Muni Diaries

Muni is the through line in this week's podcast story from Simone Herko Felton, a senior at Lowell High School in San Francisco. Simone has lived here all her life and takes the 23-Monterey to go to school daily. She explains what it's like to be a high school student in San Francisco taking this cross town bus, and why this particular line is symbolic of her multi-ethnic identity. Simone is the P...

Do you often wish you said something to someone who was acting inconsiderate or rude, and you spend days thinking about what you should have said? In this episode, our storyteller didn't hold back and called out a rude fellow shopper at the checkout line, and the results would surprise you. Justina Wu is a writer, storyteller, and producer of Beyond Borders Storytelling, a series of travel-themed...

Our previous episode featured Smiley Poswolsky, a self-described Millennial workplace expert who quit his stuffy Washington, D.C. job to become a writer in San Francisco. His story about personal growth and change, with NOPA/Western Addition in a prominent guest-starring role, really got our listeners talking more broadly about the state of our city—a hot topic lately. For this episode, we invited...

Smiley Poswolsky quit his D.C. government job and left his suit-wearing days behind in order to become a writer in San Francisco. A few years in, he found himself realizing that some of the things he was excited about the city were also perhaps ruining the place he loves. But who has the right to define what this city is about? Poswolsky is an expert on millennials in the workplace, a topic that h...

This weekend is Pride weekend, and we are highlighting stories from our LGBTQ community. Today's story is from Kurt Schwartzmann. Kurt is an artist, printmaker, and photographer.  In 2006, he lost all vision in his left eye due to complications of AIDS. In the first half of 2007 Kurt was homeless and living on the streets of San Francisco. Muni buses, running around the clock, often provided him t...

Ady Lady is a writer, performer, and all around funny person who's been described as wildly funny by The San Francisco Examiner. She's written and performed two solo shows: Sara Jane Tried to Shoot the President and From Piss to Bliss . She says she actually started writing From Piss to Bliss in a desperate attempt to maintain a state of love while riding Muni.  This story was recorded at Muni Dia...

San Francisco has been a place where many young transplants found their own identity and voice. In today's episode, storyteller Colin Daly shares the tale of a house on Folsom Street where he and his group of friends found their own "chosen family" in the 1990s. The friends lovingly named the house "Camp Folsom," where a room in the Mission was only $300 and life lessons—about money, community, he...

When the bus came to a halt, storyteller Kathleen Auterio noticed a familiar face from her Mission neighborhood. What happened next will keep you on the edge of your seat. This story was recorded at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. Kathleen  was born in Boston but has called San Francisco home for 19 years.  She is a heavy metal and horror movie fanatic, and has  told stories at The Moth Grandslam,...

Artist George McCalman shares a story of how he came to be illustrating strangers on Muni, inspired by growing up on the New York subway system. This in turn helped inspired his Observed column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Nowadays he documents life on and off the bus. Trained as a philosophy-focused fine artist at St John's University, George had a 14-year editorial magazine career before open...

Sureni Weerasekera   is a Sri Lankan-born, San Diego-raised, & San Francisco-based stand up comedian, actor and writer. In this story, told at Muni Diaries Live at Rickshaw Stop, Sureni shares a story about how people relate to race while riding public transit. Sureni is a contributing writer and actor for "Life of Trying" and runs two of Berkeley's top comedy shows, "Pizza Party" and "Subhumans."...

Growing up nerdy is not easy anywhere, especially in Alabama. Storyteller Dhaya Lakshminarayanan thought she'd left those teenage memories behind when she moved to San Francisco. But one day, she unexpectedly reunites with one of her long lost friends who shares those high school memories. Upon finding each other at the Castro Safeway, Dhaya and her friends embark on a new friendship that involves...

Peter Hartlaub and Heather Knight are long time San Francisco Chronicle reporters who have seen it all. But it took riding every Muni line in one day for them to remember why they love it here so much. This year, they will be embarking on a new journey called TotalSF. We invited Peter and Heather to sit down to have a chat about their experience in front of a live audience. This episode was record...

Matt Shapiro  is a musician and the co-owner of the Elbo Room in Oakland. After initially working at the Elbo Room for years as its manager and booker, Matt and co-owner Erik Cantor purchased the bar in 2010.  The Elbo Room has been the home of Muni Diaries Live for many years, and just before its San Francisco location closed permanently, Matt joined Muni Diaries Live on stage to share one of the...

Gwen Carmen is a storyteller, cancer survivor, and a long time teacher of the San Francisco Unified School District. In this episode, Gwen tells a story about taking BART to see one of Aretha Franklin's final performances. On her journey home from the concert Gwen finds herself in the middle of a crime scene, luckily some of her previous students arrive to save the night. You might remember her fr...

Meaghan Mitchell is a native San Franciscan and news editor at Hoodline, which you can imagine gives her tons of local cred. Meaghan shares a story of one really hard day at school and how it brought her to Muni. And podcast listeners: we will be at the Betabrand Podcast Theater on Thursday, March 7 at 7p.m. to tape our first episode with a live audience! If you'd like to be in our audience, make...

Green Apple Books is one of the most beloved bookstores in San Francisco, and a mainstay on Clement Street (and now also in the Inner Sunset). Founded in 1967, the bookstore is now owned by three of its employees. We invited co-owner Pete Mulvihill to the San Francisco Diaries podcast studio to share how he went from being a young book lover working at this iconic shop to being its owner. You can...

Storyteller Nuala Sawyer was having a terrible year in San Francisco. One of those times in your life when you just think things couldn't get any worse. Then, a man on Muni shared a vulnerable moment with her that changed her perspective. Nuala is the news editor at SF Weekly. She writes about a little bit of everything: City Hall, the courts, homelessness, immigration, housing, crime and of cours...

Storyteller Irene McCalphin has often experienced the invasion of personal space on public transit, but this one time she decided enough was enough, and she was going to take up the space she deserves. As co-founder and massage therapist of A Sovereign Embodiment Healing Collective and Board-member of the Body Political, Irene blends magic with massage, storytelling and performance art to liberate...

Storyteller Baruch Porras-Hernandez is a writer, performer, host, storyteller, and regular KQED community events host based in San Francisco. He is a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry and  regularly organizes poetry shows in the Bay Area. In today's story, Baruch shares an exchange that he had with a visitor while working at one of the longest running gay sex clubs in San Francisco. Upon realizing...

Today's story is from Luke and Chris, who you might know as Sequoia and the Early Bird on the radio show, Rollover Easy on BFF.FM . Rollover Easy is a morning radio show that has a "healthy dose of positive news, banter, and interviews with interesting San Francisco locals." Luke and Chris are up every Thursday morning at 8 a.m. to report on and chat with locals over coffee. In this episode, Luke...

If you've been to our live shows, you know the highlight of every show is The Muni Haiku Battle. It's a Muni-themed poetry throw down and we've had some pretty intense battle on stage of the 5-7-5 variety.  In this episode we have our reigning champion Alexandria Love and challenger Jessica Cohen from our 10th anniversary show this April at the Elbo Room.  Jessica is an illustrator, an infrequent...

In this episode, storyteller Louis Evans shares a story of one seemingly uneventful day when he was leaving the underground parking lot at Civic Center, only to find out that there's an active shooter situation above him. Louis is the host of the new literary event, Cliterary Salon . Cliterary Salon is a show of rowdy, original stories about female sexual pleasure or feminism or anything in that u...

Storyteller Thea Selby has lived in the Lower Haight since 1999. She's a mom, a member of the City College of San Francisco's Board of Trustees, and, as you'll learn in this episode, a tireless advocate for the art that has defined her neighborhood for decades. Listen up as Thea walks us through the tumultuous history behind the Love in the Lower Haight mural project

When City Arts and Lectures call you to be the backup for your favorite writer, you clear your calendar right away. In this episode, storyteller Judson True recalls that one fortunate phone call in 2001, right after 9/11, when he was called to be the backup interviewer for Scott Shafer. The subject? His favorite writer, Joan Didion. Judson is currently the chief of staff for state assemblyman Davi...

It wouldn't be a cross-town Muni line if manspreading, drinking, and unintentional, impromptu history lessons didn't factor in somewhere, right? Today's storyteller, Molly Martin, is a tradeswoman and longtime Bay Area resident. Molly previously served san activist and organizer for Occupy Bernal, a neighborhood group focused on fighting evictions in Bernal Heights. She's currently working on a bo...