First responders cited by first names
Having gotten tangled up in a traffic jam of runners in that Sunday morning’s Giant Race, I arrived at the San Francisco Fire Department’s Sept. 11 Remembrance Ceremony about 10 minutes after it started. Uniformed firefighters, command staff and members of Fire Station 4 were reading the names of New York firefighters who died that day 15 years ago.
Trying to figure out how late I was, I paid attention to the order of those names ... and realized, in the middle of many Kevins, that they were alphabetized by first names rather than last. That seemed odd at first, but when Francee Covington, president of the Fire Commission, spoke, emphasizing the tragedies of their losses for their families and friends, it didn’t seem odd at all. These were Roberts and Thomases ... and they won’t be forgotten.
At the end of the ceremony, a remnant from the World Trade Center was unveiled. The program identified it as No. F-0005.019; the size of that number led me to expect a metal chunk in a Plexiglas box. I was wrong. It was a box-shaped exterior steel piece about 4 feet long.
Understanding that it was one among thousands, maybe millions, of such pieces brought home the magnitude of the Sept. 11 devastation.
The 80th birthday of “Steve Reich: An American Maverick” was marked “with solemnity and celebration,” said Michael Tilson Thomas, on Sunday night, Sept. 11, by the San Francisco Symphony, in a program that began — in a prelude to euphoria that was a gentle but firm percussion massage — with “Six Marimbas,” and went on to feature the Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird and the maestro sitting side by side with the composer to perform “Clapping Music.”
Marimba players Katrina Shore and Yi-Hsuan Lin, graduate students at the San Francisco Conservatory, were at a post-performance reception for Reich. “Playing the music is mentally demanding,” said Shore. “There’s no downbeat, but you still have to lock in with each other. You can get messed up really easily.” They didn’t.
Thomas talked about Reich’s role in defining avant-garde music in the second half of the 20th century, which “suddenly became this music that gave us back the joy of tonality in an ecstatic way.” Best of all, the tribute was in no way a summing up. “This man writes great notes,” wrote Thomas in the program, in the present tense.
He doesn’t walk around showing his new gold medal to everyone, but Daniel Rodriguez, 71-year-old doorman at the Brocklebank on Nob Hill, is feeling pretty good about it. Rodriguez is a member of the Ancient Regime, a team of 70- to 74-year-olds who just won the Americas Masters Games basketball tournament in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Rodriguez started playing basketball as a kid in New York, before his family moved to California. At Garfield High School, he was named Los Angeles high school player of the year. He played in Europe for 18 years. At 6 feet 1 inch, Rodriguez says he’s “a petite kind of guy, always the littlest guy on the court. They used to call me the Road Runner. But now, it’s not beepbeep. It’s like, beep ... beep.”
The team that the Ancient Regime beat at the games was from Portland, and included Jim Barnett, TV analyst for the Warriors. “He’s a very good player,” said Rodriguez, generous in victory.
I’m picturing Ruth Braunstein ,who died last week, at a crowded Saturday afternoon opening in her SoMa gallery, an unexpectedly light and airy space on a dismal stretch of Clementina Street. She’s not a young woman anymore, but she is dressed with wit and color, and she’s racing around the gallery showing off the works.
That gallery closed in 2011, but last January, an exhibition of works by artists Braunstein represented over the years was presented at Fouladi Projects as a tribute to her. By this time, well into her 90s, she was sitting rather than standing, looking quite amazed at the attention, but enjoying a shower of affection from her artists and her art lovers.
She had a distinctive throaty voice, and somehow, even when she was frail, a hearty manner. With some deaths, the phrase “too soon” has no expiration date.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I’m leaving tomorrow for Switzerland with my ex-husband, who’s now gay. And a much better traveling companion.” Woman at San Francisco Symphony concert honoring Steve Reich, overheard by Bertie Brouhard