 It's not something, an era. It's not a fun topic of conversation yet for people. It's not like people share their war stories so much yet about the AIDS era, at least in my social circles. You know, no one had ever asked me, the book came about because no one had ever asked me what it was like. And Brontès Pernell said, what was it like when everyone started dying? And I was like, oh, you know, I'd never articulated it before. I just think I said something, oh, it was scary, I didn't like it. I didn't have an answer ready because no one had ever asked. So, and then like literally the night after he asked that question, I started the book. That's so heavy. That is so heavy to think about that. That we're all, you know, walking around having experienced that and not talking about it with anybody. Although, you know, I think about my parents' generation and- Right. They didn't talk about anything, right? You know, pogroms in Russia, they didn't mention it. Yeah. That's the old country. Yeah, we don't know about that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the ACT UP crew is sort of the opposite of that, that this is a group of people, you know, the ones who have survived and are still around and all on social media together and all talking about it all the time. So that was the opposite problem, the pressure to sort of represent a time that means so much to so many people. And yet still, even for all the things that have been written in the movies that are starting to come out and so on, there's still a way this history isn't talked about, the silences you're talking about, Alvin, and just the general way in which queer history isn't really taught to young people. And so there's a lot of urgency around like the story being told right and a lot of people who sort of feel like they have ownership of the story. And it's a really fascinating thing for this community to still be at it. I mean, I got most of my information about COVID from the former AIDS activists, some of them are still in treatment issues, a lot of whom are public health people now or have gotten into professionalized fields that grew out of that experience with AIDS. Those were the people I was getting all the information about COVID from. So that crew, those people, are still at it and still talking about it. But I think the thing you're talking about that's so beautiful is that the personal silences are still there, right? It's easy to talk about the policy or about the fights of the one, but what about that night when? I have been getting a lot of stories. Since the book came out, people have been calling me up and telling me new stories. And so my publisher's listening, I will do an extended remix. I will throw in 40 pages of interesting stuff for the edition. If you like Marguerite D'Arrai, you'll just write the same story again as another book. We'll all buy it again because we love this one. So shall we do the lightning round of questions, Beth? Oh yeah, I wanted to just do a little bit of a getting to know you quick quiz with Alvin because I just think it's just fun to sort of, it's sort of a Proust Questionnaire style. But I did want to put on some music. I don't know if we'll be able to hear it as we just ask him a few questions. Okay. Alvin. If I were to make an Alvin Orloff art film that followed you around for 24 hours, who should I ask to compose the score? Not Alvin from Soft Cell. Good answer. Alvin, which business establishment would you visit first after everything reopens in San Francisco? The 80th thrift on Valencia Street. Best thrift store in town. Right. Speaking of thrift stores, which thrift store find have you had the longest? Well, I've been a thrift store addict since the age of 16. So I can't actually remember that far back, but this is maybe my best. This is a 3D image of a beautiful woman looking in the mirror on her vanity and suitable for framing. It's gorgeous. Does she have macrame around her wine goblet in the front there? What is going on? I think, yeah, I think it may be a macrame perfume holder, perfume bottle holder. Okay, this is straight from the Proust questionnaire. On which occasion do you lie? If people ask me if I like their new haircuts, I always say regardless of what I think, it's great. Because once they've got their hair cut, there's nothing they can do about it. Very, very smart. Alvin, if you had to make your living by selling a craft project on Etsy, what would that craft project be? I lack manual dexterity, so I think the only thing I could really do was glue googly eyes on pine cones and little felt noses and feet and call them piney people and sell piney. I'm sure there's a market. Maybe you could learn how to do macrame perfume bottle cozies for your future. That would be also a good one, but I'd have to learn macrame. But I'd be up and up for it. Yeah. Two more questions. Name a memorable customer at the bookstore where you work. Well, this is a stereotype smasher. A woman in the burqa came in and went straight to the gay porn section and spent, oh gosh, maybe 45 minutes leaping through every piece of gay porn that we have. Incredible. Every of your stereotypes, just throw them out. Yeah, thank you. In your book, you talk about how Tony vaguely got Lauren Bacall to write a letter to a diet when he was in the hospital. And I'm just wondering, which legend of the silver screen would you wanna receive a correspondence from in a time of crisis? I'm gonna have to say Carrie Grant because his debonair energy is what you need in a crisis. You need someone who's got that Genesequai debonair style energy. That's a good way to end it coz I feel like you have that energy right now, Alvin. And we'll just do a play a little. Okay, that was just a little getting to know you questionnaire with Alvin Orloff. Thank you very much. Well done, well done. Thank you, Beth. Someone just, someone wants you to post your questionnaire so they can ask everyone those questions. Because that is, that is the window to the soul questions. Window to the soul. Somebody else wants to see your whole apartment, as do I. I can do like a Jackie Kennedy touring the White House sort of. With just a voice that really nice just soft, very soft spoken. This is my couch. Yeah, I love that. Someday. So, Beth, your book came out in the middle of the COVID crisis and you haven't been able to tour. I'm so sorry. I know. I know. I wish you could go on a great big tour and tell everybody. I know. I know. Well, do you remember? Yeah, I do. Remember, we were gonna do this event in person. When it first started, we thought, well, by June it'll be fine and I'll come out to San Francisco and we'll do the event in person. I know, we were wishful thinking. But yeah, this is my new book. It's called Edie on the Green Screen and it's a novel. And yeah, and I, you know, I'll be out. I get, come out to San Francisco a lot during the normal time. So we'll see whenever I can get, you know, who knows, 2021. Here's hoping. So one of the reasons I like that in your novel so much is because it's about someone who has to move on from a world that, let me put it this way. There's a Susie in the Banshee song called Your Party's Fall because your parties fall around you. And it is very much what happens to Edie, the main character in your book. And it's very much what happened to me when all my friends died all at once. And the scene that I was part of blew away. I was gone with the wind. And so I'm wondering, it's the personal disasters, the way they link up with national disasters has become an interesting thing for me. And I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this question. Well, you know, well, I think it's interesting because I think in a time of a disaster or a personal disaster or national, international global disaster, you are forced to look or you should be looking inward and trying to figure out who you really are and what's important to you. And I think that like we were talking about with, your friends dying of AIDS and the city gentrifying people having to move, people leaving that now in this time when we're all sequestered in our homes for the most part and then wanting to go out in the streets and protest and you know, you have to think about who you are without a lot of the external stuff and what's important to you. So. Outside of my social circle. So yeah, crisis and opportunity, a crisis, a unity as Homer Simpson once dubbed it. Oh, you didn't even have to attribute that to Homer. I would have thought it was you. No, for whoever wrote Homer Simpsons dialogue. I feel so unprepared. I don't have any Homer Simpsons quotes of my fingertips right now. Might be the only one. Okay, let me think about some more things to talk about. Gosh. So. All right, this is an interesting thing. Nostalgia gets a really bad rap these days. People hate the very thought of old people talking about the old days. People are very suspicious of that. It seems kind of sentimental and maybe escapist and self-indulgent, but I am sort of of the opinion that you can't really escape nostalgia if you're going to talk about history if you live through it. And. Oh, that's interesting. I think you should talk about that, Carl, with your new book, yeah. So Carl, I mean, a lot of people I know are nostalgic for the AIDS era because of the sense of community and purpose they had as activists. Have you encountered this? That is the ultimate crazy nostalgic thing to say. It's like when I was young and people would say, oh, I'm nostalgic for the closet. It was so much more interesting then. Now everything's just out there and in your face. It makes no sense at all, right? Like the worst, most painful epidemic where how many thousands of people in this city alone died and then people are like, but this happened and that happened and it's so much better than now. I mean, good Lord, if there's one thing people can just take off their nostalgia list, I would say the AIDS epidemic would be one for starters. And maybe people are just nostalgic for whatever happens when they're young. It doesn't matter. It can be, you know, Anzio storming the beach at Anzio, but it doesn't matter because you were young. I don't know. Yeah, I think there was a difference between looking back and saying there were things that I miss or things that were better, but nostalgia sort of is, I guess, despite its very definition, is supposed to kind of sugarcoat all that, right? So it sort of just sort of feeds upon itself right away, right? Unfortunately, I think I'm generally prone to nostalgia. I just have this Pollyanna view of everything and I don't know that it's going. Yeah. Now I'm kind of nostalgic too. A selective like, almost like a survival mechanism to block out the pain and like... Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think... Have you ever seen the movie Pollyanna with little Hailey Mills? I mean, it's really good movie. I recommend it. Someone wrote the comments nostalgic for my hair. Hi, Gary. Hi, Gary. That's a nostalgia I can definitely get behind. Somebody does want to know if we still love the city. Do y'all still love the city? Yes. I do. Weirdly. Okay, here's why I still love the city because I don't know how they do it, but there's all these young queer people, LGBTQ, I, et cetera, et cetera, people moving to the city still and they've still got great energy and I don't think they have lives as easy as it was for me or before AIDS, because they're paying ridiculous rents and they've got to work really, really hard and if you moved here in 1979, you didn't have to work that hard, but these young people with lots of energy and creativity are moving to the city and they're great to be around. I love hearing that. The young people at the store where I work and they're delightful. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I love the city. I live in Stoma. I live right near, not too far from Civic Center or Sixth Street and it's until this horrible pandemic and shut down, it's been incredibly vibrant down here. The stud being bought by this collective of 17 people, most of them in 20s, 30s, 40s, and revamping it and all this new programming that got brought into that bar where suddenly there was like some, their survival mechanism was to just do lots and lots of new programming. So this is this whole new wave of drag, bands playing and just building off that great stud tradition of every part of our coalition, our queer LGBTQ, IAA, allies all together, just beautiful stuff. I mean, Wicked Grounds Cafe, the King Cafe, that's like super trans positive space, like doing all this great kinky stuff and bring that whole dialogue up to stuff around consent. And there's so much cool stuff that's been actually going on like right here in the heart of the city. And I trust that San Francisco is always gonna find that next generation that's gonna be able to do it. It's a direct line from what you were writing about in your book Alvin and you were writing about your book Beth to these kids today, they always show up. Who knows, how? And I'm just the other day I was there was a rally here in the mission of Black Lives Matter rally and it was organized by, guess how old the people who organized it, 17, and there were like 2000 people. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, the same thing for the protest that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, which again, a direct lineage back to like the act up days of protest organized by a 17 year old black girl from San Ramon, like stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge because she got protests together. I mean, that makes me say love San Francisco because the politics spirit, the grassroots, all of it. Yeah, I love all that. Well, I think that that's good too. It's a good counterpoint to the connotation of nostalgia being this, things aren't as great as they used to be and things were better when, it's like having direct experiences with people who are younger, who are doing bullshit, who are there making things happen in the same way that we all were trying to do when we were their age or, I mean, that makes me really happy because I haven't been around San Francisco as much, so I don't know about the young people. Of course, it's like you just read about the, in the New York Times, all the tech ruining everything and people love to complain about it, you know? And it's hard. I mean, I basically had to write my book so that I could complain about it in a certain way because it was just hearing it everywhere and I was feeling it, but you don't, what are you gonna do if all you're doing is complaining? And yeah. But you know, one thing about, the universe loves to humiliate me and so I complain, complain, complain about tech and then this COVID thing comes in and I'm locked in my apartment and I'm so glad for all the technology. I'm so glad that we can do this. Boom, I'm so glad I've got the horrible social media that drive me crazy. I'm glad that, you know, it's an irony, a sad irony that's been once again forced to bow down and say, yeah, tech has its points. Yeah, yeah. Well, what's interesting to me about it too is like it's often positioned as tech versus, you know, versus San Francisco or tech is destroying San Francisco, but I know so many creative people who have jobs in tech and they are not the tech that you sort of always hear about, right? Like there's lots of incredible people who are creative, who need work and that's where the jobs are. So I feel like the dichotomy of like tech killed San Francisco, is just really simplistic and for me it always goes back to capitalism. Realistic, capitalism, you know, greed around land use, like that to me is the real villain of, you know, that's the thing that's gonna kill the city, it's gonna be that shit. And it's horrible, but it's happening to every city. I don't think it's happening. I mean, we're just a little bit ahead on the curve, but it's so sad, you know, I did get to go to a few other cities on my book tour when the book came out and, you know, Seattle, you know, same thing, you know, it's all the nightmare of gentrification is. I love what we're all writing about the past, so we can just like kind of focus on that and let the futurists tell us what's actually gonna happen on the other side of this because I can't write that. We need Ursula Gwinn or someone like that. Yeah, right. There is a question, will we be better or worse when we emerge on the other side of the pandemic? Yes. I think both. I think some things are gonna be way, way better and some are gonna be way, way worse. I really, I think that the economic nightmare that's been going on for like, for me, it's like 25 years, this slow erosion of security and just finding it more and more impossible to live. And people weren't really talking about it until like what, 2008, the, what was it, what was it, the name of the group? Occupy? Occupy, yeah, came along and then sort of, but now I think it's got that whole energy of wanting to redress the economic inequalities is getting a big boost from this because, I mean, everyone's seeing that, you know, the corporations are using COVID as an excuse to loot the public treasury and throwing crumbs to everybody who is not part of the corporate elite. And I think that on the other side of COVID, I think we're gonna see some real class action, some real class conflict and it's gonna come out in the open again. My prediction. Take notes. Or worse, I mean, gosh, we're all gonna have to be really careful for a really long time because I don't think COVID is a once off disease. I think that humanity has pushed nature so far and we're explaining animals so horribly and so heavily that there are gonna be more pandemics rooted in, what do they call it, zua, something or other? Yeah. I can't remember the exact word. A lot more diseases are gonna be jumping into the human species from all the animals we're mistreating. Let's talk about how we miss the 80s, Alvin. We have a question up here. What would diet say about COVID, et cetera, if you were zooming with us? The diet pop institute is my great partner in crime who is the kind of centerpiece. He was my soulmate and centerpiece of the book, Disasterama, and he would find something really irreverent to say about it, but I can't quite think what. And this is one, zoonosis, Kevin Clark knows the word that I was looking for for diseases. All right, back to diet. He would have something really irreverent and kind of disturbing to say, yeah, we had it coming. There we go. Yeah, I think diet might very well say we had it coming. Oh, Monique Jentensen has a question. Memorize, we had to change or delete anything because of people not wanting to be included. No, no one told me, don't say it. What about you, Beth? Has anyone ever asked to be taken out of your writing? Mm, I'm trying to think. I don't think so. If they knew that I was writing, I don't think anybody said, I mean, my husband's great about it. I don't write about my kid. And I've never written about really very specifically about my oldest brother who died five years ago, who had a lot of disabilities and I'm trying to write about him now. But that was more inferred that I realized that neither my son nor my brother would probably like to be written about while they're around and aware of it, yeah. I never write about my siblings, but we're in good terms. I mean, I don't have anything bad to say about them, but I just haven't got around to them yet. Yeah, we've got time. Yeah. Well, I think earlier, I know she's still here, but my younger sister was on this chat, so maybe I should ask her how she felt. Her writer and the family, who's always sort of thinly fictionalizing your family. Monique, I don't think I've been asked to change or been told to change by anyone I've written about. But I have conversed, oh, there's Cam, your first book was very interesting on that front. That's my sister. Yeah, when I created a family where the youngest child got killed off and here she is alive and kicking. I've done it because, yeah, like Beth was saying, inferred what would be the way to kind of handle it, right? No demands. Another question, when we set our writing pre or post COVID, if we were to start a new project right now, what do we want to write about? Oh my God. I have something to say about this. Because I've been working on a screenplay with my screenwriting partner, Aaron Cantor, and we started a script, we had sketched it out last year at some point, but we really started working on it in earnest, sort of right before Shelter in Play started. And we live in different cities, so we were doing everything remotely anyway. And then it was a script set in the San Francisco nightlife and there was actually a scene set at the stud and while we were writing it, the stud closed down. And our whole goal was to be able to shoot a film in our community, about our community, and suddenly the venue itself was gone. And it really was a moment of reckoning that I'm not sure we've completely recovered from yet where we've had to really think about, okay, is this a pre-COVID script where we set this scene in the nightlife before nightlife went away for some unforeseen period of time or are we trying to be futurist and imagine, okay, this is set in 2021 or 2022 and this thing might actually get shot and what does it look like? And it's a real dilemma and I'm finding this with my students, I teach at USF and a lot of students are writing novels and they're trying to figure out like, if you're writing a contemporary story where it feels like a real line in the sand, right? Because reality is so different on either side and I think it's so critical. You can't really just try to figure it out. Oh gosh. Yeah, I think I would have to write about pre-COVID because it takes me a really long time to know what I think about anything. Like I know what I think about the events that happened to me and my friends in 2015, 2018, I'm still digesting that. It's just having a very slow brain. And we have another couple of questions here. What are our favorite books as kids? Oh my gosh, the Oz series. There are like 26 Oz books. L. Frank Baum wrote 14 and then Ruth Plumlee Thompson wrote like 20 and Jessica, there's so many Oz books and they were so great. What about you guys? I read all the Zulfa Keatley Snyder books and I was really little but I would take a lot of my mom's books off the bookshelf and read sex scenes. You know, when I was very young. So a lot of Sidney Sheldon, a lot of, you know, she read everything. Danielle Steele, what are those books? Flowers and the Attic. That's all about like incest between siblings. I just, I read a lot of really weird stuff when I was little. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we, my parents had a copy of Jacqueline Suzanne's Once Is Not Enough that ends in an acid orgy. And last year for Linquake, there was an event at the Green Arcade Bookstore that was about pulp. And they wanted us to talk about the influence of pulp on our writing. And so I just went to Jacqueline Suzanne. I was like, it's more camp than pulp. And I read the acid orgy scene at the Green Arcade Bookstore and it was really, really one of my favorites. I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna have to revisit that. That's, it's, the protagonist is a girl named January who has daddy issues and winds up in an acid orgy. Yeah, this one does. There's another question now. Are there other San Francisco memoirs we recommend, favorites? I'd say Michelle T's Valencia. I love, love that book. And there's a new one from Mark Hustis, The Impressario of Castro Street. Oh yeah, I haven't read that. A lot of showbiz type stuff. And, and, and Olya Volts has a new one about growing up in a family of pot brownie distributors. Oh yeah, called Homebaked. Homebaked, that's a great one. Yeah, I like Homebaked, that's really great. It's our next month's on the same page. So, Olya will be here. He's great. What about self-censorship around memoir? Do you ever struggle with worrying about how people might react to your version of a story versus how they might remember it? Yes. I do worry about it. I didn't actually encounter any, any difficulties. No one telling. Well, no, there was one thing I attributed something. I won't say it because it's embarrassing, but to someone other than me. But I did attribute a certain heroic act to somebody who didn't actually engage in a heroic act. And I discovered it afterwards. But I don't really self-censor. I just try to get it right. And, oh, and someone pointed out a new of what really wonderful memoir of San Francisco, Fairyland by Alicia Abbott, which is a must read about a young girl growing up with her gay dad and her gay dad is kind of a bohemian writer type in the new narrative movement. And that's a really great book, Fairyland. Yeah, and I would also concur with, oh, the glory of it all, Sean Willse's book. Oh, right, I forgot. Get all the tea on Ms. Dee Dee Willse, honey. I know, don't miss it. And then, of course, Pat Montadon, his mother wrote, oh, the hell of it all in response. I never read her version. I didn't read that one. We did a, we did a Portsite show where we had both Pat and Sean on the, on the show. It was fantastic. They both kind of told their versions, but yeah, she's amazing. Are you going to read from your book, Alvin? It's this time. Yeah, read from your book. All right, so I'm just going to read, because this is a time of protest and I want people to be able to kind of, I think we're all looking for new creative ways to protest. I'm just going to read this one little bit. This is in the height of the act up queer nation era, probably around 1992-ish or so. And example one, picture me writhing on the sidewalk outside of Macy's Union Square on Black Friday, while someone dressed as a can of Coors beer pretend kicks me and someone dressed as a pack of Marlboro's pretend clubs me with a cigarette. My friend, Dyatt, who's the lead singer of the pop institutes, the band I was in, sings the mugging and earnest young activists hand out flyers urging a boycott of Coors and Marlboro for funding anti-gay politicians. Pedestrians ignored us as they rushed off to buy gifts for Christmas. Example two, an evangelical preacher in the Sunset District publicly urges that gay should be put to death. So the pop institutes joined the sisters of perpetual indulgence for a counter sermon. I brought along the Daiglo Orange Cross in which I had recently been crucified as a playboy bunny for an Easter show and we produced some convoluted street theater outside the church. Theater is the only weapon available to the penniless and powerless. So we were doing the best we could, but alas, our little show was both inaudible and invisible to the congregants inside the church, which resembled nothing so much as a World War II bunker with stained glass windows and a spire that couldn't have been used as a gun turret. Dyatt and I never discussed it, but we both knew that the giant corporations and religious zealots we were protesting barely noticed our existence. Such a bogeyman lived in the real world, a place where theatrically expressed opinions by oddly dressed youngsters meant less than nothing. That our demonstrations didn't change a lot of minds, didn't make them entirely useless though. Sometimes you have to preach to the choir to make them sing louder. Plus our ineffectual protests made us feel better like kicking a cabinet door on which you've just banged your shin. And maybe just maybe by registering our objections to being reviled, we salvaged a bit of dignity. Whatever the case, protesting kept us busy, essential since we were young and incapable of sitting still. The end. Okay, let's hear from one of you two. Oh, do you wanna, I feel like Carl, you read and then maybe there's more questions for Alvin. I feel like, yeah. Sure, well, this would be a good segue because I'm writing about that same period. I'll be reading about that same period too. So this is from the novel about Act Up that I was referring earlier. And just a little setup here. So it's 1989, it's New York. There's a narrator and his boyfriend who are two white boys in their early 20s involved with Act Up. And the third character you'll meet is Floyd who's a black activist in the group who's 15 to 20 years older than him. And right before this happens, there's a scene or the previous time you see Floyd in the book, he has kind of schooled a bunch of the younger white Act Up activists about their sort of clumsy language and presumptions around doing outreach to communities of color. So Floyd has schooled our narrator and this is the first time we're seeing him after that. They run into him in the West Village at night and there's some small talk and then they offer to buy him a drink. Floyd steers us to the ninth circle, a bar we've never been to before. Inside it's sad and a little seedy. Floyd sits on a bar stool, legs crossed, smoking a cool and sipping a grasshopper. This has been my drink since I first came to New York. Oh, I used to have fun here, he says. In the 70s, this bar was the place. Did you come here after Stonewall? I asked, child, I was at Stonewall. He's smiling now. The Stonewall wasn't much for fancy cocktails though. He went there to dance. To this day when I hear Aretha Franklin's think, I go right back to that summer when we fought the police. All of us dancing with our hands in the air singing freedom. People claim that Judy Garland's death set off the riot, I say, he shrugs. Judy was beloved, but I'm not sure she deserves credit for our rebellion. The harassment was constant, especially for us Black brothers and sisters. You'd sit on a stoop with your friends enjoying a summer night and the police would tell you to move along, threatened to arrest you for loitering, but we didn't move along. We just put more asses on more stoop. You had to be on the streets if you wanted to claim the streets. They couldn't arrest everybody. As we exit the bar, he sits down on the stoop and gestures to us to do the same. Come on, children, feel it with me. Lounge. We sit and then lounge, spreading ourselves out like we own the steps. Floyd says, back then, you'd have your one pair of jeans, just one. That's right, your second skin, you'd buy them shrink to fit, put them on, step into the shower and soak. Let them dry onto your body and then you wear them till they were falling off. Today you all want new, new, new, but back then you walked around with your history showing. Oh girl, I can see your history, I joke. That's right, read it and weep. He takes us on a tour pointing out bars that were open 20 years earlier and places where bars used to be and places where cruising happened that were now either desolate or gentrified. He points to the Oscar Wilde bookshop. Before we had a community center, you went here and asked your questions. What's the best happy hour? Where's the protest march beginning? What's the number for the VD clinic? Didn't matter who was working, they'd answer or they'd know who to ask. Walking us down Christopher Street, he says, a year after Stonewall, we marked it with what we called Christopher Street Liberation Day. That became Gay Freedom Day. Then someone decided to rename it Pride. As far as I'm concerned, that was the beginning of the end. The end of what, Derek asks? We were blown away by what we saw at the Gay Pride Parade. Once you're celebrating Pride, instead of freedom, you're just saying, look at me, but freedom. Just another word for nothing left to lose, I finish. Yes child, that's right. The white woman who sang that song was half a dyke herself. She knew the score. That's it. I know everyone is clapping. That was amazing. Oh thank you, thank you. I hear you with my heart. Beth, you wanna read a little piece? Yeah, I had something marked, but I just didn't know if we were running out of time or... Okay, I can have two minutes excerpt here. This is when Edie goes back to her, the warehouse that she's been living in, on Mission Street late one night. The warehouse was unlocked, never a good sign. The entrance was a set of swinging glass doors, which made it look like a barely functioning business, a shabby hardware store or shady credit union. If it were left unlocked for even five minutes, someone would come wandering in off the street, because the Art Fart Warehouse was known to the local street populace as a place where if you tried enough times, you were eventually bound to gain entry. There were so many variables with its unpredictable residents, including states of inebriation, relationship drama or habitual spaciness, that it was a miracle the door ever got locked. You'd think caution would be rampant in a communal living space with all its bed hopping and disappearing peanut butter, but personal responsibility was a tough nut among warehouse dwellers. Because of, sorry, because of this, the place was being ripped off constantly when plenty of people were home. Bikes, records, stereo equipment, computers, and musical instruments were easy to snatch and pawn. I, on more than one occasion, had bought my own stuff back from Anthony at Eagle Loan, but sometimes I was too late and everything had already been sold. When my stereo got stolen in the middle of the day while I was sleeping, my refrain was, well, at least I don't have to worry about my stereo getting stolen anymore. That's when I got a padlock for my bedroom door. I hesitated at the threshold for a second. Something was off. It was raining. It was raining inside, but it wasn't raining outside. The front workspace was dark, which was strange, because there was always a light burning somewhere, and there was water falling from the ceiling. It smelled like rotting garbage sacks with occasional surges of something even more foul, human. I rushed back into the kitchen and there were my roommates, Ed, Jen, Jake, Luke, Luke's girlfriend, Keisha, and the new British guy who had given everyone tattoos with a gun he made from an old Walkman. They sat in the red vinyl booth, a massive curved banquette that had been rescued from a diner and was patched with duct tape, holding umbrellas over their heads. A few tall votives burned on the table and no one was talking. They barely looked up when I ran in. You guys, what's happening? They immediately sprang to life like a switch had been flipped on grubby animatronic dolls. Answers came spilling out from everyone. It's the pipes from up there, from the fucking hotel. It's fucking toilet water from junkies. It's ship water and shower water. It won't stop. I was rarely surprised by anything anymore, but I did want to know one thing. How can you guys just be sitting there while shit is raining down on you? Okay. I think that's very 2020. This is what 2020 is. It's just the shit is raining down on all of our heads right now. Listening to that, reading that, I went back to this nostalgia question because I started remembering the apartment that I was in when it wasn't necessarily shit water, but it was some kind of foul, filthy water that came down. And I had a pang of nostalgia while you were reading. It wasn't that great to just be rained on in your own house. The nostalgia is that you survived it, right? Like, you don't really want to get blood or anything more, but the fact that you lived through it and you got out the other side and you're okay, I think that allows it or something. Yeah, good point, good point. Yes. So I think we're kind of out of time, aren't we? 7.15, I think that's supposed to be our cutoff. Are there any words of farewell that people want to? Everyone can secretly unmute themselves if they really want to speak. Beth, did you have something to say, though? No, I just wanted to say thank you so much for sponsoring this and thanks to Carl and Reed Alvin's book if you haven't read it yet and you just enjoyed this conversation because it really is, it manages to be so funny in such a bleak time. And I feel like we all need that right now. Well, I think that's what tonight was. I think this was so fun and it definitely, it took me away from our reality for an hour and 15 minutes and I really appreciate the humor that has happened here tonight. And the audience, this has been the most lively audience that we've had for a presentation so I appreciate you all too for chatting and keeping it going. And you may unmute yourself and say something if you'd like, keep it cool. Don't make me, make me hear you again. Anyone wants to turn down their videos and give a smiley face. Talk to us, talk to us. I love to see people, I miss, I miss everyone. Thank you Alvin and Beth and Nissa and Lisa for... Yeah, yeah. Yes, I feel lucky to be on board. There's somebody, everybody waving. Mr. Jim Van Busker, there's Mr. Jim. He's gonna be presenting at the end, the 25th, June 25th, pre-stonewall. There was a pre-stonewall. What? Come find out. It's nice to see all you people. The library loves you and misses you. Thank you library, thank you library. Thank you library. And this is where it gets really weird. So we're done, we're done. We're done. Just fire us all, just fire us all. I'm gonna fire you, but you will get an email from me and it'll be a wrap up and the video will be available eventually. One more time with the link for everything we talked about, which I just sent to Lisa. Now let me send that to everybody. All right, good night, beautiful people.