 My name is Marilyn Fowler and I am a DJ at KPO Radio. Please describe your ties to the Western Edition community. Well, first off, I was born in San Francisco, started out on Schrader Street, but my tie is the radio station, which is at 1329 to Visadero, which is just around the corner, practically. Can you tell me more about your experience growing up in San Francisco? Well, when I was little, we lived in the hate, and that's when they were, it was during the 60s, and we lived there until I was six-year-old until, and I'm quoting my mother exactly, those damned hippies moved in, which always makes me laugh, but yeah, so that's my time growing up. I went to Gratton when I was little, and then when I graduated from UC Berkeley, I moved back to San Francisco, and I've lived here ever since. And how did you get into working at KPO? It was by accident. The company that I was working for, the owner of the company was a gambler, and so the manager of the company decided to shut it down before the gambler ran the company into the ground, so suddenly I had this free time and I had some savings. A friend of mine said, hey, you should go volunteer at KPO, and I said, what's that? I listened to a program, and it was Peppermint Patty, and it was at the time that the guy had injected cocaine into his, and it fell off, and then she played Patsy Kline's I Fall to Pieces, and I was like, oh, that's a special kind of wrong. Yeah, I want to go do that, and so I called up, and I went in, and the station manager said, well, the DJ is here. He can show you how to queue up records, and I said, okay. And then he did it to about 15 minutes, and he said, well, why don't you get some records and practice in the other room? And so I did, and then he said, well, the DJ is leaving. Why don't you go on the air? And I was like, what? And I went on, and the board of supervisors meeting was that day, and they told me, oh, they hardly ever go on a closed session. They hardly ever end early. They did both. And so, and then the next DJ was an hour late, so I was on from 120 until 6 o'clock, and it was the most fabulous thing, and so. Do you remember that first radio show? Oh, yeah, because I had had a bad weekend. I had auditioned to be a dancer, and I thought I'd just tanked it, and then it was just a bad weekend, so it suddenly turned around. I was so excited that when I left, I was calling my friends, and no one was home, and the bus wasn't moving fast enough, so I had to get off the bus, and I ran, and I couldn't find any of my friends, and I just got an ice cream, but it was, I was just so excited. And then when I got home, it turned out that I actually got the, you know, became a dancer, so. Talk about a whirlwind. I know. Have you always been a performer? Really, I mean, I always liked drama, but the performing actually came, like everything changed in 1988. I went from, you know, kind of being in the, you know, doing clerical work in an office to doing radio and dancing, and I remember two dance troops, and yeah, I just sort of fell, and everything I've done, I've fallen into. So when you said you went to E.C. Berkeley, you didn't major in theater or dance or anything like that? No, no, I took a drama class, and I met a really good friend there, but no, I was focused on different things when, like when I first went in, I wanted to speak all the languages, but all of the finals for all the languages were on the exact same day at the exact same times, and I didn't know at the time that you could move finals around, so I was like, well, okay, let's figure out something else. And so you fell into dancing and radio, and how has that been? Well, I love it. There's no money in it at all, because the radio station is, all the DJs who are there are volunteer. Basically, everyone is volunteer, so people, the fact that it's been on for so long, so consistent is really a testament to people in the community who are willing to give their time and their effort to keep it going. That's commitment. Yeah, and a labor of love. Yeah, there are people who've been there from the get-go, been there since the 70s, and I've been there since 88, so people really love it. Have you ever missed a show? I'm not perfect at all, I'm not perfect at all, but I've never missed a show where there wasn't, it wasn't like I didn't show up. It was more like I knew I wasn't going to be there, so I would plan a show in advance, or I'd give them enough time so they could, because there's always someone who wants to be on the radio, so it's never a problem. Yeah, yeah, when I prepare a show, it's actually someone not getting to go on the air. And I know since it's a community run, a community run radio for the community, I'm sure you've met a lot of cool people from the community through it. I've been really lucky, I've met a ton of people. I have the librarians on the last Monday of every month because I've loved libraries since I was a kid. But I've met, I talked to one of the people who worked at NASA to get the, was it Rover, the Mars probe. I spoke to him the morning after they got it. So that was exciting. I've spoken to local impresarios, lots of drag personalities, Eddie Muller, who does the noir festival, Anita Manga, does the silent film festival, the people from the African American Shakespeare Company, Brava Theater, I've just been really lucky. I have a blue show and then I have an interview show and I've been really lucky that people want to come to the KPO and talk about their stuff. How do you find your interviewees? Do you seek them out or do they come to you or how does it work? It's a combination. When I first started doing it, it really was, for me it was, oh, there was a DJ who was on after me and he needed to take some time off and I said, oh well, I'll just have this show and it'll be like a placeholder till he comes back. But then he moved to be closer to his children so I was like, oh, I guess I'm doing this. So what I first did, I have a lot of friends who are performers so I'd ask them and I would get emails from people who wanted to come and talk about their stuff so I'd do that and it just sort of grew. So I'll be walking down the street and I'll see a post and I'll think, oh, that looks interesting, let me write that down or I'll be talking to someone and they'll say, oh, I'm doing this thing and I'll go, oh, do you want to come on in the show? But now I get an overwhelming number of emails. Hey, can this person be on, can that person be on, can we talk about this, can we talk about that? So the emails are a little bit daunting because as you know in the library there's just so many but I haven't had difficulty finding people at all. No shortage of material. No, no, there's always somebody in the Bay Area who's either performing or writing a book or doing science or, because I have the Wonderfest people on and they come on and they talk about their, I call it Centrelating Science Monday so that's the first Monday of the month but yeah, there's always, there's so much going on in the city, I wish I could accommodate everyone and it's really hard to not be able to. So you said you've been doing this since 1988. Yeah. I'm sure you've seen a lot of changes that have, you know, gone through the city, the community, can you tell me more about that? Well, we've gone through several housing, I'm going to call them catastrophes where, like even in the best of times, when I was a college student, UC Berkeley had a 1% vacancy rate and that was in the 80s and college was actually even affordable then so I was able to graduate without debt. So what I see happening now is when I was younger, if I didn't like where I lived, I could just move to a different part of the city so I've lived in a number of different parts. Nowadays, if you need to move, you're done. There's no way most people can afford to live in San Francisco. I'm lucky because I got, when the bubble burst from the 2001.com, housing prices sort of dropped and I was able to get in. Also, friends helped me get in but I've had so many friends who've had to move and they moved to Oakland and they're getting priced out there because they don't have as robust a rent control as we have here so that's really daunting. I've also seen sort of an explosion of homelessness and really sort of profound drug addiction. It's almost Dickensian in a way, just how down and out people are and that's concerning to me, I want that. At the same time, I've seen a burgeoning of theater and I've seen how the gay rights movement it's moved from activism to a very matter of fact like, oh yeah, we're gay, no big deal. You see the transformation of society from one that's not as tolerant to one that's very tolerant of diversity and that makes me happy and that children are more sort of like, oh yeah, gay isn't a big deal. That makes me happy. Yeah, maybe it's a mixed bag, change is change. I love that you mentioned both the positive and the negative. I guess that brings me to my last question. What are your hopes and dreams for the years to come for both the Community of Western Edition and the city as a whole and maybe even the world? My hope is that we find a way to deal with homelessness and people who have profound mental health issues in a way that's compassionate and because when someone is suffering on the streets you're not separate from it. I just feel like there's such a narrow, like I think of it as there but for the grace of God go I would just take one tiny little tweak in my circumstances for it to be me or you or anybody. So I would like that. I would like housing to be more affordable in the city. I would like the arts to flourish, to continue to flourish and I do like San Francisco's freak flag and I wanted to continue to fly with all its majesty and splendor. It sounds like you'll probably be staying in the city for long term. And while it's my birthplace, I don't want to leave ever. Thank you Marilyn. Thank you.