Citizen takes cleanup into her own hands

Living over the Stockton Street tunnel, almost next door to the Ritz-Carlton,

Catherine Luciano has noticed, with growing dismay, street debris that has accumulated on one side of it. “Along the south wall of the hotel along Pine Street,” she emails, “the debris, clothing, food, liquor bottles, shoes, Styrofoam containers, cardboard mattresses and other unmentionables” have littered the street. Luciano says she’d call the hotel about once a week to say that the area needed monitoring and cleanup.

On Tuesday, Feb. 20, she couldn’t stand it any more. She put on “a rather stylish pair of green latex gloves,” picked up a large trash bag, went outside and “cleaned it all up myself, in our Arctic weather of 47 degrees . ... Virtually minutes later, with the Hefty trash bag happily stuffed and now filthy gloves, that block of Pine Street between Grand and Stockton proudly shimmered, having improved in appearance tenfold.”

Whereupon she went into to the lobby and up to the front desk, telling the clerk of her deed, in hopes the general manager might be notified. The clerk “seemed somewhat stunned as I placed my gloves and the well-fed trash bag on their counter,” writes Luciano. By the time Luciano turned to leave, the clerk’s “mouth was still dangling wide.” But, Luciano added, an elderly woman who’d witnessed the encounter “touched my elbow and winked, saying ‘Atta girl!’ as I walked away.” The hotel’s “communication specialist”

Travis Jay said he didn’t have any comment, but suggested that I reach out to the hotel’s corporate PR people, located in another city. Consuming interests: Contemplating the “Sale” signs in front of Graffeo Leather in San Carlos, Darryl Forman and a group of fellow walkers were drawn into the store. She couldn’t resist going inside, but she kept repeating to her pals, “But I don’t need anything.” The store owner advised her: “If we bought only what we need, we’d only shop at Safeway and CVS.”

John’s Grill owner John Konstin is just back from Sydney, where the price of a pack of Marlboros is $40. There were hardly any smokers on the streets, and in a small alcove in front of his hotel, the Sydney Four Seasons, mostly Asians and European hotel guests were smoking.

Although David Sedaris told the New York Times a few years ago that his favorite thing to do when traveling is to shop, and although he said in that interview that Tokyo “really is the best” city for shopping, there are certain things that one buy in San Francisco. On their way back from Japan, Sedaris, his husband, Hugh Hamrick, and his sister Amy stopped at MAC on Grove Street. There, they are said to have bought Belgian clothes from Dries Van Noten and Walter Van Beirendonck penis-print socks. Beats a cable car key chain. When I saw Word for Word’s new production, “Lucia Berlin: Stories,” at the Z Below Theater on Sunday, Feb. 18, I thought about Nicolas Cage’s portrayal of an alcoholic — I was going to write “drunk,” but the word drips with disdain — in “Leaving Las Vegas.” But finding a term that really covers everyone who drinks too much is like finding a word that would cover everyone suffering from cancer. Every victim of the disease is a victim in another way.

For me, watching the Cage character on screen had been a visit to a strange place. But getting acquainted with the main character in Lucia Berlin’s stories — acknowledged before the writer’s death as a semiautobiographical figure — was like encountering someone I might have met before, on the job, at a meeting, in the supermarket. Her alcoholism leads her down terrible paths, but it seems that so often, many of us know some similar path, desperate to hide obsessions that take over our lives.

Many of the Bay Area’s best talents were involved in this production, starting, of course, with the writer, who lived here for a long time. The two directors, Nancy Shelby and JoAnne Winter are among the founders of Word for Word. The vivid projections that serve as settings for the stories are by artist Naomie

Kremer, and an inventive but unassuming jazz score by Marcus Shelby lets the words tell the story, exactly the Word for Word mission.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “If you fall off, I’m going to be rich.” Woman to husband at edge of Grand Canyon, overheard by Patricia Stoyanoff