When you’re talking about towns that know how to make trouble, it’s safe to say San Francisco must be at the tip-top of the list.
Where did the beatniks of the ’50s, for example, do most of their coffeehouse-hangin’ and bongo-bangin’? And then there was that ’60s thing, with all them hippies and their kaleidoscope eyes and their seditious beads and their anti-establishment guitars and their little tablets of WMD (weapons of mind destruction), resulting in their city, The City, becoming the trouble-making headquarters for the trippiest trip this planet has seen in quite some time. When it quickly became clear that that scene wasn’t exactly built for endurance, cue the Colombians, who showed up with their bulging briefcases of WND (weapons of nasal destruction) and said, “Hey, dig this stuff, man! It’ll make you feel great, make you ball all night, and it’s good for you, too!”
And now, San Francisco is rockin’ the boat again, because (a) it knows how to rock the boat, and (b) it’s real good at it. If all the cities in the U.S. went to a big ole street party every year, San Francisco would always be the first one to get up and dance (because it would always be the first one with four drinks down its gullet).
The City saw what was taking shape and didn’t waste any time. It saw that Massachusetts was getting close and realized that it just wouldn’t be right for same-sex marriages to debut in Boston. So the Frisco Kid, incarnated as its dapper new mayor, declared marriage season to be open for men who love men and women who love women.
All across the country, lots of people said, “My oh my that rascal San Francisco is at it again! Grrrrrrr, grrrrrrr, teeth clench, teeth clench!” They looked at the newscasts through the cracks in their hands that were slapped over their faces because they didn’t want to see the horror and the mockery sure to be whipped upon The Precious Institution, the unbearable defilement perpetrated by hordes of wretched, mincing gargoyles, all flaming up a storm with their nose-eating viruses and neon-pink boas, the kinds of creatures whom (it used to be said) “only came out at night.”
But when the fretful looked at their boob tubes through those trembling finger cracks, they didn’t see a parade of weirdos and abominations storming City Hall. What they saw was a stream of regular-looking folk, people you wouldn’t look at twice in the supermarket. Nothing glamorous or strange, just nice, ordinary, really kind of, well, normal people, beaming with glee at the thought of actually hitching it up, if only for a few days, until some judge somewhere said, “Sorry, folks, fun’s over.”
And so once again, the question arises: How utterly bland would this country be without dear, beloved, crazy, fearless San Franfuckingcisco?