Boheme Fall 2020

NORTH BAY 2020

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Intriguing creatives of the North Bay

La Vie En Pose

Point of the Matter

A Letter from our Editor

Andy Fyne and Marin’s Spahr Center reduce harm one needle at a time. P20

P4

Making the Cut Filmmaker Angie Powers mixes humor and heart in her first feature film. P6

Pot professionals discuss how Covid-19 is remaking the cannabis landscape. P24

Nourishing Community Entrepreneur and restaurateur Amber Driscoll also serves Marin’s ExtraFood. P10

Empowering Practice

Virtual Vino St. Supéry Estate Vineyards & Winery goes from tasting rooms to tasting zooms. P34

Buttered Up

Dr. Toni Ramirez proves that justice can be good medicine. P14

San Anselmo’s M.H. Bread and Butter reminds that our best rituals include food. P38

Publisher

Advertising Director

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Lisa Marie Santos

Kara Brown

Editor

Advertising Account Managers

CEO/ Executive Editor

Danielle McCoy Mercedes Murolo Lynda Rael

Dan Pulcrano

Daedalus Howell

Contributors

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Cannabis Kaleidoscope

Evan Davis Jeffrey Edalatpour Kary Hess James Knight Chelsea Kurnick Charlie Swanson

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COVER: Sarah Hanson Citron, founder of Bricoleur Vineyards; Photograph by Kailani Andrade

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La Vie

La Goulue arriving at the Moulin Rouge, 1892, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

EN POSE

E

lle Decor recently ran a story that I couldn't bring myself to read beyond its headline, which declared, “We are all Bohemians now.” I inferred this had something to do with how to design one’s pandemic pad with an array of tassel-cornered throw pillows with a Toulouse-Lautrec print and maybe a fern hoisted to the ceiling by its macrame harness. Who knows? I didn’t bother to read it because I know where the real Bohemians are—here in the splendiferous North Bay, where defying the conventional both aesthetically and philosophically is not just the default lifestyle choice but an art unto itself.

4

I don’t fault a junior varsity interior design mag for trying, but “Bohemian” is more than a term du jour.

We’ve seen others come and go. Remember “artisanal”? At a recent multistate cocktail party I attended via Zoom, the hostess offhandedly defined “artisanal” as a portmanteau in which “artists talk out their asses.” Sure, part of it rang true and I’m prepared to let “artisanal” go. But not bohemian. I’m going to stand my hallowed North Bay ground, Elle.

Bohemianism is earned, not declared.

No butts about it.

We’ve paid our dues here. Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties have long practiced the art of living. Here, it’s not

what one pays, but how one plays. And to prolong this hazy phrasing, we don’t play for keeps, so much as share—be it the bounty or of ourselves and talents. That is certainly the case you will find with the faces and places presented in these pages.

During these strange times, we need to connect to meaningful experiences and each other more than ever. The good works provided by those profiled here accomplish exactly that. It is our privilege and pleasure to share our words about them and hopefully, in some way, bring greater definition to what it means to truly live la vie boheme.

— Daedalus Howell, Editor

EVAN DAVIS is a (mostly) fiction writer, devoted son and cardgame enthusiast. His work has appeared on Third Flatiron and the Nightlight podcasts, among others.

KARY HESS has written for the North Bay Bohemian, the Marin Pacific Sun and the Petaluma ArgusCourier, and is the creator of SparkTarot.

JAMES KNIGHT contributed to the Bohemian’s Swirl wine column from 2007 to 2019, is a past fellow at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers and a past master at WFH.

JEFFREY EDALATPOUR’s writing about arts, food and culture has appeared in KQED Arts, Metro Silicon Valley, Interview Magazine, Berkeleyside.com, The Rumpus and SF Weekly.

DAEDALUS HOWELL is the editor of the North Bay Bohemian and the Marin Pacific Sun. He is also the writer-director of the feature film Pill Head and the author of Quantum Deadline.

CHELSEA KURNICK writes journalism and poetry. She is on the Board of Directors of Positive Images LGBTQIA+ Center. Kurnick received a 2019 Discovered Award from Creative Sonoma.

BOHÈME 2020

CHARLIE SWANSON is the arts editor of the North Bay Bohemian and the Marin Pacfic Sun. He also co-hosts Laser Discourse, a podcast celebrating movies and obsolete technology.

JONAH RASKIN writes the cannabis column for the North Bay Bohemian and the Marin Pacific Sun, and performs his own poetry live with jazz all across the North Bay.

ON LOCATION Writer/ director Angie Powers (second from right) talks with Guinevere Turner (middle) during the filming of ‘Lost in the Middle.’

Making THE CUT

BY CHARLIE SWANSON 6

BOHÈME 2020 CULTURE

S

onoma County native Angie Powers taught herself to tell stories while growing up on her family’s apple orchard.

“There was always stuff we had to do that was wildly boring,” Powers says.

“Like, after my dad pruned the apple trees we had to pick it up and put it in a burn

pile, and so I just started telling myself stories while working.”

That internal storytelling transformed into story writing, and Powers earned an MFA in English and creative writing at Mills College in Oakland. She then studied screenwriting and now works as a corporate and creative filmmaker.

After living away from Sonoma »»

Photo Courtesy Elizabeth Stark

Filmmaker Angie Powers mixes humor and heart

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‘It was amazing how much people were willing to give...

I was very touched and moved by the support of the community.’’

— ANGIE POWERS, ‘LOST IN THE MIDDLE’

«« County, Powers returned to the region to be close to her parents and raise her kids, and she used the local landscape as the backdrop of her first feature film, Lost in the Middle.

“Growing up here, I’m old enough that there wasn’t much happening when I was young, so there was a lot of drive to get out (of Sonoma County) in high school,” Powers says. “Then, I remember coming back to visit my mom at some point and looking out her window, thinking, was it always this beautiful? I had just been so immersed in the beauty of our county growing up, I had no idea how special it was, I had to leave to get that perspective.”

Under normal circumstances, Powers would have premiered Lost in the Middle earlier this year at Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol, at the benefit event for the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, where parts of the film were shot.

Obviously, things are far from normal, and the fundraising night-at-the-movies event has been postponed due to the shelter-in-place orders in effect in the North Bay. 8

BOHÈME 2020 CULTURE

Local audiences will have to wait to see Powers’ film, though the wait will be worth it, as Lost in the Middle—about a group of friends in their 40s—features a blend of outrageous humor and heartfelt drama.

The kernel of Lost in the Middle comes from Powers’ own group of high-school friends. She describes the group as a rowdy bunch; and she says she realized the deeper importance these friendships held after a friend’s wedding several years ago.

“I started thinking about my friends, the things we know about each other, the things we hide from each other even though we’ve known each other for so long,” Powers says. “The story is about what it means to be friends, what you have to accept about each other; and that honesty is intimacy.”

Lost in the Middle follows a similarly rowdy group of longtime friends dealing with a very different life moment— spreading the ashes of a recently deceased group member. Tonally, the film is reminiscent of The Big Chill, only more diverse, more queer and more audacious in its comedy.

“It was phenomenal,” Powers says of the filming experience in Sonoma County. “We had 300 people volunteer to be part of this, and we ended up with a core group of locals who committed essentially two full weeks of their time and helped bring this together.”

Powers also notes that while the budget was miniscule, the outpouring of support from local restaurants and businesses added untold value to the production.

“It was amazing how much people were willing to give,” she says. “I was very touched and moved by the support of the community.”

The film finished shooting shortly before the Tubbs fire hit the county, and Powers says that the community built around the film’s crew came together to support each other even after wrapping production.

“People were checking in on each other, bringing masks to each other,” she says. “It was the best of what the county has to offer, when you’re struggling like that.”

Lost in the Middle screened at select festivals last year, winning Best Feature Award at the Broad Humor Film Festival in Los Angeles. Powers is disappointed the film could not be screened earlier this year at Rialto Cinemas, and hopes to reschedule the screening for the fall, mostly because the event will benefit the OAEC’s work in cultivating a sustainable and diverse ecology in Sonoma County.

“I love this county, and I know that sounds cheesy,” she says. “This is a place where people produce things, so I am confident that our county will come back, especially the artists, and I’m hoping they can lead the way in what might be a new way of doing the things we do well.”

Angie Powers also runs Bookwritingworld. com with her producing partner Elizabeth Stark.

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Nourishing COMMUNITY

PROVIDING Entrepreneur Amber Driscoll is the development manager for ExtraFood, a Marin nonprofit that gathers up excess food from over 250 grocery stores, hospitals, schools and office parks, and redistributes it to those in need.

BY KARY HESS

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BOHÈME 2020 HEALTH

A

mber Driscoll has a knack for business and a love of food. She emerged from years of fundraising work to open two North Bay restaurants— Speakeasy in Petaluma and Fog’s Kitchen in Inverness—and The Big Easy, a music venue in Petaluma, as well as the Opera House Collective, a retail collective of almost 100 artists and makers.

“I was working in nonprofit fundraising, which was my profession for a number of years, but had dreamed about opening a restaurant,” Driscoll says. “I have an MBA from UC Irvine and had wanted to make one of my many business ideas come to life for a long time. Eventually when the perfect little space became available, in the heart of downtown in Helen Putnam Plaza, I opened Speakeasy along with my business partner Roger Tschann.” »»

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‘I’m really grateful to be able to support such critical work at a time when so many people are suffering because of this pandemic.’

— AMBER DRISCOLL, EXTRAFOOD

«« In December 2019, she brought her love of nourishing the community full circle back to fundraising. She is currently the Development Manager for ExtraFood, a Marin nonprofit that gathers up excess food from over 250 grocery stores, hospitals, schools and office parks, and redistributes it to those in need.

“I decided last year that it was time for me to apply myself again in a full-time capacity to support the work of a community nonprofit,” Driscoll says. “I’m really grateful to be able to support such critical work at a time when so many people are suffering because of this pandemic. The people I work with are so inspiring, and it’s rejuvenating to be working alongside so many coworkers and volunteers who do so much for their neighbors.”

According to Driscoll, about 20 percent of the populations in Marin and Sonoma counties are food insecure on an ongoing basis, and 41 percent of the children in Marin County are enrolled in free or reduced-cost lunch programs.

Add to that the newly food insecure as a result of the current pandemic.

“Now there are tens of thousands 12

BOHÈME 2020 HEALTH

more people who are food insecure for the first time, who don’t know how to access supportive programs,” she says. “A lot of these people are service industry people who live paycheck to paycheck and maybe don’t qualify—for whatever reason—for state or federal food programs.”

Driscoll explains how ExtraFood’s staff and volunteers first pick up the fresh food from food businesses all around the county and then deliver it to over 125 nonprofit partners and food programs which are already connected with, and serving, the most vulnerable people in the community.

Their Community Meals Program then partners with restaurants and catering companies to make freshly prepared meals for people in need, including low-income seniors and families—many of whom have been devastated by this crisis—reaching over 8,000 people.

In fact, over the past six and a half years, ExtraFood has collected 4 million pounds of food and served 3.3 million meals to the community.

Driscoll is proud of her work at

ExtraFood, particularly the four new distribution sites she helped launch over the past 2-and-a-half months. Two are at schools serving families whose children used to attend those schools where they received free or reduced cost breakfast and lunches before the pandemic shifted schools to distance learning.

“Since the crisis began the most urgent need we have is for fresh, prepared meals,” she says. “Many families who have lost their jobs and have children who used to rely on the school breakfast and lunch programs are asking for prepared meals. Additionally, many seniors who struggle with hunger can’t leave their homes, and many also have trouble cooking for themselves.”

“I’d love to see ExtraFood grow,” says Driscoll. “It’s such an efficient, really well-run organization with hundreds of amazing volunteers. By [its] nature food recovery is localized—it’s all about the local food system and moving food from place to place in as short a distance as you can.”

While Driscoll’s restaurant, Fog’s Kitchen in Inverness, has since closed and she and her partner Terra Livingston sold the Opera House Collective to Kory Vanderpool in 2018, Driscoll still works with Tschann at Speakeasy and The Big Easy in Petaluma, navigating the new normal for the community.

“Recreating togetherness in the wake of this pandemic, and with such a charged and divisive political landscape, will require a lot of our thoughtful attention and combined efforts,” she says. “I’m focusing on helping to rebuild the community, and supporting the hard work of other small business owners, nonprofits and public officials who are trying to solve these complex problems and fight for equality and justice.” w

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EMPOWERING

Practice Dr. Toni Ramirez puts justice at the center of her practice in her office and community

BY CHELSEA KURNICK

D

At 18, she was accepted into an eight-year program at Brown University which included an undergraduate »»

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GOOD MEDICINE Dr. Toni Ramirez and 40 colleagues founded Health Professionals for Equality and Community Empowerment (H-PEACE) after the Trump election.

Photo by Orlando Ramirez

r. Toni Ramirez entered medical school as an act of rebellion. That, and she wanted to help people. In high school in El Paso, Texas, her guidance counselor mocked her ambition to become a doctor, despite the fact that she was at the top of her class. A Latinx child in a border town, Ramirez thought, “If you’re telling me I can’t do this, what are you telling my peers who aren’t at the top of the class?”

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‘Leaving work, we’re tired and want to see our families... If you want to get doctors to show up, feed them and allow them to bring their children.’

— DR. TONI RAMIREZ, H-PEACE

««

degree followed by medical school, permitting that she met certain requirements (which, of course, she did).

Today, Ramirez is a Family Physician at the Lombardi campus of Santa Rosa Community Health (SRCH) in Roseland, California. Thankfully, she says, she enjoys the work of being a healthcare provider. At SRCH, Ramirez runs the Gender Clinic, providing care to transgender patients.

“As a member of the LGBTQ community and somebody whose mission in medicine is to work with the most impacted and disproportionately affected by health inequity, it was an easy decision to do gender-affirming care,” Ramirez says. “There aren’t enough providers doing it. And the health disparities in the trans and nonbinary community are so vast.”

Competent trans healthcare can be hard to find and difficult to access, so SRCH being able to serve anyone— insured and uninsured—is remarkable.

Clients travel from as far away as Willits and Marin.

HEALTH BEYOND MEDICINE Despite the powerful work she does,

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Ramirez quickly learned there were limits to how much she could help people as a physician. She sought to create space for activism beyond her day job.

When Trump was elected president in 2016, she and about 40 other providers around Santa Rosa came together to form Health Professionals for Equality and Community Empowerment (H-PEACE).

H-PEACE is composed of family physicians, psychologists, nurses and nurse midwives. Most founding members came to the table with at least one area of focus in mind for advocacy. Topics included health access for all, immigrant rights, reproductive health, LGBTQ+ rights and environmental protections.

Ramirez had long imagined creating an organization through which healthcare professionals would make public statements, offer commentary about important community issues, make endorsements and consult with local government officials. She believes that Trump’s election resulted in a bigger group of providers feeling called to activism.

“We met out of fear of not being able to provide the care needed for vulnerable communities,” Ramirez says.

Ramirez says that because people

are vulnerable at the doctor’s office, providers often have a unique window into their patients’ lives. But, she says, limited time with patients limits a provider’s impact. She offers an example of treating someone who has diabetes.

“I get 15 minutes for a visit, so I may learn about a lot of factors that impact a person’s health—their immigration status, their low wage job, maybe they don’t have insurance so they don’t get their meds covered,” she says. “They have chronic stress, so they’re depressed and it’s affecting their sugar levels.”

There’s so much happening outside the four walls of the doctor’s office that Ramirez says prescriptions alone cannot treat the disease.

She explains, “Providers see how many intersections of people’s lives affect their health, but we’re so overwhelmed in this for-profit medical industrial complex that most doctors don’t look up and say, ‘Hey, do you know how horribly high rent is impacting the health of our patients?’”

Perhaps H-PEACE’s greatest accomplishment has been finding and forging spaces where providers can use their voices powerfully to advocate for patients beyond one-on-one interactions.

“Being a doctor, it carries weight when I say that what my patient needs is a livable wage or an equitable rent in order to treat their diabetes,” Ramirez says.

H-PEACE supported North Bay Jobs for Justice’s campaign to raise the minimum wage, which has passed in Santa Rosa, Petaluma and Sonoma.

There aren’t many groups like H-PEACE in the U.S., so the group didn’t have a specific model in mind when they started. They took some inspiration from unions.

Mara Ventura, executive director of North Bay Jobs with Justice, met Ramirez when she attended the first »»

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FRONTIER Dr. Toni Ramirez went from a border town to a frontier of healthcare.

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up care at emergency shelters during Sonoma County’s fires in 2017 and 2019 and coordinated for volunteer providers to come up from the Bay. That said, “It’s hard for H-PEACE to be H-PEACE during a fire or our Covid19 pandemic,” Ramirez says, because providers are integrally involved in these crises through their daily work.

THE NEXT CHAPTER After several years in Santa Rosa, Ramirez is heading home to El Paso before 2020 is over. Mara Ventura will be moving with her—the activists are engaged in more ways than one.

“I proposed to her via flip-chart,” Ramirez says, laughing. “She taught me the power of flip-charting and organizing, so that’s how I asked her to marry me.

We’re excited for new challenges.” She notes that they will focus on the border, and immigrant and asylum rights.

Though it was always her plan to eventually move home, it was important to Ramirez to stay in Santa Rosa long enough to ensure that H-PEACE would take root and SRCH would have a provider to continue gender-affirming care.

The Gender Clinic hired Dr. Arunima Kohli to take over for Ramirez, who is thrilled they have found a physician who is a woman of color, part of the LGBTQ+ community and who has a background in providing trans healthcare in Sacramento and at UC Davis.

H-PEACE thrives in the hands of several founding core members and has recently welcomed two newer members to its core team.

Ramirez is eager to bring home the experience she’s gained as a doctor and community organizer in Santa Rosa. She also can’t wait to eat her mom’s cooking. w

Photo by Nestor Torres Lupercio

«« H-PEACE meeting that Ramirez led. Familiar with healthcare unions, Ventura provided mentorship to H-PEACE on how to organize.

“It was really eye-opening to see how actively nursing unions were engaged in the fight for Medicare for all,” Ramirez says.

Almost immediately, H-PEACE became an inspiration to providers elsewhere. A doctor in Salinas looked to them when advocating for the healthcare of farmworkers in his area.

Then, during midterm elections, members of H-PEACE spoke on national panels about how to get healthcare providers engaged in community activism. Pro-tip: Offer food and invite their kids.

Ramirez says it’s often that simple.

“Leaving work, we’re tired and want to see our families,” she says. “If you want to get doctors to show up, feed them and allow them to bring their children.”

The value of H-PEACE, according to Ramirez, is adding a healthcare perspective to social justice issues and, in turn, learning from community organizations doing health equity work. H-PEACE has forged relationships with community leaders including Ana Salgado of immigrant rights organization Comité Vida, Richard Coshnear of Vital Immigrant Defense Advocacy and Services (VIDAS), and Sonoma County Supervisors.

Ramirez says she learns the most by being part of the community, not just as a doctor. It’s a balancing act between leveraging the weight it carries to speak as a provider and simply being present as a fellow queer person or Latinx person listening to community leaders.

“I came from a place where I wasn’t supposed to be a doctor—this isn’t the trajectory people thought I should take,” Ramirez says. “So I work really hard to reduce the power dynamic between doctor and patient or doctor and community.”

Ramirez says that elitism in medicine hinders providers’ ability to do true healthcare.

“Especially during this pandemic, I hope medical institutions will acknowledge the importance of raising up our humility and taking the lead from community members who may know more about how to address health inequities than providers,” Ramirez says.

Members of H-PEACE helped to set

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CARE Andy Fyne, Harm Reduction director of the Spahr Center.

POINT OF THE

Matter Marin’s Spahr Center reduces harm one needle at a time

BY EVAN DAVIS

W

e’re familiar with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts; more rare is when the whole transcends the sum of its parts and becomes something else entirely. Such is the case of the Spahr Center in Corte Madera.

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HEALTH

Photo by Richard Mikles

The Spahr Center originally came about in 2015 as the result of a merger of the Spectrum LGBT Center and the Marin AIDS Projects. It was then named in honor of the founder of both organizations, Jane Adams Spahr.

“There’s a call for community building, advocacy and inclusion in the county,” says Andy Fyne, Harm Reduction director for the Spahr Center. “We’re really working hard to bring it together as one cohesive entity and not just two sides of the same coin.”

Recently, the Spahr Center was awarded $228,900 in state funding over a three-year period to support Marin County’s Syringe Access Program. The mission for this program can be summed in two words: harm reduction. Their services range from distributing supplies confidentially and free to those who need them; to providing shelter, counsel and education; to all-important advocacy; as well as to assisting with interventions and providing equipment for overdose reversals.

“We’re not an abstinence-based approach,” Fyne says. “We’re a harmreduction approach. Any step towards a positive goal, any change you can make, is good. A small one, a large one—harm reduction is recognizing the inherent danger of illegal-substance use. We’re just not going to ignore the problem while someone’s struggling with a substance-abuse disorder.”

And therein lies the tender line they dance, acknowledging the less glamorous realities of real life while still pushing for realistic forward progress.

“Without a syringe exchange,” Fyne says, “the drug use is still going to happen, syringe use will still happen, and there won’t be someone handing out sharps containers and someone»»

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‘Without a syringe exchange the drug use is still going to happen, syringe use will still happen.’

— ANDY FYNE, SPAHR CENTER

««

collecting sharps containers and disposing of them properly.”

Any pursuit of this magnitude and delicate design is bound to be fraught with challenges, and the Spahr Center has met with many. Funds shortages, difficulties with location and battles with social stigmas continue to present themselves.

In many cases, exchange programs are supported by the county in which they reside, but even then it can be difficult to make do. As the Spahr Center has found, when unable to secure enough funding for the supplies they need, they “just take it out of the budget.” Supplementing their resources from the private sector remains an option, but it’s not always a complete answer to the problem.

“We had two private foundation grants that did not cover the $20,000 supplies we needed, and so the rest we would just take out,” Fyne says. “[We would] need other things to do a syringe exchange. The space was a closet … the staff were the frontdesk volunteers. They’d put the phone on auto-answer and run back and do an exchange with another member.”

When the Spahr Center later lost one of those private foundation grants, Fyne says, “it became a drain and it was just running a deficit. And our board of directors was like, ‘we can no longer run programs at [such] a loss.’ We went to the county Board of Health, went to Matt Willis who’s the director, and said, ‘Look, we can no longer do this. This is a public health function and we’re happy to perform it, but how do we do it?’”

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On top of these logistical issues, there’s also combatting the inherent stigma of needle use.

“I think when you explain harm reduction to the average person in Marin,” Fyne says, “they get it, they support it, but when they think about the syringes [themselves]—there’s a bugaboo about syringes in the playground … then it becomes ‘not in my backyard.’”

In an attempt to better combat these problems cooperatively, the Spahr Center looked to local providers of homeless services, asking to co-locate with them.

“We’ve received various degrees of push-back,” Fyne says. “They’re dealing with their own image. My sense was whether they knew we were doing this for 30 years in downtown San Rafael or not, whether they knew we were collecting syringes to keep them off the street or not, whether they knew we were preventing infection, whether they cared or not, they didn’t want it [front and center].”

This is where the California Harm Reduction Initiative comes into play— CHRI for short, pronounced “cheery,” not “cry.” What the CHRI grant represents, to the Spahr Center and the members of Marin affected by substance abuse, is a chance at stable footing for what may feel like the first time. Resources that have for so long been piecemeal and unsure now carry a measure of guarantee, a substantial blessing in this nature of work. The organization was quick to show transparency as to how the funds will see use.

The funding pays for existing staffing and operations and also allows for the Spahr Center to build a consumer advisory committee with paid interns to help in staffing the syringe-access sites. Part of the funding helps the hard-reduction staff to increase their outreach in communities of color and to build greater equity into their provision of services to Marin’s substanceusing communities and their allies.

With the recent months’ headlines involving the pandemic, the CDC news and activity surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, it may seem a reasonable assumption to see this grant to the Spahr Center as a reaction to those events, but the truth is that it was the culmination of years of persistent, nonstop effort prior to any of those things.

“This was all in play years ago,” Fyne says. “Including the push for racial equity … I have to say I’m very proud of my harm-reduction community in California … I’m proud of this group in the fact that we were doing it. Before George Floyd, we were doing it, you know?”

The tag line for their community outreach efforts is “nothing about us without us”; and so the largest change this event represents is a growing shift of perception around those people affected by substance abuse disorders and how to treat them. It’s a turn away, step by step, from a paradigm of shame, outcast-culture and absolutism to one of involvement, understanding and acknowledgement of realistic approaches to these problems.

The efforts of the Spahr Center, together with coming legislation to follow existing bills like that of AB 186, which makes it legal in the City and County of San Francisco to operate syringe-access sites for the purposes of treatment and overdose prevention, are an optimistic look ahead at what our communities can accomplish despite troubled times. w

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Cannabis KALEIDOSCOPE

BY JONAH RASKIN 24

BOHÈME 2020 EPICURIA

Photos by Jonah Raskin

On pot, the pandemic and price

I

n the middle of July, growers, dispensary owners, distributors and consumers told me that illicit weed was bringing in more money per pound than legal weed.

My sources also told me there was a cannabis drought, though I knew that California had been overproducing weed and shipping it out of state where it fetched higher prices than close to home. »»

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What had turned the marijuana marketplace upside down, and did it have to do with the pandemic, I wondered.

David Downs, the California bureau chief at Leafy, assures me that the drought is “real,” that the market is “bifurcated” and that in the illicit world the markup is 90 percent. Still, given the volatility of the cannabis world, that could change as quickly as the Dow Jones.

I decided to play pot detective and uncover the truth about the kaleidoscopic cannabis marketplace.

Fortunately, I wasn’t starting from scratch. Ever since February 2020, I’d been visiting dispensaries, farms and manufacturing centers in California and writing my weekly cannabis column, “Rolling Papers,” for the Bohemian and the Pacific Sun. I had clues and hunches and the names and addresses of people and places where I could poke around, ask questions and listen.

At The Galley, a cannabis manufacturing and distribution company in Santa Rosa, I sat down with Annie Holman, the CEO, and Cheriene Griffith, the director of operations, as well as a U.S. Navy veteran and a long time player in the food industry. We were all masked.

Holman and Griffith had weathered the pandemic and survived the storms that had hit The Galley. They were on course, making and delivering (from Modesto to Ukiah) topicals, tinctures, gummies, hard candies, refills for vape pens, beauty products, pre-rolled joints and a variety of chocolates and baked goods.

“It’s a difficult industry to be in,” Holman told me. “We share the pain, perhaps more than any other industry, and band together.”

Last winter it looked like The Galley might sink beneath the waves, but Holman and Griffith rose to the occasion and created a protocol to keep them and

28

BOHÈME 2020 EPICURIA

SIGN OF THE TIMES A Covid-19-era flier issued by the City of Santa Rosa.

everyone else aboard the vessel healthy and happy, albeit stressed. There were masks, hand sanitizers, daily health checks before anyone arrived for work, and a log for each and every person to accurately report his or her health. Plus, there was social distancing inside the 8,300-square-foot facility.

Griffith told everyone on the crew, “If you’re sick, don’t come to work.” She and Holman held bi-monthly meetings, talked about their own fears, encouraged workers to share theirs and created a team spirit to combat anxieties. In Southern California, food companies closed after employees tested positive for Covid-19.

“Cheriene saved the day,” Holman told me. “She’s the keel that keeps me straight.”

What saved the company was not

only Griffith’s steady hand, but also the ability, soon after the pandemic hit, to transition from making cannabis products to mass-producing hand sanitizers, and with a permit to do so from the city of Santa Rosa.

During a six-week run, The Galley made 45,000 units, registered the product with the Food and Drug Administration, sold a bunch and donated hundreds to the city of Santa Rosa, the homeless and residents of a nursing home.

“We launched that product in tandem with Covid-19,” Griffith told me, showing off a bottle with a label that read “Stop and Sanitize” and depicted a hand and an American flag, as though to say it was patriotic to use hand sanitizer.

About the price of weed, Holman had a theory worth considering.

“A lot of Boomers, who had grown up with ‘Reefer Madness’ and the whole stigma around marijuana, were afraid of going into a dispensary and went back to the black market they knew from the old days,” she said.

Gifted with an uncanny sense of what would sell and not sell, Holman also followed a kind of moral compass that emphasized cooperation rather than competition. During the pandemic, she and Griffith reached out and helped “legacy” growers hard hit by woes, in part because they’d been outlaws who had cultivated illegal weed for years and even decades and had trouble adjusting to the brave new cannabis world of fees, taxes and environmental rules enforced with guns by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“All through the pandemic, we deposited money with the Bank of America and Chase and haven’t had a problem,” Holman said. “Though we haven’t deposited large amounts of cash.” »»

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‘A lot of Boomers, who had grown up with ‘Reefer Madness’ and the whole stigma around marijuana, were afraid of going into a dispensary and went back to the black market they knew from the old days.’

— ANNIE HOLMAN, THE GALLEY

«« That kind of candor about baking is rare in the marijuana industry.

Erich Pearson, the CEO at SPARC, deposits cash in a financial institution, though he hasn’t told me which one because he’s concerned that if word gets out, scores of growers will show up with their cash at the same branch and his account will be closed. A legacy grower himself, Pearson has taken big risks and made a more or less smooth transition to the legal market. When I showed up at his farm in Sonoma Valley at the end of July, the crew had just finished harvesting tens of thousands of mature plants. The pandemic hadn’t prevented the harvest from taking place, nor had it hindered the men who were putting thousands of cannabis starts in the ground.

Perason took one look at the crew and said, “None of these guys have papers.

We help them and they help us. It’s a good deal.” Illegal labor, illegal crops and illegal chemicals: that’s the story of much of California agriculture.

While Pearson didn’t have an economic theory, he told me there was a drought and that black-market weed was worth more than legal weed.

Two days later, I watched a 60 Minutes segment about Emerald Triangle cannabis and heard the reporter say that 32

BOHÈME 2020 EPICURIA

she had visited a garden with 40 plants, that marijuana was harvested only once a year and that the price per pound had dropped drastically.

No one knows better how false and misleading those statements are than a friend, whose real name I would rather not provide since he was recently robbed at gunpoint outside his San Francisco dispensary. Let’s call him Ali Baba. He’s from the Ali Baba part of the world. In March, thieves took all the money in his wallet, he tells me, though he adds that they didn’t take the $5,000 in cash which he’d stashed in the trunk of his white sedan.

I sat with Ali in the enclosed patio behind his dispensary, where we were joined by a young fellow who looked distinctly Asian.

“Japanese?” I asked.

“We Asians all look alike, don’t we?” he replied and laughed, adding, “Chinese.”

My sources tell me that most Chinese in the cannabiz grow indoors. This fellow grew outdoors and hired day laborers, most of them Latinos and Latinas, to do the heavy lifting.

“Visit me,” he said. “I’m a few hours north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a crazy time. Prices have been going up, and there’s been a real pot shortage, too. I’ve been told no one is making big

money, but that’s not true. The pandemic has been a boon to the pot business.”

It has also been a boon to cannabis medicine, and has added to the already ample body of evidence that suggests that cannabis can alleviate headaches, menstrual cramps, PTSD, loss of appetite, insomnia and mental health issues associated with the pandemic, though in a recent article in The New York Times, Jenny Taitz, a UCLA professor in clinical psychology, suggested that using cannabis to deal “with anxiety and uncertainty” was dumb. Taitz argued that those who wanted to “empower” themselves in the midst of the pandemic might try half-a-dozen “quick strategies,” including mindfulness, listening to music and conscious breathing exercises.

None of Taitz’s suggestions would have surprised famed astronomer Carl Sagan, who years ago conducted a cannabis experiment on himself: he got high, kept notes and wrote an essay in which he explained that marijuana enhanced his sense of smell, sight, touch and taste. Sex was never better, food never tastier, music never more beautiful, he wrote. Sagan didn’t publish his findings for fear that he and his work would be ridiculed. Were he alive today, Sagan would join the connoisseurs who have come out of the cannabis closet during the pandemic.

During my detective work, when it felt at times like the world was ending, and my own fears were rising, I didn’t solve all the mysteries of the kaleidoscopic marijuana marketplace, but I went home with samples. The cannabisinfused chocolates from The Galley were the best. I followed Annie Holman’s suggestion and ate only a small portion.

After two hours the weed kicked in, and my anxiety levels dropped. That night I slept more soundly than I had in a month. w

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POINT AND CLINK Online wine and food events aren’t the future—they’re now.

St. Supéry proves you can’t spell ‘oenophile’ without ‘online’

34

BOHÈME 2020 EPICURIA

Photo by James Knight

BY JAMES KNIGHT

L

ike learning how to speak fluent Italian, or building a home gym out of recycled wine bottles and cat-food cans, virtual wine tasting is one of those Covid-19 lockdown activities that I did not jump right into in mid-March 2020.

My attitude toward tasting wine, but without the wine, could be described as dubious, yet compassionate: virtual wine tasting? Good luck with that— no really, best of luck with that.

But that also left me with a lot of options just in case the situation lasted into, gosh, summer of 2020, or was compounded by an early start to the wildfire season, precluding my favorite outdoor activities with a persistent pall of smoke. You just never know.

So, at last I chose to break down and download Zoom, the web-conferencing tool, when the umpteenth winery asked.

Besides, a record heatwave was on the way, and St. Supéry Estate Vineyards & Winery’s notion of sending me two bottles of crisp, cool and not-at-all-virtual Sauvignon Blanc was my idea of good timing. I chose wisely. The team at St. Supéry are past masters of the virtual wine tasting, as I learned from winery CEO Emma Swain.

“We started doing virtual tastings about 10 years ago, three or four times a year,” Swain says. These were on Facebook Live or Twitter, and the idea was to bring viewers, or online participants, into a live event in which Swain and others tasted wines, focused on Cabernet Sauvignon or some cuisine theme, often in a restaurant. “We were trying to bring people together and kind of have a party.” The in-person aspects of those events were nixed by California shelter-in-place orders. “In March, we relaunched them in a virtual format,” Swain says.

The physical winery is located in Rutherford, in the Napa Valley, and is open to visitors again, by appointment, albeit in a courtyard setting that, ironically, they were not permitted by local authorities to utilize as a tasting area until the pandemic.

“You know, if you come to wine country, you want to be outside,” Swain says. “So, it’s actually better.”

I set up my personal virtual tasting station out of doors, too, when the day of the tasting arrived. I’d heard that »»

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««

having a thoughtfully arranged Zoom background is the thing to do, and the sunflowers I planted back in late April came in handy. Alas, I rushed inside to fetch the chilled 2018 Napa Valley Estate Virtú ($30), which I’d studiously ignored for a minimum of 10 days after the shipment arrived, along with the 2018 Napa Valley Estate Sauvignon Blanc ($22), missed the start of the program and failed to switch on my video feed. And I was even wearing pants.

Was that a virtual wine tasting faux pas? Not really, and not everybody wants to, Emma Swain tells me during another Zoom chat the following morning—but that she appreciates the sunflowers.

“I always go on a little early, and see everybody on-screen,” Swain says. Many participants are wine club members, and frequent the sessions, which are held Thursdays at 3pm and 5:30pm Pacific Time. “And it’s like I have all these new friends all across the country—there’s Samantha, and there’s Joe! I like seeing everybody on the screen.”

Instead, my name appeared in a small box at the top of the screen (in scroll mode), along with a few others in the name-only club, aside a few dozen folks in ones, twos and a foursome, who variously stared intently into the screen, drank wine or talked offscreen. In the big picture, Swain appeared in her office, moving the program along by introducing a cast of

36

BOHÈME 2020 EPICURIA

characters in the winery, culinary garden and kitchen, and answering questions generated on a chat panel.

It isn’t expected that “tasters” chime in on audio. They don’t even have to drink the wine. Here, I’d saved my bottle and brought a corkscrew to the table, half expecting a kind of “one, two, three!” coordinated opening.

“I was razzing some people when I saw them drinking sparkling wine,” Swain says of a recent event. “What’s with the Champagne?”

They said they couldn’t wait—they’d already finished the bottle the day before.

But a Champagne toast is traditional in the St. Supéry cellar, explained winemaker Brooke Shenk, who shares Zoom duties with VP of Winemaking and Viticulture Michael Scholz every other week. The screen switched to a photo of the cellar team toasting to the harvest, all masked and practicing distancing, then to the harvest crew picking Sauvignon Blanc at night, and back to Shenk, thanks to a behind-the-scenes editor who smoothly weaved the live event with recorded video.

Holding a glass half full of opaque, margarita-like liquid to her ear, Shenk told the group, “You can actually hear the fermentation as it’s spritzing away!” After she described the steps they take with the Sauvignon Blanc in the cellar, Shenk returned to join the small-screen people and sip on some finished wine at the day’s end,

while Swain introduced estate horticulturist Brianne Hoover, who displayed some unusual beans and carrots picked from the garden. Then, estate chef Tod Kawachi prepared a miso marinade for the veggies.

Miso, according to Kawachi, is what all the cool chefs have in their personal stashes for home cooking these days.

I’d like to have more of this cool, slightly green-grassy but mostly juicymelon tasting Sauvignon Blanc in my stash, but I have to agree with Swain that the Virtú has its virtues as a food pairing wine—a blend with 46 percent Sémillon, it’s less fruit-forward, but has more weight and texture.

Kits can be bought that include all of the wines in the series, plus a few handy items and the recipes from Kawachi, all of which, in this series, are vegetarian. Swain says that her husband is going in the opposite direction of the “Covid gain,” and getting skinnier “with my cooking all these great meals that I’m getting from Tod!” Following up on a sustainable seafood series, and a Napa Green series, this harvest series has another four weeks to go, through Sept. 17, followed by a holiday cooking themed series. Wines can be bought online, or found locally via “wine finder” on the website, for the tasting.

Participants don’t even need a bottle, but even better, they can share a bottle: Swain relates a story about two couples, in the same apartment building but practicing stringent social distancing, who pour half a bottle and leave the other half by the other’s doorway. Then, they join each other onscreen, making for a real, virtual, wine-tasting get-together.

Visit St. Supéry any time, virtually, at stsupery.com.

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BAKED San Anselmo bakery M.H. Bread and Butter is lauded for its pastries.

Buttered UP M.H. Bread and Butter maintains a Marin ritual

BY JEFFREY EDALATPOUR

T

38

BOHÈME 2020 EPICURIA

M.H. BREAD AND BUTTER

www.mhbreadandbutter.com 101 San Anselmo Ave., San Anselmo 415.755.4575. Open every day, 8am to 3pm.

Photo by Tina Salter

he summer fruit tart at M.H. Bread and Butter is a yogurt parfait that’s been modified by the devil. A pastry crust— baked in the shape of a small bowl—holds a heavenly cloud of Bavarian cream. Last month a baker quartered apricots and lay them on top. Last week, bright red raspberries dotted the cream.

The apricots and the raspberries weren’t drenched in honey, macerated or trapped in a sticky gelatin. They remained pure, unadulterated.

Among the many golden-hued pastries that fill the vitrine, those fruit tarts stand out and draw the eye. Hours after I’ve eaten one, I think of it again late at night, long after the cafe has shut down for the day. It’s the consistency of the cream that’s memorable, hovering precisely between a simple whip and a denser crème pâtissière. There’s a sweetness to it that’s faint, barely detectable. Each tart bite of fruit marries so agreeably together with the cream and flaky crust.

The chefs address the same amount of care and attention to the breakfast, lunch and brunch items. Lettuce is the star in salads—and not on sandwiches. Instead, they add satisfying combinations of avocado, radish, cabbage and red onion. But M.H.’s shining North Star is the bread. Co-owner Nathan Yanko perfected his bread-making craft at Tartine bakery before opening M.H. with his wife, Devon. You can mock the idea of ordering toast there and still indulge in their variations on the theme, with cashew butter or, yes, avocado.

Covid-19 has moderately altered the way the bakery does business. Patrons no longer wander in willy-nilly to gaze open-mouthed at the various croissants stacked side by side. Loaves of walnut, spelt or rye still crowd the shelves, resting just out of reach behind the counter. The staff is masked, attentive at the door and eager to expedite the orders.

Like every other public exchange that takes place between strangers nowadays, there’s an underlying sense of mild panic and urgency accompanying every transaction. An unspoken, two-way signal courteously reads: “Let’s get this over with.”

Everyone lines up outside, politely, in a more orderly fashion than elementary school kids do. Adults scroll through their phones to mask any signs of impatience.

When the sunlight hits the asphalt in a merciless way, the line snakes to the right under a canopy of merciful shade. All of the wooden tables out front, facing San Anselmo Avenue, are taped off, verboten.

Now, people wait there, endeavoring to stand six feet away from each other.

They squint into the darkened windows, hoping that the next hand-delivery will be theirs and only theirs.

Around the corner on Belle Avenue, open orange umbrellas stretch as far back as the parking lot. Tables there are spaced far enough apart so as to encourage al fresco dining. It’s a lovely illusion.

For a few minutes, you can sip an iced tea, unpack a sandwich and a tart, and pretend that life is a sun-dappled picnic.

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