We went to a play at the university last
night. It was called Gibraltar and is a study of a new widow
adjusting to the death of her husband, and learning about grief (a real
"upper" of a show!)
The
set was designed by John Iacovelli, an Emmy award winning artist who teaches
MFA design at UC Davis. John was my very first interview when I
started writing for the Davis Enterprise and my memory of him was
that his hair was much wilder and I found him scary (mostly, I suspect,
because it was my very first interview).
He has designed everything -- more than 200
stage productions and often when you look at credits for movies or TV shows,
John is the designer. He's won all sorts of awards in addition to the
Emmy (for his production of A&E's Peter Pan).
I particularly liked the design for this show
because it is set in an apartment in San Francisco and it took me a little
bit to realize that the apartment had a window seat. Maybe it was because
the stage of the little Wyatt Theater is so oddly shaped that a window seat
is the most logical thing.
But as a native San Franciscan, I appreciated
that little touch, because one of my favorite things about San Francisco is
that it seems to be the showplace of bay windows. Drive around the
City and everywhere you look, houses have bay windows, many with window
seats. In fact, it's only lately that I am noticing buildings built
with flat fronts.
When we were growing up, we didn't live in a
fancy Victorian like these famous ones, but our house had a bay window with
a window seat.
(When we lived there, there were no trees on
the street and no garage under the window seat.) It seems that every
house existing in the city when I was growing up in the 50s had a bay window
somewhere in the house.
Our window seat was in the living room and
looks most closely like this:
Though it was about twice as wide as this one
and it was probably higher than this one is.
When we got our TV set, a giant Muntz TV, the
logical place to put it was in the center of the window seat, which made it
a great place to sit with your back against the TV and read or watch the
world outside. Our street was one of the steepest in the city, so it
was a "show" to watch tourists try to drive up to the next street.
There was a stop sign at the top of the hill, so you had to be balanced on
this steep street and then try to start up again without sliding back
down--and when I was growing up, automatic transmissions were not
commonplace. In fact, in one of his very early bits, Bill Cosby had a
whole thing about trying to drive in San Francisco and encountering a street
like ours.
We watched many people get to the top of the
hill and then slowly back down again to find a better way to get to Union
Street. Especially in the rain!
I loved to sit on the window seat in December
and watch for the mailman. Our house was the third house on his route
and he took the bus from Rincon Annex and got off at our street early in the
morning. It was best on days when he delivered mail more than
once a day (can you believe they used to do that?)
When I think of our little flat in San
Francisco, my two strongest memories are the floor heater, which I loved to
stand over when it was cold, the warm air blowing up my skirt. I could
stay there for hours too. And the window seat. I still have fond
memories of the window seat and wonder that now that the place is all
yuppified what it looks like today.
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