Mike Irish is his actual name.

Welcome to my episode with the current (it no longer works to say “new”) owner of one of my favorite places in San Francisco—Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. I’m not sure where to begin, but I suppose a sprinkle of backstory can’t hurt.

Back in 2022, I recorded an episode with Emmy Kaplan, then the owner and forever the founder of Emmy’s. It was a fun interview, and through that chat with Emmy, we discovered that we had been across-the-street neighbors in the Mission back in the early 2000s.

Fast-forward to summer 2024 when I applied to be on KQED’s Check Please! Bay Area and rated Emmy’s as my No. 1 pick among the three spots I proposed. Then a funny thing happened—before we shot the Check Please episode, Emmy sold her restaurant to one of the bartenders at the place—Mike Irish.

That brings us to this episode. From the first time Erin and I met Mike at the bar at Emmy’s, I knew I liked the dude. Now let’s get to know Mike together as he approaches the one-year mark of owning his first restaurant, an SF institution.

Mike was born in Houston, but he didn’t stay there long. His dad ran catering trucks for restaurants, and soon moved around bit before settling in Arizona, in the Phoenix area, where Mike mostly grew up.

He came of age in the late-Nineties/early 2000s. Being in Arizona, Mike tells us some of the things about life there that he just considered normal, things like wearing oven mitts to get into your car in the summer. It was hot, but swimming pools were easy to find.

Sports was pretty central to young Mike’s life. He played basketball, baseball, soccer, and other sports. His dad coached some of the teams he was on. He was a good kid. Basketball took over, eventually. He looked up to local players, especially Charles Barkley, whose number Mike shaved into his head.

But after a couple years playing in high school, basketball started to fade and was replaced by theater and drama. Looking back, he calls it a “hard turn,” but we both recognize the plasticity of that age—the teen years.

In his drama classes, Mike gravitated toward writing. He played guitar and wrote songs. He wrote a play for his school. All that young talent and creativity led to Mike and his friends making movies. He was also in bands playing mostly folk music.

With all this going on, he met his first girlfriend. They dated briefly, didn’t talk for 20 years years, and today are married. But we’ll get to that later.

Mike graduated from high school and went to New York City for college pretty much right away. He had visited NYC once before and liked it. He got into film school there, beginning a journey that lasted until three years ago or so.

And so, for nearly 20 years, Mike Irish existed as a filmmaker in New York City.

The school and his place were both in Manhattan. When he first arrived, he knew one guy from a band they’d both been in, and Mike was grateful for that. But of course they didn’t become close in their new hometown, as they attended different schools and made new friends.

Mike made student films, and kept going after he graduated. To survive and pay rent, he started bartending, something that, later in life, would prove crucial to where he is today. I ask him to name-drop some of the bars in New York where he worked. He rattles off several, then summarizes by saying he worked at possibly 50 different sports in NYC.

We talk about the films he made over that almost two-decade span. Some won awards, both domestically and internationally. The most highly acclaimed of his movies was The Life of Significant Soil, which Mike says he’s seen being played on airplanes. Another movie, Permanent Collection, premiered in San Francisco at the Roxie. Mike came out here for that and stayed for a week.

That was February 2020, weeks before COVID shut The City and the world down.

Going back to his first girlfriend, whom Mike had met in high school, she already lived in San Francisco. They had lost touch over the years. But she noticed his name on a movie showing at The Roxie and came out to the premiere. A reconnection was made, but Mike returned home to New York after that week.

Still, the two kept in touch. Once it was possible, one would fly out to be with the other, either in New York or here in San Francisco. That eventually gave way to Mike’s decision to move to The City.

Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode about Mike Irish.

We recorded this podcast at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Misstencil at a new school half a world away from her home in China.

Her time in Switzerland started off in business school, a topic that she admits she’s not the best at today. Aside from school, she visited other parts of Europe. She got a job in Switzerland, but called her family back home as much as she could afford to. One call she had with them around the new year one year had her feeling like family members were passing the phone and no one wanted to talk with her. She then learned that her grandfather, the one who had raised her, had passed away days before this call. The family had kept the news of his illness from Misstencil, ostensibly to protect her.

Her grandfather’s death took her about a decade to get over. She was left with a sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose. Going back home felt out of the question, and she liked Switzerland. But her school there had a joint program with a school in the US, and so she applied for a visa. That school was in South Carolina.

When her time in South Carolina came to an end, she had a choice—New York or San Francisco. She (correctly) chose The City.

Misstencil had friends in SF already, and they let her stay with her. Those friends told her about a website, then only in the Bay Area, that she could use to find her own place. That site was Craigslist, and they were right. She soon found a place of her own. The year was 2000, and little did she know that she was beginning what would be a decades-long stay here.

Her first job in The City was for a big company, one that had a dress code that put her in high heels. Looking back, Misstencil is so far removed from that corporate world that she cannot imagine wearing those shoes, or painting her nails, or other things that go along with corporate culture. But we’ll get to that.

She found herself meeting and befriending older hippies who encouraged her to pursue her art. She was broke, and they put her up. They helped her get art supplies. She had previously set aside any artistic ambitions while going to school and beginning what she thought would be a career. But summoning inspiration from the art her dad used to do and accepting the help of her friends in her new city, she decided to go for it.

Misstencil (not known by that name just yet) began to show her art. She recounts the first time she sold a piece, and how that felt. She walked by the gallery and saw that red dot and knew she had to tell everybody about it. She says that art and San Francisco and those early friends she made here saved her.

Looking back on her life and the emotional struggles she had endured, Misstencil came to realize that, as an adult and survivor of depression, she wanted to help kids going through that. She lived with roommates in a rent-controlled spot, thus allowing her to do side work of that nature.

The person who today is Misstencil of course wasn’t always known by that name. That started in 2022. She shares the origin story of her pseudonym.

It all began with her simply wanting to beautify parts of The City that had lost their luster, so to speak—boarded-up storefronts and the like. She found herself all over town, talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing how much neighborhoods meant to people. This led Misstencil to conceive of her “San Francisco Lonely Hearts” project, which is how my life intersected with hers. It’s a way for her to show her deep love for and appreciation of San Francisco.

She shares how she settled on stencil art for her method lately. She never had any formal training or went to art school. She says that because she didn’t have a very happy childhood, she wanted her art to help her feel like a kid again.

Misstencil goes on a side story about the time she connected with SF icon Frank Chu and invited him to do Bay to Breakers with her. We also talk about the day we met, when she showed her SF Lonely Hearts work-in-progress canvas outside of Vesuvio. In addition to the 2D art that day in Jack Kerouac Alley, she had Frank Chu on a Roomba holding his infamous “12 Galaxies” sign, and a Golden Gate Bridge bench placed in front of the canvas.

Before we wrap, I ask Misstencil about upcoming shows she has, and she humors me by plugging our “Keep It Local” show, which she’s in.

We end the episode with Misstencil’s thoughts about our theme this season and the theme of the show this week: Keep it local.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

Misstencil was born on a mountain in China.

In this episode, we meet artist Misstencil and she shares the story of her life. Before we get to that, be sure to RSVP to our Keep It Local show on May 23. Misstencil will be one of the six artists featured that evening, and for a very good reason. But we’ll get to that.

As the Communist Party came to power in China, her dad and his family found themselves on the unfortunate side of things. His side of the family had a history as successful business people, which was suddenly frowned upon. Her mom came from a family of professors, also not favorable in the “new China.” Her dad was from Hunan Province, where her mom’s family later moved.

When her dad was young, his family gave him up to a foster mother and foster sister. That foster family, capitalists like her dad’s family, was ostracized and became homeless. Misstencil’s dad was smart and talented, but because of his family’s background, was denied the opportunity to go to college.

He also had tough luck with women. When it came time to meet their parents, once it became obvious what his family’s political background was, they would end the relationship. This happened on more than one occasion.

Despite being attractive and talented (at art and engineering), he was still single at 30. Then someone introduced him to the woman who would become Misstencil’s mom. On their first date, he wasted no time letting her know his background. And it landed. She told him about her own background, and said she wanted to give him a chance.

After the two got married, the government sent them to work hard jobs in the mountains. The reality of life there meant that children went to day care while the parents worked. And after work, those adults had to attend political meetings. There was little to no time to raise kids. This was the situation in which Misstencil would grow up.

Because of this, her parents sent Misstencil to live with her mom’s parents when she was eight months old. She saw her parents only once a year until she was around 12.

Growing up with her grandparents was traumatizing for Misstencil, despite how good they were to her. And that led to depression. All the kids around her had parents, but she effectively did not. It also affected her performance in school. She didn’t do well in any subject except art. Her depression made it hard for her to be interested or to take school seriously.

Misstencil’s parents took her out of school eventually, out of fear that they would lose her, and were able to get her into an education program that was not goal-oriented. In that time, she started to change, which she attributes to the lack of pressure. “I no longer had this pressure of doing stuff I don’t like to do,” she says.

When she graduated, that school sent Misstencil and one other young woman to Shanghai for college. She says that it was an especially optimistic time in China, and she embraced her time in the country’s largest city.

Misstencil shares a fun sidebar about the first time she saw and went into a McDonald’s. Because she was totally unfamiliar with the menu, she ended up ordering a bunch of desserts.

Then she tells us about seeing an advertisement for a meeting about a school in Switzerland. More importantly, cookies would be served at this meeting. That was enough for young Misstencil.

Like many people in China, she was familiar with Switzerland and its amazing mountain scenery. Calendars depicting the Swiss Alps were common. But Misstencil never imagined that she’d have the opportunity to go there.

As we’ve mentioned, the Chinese government exploited people like her dad. He was never really compensated for the incredible contributions he gave to his society. But then he found himself with a little bit of money, and told his daughter that they could use it to send her to Europe for school, at least for a year. She jumped on that chance to get out of her home country.

Misstencil shares the detailed story of her journey to Switzerland. It involves large amounts of paper currency, some of which ended up in her shoes. Arriving was tricky, too. It was the middle of the night and there was a train to catch. And she needed to go to the bathroom, but didn’t have the coins needed to do that.

A further complication was that she didn’t speak the language (German or French). A friendly fellow train passenger offered help finding her stop. But then he fell asleep. Eventually, she made it … in the middle of the night. There was no one around. So she walked.

When she arrived at her new school, she was told that because school started the next day, she’d have to pay to stay there that night (which was already half over). Misstencil notes the contrast between this and what she was used to at home. She says she wondered if she had made a mistake.

But she paid, and the next morning after she woke up, she opened her window. It was like being inside of a calendar, she says.

Check back next week for Part 2 and the rest of Misstencil’s story.

We recorded this episode near Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park in May 2025.

Photography by Alfredo Becerra

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Fredo and Laine had worked for the same company for a minute, but both left eventually. That social group they’d formed with a few other artists they worked with kept in touch. Some years went by.

Fredo attended a workshop for artists at Hunt and Gather in the Sunset, and let Laine know about it. She says that he asked her to be his “accountability buddy.” He says it wasn’t a question, but more a half-joking demand.

Fredo shares what an “accountability buddy” is, in this sense. At the workshop, each attendee set up goals for the next year. Your accountability buddy helps you stay on-target for achieving those goals. For Fredo and his buddy (Laine), part of that meant meeting almost once a week to go over what Fredo had been able to cross off his list and what was ahead. One vital area he felt he needed her help with was networking.

With Laine holding him to task, Fredo knocked out most of his 20 goals for 2023 by August of that year. But, because his networking goal didn’t have a metric, per se, it proved trickier.

And so they got together for coffee and sat in the parklet outside of Gus’s on Haight. Fredo brought a newspaper with him that day. He’d noticed that he kept hearing about art shows after the fact. Because he wasn’t really part of a larger scene (yet), he wondered how people found out about these events. His idea was to create a publication to do just that, and more. And then a funny thing happened. Laine had had the idea to make an art magazine that very same week. Kismet!

They took that as an obvious sign that this was something they had to do. And so they started hanging out even more, talking and talking and talking about what they wanted their publication to be. What kind of paper? What would it look like? How do we make it free for artists to be featured? Do we want advertising?

They answered those questions with several notebooks and a lot of caffeine. The first issue of 415 Zine took them seven months to make. Over that time, Laine came up with the idea of tying the title back to the structure of the publication—it could be four of something, one of something, and five of something. They did their due diligence when it came to researching the media landscape, especially when it came to art journalism. They settled on having their boundary be a geographic one, rather than having an artistic-genre focus.

The “4” would be short features on artists—two pages of full-color examples of their work accompanied by brief write-ups about them. The “1” would be an in-depth interview with a single artist, with several samples of their art to go with the interview. And the “5” would be spots around San Francisco for folks to go experience art. Places like Madrone Art Bar, where we recorded this episode.

I ask Laine and Fredo to talk about those seven months, from conception to the first publication, and the ups and downs they experienced in that time. Laine says she was in “no looking back” mode, and Fredo concurs. The only questions that popped up were around content. They were in it, and nothing would stop them.

Though that first issue took them a little more than half a year, they quickly decided that 415 Zine would be quarterly. Most of the heavy lifting of creating something from scratch had been done. And though putting together a publication like this is no small feat, they felt they had it down.

As we recorded that day in April 2025, Fredo and Laine were about to celebrate the first birthday of their creation. That party fell before this podcast was ready to go out, but I asked them to talk about the anniversary and what it means to have a full year and now five issues behind them.

We end the episode with Fredo and Laine’s thoughts about our theme this season—Keep it local.

Photography by Mason J.

Alfredo Sainz’s grandfather came to US from Chihuahua, Mexico, in the Bracero Program during World War II. That family then migrated from El Paso, Texas, through New Mexico and Southern California, then as far north as San Francisco.

In this episode, get to know Fredo and his 415 Zine co-founder and co-publisher, Laine Wiesemann. We begin Part 1 with Fredo.

Fredo and his brother were his family’s first US-born members, making them both Chicanos. Most of his mom’s family immigrated to the US, but many family members on his dad’s side still live in Mexico, mostly in Guadalajara.

His grandfather followed the work, which lead him to San Francisco in 1946. He worked in construction, eventually bringing his wife and children, including Fredo’s mom, to live with him.

Fredo’s family settled in Excelsior near Crocker-Amazon Park. He attended Sacred Heart. After high school, he moved to Daly City and then the Sunset, where he lives today. Many of his high school classmates are still in SF.

He’s never lived anywhere else, though his family did spend summers in Mexico, something Fredo remembers fondly. His grandfather still had a ranch there where they would stay. They’d set out right when the school year ended, and return right before the fall semester began, with a side trip to K-Mart for school clothes, of course.

I ask Fredo if he’s ever been tempted to live somewhere else. He expounds on an emphatic “No!” Then he talks about a BBQ spot out near the ocean close to Doggie Diner where he was introduced to peach cobbler.

Next, we turn to Laine and her story. She’s from the Central Valley—Sanger, California, near Fresno. The family later moved north to Linden, near Stockton. Both her parents were train engineers. Her mom was one of the first women engineers, in fact.

Laine visited San Francisco a lot during her high school years. She remembers crossing the Bay Bridge and being awed. She has memories of her dad taking her and a friend to Amoeba Records.

She’d been doing art since she was little, but really started getting into it when she was in high school. In her freshman year, she did commissions. After graduation, she moved to Chico, where she says she “learned how to party.”

A friend of hers had moved to The City and her boss was coming here, so, with those things in mind, Laine decided it was time. She moved to San Francisco in 2008.

That boss ended up not moving here after all, so Laine had to find work upon her arrival here. She was able to do that relatively easily. Though she’d worked at Trader Joe’s in Chico doing her store’s art, by the time she got to San Francisco, she took a break from art. She worked for a caterer doing special events. And it was at that job that Alfredo and Laine met.

I ask them what year that connection was made, and the fact that they both struggled to remember says a lot. Deep friendships can do that. They ballpark it as 2009 or 2010, before the Giants won their first World Series in SF. A small subset of their coworkers were artists, and they all formed a tight social circle.

Fredo and others urged Laine to get back to painting. And, inspired by her and others in the group, he decided to pick something up also. He channeled the graffiti he’d done when he was younger. Soon enough, that work crew had a group art show and they asked Fredo to be part of it.

That show led to another with the same artists. They had their own art, of course, but the four also contributed to a single collaborate piece. Me, Laine, and Fredo struggle to remember the name of the game with plastic monkeys that Laine compared the piece to. “Barrel of Monkeys,” Fredo eventually recalls. Yep.

It was 2016 and with those shows behind him, Fredo decided to run with “above-ground” art. He says that, especially in those days, Laine helped him out a lot with the technical side of creating art. Fredo also credits her with being good at the business side of being an artist—promotion and sales and such.

Since she started doing art again, Laine hasn’t stopped. She shares how that got going again. She was visiting her girlfriend’s relatives in Tamales, where many members of that family paint. Laine was inspired. But when it came to subject matter, she felt she had two options—the surrounding natural beauty (specifically, a nearby creek), or a shiny red teapot. She settled on a mashup of sorts—the teapot pouring into the creek.

She had a lot of fun with that little painting. And so, she picked that up and ran with it.

Check back next week for Part 2 with Laine and Fredo.

We recorded this episode at Madrone Art Bar in April 2025.

Photography by Mason J.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We recorded this episode over Zoom in March 2025.

In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school.

What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she made in San Diego, one was set on living in New York and going to NYU. And then 9/11 happened, and everything changed.

She’d had dreams of moving to New York and becoming an artist, but those plans were put on hold. After a short stint in Paris, in early 2002, Kundan moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. We take a brief detour to talk about Kundan’s time in Paris, a city, she says, that will always be a part of her soul.

It was in New York that Kundan says she really came into her own. She’d graduated college and was diving into the abyss of early adulthood, finding jobs, paying rent, etc. She also learned how to have fun. This meant, through her work at a music venue, absorbing all the acts that came through. She made lots of friends, too, through serving and bartending at the venue. It was in this job that she became friends with the one and only B.B. King.

That was Kundan’s first bartending job, at the club. She also did some “cater waitering” with a catering company in New York. But we’ll get back to that.

After New York, she pondered a couple different places to start the next chapter of her life. Her sister had quit practicing law and was writing for television in LA, so that was a possibility. But Kundan chose to be closer to her childhood home. Her adult life in The Bay began at a friend’s house in Palo Alto while she “figured out how to get her way into San Francisco.” It was 2007, and she got a 9-to-5er as a receptionist at an engineering firm near the North Point Shopping Center. Then the bottom fell out of the economy and Kundan got laid off in 2008. We go on a bit of a sidebar about that shopping center (I worked nearby back then).

Kundan used time after her layoff to travel. One of the first places she went was Memphis and Graceland, where she took her mom. There was a family trip to Spain. Then she traveled all over India with a friend for what turned out to be three months. Kundan talks at some length about the ups and downs and rewards of traveling.

When she came back to The City, she needed to find a new place to live. A friend had told her about a bar in the Haight that might be a little intimidating, but Kundan didn’t mind that. That bar was Zam Zam. Right away, she loved the place and made friends, including one woman she felt she knew from somewhere. Eventually, they figured out that she was Kundan’s bartender back in New York. Small world, SF-style. That woman is responsible for Kundan’s job at Zam Zam.

What started out as her filling in has turned into 14 years or so behind the bar at one of my favorite San Francisco spots—Zam Zam. She found a place to live nearby and loved that she could walk to her new beloved bar, whether to work or connect with a friend or meet a stranger.

We fast-forward a few years to when my life intersected with Kundan’s. I was on a “Bourdain Crawl” with Bitch Talk Podcast shortly after the renowned chef and author passed away in 2018. When we got to Zam Zam that weekday in June, we lucked out that Kundan was behind the bar. Shortly into the recording of Kundan’s retelling of Zam Zam’s history, Erin of Bitch Talk turned to me and said, “This would be good for Storied.” And that’s how our first episode with Kundan came to be.

Based on that first meeting, Kundan talks about learning the history of the bar she works at. It happened thanks to many factors—her own love of history, the bar’s unique story, visitors’ consistent questions about the place, and the current owner’s knowledge of his business. She goes on to talk about working at the bar the day that Bourdain died. Like a lot of people, he had meant a lot to Kundan. She had even considered culinary school after getting laid off. She worried that the day would be difficult, but it turned out to be the exact opposite—folks were there to honor the man.

Then we back up a bit chronologically to talk about art coming back into Kundan’s life. She’d never really stopped, but it wasn’t front-and-center for her like it is today. A cousin (one of 26) commissioned her to make paintings for his new office. Soon after that, she got the job at Zam Zam, which allowed her the time and freedom to paint more, and so she did. A friend tapped her to be in a show, her first, in the Mission. And when Kundan and I recorded, the show that she curated (her first) was still up at Mini Bar. She shares a little more about how much Mini Bar means to Kundan.

Kundan talks in some depth about the subject of her second appearance on Storied—Rootstock Arts, the arts nonprofit she started with her childhood friend, Sameer Gupta. For her, all the hassle and trouble and stress of doing an art show is nothing compared to the rewards, which are many. I have to agree, 100 percent.

We end the episode with Kundan’s thoughts on this season’s theme (also the theme of next month’s art show in South of Market): Keep it local.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

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

• SFFILM’s THE HORROR! festival spotlight

• Festival Talk: Filming in San Francisco

• The film Outerlands

• A Tribute to Chris Columbus + Rent

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

We recorded this episode over Zoom in April 2025.

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

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

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

• Rootstock Arts' Color Your Mind Festival (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check back next week for Part 2.

We recorded this episode at Mini Bar in April 2025.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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