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I remember one of my early trips to the city i now call home -San Francisco – was when i was on tour with a funny play called SOCIAL SECURITY, starring Lucie Arnaz and her husband Larry Luckinbill….i played Lucie’s character’s sister “”Trudy….we courted to all sorts of corn-fed American cities, like Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, Des Moines, and so many more, all hoping to capitalize on Lucie’s famous Mother’s name, so we could fill the seats with laughing and appreciative theater-goers….the play , by Andrew Something-or-Other, was quite funny, and audiences did enjoy themselves, and we did attract large numbers of people who were delighted to love Lucie as much as they used to love Lucy.

Anyway, we sat down in SF for a couple of weeks , whereas our usual stay in a city was a mere 4 or five days then we would move on to the next venue. But SF hosted us marvelously for the entire two weeks, and we had, once we opened and settled into our two-week run, we did have plenty of time to explore this marvelous city.

One day, we went to Sausalito for lunch and shopping. We sat and stared at the city from across the luscious body of water that separates the two

cities…that same day we spent hours up on the Marin Headlands, bathing in the extraordinary vistas provided by the horizon filled with beauty shots of the Golden Gate and its accompanying Bridge, that seemed to love, seemed to require, to sit and pose like same grand old dame awash in the aqueous luxuries of the Ocean and Bay….i suddenly realized:

San Francisco was a town that adored to look at itself.

From many angles…all angles….up high and from down below, even the view from under the Golden Gate Bridge was enchanting if you booked a cruise on a boat that took you there some afternoon. Every inch of exploration was (and I hasten to add, IS), every inch of searching for more of the City reveals even more of the amazing beauties and mysteries of the City..San Francisco is bathed in its own rich broth of history, story, wild tales, vast fortunes, scurvy pirates , and technicolor conflicts and conflagrations…this city’s history seeps out of every fold of its neighborhoods, hills and valleys….and nothing looks the same from anywhere!

To call San Francisco a kaleidoscope isn’t quite right, because even the wildest kaleidoscope is ultimately predictable in its repeating patterns….there’s only so much a confined set of colors and glass fragments can create.

But SF is UNconfined, ever-changing, dangerously unpredictable ,so that even a jaunt to a favorite coffee bar to sit and write in, can be filled with surprises….something about the many hills, the breath-taking anti-gravitational pull up the steep streets, the hyperventilating maybe, that produces fantasy and dream-like experiences….OR maybe it’s just all the marijuana smoke floating every where in the air in every single neighborhood….i think of NYC as a city on the back of a huge cockroach , which enables me to see SF as a town held up by a large net of marijuana smoke……we are what we smoke, here…at least it seems that way some days.

I do not smoke.
But I do dream, and if Life is a Dream (as certain playwrights and philosophers think and write) then our view of Life in its entirety is unencumbered , vast, limitless, and endlessly entertaining….ever changing….ever unembraceable….ever undefinable….ever lovable and hateful, all at the same time.
From everywhere. Through it all. To the end of Time.