San Francisco Chronicle Arts & Entertainment - Spoken Edition

Buffy posted on Facebook that she had voted, and I hit the “like” button. Buffy and I have known each other since Oct. 3, 1994, when we swore to uphold the Constitution of California. Buffy does not know how I vote, because we still have a secret ballot in this country, but she has a good guess. And that’s not the way she thinks that a law enforcement officer should vote.

If you’re reading this, it means my 29-year-old son proposed to his longtime girlfriend last weekend. If you’re not reading this, it means he chickened out. My deadline for a Tuesday column is Friday at noon, so I’m writing this without knowing if he actually went through with it. He seemed pretty determined, though, so I decided to take the chance of writing something that might never be published. If he gags, I’ll just disown him.

It’s a Friday around 11 p.m., and Dimples is in full swing. The karaoke rooms of this subterranean Japantown bar are occupied by one party of mild middle-aged men singing Korean songs, and one group of decidedly not-mild 30-somethings singing the standards. Shouted segments of “Don’t Stop Believin’” blare into the main bar whenever someone opens the door.

A wise Buddhist (is there any other kind?) once told me, “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” If I believed that nonsense, I wouldn’t be able to report on the 13th Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame induction luncheon at all. Actually, the food was good at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco; so was the weather. And there were plenty of opportunities for schmoozing. That’s it. Drive carefully! The event, hosted Oct.

Anna Halprin, the 98-year-old dance pioneer who lives in Marin County, fractured her back recently. I didn’t learn this in the news — Halprin isn’t interested in anyone’s pity. Instead, I was lucky enough to be part of a group of 30 students who took a workshop with her at the deYoung Museum on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 20. She taught the workshop as part of a series of performances, films and talks the museum has been hosting in her honor.

“A season is a lifetime.” Let me catch the infrequent reader up. In July, my husband, Brian, and I made the hardest decision our marriage has faced: To keep our son Zane safe, we sent him to a “boarding school” over the mountain and across the desert. Frequent readers dove right in, lighting candles and sprinkling pixie dust, and, like Tinker Bell, we survived on your belief. Last weekend, Brian and I got up at 4 a.m. and flew down to El Paso.

Knowing little about Wittgenstein other than to pronounce its “w” as a “v,” and that his loose job description was “philosopher,” we studied up while driving to Geyserville the other day. The destination was the Oliver Ranch, a 100-acre former sheep ranch that’s an outdoor museum for 19 site-specific works commissioned by Steve and Nancy Oliver.

It was around 6 in the evening last Saturday, and my wife and I were getting ready to go out. While she delicately slapped on some makeup and fiddled with her hair, I was busy pumping pushups and stretching. “What are you doing?” she asked as she watched me perform a couple of hip twists. “Loosening up for our usual battle tonight,” I replied. “I’m determined to hold you back this time.” Let me explain.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" is a film about Lee Israel, a biographer who started a side hustle writing fake letters as Noel Coward, Louise Brooks, Dorothy Parker and other deceased luminaries and selling them to collectors.

Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago. 1993 Nov. 3: In the most closely watched race in San Francisco, a city police officer has narrowly won the right to bring his 10-pound wooden partner — a ventriloquist’s dummy — with him on patrol.

It was around 6 in the evening last Saturday, and my wife and I were getting ready to go out. While she delicately slapped on some makeup and fiddled with her hair, I was busy pumping pushups and stretching. “What are you doing?” she asked as she watched me perform a couple of hip twists. “Loosening up for our usual battle tonight,” I replied. “I’m determined to hold you back this time.” Let me explain.

After I read the United Nations’ new apocalyptic climate change report, I looked to see when my house was going to be underwater. For this grim task, I set out to model different possibilities with an online sea level rise tool from Cal-Adapt, a public database for research from California scientists and researchers.

When I was born in 1978, my father wasn’t allowed into the San Francisco Children’s Hospital delivery room for the cesarean surgery from which I emerged. My mother was 32 at the time, considered a bit old to be giving birth to her first child. When I pop out my one and only kid, sometime between when you’re reading this and next week, I’ll be 40.

They call us the sandwich generation: our kids on one side, aging parents on the other, and us, a mess of jelly in between, trying to hold everything together. I heard of one 70-year-old man who’s still taking care of his 90-year-old parents —and handing money out to his 50-year-old kids. I have started to feel myself as if I have a 17-year-old, an 18-year-old and a 76-year-old.

The Fisher-Paulsons are as strange as it gets, so it came as no surprise that Aidan has the second sight. He tells me that late at night the ghost of Krypto pads through our bedrooms, tail wagging as he checks that each of the humans and the canines still dreams, this Ghost-of-Pekingese-Past. We’re accustomed to spirits in the outer, outer, outer, outer, Excelsior, mainly because of Nurse Vivian and Tim. In fact, I insisted on them.