 Hello, Muni lovers. Yes, we love Muni. Our library wants to thank you all for being here. We know there's so many other places to be, but the Civic Center is gorgeous on Sunday, Farmers Market. We're gonna have a book signing because I know you've got all those books outside the lobby, in the lobby, correct lobby, after the event. Please make your way that way once we conclude. You can talk to everybody who is behind the book, in the lobby. Our library wants to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Ram Yatush Sholoni people, with the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working in their traditional homeland, and as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first people and wish to pay their respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ram Yatush community. I encourage you all to check out Segorte Land Trust and all women-led indigenous land back movement coming out of Oakland. They're doing amazing work, and they can always use your help with those dollar signs. Check them out. I also want to thank all of the amazing people behind the scenes of this library that make things happen, Mike and Kenny, our custodial crew, who really you don't see them, but they do all they are the spine of this place. With that, I want to tell you about one amazing event we have coming up Tuesday. It's an off-site event, so I'm really trying to get everyone to come out and really support when we do off-site events. This is going to be at the African-American Art and Cultural Complex, the amazing author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, and she will be in conversation with Dorothy Lazard, who is a East Bay historian and librarian, so of course we love her, and this book on the rooftop is all about 1950s San Francisco in the Fillmore era, and based around a mother and her daughter's singing group that she's fostering, and then comes into all sorts of gentrification that happens in the city. It's an amazing book. Come check it out, and I hear there's going to be free books at that event as well, so come get both of our author's events that night. Alright. Again, book signing and the lobby after the event. We're so excited today. I've been working with Leah on this event for about two, three months now, so we're excited to see it come together, and I'm excited to see a pretty nice full house in here. So, muni through the eyes of Keith Ferris, colorful pencil portraits of operators, lively drylings of bus passengers, and black-and-white depictions of bus stops, paired with Leah's engaging interviews. Muni operators share nitty-gritty of their daily hustle and transporting passengers across the city, offering insights to what sparked their journey into this profession. Muni is my ride, is sure to delight. Keith Ferris has exhibited in the 1970s, maintained a fine art studio for over 47 years, although his focus has been on abstract oil painting and canvas, drawing remains a foundation to his work. The over 50 drawings in Muni is my ride, which he started in 2009, evolved and helped him hone his ability to capture a likeness in his portraiture. Leah Smith writes short stories and novels. She has had short stories published in both national and literary magazines. She has employed her writing skills to advocate for her community and has project-managed several community art installations, including the Alamany Island beautification project, the first freeway pillar painting in San Francisco, and flanked by 48 art panels at the intersection of Alamany Boulevard and San Bruno, which also features a librarian. I love those. They're so beautiful. You should go walk it sometime. It's really great. All right, and with that I'm going to bring up Leah Smith. Welcome everybody. That librarian is actually here, the one in the panel, Roz. Roz, where are you? Okay, what a beautiful crowd. This is really wonderful to see all of you here. Thank you so much for coming. How many of you like me took Muni or public transportation to get here today? All right, I was pretty sure I was going to see that show of hands. Thank you for coming to celebrate the people who make Muni run. We want to thank San Francisco Public Library for hosting us and a really big special thank you to Anissa Malady, who was just up here and someone who's not here, Nicole Termini-Germain, who made this event happen for us. Big shout out to our publisher, Patrick Marks, for believing in our work and getting it out to you. Truly a labor of love and we're deeply grateful. We also want to thank Julie Ann Ewen, our designer. So her design is amazing. She also took painstaking attention to detail to make sure that Keith's work is shown as at its best. And in the loop, when you see the loop later, you'll see there are a lot of like lines. She got rid of all of that stuff for the book that you hold in your hands. So we hope that your curiosity has brought you here and there will be time for questions. After we give you a little bit of information about the art processes and an earful from operators that you will meet in the book. So let's see if I can handle the technology here. OK, here we go. Thank you, Mike. So 2011 was the first passenger drawing. Each passenger drawing was inspired by the uniqueness of a passenger. And all 27 of the passenger drawings represent 10 years of serendipity and spontaneity. So what Keith would do is if he saw something that really struck him on the bus, he's a regular bus driver, he would, a bus rider, he would fix that image in his mind and go home and do a quick sketch. So in this case, he was attracted by this pair, a little girl and her mother, both carrying umbrellas. So he comes home, goes to his studio, does the quick sketch, and then does notes, colors, details, things that he wants to include. And this is the final. So here's another example of from his sketchbook. So you see a little tableau. So he's doing a quick sketch to sort of set in his mind the position of the bodies and also little notes about colors and details. There's a little notation that says nice loafers. You'll you'll notice shoes are a theme. Here's another quick sketch. So he saw this tableau in the back of the bus. And you'll notice on the right hand side, he's used watercolor because he's experimenting to see how am I going to treat this man's coat. Ultimately, he did go with colored pencil, but that just gives you a little bit insight into how he's working these up. And in this example, on the left hand side, you see the quick sketch with notes. On the chair, it says blue, but in the final, there's no blue. So he put the color actually outside the window. And that that drawing is a little bit unusual. It's, I think, one of the only drawings that has a something in the background outside the bus. Notice the shoes. When in a rare instance, when Keith's memory was not sufficient, he would ask me to model for him. So he instructed, he got this big coat and he said, hey, put this on. And he instructed me how to pose for him so that he could recreate the drape of this man's coat. And for this beautiful jacket and bag, he decided to go with India ink. And so these two from his notes or whatever are where he's experimenting with the India ink to make sure he gets the effect that he wants. And here's the final young man on his cell phone, beautiful black jacket and the big black satchel with this huge buckle. So another element that he brought in was construction paper. This is Cynthia Bailey, a wonderful operator. If you get a chance to ride her 30, she usually drives the 38 Geary. She's wearing a muni issue blue coat for cool weather. And that's blue construction paper. And what Keith did was he came in on top with colored pencil, light blue, dark blue, black and red to model the form and make it look like there was actually a body inside this clothing. Here's another example of that technique. This is Mike Delia, rest in peace. Mike passed last fall. He's a wonderful F car operator known as Mr. Boston is from Boston. Again, he was wearing a rich black jacket, black hat and then Keith came in on top with dark blue pencil, red, gray, white to model the shape, model the form. And in this last example, this is Alex Rodriguez. He's wearing a dark black hoodie and you can't see it so much in this slide, but you can see it in the book where he's Keith has gone in with dark blue pencil to create that form. Um, so all the operator portraits were permission driven. The passenger drawings are all anonymous. Those people don't know that they were being fixed in this man's memory and recreated in the studio. So this is a preliminary sketch of Dustin Wells. He came to our house for an interview. Notice the disembodied hand on the table. So Keith was really fascinated with Dustin's hands and he's very happy how the hands turned out. So you can check that out in the book. If there was something in the preliminary sketch that Keith thought that's it, he would do a pencil transfer. So in this case, it was Dustin's head, the attitude, the shape, the size, everything just was like perfect. So Keith did this pencil transfer to save himself a little work. And here's another preliminary sketch with notes. This is Wendy Lee. Um, she drives for Kirkland. And again, you'll see the disembodied hands down at the bottom. Uh, he wanted to capture how she had laced her fingers together. And again, there are little notes there that he, what he wants to capture. So Keith told the operators, um, that they could wear anything they liked. So some chose their uniform. This is Bram Benzekri sitting at a picnic table in McLaren Park, which is near a house where he gave a pose for Keith. And Keith did a quick sketch and then worked up this drawing. And, um, we interviewed, oh, and others chose their favorite shirt. This is the Primo Rivera. And when his friends saw the book for the first time, they said, Primo, that is your favorite shirt. Those were really amazing. Well, some of the operators we interviewed on the job. So necessarily they were wearing their uniform. This is David Chin. He's on a short break on the nine San Bruno. We caught him down at Market Street and he was so gracious. He agreed to the interview on the spot. Um, so he's in his uniform. And Harley DeVira also wanted to be in his uniform, but we interviewed Harley during the pandemic via zoom. We have never met this wonderful young man in person. We hope to someday. He wasn't wearing his sunglasses for the interview, but he said after he saw the portrait, he said, you got to put my sunglasses on because that's how my passengers will recognize me. Okay. So Keith, um, always took a posed photograph of all the operators to give them some say in how they were represented. Rory O'Neill wanted to be astride his beloved triumph motorcycle, a gift, a birthday gift from his wonderful wife, Olma. And, um, this motorcycle actually does not exist anymore. So this is kind of a little treasure. Uh, so Keith took a photograph, did the sketch on that you see on the left and then worked up the final drawing, which is on the right. And up in the upper hand corner is the M.R.U. It's a, uh, emergency vehicle that they use for when there's a L.R.V. accident. Um, it's, it's a unique truck. Um, same process for Sonia Leonard Yellowrobe. So on the left is the sketch that Keith did while I was interviewing her. She wanted to be depicted on her Harley Davidson. And so she got it out and got on it and, uh, posed for a photograph where, so Keith was able to work up this drawing. Um, so I'm not sticking with my notes. Oh, yeah, there were huge challenges. Um, sometimes things did not really work out. And Keith would get quite frustrated, but he forged on ahead and did revisions. So Terrell, who you're going to be hearing from today, uh, Keith only met Terrell briefly and was during the pandemic. So Terrell's in a mask, took a quick shot of him and Terrell loves San Francisco. And so Keith wanted to do a portrait of Terrell with his beloved city behind him. So he invented a pose. Well, sadly, Terrell came out looking like a teenager. So Keith persevered. And when we sent the revision, the new drawing to Terrell, and he texted back, Keith nailed me. That was a happy day. So it's really wonderful. Um, so Keith was really, um, true to the operators. If something wasn't working, he would, he would redo. So here's one more example. This was the first portrait of Mark Spencer, who's a cable car operator. And Mark was okay with it. His girlfriend was okay with it. But Keith was not okay with it. He said, Mark looks like a cartoon. Uh, notice the cable car in the left hand corner. So it comes up. So Keith redid the portrait and made this beautiful, warm portrait of a genuine human being, Mark's cable car is the one you want to be on. Uh, he and his grip, Cedric, they're amazing. So in this portrait, you'll notice there's no cable car because it wasn't going to fit in nicely. So Keith put that on a separate page for all the equipment. Keith did pencil transfers because he wanted it to be accurate. So I'm going to draw to a close, uh, with one more. Thank you to our publisher, Patrick Marks, for advising Keith to take the six original bus stop drawings and expand them to 27. Because in order to get on a bus, you have to be at a bus stop. In this case, University in Bacon, you're waiting for the 54 Felton. And then you have to get off the bus. And I took liberties. You took the 54 to Balboa station. You got on the F car and got off at the Ferry building. So with all of that, we are going to bring the artist and operators up to the stage and they are going to read from the book. And after that, we will do Q and A. So gentlemen. So I'll introduce everyone once they've taken their seats. Brendan, can you move down one? OK, so I'm going to go from your left to right. So, um, first person is Keith Ferris. He's the artist and he will be reading from his meditations. And then we have three operators, Brendan Bartolomew, Charles Halakki, who's moved on from operator to be trainer extraordinaire and Terrell James Geron. Sorry, Terrell James Geron. So Keith will start out with three meditations and then we'll pass the mic metaphorically speaking. Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming. So I'm going to be reading from page 135 in the book. And you can see the image behind me. I had always wanted to do one of these real elderly citizens who go around with shopping carts. I think she had recycling and she seemed very lonely to me. I really like her hat. It was multicolored, a garden hat, not with floral pattern, but more like squares of red and green and yellow, a pattern print. She was wearing this super green insulated jacket zipped all the way up to her neck and a pair of blue jeans. She sat very still, looking straight ahead. Maybe she'd had eye surgery and they were prevented to keep her UV out. She had three big sunglasses or she had these big sunglasses really dark that made her look like an owl. And next I'm going to read from page 21. I was interested in the mirror, the reflection of the front of the bus. Just above the heads of the guys in the mid bus stairwell. At times I couldn't see them because other people's backpacks broke my field of vision. These guys look like they really wanted to get off the bus. Right after work everybody just wants to go home. Very inward focused. I wanted to include the suggestion of how tightly crowded the bus was and roughed in other passengers in pencil. I thought it was really cool how you had these three heads and how what could have been a fourth head was actually a mirror. And finally page 57. This man was a really big guy in an orthopedic boot with crutches. And the young Asian woman was moving quickly to a friend's music. So I tried to give her a look of motion. Colored pencils have their limits and I took some liberties to get across the garish reflective material on the front of her t-shirt. Which I could see through the opening of her suit coat. In my objective paintings I'm interested in the quality of the paint and color. With these drawings I'm interested in a realistic to a point depiction of a certain reality. These two body types, their dress, how much bigger everything was on this middle aged man than this younger woman. That was what I was after. Thank you. Thank you. Phillip, are you still here? Phillip House? So if you go and use a restroom, I invited Phillip and he was here for a while. He is also a former Muni operator. So he does some stints as the attendant in the restroom. So if you go there you can say hello to him and honor him as well. Okay, we're going to go to Brendan. Sorry. You guys didn't sit in order. Okay, so a good friend noticed how many people I seem to know everywhere I go and compared me to Mr. Rogers. It's kind of true except I'm a little less wholesome. I am interested in what makes people tick. Of course some people just don't pay attention to the driver and I don't force my humanity on anyone. I don't drive with my barrier window closed because I feel the barrier sends a message that we're separate and don't trust passengers. That said, I have never been assaulted. So I don't judge operators who do drive with the shield closed. A huge coworker complaint is people who cause problems and they want police and they being the coworkers, my coworkers, they want police on the bus. But I think Muni should repurpose fare inspectors into goodwill ambassadors. I would also put outward cameras on the bus. If someone is blocking a bus zone you press a button, a picture is taken and the owner gets a ticket in the mail. But apparently we don't have the legislation that would enable such a system. Cars parked in a Muni red carpet lane can get a ticket but Uber and Lyft are incentivized to block bus zones because it's unlikely they'll get ticketed. If we could automatically ticket, that would reduce a lot of pain. Driving eight to ten hours is exhausting and your mind is numb at the end. If somehow people could make a good living for a seven hour work day, it would be so much easier on the body and the mind. This is in response to Leah asking me what would be my wish list, what would I change about Muni if I could. And so here's my next big one. And I'd bring back the Landor Sunset livery, the paint scheme where the bus is all white and there are these orange stripes along the bottom. There's always the specter of autonomous vehicles replacing us and I hope that never happens. I would not want to lose the camaraderie and low brow humor Muni co-workers share. And I guess I'll stop there. They can read it themselves. Yeah, if you read my interview, that segues into some very low brow humor and a true story which I shared at the last event that Leah and Keith hosted. Okay, let's go. Thank you, Brendan. Let's go to Charles. Good afternoon. My name is Charles Haletke. I've been with Muni for 21 years doing a lot of different jobs, including being an operator for nine years. But I'll read a little bit about being a training instructor, which I did in various forms for about eight years. The scariest thing as a trainer is you're responsible for the vehicle you're on and the people around it, but you're not in control. On a cable car, I can and have put my elbow in someone's chest, pushed him aside and taken over. But the first day out teaching someone you've never met before how to make right turns on city streets in an 18-ton bus and all I've got is my voice, that's a tricky thing. I prepare students. If I yell at you, and I'm going to at some point, if I yell stop, it doesn't mean I think less of you as a person. It just means stop right now. And if I yell stop, stop, stop! Put your foot on the brakes so hard you put me through the windshield. I know an instructor who's been bounced off the windshield and cracked it. He's still a training instructor. When the student sees hazards before I do an act, that's the goal of training. But trying to figure all that out, the communication, that's nerve-wracking. I can mostly figure out whether a training can do the job. Is that terrible mistake a one-time thing? But back when I started as an instructor, there was this one student. All the way through training, I was not confident about letting her pass training. But I did. Months later, I boarded a crowded downtown bus over 70 passengers, and the bus pulled away with a notably smooth start. Traffic was hideous, and the operator was zig-zagging around double-parted cars with excellent skill. As I got off, I heard a voice. Mr. Helette Key! And there she was. At that moment, and hundreds of moments since, when I see others I've trained, including these two guys here, realizing that everyone on that bus is safe because of the work I do, I've nearly broken into tears. That sense of ownership, I trained that operator. That feeling is profound and gives me immense pride. Some uni managers look at data, spreadsheets and do analysis, which is important, but they forget that there are real, living human beings behind all that. I don't like aspirational planning. Too often, we've done planning based on what we'd like to see rather than based on our resources, and this leads to big service gaps. It's nice to be a visionary, but public transit has a way of enforcing reality. Muni has turned me into a ruthless pragmatist. A plan for the future has to be reasonable. The business of transit is fundamentally human. Our cargo is people, and the vehicles are operated by people. People can be uncooperative and cranky and smell bad and have to pee, and I haven't started to describe the passengers yet. It's a very human industry and to see it as anything else is just flat wrong. Wonderful. Okay, we're going to Terrell. Hello, everybody. I'm Terrell. Born and raised in San Francisco, original San Francisco Giants fan and 49ers fan. I'll read a little bit. So, driving for Muni has given me more confidence in myself that I can do a public service job and remain professional. When I was a kid, I always paid my fare. I see people walk right by the bus driver without paying, and that's not right. We provide good service at a fair price so it's worth something, and people should pay to use it. When passengers are on my bus, whether they like it or not, I take some ownership over them. My colleagues say I'm disconnected from the passengers. I drive, I get paid, I go home. I totally disagree with that mantra. It's my job to make sure my passengers are safe, not just that they get from point A to point B. I hadn't been driving long before COVID-19 hit, and it made us rethink just about everything we do. Taking care of my passengers is important, and at the beginning of the pandemic, I was thinking, is this person sick? Can I bring anything home to my family? I was caring for my mom, so I became more cautious and careful. I made sure to wear gloves, carry hand sanitizer. Muni issued us masks, but I bought my own N95s because they fit better and didn't fog up my glasses as much. I carried a big backpack full of Lysol wipes and clean supplies and food. People laughed at me, but I was safe. At the height of the restrictions, I felt like I was driving a hospital waiting room with anxiety thrown on because in a hospital setting if something goes wrong, staff can call security. If there was someone on the bus who didn't want to put on his mask arguing with me, I called dispatch, but by the time the police arrived, everyone had already gotten off the bus, including the violator, leaving me sitting there in the driver's seat alone. If it happens on your first trip, you're cool, you got all day, but on your last trip, you just want to go home. I could drive a bus in Sacramento, but driving in San Francisco is more than livelihood. I used to leave three hours before my shift just to get there so I could avoid accidents, traffic, whatever. But when I get here, there's something inside me that's awakened when I'm here. I hope there will always be real drivers driving the buses. Companies around here are gathering data to market self-driving cars and they're thinking potentially one-day self-driving buses. I don't think a robot will ever be able to handle the kinds of crazy situations we face. Humans have the ability to react, to react without having to be programmed to anticipate a set of situations. You just can't predict what happens out here. You're constantly on. Thank you, Terrell. So you can see why I had such a great time interviewing these gents and the ladies too. We tried to get some women to come to speak, but they're busy with their families mostly. So we now are going to open the floor to questions and Anisa has a mic and the media requests that you wait until you have the mic in your hand before you pose your question so that it will go into the recording. So does anyone have a question that they would like to ask? The artist or the writer? Hi there. If there's one suggestion or recommendation you have for your writers, what would that be? Did you guys hear that? I didn't hear it. If there's one suggestion you would have for your passengers, your writers, what would that be? I could go first. If something is happening on the bus that's making you feel unsafe, tell the operator. There's so many stories on social media where somebody was being harassed, threatened, whatever. And the operator had no idea this was happening and so that would be, yeah, tell the operator it's our responsibility to call a supervisor or stop the bus or in some way make sure that you're safe. I think that's what I was going to say. You got anything to add? I just add that you want to keep the communication lines with the operators open. A good way to practice that every day is when you get off, say thank you. That means more to an operator than you can imagine because for a job that involves seeing so many people all the time it's rather lonely sometimes. So yeah, say thank you as you get off. Even if you holler from the back door, that's fine. You remember that the person up front is a person and someone who can help. And I'm going to add on to that. The other thing is when you acknowledge the operator either greeting or leaving, whatever, is you're also letting the other passengers know that you're paying attention and that you care about the operator and so that puts social pressure on other people to also treat the operator like a human being. This woman in the front had a question? Oh, no, it's fine. Terrell? No, it's okay. No, jump in. Go ahead. No, it's fine, really. No, no, go ahead. He'll come back in. Go ahead, ask a question. I don't know if it's more of a question, but I adore you guys. I do. I mean, I know I've seen some of the BS and I do say thank you and I do say take care. So I know it's not an easy job. So as a kid, I didn't pay attention, but now that I'm older, I appreciate it. And thank you very much for depicting all of these. It gives really life and humanism to Muni. But anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Don't be shy. Okay. I don't have a question either, but I just wanted to say thank you. I know there's hundreds more Muni drivers who are working today, but I just wanted to just express my gratitude just as I have a disability and so I'm not as able to ride my bicycle as I used to, but I rely a lot on Muni to get around. And then just also just a wonderful way to see the city. I find Muni relaxing as well. And so just wanted to express my gratitude to all of you. And also for the authors or for highlighting the Muni operators and just them and telling their stories. So just wanted to say thank you. If I may, a good way to express gratitude for Muni operator is, especially in the moment, aside from telling them personally yourself, take down every bit of information you can about the circumstances. The number of the vehicle, the route, the direction, the location, the exact time, all that information, if you can read it, the number on the operator's sleeve, as much as you can and a description of the operator, scribble it down and call 311. You call 311, there's a short phone tree, you get into Muni, and you just tell the person who answers that, you know, I was on this bus, this is what happened. The operator was fantastic and amazing into these 16,000 different ways. And all the details, that commendation will get to the operator. If there's been one major improvement in Muni since I started a long time ago, it's that commendations now routinely get to operators. They didn't when I was a new bus operator. So call 311 with the commendations. It makes a big difference because they get a nice shiny letter in their file about it. I have a question. Instead of the question that maybe would be asked as well as your wildest ride, what has been your most joyful experience on a drive? So there's lots of moments of serendipity and lots of funny things that happen and sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. I was gripping a cable car, it was a cold winter morning, one of those clear cold days, and my wife brought her father and his wife, her stepmother, onto the cable car for a ride. And so we left Powell on market and they were on the running boards and at the next stop, this guy stepped up next to my mother-in-law and he was a regular rider and he made some sort of nice little comment and said, oh yeah, it's really cold today. I said, yeah, it's pretty chilly. Yeah, it's colder than a mother-in-law's kiss. And I looked at him and I said, can I introduce you to Susie, my mother-in-law? And he looked at her with the most beautifully horrified look I've ever seen on anyone. Sometimes things like that just happen. It's lovely. Brendan or Terrell, do you want to jump in? Joyful ride? Or a lucky one? Or something you want to crow about? I'm trying to think of some good examples. There's one that I think... No, I mentioned it in an article I wrote for CityLab. It's not in the book, though, but for a while I was driving the 43 Masonic, which goes through the Presidio, which is where Lucasfilm is located. And I don't know if I'd call this really a joyful experience, but this guy got on the bus wearing a Lucasfilm jacket, like a crew jacket that you'd worn if you were involved in the making of a film, and it was one of the Star Wars films. And so we get to talking, and it was so interesting to me, because he told me stuff I never would have guessed at regarding how the animators at Lucasfilm deal with the nuts and bolts of making a Star Wars movie. Like, among other things, he told me that they actually look at the fan websites, like Wookiepedia, for example. They actually go and reference Wookiepedia when they're trying to figure out, okay, what's the background of the spaceship? What are its capabilities? What is its historical significance? Because they understand the fan community oftentimes has more information about it than their own organization does. So it was, like, so fascinating to me to hear that there's this feed... a positive good feedback loop happening between Lucasfilm and those of us that are so devoted to these movies. And then the thing that really sparked joy for me is that The Last Jedi had just come out, and so many people have been so unhappy with it, and I told them, I really enjoyed that movie, and he got so happy. It was like he was so thrilled that somebody had something good to say about The Last Jedi. So there's a little joyful thing. I don't know if anything specifically joyful comes to mind. I mean, I pick up a lot of people, and it's always interesting. Even, you know, any day that I'm tired or sleepy, it's not long before someone would get on the bus and say something or do something that just, you know, wakes you up. So I remember... I'm a huge Star Wars fan, too. And this past Halloween, I remember having a guy on the bus and a full Chewbacca outfit. And I mean, he was... I don't know if he had on some types of shoes or something, but he was super tall. It looked like Chewbacca. He was so amazed. Yeah, so... I never met a Chewbacca, but I did talk to Simon Laban on a cable car once. And Willie Brown got on the One California when I was driving it, and had an amazing conversation with him. And that's when I discovered the power of political charisma. When he got off the bus, if he'd told me to run over the little old lady walking in front of me, that was a good idea. It's a little frightening. Did you hear the question in the back? Did Chewbacca pay? I don't remember. He got on the back door. I got to see Nicholas Cage on one of the bus, the 22. I feel kind of awkward of following up this joyous, your most joyous moment, with something a little different. So every profession has its physical challenges. And I was a teacher, and I had to be on my feet all day, but I always looked at the muti drivers and thought, those guys are women, or just sitting. You know, they're just sitting there. And then I read Stephanie Jackson's description of her shoulder and the tendon tears. And I was wondering, what kind of physical challenges do you have? I imagine with the cable car, it's pretty rigorous, but for the rest of you, I imagine you're not just sitting there because everything looks easier from the outside, you know? So I was just curious. Thank you so much. Well, I could go. Here's an injury that's not the shoulder. This happened in the height of the pandemic, March 13th, 2021. This was when everything was very locked down, and I had a shift where I drove maybe one or two round trips on the 9 San Bruno, and then I had a little bit of break time, and then my bus became the motor coach substitution for the T-3rd, and I figured out that my bus was the last bus you could catch if you wanted to get to the BART station before they locked the doors. So I had prioritized, okay, I've parked my bus, I gotta go to 7-Eleven, put my snacks and get back to the bus quickly so that I'm not making anybody late for the BART station. Unfortunately, I tripped and fell and broke my fall by throwing my hands out in front of me, and so these two fingers, like, they were still attached, but just, you know, like, they broke two fingers, and so, you know, it was a heck of an experience. I got my cell phone out, I called the Transit Management Center, and I said, I hate to tell you this, but I think I just broke my hand. So that's just, you know, it's a workplace injury, and that's the kind of thing that can happen. You are gonna get hurt doing this job eventually if you do it enough. Yeah, sitting down all day long is not good for you. There was a public health study done a number of years ago in London. It was in the 50s, I think, and they still had streetcars, and they found that by every health measure, the bus operators scored lower or less healthy than the streetcar operators, and it's basically the same job. Like, why, and the folks doing the study went back and forth and back and forth and finally figured out that the streetcar operators were standing at the controls, kind of like a couple of our historic vehicles, and the bus operators were sitting, and that was the difference. It is a big health issue. The DMV requires that everyone with a commercial license go through a medical exam every two years, and they check for a number of things, including blood pressure, diabetes, several other things as well, and we have quite a few operators who struggle with a lot of those health issues, probably related to sitting down all day. Cable car, of course, is something completely up, you know, something else. I did it for six years regularly as a gripman, and my right shoulder is still bigger than my left, and I got a massage earlier this week, and the massage therapist was good. He found the knot under my right shoulder that's not on the left side and said, what the heck is this? And then I had to explain what I used to do for a living. Yeah, some of us, we try to exercise on the bus, so, you know, like, we'll get to the terminals if we have time, we'll go in the back, and, you know, we'll use those poles that you hold on to and try to do pull-ups. We'll do dips on the back with the seats, push-ups, you know, if we can. But, I mean, it is tough. You know, we work long, odd hours. Sometimes it's hard to get time to eat, so, you know, it's tough. Sometimes we're out there, we're trying to get the people going where they got to go. You know, there's events, things going on, and, you know, when there's reroutes and stuff, our time schedules are just totally messed up. You know, they don't account for anything to go wrong. So, when it does, you know, we're out of time. So, you know, we make do, so. But, yeah, sometimes it's tough, yeah. Anisa, how many more questions do you want to go with? Let's see. It's five to three. Two to three, three to four. Okay. We're good. So, Leah and Keith, thank you so much for just putting together what is essentially, so far, what I can tell, like a love letter to, you know, the mass transit of our city. And just giving visibility to the voices of all these transit operators. People who, on occasion, I would love to have a conversation with just to know more about their job. But, of course, the sign says, please do not speak to the operators for good reason. So, you give this opportunity for us to kind of finally just get to know them a little better. Keith, I just wanted to ask, how did you approach just sort of your selection process of, like, where to do your sketches? Like, did you just sort of plan out, like, these are all the routes that I want to cover, or was it, like, the routes you usually take? Like, how did you approach where, what buses and that you chose to sketch? Where do I approach this? How did you approach which buses you chose to sketch? Maybe the bus stops, the routes. Was that by design? In the operator portrait? Just, like, the bus rides that you took. Yeah, I chose that because... I usually chose the bus or the vehicle that the driver happened to be driving at that time, whichever bus was their bus at the time, or if it was a cable car, it was a cable car that I would use. And where did you find your passengers? Were they on specific routes that you specifically went road, or were they just your regular routes? It was very serendipitous. If I was headed downtown to buy some supplies of some kind, I could run into a passenger that way. I rode the 44 quite a bit, so I ran into a lot of passengers on the 44. And what's the other one? The 9, also, the 8. And the Gary. Yeah, the Gary bus also, yeah. Yeah, we have a pretty wide range. We really range in the city because of Muni. We really take advantage of all the different neighborhoods, all the different places we can get items. We really take advantage... And Muni is why. Yeah, so this image of this guy with the Batman sweatshirt was I saw him on the 44, and I've never seen him since, and I ride the 44 a lot. So I really wonder where he came from. Can I tell a funny and off-color story about my portrait? Okay. So Keith and Leah had provided me with several initial sketches of me that he had done, and I showed my friend one of the preliminary ones, and my hands were underneath the table, and my friend looks at it, and she's like, it looks like you're hunched over and touching yourself underneath the table. So I emailed Leah and Keith, and I said, could you put my hands on the surface of the table so it's clear that's not what's happening? Okay, another question. I saw some other hands. We got one in the front and then one in the back. Hi, thank you for all of this. What a treat. I do have a question about how do you guys feel about when you come into contact with skateboarders? I know that's got to be an issue. Like San Francisco skateboarding and Muni, those have got to be interesting ingredients for God knows what. I just wondered if it's something that you, is it like the thorn in your side, or is it something that you, yeah, how do you guys feel about that? I mean, I see people with skateboards, but I think I would just put all of this into the same category. So scooters, skateboards, bicycles, mopeds now. If they're on the street and they're riding in the path of a bus or in the bike lane, it gets to be annoying. You want to try to take care to make sure you don't hit them or sometimes people will be on those scooters riding down Market Street and their tires will hit on the rails on the ground and they'll fall down. And if you're going too fast, you could have an accident. So I always give an extra room when I see someone like that. But I mean, yeah, if they're out there, it's not much we can do. We just look out for them. I can't even imagine. I cannot imagine what you guys dodge. So congrats for being awesome and thank you. Yeah, there's some philosopher, I forget who it was, but he famously said, hell is other people. And I want to change that because I feel it should be changed to hell is other road users. There's room for stupidity no matter what vehicle or kind of transportation you're using, whether somebody is driving a car or not paying attention or on a skateboard and not paying attention or walking or not paying attention. It doesn't matter. They're all hazards. They all go in the same bucket. You try not to kill them even if they deserve it. Right. How about the infamous graffiti buses? Oh, I love them. Do you hate them? What's that? Oh, buses marked up. It's, you know, he's done pretty well with graffiti. You know, it's much better than it was to say in the 80s or 90s. I look at it this way. I live in San Francisco. And there's what about 800,000 of us who live here. We own the Muni Railway. It's owned by the city and county. So if you you're marking on a bus, I own personally one 800,000th of that bus. And please don't mark it up because it costs a lot of money to clean it off. So one of my favorite things to do when I when I'm at a bus zone stopped at the bus in the bus zone and I look in my mirror and I realize some kid is riding on the side of the bus. Pardon. One of my fun things to do is I set the parking brake and I come storming out of the bus like like like like I care. Like you rotten kid. And it's I'm just play acting. But I feel like it gives the graffiti artist a little bit of a thrill because they they get to feel like they're running away from an authority figure. And what they don't know is Muni would fire me in a second if I detained them or put my hands on them or anything. Muni does not want us in confrontations at all. And so to me, it's like I'm playing my role. They're playing theirs. And it's not really all that serious. Yes, I do have a question, but I want to thank you very much for all that you do every day. I want to thank Leah and Keith also for their contribution to this wonderful book. But I also wanted to know I've been riding Muni since 1966. And I was wondering I've had basically very good experiences and I continue to have them. But I want to I earlier we saw people raise their hands if they came here on Muni. And I was wondering if people would be willing to raise their hands again so I can take a picture. That's a wonderful last question. Let's do it. OK, all right. Wonderful. So we're going to wrap it up. And so the three operators, Keith and I will be outside if you want to get your book signed or just want to chit chat with us. And so Tina, I'm going to pose the question one more time. And then if you could hold your pose and Tina Martin can take your shot then we're all good. Are you OK with that? OK, so who like me rode Muni to get here today or public transportation could be Bart? Keep him up. Keep him up. Keep him up. One more time. Yeah, keep him up. Oh, she's doing a panorama. And you can come up to the stage. Anyway, thank you all for coming. We just really appreciate it. Yeah.