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Dec 28, 2024 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
It didn’t bother Shulamis Koyfman that her family thought she’d probably fail the California Board of Nursing licensing exam; she thought so, too. After all, she was 65, she’d lived in the United States for only three years and her English was, she recalls, not so hot. “Honestly, I was 100 percent sure I would fail, but I said to myself, ‘Well, I will try, I will try.’ I can at least say I tried.
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Dec 27, 2024 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
When his mother, Lucrezia, was diagnosed with cancer, then 25-year-old Frankie Gaetano Balistreri cared for her at home.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
I got my first job in San Francisco nearly 40 years ago, in the Flood Building, at 870 Market Street. A chubby cheerful, uniformed lobby attendant pressed the elevator buttons for me. The lobby was marble and, oh wonderful, there was a Woolworth’s on the ground floor. I loved to sit at the curved Formica lunch counter just like I loved the ladies who served me: bright lipstick, hairnets, and pink puffy-sleeved uniforms. I loved the Coca-Cola glasses and the grilled cheese sandwiches.
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Aug 11, 2024 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
It’s Sunday in the park with the Maestro, as members of the Golden Gate Park Band, in crimson jackets and caps, file onto the stage at the music concourse. During a brief rehearsal before the show, Maestro German Gonzalez moves gracefully between the podium and the microphone, his expressions changing fleetingly with the music, a radiant smile occasionally flashing across his face.
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May 17, 2024 | 
sfseniorbeat.com | Naomi Marcus
The ghosts of San Francisco’s past are still there if you only look and listen SENIOR BEAT COLUMN: I got my first job in San Francisco nearly 40 years ago, in the Flood Building at Market and Powell streets. A chubby, cheerful, uniformed lobby attendant pressed the elevator buttons for me. The lobby was marble and, oh wonderful, there was a Woolworth’s on the ground floor.
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Mar 24, 2024 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
Imagine having such a terrible toothache and no access to a dentist that you take a pair of pliers and pull your own tooth. Meet Chester Moody. It’s 1958 in the Jim Crow South: Lorman, Mississippi to be precise. He is 17 years old, attending Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a historically black college, and he is in excruciating pain. At the administration office, he is told it will be 21 days before a dentist visits the college, and Black students can’t leave campus.
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Feb 6, 2024 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
You are a Brooklyn girl, raised by Holocaust survivors in Williamsburg, a graduate of PS 164 in Boro Park and Hunter College in Manhattan. In 1977 you’re a schoolteacher in Harlem and a single mom to a beautiful biracial daughter, Anais, age two. Her existence is a secret from your Orthodox Jewish parents; your older sisters told you it would kill them. So, instead, you marry a gay white South African Jewish guy in need of a green card.
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Nov 23, 2023 | 
missionlocal.org | Naomi Marcus
So you are a professional clown and there is a global pandemic. Sounds like a setup. Alas, no. For longtime Mission District resident Moshe Cohen aka Mr. Yoohoo, it meant separation from his patients (he performs in local hospitals as part of the Medical Clown Project), his students (he teaches workshops in “clown” all over the world), and his beloved global community of theatre artists and collaborators.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
boomermagazine.com | Kathy Witt |Rick Steves |Naomi Marcus |Annie Tobey
Long-time travel writer Kathy Witt transports readers through an immersive Monet arts excursion in Cincinnati, Ohio, with places to play, stay, eat, and more.
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Oct 3, 2023 | 
boomermagazine.com | Rick Steves |Naomi Marcus |Annie Tobey
“It’s the anti-club club: flea market furniture and a mishmash of colors. It’s pleasantly chaotic, designed to be undesigned.” Travel writer Rick Steves and three local Hungarians give us an inside look at Budapest ruin pubs. Budapest, the cultural capital of Hungary and much of Central Europe, has no shortage of nightlife. You can go there for grand opera, folk music and dancing, a twilight boat trip, or live music in a nightclub.
