After the checking the artists' booths, and the crowd, I found myself gravitating toward the Boom-Boom Room(formerly one of the "Jack's" chain of clubs throughout the city) John Lee Hooker's new blues club, at the corner of Fillmore and Geary. There was going to be live music there, for the 4th of July celebration. The "freakish sounds" of Oscar Meyer's BluesBeat.

As you would expect of a place owned by legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker, there was an interesting mix to the crowd. It was not the crowd of Jack Kerouac's description of Fillmore Street from the '50s in On the Road, as most of the black people have been chased out of San Francisco over the last few decades. This city's own Human Rights Commission reports as much. It is not even the same Fillmore district of "The Summer of Love" when the newly-reopened Fillmore auditorium(right across Geary from the Boom-Boom Room) had its heyday with Hendrix, the Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane playing there. Now the Fillmore is mostly Caucasian.

Things had gotten so bad when this club was still "Jack's" that you would only find white YUPsters here. But now that John Lee has made his presence felt, the crowd is approximately 10% African-American again, reflective of our share of the population of this city.

It was good to see young hipsters in the crowd, who looked more like bike messengers than beats, grooving to the same sounds as the people in their sixties, fifties, and us Baby Boomers.

The band, Oscar Meyer's BluesBeat? I suppose I have to tell you. The best thing I say say about Oscar's wieners is that the guitar and sax screamed. The drummer was journeyman -- he recognized a bottom. Unfortunately, the trumpet player(you guessed right: Oscar) was lame. Whenever he soloed, my mind would scream, "Faster, Bruhther, faster!" The singer, like Oscar, missed the syn-co-pated, scat-turated bounce by half-a-second consistently. I did not say anything about the keyboards, did I?

The crowd at the Boom-Boom Room was as much the show, for This Writer, as the band. There were lovely women, fantasy-makers, in that crowd that reminded me of part of this city's charms. A woman who was here in San Francisco for the first time, as part of a "floating" 30th high school re-union(they do it in a different city every year) blatantly flirted with me the entire afternoon. Being a cybergeek, I was not used to this kind of f2f attention, but I recalled it from my youth in the "real world."

A guy in his late sixties, who came in during the late afternoon and needed a seat, which I proferred, gave me the jazz schedule for a new club only blocks from where I live and told me he would be there every night this week, that I should check the live jazz.(Not on my budget, of course.)

Everything which made me originally love San Francisco, the people seeing the city for the first time, the diverse crowd, the wonderful music, my experience of the city intersecting with the trove of verbiage and references from other writers who have breathed this foggy air before, the fine women, was coming at me all at once!

My giddiness would not have been any less in North Beach at Vesuvio's, in the Mission District at Bruno's, walking up Carol Doda's Broadway, or near the Ferry Building.

IN THIS EDITION: As those of you who have tracked my design aesthetic will notice, I have placed a few contrapunctual "Easter Eggs" throughout this page and on one other page of this edition. It would not be an Easter Egg hunt if I told you which other page. You'll find me doing this throughout the week.

As Salvador Dali said, "The secret of my influence was that it was a secret."

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