Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
C'mon in, the water's great!
  

    
late to the party here --- realizing i was adjacent to much of this.
was friends with langdon's gf, a woman who was greil's babysitter
and later ended up at sfzc (<renshin> knows her).

my intellible image is of the hip dishwasher at nino's steak roundup
in madison wisconsin in 1971 --- never parted from his RS.
  

    
My pleasure, as always, thanks for the opportunity. I'm here every
day and will continue to natter on about my favorite topics. 
  

    

I've greatly enjoyed this, thank you.
  

    
wrt # 102, i of course meant 'indelible'. weird autofill, i think...
  

    
Your words made an inedible impression.
  

    
I saw that but I had more trouble figuring out how Langdon Winner's
girlfriend was Greil Marcus's babysitter. 
  

    
the same person? is that so hard to imagine in berkeley in the early
70s? but yes, the babysitter for greil's daughters...
  

    
It was the idea that she babysat Marcus's *children* that wasn't clear
to me right away!
  

    
i shouldnt post late at night: the cryptic and the typo quotients
get much higher. tangential to peter's book, the mutual friend and i
worked at cocolat, early gourmet gehtto fancy french bakery and the
friend took me to dinner w/ greil. he was wildly unimpressed with
me; but then i was pretty much a latent human being in those days.
  

    
Fond memories of Cocolat!
  

    
Oh yes!
  

    
(could do drift about cocolat, but this is peter's topic and nothing
to do with RS, so...)
  

    
Yeah, that fern bar..Henry Africa's..went in once, never went
back..now late night feeding was accomplished at the Hippo Burger
joint on Van Ness, back in the day
  

    
And thanks be to Peter R. for being available to answer questions
about new book..RS was a steady staple in my life and others, as
well..in the early days, I read it cover to cover religiously
  

    
In the late 70s our late night feeding was at the Edinburgh Castle.
The other end of the scale from Henry Africa's.
  

    
I had to look up fern bar, a term I knew without really knowing. The
Wikipedia entry has a photo of Eddie Rickenbackers in SF, which was
started in 1986 by Norman Hobday, who had opened Henry Africa's in
1969. He was was perhaps inspired by the slightly older Perry's,
mentioned in Maupin's Tales of the City. The concept might go back
to the original T.G.I.F's in NYC, from 1965.

Though they seem to be disparaged as singles bars and "meet
markets," they seem a vast improvement over more typical bars.
Interesting that these inspired a whole genre of bar/restaurants.
  

    
I liked fern bars because they seemed more welcoming of women than,
say, those New England neighborhood dives with separate "Ladies
Entrances."

I mean, now it's easy to see that appealing to women was a way to
stock the pond with fish, so to speak. But I just wanted to be able
to buy a Gansett without the bartender giving me the stinkeye, so I
appreciated the effort.
  

    
I was working the Union Street bars in a 68-71 and watched the decor
conversion hit most of them.  The Union Street and Marina singles
scenes began to make the news.  Herb Caen had something to say about
it daily. There was a singles laundromat of note at Fillmore and
Lombard.   The Marina Safeway became a meet market. The turn of the
decade was all about 20-somethings taking advantage of The Pill,
which had hit the market in 63.

My work was on Union Street and Grant Ave., and the differences were
striking.  Grant with the Saloon, the Trieste, the Coffee Gallery
and that bar at Grant and Green with the rapidly changing names, all
stayed traditional, one-step-up-from-the-gutter, joints, but Union
spruced up in a big way. Places where respectable women could go
without men for protection. The tell was the restrooms.   On Union
Street, they had people to clean them, while the restroom at the
Saloon was, and is, famously toxic. Take a piss in there and live,
and you have lifetime immunity to everything.
  

    
Then there was Le Colonial, a fern restaurant.