Dragon Dancers

After a year's absence, Bernie and I made a trip to San Francisco on Sunday.

Our goal was Francis Ford Coppola's restaurant Cafe Zoetrope, as Bernie had heard that it was an interesting place with good food. Duh, why else would we go there? I had more or less picked the locale for our search for an Italian restaurant in North Beach, the section of San Francisco around the vicinity of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul. I had an urge for Italian, and since I more or less remembered the streets there, FFC's place seemed a good bet.

Our review of the restaurant will be in next week's Piker Press. The picture that you see came about as a result of having ten minutes to kill before the restaurant opened for lunch.

We walked up the street a block and presto! we were in Chinatown. Another block, and we turned a corner to find a crowd growing, blocking a narrow street, and young men in the trousers of dragon costumes milling about in front of a store. To promote their new big sales event, dragon dancers had been hired, and a Chinese band of traditional instruments were there to play the background music for the dance. Marvelous! (Each of those dragon costumes has two men in it, by the way. Quite the acrobats!)

It was a cool experience on a number of levels. One, I liked how the store owners were unafraid to use a traditional ritual in public to celebrate their sale. Most communities want to hide their roots behind closed doors or forget them completely. Two, I liked how the community swarmed into the street to watch. Cars got through the intersection slowly, but it was apparent that the people were more important than traffic. Three, after only a few minutes of the acrobatic dragons, a funeral unexpectedly drove through, with a band marching ahead of the hearse, and giant incense sticks mounted on the cars -- and the neat thing was, the performance STOPPED and people waited reverently until the procession was past before starting up the entertainment again.

Cultural awareness, community participation, and civility. Where else do we see that nowadays unless it's orchestrated by some huge group? And then you don't get the civility! I would like to see my town mill about in the streets. I'd like to see parents sitting on chairs on the sidewalks, watching their kids play kickball in the street.

I'm a dreamer, all right.