San Francisco Chronicle Arts & Entertainment - Spoken Edition

A Tale of Two Pinkies. In 1974, Nurse Vivian got it into her head that, since I was captain of the Math Team, I would make a good accountant. In her mind a good bean counter needed decent typing skills. So that summer she sent me to Longwood High School, in Middle Island. Worst summer vacation. My fingers are stubby, and my eye-hand coordination minimal.

“I have a job for you,” my wife said to me as I headed off to work Monday morning. “It won’t take long.” I have a reputation for being a bit of a slacker when it comes to household maintenance. In fact, I’m pretty much incompetent, or at least I’ve conveniently convinced my wife that I am. “Don’t ask me to change the outdoor light bulbs again,” I pleaded.

Bourbon & Branch changed the game when it opened in 2006. A theatrical enactment of a 1920s speakeasy, Bourbon & Branch shocked San Francisco with its requirement that all visitors make reservations, retrieve a password and show up at a specified time at an unmarked door on Jones Street in the Tenderloin. What awaited them inside was a fantasy of Prohibition-era San Francisco, dark and hushed and furtive. And drinks: complicated drinks. Expensive drinks.

From the beginning, we expected their demise. The goldfish that our friends won at the elementary school carnival had quickly expired, but at the pet store, the clerk informed me that these creatures could in fact live for years, if cared for properly. More reality checks followed: The glass bowls on display weren’t suitable digs for a pair of goldfish, because of their rapid growth, and their frequent eating and defecating fouled the water.

Correspondent Roberta Brouhard emailed last week that she’d witnessed a 38R-Geary Muni confrontation that arose when a frail elderly man motioned to a woman in her late 30s that she should give him her seat. “Have you ever been seven months pregnant?” she asked him, in what Brouhard described as a stern tone of voice.

I have a very close relative who is one of my heroes. I think about what she’s done, and my heart swells and my admiration grows each day. I’ll give an example. She went with her husband and her children for a week’s vacation a few months ago in Costa Rica. And while her family was swimming and sunbathing on a beautiful beach, she climbed into their rental car and drove 45 minutes, every day, to a small town deep in the jungle.

A recent discovery made me giddy with joy and relief: In the second grade, homework packets arrive on Fridays, giving us the weekend to work on it, too. In years past, when the packets arrived on Monday, we raced against time on afternoons busy with their activities — soccer or baseball practice, Maker workshops or more. We also had to juggle that with our work responsibilities — pages to edit, emails to send, or a red-eye to hop on a business trip.

When Marvin Mutch looked up from the lower yard at San Quentin State Prison, he would see the top of Mount Tamalpais and think of freedom. For Mutch, who spent more than four decades in state prisons and 36 years at San Quentin alone, that mountain was a goal. Within two weeks of his release in 2016, Mutch was on the top of Mount Tam and looking down on San Quentin, now tiny in the distance. He wasn’t alone.

The Bungalow wasn’t always blue. Built in 1926 in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, it was the color of day-old oatmeal by the time we first saw it in 1999. We painted it the color of Batman’s cape as worn by Adam West during the ’60s. It’s likely that at some point in its first 74 years, the kitchen was remodeled, but there was little evidence of such.

Regular readers of this column might remember my rant many months ago about driving irritations. I had about 122 lined up but narrowed it down to two: runner-up was driving slow in the fast lane, and No. 1 was not pulling into the intersection when turning left at a stoplight, which means only one car can make the turn at each light change.

Dear Mick LaSalle: How about writing an occasional column called “Second Time Around”? In it, you go back in history and choose someone that didn’t win the Academy Award but who could have (should have) won. Robert Freud Bastin, Petaluma Dear Robert Freud Bastin: Involving the Oscars into the concept would imply that the Oscars are a genuine standard of quality, which I don’t believe.

Chuck Berry, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye. B.B. King, Tina Turner, James Brown. It’s Friday night at Club Waziema, and in a dimly lit room where these legends performed at all-night parties a mere half-century ago, a group of 20-something dudes is playing pool to the sounds of Incubus from a jukebox. Let’s back up. Waziema is a dive bar with hearty Ethiopian food, well-loved red velvet wallpaper, year-round Christmas lights, homey couches and newspaper-covered end tables.

Documentary filmmaker Dana Nachman was in the midst of a conference call about “Pick of the Litter,” her revelatory new film on training guide dogs. Suddenly, a bark could be heard in the background. It emanated from her own pet, PC (short for Princess Chaling) who, she believes, got excited by a gardener’s knock at her home in Los Altos.

Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago. 1993 Sept. 22: Convicted mass murderer Richard Ramirez, the notorious Night Stalker, tried to smuggle a handcuff key and a hypodermic syringe into his new cell on San Quentin’s death row yesterday, prison officials said.

The athletic director at Saint John’s School has very high standards for parent coaches: They must have a pulse. He has voluntold me into basketball, baseball, cross-country and our current sport: futbol. I did ask him once, “When did we run out of straight fathers?” I have no qualifications. Back at St.