San Francisco Then & Now

I’ve been at a psychiatric conference in San Francisco this week and I have to say it was a bit on the boring side.  Of course I am comparing it to the same conference in the same city I attended 13 years ago.

At that time I was a young and robust 45 year old and I had friends to share in the experience.  One was a Russian-American friend who I’d befriended in Bloomington, Indiana in the mid to late 90’s.  He was studying choral conducting and music composition and eventually took a job in the Bay area, living in Oakland.  At some point he picked me up in his clunker of a car and we trundled across the Golden Gate Bridge, wound through the hills of Marin County, and parked in the shadows of the giant redwoods.  He also took me to the grand and gorgeous Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Cathedral to venerate the relics of St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai & San Francisco (his dried out remains reclining in a glass-topped casket to the side of the nave).  We also visited the famous Japanese Gardens and a museum featuring Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”.

Another evening or two was spent with an Armenian-American friend who I knew from our shared four year psychiatry residency at Walter Reed in Washington DC.  He was obviously there for the conference as well, but as an added bonus his brother joined us - up from LA as a lawyer on the lam.  The three of us roamed the city which included yucking it up on a nighttime trolley rolling up and down the hills of San Francisco and dining at an Italian restaurant on the edge of Chinatown. 

In those first two days of the conference I figured out the city bus system (BART) through trial and error and utilized it to visit various parts of the city to include a beach to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge for a photo-taking opportunity and the hilltop park that included the “painted ladies” houses featured on the TV show “Full House”.  This need to use public transportation was in part motivated by my decision on that first day to attend a Vespers service at the oldest Orthodox Church in the US.  In a kind of ascetic gesture I decided to walk to it from my hotel up and down those famous San Francisco streets, arriving an hour or two later with sore legs/hips and sweaty, understanding that this type of travel was unsustainable and not particularly efficient.

And of course I took lots and lots of photos, but at that time it was with an actual camera.  I had a small BlackBerry phone from work that was not designed to take photos like smartphones these days.  A memory that stands out perhaps most clearly from this trip was the night I was returning to my hotel from hanging out in Chinatown and happened upon a homeless man sleeping against a wall.  On the wall was a large Levi’s Jeans advertisement of a beautiful blown up model standing probably 10 feet tall gesturing down to the sleeping man.  The juxtaposition was so striking that I literally ran back to the hotel to retrieve my camera and returned to take the photo, leaving a tip in his cup as a thank you.

Upon my return to the Midwest I couldn’t stop thinking about that photo and I ended up writing a poem inspired by it.  It was my first published poem/photo combo in the pages of “So It Goes”, the literary magazine of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

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So fast forward to 2026 (this past week) as a 57 year old with much less hair and a graying beard.  My camera was at home collecting dust in the back of a closet but my phone and its handful of photo-apps was busy taking new pictures of San Francisco.  Another friend from residency had contacted me to meet up with her and her friends at a restaurant on the far side of Chinatown right across the street from the one I’d been to 13 years ago with Vahag and Varand.  It was a little over a mile away and I decided to walk to it as a street photography opportunity.

One of those photos was of a flyer taped to a light pole: Bruce Lee - Double Feature.  An image of Bruce Lee from “Enter the Dragon” was just what you might expect to see in Chinatown and brought back memories of my younger years when my dad took me to a Bruce Lee double feature at a drive-in theater when I was in middle school.  This opportunity had been provided by my Kenpo Karate sensei who was running his school out of a church basement in Paoli, Indiana.  He gave our class free tickets and his blessing to watch inappropriate movies for our young age.  At the time I was into buying throwing stars from advertisements found in my comic books and making nunchucks from an old wooden broom handle with my dad’s power tools on the down low.  My mother eventually figured out she was missing the broom and accurately surmised that I was the guilty party.  

In my early twenties I visited Chinatown in Washington DC after returning from two years of Army service in Korea between my junior and senior years of college.  I had the summer free and decided to visit DC where a Korean friend had started school at American University and a college buddy of mine was now working post-college.   I roamed the city as was my wont and in Chinatown I came across a bonafide pair of yellow-with-black-stripes Game of Death nunchucks!  Of course I bought them and today they are in a box in my attic waiting to be some day gifted to a grandchild that will surely ruffle feathers.

So back to this past Sunday… after I got back to my hotel from dinner I was looking at the photos I took and examined the Bruce Lee one more closely.  The bottom half of the flyer had a picture of “Saikat for SF” and an internet search revealed he was a candidate running for Congress who had worked with Bernie Sanders and AOC.  I also learned it was “free admission” and at the “Great Star Theater”.  Another internet search revealed this was the oldest theater in Chinatown and a historic landmark.  Last of all I saw the date and realized it was happening the very next evening.  I scanned the QR code and it sent me to a site where I could RSVP for the event.  I filled it out and was notified I was in!

When I arrived the next night at the Great Star Theater there was a small line out front and volunteers taking down people’s information while they waited.  The young man who approached me had very long hair and a beard.  He asked for my phone number  and then my zip code.  I was feeling some serious imposter guilt but I held the course.  “Are you registered to vote in SF?”  My answer was succinct, “No”.

Inside the theater lobby they had a catered spread that I bypassed and headed into the theater proper.  The building structure and seats looked old and worn out.  Colorful shapes were projected on the ceiling and viewing screen with music playing over the speaker system.  I found a side seat and settled in.  Next to me standing in the aisle was an animated young man hamming it up with two women who he’d just met and they were taking selfies together.  I suddenly became aware of the music playing - a smooth jazz type song that I recognized from my late teen years.  For a brief moment I felt like I was in a dissociative dream state.  It was my favorite song by a jazz guitar duo known as “Acoustic Alchemy”.  I had their album “Red Dust & Spanish Lace” on cassette that I would listen to on my Walkman until that Walkman with tape inside was stolen in Korea.  The song was “Girl with a Red Carnation”.

The movie started and the first thing I noticed was the 70’s wicka-chaka-wicka-chaka soundtrack.  The crowd was into it and laughed and cheered at the appropriate moments, especially when Bruce was kicking some bad guy’s ass.  The feeling of community and connection in celebratory mode was palpable and something I’m not used to where I live in the Midwest.  Before the intermission where Saikat and company were going to talk I slipped out the back.  On my walk back to the hotel I had the feeling “my reality” was slowly reasserting itself after being caught up in something that was almost like being in a movie where I was an extra.