in the city there's a thousand things i wanna say to you

porchlight was a good time. huge crowd, good stories. ted brinkley's small jazz argosy provided a musical score for two film segments, the first a 5 minute or so short of turn-of-the-century san francisco, shot from a cable car as it wends its way along market towards the ferry building. i'm sure with a little research i can locate the title and more details, but well, i should get to doing the work for which i'm paid. the second piece was a montage of clips from hollywood features filmed in sf, including dirty harry, the presidio, 48 hrs, vertigo and it came from beneath the sea.

stories included tony dingman's recounting of his being hired to be nicolas cage's drinking coach on leaving las vegas, tara jepsen's tale of trying to get an indie script produced, and adrian belic relaying his caper about trying to cross from afghanistan into tajikistan as a stowaway aboard a container ship, just as the fall 2001 us-northern alliance military operations were at full pace. jeannie epper provided the most "hollywood insider" moment of the night...the first line of her bio reads that she did the stunts for lynda carter on wonder woman, and you really can't get much cooler of a bio-line than that.

the highlight though, was cathy begien's emotional retelling of how her mother came to not just accept but to embrace the fact that her daughter was not going to pursue a traditional career, but would instead be an artist. her closing move was to offer up a toast to the room, the spirit of the toast being to follow your heart.

the soundtrack for the ride in and out of the city was the detroit cobras' latest baby, one of those "been out for a while but i'm just getting to it now" records. a fun update of old and obscure stax-volt, soul and motown songs, mucked up with dirty guitars. check out "i wanna holler (but the town's too small)".