Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

Well, you’ve reached Vacation Roey, who can’t bother to be curious about things he’s not doing. 

There are very important, deeply consequential things happening like the showdown between Los Angeles residents and law enforcement over ICE actions. There are big sporting events like the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final. They’ve just happened to unfold while I’ve tuned out from the world for a much-needed recharge.

I’ve been on vacation in San Francisco for the back half of this past week and this past weekend. All of my focus has been on following my curiosity wherever it leads in a totally new place.

So where did it lead? Lots of places… seafood bars and warning tracks and drag shows. Driverless taxis and cathedrals to the internet… and Cereal Man. Yes, you’ll be curious about Cereal Man. I know I was.

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s the accidental phenomenon. It’s mother f’ing Hoodslam! 

So let me back up… Hoodslam is a small, Oakland-based independent professional wrestling promotion. It’s an absurdist and way edgier version of pro wrestling, and with the sheer number of openly and proudly LGBTQ+ performers, it often skews closer to drag than to the more classically “macho” pro wrestling put on by the likes of WWE.

Here, performers are far more likely to tell you they’re drunk or about their masturbation habits than they are to tell you to say your prayers and take your vitamins. Sure, there are steel chair shots, but they paled in comparison to the pain delivered by a librarian wrestler who tore a page out of a book to give agonizing “paper cuts” to his opponents.

At normal wrestling shows, fans chant at the wrestlers. At Hoodslam, wrestlers chant at the fans. Their rally cry: “Fuck the fans!” Then the fans join them in chanting “Fuck the fans!”

I joined a few hundred folks on Friday night in a quiet corner of Oakland in a grimy ballroom and nightclub where a wrestling ring was set up. I ended up pressed against a corner of the ring, mere inches from the action. On a couple of occasions, performers either tapped me to make their way over or, in one instance, I took a bump as one ran over to attack an opponent.

The show kicked off with someone freshly cut loose from WWE: Bay Area native Shotzi Blackheart, who kicked off a run of the independent circuit by coming back to where she started. Before making it into WWE’s system, Shotzi started her career at Hoodslam, parodying former wrestling valet Missy Hyatt by performing as Missy Highasshit.

Shotzi’s return involved an emotional match against her original trainer, a wrestler who goes by Rick Scott Stoner (he and his tag team partner Scott Rick Stoner are a parody of the 1990s wrestling tag team of real-life brothers Scott and Rick Steiner.) Just a couple feet above my head, she climbed to the top rope for a couple of high-flying moves.

Over the span of three hours, heroes and villains alike squared off in everything from blood feuds over broken friendships to a battle between a dog-like character who pantomime peed on opponents and a horndog-like character who pantomime ejaculated right back at him.

One somewhat Pride Month-themed showdown featured two wrestlers who sang before squaring off and then fought part of the match over control of the microphone—fan favorite wrestler Lara Frazier got the crowd going with their rendition of Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go,” while her villainous pop star-themed opponent B3cca sang one of her original songs (available streaming on Spotify, as she made sure to tell us. Give it a shot and I dare you to not get it stuck in your head.)

But the highlight of the show was a championship showdown pitting champion Kidd Bandit against Hoodslam’s creator, the trans wrestling star Dark Sheik.

The match spiraled to include about six or seven people. But during a showdown between the two advertised competitors, one of the unannounced opponents truly stole the show.

The synth pianos and urgent beat of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” blare out over the ballroom speakers.

A tall, somewhat portly man in a sleeveless purple suit emerges. His chest hair is showing.

He struts onto the stage carrying a box of Cap’n Crunch and wearing a rectangular mask with a face in the middle. The mask includes holes for the eyes and a wide square jaw around the man’s mouth. Above his face, his mask reads: Cereal Man.

The crowd absolutely loses it.

Cereal Man is an icon of Hoodslam, appearing as a comedy character who has performed at their shows for years. Both on the microphone and in his matches, he cracks people up. During the match, with cereal flying everywhere, he repeatedly stumbled into his opponent and friend Dark Sheik, nearly costing her a win. At one point, the two repeatedly sneezed on each other. But ultimately, it was Dark Sheik who came out on top.

Throughout that match and all the others, another signature Hoodslam chant emerged: “This is real! This is real!”

Like all performing arts, pro wrestling straddles fiction and reality. It’s “fake” in that it’s predetermined and not every move hurts (except the paper cuts.) But the mat is hard. The performers do genuinely pull off their cartwheels and flips. And you can try to slow down, but there’s no way to truly fake having your head collide with a steel chair.

So go ahead and keep your Hulk Hogans and your John Cenas. The paper cuts are real. Cereal Man is real. This. This is real.

My Reporting

This time around, I’m able to report from on the ground outside of Washington, DC, on a game with two teams I’m not as familiar with. On this weekend’s docket: Bay FC hosting Portland Thorns at PayPal Park in San Jose.

In front of over 14,000 fans, Bay FC put themselves into playoff contention with a win over a Portland Thorns team that was ahead of them in the standings and riding a five-game undefeated streak.

In what has become a bit of a running theme for Portland, the Thorns created chances, taking a total of 16 shots, but struggled to create many favorable opportunities to score.

A big factor in that was a strong day from Bay FC goalkeeper Jordan Silkowitz. The 25-year-old is in her third season but this is the first year where she has received minutes, and we detailed a bit of her journey in a previous edition of the newsletter.

There have been some ups and downs for the Virginia native, but she’s riding a string of strong performances lately, including two clean sheets in her last three matches. Overall, she ranks 10^th out of 17 qualifying keepers with a 70.8% save percentage and tied for 3^rd among all keepers with 33 saves.

Silkowitz made a career-high five saves while helping Bay blank Portland in Saturday’s win.

On offense, meanwhile, Bay FC capitalized in a fairly unlikely way to net the lone goal of the game. A transitional moment allowed Bay to push into Portland’s 18-yard box, where a give-and-go between midfielder Taylor Huff and forward Penelope Hocking nearly collapsed. Hocking lost control of the ball and was at risk of having Portland win back possession.

But Hocking was able to move the ball to a spot to the left of the goal. Bay defender Alyssa Malonson came running in at full speed and used her momentum to smash a ball high into the top of the net on the near post side, past the diving Portland goalkeeper Bella Bixby.

The metrics show that Bay was able to take advantage of a pretty low-percentage shot. The data folks at FBref put Malonson’s shot at 0.05 expected goals, or xG (in layman’s terms, shots like hers end up as goals about 5% of the time that a player takes them.)

It was that unlikely effort that netted Malonson her first career NWSL goal in her third season as a pro in the league.

Postgame, Malonson said that her teammates were pretty surprised, too.

“Honestly, I looked around and I didn’t think anyone else thought it went in,” Malonson said. “I was like, ‘no, that went in. Come cheer for me!’”

While Malonson downplayed the degree of difficulty of the shot, Silkowitz jumped in to offer a keeper’s perspective.

“She hit that on the run as hard as she could. I’m just thankful that she scored on someone else besides me. It’s really hard to do—the power and where she placed that and her ability to, in that moment, full speed, be able to see the goalkeeper cheating and sneak it in, near post? It’s such a good finish,” she said.

The second half saw the teams combine for only two shots on target, with Bay FC attacker Racheal Kundananji registering a shot after an off-target near-miss in the 74th minute, and Portland’s midfielder Olivia Moultrie missing a low-percentage shot from the edge of the box.

Bay FC has been a club in flux, as they’ve struggled to translate some major investment by ownership into consistent on-the-field success since they began play before last season.

Their coach, Albertin Montoya, is still under an independent investigation ordered by the NWSL into his conduct last season. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in March that at least two players filed formal complaints against Montoya and coaching staff, alleging a toxic work environment and bullying. NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman told reporters last month that the investigation is “still underway.”

But on Saturday after a win, the message from both the coach and the players was that their recent success had a link to a mentality of enjoying the work they’re putting in.

“We’re enjoying our football. That’s been the message: enjoy,” Montoya said postgame. “Enjoy what you’re doing. Enjoy playing for each other. And you can see they are. They’re smiling and having fun, but at the same time, they’re competing and we’re trying to be the best. It showed out here today.”

Montoya specifically mentioned giving players the opportunity to be more creative in their playing styles in recent games. He noted it began vs the league-leading Kansas City Current last month, in a game they lost 4-1. But since that defeat, Bay is now undefeated in their last three matches, winning two.

And two of the top performers for the club Saturday agreed with the idea that enjoying their work is leading to better results.

“Getting to come to practice every day and just getting to do it together, I think it’s something super special and I think we would do anything for the person next to us. And just continuing to have that environment and that culture is something that’s really important and it gets you through your hard times,” Silkowitz said.

“You just want to enjoy doing what you do,” Malonson said. “You want to love your job and I love it, especially with the people around me.”

Other Takes and Things of Note

Don’t Be a Drag, Just Be a Queen – On my first afternoon in San Francisco, I went through the Castro, one of the nation’s first LGBTQ-friendly neighborhoods. Strolling past various fliers, I noticed that It wasn’t just the usual mix of local small-time performers. There were stars, including performers from TV shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, I snagged a ticket to see “The Big Reveal,” a one-woman show put on in Berkeley by Drag Race Season 9 winner Sasha Velour.

For the price I expected to pay for a ticket, I was able to get both a ticket and a VIP pass. I had the chance to meet Sasha and take a photo with her. Since she is quite the nerdy and high-minded queen, I thanked her, fairly tongue-in-cheek, for bringing nerd representation to drag.

The show itself was a 90-minute extravaganza, featuring lip syncing along with some classic dance tunes, and watching Sasha reflect on topics like her family background, the merits of the term “camp” and its role in drag, and the radical political nature of what she does as a queen.

And, of course, the show straddles high and low culture just as much as the drag Sasha performed on her way to winning her season of Drag Race. How many drag shows can you think of where a performer lip syncs a fast-paced Britney Spears medley but also offers a detailed and nuanced critique of the work of Susan Sontag?

The outfits were gorgeous, the gags and unexpected reveals drew belly laughs and deep gasps, and there wasn’t a single moment that felt excessive or like a drag (pardon the pun) on the show.

Because the Wednesday show was her first in Berkeley, the city where she was born, it also included an emotional moment at the end where Sasha thanked several members of her family (and her chosen family) who were in the crowd to support her.

It felt like the right moment to go see this show. Earlier in the day, I walked through The Castro, where I explored the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Inside, it taught me about how San Francisco has not only been a welcoming city for LGBTQ+ people, but one where the fight for gay rights turned violent or even deadly.

Here, the 1966 Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Riot occurred three years before Stonewall, with trans women and drag queens fighting against bigotry by police. And around the corner from the museum, Harvey Milk made his home and built his career in public service before being assassinated by his former colleague Dan White. (Milk’s name was recently in the news because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced an order to remove Milk’s name from a U.S. Navy ship. Milk served in the Navy during the Korean War.)

It’s in this area, where drag and Pride first unfolded as radical events and even riots, that I saw my first in-person drag show. I had avoided some others thinking that they were more geared toward clubgoers and drunken nights out. But in a fairly staid Berkeley theatre, Sasha Velour showed that drag can be so many different things, often at the same time. For me, at least, that was the biggest reveal of all.

A Splash Hit! – I checked Oracle Park off my list of ballparks visited, which now is entering the back half as I’ve attended more than half of the 30 in MLB. Oracle will definitely end up not far from the top, as it impressed me across the board. The views, the food, the amenities—all of them stack up to create an amazingly friendly experience.

I snacked on some delicious Gilroy Garlic Fries but made sure to mask up afterward to shield poor bystanders from my horrific garlic breath. I was too full for it but still forced myself to cool off with the park’s signature crab sandwich on San Francisco sourdough bread.

And best of all, thanks to the kindness of a stranger on Reddit, I took in the game through the Gotham Club. It’s a supplement to a ticket that is only available to season ticket holders who join the club as members. They can loan out their membership at times to others, though, allowing me to take full advantage.

The club sits inside the park’s 24-foot-high right field wall, allowing you to sip on drinks and nosh on snacks while scoreboard operators adjust the panels of the wall’s manual scoreboard of out-of-town games. I took in most of the game just inches away from right field, on the other side of a chain link fence from where right fielders like the Giants’ Daniel Johnson and Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. patrolled the outfield grass.

Arguably the wildest part of the experience came pregame, as the fences open up to turn the club into a bar with an outdoor patio… except that patio is the right-field warning track. There’s a divider up but you are quite literally on the field as teams warm up just a few feet in front of you. It’s wild to look up and process what it must be like for professionals to look up at the commanding wall to try to figure out how to field balls off its many nooks and crannies.

For years, I had watched in awe as a kid as Barry Bonds hit towering fly balls over the wall and into McCovey Cove as “Splash Hits” for brave kayakers to chase down. I’ll never be a major leaguer but at least I can say I had the opportunity to be on the same major league field, albeit with a drink in hand instead of a baseball glove.

A Trip to the Wayback Machine – My trip also included a visit to a gift to the internet: the Internet Archive. The keepers of the Wayback Machine, the service that allows users to chronicle how websites change over time, the Internet Archive has a physical location in San Francisco. The Archive operates out of a converted church with offices. The main chapel space houses servers that hold significant portions of their archive, which will pass 1 trillion web pages later this year.

Founder Brewster Kahle gave us the tour, walking us through the Internet Archive’s efforts to capture as much as they can—everything from websites in different countries, to movies, to old TV, to print books, to records, to old video games. Kahle is an early computer entrepreneur who also started Alexa Internet, the company that hosted a long-running ranking of websites by traffic.

Now, he has dedicated almost 30 years to archiving as much of the internet and other pieces of technology as possible. The group is a nonprofit but one that is also under threat, particularly from lawsuits. The Internet Archive has become a hub for works that book and music publishers feel should be blocked for copyright reasons. During the tour, Kahle was frank about the threat, saying that either lawsuit could well destroy their operations.

For me, the tour served as a reminder of the fragility of the internet. Whether it’s your photos, an old website, or a deleted government document they no longer want you to see, the internet is not as “forever” as it seems. I use the Wayback Machine from time to time at work, if I’m tracking down an old story or changes to a government page. In a time where keepers of information, from libraries to Wikipedia, are all under attack, it was nice to see a place like the Internet Archive continuing to try to do what now feels impossible.

Something Good I Ate

For over a century, a narrow storefront on Polk Street in San Francisco has housed 18 wooden stools and a marble counter. Inside Swan Oyster Depot, Niners and Giants memorabilia line the walls of a spot with a tumultuous energy on par with the kitchen from the TV show The Bear.

A spot frequented by culinary legends like James Beard and Anthony Bourdain, chances are this is your favorite chef’s favorite spot.

Except instead of keeping it back of house, the organized chaos of Swan Oyster Depot occurs in full view of patrons. Crabs sit upside down on the back counter, ready to be pulled in for a meal. Smoked salmon for breakfast means Jimmy goes a few feet over to one of the largest fish you’ve ever seen and slices off a couple fresh pieces of today’s catch to drop onto some sourdough and serve on your plate. 

The menu is very straightforward. There are prices for smoked salmon, oysters, crabs, beer and more. But if you tell the folks there what you’d like, they can work on customizing it to your liking. A full $35 order of smoked salmon was definitely set to be too much, so they served me a half order instead.

Swan Oyster Depot also has a secret menu with items like a “dozen eggs,” consisting of 12 thin raw scallops served in ponzu sauce with Sriracha, “Sicilian sashimi” made with tuna, halibut, yellowfin, scallop, and salmon topped with salt, pepper and olive oil, and the “Crabsanthemum,” a plate of Dungeness crab legs arranged in a floral shape 

As much as I wanted a Crabsanthemum, I couldn’t put back an entire plate for breakfast, so the folks behind the counter made me a “crab cocktail,” mixing in crab legs and crab meat in a cold cocktail that was oddly refreshing, especially served with cocktail and “Louie” sauces for dipping.

It wasn’t exactly a typical breakfast, but the restaurant opens at 8 and is usually full not too long after, with waits often topping an hour. So when I was up early, it felt like now or never.

I’m happy to confirm that it was 100% worth it. Not every seafood place can pull off breakfast, but 100+ years in, Swan Oyster Depot can.