In the dark theater, Sylvia is lost, found
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is in full swing, with movies scheduled back to back, so there are long lines up and down Castro Street of people waiting for one movie to end so they can get in for another.
The opening of the doors at this festival always seems to unleash a tsunami of avid movie-lovers rushing to find their places. (“You saving that seat?” “That’s your scarf ?” “That one, too?”) People are happy to be there, but there can be a little bit of tension mixed in with the communal camaraderie.
Moments before the start of the opening-night program, most seats were filled. People were settling in, scanning their text messages before turning off their cell phones, trading seats because the person in front was too tall, asking friends whether they were planning to attend the post-showing party and so on. The organist had already finished playing “San Francisco,” the traditional closing of the premovie musical program.
And then, from a few rows behind us, a man’s voice, all-out loud and high, blasted through the theater. “Sylvia! Sylvia! Where are you?” I expected to see someone prowling the aisles looking for his mate, but I turned to the sound, and saw, about three rows back, a man standing at his seat, scanning the crowd. “Sylvia! Sylvia!” he continued, his voice at the level of Tarzan summoning Jane, Romeo summoning Juliet, Cathy summoning Heathcliff. “Sylvia! Sylvia! Where are you?”
And then the trailers began, and after that the welcoming speeches, and the movie rolled forth. I supposed Sylvia had responded. At the party after the movie, I found myself face to face with the Sylviaseeker. He was Joel Rubenstein, he said, and he is an antipoverty activist, a retired computer programmer. He and Sylvia had been looking for seats, he said, and he’d found two, and that’s what he was trying to convey in his spoken version of an all-capital-letter text message.
He was just about to go to Washington, D.C., he said, for his annual Capitol Hill trip to talk with legislators about his beliefs. He was taking Sylvia along with him. I’m counting on him to speak up loud and clear.
P.S. The showing of Robert Philipson’s “Body and Soul: An American Bridge” — a documentary that describes the song’s role linking Jewish songwriters and black jazz musicians — on Sunday, July 23, was followed by a performance of the Marcus Shelby Quartet; wild applause for singer Kellye Gray’s scatsinging, scattered like fairy dust over a happy audience.
Last week’s mention of Crockett and C&H Sugar reminded Connie Downing of a consulting gig she once had with that company: “My most vivid memory was of my faux pas: ordering a Diet Coke when my C&H client took me to lunch.”
Brooklyn has Park Slope; we need our own version. Why not let the Millennium Tower “gently come to rest against another one, two or three adjacent (soon-to-be) sloping high-rises?” asks Mark Aronoff. Meanwhile Randall Miller, whose credentials include one semester of civil engineering studies, suggests the simplest solution: “Just remodel the second floor into the lobby.”
A report from Thomas Matson, who went to see Jennifer Holliday’s Saturday, July 22, show at the Marines’ Memorial Theatre in San Francisco: The Texas-raised singer told the audience that when she arrived in New York and was hired for “Dreamgirls,” director Michael Bennett told her to study the vocal style of Barbra Streisand. “Who’s Barbra Streisand?” she asked.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I don’t know why folks are so excited about the solar thing. The moon will just get in the way and you won’t see the eclipse.” Woman to man, overheard near 11th and Minna streets by Stanton Lovelady
If you’re looking around and thinking the city’s a lot more crowded than it used to be, you’ll be relieved to know that although we’ve added a frog recently, we are down three penguins. At the San Francisco Rec & Park Commission regular meeting Thursday, July 20, approval was granted for acceptance of the Fresno Chaffee Zoo’s donation of a tomato frog, and the San Francisco Zoo’s donation of three Magellanic penguins to the zoo in Jacksonville, Fla.
The transfers are part of a formal Species Survival Plan, “to maintain genetic diversity,” said the zoo’s Steven Haines. Like most such requests, approval was a slam dunk. The San Francisco Zoo has 55 Magellanic penguins, the largest colony in the United States. Since 2013, it has also donated penguins to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Mich.. Red states note: This is how we spread San Francisco values.