• Storied: San Francisco

  • De: Jeff Hunt
  • Podcast

Storied: San Francisco

De: Jeff Hunt
Escúchala gratis

  • Resumen

  • A weekly podcast about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.
    Copyright 2024 Storied: San Francisco
    Más Menos
Ciencias Sociales
Más Menos
Episodios
  • Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9)

    Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9)
    Mar 11 2025
    In Part 2, we pick up with Ellen's life after she graduated from Washington University. Next up was a move to New York City. In the Big City, she consulted for a financial services company. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis of those years. She found the job market tight, so she got a job in Washington, DC, where she lived for four years. Ellen says that during her time in the nation's capital, she behaved like a New York snob, never really giving DC a chance. She'd go back to NYC just about every weekend. Some of her New York friends didn't realize that she'd moved, in fact. Her return to NYC four years later was perhaps overdue. Ellen spent the next four years in New York, and she still loves going back to visit friends there. But it was time for a move across the country. Ellen's then-boyfriend/now-husband got a job in San Francisco, a city she'd visited before that move. She hadn't spent significant time here and was somewhat reluctant to leave New York. But she saw what a good opportunity the move was, especially for her partner. She approached her move out West setting aside her own reservations, and decided to embrace her new hometown. She wasn't able to keep her East Coast job out here, so that meant looking for work. It was 2016, and Ellen was able to find folks here whom she'd known in New York, and that of course helped her transition to SF life. Ellen goes into some detail about the adjustments that New York City transplants make in San Francisco. Parks, brunches before noon, exercise, just being outside a lot. She also noticed people complaining about the weather a lot, which we do. We're spoiled AF, right? We take a short conversational detour to talk about what all attracts us and draws us to SF, including when we leave on vacation and come back. Then we pivot to talk about Ask Me SF. Ellen lays the background for us, describing what folks who don't live here kept saying about her new city. She felt offended. "How dare you?" she often asked herself. She might not have had this term in mind, but Ellen was experiencing folks on the Doom Loop. But she felt differently about San Francisco. And so she set out to provide a service for people, a collection of resources meant to help experience all the good that is here. Like Storied: SF for me, she wanted to promote the things about living here that she finds joy in, to get word out so that others, too, might experience the wonder that's so woven into life here. We end the episode with Ellen's thoughts on our theme this season: Keep it local. Visit Ask Me SF and follow them on Instagram for more info and inspiration.

    We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.

    Photography by Nate Oliveira
    Más Menos
    24 m
  • Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9)

    Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9)
    Mar 4 2025

    One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in.

    In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs Ask Me SF, a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode.

    We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed.

    Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town, and so she found it hard to relate fully to folks around her. Her family was in North Carolina, and Alabama before Ellen was born, because her dad, who’s a doctor, went to school but also wanted to go to small towns in the US to run his practice. He did well in that sense, but his American-born Chinese kids not so much.

    The family moved to Taiwan when Ellen was 10, and that presented new challenges because of her decade in the US.

    Before that move, she had taken up violin and piano (“like a good Asian kid,” she says) and dabbled in visual art. She drew and did some painting at home and at school, back when schools had art classes.

    She kept that going in Taiwan. But she experienced culture shock just the same. Remember: She arrived when she was 10, and so she spent those very formative early teen years in a familiar but also not familiar part of the world. Other kids at the American school she attended were mostly relatable. But Taiwanese folks who’d never left their homeland presented some friction for folks like Ellen.

    When it came time to choose a college, her parents encouraged her to do a pre-med program, but left room for that track not to stick with their daughter. She chose Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and ended up minoring in Visual Communication.

    We go on a short sidebar here about Ellen’s older sister, Helen. Despite the age difference and their varied experiences back in Taiwan, the two have always been close.

    [There’s a brief pause in the recording at this point. We relocated to the backyard at Ocean Ale House when the band began to play.]

    Nowadays, in hindsight and with some life lived between then and now, Ellen has come to appreciate her ancestral homeland.

    She says it was never a question whether to come back to the US for college. A counselor helped her choose a school that was both good for pre-med and had a solid art program. She chose Washington University sight-unseen.

    She did pre-med, but only for the first two years. Then she switched, with her sister’s encouragement, to business with a vis-com minor. Ellen graduated in four years and set off for the East Coast.

    Check back next week for Part 2 and Ellen’s move to San Francisco.

    We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.

    Photography by Nate Oliveira
    Más Menos
    23 m
  • Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8)

    Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8)
    Feb 25 2025
    In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco. The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact. As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an understatement. "It's the closest I've ever come to literally shitting my pants." Nato then does a rendition of his first joke that night. Audible growls are heard in our recording. Nevertheless, he did a few more open-mics at that spot in Seattle. He liked it enough. But after graduating from college and moving back to The City, he dedicated his life to being a union organizer. As a history student at Reed, he'd written a thesis about the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco in the 1870s. Nato then explains how the series Warrior is based on this time in SF. There's bits in the story about the incredibly racist and anti-union human for which Kearny Street is sometimes attributed to. That thesis is what got Nato interested in doing labor work. He resumed going to comedy shows, but not getting up on stage. Around the time he turned 30, he found himself laboring over the jokes he'd tell at all the weddings he'd go to. He was also asked to give talks at labor conferences, which doubled as canvasses for Nato to deliver more of his own comedy material. All of these comedic sprinklings led him back to the stage. His first regular spot back in SF was the BrainWash (RIP) on Folsom Street. Once again, the jokes bombed, though his pants fared better this go-round. He offers up another telling of a joke from that era of his. You've been warned. As he left the BrainWash one of those nights, local comedy legend Tony Sparks asked him to come back the next week, and he did. Eventually, Nato invited his friends to come see him perform. He'd moved back to San Francisco in 1997 to do union organizing, as we've mentioned. Two years before that, John Sweeney had been elected president of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney pushed to "organize the unorganized" and bring young people into the labor movement. Nato was part of this wave. He got a job at Noah's Bagels and organized a union there. He went to anything he heard about that interested him. He and his then-girlfriend/now wife would attend talks and rallies together. Nato would sometimes find himself that only ally at, say, LGBTQIA union meetings. This was well before we even used words like "ally." Nato was approached to organize workers at the Real Foods on 24th Street. Then the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was beginning to organize bike and car messengers in San Francisco. Nato worked as a car messenger, which he did for three years, and helped organize his coworkers. We go on a short sidebar about bike messenger culture in The City in the late-Nineties. It was huge. A few moves from union to union here and there, and Nato found himself raising money and helping to open a low-wage workers' center for young and immigrant folks in the service industry. That center is still around today. The second time Nato left San Francisco was in 2012. This flight took him to New York City, where he relocated to write for his friend W. Kamau Bell's first TV show, Totally Biased. As Nato puts it, he "got the chance to be a Jewish comedy writer living in Brooklyn for six months." Then, in 2018, he and his family moved to Havana, Cuba, for six months while his wife worked on her PhD research. Nato says that the only time he was tempted to relocate permanently was during his time in NYC. His kids liked it there. They looked at different neighborhoods and even schools. But Nato wasn't all that happy in New York. The experience took a toll on his friendship with Kamau (they've since moved on and are tight once again). And then the show got canceled. The universe had spoken. That center he'd helped to found back in San Francisco had passed the nation's first minimum-wage municipal law. In 2006, they helped pass paid sick days here in The City. Nato had left the organization just before that to join the California Nurses' Association (CNA). Through that org, he was part of the ultimately successful effort to keep St. Luke's hospital open. It was after his time with the CNA, 2011 or so, that Nato returned to doing stand-up. He recorded his first comedy album and went on his first comedy tour (with Kamau). In 2014, he returned to organized labor, joining Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1021. He works there today, as head of collective bargaining. We return to comedy and Nato lists off some more folks doing open-mics with him a decade or so ago who've moved on to various...
    Más Menos
    37 m

Lo que los oyentes dicen sobre Storied: San Francisco

Calificaciones medias de los clientes

Reseñas - Selecciona las pestañas a continuación para cambiar el origen de las reseñas.

Reseñas de Audible.com

Opiniones de Amazon
No hay comentarios disponibles