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!

Writers Strike!

 By now, most of us have heard about the Writer's Guild of America strike in Hollywood, all about the mind-freaking profits made by the streaming services like HBO, Netflix and Paramount and the dwindling pay of those who write the scripts. The streaming services have more deviltry in the works: hiring writers to write the initial scripts of a series, then using AI to write the rest.

This isn't a new problem, just a more public one. When I first started out as a writer, I was able to make a living with my travel books for Moon because I was able to negotiate an upfront payment against residuals. Also in the contract: the right to write future editions. After 2010, publishers figured they could save money by buying my words outright and hiring in-house staff to do the rewrites. No more contracts, no more residuals, no more long-term relationship. We refer to "the good old days" as pre-2010.

I've started a petition to present to the Writers Guild. Please sign it if you wish to support fair pay for fair work: https://chng.it/SFmdKyVZqb

A GEM of a restaurant: Lados

Eat, drink and enjoy

As a travel writer, I reviewed more than 500 restaurants, all over the world. I always looked for one type of place in particular. There's plenty of good food out there (bad, too; I never wrote reviews for those), but a place that met three criteria was golden: 1. locally owned, 2. amazing food, 3. decent prices. I found one, in the south bay. And believe me, you'd never know it was there unless someone told you about it.

LADOS (115 Plaza Dr, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, Lados Restaurant (ladosfood.com)) is a small Pakistani restaurant set in a residential neighborhood in Sunnyvale that's worth finding. You won't find slick decor here, but you will find a place filled with local folks and food that is made to order (yes, you'll wait a few minutes). Two vege samosas ($6.49) are huge and delicious. and the legendary Zinger burger (with fries, $14.99, which is actually fried chicken) is huge - easily enough for two. When I first pulled up to the place, I thought it was closed; the attached business space is for lease, and the door doesn't call a lot of attention to itself. Not many tiny, non-descript eateries get 4.4 stars at Yelp (Yelp review lados, sunnyvale - Search (bing.com), but this one deserves that and more. Nice people, too.

This Dream Interpreter is the BOMB!

Loathe as I am to promote anything AI, Jane Friedman (a fellow writer and writing coach) passed this along for fun. I'm hooked. The interpretations are so right on, informative and positive, I had to share it. Scroll down to see the interpretation after you type in your dream. Enjoy!

DrAIeam Interpreter 

   

A little reminder for all you cooks and writers out there.

  

Frankly, Ozzie is too old and tough to cook.