A Bowl of Cherries

Week 76: San Francisco, CA

It occurred to me this week that I might do very well as a travel writer. I don't express this to pat my own back in any way about my writing abilities. I have just reached a stage in my life when I realize I have put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I have been doing theatre since I was 12 and I have focused all my energy, my passion and my resources into generating a life in the work that I love. And I have no intention of stopping acting; but I often think about things I love to do that I might pursue as other outlets for my creativity and possible sources of income. Travel writing and taking photographs of the places I visit seem to me very pleasant side lines. I think about Julia Powell, who decided to tackle a year long project to execute 365 recipes as set down by Julia Child. Her passion for her project transformed her life, led to a blog, which led to a best selling book, and now is a feature film starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. One wonders what is possible if one just follows one's heart--or gut--or both.

San Francisco, like all great cities, is endlessly fascinating, mystifying, and full of surprises of every stripe. This week, on our day off, I convinced my buddies Tim and Lenny to head out with me to take the 49 mile scenic drive through San Francisco. I needed the practice driving and I thought it would be a great way to see the various neighborhoods of the city without sitting on one of those silly double decker buses. Well, we had a terrific time. The drive was originally created in 1938 to promote the Golden Gate Exposition of 1939, inspired by the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. Why 49 miles? It's a special number in San Francisco: the city covers 49 square miles, and became prominent during the Gold Rush of 1849. Now, driving in San Francisco is a fascinating set of challenges all its own. I am sure you remember crazy chase scenes like in "What's Up Doc?" or "Foul Play." This is a city of incredibly steep hills, where one must drive to the top only to be met with a stop sign that causes one to teeter perilously at the peak of an incline before proceeding again. Talk about Vertigo! The drive was worth it though--from the crowded streets of Chinatown, to the expansive boulevards of Nob Hill; from the winding climes of Twin Peaks to the tourist delights of Fisherman's Wharf. I drove for three hours and we still didn't get through Golden Gate Park and a number of other notable areas. Thank goodness I am here another month.

I am slowly discovering the various neighborhoods in San Francisco, and like most cities, the more you explore the smaller and more manageable it all starts to become. The neighborhoods here are all unique, with their own cultural and aesthetic personalities, and one can easily bump right into one area from another since they are all sort of stacked up against each other. My most pleasant day this week was Thursday, one of those beautiful, mild days where one can wander and explore at one's leisure, and I found myself walking north up Polk Street through what I found out was Russian Hill.
This enchanting neighborhood is fast becoming my favorite in San Francisco. Polk Street is lined with charming and completely unique businesses--antique shops, vintage clothing stores, interior design galleries, antiquarian booksellers, well worn old world pubs (including the appropriately named O'Reilly's Holy Grail Pub). It is here that that distinctly European flavor I have been feeling in San Francisco is most apparent. After wandering through the various shops, fantasizing about purchasing things to decorate my New York apartment, I had a late lunch at La Boulange de Polk, an authentic French boulangerie serving magnificent pastries and delicious soups and sandwiches. Then further down I stopped in at Lotta's Bakery, owned by a charming couple, one of whom is the baker and the other a collector of vintage objects which are also a part of the bake shop. Lotta's makes the real old fashioned, home style baked goods I adore, and I couldn't leave without a slice of the rhubarb pie. The shop is named after Lotta Crabtree, a famous entertainer and San Francisco legend. Lotta was an actress and vaudevillian who became one of San Francisco's wealthiest residents.
The character that Jeanette MacDonald plays in the 1930's movie, "San Francisco," is based on Lotta, and in fact, the event at the end of the movie, when the earthquake has devastated the city and Jeanette leads the survivors singing to a place of safety is a true story about Lotta Crabtree. I was amused too, to learn that Bob, the co-owner of the bakery, used 'Lotta Crabtree' for years as his drag name. How San Francisco is that? As I contentedly wandered back to my hotel, I stopped for some fresh flowers and a pound of cherries, which are now in season. I brought the cherries home, washed them, gobbled a few, and like my Mom used to do, I put them in a bowl in the fridge for later enjoyment. Something so simple can be such a pleasure. To me, fresh cherries mean that summer is indeed here.

Lest you think the City by the Bay is all charm, I can tell you about the Tenderloin, the area at the bottom of the hill from my hotel, where our theatre is located. Again, one can walk, as if through an invisible membrane, from the rather affluent Nob Hill neighborhood to the north into the Tenderloin and feel a distinct and quite unpleasant shift in reality. The Tenderloin district became a disreputable area as early as the 1920's, where it was populated by gambling halls and speakeasies. Sandwiched between Union Square and it's fashionable shopping district, and the Civic Center, this area is sort of the sink drain of San Francisco, where all the undesirable human refuse of the city washes up. Crackheads, prostitutes, the homeless, and a plethora of just plain old drunks (there are 60 liquor stores in this small area) and crazies hang out on the streets at all hours of the day and night. Walking through this bedlam of fist fights, drug deals and public urination every day and every night to and from work is not the most pleasant thing imaginable. It's piteous, really.

Yet, as you know, my credo is to look for the beauty, and I had the pleasure on Friday of exploring the beauties of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This magnificent institution is every bit as impressive and as rich in great works as the MOMA in New York. Housed in a beautiful building with a glorious, sun drenched central atrium and a newly opened and expansive rooftop garden, the SFMOMA represents modern and contemporary art in all its diversity. From Rothko to Warhol, from Matisse to Picasso, there is something for everyone here. My favorites of the painted works in the collection were Lichtenstein's triptych of pop art interpretations on Monet's "Rouen Cathedral" series; Magritte's surreal commentary on male grooming and accoutrements, "Personal Values;" and a very famous Diego Rivera, "The Flower Carrier." Most exciting for me were two wonderful exhibitions of photography. The first was an in depth exploration of the seminal photographic collection "The Americans" by Robert Frank. Frank was a Swiss born Jew who came to the states, optimistic about the country and what it represented, until, with the aid of a Guggenheim Foundation grant, he traveled extensively throughout America, photographing with an unflinching eye the shifting landscape of American life.
His vision is often bleak, cynical, yet touched with moments of heartbreaking empathy for the fragility and anonymity of modern urban life. It's an amazing vision of our country in the middle of the 20th century. The other exhibition I visited explored the relationship between the work of great American photographer Ansel Adams and painter Georgia O'Keefe. The two met in New Mexico in the 1920's, and were aligned with each other through their common bond with Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keefe's husband and Adams' mentor. Both artists explored the natural beauty of the American landscape, and both were drawn to the abstractions possible when focusing in closely on the details of plant life, terrain--whether it be sand dunes or mountain crags, and the inside of flowers or just the foam on the surface of a pond. Adams palette was the evocative range of silvery hues of black and white photography; O'Keefe's aesthetic was all about the exploration of color in organic expressions of astonishing variety. Further proof that art is here to remind us all of our common humanity, our common connection to nature, and the infinite individual expressions of those experiences that are available to us. Looking at an Adams photograph of a leaf or the patterns of light on a stream, I am reminded of that bowl of cherries. Something so simple can be so joyful, so life affirming. Remember that old song... "Life is just a bowl of cherries, don't take it serious, life's too mysterious."