In November of 2020—a year none of us will ever forget—I suddenly found myself driving, alone, from my part-time home in the Santa Monica mountains, where I had been living with my partner throughout the Covid crisis, to a house in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where I had lived, with a series of housemates, for more than fifteen years. I was heading back to the Bay on fairly short notice in order to pack up my belongings and move out of this house, which by now I and many others affectionately called “Franconia” because it sits at the intersection of Franconia and Rutledge streets, and because, over the previous decade, I had hosted a salon there—the Franconia Performance Salon—which had made some kind of mark on the performance culture of the Bay Area.
The Franconia Performance Salon existed as a named, numbered entity—FPS#1, FPS#2, etc.—for roughly ten...