 All right. It's time. We will get going with some library announcements first and then we'll go into the main event. So first off, thank you all for being here today to the first of what we hope will be many total SF book clubs. And we know that there will be three more for sure coming up. So those are already in the books and almost in the books. So pay pay attention and stay tuned for more. And today of course we're here for all your bowls home baked my mom marijuana and the stoning of San Francisco and home baked was our July 2020 on the same page books so SFPL is very familiar already and we love it and we love the deep San Francisco dive. We want to welcome you here to the unseated land of the Lonie tribal people and acknowledge the many raw nutrition only tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we work and reside in the Bay Area. Our libraries committed to uplifting the names of these tribes and families and to promoting and educating and providing useful and factual information about first person culture, land rights, and all sorts of topics and I'm going to put some links in in the box that you can find reading lists to things we talked about tonight, including first person's culture. The library is not a neutral institution and stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and we also want to condemn our horrendous violence against Asian and Asian Americans in our communities and our state and nationwide, both the reported and illegal crimes that have occurred. Our library stands in solidarity with our Asian communities, neighbors and colleagues, colleagues, distressed and hurt by these attacks, anti black and anti Asian racism both uphold white supremacy, and we are all hired by these racial structures. Our library has been working hard on a racial equity committee commitment, and that can be found in the chat when I put that link in, or you can just Google SFPL racial equity. Things are happening we're opening three libraries open now for our browse and bounce service plus mini libraries with to go services, and we are still wearing our masks to protect our library families and friends, and all of us out there working. The AAP I month in May and we have selected. I think Vanessa is a friend of, of total SF Vanessa Hawes book, a river of stars, and on the same page if you don't know is a bi monthly read where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book at the same time. And Vanessa and Yalitza Ferrara's will be in the library next week will also have a book club on Sunday, a very San Francisco book as well. Right. If you don't follow Chinatown pretty on Instagram. I encourage you to do so right now. The most stylish and wise Chinatown seniors ever with the best socks in the world. And this book is out by Chronicle and our, the photographers Valerie Lou and Adriana low will be in the library next or virtual library next week. More API performances. Poet Clara who and David Wong will join us for poetry and music. We also I don't have a slide but we also have a musical performance coming up on Sunday. The Sunday after this, and it will be Kyoto Japanese string instrument very beautiful. Poet Laureate tango I said Martin is bringing the poets from Mississippi poetry and resistance contemporary giants of poetry in Mississippi. So some silver linings of pandemic life is we get to have amazing people with us. And we're a shout out for tango all the love to tango who is just upping our game the library with bringing authors and helping us bring in these amazing humans celebrating Marlon Peterson's book bird uncaged, an abolitionist freedom song in convo with Kisi Limone, who I cannot say enough about read heavy such an amazing book and his book Long Division has just been republished. Please join us for that and that you'll notice is in June 21 because it's time for summer stride. Woo summer stride. We are super excited every night, Tuesday night in summer, look for an author 7pm Tuesday night right here, right here. There's kicking it off with Jennifer Worley, who is a one helps do the first unionizing of the lusty lady. So we got some great great fun. All right. I'm going to kick it off. I'm going to kick it off and kick it out of here and introduce Heather night Peter heart love. Thank you for being here for our first total SF book club. Take it away. Thank you so much. Hello and welcome to the first total SF book club it's a celebration of San Francisco public libraries independent bookstores reading and this month the manufacturing of marijuana brownies. Of course we're talking about home baked. This is all read by alia Volts, the best author, any new book club could ever hope for. She's also the inspiration behind Peters and my matching t shirts, which say sticky fingers brownies eat it baby. Thank you so much Heather and and Peter this is absolutely and an honor and huge gratitude to the San Francisco public library and the Chronicle and green apple books for supporting me through this I'm so happy to be here with you all. We want to remind listeners and viewers to drop your questions in the q amp a box and we will get to those later in the hour. Peter you're muted. There's my first foul of the night. Along with our partners at the library and green apple books we just like to thank Nick Petru lockers who will be creating the official cocktails of the total SF book club. This month is the pot shot. I made one right here it is an orange vodka and chocolate jello shot with optional cannabis butter additive. And thank you very much Nick, super exciting he really thinks a lot about the book and the themes and I'm going to. I'm going to try one tonight as we're talking case just like Anita Bryant tears. Wow. I have time to make a pot shot today so I'm going with boring old wine. Cheers everybody. Cheers. Well with our first edible sighting of the night from Peter screen let's get to all you just want to say I loved reading home baked and I was really sad when it ended it was such a fast read a real page Turner. It's the perfect combination of San Francisco history, family drama and comedy. And it's the story of your mother Meredith waltz who ran sticky fingers brownies selling thousands of illicit pot brownies, all of our San Francisco every month, even when you were a baby. And there's an especially great part where you're describing how she managed to carry you and all of those brownies before you could even walk so hoping to kick tonight off with you reading that excerpt for us. Oh sure okay I'd be happy to, and I also have a little slide show here I want somebody to holler at me if this doesn't work the way it is supposed to. There are some images while we go along, so that you have something to look at besides my mug. There's that slide show. Okay tell me if that didn't work somebody holler. You're good. Okay. Mayor resumed her Castro run on February 24. Now with a wiggling crying pooping little person hanging from her neck in a Roboso style sling. Of course, you were always with me, she says, first through pregnancy, then once you were born I carried you in a front carrier with all the fucking brownies. And then in a Jerry carrier on my back, which was nice because it freed my arms and you were cooing in my ear. I loved that. Eventually a stroller worked because I could put some of the brownies in the stroller. Seriously, I say, vaguely disturbed by the idea of my mom dealing out of my pram. And then she says, but you know, hanging off the back. They were heavy. So if you were out of the stroller it would tip backward. Here I was with a beautiful baby and brownies all dressed up. People loved us. There it is. They loved us. My mom wasn't the type of druggy who neglected her child. She was the type who took her child on deals. If I was her karmic contract as she's still fond of saying that meant she was also mine. At two and a half month months old, I became her accomplice cruising along with her from business to business. Loaded with contraband, getting my diaper changed in supply closets and break rooms, being greeted with squeals of delight and having my little piggy toes wiggled by customers while my mom dished out the goods. Smelling, I'm quite sure, like a Rastafarian in a chocolate shop with notes of sour milk and pee. Here's another thing I know. I liked it. True. I was too young for specific memories. My pre-linguistic brain had no way of cataloging my experiences or the people we encountered, but something from these early forays into the city stays with me like an aftertaste. It's a peculiar type of nostalgia, undiluted, raw, separate from my remembrances of later years, a feeling more than a narrative, a sense of belonging. I somehow understood, even then, that my mom and I loved San Francisco and San Francisco loved us back. Love it. Thank you so much. I just wanted to start by asking you, you were immersed in sticky fingers since before you can remember, when did it move out of your childhood memories and into a situation where it's just like, I've got to write this book. It was a gradual process. I didn't come to writing until I was in my 20s and then I really wanted to write fiction. Somehow I wasn't that interested in taking apart my own life, but I had also grown up with this experience of, once it was safe to talk about the family business, any time I mentioned it to somebody, it would be like, the eyes would pop out. And I grew up with this experience of being from such a different family than other people had. And I felt like I had this vibrant world that I was never able to share because it could get my folks in trouble. So eventually it started to become clear that I needed to tell the story somehow. And then I started doing the interviews gradually over time and became really fascinated in the larger picture as I went. About those interviews, I want to thank your parents because their candor and the conversations that you had just elevated this book for me. And I wanted to ask you how that started. Like, how does that conversation start? And how do you build that kind of rapport where you're telling everything? That's true. Well, my mom and I have always been really close. So we had the rapport where we could talk about anything. And I think that it was part of the way my family handled the secrecy, which was necessary for us, was to create an environment of openness at home. While I couldn't talk to other kids or teachers or anybody else about what was happening at home, I could talk with my mom and with her friends within the sticky fingers circle about absolutely everything. There's nothing off limits. So we already had that kind of openness. I started recording the interviews actually while my mom was unwell for a period and she was on chemotherapy. And I was looking at her mortality. And I had grown up hearing all these great stories. My mom's a great storyteller. And so I started recording them because I was partly for the book, but I wasn't really thinking about the book yet. I really just wanted to have the stories recorded. So I got interested in them as subject matter. And one kind of one story would lead to another and then it would be like well you should ask your dad about this or you should ask Barb about this. Because of course it's not just the candor with my mom and my dad. I, by the end of the thing had interviewed 65 people and, and the vast majority were astonishingly open with me. The whole community I think I think the cannabis community really has is a culture of storytelling to begin with. Right so once you can trust somebody, the floodgates are open. And I know you interviewed 65 people plus you did a ton of historical research about the cannabis industry in San Francisco itself. How did you keep everything straight and form like a cohesive narrative. Because I did that. I thought it works. It eventually worked. It didn't work along the way. This was actually a 1012 year process. And it went through many different shapes, and I just spared many times I gave up many times. And so I would I put it down for seven years, six, seven years at a point. I didn't. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. How to combine the cultural research and the cultural history that I wanted to write because that was the part of the story that really fascinated me with the personal story that I knew would interest other people. It's like how do you bring those two things together. It took it took a long it was a lot of experimentation honestly and a good writing group good feedback. What was the key to after that seven year break to pick it back up again because if I put a story down for like a month I'm never going back to it. Yeah. Well what what happened really so it had this book actually shopped or a version of this story actually shopped to publishers in 2009 and was roundly rejected by the entire entire publishing world. And that at the time it was more of an oral history I didn't have quite have the form together. There at the time. One of the responses that I got from a lot of editors was that cannabis was too niche of a subject. They thought there would be a small market for it this is in 2009. Well that changed a lot in the 10 years after that. So, I came back to it I get in around it was 2016 I actually came back to it in the lead up to the 2016 election. Before that legalized adult recreational use of cannabis was about to pass. And people were talking about cannabis again. And I, I became frustrated in the conversations with the fact that people were not talking about the relationship between HIV AIDS activism, and cannabis legalization and I believe that we would not have legal cannabis at all. Because it was out HIV AIDS activists and without the crisis and all the loss of that period that made it a life or death question for people. So I began it began to feel at that point more urgent for me and I felt that I held a piece of the story that no that no one else had or that no one else was was telling. Any of you out of all of those that stood out to you, even if it wasn't a star of the book like your mom or dad but some little, you know, little player that really informed your writing or was super helpful. I mean there were so, there were so many. One, one person who really moved me personally was Dan clowery. I don't know if he's watching but I found him very late in the process. And he had been at sort of a subcontractor he had he had sold hundreds and hundreds of brownies and on a Friday afternoon from behind the counter of the village deli so you had them in the in the deli counter, and you had to know how to ask. So, in that era, he moved a lot of brownies and it's just a really sweet guy. Well, when AIDS hit, he, he went back to school and he became an AIDS nurse. And so he united the two parts of the story in a way that I found really moving, and he could speak really eloquently about how that changed and what it meant to help. There was a there was I think. I think that one thing that happened during the AIDS crisis. There was so much horror and loss, but people also really grew up. You know so you had a culture that really exalted physical beauty and there was a lot of freedom and hedonism and a focus on pleasure and, and all of this kind of no holds barred freedom. And that happened, it changed so much people became concerned with nurturing others in the community it's a really maturing arc that I found very moving personally. Yeah. And when did you finally know like I have the book. I'm 100% golden. I don't know if I ever, if I ever entirely felt that way. But there was a point when the pieces kind of clicked together and I felt like the hardest thing just from a craft perspective was finding a voice that I could hold consistently through the different kinds of storytelling that I was doing and that was very hard to find something that could tell the tell the family story and tell the social story and so when I had that I was like okay I can do this for a whole book. I can keep this going. You know, Heather and I were just devastated to learn that you had a Sylvester impersonator set for your book launch and had to cancel it. No San Francisco and should ever have to cancel a Sylvester impersonator. I just wanted it sorry to bring that up again. It hurts. Yeah. So, I mean, what's it like to have a book come out during the pandemic, you know, what was it like how did it change things were there any positives. Yeah. I mean of course initially it was devastating how could it not be the timing of my release was three weeks into lockdown basically. Nobody knew how long it would last, but I had to cancel the book tour and the party and all this stuff so initially that it was devastating and I thought nobody's going to read this book you know that I've been working on for forever. Then the literary community really came together in a supportive way, and indie bookstores came through, like champs and immediately converting to virtual platforms, which no one was doing right so. So there was a lot of everyone had to think very fast on their feet, and liquid came through with virtual things so that this that happened. And I've also been really fortunate in that home baked resonates with some of the experiences that people are having in 2020. There was a lot of resonance between the early days of the AIDS crisis and the early days of COVID and how the government handled that or didn't handle that and, and the fear around it so there was resonance there. There was later on resonant there's a lot of, of political action in the book and clashes with police and that resonated with the protests. Over the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer and so there were things that people could connect to and cannabis certainly had a moment. The industry cannabis industry just boomed. So, so there, I was fortunate in that people found and it's also a generally uplifting story, and a story that transports you to another era and I think people appreciated that during lockdown. So I was lucky. And, and the silver lining of course is being able to do events and meet people from all over the world do events with people all over the world I got to do a book event with with Armistead, my pan who's in London. And I would not have been able and he's of course a hero of mine. And so I wouldn't have been able to do that. So that of course has has been great and I visit a lot of book clubs in, you know, in Cleveland and in Georgia and it just places that I might not get to on book tour. So even as we come out of this I hope that some of those some of that agility stays with us. I'm so impressed and I'm glad you brought up the booksellers and the agility because I've seen them be so nimble through this and I hope better themselves for years forward because I'm hoping everybody listening to this will preorder from bookstores now because they're all ready to do it. So thank you for for mentioning that that's one of Heather my priorities with this book club. And just it I'm sorry I didn't drop it on that Amazon. For a period, de prioritized book distribution. So people who ordered from Amazon weren't able to get books early or on time. People who ordered through Andy bookstore in the bookstores were filling orders though. I mean, it was they were just really smart and really showed up for for the, the author community and for their own communities to make sure people had places to go for education and and and books and community. Yeah, I think people will come out of this appreciating their indie bookstores and their libraries mentioned both of them. Yeah, I also wanted to ask you, you know, I'm reading the book, and through a lot of the book like I wanted to get in a time machine hop back and get your parents a lawyer, like just you need to talk to a lawyer, and I wanted to take away that ledger with you. But on the other hand, like there's a lot of it that's really romantic and like swashbuckling and fun in a way that I don't know that many of us get to experience. Is there a little piece of you that wishes. You got a chance to take over your parents, marijuana brownie business. Oh, um, no, I mean, I, here's the thing, I, there is a piece of me that wishes. To have been an adult in that era, perhaps to have been in it to have lived in a time and a place when, when the cannabis community really was about friendships and about, you know, it still is in a way and there are pockets there are certain kind of business entrepreneurs who are really fighting for that kind of community engagement. But the big, the big scale can a business is not something I would want to be involved in. And honestly the sticky fingers model of going door to door and selling to people who are working behind the counter they only sold to people at work they never sold to people on the street. So this model of this model wouldn't fly today like I can't imagine working in a boutique and buying large quantities of contraband over the counter and then so I mean I just can't imagine that happening. And part of that I think is you know the cost of living is so extreme you can't afford to lose a job you know we have to, we can't be as loosey goosey about that kind of thing. There are things that I miss profoundly about the cannabis community, but yeah I don't know. Not really. We'd like for you to read a second excerpt excerpt from your book now and so many of your scenes paint really vivid pictures of old school San Francisco, which I know you loved. And if you could read the one about street artists at the wharf. Sure. Yes, this is this is very much a vanished culture so good segue speaking about what is no more. All right so this this is a kind of a snapshot of Fisherman's Wharf in 1976. Good morning's Mayor sold brownies at aquatic park on Fisherman's Wharf hundreds of crafts people gathered on concrete bleachers to mill and gossip while waiting for booth assignments. The park descended to a semi circular peer with a postcard view of the Golden Gate Bridge ablaze in international orange. The park had been a bustling working class waterfront since shortly after the gold rush. The briny stench clashed with rich aromas from the Jaredelli chocolate factory. In the mid 60s, a real estate developer bought the factory restored the red brick buildings around landscaped courtyards and converted it into a shopping Plaza. Now that's San Francisco. The new mall, the cannery opened an adornment fruit packing plant shoppers didn't rush to the new malls all at once. The area still reeked of fish guts, but a path, a path had been blazed and more entrepreneurs followed. This immigrant named Thomas Fong turned a nearby grain mill into a wax museum with over 200 celebrities and a chamber of horse I have so many memories of going to the wax museum as a kid. After a 19 month occupation of Alcatraz Island by a group of American Indian activists asserting their right to surplus federal land. The US government re rebranded the former maximum security prison as a tourist attraction. The red and white fleet offered the first Alcatraz cruise in 1973 souvenir shops specializing in escaped in made t shirts mushroomed through the throughout the area, followed by upscale boutiques and art galleries. The blue collar seaport morphed into one of the most visited tourist traps in the world. The hippies hippies began selling crafts on the waterfront around 1970. They were not welcome merchants threaded that the peddlers shaggy outfits would mar the area's new image. Police crack down, making arrests. So the craftspeople pooled funds to hire a lawyer and founded the San Francisco street artist guild. These, there were protests, press conferences more arrests. Eventually, the street artist unearthed an obscure law enacted after half of San Francisco's merchants lost their places of business in the 1906 earthquake and fire. This law guaranteed anyone the right to a peddler's permit provided they made the goods by hand. The artisans had an effect on fishermen's worth that neither the merchants, nor the politicians, nor even the street artists anticipated tourists loved it. People visiting San Francisco in the decade following the summer of love media circus wanted to see smell and even touch real hippies. Then they could take home a souvenir crystal necklace or a hand crocheted shawl that still smelled of Nag Champa incense incense. To avoid jockeying over the best spaces, the vendors came up with a lottery system, and from then on names were drawn from a diaper pail, which rumor has it got thrown into the bay more than once by grumpy street artists. The lottery was slow and mornings could be miserably cold, especially in summer when massive fog fog banks clung to the bag, Meredith's mobile bakery had a captive audience. When the lottery wrapped up at 9am Mayor would head home to take advantage of the morning light. She'd lose herself in drawing or painting her style evolved becoming looser and more more colorful. Afternoon she'd restock and head back to the wharf for a second round of sales. Now strolling with a basket of baked goods and a Guatemalan pouch of magic brownies. Mayor favored jeans or hair and pants tucked into chic hakers with heavy wooden heels that made a satisfying walk when with each step. She wore a men's bomber jacket soft and scuffed with a sterling silver house fly house fly pinned the lapel. When strolling in Morocco she'd learned to tie elaborate turbines, and she lined her eyes with coal. She'd never been girly. Her laugh was a good fall. The wharf crafts market was enormous by 1976 now circling several blocks, folks sold hand painted silk scarves buckskin moccasins perfumes and carved wooden toys. Inside urban hippies were back to the landers who drove in from rugged parts of California, people whose eyes reflected the forest. On street corners and stages set up in the outdoor malls, buskers gathered crowds. Among them were up and coming comedians like Penn and Teller and Robin Williams. Magician and funny man Harry Anderson describes his fisherman worth period as a band of time when the street was really a spectacular place. A classical pianist wearing a white tuxedo and tails played a baby grand on a truck bed, a scraggly haired dude calling himself the human jukebox, saying tunelessly and played a horn through a hole cut into a refrigerator box painted to look like a juke. And trilliquists and mimes and puppeteers and jugglers and magicians, not a square pig among them, my mom says of the performers, all of those guys bought weed brownies, all of them. That was wonderful. And what a good segue to talk about San Francisco and how it's changing. I remember Heather and I when we first sat down with you. We asked you is there anything like better about the city now than when you were a kid. And there was the longest pause I edited most of the pause out you had trouble with that but on the other hand you know Heather and I Heather grew up in Davis I grew up in a thrilling game. We didn't experience it we were visitors into the city. I wanted to ask you what you loved about it the most. And what are the things that you hold on to the tightest your fondest memories from those 70s and 80s upbringing years. Yeah. For me it was, it was really the, it was really the community, you know I had this. And part of that is also just the cannabis community but we had this whole extended family of really vibrant creative people, and we lost a lot of these folks during the AIDS crisis but you know everybody was an actor or a musician or did makeup or you know just every everybody had some kind of art that they made. And it seemed like that was the majority of people were artists. And also, you know, I mentioned, I mentioned AIDS but also it's a matter of the artist being priced out and of course, you know a lot of people have written about this and talked about this. It's, it's no longer possible for most people most creatives to survive here unless you have some kind of overly high paying job and unfortunately in America, the arts don't pay for most of us. That has been the biggest change in my view and my biggest kind of gripe and feeling of nostalgia also a lot of the cultural and racial diversity and for the same reason you know because, because particular high paying industries have taken more than their share of space and have changed the market so greatly. But yeah it's really it's really that that feeling of that feeling of knowing that most of the people you meet have got something going on that special. You've seen San Francisco emerge from crises in the past including as we spoke about the AIDS epidemic and which killed many of your mother's friends and 1989 earthquake among others. How are you feeling as we emerge from the coven 19 pandemic do you think we can weather this storm to and are you optimistic or pessimistic about San Francisco. I'm a pessimist by nature. I do not the best person to ask about that. But, but there are some things that have given me hope of course in this in this past year I clearly San Francisco has emerged as a leader in covert caution and been, you know ahead of the pandemic has given a lot of ways and has therefore seen less death. And, and so that is that is inspiring that is hopeful. Some of the big tech is leaving that might make room for a return in some way of arts cultures. But we've also lost a lot of, you know, legacy big businesses and treasured cultural institutions during this era. We're losing them before this though, you know, so I have a I have a mixed feeling I would like to think that that going through this as a as a city together will make us stronger and more attentive to the people around us more caring of our neighbors. I'm not sure if that will happen. I do believe, however, that I do believe, however, that that San Francisco has always thrived on these cycles of like mass migration for for a particular thing right the gold rush draws a gazillion people out here. Summer of love drew 100,000 people out and then another 100,000 people came out during the 70s to be part of what at the time was called gay liberation. And now, you know, 100 or two or so 1000 people come out to participate in the tech industry. So this is kind of what we do and every time it happens, people get edged out somebody has to leave it's a small city, geographically. So, you know, this is sort of our thing. And I do think that it will, it will change, whether it will change for the better right or not I don't know. I wanted to ask if you've had a chance to relax and enjoy yourself I know you worked on this for years that's part one and part two. I'd like to read another book by you or project I'm wondering if you have anything else in the works. Thank you. Thank you for the pressure Peter I contradictory question. Yeah, yeah I'm really I'm really resting over here. I'm not really a relaxed person by nature I, I, I kind of need a project to be comfortable in my skin for better or worse. So I've been working very hard, actually through all of this. And I'm currently working on the possible series adaptation of home baked that's a thing that's happened I can't say a lot about it right now but it's, it's something is happening anyway. So that's a lot of my efforts and I, and I am chipping away at another book related to my great grandmother, who people who read home baked me may remember she's mentioned in passing that she was married to a ghost. So another rather wild family story they just keep giving them to me. Your family has given you a wealth of information to work with and speaking of which we have a special surprise for everybody, a special guest stars joining us now, all his mother Merity Volks. We're so excited about this we just found out today that this was happening so. Yay. And Palm Springs. Yes. I mean desert hot springs just outside of Palm Springs. Yeah. We love you. Just hello welcome. This is such a wonderful, wonderful book and to have you here is just really special. What, what did you think when she called you the first time and said I want to write a book about our lives. I thought it was great. Aliya was always a very gifted writer. And actually when she was a teenager. I encourage her to be a stand up comedian, because I thought she'd do very well at that. But she also is an excellent writer and so I was really pleased with that I was, it was a little frightening to be exposed. You know it was something I kept to myself for a very long time, but it worked out just fine. Yeah. So so many wonderful things coming out of the book, not the least of which is now I refer to every bed as a barge now and I will until my last day. Did she have to twist your arm to get some of these secrets out or were you just ready to talk about a lot of these details of your life. I've always been really open and I've always been really open about my life with her. I felt like that was always the best thing is to be truthful. And so we would just barge out and and tell store I tell stories. You know, just, yeah, we talk about that. Aliya also went through all my photographs and old letters and things like that old artifacts. So that was kind of cool. I know you'll be staying. We will have a Q&A segment so please enter your questions they can be for mother or daughter and yeah just really, really glad to see you after reading the book. Heather has interviewed you this is my first time meeting you so it's just such a pleasure. Thank you. It's my pleasure. I've been doing this hundreds of miles from San Francisco and decades away from sticky brownies but when this book came out. Did anybody in your new circle like where they shocked or what was that like to for this. Yeah, I had a couple of close friends, call me and say, who are you. A few people because I kept it to myself. I didn't talk about it much, or at all, really. And so, and I also work with at risk teenagers, I teach art to incarcerated boys. So that was a little, that was a little tricky, you know, a little bit, but and I thought people could be sort of judgmental about raising a child in a drug culture. And actually, I didn't get any negative feedback from anyone. People just really were like that's pretty cool. Your artwork was mentioned in the book and I can see behind you you have a lot of art when I interviewed you a month ago, you also had a ton of different art behind you so I know you're very prolific. Can you describe what a typical day is like in your life now. I get up, you know, through the pandemic I was, I was sheltered in place alone for 14 months. And I'm just really, really thankful that I had my art, because and even now I get up, and I go to my easel and I start working, and I work on a daily basis. And, and I've always wondered what it would be like to make art every single day, and not have to go out and teach or, you know, do or have a social life. And now I know what it's like. And it's actually pretty cool. Yeah, I feel very alive and very safe when I'm, when I'm making art when I'm painting or drawing. You know, if that's been great. And, yeah. Recreational cannabis is legal now we have a recipe for pot shot in the San Francisco Chronicle today. What do you think about recreational cannabis becoming legal and and frankly you're part in it you're, you're, you're, you're, you're part in it. What do you think about the developments of the last several years. I think it's wonderful. And actually here in desert hot springs. There's, they've actually opened up an enormous cannabis business they, they trim they grow. And there's easy nor I mean they're blocks and blocks and blocks of giant buildings, which employ hundreds and hundreds of not thousands of people here to process cannabis. And you, when I walk out of my door I can smell it wafting in the air. It's an enormous business here in desert hot springs. And, and I'm really glad to see that I'm happy to see that. You know I didn't, I didn't think of myself ever as a pioneer, but people like Dennis Perone or brownie Mary I felt like, and especially Dennis Perone were really, really pioneers. And I guess I was a part of that. You know I didn't look at it like that until Alia wrote kind of into Alia kind of brought it all together and wrote the book, but I have a great respect for those people that I that were my peers at the time was very risky behavior. To say the least, you're definitely one of them and we have a lot of respect for you and thank you. Alia framed it so well. I have to ask you still eat pot brownies with the old recipe the recipe that is in her book, which is such a great additive. Well I never baked. I don't know if you remember but I'm like in a foreign country in a kitchen. I just, yeah, I'm disastrous in a kitchen, but Barb, who was our baker is a wonderful baker and she banks, and she's transformed the recipe I mean the original recipe, they really were like, like cow pies. And edibles right now it's down to a science where you're not chewing on pot, we chewed on pot. I mean it was like. I mean they were like, but they it was like what you get now. And everything is down to a science now. And so yes, I don't smoke anymore because of just protecting my lungs, but I've been known to do a little corner of a brownie and then paint. Sure. Very nice. Yeah. Well we have a lot of questions from the audience so we'll turn to that for a bit. And did you consider any other titles for your book, because this is such a perfect title but did it take a few iterations to get there. It did. It was for the longest time it was sticky fingers brownies, or just sticky fingers. And then the year that I was going to intending to shop it just, it was actually just months before I started looking for an agent. And so I had a planner's book called sticky fingers came out and I was like, I could ring his neck. So I had to go back to the drawing board and and and we went through a few different titles that didn't stick. Before landing on this one. And were either of you ever nervous about legal ramifications, as the audience member put it were you ever nervous about the long arm of the law. So before I really got into seriously looking at publishing this. I researched the statute of limitations and I researched, you know, could they come at her for through taxes or. And, and I made sure that there was not going to be any consequence of that nature from the book we were both concerned about, you know, her teaching and and her position in the community where she is now. Unfortunately, it's been fine I mean it was so long ago she got out of the business in 1998 so. I think nothing was good, but I did I did I did make absolutely sure that nothing was going to happen because of this book. I have a question from Julia apte. It's a barge question just clarifying. Do you have a barge at your own house. And can anyone have a barge. Is it just married he's the only one with the barge. What are the barge rules. Anybody could have a barge. I do have a barge here, but Ali is the only one on her visits, who I've barged with in a long time. But yeah, you just have to want to hang on the bed with your friends. Rather than sit on a couch or in a chair, you have to want to kind of lays out and, and you shoot the shed in a prone position on the barge. Yeah. I like that barge is a verb to I barge. It's a state of mind, you know, more than more than a place. Yeah, I think it is possible to barge without a bed, but it's I disagree. I just Carol I guess who asked the question about the, about the long arm of the law clarified that she meant at the time. And yeah, there was a lot of concern about getting busted at the time, certainly. Yeah, we didn't here's part of the thing is going out and selling the brownies. We were dressed in these colorful clothes and very high profile. Like we were not like lurking in the shadows very up and in the open. And because of that it didn't look like we were doing anything illegal. I mean, as soon as you start like, you know, tippy towing around corners and darting your eyes and looking over your shoulder. It was very suspicious. And also people were very protective of us. So that if law enforcement came in a plain coast cop or on Fisherman's war on pier 39 if one security camera, people would let me know that they were there. And I would know what to do. And so that was like a fine dance. What I did worry about was that Doug Ali his dad kept books. He insisted on keeping a ledger of the money, what came in what went out. But we know about the ledger. I was stressing out about that ledger ledger just drove me nuts. And we'd argue about it. Please get, let's get rid of the ledger. And we finally did we went to Baker Beach. And there's actually one of the pictures in the slide show where we're in leather jackets and he has Doug has an envelope under his arm and that's the ledger. And we went to Baker Beach and birth the books. I think I think everybody who read home baked had a point where they were yelling at the book get rid of the ledger. You drove me nuts. Yeah, the ledger. Oh, I was about me on the streets. Right that I had that down. I really did. But I was worried about the book. You know, so we have a question from Carolyn DeRue who says, this is for Alia. You speak about everyone with such compassion and understanding from police officers. You even brought a context to Dan White and the neighborhood that elected him. How did you bring so much compassion to so many people in this book. You know, I think I spent a lot of time talking with people that that I really, I really recommend this kind of oral oral history project to anybody even if you're not a writer to sit down with a tape recorder with your parents or the elders in your life doesn't have to be your parents with elders and ask them about their pasts because people don't. You know, and so I found like one of the things that surprised me so much in the interview process I kept thinking that people would be a little cage year or more protective of their stories about their legal activities or more hesitant to talk about personal loss during the AIDS years. And as it and as it turned out people it's like all you have to do is ask a couple of questions and especially with older people who are maybe looking at their own mortality boy the stories just come. And it really that kind of openness really helps you build compassion but I also just. I don't know I try to I try to get into people's perspective and understand that even though we have, and here we are in a time of terrible cultural divide that everyone is just trying to find their way through life it's not easy for anybody. And we might not see eye to eye but of course you know everybody is trying in some way so it. It's helpful to think about that. Yeah, I. I judge some people. Question from bill Burke. Could Merity speak a bit about how her dad encouraged her non conformist tendencies. He sounded like a great guy in the book. I think that my dad was a great guy. I think I was always a non conformist, I just what I was always an artist, always, like I had my first art scholarship when I was six. I was always an artist, which kind of made me a non conformist in a certain way. And my dad just love me. He just love me unconditionally where so he didn't actually push me into being more of a non conformist. He just accepted what I did because it was me doing it. Yeah. And, and he was a great guy and he had a great big heart, and he knew about the brownie business. And my dad was very street smart he's very sweet smart man, and he just was like just use your head use your instincts and be careful. And that's how he was. He was never judgmental of, of me, even when I got into trouble, he didn't. He just supported and loved unconditionally. Yeah. And I, I love this, I'm sorry we're jumping around but there's a lot of questions I love this question from violating. I do have a home baked music playlist and I'll be more specific and say, was there music that was inspiring you. And both of you, you know, say this gets made into a movie, what's like the Scorsese style soundtrack, like, are there a couple songs that that you think of when you think of the book. Definitely some disco in there. Yeah, so that's on a summer or some you know some early, early disco for sure that's, that's got to be part of it, because of the 70s. For one thing, where things kind of start out. The 80s starts to change. I mean then we go into what like Madonna and it changes again. Do you have any ideas, Holly. I mean, well, I don't know. There's there's some great San Francisco punk from the 70s. Vaster for sure. Definitely Sylvester. I mean I was close with Sylvester. I brought him brownies every Friday for, I don't know how many years. So he's part of that whole the whole disco scene. Also, I mean, right he's a big part of San Francisco history. So that would have to be part of a big part of it actually. I think a lot of people are asking about my parents artwork and so I'm going to I'm putting a couple links in the chat for my dad's website and my mom's website so you can see their work. And people are also asking about the bag so if I can just indulge for a second I have a couple of them here. So every Friday, or in Saturday. So these would go out and so the in a bag these are these are lunch bags. Here's the one with the recipe, actually. And so these are Z lunch bags, and sometime during the week. Doug or Mayor or somebody else in the warehouse would design one of these bags, based on whatever they were thinking about that week or whatever was going on something that was going on politically or here's Mayor's bagger. And it became a sort of underground comic, and if people bought a dozen brownies they would get a bag and so some people collected some people like collections of hundreds of these I have more than 100. Yeah, the bags are the bags are great and they're a lot of fun and then this was. This is a kind of a family portrait this is my dad's drawing of my mom while she's pregnant. And that became a t shirt, which Peter and Heather are both wearing I've reissued them. Folks can hit me up if you if you want one and I've made a couple new ones. Since then but yeah the artwork was such a big part of it I think I think a lot that customers really responded to the artwork right and would wait to see what's the design going to be this week. My favorite was the one that said if all the world's a stage San Francisco is the cast party. Yes, I actually have the original bag here. And that was done by a guest artist, who's still here in San Francisco, Stannis fluoride. And he gives, he gives tours of the hate and and and whatnot he's kind of he's a local historian the legend. He's a legend. Yeah, so standard a couple of bags. I think our hour is just about up but Peter you have an announcement right. Yeah, we have another big surprise. Our summer selection is going to be the end of the Golden Gate it's a collection of famous San Francisco writers. Yeah, we'll be back. We're just going to pick all the books until the end, writing about loving and sometimes leaving San Francisco, Gary Kamaya wrote the introduction. W come out bell Beth Alyssa Margaret show. And we think it's going to work really well because it'll get into a discussion about San Francisco is we're coming out of the pandemic. And also for podcasting. Heather and I are very excited to be talking to several of these personalities as the weeks and months go on so it's the total SF podcast wherever you get your podcast we have a during the pandemic we did a tribute to indie bookstores with authors, like Natalga Meyer and Stefan pastas the community, Jud Winnick. So check that out we'll be talking a lot about books and indie bookstores in the library there. And yeah, subscribe to the Chronicle and keep an eye on the San Francisco public libraries page. And then we'll be doing these virtual or in person we just absolutely love this relationship. It's such a great thing. Heather and I love the library we're open about it. If that makes us bias journalists, then so be it we love the library. We are pro library. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thanks to Anisa, Milady Michelle Jeffers and Michael Lambert with the San Francisco public library. And thanks to our partners at Green Apple books. Huge thanks to all you volts who will forever be our number one total SF book club author, and to her mom Merida for joining us that was a really special treat. Good night everybody. Thank you so much for coming out. Good night. Thank you everyone so much and Peter and Heather you guys are the best. We love you we are so happy that that you went on this journey with us it really was a journey and we'll stay in touch you're our next book to maybe we'll get you back on the podcast. Anytime, anytime. Wonderful to meet you Merida. Stay safe everyone. Thank you.