Rae performed at the Varnish Art Gallery in San Francisco last week. Facing East’s Sue Li-Jue organized an event of women performers for the evening, including Yumi Thomas (Solo classical voice performance), Anamude (Vocalist and guitarist), Jenny Zhang (Performance artist), and Nitya Venkateswaran (South Indian Classical Dance).

Rae performed The Bowl, this time without any A/V problems at the beginning (as there were at APAture two months ago). From Varnish’s second floor, I videotaped and photographed the event. The gallery is located near Second and Mission, and there were quite a few hip San Franciscans wandering around the street and in the gallery (think leather jackets, sport coats, dress shirts). The group of people who came to the event wasn’t exactly the type that would normally attend a Kearny Street or APAture event, but hey, I’m all for expanding their horizons!

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A funny thing happened on the morning of the last COBA meeting of 2004, my primary photo hard drive crashed! I was working on the computer when I suddenly heard this awful clicking and scratching noise emanating from one of my hard drives. When I realized that it was the hard drive that contained all 70,000+ images, my heart sank. Though I had just backed up the hard drive the night before, I neglected to copy over the iView catalogs that contained all of my annotations for the past 3.5 months.

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It’s Halloween again in Clubertino! The kids (and their parents) were out in full force last night. Randy transformed the house into one of the coolest houses on the block. With black light and highlighters, he created a board on which the kids could write their names and costumes. Dressed in my Broken Sword costume, I handed out delectable treats to the likes of Spanish dancers, cheerleaders, Jason, Bushies, Superman, Spider-Man, deviled eggs, skeletons, and basketball players.

The kids seemed eager to come to our house, screaming things like, “Oh, let’s go to the purple house!” or “That’s soooo cool!” I fondly recall trick-or-treating in the past in my Army costume or V outfit. The kids started coming around 6:30 pm and the last ones knocked on our doors at 8:30 pm. Honestly, I don’t recall how long we used to stay out; question for everyone who trick-or-treater in the 80’s — how long did you stay out?

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