Strange and Wonderful Coincidences 1

Once a month, I go to a little event called "Dance Sister Dance", held outdoors in Corte Madera Park. A bunch of women gather to dance to an excellent playlist and peruse our personal clothing swap. This Mother's Day (as in every Mother's Day), women are encouraged to bring pix of their mothers and daughters, or the real thing. I brought my daughter; we danced, we picked up treasures. My daughter Nikki found an amazing hand-embroidered men's shirt, somewhat smelly and covered with spots of mildew. Another dancer, Ann Marie, told her she found it under a tree, partially buried, in Bernal Heights in San Francisco. What a life this shirt must have had!

Nikki was interested in the style of embroidery; the work was finer than anything seen nowadays, and completely done by hand with tiny stitches. She spent an hour on the net searching, with no luck. Then I remembered a book I bought in 1974 that I kept because it reminded me so much of that time. NATIVE FUNK AND FLASH (Alexandra Jacopetti and Jerry Wainwright) celebrated the handmade, the artistic, the wild wearables of the hippie era.

There, on page 96 and 97 was The Shirt modeled by the man it was made for, Alan Stelzner, father-in-law of the artist, Joanna Droeger:   

It's easy to see where Droeger's talent was developed. As a child, she learned to embroider in a convent school, then spent time in a Japanese internment camp. She's made very few pieces over the years, and only for very special people.

What she was best known for, though, is a piece of San Francisco history....to be continued in my next blog post!