The Bitch is Back: Stories of Resurgence

We wrap up our North Beach series with an interview with Graziano Cerchiai, the patriarch of the city's legendary Bimbo's 365 Club, on his 91st birthday. 

Our guest this week is theater director and current Chief Producer at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Jonathan Moscone. Jon talks about his North Beach memories, including memorable nights at Tosca, and how the pandemic has unveiled inequities in our society that we cannot ignore. 

Arline and Beth catch up with poet Jack Hirschman.  He looks back on his friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and shares a poem he wrote for Lawrence on the night of his passing.  

Arline and Beth catch up with City Lights Books' linchpin Stacey Lewis. She looks back on 25 years at the iconic bookstore and remembers her mentor and friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

A year after Tuttle's death, Arline and Beth remember the tattoo icon with his friend and archivist Danielle Boiardi. 

Arline and Beth talk to San Francisco legend Peggy Knickerbocker. The cookbook author and gal about town talks about The Dolphin Club, her new memoir, and childhood friends helping get her through the pandemic. Her story about running around North Beach was recorded at Bimbo's in 2018. 

Beth and Arline remember a great show back in 2019 in the perfectly lit, crowded lounge at Bimbo's. Porchlight favorite Jesse DeNatale was there. He spent the pandemic creating a beautiful album "The Wilderness." Hear all about it and the roads that lead us wherever the hell we wind up.

Every year, we join forces with the amazing Litquake Literary Festival to bring you a night of stories told by authors and writers. Our theme for this show is ripped from the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime,” and involves tales of explosive scenarios, epic struggles, and living each day like it could be your last. With Greg Milner, Laurie Notaro, D. Watkins, Jack Boulware, Eric Spitznagel, Bucky SInister, and Pamela Alma Weymouth. Hosted by Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick, with music by Marc Capelle. 

Who am I?

It's a queston that never fails to amuse, confuse, bewilder, and humble us as we plunk along our journey on this earth. To what end, no one knows. To paraphrase Oliver Sacks, it is an enormous privilege and adventure to be a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet. And you are free to have canned fish for lunch every day, if you wish. 

As Porchlight celebrates fourteen years of personal storytelling onstage, we look to a theme where storytellers can choose to reflect or freak out on the whats, whys, and hows of who they think they are. 

Cousins author Mary Roach and bookbinder Dominic Riley
Mythbusters legend Adam Savage
writer and actor Moon Zappa
Executive strategist Karla Martin
Writer/performer/psychic hotline operator Ben McCoy
Bawdy Storytelling dynamo Dixie De La Tour