"Reflections on Culture, Faith, and the Cities That Raised Me"

A great place to people-watch and sip cocktails in North Beach is Vesuvio Cafe's balcony/second floor. This renowned San Francisco cafe/saloon was first established in 1948 and is located across Kerouac Alley from the infamous City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue near Broadway.

The Weight of Ritual
Religion has always struck me as one of the most complicated things humans try to organize their lives around. No matter the tradition—Ash Wednesday, Ramadan, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism—each comes with practices that can feel overwhelming or impossible to fully understand. And yet, year after year, people return to these rituals with a kind of stubborn devotion. Maybe that’s the point: not mastery, but continuity. The same way a city shapes you long before you understand its rituals.

Cutting the Cord on Peacock
With the Super Bowl behind us—well, Bad Bunny’s halftime show, since that was the only part I cared about—I finally canceled my Peacock subscription. I wasn’t watching much anyway. Even Days of Our Lives, which has been running since November 1965, lost its pull for me once it moved off broadcast TV and behind a paywall. A Roku subscription isn’t expensive, but why pay for something I only check in on once or twice a year? So, goodbye Peacock.

Hints of Spring
March has arrived, and the air already smells different. Spring announces itself quietly—long before the temperatures catch up. The mornings are still February-cold, but something in the atmosphere has shifted. Peekskill, that quiet, watchful character in my life, is stretching its limbs again.

A Dive into San Francisco’s Past
I recently watched a documentary about Carol Doda on Prime, and it was captivating from start to finish. Doda became famous as the first topless performer at the Condor nightclub in San Francisco, but the film revealed so much more about the city’s history—especially the parts that rarely make it into the nostalgia reels.

San Francisco, in those days, was a character with neon breath and restless hips. A city that seduced you, shocked you, and dared you to keep up. But even in its counterculture glow, being Black meant being excluded from certain clubs and performances unless you were white. Carol Doda and Judy Mamso helped define the era’s nightclub scene, with Mamso pushing boundaries through interracial performances and even incorporating animals into her act. But Black women weren’t allowed to participate in topless performances until the 1980s—by which time the glamour had faded and the clubs had drifted from North Beach into the Tenderloin.

Movements, Music, and the Dance Floor
The documentary also touched on the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the dances that shaped the era—the twist, the swim. Bobby Freeman, a Black San Francisco singer, created the “Swim” dance at a Twist Party concert at the Cow Palace in 1962, later immortalizing it in his 1964 hit C’mon and Swim. These were the cultural currents that made the city feel alive.

A City That No Longer Exists
There was a time when San Francisco felt like a world unto itself. Department stores had topless sales assistants. Shoe-shine girls worked topless, their movements becoming part of the city’s strange choreography. Men stood on Broadway calling out to lure tourists into nude clubs. And then there were the darker stories—the club owner found murdered on Carol Doda’s piano, a girl surviving the attack. These were the stories that greeted me when I first arrived in the city as a young man. San Francisco was a wild, unpredictable character then—one who didn’t care whether you were ready for the story or not.

What We Outgrow
Now that I’m no longer new anywhere—no longer the wide‑eyed kid stepping into San Francisco for the first time, nor the newcomer wandering Peekskill’s hills four years ago—I finished watching The Night Manager, recommended by my Ecuadorian friend Leo. Tom Hiddleston was magnetic as Jonathan Pine, Hugh Laurie deliciously sinister as Richard “Dickie” Onslow Roper—but it was Diego Calva as Teddy Dos Santos, the Colombian arms dealer and secret son, who stole my heart. The story ends in tragedy, and I felt oddly cheated by the lack of redemption. I doubt I’ll watch a third season. Life is too short for shows that leave you empty.

Still, I’m looking forward to discussing it with Leo. And honestly? I’d rather have Carol Doda and Judy Mamso on the screen—women who knew how to command a room, rewrite a culture, and leave a mark that still echoes through a city that barely resembles the one they helped shape.

Two Cities, Two Selves
San Francisco was the city that raised my younger self—reckless, curious, open to everything. Peekskill is the city that holds my present self—seasoned, rooted, discerning. One taught me how to enter a world; the other taught me how to stay in one. And somewhere between the two, I’ve learned to recognize when it’s time to let things go, whether it’s a streaming service, a storyline with no redemption, or a version of myself that belonged to another city entirely.