San Francisco, Day 2 - Sunday: All the ways we’re strangers in town
The apartment, our beautiful oasis in the city, has signs near every water faucet reminding us that California is experiencing a severe drought and to please conserve water. Despite these reminders, which my family has verbally acknowledged, I can’t get any of them to actually act like we’re living in a water-deprived area. Michele insists on running the laundry every other day; on the days we don’t do laundry, we’re running the dish washer. By the end of our second day here, I stopped dropping reminders; they will do what they do.
Golden Gate Park: a learning excursion
We started our second day in a leisurely fashion, with breakfast in the apartment. Michele and Valerie kept talking about wanting to go to Golden Gate Park, which is a little like saying one wants to go to Central Park. If you don’t know where in the park you want to go, you’re basically throwing a dart at a dartboard while wearing a blindfold. You could land anywhere, which is what we did. We actually disembarked from our first ride on public transport in a residential neighborhood adjacent to the park. When I asked them what they wanted to do in the park, they kind of looked at me blankly. By the time we’d walked a while-still in the neighborhoods, not in the park yet-we were all hungry and decided to stop for lunch before venturing further. We found a pleasantly commercial area that had strong Asian influence and had lunch at a Thai place. Lunch was delish-we ordered and ate too much food. Then we headed over to the park.
As it turned out, Michele wanted to go to the Botanical Garden. It took us 20 minutes to walk from where we were to the garden gate, where we discovered there was a fee. Michele was ready to abandon the idea when I stepped in to treat the family. I was damned if I was going to waste the afternoon because of an entrance fee. As it turned out, it was money well spent. The garden is large and lush and beautiful, with sections marked out by region. I saw kinds of plants I’ve never seen before. Many flowers were in full bloom and I took some marvelous pictures. I could have spent a lot more time in the garden, but for two facts: 1) We were traveling by a transit system with which we were not yet familiar, and 2) we had a date for the evening.
Beach Blanket Babylon
My cousin Susan is my late cousin Paul’s widow. We are still getting to know her, this as a result of the fact that she and Paul were only married a little more than a year before he died. The whole thing was wonderful and awful all at once. But I knew the moment that I met Susan that I wanted to keep her in my life. She’s a lovely woman, she clearly adored my cousin Paul, and we share many interests, including theater.
And theater is what brought us together for our Sunday evening entertainment. Susan had gotten us tickets for Beach Blanket Babylon, a long-running revue that’s a sort of staple of San Francisco tourist entertainment. The story is thin as tissue paper: Snow White is seeking love around the world and needs advice and help. Along the way, she encounters a variety of celebrities and personalities drawn from pop culture, music and politics who variously showboat and offer counsel. The content of the play evolves each year as news changes and people get their 15 minutes of fame. The costumes are hilarious, the send-ups clever and funny. But what’s most distinctive about the show, besides the absolutely stellar vocal pyrotechnics-these people have chops--is the headgear. The wigs and hats are not to be believed. Some of them tower above the performers, twice as high as they are tall. The wigs are oversized and exaggerated. Some of them have moving parts. It’s all very silly and highly entertaining. We had a perfectly marvelous time.
I did want to note that for all the show’s irreverence, there was one thing that I thought was handled very well. When we arrived, the pre-show music being played as Prince. Throughout the show, Snow White kept talking about finding her prince. Eventually she decides that she’s worthy of a king and she ends up with Elvis. My suspicion is that, at some point during the show, Prince was going to show up. I heard later, as we exited the theater, someone who had seen the show before say that Prince was, in fact, one of the celebrities usually skewered. It’s obvious that the director altered the script as a result of Prince’s (insanely untimely) death to keep things fun and tasteful. They played Prince music as we left the theater as well. Good on them for handling his passing with taste.
We had dinner at an Italian restaurant just a couple of blocks away called DeLucchi’s. The food was absolutely delicious and we just rather reveled in each other’s company. I couldn’t get enough of Susan, and as it happened, we already had plans for me to see more of her the next day. We retired happy, well fed, and delightfully entertained.
Golden Gate Park: a learning excursion
We started our second day in a leisurely fashion, with breakfast in the apartment. Michele and Valerie kept talking about wanting to go to Golden Gate Park, which is a little like saying one wants to go to Central Park. If you don’t know where in the park you want to go, you’re basically throwing a dart at a dartboard while wearing a blindfold. You could land anywhere, which is what we did. We actually disembarked from our first ride on public transport in a residential neighborhood adjacent to the park. When I asked them what they wanted to do in the park, they kind of looked at me blankly. By the time we’d walked a while-still in the neighborhoods, not in the park yet-we were all hungry and decided to stop for lunch before venturing further. We found a pleasantly commercial area that had strong Asian influence and had lunch at a Thai place. Lunch was delish-we ordered and ate too much food. Then we headed over to the park.
As it turned out, Michele wanted to go to the Botanical Garden. It took us 20 minutes to walk from where we were to the garden gate, where we discovered there was a fee. Michele was ready to abandon the idea when I stepped in to treat the family. I was damned if I was going to waste the afternoon because of an entrance fee. As it turned out, it was money well spent. The garden is large and lush and beautiful, with sections marked out by region. I saw kinds of plants I’ve never seen before. Many flowers were in full bloom and I took some marvelous pictures. I could have spent a lot more time in the garden, but for two facts: 1) We were traveling by a transit system with which we were not yet familiar, and 2) we had a date for the evening.
Beach Blanket Babylon
My cousin Susan is my late cousin Paul’s widow. We are still getting to know her, this as a result of the fact that she and Paul were only married a little more than a year before he died. The whole thing was wonderful and awful all at once. But I knew the moment that I met Susan that I wanted to keep her in my life. She’s a lovely woman, she clearly adored my cousin Paul, and we share many interests, including theater.
And theater is what brought us together for our Sunday evening entertainment. Susan had gotten us tickets for Beach Blanket Babylon, a long-running revue that’s a sort of staple of San Francisco tourist entertainment. The story is thin as tissue paper: Snow White is seeking love around the world and needs advice and help. Along the way, she encounters a variety of celebrities and personalities drawn from pop culture, music and politics who variously showboat and offer counsel. The content of the play evolves each year as news changes and people get their 15 minutes of fame. The costumes are hilarious, the send-ups clever and funny. But what’s most distinctive about the show, besides the absolutely stellar vocal pyrotechnics-these people have chops--is the headgear. The wigs and hats are not to be believed. Some of them tower above the performers, twice as high as they are tall. The wigs are oversized and exaggerated. Some of them have moving parts. It’s all very silly and highly entertaining. We had a perfectly marvelous time.
I did want to note that for all the show’s irreverence, there was one thing that I thought was handled very well. When we arrived, the pre-show music being played as Prince. Throughout the show, Snow White kept talking about finding her prince. Eventually she decides that she’s worthy of a king and she ends up with Elvis. My suspicion is that, at some point during the show, Prince was going to show up. I heard later, as we exited the theater, someone who had seen the show before say that Prince was, in fact, one of the celebrities usually skewered. It’s obvious that the director altered the script as a result of Prince’s (insanely untimely) death to keep things fun and tasteful. They played Prince music as we left the theater as well. Good on them for handling his passing with taste.
We had dinner at an Italian restaurant just a couple of blocks away called DeLucchi’s. The food was absolutely delicious and we just rather reveled in each other’s company. I couldn’t get enough of Susan, and as it happened, we already had plans for me to see more of her the next day. We retired happy, well fed, and delightfully entertained.