Intersections SF: James Brown's 'always turn left' story at Hawk Hill (Episode 4)

James Brown is a self-described "former ad guy" who turned himself into a leading meditation teacher and founder of Flow Meditation. He his recent book Meditation Made Me Do It is a pithy, personal, practical collection of short essays, stories and life lessons that explains "how sitting to do nothing can change everything." You can find him on the web at flowmeditation.cc and on Instagram at @flow.meditation. James' story of how following his intuition resulted in a major change to his life—and his family—takes place at Hawk Hill in 2011.

Trigger warning: Part 2 contains a story of domestic abuse. In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Sunny arrived anew in her hometown of San Francisco. After that "talk" with her dad about her tattoo, she peaced out on her parents and went to stay with a friend in El Paso ahead of her move back to SF. Before leaving, when she went back home to get the rest of her stuff, Sunny ran into her mom, who was upset. Sunny told her, directly, that she would make mistakes in her life, and that moving away was not one of them. She reminded her mom that her dad, Sunny's grandpa, disowned her years before. She and her parents were eventually able to close that chapter of their relationship. Now in SF and going to school at USF, it was the era of the dotcom boom (in 2000, around the time I moved here). With everything going on around tech, Sunny found community as a founding member of the SF Indie Media Collective. She aligned herself with many women around here interested in an alternative to the onslaught of tech in The City (in hindsight, I wanna say, "Just you wait …"). It was also a time of warehouse parties. People who went to Burning Man were artists, not tech douches. It was peak bike messenger days. Toward the end of her time in college, Sunny became more and more engaged in activism. I ask whether the school (USF) had an impact on her activism, or if it was The City, or a combination of the two. She points to the time when she was 8 and wanted to design fashion that would fight deforestation in Madagascar. All to say, she's had an eye for social and environmental justice since she was a kid. USF and San Francisco served to solidify that for her as a young adult. Sunny speaks to two times in her life that she missed out: 1) being taken away from most of her high school years, and 2) having left San Francisco when she was young, despite visiting regularly, there was a lot of The City she needed to reacquaint herself with. She reminisces about some of the spots, especially around USF, that she and her friends would frequent. Around this time, Sunny was involved in an organization called School of the Americas Watch. The group stood against the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, which trained paramilitary for dictatorships. That's an easy thing to oppose theoretically. But SOAW did the work on the ground. For Sunny, that meant traveling back to Georgia. School of the Americas had existed long before 9/11. But after that, security ramped up. Before she shares that story, Sunny retells her own Sept. 11 story. She was USF student body vice president at that time. Living off-campus, she ran back still in her pajamas when she knew something was going on that morning. She met with the student body president and they went to the Board of Trustees to try to secure protections for Arab and Muslim students. They tried, but the board wasn't too into that. Back to School of the Americas, there was an annual protest there. 2001 shouldn't have been different, but it was. Prior to that point, there was no fencing. Celebrities would show up. The protest was always peaceful. Post-9/11, a chain-link fence went up. Little did protestors know, but leadership that year planned to make an example of them. The protestors decided to cut a hole in the fence nonetheless. A group that included Sunny was arrested and kept over the weekend. There's a side story here about her witnessing prison racism first-hand. The end result of all that nonsense was that Sunny was released, but was told to come back to Georgia for arraignment. The judge told her to issue a written apology to earn "only" a year of federal probation. A Mission High teacher friend of Sunny's refused and served time in Dublin, California. Sunny, meanwhile, had lost her job and still had a pay a hefty fine. Trigger warning: At this point in the conversation, Sunny shares the story of dating another member of the media collective, a man who turned out to be abusive toward her. It's a tough story to hear, and I'm sure tougher to have lived through. But it's an important story to share. She moved into an anarchist co-op in Oakland with that guy. After putting her in the hospital following an assault, Sunny did what she knew would be the hardest thing—she told her parents what was going on. She did that and moved out to stay with a friend. Soon enough, someone told Sunny to apply to be part of a new journalism school. She got in. That took her to Merida in the Mexican Yucután. Through the school, she was in Bolivia when Evo Morales was elected. Eventually, she came back, moved to The Mission, and got a job at Balazo Galleria. Their landlord was an immigration lawyer who eventually basically evicted them when she threatened to expose a roommate who was here on a visa. Ugh. From there, Sunny moved to South of Market near Howard and Sixth Streets. She lived with fellow activists and a professor at New College. Another roommate was a tenant organizer in the Tenderloin and there were plenty of bike messengers. Sunny became the lead tenant after enough roommates moved out. She recounts various stories from that apartment. She had a detour of sorts when she worked for a children's furniture-maker. A woman she nannied for opened a store and Sunny designed furniture. She also managed the store on Polk. Things were going well, especially when FAO Schwartz placed an order. But then, with the 2008 recession, the company filed for bankruptcy. From here on out, the episode is very "inside San Francisco politics" that covers a time span from about 2003 to the present day. I consider it very important context for how we got to the point we're at, mere weeks before an election that could further erode the working and middle classes in The City. Sunny had been volunteering for a friend she knew from the SFUSD School Board, board president Mark Sanchez. He was running for D9 supervisor. Sanchez asked Sunny to be his campaign manager, and she accepted. It ended up being what got her into SF electoral politics. Her candidate didn't win, but she was in. Going back to 2003, when Matt Gonzalez ran for mayor and energized young voters (including me), Sunny learned about the Green Party. Sanchez was also a Green. This is when Sunny met Jane Kim, another Green Party member. Kim was on the School Board with Mark Sanchez at the time. When 2010 rolled around, Jane decided to run for D6 (where Sunny lived) supervisor, and tapped Sunny to be her campaign manager. It was a tough fight, but despite being an upstart campaign with few or no endorsements, Jane won. Sunny stayed on to work in Jane's City Hall office. She lists other folks who worked in that office and with whom she grew close. From Day 1, the job was rough. Homicides, dissolved redevelopment agencies, the SF mayor becoming California lieutenant governor, and a new mayor (Ed Lee) coming in. Before leaving the Mayor's Office, Gavin Newsom cut a deal with Twitter, the so-called "Twitter Tax Break." (Sunny points out that it was actually Twitter's Market Street landlord, Shorenstein, who got the break.) Ed. note: For years, I was under the assumption that Jane Kim was involved in crafting and being integral to the incentive to bring Twitter to SOMA. Please listen to Sunny's insider story of how that all went down for a more nuanced account of how events transpired. In short, it's complicated, as many things are. Then the conversation turns to when David Chiu, then the D3 (Chinatown, North Beach) supervisor, ran for and won a seat in the California Legislature, vacating the D3 seat. Mayor Ed Lee appointed a woman named Julie Christensen to Chiu's vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors. This enraged Chinatown political boss Rose Pak, who felt Ed Lee had betrayed his community. And so Pak set aside her differences with ex-Supervisor Aaron Peskin and convinced him to run. Peskin had a campaign manager that no one really liked. By "no one," I mean Chinatown. It's not 100 percent clear how this came about, but for Sunny, it was her boss, Jane Kim, telling her that people wanted Sunny to step in and run Peskin's campaign. She was reluctant for several reasons. Then two folks in Chinatown who worked on the Peskin campaign told Sunny that they were walking away unless she took over. It was that bad. She got a meeting with Peskin and laid out her rules. He brought her on. At first, Sunny thought she would be co-managing with the guy no one liked. Then the guy took offense and quit. Problem solved. Sunny found a good friend in the Peskin campaign right away. She felt they ran a good race, but despite that, didn't think that they would win. She didn't go to the 2015 Election Night party at Club Fugazi. She stayed in the campaign office alone. Then a political consultant who was at the party called Sunny to let her know that they won. Sunny picked herself up and walked a few blocks to the party. On stage with Peskin, right there and then, he asked her to be his chief of staff. She said she needed to talk to her boss, Jane Kim. Once she moved from one office to another at City Hall, it was like the two supervisors and their staff were a team. A journalist called them "the Splash Sisters," and folks in the offices joked that they were District 36 or 63, depending. Peskin and Kim were tight, indeed. Sunny has a story of Peskin wanting to skip the ceremonial part of rejoining the Board, and instead wanting to get straight to business. It was something of a wake-up call for Sunny, who wasn't used to working this way. We go on a bit of a sidebar here to talk about how Kim and Peskin approached their overlapping time on the Board. Sunny describes both as "land-use nerds" and I throw in "policy wonks." Theirs was a progressiveness rooted in pragmatism. In 2018, Jane Kim ran against fellow Supervisor Scott Wiener for California Senate. Sunny didn't work on the campaign officially, but considered herself a "super volunteer." She and some other women penned an open letter condemning Wiener and his campaign for a pro-Wiener super PAC's hit pieces on Kim, portraying her as a homewrecker (read: "whore"). The campaign itself, Sunny says, ran sexist/racist/misogynistic ads against their female Asian opponent. It was and is deplorable behavior, and Sunny and others felt a need to speak out against it. To both Sunny's and my mind, there's a through line to the current race Wiener is in, against another Asian woman, Connie Chan, in which the campaign created an AI chatbot that generated racist responses. AI and big tech companies overwhelmingly support Wiener against Chan. At the very least, it's a bad look. At worst, it's despicable. Sunny is pretty quick to give Wiener credit for being an incredibly hard worker inside halls of power. She simply disagrees with his tactics. I second that. And of course there are major policy differences. I breeze through Aaron Peskin's 2024 run for mayor, which Sunny also managed, partly for time but also because it's been covered on this show. Then I ask Sunny what she's been up to since then, because Peskin was termed out of his seat on the Board of Supervisors. She says she spent time thinking about movements change and how communities reorganize themselves. She started to believe that there are people who are progressive and don't know it. She points to many California Democratic elected officials' being overwhelmingly corporate, meaning beholden to powerful corporate interests rather than their constituents. Out of that inward examination of the outer world, Sunny arrived at the idea to start her own nonprofit progressive policy think tank and media lab. That entity's name is SF Propel. They develop policy proposals and create explainer-type videos (that I really love) to help folks understand a true progressive approach to the problems of our time. That includes everything from affordability to truly uplifting art and artists, actually regulating tech, and holding government accountable. SF Propel was Sunny's brainchild, but with some seed money she obtained, she brought in some really skilled people to help her build it. They work with her to develop policy ideas and issue stances, as well as to make those videos and plan and hold events. For more info and to get involved yourself, head to SF Propel's website. We recorded this episode in the Tenderloin Community Benefit District space in the Warfield Commons building in September 2026.

Sunny Angulo has one helluva life story. In this episode, meet and get to know Sunny. Today, she does PROPEL San Francisco, a group promoting progressive policies rooted in pragmatism and effectiveness. In Part 1, Sunny begins her own story with that of her maternal grandparents. Her mom's mom, Amparo Espinoza (née Cruz), was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. Amparo's dad worked on the railroad, meaning she lived a nomadic life when she was young. Eventually, her family made it to Northern California in is now Stockton. Amparo's husband was younger than she was. He was a gangster back in the day. Both came from big families. He grew up in poverty. He later did fieldwork. Amparo was already an independent young lady. She helped take care of her mom (Sunny's great-grandmother). She worked, which wasn't common for women of that era to do. She had a car. The two met at a dance hall social. Parents served as chaperones at these events, of course. He asked Amparo to dance, but had been so nervous to do so that he got drunk to muster the courage. Instead of dancing, Amparo helped her future husband back to his friend's car. As they carted him away, he told Amparo that he'd call her. "No you won't," Sunny's grandma said. Sunny describes her grandpa as a handsome man, but full of pride and machismo. He asked Amparo out a few more times, and got more no's. Then came the Korean war, and he got drafted to fight. War changed Sunny's grandad, as it often does. He had never left California. He returned from combat and was hanging out with friends in downtown Stockton when Amparo caught his eye. His friend assured him that she wasn't married. This time she accepted his offer, not to dance, but to get married. They had two kids—Sunny's mom, Susie, and her tia Helen. Then we turn to Sunny's paternal grandparents. Her dad's dad is from Bogota, Colombia. Papi Angulo was orphaned when he was 16. He took a banana boat to New York City looking for his two older brothers. They had already enlisted in the military at that point. He wanted to join as well, but he was too young. To pass the two years until Alfredo was eligible, he ran errands for a pharmacy and worked in an actual sausage factory. Across the country at the time, unbeknown to him, in a little town called Shingle Springs in El Dorado County, Sunny's grandma, Eleanor, lived on a cattle ranch. She was the youngest of three daughters in her family. Her lineage was Swiss. Eleanor would be taken out of school to help her family herd hundreds of cattle from El Dorado to Upper Bassie hundreds of miles away. It was a three-day journey by horseback, which is how Sunny's grandma made the trek. They'd spent the winter there, and months would go by when they didn't see a human being who wasn't a member of their family. With her older sisters married and out of the house, Eleanor decided that marriage wasn't for her. She went to Oregon to get a college degree in home economics. After that failed to grab her interest, she joined something called The Secretary Corps, which sent her to Italy. It was just after World War II, and there were still active military bases in the region. Alfredo had enrolled and been sent to Italy. Where he was stationed, they had bowling competitions. Alfredo and Eleanor got partnered up and ended up winning and getting a huge trophy. The family lore goes like this: Alfredo told Eleanor, "Either we split this down the middle, or you marry me." And so they got married. When Eleanor called him, trans-Atlantic, to let her family know, she realized that she didn't know her new husband's name. Classic. Alfredo got stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato in the North Bay. Now we turn back to Sunny's parents. Raised in Stockton, her mom, Susan, came to San Francisco to go to college at USF on a scholarship. At that time, the school wasn't integrated along gender lines. Women were separate from men. Her dad, Sam, also went to USF, on the men's side. He came here to do ROTC, something he'd been involved with since high school. Both of Sunny's parents were resident assistants (RA) at USF. Susan also helped give campus tours to prospective students. And she worked in the school cafeteria. Sam would go there early in the day, owing to his ROTC schedule. He went on a date with Susan's roommate, who told her that he wasn't for her, but that Susan should try him out. They hit it off. Some months later, but before they planned to get married, they had their first child—Sunny. The wedding was moved up before she was born. I ask Sunny whether she figured out the math on that when she was an adult, and she says that it was her sister who actually uncovered that truth. Sunny was born in Letterman Hospital in the Presidio, where Susan and Sam lived at the time. After having their first kid, they moved over to Parnassus, where Sam was attending dentistry school at UCSF. After that, and following the arrival of her sister, the family moved to the Inner Sunset. Sunny goes on a sidebar here about how little her parents paid back in the Eighties vs. what folks paid 10 years ago or so. Of course, it's even more exorbitant now. Years later, when Susan was pregnant with Sunny's brother, the US military stationed Sam in Germany. He went over ahead of his family, which meant that Susan traveled with two young girls (Sunny was 4 or 5, her sister was 3 or 4) while pregnant with her third child. She had never really left Northern California, to boot. Sunny thinks it was her first trip on an airplane, also. The family lived in Aschaffenburg, Germany, but the nearest hospital was in Frankfurt. So that's where Sunny's brother was born. They stayed in Germany for a couple of years before returning to the US. Sunny had started school in Europe. Susan was happy to be back. First, they went to Tacoma, Washington. But when they were in the US, no matter where they lived, the family always came to San Francisco for the summers, because duh. Visits to The City back then included the traditions of eating at Viking Subs (RIP) and going to a Giants game. They'd have birthday dinners at Delancey Street. They'd of course visit The Exploratorium. And they went to Cayuga Park and Ocean Beach. Sunny talks about a cousin, years later, when she was a teenager and having a hard time, who lived in San Francisco. Sunny idolized her cousin. She lived in Dolores Heights and to young Sunny, was oh so glamorous. She was artsy and confident. Sunny remembers a San Francisco where Crissy Field was still an airstrip. Even though she didn't live here consistently until much later in her life, those frequent visits allowed Sunny to see how The City has changed over time. When I ask Sunny to list her schools, still unaware of the rest of her life story, things get … interesting. The story is anything but straight-forward. For her high school freshman year, her family was in Augusta, Georgia. Her sister assimilated well, but Sunny not so much. She says she hated it there. For their next move, the military gave her dad the option of a base in Louisiana or one in El Paso, Texas. He chose Texas, and it didn't help Sunny's discomfort. She started researching how to emancipate yourself from your parents. She was 15. Life had changed for Sunny when she started high school. Self-esteem was low. She thought she was fat. She didn't like her hair or her glasses or her skin. She developed an eating disorder. She and her parents fought a lot. She did some not-hardcore drugs. By the time her sophomore year rolled around, Sunny and her parents were, as she describes it, "at war." She was dating an older guy. Enough was enough. She wanted to free herself and move to Atlanta or San Francisco to be an artist. But before that could happen … Sunny shares the incredible story of how her parents had her abducted and taken to Utah. Yes, you read that right. It's really too much to go into detail about here, so please listen to this segment. After a little more than two years at a facility in Utah, Sunny rejoined her family, who had moved to El Paso by then. It was Sunny's first time in that Texas/Mexico border town. And it came on the heels of a family tragedy. A cousin of hers had passed away right before Sunny's release from the facility in Utah. It was a complicated time, to say the least. But she enrolled in the second semester of her senior year of high school nonetheless. She didn't have any friends in her new hometown, but, she thought, at least she knew her sister. Turns out that her sister had told all her friends that Sunny was dead. A contingency of Sunny's rejoining her family was that there were rules, a contract of sorts. It meant she couldn't go to prom. She couldn't get a tattoo (we'll get to that). She was counting down the days until graduation, and had already been accepted and even gotten a scholarship to go to USF, just like her mom did all those decades ago. Sunny's parents suggested a trip to San Francisco to check out the campus. Following that, they'd join other family for a summer vacation in Upper Bassie. But before they left El Paso on that trip, along with a friend from Georgia, Sunny got her first tattoo—of her zodiac sign, Leo. Back home in El Paso, only a couple weeks until she was supposed to move to San Francisco to start college, Sunny's dad wanted a word with her. Back on that summer vacation, an unknown family member had seen her tattoo. Her dad let Sunny know that, in getting the tattoo, she had broken the home contract (see above). He had scheduled an appointment to have the tattoo removed. She refused, and her dad told her that it meant she wasn't going to San Francisco. And so Sunny resolved to return to her hometown on her own, using money she'd saved up from working. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Sunny Angulo. Photography by Mason J.

Listen in as I talk with JoAnne Winter and Vanessa Flores Chacko of Z Space. We chat about the theater production group. Their program Word for Word's next production, Assimilation, includes two short stories, one by E.L. Doctorow and another by Tatyana Tolstaya. For more information and to buy tickets for Assimilation, which runs Oct. 14 through Nov. 8, visit Z Space's website. We recorded this podcast on Zoom in October 2026.

Chris Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death, which have each been translated into over twenty languages. Chris' long running podcast, Tangentially Speaking includes more than 800 episodes, has been downloaded over 30 million times and has featured guests such as Rick Beato, Theo Von, Johann Hari, and Neil Strass. Chris is also a friend, and a neighbor in the rare, remote, strange, and very beautiful settlement of Crestone, Colorado. Chris's somewhat apocalyptic SF love story takes place at 454 Broderick near Hayes in 1989.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with the origin story of Raina and Vanessa's show, Valkyries, Say Less. It goes something like this … The two went to the first-ever Valkyries game, technically a preseason game, at Chase Center, in 2025. Once she discovered discounted tickets, Vanessa got about 20 friends and fellow teachers to join in. Then folks from the Valkyries cme to Vanessa's school, Roosevelt Middle School in the Richmond, for a career fair day. She was decked out in Valkyries merch that she'd already made and had been selling. Vanessa told the team reps how she'd gotten 20 people to buy tickets for the preseason opener. The reps replied, asking whether she'd ever considered season tickets. Once the info was on the table, Vanessa realized that it might be a possibility, even on a public schoolteacher's salary. She convinced the group going to the preseason opener to go in on season tickets with her. Game day came, and Vanessa compares it to her wedding day. Excitement was all around her. After the game, Vanessa connected with Raina to talk about the experience. Raina shared that, during the game itself, inside what would later become known as Ballhalla, they were scrambling to find information about the players, most of whom were completely new to them. Vanessa knew of the French players (there were three on the team then), of course, but that's about it. Vanessa remembers Raina having the idea for a podcast, based on their simple desire to learn more about the players and share that info. Raina's story is a little different. They grew up on men's basketball and were skeptical that the WNBA could bring it. Unlike their friend Vanessa, they weren't a "founding guard" (early season ticketholder). And so that preseason game was a massive wake-up call for Raina. They were in shock. The experience was profound, and she needed to better understand and process it. That's where Vanessa came in. On Mother's Day 2025 (May 11 that year), Raina went to Vanessa's house and the two recorded an intro in the basement. They started with that idea of researching Valkyries players. They wanted to use their roles as educators to teach themselves and other fans who might be hungry for that information. It was casual. They quickly realized that they have different voices and approaches, but excellent chemistry. They published that immediately. It was an introduction episode. Then came time for a second episode, and that meant work. They decided that each episode would be dedicated entirely to a single player. All good teachers know the value of games as learning tools, and so they integrated playfulness into their new show. At this point in our recording, Raina casually mentions that their dad, Eddie Mast, played in the (M)NBA back in the day. What? Raina expounds on that to explain that for them, learning player stats was a ritual growing up. It meant going to games vs. not going in those days. All to say that player stats and info come second-nature for Raina. Vanessa and Raina soon found out from their new side hustle that, every episode, they fell in love with a new player, having researched that player thoroughly. We shift the conversation to talking about the inaugural Valkyries season in 2025, which we all agree was bananas. Vanessa recalls being at Ballhalla when Golden State clinched the playoffs. She went home and booked a hotel in San Jose (because of a scheduling conflict, the first and only playoff game last year took place down there). She talks about the high highs and the immense joy surrounding our WNBA team. She'd just come out of three months plagued by severe back pain right around the time of that preseason game last year. She relishes the community that came together immediately, and is excited that kids and young people get to experience it, too. I ask Vanessa and Raina whether, like I do, they ever challenge folks in their lives to watch or go to a Valkyries, folks who might otherwise not be into basketball specifically or sports in general. They both say they have. I'll echo what we all say: If you're able, go to a game at Ballhalla. I challenge you not to have a smile on your face. It's so much more than what's happening on the court, though lately, that part doesn't take anything away. It's seeing all generations, all ethnicities, all gender expressions, and everyone is fucking happy. It's really something. An added bonus for Vanessa and Raina is, of course, getting to know each other better and becoming better and better friends. For the Valkyries second season this year, Vanessa and Raina decided to add video to their show. They started media partnerships with friend of this show Broke-Ass Stuart and Merci SF, a local online media org. They got press passes, meaning they can sit in the media section (alongside our contributing producer and my wife, Erin Lim) and attend pregame and post-game press conferences. They've hosted watch parties at Rikki's (and had another one last night at Richmond Republic) and have done community trash cleanups around Chase Center. Raina speaks to the beauty of collaboration, and how they couldn't do this alone. And they talk about watching their friend Vanessa blossom beyond being a mom and a teacher. They give a shoutout to Rikki's and Sara Yergovich, who bartended the day we recorded. Rikki's had only recently celebrated their first anniversary when last season started, which is amazing. I'm proud to call Sara and Danielle friends of Storied: SF. I mention BOUNCE, the rise of women's sports, from KALW (shameless plug as Erin hosts that show). Vanessa and Raina drop Eric Apricot's name. He's the author of Valkyrie Nation, my own go-to publication around anything WNBA. Valkyries, Say Less and Valkyrie Nation are now collaborating on a book they're calling Love Letters to Ballhalla. And Vanessa mentions Maya Goldberg-Safir, author of WNBA Rough Notes on Substack, and all-around cool person. I go on a sidebar here about talking to random people all over The Bay about the Valkyries, how infectious it all is, and how easy it is to get swept up by everything Valkyries. It also transcends generations and race. I love it. When we recorded, in late-August, the Valkyries were in second place, behind the Minnesota Lynx. They ended the season there, barely, after a franchise-historic comeback win in LA against the Sparks. As of this writing, Minnesota has been eliminated in Round 1 by the New York Liberty, making the Valkyries the de facto No. 1 seed in the playoffs. I ask Vanessa and Raina to talk about this incredible season, only the second in team history. I ask, straight-up: Is it Gabby Williams? Yes, but that's not the entirety of it. Raina talks about how Gabby has thrived here, and done so in a leadership role. They also mention the bond among all the players, something that's grown stronger over the course of this season. And they point to how the coaching staff is respecting player health differently and better this year. Maybe I'm giving our city and metro area too much credit, but I bring up a quote, recent at the time, from head coach Natalie Nakase. She talked about the love among Valkyries players. For me, that's a very SF/Bay Area thing. I'll take it. There are many ways to find Vanessa and Raina and Valkyries, Say Less. Their website is valkyriessayless.com, and it's a great place to learn about events they're either putting on or are a part of. Follow Valkyries, Say Less on Instagram @valkyriessayless and Threads @valkyriessayless. Having met their goals for Season 2 (press passes, interviewing players), Vanessa states her Season 3 goal of offering her meditation workshops to the team, in French and in English. Rad.

When Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely and Raina Mast aren't going bananas about the Golden State Valkyries, they're teaching kids in San Francisco. In this episode, meet and get to know Vanessa and Raina, cohosts of the Valkyries, Say Less podcast. We begin with Vanessa. Her parents met in San Francisco in 1970. Her mom came here the year before from her home country, France. In her mom's first month in The City, she met the man who became Vanessa's dad. She had just finished photography school back home, and planned to return to France. But fate wanted a word with her. Vanessa's dad grew up on the East Coast. Before he settled on creating stain-glass works, getting to know his own artistic bent, he came to San Francisco to explore that side of himself. He met Vanessa's mom. They were young artists, they were in love, and the rest is history. About a decade later, in 1979, they had a kid—Vanessa, their only child. She talks about being on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial, but considers herself mostly Californian/French. With her parents, Vanessa spent (and still often spends) summers in the French Alps. Both being artists, Vanessa's mom realized that between herself and her husband, one of them needed a job that offered health insurance. And so she went to a temp agency. That allowed her dad to pursue his stained-glass art. He later designed the stained glass in the Mrs. Doubtfire house. A lot of his glass art still exists around North Beach. Vanessa grew up amid all that art here in SF. But at the time, she might not have appreciated it like she does today. Eventually, she moved to New York City for college. She was drawn in by the romantic version of NYC depicted in movies and shows. After her time at Columbia University, Vanessa moved to LA to teach. She always knew she would come home, but wasn't sure when. After 11 years away (four in New York and seven in Los Angeles), she came back. She was 30 and had met the man she would later marry. It was time. Riffing off her seven years of teaching middle school in LA, which she started when she was 22, Vanessa came back and found work with the SFUSD, where she's been since 2008. We go on a sidebar about raising kids in San Francisco, something I didn't do but Vanessa did and wants more people to do. She and her Valkyries, Say Less cohost, Raina, met through a mutual friend. Vanessa's version of their meeting 10 years ago is that they were both invited to a party at that mutual friend's house. Vanessa saw Raina and thought, Damn, that is one cool-looking person. We'll hear Raina's version of that story later in Part 1. We end Vanessa's segment by hearing about her SF schools, a must for born-and-raised folks. She's quick to note that she only went to one school for K through 12—the French-American International School. Then we turn to Raina. They grew up in Pennsylvania Amish country, where they played basketball and ran track. They're from Easton, the town where Crayola crayons are made. Raina says the company would often survey town folks to help name new colors. Easton is 1.5 hours away from both New York City and Philadelphia. Both cities called to them, they say. They lived in New York City, Puerto Rico, and Upstate New York. Then they joined friends on a cross-country road trip, looking for a place to call home. After 13 years of Catholic school, they never really felt like the fit in back home. I ask if, like me, Raina is a recovering Catholic. They say they are fully recovered, in fact. Remarkable, especially for a queer woman. Brava! Being one of five kids in their family, with three brothers, was another challenge. Raina's oldest brother was the artist among them. Eventually, they took another trip across the US. New Orleans tried to grab Raina, and possibly almost did. The other choice was San Francisco, but they didn't move here right away. When it came time to move here, their family was shocked not at all. The first visit happened in 2001. There's a really funny story they share about driving through SF and ending up in Sacramento before they realized it. With no GPS and only paper maps, they circled back and this time, exited off the bridge to San Francisco. A few years later, now pregnant, they started thinking, Where do I wanna raise this kid? That's when SF really drew them in. Their younger brother lived here already, with an apartment in the Marina. There are stories about getting bested by The City's hills and wearing sandals and wondering why they were so cold—classic newcomer to San Francisco stuff. Despite all that, they loved it. In 2014, they made the leap. Since arriving to live here, they've lived in the Mission, the Haight, and nowadays, they call the Richmond home. Before their move here, they applied for art school and teaching fellowships at the same time. The teaching gigs they got offered health insurance and more stability, so they chose that path. Today, they are able to walk parallel paths of art and education. They've taught art, but these days, it's Spanish classes. Going back to their meeting story, Raina and Vanessa are both creative folks who also teach. As creative people with not a lot of money, a DIY mindset set in for them individually and together. It's what propelled and inspired them to start their podcast—Valkyries, Say Less. Vanessa speaks to being on the same "teacher rhythm," meaning time off at the same time, stuff like that. Raina adds that, both being Gen Xers, they grew up without women's sports being what it is today. We end Part 1 with Raina's version of meeting Vanessa, who would later be their podcasting partner. Right away, Raina thought Vanessa was very stylish, mostly owing to her French heritage, as they later learned. In May 2025, channeling Raina's music-recording background, Vanessa's podcasting knowledge (she has a meditation show), and both of their love of women's sports, and with the kickoff of the first WNBA team in The Bay, Valkyries, Say Less was born. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Raina and Vanessa. We recorded this podcast Rikki's Women's Sports Bar in August 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I talk with Kate Campbell, cofounder of WhoDidWhat?, a congressional accountability tracker. Their website goes live October 12. Once it's up, folks all over the country will be able to access their congressperson's voting recording, committees they serve on, any petitions with their names on it, and a score that the site gives them. It will launch covering a single topic, but an important one—how members score on the Epstein Files. Please register to vote or check your registration by October 19, the last possible day to do so in California. Follow Who Did What on Instagram @whodidwhattracker. And donate to this nonprofit's Kickstarter, up through Oct. 3, here. We recorded this podcast at 540 Bar in the Inner Richmond in September 2026.

Maria Finn is a forager, chef, event producer, author of a fantastic cookbook called Forage Gather Feast and fellow Lagotto Romagnolo dog parent who also happens to be a neighbor of mine on the houseboats in Sausalito. She is founder of The Institute for Ecosystem Based Living and Flora & Fungi Adventures. You can find her on the web at floraandfungiadventures.com and mariafinn.com. Maria's Intersections story about swimming in San Francisco Bay—and getting more comfortable with being uncomfortable—takes place at Fort Point in 2019.

Listen in as I talk with Roberto Hernandez, founder of the SF Lowrider Council. The council is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. And their Lowrider Parade and car-hopping contest will take place in the Mission this Saturday, Sept. 19. We recorded this podcast at Roberto's home in the Mission in August 2026. Photography by Tyrone Malow Diaz