Divamensch
San Francisco, July 2018 - - Day Three, 7/15/18
We thought about going to a favorite breakfast place, Mama's, but they were too crowded. We ended up at Moe's, which I really loved. I'd been there before, it's a fab joint for delish food, nothing too fancy. That morning was the final match of the World Cup, and we passed this mob watching the game at a bar, at 8:30 AM. Crack me up.
Howard and I had the most incredible breakfast: we shared the French toast and shared an omelet with chorizo and other luscious bits. And an English muffin, to put it right over the edge.
We stopped by Réveille, one of Howard's favorite coffee spots. He walked in the door and the guys there instantly started making his standard order. Don't you love that? We chatted for a while with Richard.
I told Howard after we left that he knows ALL the cutest guys in town. Really, one unbelievably cute guy after another. Richard is moving to Brazil, "just for a month," then three months in Barcelona. Hm.
We took the train to Berkeley, we had tickets for a Bergman movie that evening. Howard took this cute pic of me on our walk there, and I took this random pic of a guy in the train station:
We walked around a park in Berkeley for a while. Howard was wearing red jeans that were the same brand as the turquoise jeans I wore the day before. They are FIERCE, are they not?
Howard thought we'd go to Saturn, a groovy place with lots of vegan food, but they were way too busy. Howard kept calling it Mercury or Jupiter, just to mess with me. Thankfully he didn't call it Uranus, or I would have been messing with HIM. Anyway, we thought we'd wander and find something nearby, and wow, we hit the jackpot - - Gather, about a block away. Just as healthy, and instant seating. Delicious food, and such delightful servers. We split a salad and a pizza. Howard's bakery makes the best pizza in town, so he's very particular about pizza crust, and he was very pleased with this place.
We wandered around the museum for a bit before the movie. We were especially taken with an installation by Cecilia Vicuña, a contemporary Chilean artist. Her altered-found-objects sculptures were fascinating.
Her films were even more impressive. She sang on one of them, and her singing was incredible, full of strange sounds, so moving and expressive. They showed four or five short films and we stayed for two complete cycles, so we could experience her singing twice.
Here's a cute picture of me hanging out in one of their arty public spaces, while Howard was in the john. I set up the camera on a timer and put it on the windowsill. I look hilariously nonchalant.
Pacific Film Archive is doing an Ingmar Bergman cycle. Howard and I are big Bergman fans and we were excited to see a movie we hadn't even heard of before, *Brink of Life.* It took place in a maternity ward. It featured lots of actors we'd seen in other Bergman films: Ingrid Thulin in the lead, Erland Josephson as her husband, Eva Dahlbeck and Max von Sydow as another couple, and Bibi Andersson as another of the pregnant women. It was an extraordinary movie, so intense but effortless at the same time.
Wow, the whole movie is on youtube! Our favorite moment is at 1:07:40. A nurse comes into the room with the new mothers with a cart full of babies. And she takes two babies out of a couple of DRAWERS on the bottom of the cart. We all laughed at that.
Such a beautiful movie, and a treat to see it on the big screen with a real audience. Great opportunities for all of the actors, but of course Bergman always had such a talent for writing complex female characters. I think I might do a complete Bergman cycle at home when I finish my complete Hitchcock cycle. Oh, but I was thinking of a complete Bruce Lee cycle, too...
That night Howard took me to dinner at one of his favorite neighborhood places, an Italian restaurant called E Tutto Qua.
Our waiter was named Silvio and was BURSTING with charisma and charm. Howard told me our mom loves the food at this place but has a low threshold for the bursting Italian charm. Our paraphrase of her attitude is, "Thank you, could you please just bring me my food?"
