Good Business

“The feeling of a small town inside a big city” is the way I describe my charming Inner Sunset neighborhood just a few blocks from where I’ve lived for 43 years. I love how it has more or less retained its character throughout all the changes in the city, resisting both gentrification and being rundown alike. As noted in the post “The Eldest Elder,” there is some nostalgia for the stores of yesteryear now gone, some praise of the old establishments still going strong and some welcome of the new kids on the block— St. Frank’s Coffee (replacing Starbucks) and Luke’s Grocery the newest. 

 

Here is good business at its finest. There is an Inner Sunset Merchant Association that gets together, helped bring a Farmer’s Market every Sunday to a parking lot, blocks off a street once a month for a little street fair with live music and hosts an event called the Holiday Lights Stroll, now in its 5^th year. As noted in the sign, there is live music, cookie decorating, raffle prizes, a scavenger hunt and a trolley that rides around the neighborhood for 45 minutes. And this year, I was the trolley guide host!

After four delightful months of traveling and teaching this Spring/Summer, I’m equally loving a Fall in San Francisco. Time spent locally singing and teaching music in schools, playing piano in senior centers, an English Tea Room and Holiday parties. But yesterday, hosting that trolley ride was a first, taking four different groups of adults and kids around the neighborhood telling stories about the iconic stores mentioned above. With a microphone in hand, I was wholly in my element, greeting the folks coming on like old friends and so happy to tell them the stories I knew about the places we were passing. 

When the trolley drove on streets where there was not much to say but “Look at the prices at that gas station!” or “Here’s where my friend used to live,” we sang holiday songs and kids and adults alike enthusiastically joined in. The night was unusually cold and it wasn’t easy to play guitar with ungloved hands, but that added to the winter feeling of this Holiday time. So when we sang Jingle Bells in that open-aired trolley, we could almost feel like we were on a sleigh passing through the mythical landscapes that song evokes. 

 

And then, being who I am, I told the kids that, hard to believe, their parents had once been kids and probably sang some naughty words to that song. The parents nodded their heads and off we went into “Jingle Bells, Batman smells…” However, none of them, kids or parents alike, knew the next part and so I felt it my civic responsibility to teach it to them:

 

“Dashing through the snow, on a pair of broken skis.

O’er the fields we go, crashing into trees.

The snow is turning red, I think I’m almost dead,

I woke up in the hospital with needles in my head.”

 

Today I’ll play some background holiday songs on piano at the SIP Tea Room and two weeks from last night, will gather there again for our neighborhood Christmas Caroling party. Beginning in 1982, we hosted at our house until the pandemic and then moved to the SIP Tea Room, first singing around the piano there (with songsheets) and then out into the neighborhood, with first stop at The Little Shamrock Bar! (The one established in 1893). If you’re local, come join us!

 

PS And yes, we’ll sing some of the wrong words after the right ones. A good coming attractions to my next post that I re-post every year on this Blog—Wrong Words Day. Stay tuned!