08/28/2014
I lived in San Francisco for well over twenty years, and you never really forget an experience like that. I miss it a lot, even if I see the same caliber of freakishness here in Hollywood. I’m fully aware that I am a total freak as well.
What will Scapula find in the gallery? Find out on Sunday, and you better believe it wont be any damned Lichtenstein panels!
It’s those creepy Anne Geddes babies, isn’t it? *shivers*
What, you wouldn’t watch Jim Henson’s Geddes Babies?
A San Francisco story to prove you right:
We were on a scavenger hunt for my university. This required going around ‘Frisco and collecting pictures that would ordinarily be impossible to find. (Cop and handcuffs, naked person in public circumstance, cue wacky hijinks and et cetera.)
For the “naked person” picture, we met a fine young gentleman – I believe it was in the Haight – who was just fine with us taking a picture of him sans clothing – it didn’t have to be actually obscene by the standards these things are measured -on one condition: several girls in our group came with him and stripped down to the same level of reasonable near-nudity. (He was graciously willing to accept “bra and panties” as a substitute for full nudity on the girls’ part.)
But…they would have to come back up to his apartment to do so.
This is where normal, actually reasonable people would have run away and gone looking for the cop, and the handcuffs, in the hope of getting THAT picture if we couldn’t get the other one.
Being new college students hungry for approval and accolades in our dorm, and not actually reasonable people, our group took him up on his offer.
And so he proceeded to take the girls up to his apartment, get naked with them, and take a picture.
And nothing else happened. And everyone put on their clothes again and went about their day. Not only that, according to the participants, he was a perfect gentleman – full of joie de vivre and excellent conversation – and left the girls in our group utterly charmed.
We did not win the scavenger hunt.
But that experience stands out in my mind as a perfect example of why I have always appreciated your strip (no, that pun was NOT intentional) as, well, a genuinely realistic and emotionally honest depiction of the modern culture of San Francisco, if not the larger Bay Area in general.
Kudos once again on the improbable nature of your comic’s accurate descriptions of reality. :> And before anyone takes the time to note it: yes, we got very lucky and there were no doubt innumerable circumstances in which that story could have gone horribly, horribly wrong; but, thankfully, it didn’t, and we went back to school in perfect health, with our horizons suitably…well, broadened, I suppose.
(The real question is, of course, why any of us chose to go to a school where this was considered normal in the first place; that I can’t actually answer!)
That’s a helluva story! I would still warn folks to be wary of any stranger who offers to take you up to his apartment and strip naked (whether it’s San Francisco or anywhere else), so here’s hoping your group was ready at any time to break out the mace and scream for a cop.
That said, yes, you’re going to encounter a lot of characters in San Francisco, but it all depends on which part of town you choose to visit. SF has its own share of quiet, conservative neighborhoods, and if you show up in tye-dye, looking to score some acid, count on being hauled off by the cops.
Still, eccentric people aren’t hard to find around that city. I moved out of San Francisco to go to college; on my first trip back home I got off the subway and the first person I saw was a huge guy (maybe homeless, maybe not) wearing only a grass skirt and a hockey mask. I thought to myself, “It’s good to be home.”
That’s a helluva story too! I lol’ed.
“Friday the 13th Part XXVII: A Polynesian Vacation For Jason”?
Incognito is a snap.
“Homer? Who is Homer? My name is Guy Incognito!”
Love the “freaks” there… people you know? Nice rendition of that art museum in SF… And I know this is fiction… but a typical day at the MOMA right now is no visitors… it is closed for remodeling.
I only know one person in the line; the rest are either completely made up or based on people I saw in passing.
As for my rendition of the MOMA, I worked from photo reference. Here’s hoping that if anyone raises hell, I’ll just claim it was “found art” like those rotten Pop artists!
These are all people you’ve actually SEEN before, aren’t they?
Cutting and pasting my last comment: I only know one person in the line; the rest are either completely made up or based on people I saw in passing.
Third from the right looks like Ru Paul, “out of uniform,” so to speak.
So here’s a story about RuPaul, and it’s an LA story (not all the freakishness happens in SF, y’know): a friend of mine used to DJ at a roller skating rink. One night RuPaul and his entourage shows up, and he throws a total fit because the music playing “wasn’t gay enough”. He proceeded to scream at my DJ friend until she broke down and cried, then (presumably) went off to be an insufferable asshole to someone else.
To all the people who praise ‘Drag Race’ or whatever it is, know that your beloved icon is, in fact, a dickhead.
What a tale! Is there some kind of a scale of gayness that potential DJ’s are supposed to rate playlists on?
“Ma’am, you are clearly in a nine-Streisand nightclub district, and this playlist only clocks in at six Streisands.”
Sorry your friend had to suffer through that! I happened to find myself behind Puck from the Real World in line at a liquor store once in the same city. He was so smashed on speed he could hardly buy the rest of the recreational substances he was in line to purchase – though not too smashed to tell me some kind of a story about lounging around on his rich father’s yacht after getting fired from the show (for on-air taunting of his terminally sick co-star with AIDS, as I recall). He then proceeded to take a comically small bicycle and to try to impress the women coming out of the filthy dive bar next door by doing comically small bicycle tricks, with an almost amazing lack of success. I do not actually know how this story ends, as he was still hopping up and down on one tire trying to catch their attention when I left.
Ain’t reality TV great?
Hm, my son tells me that the only ‘gayness’ meter he has when DJing is how much creepy pop music is requested. Kind of an informal thing. Although there’s a clear weeaboo meter! Every j-pop or j-rock song requested in the first prime section is a +1 and if you hit 15, you should just cycle through nineties anime soundtracks.
That’s effing great. 😀
Speaking of weeaboo, have you (or he) played some of the so-called “rhythm” videogames? The ones with the musical peripherals, etc.?
I just can’t get over the idea of something like Rock Band or DJ Hero with a “Liberace meter”.
“Uh oh, you missed too many notes!
Better not fail the song, or RuPaul is going to enter the building with his entourage and scream at you for not being gay enough!!!!”
I’ve only visited SF a few times. Compared to the weirdness that you can find crawling in the back alleys of NY, it always struck me as an ‘eccentric but pleasant’ kind of town. I mean, sure, the people were a bit off key at times or overly pretentious in some parts, but nobody was trying to stick anything sharp in me or carting a sledgehammer and looking to bust up a street gang with it!
When your oddities are reasonable and accepted, they come across as more of a kind of quirky charm. That said, I couldn’t live there if I tried back in the day. Not enough people trying to grievously injure me. Yeah, I was kinda stupid in my younger days.
Again, it all depends on what part of the city you are in. If you visit the Tenderloin, or go a bit outskirts of town to Hunter’s Point, you won’t find any hippies and colorful fun but MUGGERS WAITING TO KILL YOU SEVERAL TIMES OVER. Every major city has a dangerous area, and rest assured, San Francisco isn’t immune from crime.
Muggers with CHARACTER, though!
It’s like, if you go to Fisherman’s Wharf, yeah, you know you’re going to see hoboes begging from the tourists…but hoboes with CHARACTER.
For what it’s worth, Jenn, I totally feel you on the “not enough people trying to grievously injure me” tip.
Even though what Casserly says is completely right; it was like…even the bad parts of SF were too “gentle” for me. I oddly found the endless, brutal amorality of poor L.A. suburbs preferable to the brazen sexuality of SF “urbs”. And I got myself addicted to that feeling of complete and utter stupidity that came attached to getting lost in, for example, East L.A., where I KNEW I could get shot just for being lost (and white), instead of parts of SF where I had to wonder about it, and might instead just meet some people who were into free love and would REALLY scare me. 🙂
Maybe we should apologize to the strip author for making his characters look sane relative to his readership? I don’t know.