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[EDITOR's NOTE: The following article appeared in G21: The World's Magazine during our first year on the Web.] DAVID LETTERMAN IN SAN FRANCISCO - SAN FRANCISCO - This was "Dave Week" in San Francisco, California, as CBS Late Night host David Letterman broadcast his program from the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in our city. San Francisco has always been a very narcissistic and simultaneously insecure city. This city has been ashamed to be the brunt of so many national jokes over the decades -- from hippies, to "fruits and nuts", to "the Twinkie Defense", to former-Mayor Frank Jordan's nude shower scene -- while at the same time being chauvinistic about being America's most tolerant and most "progressive" city.
San Francisco foists itself upon others as hip and trendy, while always being willing to fawn over anyone with the least bit of celebrity attached to their names like any frowzy matron would the perceived attentions of a new young Lothario.
San Francisco did not want to get the irony in Letterman's swipes about how easy it was to get a "gratuitous ovation" from a San Francisco audience with any compliment to the city, on Friday's final S.F.-based broadcast. That would be an admission of being fawning rubes, totally star-struck. But watching the San Francisco audience on the Letterman broadcasts this week, and the reaction of the city itself to Letterman broadcasting from here, was like watching a high school pep rally or the gushing reaction of small town folk to a surprise visit from a "star."
Reflecting on the way our so-called "sophisticated" city routinely and reflexively sucks up to celebrity, the logic of Mayor Willie Brown's recent easy election to his office fell into sharp relief. This has always been a city where style counted for far more than substance. Many pundits referred to Brown's election as a "coronation", and so it was. San Francisco will go for flash and strut over policy any minute of the day. San Francisco fawns over the Brioni-suited, Jaguar-collecting Mayor much as we do over Robin Williams' or Danny Glover's appearances; we elect officials based more on family name than political credentials. That's how we end up with a Board of Supervisors (the city and county's legislative body) featuring Angela Alioto's and Kevin Shelley's and never quite warm up to a Carole Migden. This is the city of "Diamond Jim" Brady and the Barbary Coast...
So, when a national talk-show host like David Letterman comes to town he gets tons of column inches and front-page coverage in our two daily newspapers, his gap-toothed grin flashes three-times larger than life from those expensive French pay-toilet-adjunct advertising towers all over town, and he waves at us --- again three-times larger than life --- from every other municipal transit bus. Letterman owns this town for the week. And we thank him for owning our town with gratuitous ovations whenever he utters the words "San Francisco". We are *tres* sophisticated, cosmopolitan and jaded, no?
No.
The actual truth about San Francisco (our dirty little secret?) is that it is a geographically beautiful and climactically blessed HAVEN. Rather than being sophisticated or jaded, San Francisco is a small town of less than a million people where ANYONE can come and live. We who live and work in San Francisco are not here because we are more visionary, more trendy or more hip than people in any other city---and certainly not as jaded as citizens of Rome, New York, London, or Tokyo.
We came here as refugees from the proscribed way of living *required* everywhere else we have lived. Whether to be "out" about sexual preference, to get away from the hidebound tradition which acts as a straight-jacket to exploration for Right Coasters, or to be street kids on Haight, we came here because we wanted to "hang loose" and knew we could get away with it here. That, in This Writer's book, is the opposite of sophistication; it is a desire to be as weird as you wannah be, or as conforming, and feel safe in the knowledge that no one will care one way or the other.San Francisco, rather than being jaded, is star-struck so easily because --- as a city where anyone can live --- we are a city of innocents.
We are easily awed by a sunset or a good joke.
That is why we are so protective of our image, our victories, our pleasures, and so chauvinistic about a God-given natural beauty that you would imagine that we had created the Pacific coast ourselves each morning at great personal effort, or been the architects of the view from our hills. But again, this chauvinism is not that of calculating idiots, but of the blind children who believe this paradise was made especially for them, each and every one.
RA
11 May, 1996
SF
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WEB SITE PICK OF THE DAY: Francophile? Interested in a European perspective? We think you'll enjoy reading Le Monde, from Paris.
