebrate their birthday every second day of the month (their birthday is Feb. 2). Because of this, Carolyn grew up thinking that birthdays happen every month.

She was five when her family moved out of her uncle and aunt’s place on 45th and into their childhood home on 39th Avenue, and Carolyn remembers it well. We talk briefly about the real estate agent who sold them the house and how little they paid (“$24,000,” Tony Sideco, who was in the room with us that day, chimes in—that’s the equivalent of roughly $173K today).

Linda Sideco found work at Little Sisters of the Poor Convalescent Home on Lake Street, where Carolyn would sometimes visit her. Both of Carolyn’s parents worked graveyard shifts. The young couple were able to save for a year for the down payment on their new home.

We take a sidebar for Carolyn to talk about the difference in how service and healthcare work are valued in The Philippines vs. how they’re valued in the US.

Carolyn then shares a story of how, when she was in the fourth grade, she and her twin sister started going to a new school in their neighborhood. Prior to this, they were bussed. At her new school, they asked Carolyn if she wanted to play volleyball. But to join the team, she needed to pay five dollars. She ran four blocks home to ask her mom for the money, but turns out she wouldn’t give it to young Carolyn, who was so upset that she cried until her mom relented.

She did well at volleyball and even made friends through her new sport. She felt so good about it all that she thought, ‘This is why dad brought us here.’ It was the beginning of what would become a lifelong involvement with sports.

We end Part 1 with Carolyn’s foray into many different sports and all the women along the way who inspired her.

Check back next week for Part 2 and the official last episode of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco.

We recorded this podcast at Carolyn’s childhood home in The Sunset in June 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Dregs shares the story of the day he started doing graffiti. It was also when he began experimenting with rapping.

Dregs talks about all the “cool shit in The City” back then, the early 2000s. From sports and music to the aforementioned underworld of San Francisco, SF was lit. It was a time when you could simply step outside your home and find something or someone or some people. You could take a random Muni ride and let stuff happen. And it happened all over town, with creativity pouring out of so many corners. For Dregs, tagging happened first.

He started hanging out more in The Sunset, which was quieter than his own hood. He and his buddies would tag, hang out in the park with their boomboxes, drink 40s, and freestyle. One of those buddies had a computer audio-editing program and a cheap mic (RIP Radio Shack). That friend sent him a track over AIM and it blew young Dregs away. Then he learned that two other guys wanted to battle. Dregs hopped on a bus to Lawton Park to join in. It was his first rap battle.

The crew that battled that day ended up uniting and making more and more music together. They formed a tagging crew called GMC (Gas Mask Colony), which didn’t last long as as a tagging crew, but they kept the name for their rap group. But the group splintered. As mentioned, Dregs ended up at ISA in Potrero. He got into a DJ program and honed his skills. Soon, it was time to get into a studio to lay down some tracks.

They recorded their first song and people liked it. The crew of four included several different ethnicities and neighborhoods across San Francisco, so they had widespread reach.

We take a sidebar to discuss how Dregs got his name. It’s a story that involves the movie Scarface.

Because of time, I ask Dregs to walk us quickly through the years between getting underway with hip-hop and starting his show, History of The Bay. He did music with his GMC posse as well as some solo projects. Days of hanging out and drinking 40s gave way to adult-life realities—jobs and such. They hadn’t figured out a way to make money off their art. Dregs went to City College and then spent two years at UC Riverside. He came back and worked as a youth counselor in the Tenderloin.

At another job in TL, a woman in supportive housing where Dregs worked had a psychotic breakdown. He was the only employee around, and even though he was about to leave for the day, he helped her out. The next day, a boss type thanked Dregs, but told him he’d never get properly compensated for what he did until or unless he had a bachelor’s degree. And so he enrolled at SF State.

He was in his late-twenties at this point, and did better in school than he had ever done. He was a straight-A student, in fact. He took a heavy courseload. It was the first time he’d had Black teachers. One of them advised Dregs to go to graduate school. He looked through the graduate-level programs available and decided that law was his best fit.

And so off he went, to law school in Davis. He did well at this level, also. He graduated, passed the California bar, and got hired by a firm. He was making good money and thought about saying good-bye to making music. But then the folks he worked with at the law firm convinced him not to.

One of the first cuts he did in that era was a collaboration with Andre Nikatina called “Fog Mode.” When the song dropped, it was the pandemic. Dregs had been doing his law work from home. It “sucked,” he tells me. But the track took on a life of its own. He realized amid it all that it was time to go for it with his art.

One of the first steps was to get his social media ramped up. Some people suggested TikTok, but Dregs wasn’t sure what content to throw up on that app. Others said, “Talk about you, talk about your interests.” He looked around and realized that no one out there was really talking about the SF/Bay hip-hop Dregs grew up on, or the prolific taggers he ran with. Around this time, in December 2021, his dad passed away. In the early stages of his grief, Dregs figured it was once again time to quit art and turn his energy and attention to taking care of his mom. But then something happened, something that some of us who’ve experienced loss can possibly relate to. In March 2022, Dregs launched History of The Bay on TikTok.

With his music and social media popping, his law work took a back seat. Folks in his firm took notice and laid Dregs off. It was for the best.

Find Dregs online at his website or on social media @dregs_one. Get History of The Bay on any podcast app.

We end the podcast with Dregs’ take on our theme this season—keep it local.

Listen in as I chat with Gaelan McKeown (director of the SF Art Book Fair) and Lisa Ellsworth (director of Development and Strategy at Minnesota Street Project Foundation) as talk all things 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair.

We recorded this podcast at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in The Dog Patch in June 2025.

Dregs One is a lot of things, including a podcast host.

In this episode, meet and get to know this prolific AF graffiti writer, hip-hop artist, and Bay historian. Dregs starts us off with the story of his parents.

His paternal grandmother was abandoned as a child. Her mother, a Black woman, was raped by a white doctor. She moved to Chicago, where she met Dregs’ grandfather, who was from Jamaica and, as Dregs puts, was a player. He, too, left the family, abandoning his grandmother after his dad was born. She tried ways of getting help to raise her son (Dregs’ dad, who was 13), but ended up dropping him at an orphanage.

Dregs’ dad experienced racism in the Catholic orphanage in Chicago where he spent his teen years. Education helped him emerge from that darkness, though. He eventually became a police officer in Chicago, but left that job after experiencing more racism and rampant corruption.

After that, his dad went on a spiritual quest that landed him in San Francisco. His parents met in The City, in fact, but we need to share Dregs’ mom story.

Her family was from Massachusetts. Her dad got into trouble when he was young, but managed to become a chemist. He helped develop the chemical process that went into Polaroid film, in fact. He later served in the Korean War before becoming an anti-war activist. He hosted the Boston Black Panthers in his home, in fact.

His mom mostly rejected her white culture, owing to many things, including alcoholism. She hung out with Black folks and listened to Black music. She’d be one of or the only white folks in these circles. She went on her own spiritual journey that also ended up here.

It was the Eighties in San Francisco when his parents met. Dregs is their only child, though he has some step-siblings through his dad. He says that despite his parents’ turbulent relationship, they provided a nice environment for him to grow up in.

Because both parents worked, and because he was effectively an only child, Dregs spent a lot of time alone when he was young. His dad got a master’s degree and started counseling AIDS patients in The Castro. His mom worked a pediatric intensive care nurse.

Though Dregs and I were both young at the time, we go on a sidebar to talk about how devastating the AIDS epidemic must’ve been.

Dregs was born in the late-Eighties and did most of his growing up in the Nineties and 2000s in the Lakeview. Make no mistake, he says—it was the hood. Although he lived on “the best block of the worst street,” he saw a lot as a kid.

His mom often got him out of their neighborhood, boarding the nearby M train to go downtown or to Golden Gate Park. His dad wasn’t around a lot, so Dregs spent a lot of time hanging out with his mom. They went to The Mission, Chinatown, The Sunset, all over, really.

Around fifth grade or so, when he started riding Muni solo, Dregs also got into comic books. He read a lot. He drew a lot. He played a little bit of sports, mostly pick-up basketball.

As a born-and-raised San Franciscan, Dregs rattles off the schools he went to—Jose Ortega, Lakeshore Elementary, A.P. Giannini, and Lincoln. But when Dregs got into some trouble in high school, he was taken out and put back in. It was a turbulent period. He eventually graduated from International Studies Academy (ISA) in Potrero Hill.

One of the adults’ issues with young Dregs was his graffiti writing. For him, it was a natural extension of drawing. He remembered specific graffiti from roll-downs on Market Street he spotted when he was young. He says he was always attracted to the SF underworld. “It was everywhere you went.”

Going back to those Muni trips around town with his mom, he’d look out the windows when they went through the tunnels and see all the graffiti, good art, stuff that he later learned that made SF graffiti well-regarded worldwide.

While at A.P. Giannini, a friend of his was a tagger. In ninth grade, Dregs broke his fingers and had a cast. One friend tagged his cast, and it dawned on Dregs—he, too, could have a tag.

After his first tagging adventure, Dregs ended up at his friend’s house. The guy had two Technics turntables. He was in ninth grade, but his friend was already DJing. Among the music in his buddy’s rotation was some local artists. “Whoa, this is San Francisco?” young Dregs asked. His mind was blown and his world was opening up.

Check back next week for Part 2 with Dregs One. And look for a bonus episode on the San Francisco Art Book Fair later this week.

We recorded this podcast in the Inner Richmond in June 2025.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Young Ed was studying at UC Davis and exploring his sexuality. He didn’t consider himself bisexual, and instead thought that everyone was fluid. But he thought he had made a choice—that is, to be heterosexual. Part of that decision is that Ed always wanted a family of his own, and therefore, partnering with a woman was the only way to achieve that.

But between relationships with women, Ed would visit “cruise-y bathrooms,” places known for their hookup potential. This was before the internet and smartphones. Stuff like this was word-of-mouth and need-to-know. But during his visits, Ed never hooked up with anyone. He says that he merely wanted to be adjacent to that world.

After he graduated, Ed stayed in Davis. One day over coffee with a female friend at a lesbian cafe, his friend told him that she might be bi. He said he might be, too. She suggested that they “go to this club in San Francisco” where they could scratch that itch, so to speak. Ed says that The Box remains the most diverse array of folks in the LGBTQIA+ community he has ever been part of. And it wasn’t diverse only on the sexuality spectrum. There were folks from all over the gender spectrum, too, he says. Ed watched men of various ethnic backgrounds dancing with one another and thought, ‘Why are those straight guys dancing with each other? Wait, they’re not straight. Wait, I’m not straight.’

So now he knew. But the question of whether and how to come out was a totally separate question. It was the mid-Nineties. Coming out was, in Ed’s words, “really fucking scary.” He remembered that his dad, who has since come around and is loving and accepting of who his son is, often used homophobic slurs casually when Ed was a kid. Still, Ed summoned the courage and started telling folks. His mom was cool. His dad and brother were cool, too, but also probably confused. His friends shrugged him off in a very “no duh” kinda way.

But there was that one member of his friend group for whom the news seemed not to sit well. Brad had been Ed’s friend since seventh grade back in Hawaii. Three months after coming out to his friends, Brad let Ed know that he, too, wanted to come out of the closet, but that Ed had stolen his thunder. Laughs all around.

Going back to that night at The Box, Ed met someone and they started dating. His new partner lived in Berkeley and Ed moved in (they had a roommate). Then Ed and that first boyfriend moved to the Tenderloin together, followed by a move to the Mission. Ed got a job teaching at Balboa High School in The City. He says he was so young (23) and blended in with students enough that on his first day, the principal at Balboa told him to get to class. Again, belly laughs. Ed loved teaching and did well at it. He lasted at Balboa from 1996 to 2001, teaching English as a second language to students from all over the world.

The conversation shifts to the moment when Ed realized that San Francisco was home. Despite being here so long (since the mid-Nineties), Ed feels that SF is one of several places for him. Hawaii will always hold a place in his heart. He says that his sense of adventure and curiosity have him roaming around to other cultures regularly. But being married and having kids of his own grounds him in The City. One of his two children experiences mental health challenges, so that makes leaving tricky. All of that and community. Community keeps him here. I get it.

One space Ed finds community is at The Social Study, where we recorded. It’s his neighborhood bar, the place where bartenders know his drink without him ordering it. The spot where other regulars and semi-regulars ask him details about his life. Sure, he could find that in another part of town or in another city altogether. But right now, that community is his. And he relishes it.

There’s also his work. Aside from classroom teaching, Ed did some after-school work, education philanthropy work, and some other education-related jobs. Early in the pandemic, his non-binary older kid struggled. Ed says that in hindsight, he wished he had taken his child out of “Zoom school.” He wanted the kid to pick one topic, whatever they wanted, and learn that. They would spend time outside and hang out together. But that’s not what happened. The teacher in Ed pushed his kid, over and over.

Ed and his partner were able to find support groups around SF and the Bay Area that work with children who exhibit mental health issues. That helped, but he eventually realized that his own parenting needed help and support, because it wasn’t meeting the moment. He sought that help, but wasn’t impressed. He says it was mostly folks telling him what he was doing wrong, instead of being supportive and uplifting and actually teaching him. He found a couple of tools that served as Band-Aid solutions, but he was left looking and looking and looking for answers. He needed help that acknowledged and addressed his own traumas.

And so he began working more or less on his own. One of his first discoveries was recognizing a moment, however short and fleeting, between his kid’s stimulating action or words and Ed’s reaction. If he could interrupt that automatic reaction and gain control of his own emotions, it would serve both himself and his kid. He worked on stretching out that time … from one second to two seconds and eventually to five. Once he got there, he could respond thoughtfully and lovingly vs. reacting.

Realizing that he was able to overcome his shortcomings as a parent all on his own lead to Ed’s founding of The Village Well. He’d met others who were aligned with his parenting experiences. He knew that if they created a space where folks in their situations could come for comfort and sharing and advice, they’d be doing the right thing.

If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Village Well’s website and follow them on social media @villagewellparenting.

As we do at Storied: San Francisco, we end this podcast with Ed Center’s take on our theme this season—keep it local.

We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in June 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as Megan Rohrer and I reconnect after nearly four years to talk all about their new book, San Francisco’s Transgender District. Look for it on Arcadia Publishing in August at your local bookstore.

We recorded this bonus episode outside the front door of the Golden Gate Theater in the Transgender District in June 2025.

Ed Center and I begin this podcast with a toast.

I’m proud to call Ed my friend. I met him a couple years at The Social Study, where we recorded this episode and where my wife, Erin Lim, bartends. From the first time I spoke with Ed, I knew I liked him. His energy and humor and intellect and heart are all boundless. I’m hella drawn to people like Ed.

His story begins in Cebu in the Philippines, with his maternal grandmother. Her family was poor and her parents died in the Spanish Flu of the 1910s. That loss plunged the surviving family members into what Ed describes as destitute poverty.

Following that tragedy, her older brother signed up to work for the Dole company in Hawaii. Ed’s grandmother was 13 at this time, but still, it was decided that she would accompany her brother to the islands to help care for him while he worked the pineapple fields and earned a wage.

Ed points out that the Dole Food Company (as it was known at the time) intended these migrant workers to honor their contracts and then go back to their home countries. To that end, the company only hired young men. But Ed’s family paid a stranger on their boat $20 to marry his grandmother so that she could join her brother in Hawaii.

Ed goes on a sidebar here about the tendency in his family to exaggerate their own history. “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” or so the family saying goes.

He returns to the story of his maternal grandmother to share the tale of her younger sister being so distraught about the departure, she hugged her so hard that her flip-flop broke. It was her only pair of shoes.

In the Filipino community on Oahu at the time, there was an outsize number of men in relation to women. When Ed’s grandfather first set eyes on his grandma, he began to court her. A year later, they asked her older brother if they could get married, and he said no, that she was too young (14 at the time). But they got married anyway, with the understanding that they would wait two more years to live together.

They moved in and Ed’s grandmother had a new baby, including his mom, every other year for the next 20 years.

Like her brother, his grandmother’s new husband worked in the pineapple fields for Dole, doing incredibly hard labor. His grandma washed clothes for bachelor workers. The two saved their money and bought plantation property from Dole. The property was affordable enough that they were able to build multiple shacks for the kids to eventually live in.

At this point, Ed launches into what he calls “the shadow story” of his family. He learned that shadow story when he was a kid and his mom and aunties were cooking in the kitchen. He’d sit just outside the room pretending to read a book, eavesdropping. There, he learned things like which family members were smoking pot or getting into trouble. But there are more serious elements, which prompts Ed to issue a trigger warning to readers and listeners.

His grandmother didn’t quite agree to go to Hawaii. When she told her brother no to the idea, he beat her. He did this repeatedly until she acquiesced. But it was in one of these violent melees that his grandmother’s flip-flop broke.

All this to say that Ed’s grandmother didn’t have much agency in her life decisions. The last two of her 10 children almost killed her. After number 10, the doctor gave Ed’s grandfather an involuntary vasectomy.

Ed shares the story of how, on plantation payday, the women and children would hide in the fields with the men guarding them. It was a way to try to protect them from workers in the next village getting drunk and coming in to cause trouble.

He summarizes the family history to this point by pointing out the incredible amount of resilience his ancestors carried. Also strength and love. But also, violence. All of those qualities manifested in their and their children’s parenting practices.

Ed’s mom raised her kids in this way. The severity of the abuse waned over generations, but it was there nonetheless. Ed says he was ultimately responsible for his mother’s emotions. For many of these reasons, in his adult life, Ed founded The Village Well Parenting. We’ll get more into that in Part 2.

We back up for Ed to tell the story of how his mom and dad met each other. His dad was in the Army during the war in Vietnam. On a voyage to Asia, his boat took a detour and ended up in Hawaii, where he remained for the next five years.

His parents got together and had Ed and his younger brother. They grew up among a much larger Filipino extended family, but Ed didn’t really know his dad’s Caucasian family, who lived on the East Coast. He’s gotten to know them more in his adult life.

Ed grew up on Oahu in the Seventies and Eighties. His family was between working class and middle class, and there was always stress about money. But in hindsight, they lived well. We share versions of a similar story—that of parents telling kids that Christmas would be lean, that they didn’t have a lot of money (probably true), but that never ended up actually being the case. Both of our recollections was mountains of gifts on December 25.

Growing up, Ed was always feminine. He was also athletic. It was a time before Ellen, before Will and Grace, when “athletic” also meant “not gay.” Ed says he wanted to be “not gay,” but he couldn’t help who he was. That led to his getting bullied.

Moving to the mainland for college meant escape—from his own torment and from that of his peers back on the island. Ed went to UC Davis. He had played competitive soccer in middle school and high school, and because his teams were good, they came to the mainland a couple times. But Davis was a whole other world by the time he arrived to go to college.

It was the early Nineties. He took what we call a gap year before coming to California. For him, that meant working. In one of his jobs, he served tables at CPK in Hawaii, where Carol Burnett was one of his regulars.

We end Part 1 with Ed’s story of his time at UC Davis and not yet accepting his queerness.

This Thursday on the podcast, I talk with Megan Rohrer about their new book on the Transgender District in San Francisco.

And check back next week for Part 2 with Ed Center.

We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in June 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we start off talking about the underground nature of trans and drag safe spaces such as Compton’s back in the Sixities, and well before that. Because of this, precise records of places and events are often hard to come by. Saoirse also speaks to the human psychology of needing other people to act in order to justify joining an action. Of course, everyone’s threshold for this varies.

Shane joins in to talk about how queer history is the story of fighting back against hate when there’s nothing left to lose. Folks on the frontlines of these battles don’t always plan the fights that end up happening. Case in point—the events at Compton’s Cafeteria that form the basis of the play.

Then we shift the conversation to talk about Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and how the play came about. Mark Nassar (Tony and Tina’s Wedding) saw the Tenderloin Museum’s (TLM) exhibition on the riot at Compton’s and soon got in touch with Donna Personna and Collette LeGrande through a project the two were working on at the time—Beautiful by Night, a short documentary about their lives as trans people and drag queens. Over the course of about a year of periodic meetings at Mark’s house, where Donna and Collette shared their stories of Compton’s and the riot, the three weaved together enough personal stories to create an immersive play. Katie Conry at the Tenderloin Museum told the group that if something ever came out of what they’re doing, to let her know.

Shane shares her story of the first time she saw Donna Personna perform. Prior to that, Shane thought that drag was a young person’s thing. She’d never seen someone of Donna’s age do drag. But she was blown away and was able to meet Donna. That night, Donna hinted to Shane about the project she was working on with Mark Nassar and Collette LeGrande. She told Shane that when the time came, when they had something ready, she’d let her know. About a year later, Shane was at Mark’s house reading for the role of Rusty, the character based on Donna.

Some of this story has already appeared on Storied: SF, in the podcast on Katie and TLM. The museum helped bring the play to life by getting a space for the production. It was 2018. They were doing it. The first run of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot lasted several months. It was deemed a success and the plan was to bring it back in 2020. But the universe had different ideas.

Prior to the pandemic, the biggest challenge was securing a space. But then, Shane says she was at Piano Fight in February 2020 for an event to sign a lease on a new spot. Just a few weeks later, the first shelter-in-place orders were handed down. Shane speaks to what it means, now more than five years down the road and in a very different political and social environment, to get the play staged. And Saoirse talks about how honored she is and how personal it is for her to portray an actual living legend (Collette LeGrande).

I ask Shane and Saoirse to respond to this season’s theme on Storied—”keep it local.” Saorise then shares the story of being targeted and harassed by right-wing bigots (is there any other kind?) right here in San Francisco. She tells this story to emphasize that, even in The City, trans people are not safe from fascist transphobia and violence that are spreading across the nation and the world. She also speaks to the massive wealth disparity here in SF and The Bay. All of this to say that for Saoirse, keeping it local requires engaging with all of these truths.

Shane begins by riffing off of Saoirse’s response. She works for The City and County of San Francisco and wonders whether some of her coworkers know what’s at risk. She points to right-wing groups coming to SF to hold “de-transition” events. She then ends the episode by cataloging the many reasons she loves The City and wants us all to fight for it.

For more information and to buy tickets for Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, please go to comptonscafeteriariot.com.

And follow the production on Instagram @comptonscafeteriariot.

We recorded this episode in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play space in the Tenderloin in May 2025.

Photography by Mason J.