Flavorhood went to dinner at Oakland's newest Italian restaurant with Christina from East Bay Dish and Shawn from Tart! Bakery We had a fabulous time and thought the appetizers were well worth a trip back. Nice addition to the thriving Grand Lake food scene!
POP! Flu addled, I teetered unsteadily to the microwave to investigate. “Eewww,” I screamed. There was a kidney or some other organ poking out of the arroz caldo (chicken/turkey rice porridge) my husband was reheating for me as a salve for my illness. He came into the kitchen grinning sheepishly, “Sorry. I guess I didn’t get all the ‘parts’ out.” It was a conversation rehashed in many forms during the time we were together. As a white girl growing up in the 60s and 70s in relative affluence, I cut my teeth (literally) on prepared, often prepackaged and pre-cooked food. He was ...
Went to lunch with the progeny at Homeroom. Old school mac n' cheese with a hipster twist. It was delicious! The $10 mac n cheese will definitely fill you up. Don't forget to try the homemade oreos.
On November 6, 1973, Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster was shot and killed with cyanide-encrusted bullets by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) as he walked to his car after a school board meeting. The SLA killed him because they (mistakenly) thought he supported a student ID program and the placement of police in schools. Dr. Foster, the first black superintendent of schools in Oakland, was a visionary who put his focus for reform not only on schools but on the social and economic forces that shaped them. His death was a huge loss for the future of Oakland schools. I remember ...
Inexplicably, my car slid sideways across College Ave into the path of oncoming traffic. The guy on the radio (live 105) shouted “There’s broken glass all over 9th street…” seconds before the station went dead. All the way down College people were streaming out of their houses, faces tight. People I recognized as natives. Native Bay Area people like to take earthquakes in stride. We smile at the freaked out newcomers and say “that was fun.” Not this one. I’ll never forget the creeping, sick feeling I had watching early helicopter footage of the Cypress freeway running through West Oakland. The anchorman ...
Maybe it’s just me. I’m tired. The news used to energize me and spur me into action, not make me want a long winter nap. But things seem so bleak now, with our dysfunctional government (controlled by slack jawed fanatics hopped up on personal ambition and bigotry) handing over the crown jewels, the welfare of the american people, to the robber barons. It makes me extremely angry. I want to fire everyone. Being this angry all the time makes me tired. When cynicism threatens to take over, I look around this place. The restored wetlands on the bay waterfront, the ...
Until I saw all the cute boys in the neighborhood, I was seriously pissed that my mom moved me to Rockridge when I was 14 (in 1975). I was a Berkeley kid. Moving to Oakland was uncool. The kids that hung out on the steps of Chabot School (smoking and drinking) were rivals to the kids who hung out at the 7-11 in Elmwood (smoking and drinking). It was a Jets/Sharks kind of situation. Well, without any real threat of violence. Oddly enough, my parents didn’t take my grievances about the situation seriously. With the perspective of an older person and the ...
Contrary to popular belief, Gertrude Stein did not disdain Oakland. Her so often repeated (and misquoted) line “there is no there there” was not an indictment of our city, but an observation made in painful nostalgia that the Oakland of her childhood (and her childhood home) no longer existed. The rural Oakland (pop 35,000) that she left in 1891 had given way to an urban Oakland (pop 300,000) when she returned in 1935. But her actual meaning doesn’t matter. The saying so perfectly represents the dichotomy between the perception of Oakland and the reality. To outsiders Oakland is either a thug ...
“Have you found my husband’s body yet?” my grandmother practiced saying in Spanish on her third day alone in the desert. She was in a VW bus in Baja. When it broke down my grandfather rode off on the 90cc Honda dirt bike across the sand dunes to look for help. At the time she was practicing her morbid Spanish, he was waiting for auto parts on the laid back schedule of a small Mexican town. The note he’d written and given to a crop duster to drop to her had (predictably) not made it into her hands. They were adventurous people ...
Getting knocked unconscious is (ironically) the most memorable experience I’ve had on Grand avenue. I woke up on the pavement after a car driving next to me honked so loudly that I swerved into a parked car and flew off my bike headlong and headfirst into the street. I was 12. No one stopped. Likely concussed, I rode home anyway. Later that day my mom yelled at me and my dog bit me. That’s the stuff of country songs right there. That was the summer I was taking sailing lessons on Lake Merritt. In those days, in the late summer and fall ...