Part 2 picks up right where we left off in Part 1, with Mike’s move to The City. It was 2021, around the brief lull in COVID cases before Omicron hit.

Full disclosure: This part of my episode on Mike has way more content about me than most of what I publish here on Storied. I guess you’ll just have to deal.

Mike knew he could fall back on bartending here while he figured out his next gig in his new city. He’d taken one of what he calls a “big swing” with his move to New York City when he was 18. Now was time for another big swing, this one in San Francisco.

He worked briefly at a mezcal bar on Valencia and a month at a cocktail bar in Emeryville. Then, fate wanted a word with Mike Irish.

Someone he met at a memorial for a friend grew up with Emmy Kaplan and mentioned the restaurant to Mike, suggesting he try to work there. He started off with one or two shifts a week, mostly filling in. And then Emmy offered Mike more shifts.

This is one of several points in the podcast where I go on and on about myself. I share the story of my own decades-long experiences with Emmy’s, but for good reason. It culminates with my first time eating inside since the pandemic, when Erin and I sat at the bar and met Mike.

Back to Mike’s story, Emmy had just got her liquor license and needed a bartender who could do that. Mike was the guy.

He became “bar lead” (they couldn’t call the role “manager” and have Mike still receive tips) and created the cocktail menu for the place. He left the hiring of bartenders to Emmy, but Mike eventually took over ordering. He says he’s always had a mind for the business side of things, something not all bartenders carry with them. That possibly stemmed from Mike’s time making movies. He says film production is “the exact same thing” as running a restaurant.

Then we get to the elephant in the room—how Mike ended up owning his boss’s restaurant.

Emmy had told Mike that a neighborhood bar near her restaurant might be up for sale, and that he should look into buying it. She brought a broker into Emmy’s and he sat at Mike’s bar and chatted with him about what Mike thought was that bar for sale. It turned it he was talking about Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack being on the market. It was roughly early spring 2024, and by summer, the deal was done. Emmy and Mike kept that broker, but ultimately worked it all out themselves.

He does share the story of how the deal almost fell through. Obviously, it didn’t. But you just gotta hear this one. He says most of their agreement is verbal/handshake, which speaks to how cool Emmy is.

I prompt Mike to do something he says he hadn’t really done at the time of the recording—reflect on the massive life changes he’s been through just in the last five years. He moved across the continent, got engaged (and since married), had his first kid, bought a car, bought a business. That’s a lot.

Mike says that, after the first day of operation with him as the owner of Emmy’s, it all hit him—how hard it was and was going to be moving forward. He couldn’t take a day off or call in sick. After about a week or so of mental anguish, though, it all started to click for him.

And then we get to the part of this episode where my life and Mike’s really got intertwined—when I went on Check Please! Bay Area last summer, right around the time that Mike took over Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack. In our recording, Mike did something that I don’t think anyone who’s been on this podcast has done over the eight years we’ve been around—he turned the mic around and asked me some questions. I was happy to oblige, since he was unaware of how applying to and being on Check Please! works.

This part of the podcast is essential Check Please! Behind the Scenes.

We end the podcast with Mike’s take on our theme this season—Keep it local.

We recorded this podcast at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in April 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Welcome to this bonus episode about Homeless Children’s Network (HCN).

Malik Parker is the director of the Jabali Substance Use Disorder (SUD) program at HCN. He is originally from Fayetteville, North Carolina, but his mom is from Oakland. He left NC for The Bay the day after he graduated high school in 2011.

Cameron Smith is HCN’s director of Afrocentric programs. He is from Columbus, Ohio, but has been in SF for more than 10 years now. Cameron came here on a whim; he had a friend who needed a roommate. His first job in The Bay was in San Jose at the YMCA as a basketball ref. He knew then that he wanted to serve, to give back.

Cameron shares the origin story of Homeless Children’s Network. HCN was founded in 1992 with the intent to serve as a connection between six different shelters in The City. Their CEO today, Dr. April Silas, has been with HCN since the beginning. The idea was that folks experiencing homelessness were transitory, and it would be best if services they received in one shelter followed them.

Nowadays, they serve more than 2,500 clients per year. They have around 60 partnerships with other service organizations in The City. Please visit the HCN website for more info.

They are currently in the middle of their Jabali awareness campaign, a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Public Health that provides services around the fentanyl crisis. Cameron points to the Black population in The City being about 4–5 percent of the total, while Black folks experiencing fentanyl overdose deaths range from 30 to 40 percent of the overall number in SF.

The Jabali campaign aims to bring awareness to treatment as well as warning folks of the dangers of the deadly drug. HCN runs ads on social media and YouTube as well as billboards around town. They aim through these ad campaigns to be as ubiquitous as, say, a Sweet James or Ann Phuong. The goal is to make folks aware of HCN and its services before they might realize they need it.

A big part of Malik’s job also involves meeting people where they are, bringing those same messages as HCN’s ads. He says that this aspect of his role with HCN is perhaps the most rewarding for him.

Malik has learned a lot in his time with HCN, including in their work with SFDPH. He’s uncovered his own biases, which is part of what he works so hard to help others see. He emphasizes for folks the “us” aspect of it all. He says he relishes the give-and-take of seminars, the things he hears people say to one another.

When I mention the United Playaz motto, “It takes the hood to save the hood,” we go on a bit of a sidebar about communities looking internally to solve their own issues.

HCN has workforce development programs, and I ask whether anyone who’s been through their programs has come back to work with them. That has indeed happened.

Then our conversation shifts to ways that The City has adopted a “tough on crime” approach in the last couple of years to several areas that HCN deals with (see the recall of Chesa Boudin and shift rightward of our Board of Supervisors, among other signs). No one in the room the day we recorded agrees with that approach.

We end this bonus episode with ways that you can get involved with HCN, whether it’s donating, volunteering, attending a seminar, or something else. Please visit HCN’s website to learn more. Follow them on social media @hcnkidssf.

We recorded this episode at Homeless Children’s Network offices in The Fillmore in March 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Misstencil at a new school half a world away from her home in China.

Her time in Switzerland started off in business school, a topic that she admits she’s not the best at today. Aside from school, she visited other parts of Europe. She got a job in Switzerland, but called her family back home as much as she could afford to. One call she had with them around the new year one year had her feeling like family members were passing the phone and no one wanted to talk with her. She then learned that her grandfather, the one who had raised her, had passed away days before this call. The family had kept the news of his illness from Misstencil, ostensibly to protect her.

Her grandfather’s death took her about a decade to get over. She was left with a sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose. Going back home felt out of the question, and she liked Switzerland. But her school there had a joint program with a school in the US, and so she applied for a visa. That school was in South Carolina.

When her time in South Carolina came to an end, she had a choice—New York or San Francisco. She (correctly) chose The City.

Misstencil had friends in SF already, and they let her stay with her. Those friends told her about a website, then only in the Bay Area, that she could use to find her own place. That site was Craigslist, and they were right. She soon found a place of her own. The year was 2000, and little did she know that she was beginning what would be a decades-long stay here.

Her first job in The City was for a big company, one that had a dress code that put her in high heels. Looking back, Misstencil is so far removed from that corporate world that she cannot imagine wearing those shoes, or painting her nails, or other things that go along with corporate culture. But we’ll get to that.

She found herself meeting and befriending older hippies who encouraged her to pursue her art. She was broke, and they put her up. They helped her get art supplies. She had previously set aside any artistic ambitions while going to school and beginning what she thought would be a career. But summoning inspiration from the art her dad used to do and accepting the help of her friends in her new city, she decided to go for it.

Misstencil (not known by that name just yet) began to show her art. She recounts the first time she sold a piece, and how that felt. She walked by the gallery and saw that red dot and knew she had to tell everybody about it. She says that art and San Francisco and those early friends she made here saved her.

Looking back on her life and the emotional struggles she had endured, Misstencil came to realize that, as an adult and survivor of depression, she wanted to help kids going through that. She lived with roommates in a rent-controlled spot, thus allowing her to do side work of that nature.

The person who today is Misstencil of course wasn’t always known by that name. That started in 2022. She shares the origin story of her pseudonym.

It all began with her simply wanting to beautify parts of The City that had lost their luster, so to speak—boarded-up storefronts and the like. She found herself all over town, talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing how much neighborhoods meant to people. This led Misstencil to conceive of her “San Francisco Lonely Hearts” project, which is how my life intersected with hers. It’s a way for her to show her deep love for and appreciation of San Francisco.

She shares how she settled on stencil art for her method lately. She never had any formal training or went to art school. She says that because she didn’t have a very happy childhood, she wanted her art to help her feel like a kid again.

Misstencil goes on a side story about the time she connected with SF icon Frank Chu and invited him to do Bay to Breakers with her. We also talk about the day we met, when she showed her SF Lonely Hearts work-in-progress canvas outside of Vesuvio. In addition to the 2D art that day in Jack Kerouac Alley, she had Frank Chu on a Roomba holding his infamous “12 Galaxies” sign, and a Golden Gate Bridge bench placed in front of the canvas.

Before we wrap, I ask Misstencil about upcoming shows she has, and she humors me by plugging our “Keep It Local” show, which she’s in.

We end the episode with Misstencil’s thoughts about our theme this season and the theme of the show this week: Keep it local.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Fredo and Laine had worked for the same company for a minute, but both left eventually. That social group they’d formed with a few other artists they worked with kept in touch. Some years went by.

Fredo attended a workshop for artists at Hunt and Gather in the Sunset, and let Laine know about it. She says that he asked her to be his “accountability buddy.” He says it wasn’t a question, but more a half-joking demand.

Fredo shares what an “accountability buddy” is, in this sense. At the workshop, each attendee set up goals for the next year. Your accountability buddy helps you stay on-target for achieving those goals. For Fredo and his buddy (Laine), part of that meant meeting almost once a week to go over what Fredo had been able to cross off his list and what was ahead. One vital area he felt he needed her help with was networking.

With Laine holding him to task, Fredo knocked out most of his 20 goals for 2023 by August of that year. But, because his networking goal didn’t have a metric, per se, it proved trickier.

And so they got together for coffee and sat in the parklet outside of Gus’s on Haight. Fredo brought a newspaper with him that day. He’d noticed that he kept hearing about art shows after the fact. Because he wasn’t really part of a larger scene (yet), he wondered how people found out about these events. His idea was to create a publication to do just that, and more. And then a funny thing happened. Laine had had the idea to make an art magazine that very same week. Kismet!

They took that as an obvious sign that this was something they had to do. And so they started hanging out even more, talking and talking and talking about what they wanted their publication to be. What kind of paper? What would it look like? How do we make it free for artists to be featured? Do we want advertising?

They answered those questions with several notebooks and a lot of caffeine. The first issue of 415 Zine took them seven months to make. Over that time, Laine came up with the idea of tying the title back to the structure of the publication—it could be four of something, one of something, and five of something. They did their due diligence when it came to researching the media landscape, especially when it came to art journalism. They settled on having their boundary be a geographic one, rather than having an artistic-genre focus.

The “4” would be short features on artists—two pages of full-color examples of their work accompanied by brief write-ups about them. The “1” would be an in-depth interview with a single artist, with several samples of their art to go with the interview. And the “5” would be spots around San Francisco for folks to go experience art. Places like Madrone Art Bar, where we recorded this episode.

I ask Laine and Fredo to talk about those seven months, from conception to the first publication, and the ups and downs they experienced in that time. Laine says she was in “no looking back” mode, and Fredo concurs. The only questions that popped up were around content. They were in it, and nothing would stop them.

Though that first issue took them a little more than half a year, they quickly decided that 415 Zine would be quarterly. Most of the heavy lifting of creating something from scratch had been done. And though putting together a publication like this is no small feat, they felt they had it down.

As we recorded that day in April 2025, Fredo and Laine were about to celebrate the first birthday of their creation. That party fell before this podcast was ready to go out, but I asked them to talk about the anniversary and what it means to have a full year and now five issues behind them.

We end the episode with Fredo and Laine’s thoughts about our theme this season—Keep it local.

Photography by Mason J.

Check out my conversation with previous guest Lincoln Mitchell as we chat about Lincoln’s new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco.

Look for Lincoln at the following events for his new book:

• April 29: He will be in conversation with Bill Issel discussing the book and what it can teach us about San Francisco today. Hosted by the Phoenix Project at the Roar Shack, 34 7th Street, from 6–8 p.m.

• May 1: He will be in conversation at the University Club with Corey Busch, who served on Moscone’s senate staff, was a senior member of Moscone’s mayoral campaign staff, press secretary and chief spokesman for Mayor Moscone, and was Moscone’s chief speech writer. This event will begin at 6 p.m.

• May 13: As part of the San Francisco Historical Society’s History Live! program, he will be discussing the book at 6:30. The event will be free in-person or online.

• May 15: He will be in conversation with writer and scholar George Hammond about the book at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco at 5:30 p.m.

• May 28: The Savoy Tivoli in North Beach will be hosting a book party, which will feature a brief discussion of the book as well as an exhibit of the works of noted San Francisco photographer Dave Glass.

For more information about these events, including how to RSVP and buy tickets, go to LincolnMitchell.com.

We recorded this episode over Zoom in March 2025.