September 19, 2002

Imagined or real, the style of a city or the image of a city influences a visitor. Novels and plays set a scene — a mindset, so to speak.

Under the spell of my idea of a gracious San Francisco, I kept slipping on a sports coat every morning before leaving the hotel, thinking I needed to be dressed for a snappy lunch. A cold crab salad served on a crisp white linen table cloth, for instance, graced with heavy silverware at a table close to a quiet water fountain bubbling in an ornate pond under the yellow, red, and blue stained glass atrium of the likes of the old Palace Hotel.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, I debated whether to wear a tie or fold one in my breast pocket. (This isn't going to take long. I dress in a hurry. Always have.) Might just be the day my friend said, "Know what I'd like to do? I'd like go to tea over at the St. George Hotel in time to dance to the new combo." Thus inspired, I turn to the closet for a bow tie and knot it into a daunting butterfly of a bow in front of the closet door mirror before I can change my mind.

And how does the day unfold? We are out all day. The Palace Hotel Garden Room is closed for renovation. As for tea at the old St. George, by tea time, we are five miles away at the Museum of Natural History, drinking powdered coffee from a styrofoam cup in a cafeteria framed in plastic and chrome. All the tie adds is more respect from the waitress. Poor kid, she probably thought I was a director of the museum, checking on the cafeteria.

Nightfall brings a different atmosphere. Mounting one of those four-wheel rocket ships of a taxi cab I warned of before, we race over to the Legion of Honor building for the second performance of the Summer Mozart Festival of Music. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, copied after the 18th Century Palais de Legion d Honneur in Paris, was built in 1924 to commemorate the dead of World War I.

There the imagined elegance becomes genuine. We find our way down wide, gray-white swirled marble staircases, making an entry to an oval-roofed hall of grooved pillars that frame arched doorways fit for a queen and her entourage. Here are the ladies and gentlemen of my imagination. The ladies range from the sleek in black dresses cut to show white pearls or glittering jewel necklaces to the thicker dowager shapes of abundance in skirts of a purple hue displaying heavier stones and longer strands of pearls. The men go from tailored dark suits to doughty ol' gents wearing thick tweeds bought in England 40 years ago. All drink yellow-gold champagne fizzing in flutes as thin as the stems of the flowers in her majesty's centerpiece.

The lights make a polite blink for curtain call. Only one blink to summon such a high class crowd to the concert hall. Not, blink, blink, blink, but a gentle wink. The wine flutes land on napkins on the bar or on the waiters' trays. I hold in my stomach and walk loose and casual, guiding my friend's elbow into a concert room upholstered as soft as the texture of cashmere. The feel of her elbow steadies me. However, that same old doubt returns: "Gawd-a-mighty, little cowboy, who would ever believe a chunk of the roughest grade of coal ever measured in Mertzon was at a chamber music concert in San Francisco?"

Oh, how fine and light, the musicians fiddled and feathered the bows across the strings of the violin and cello. I was far enough back to study the audience. "Here must sit the best educated and best oriented people in the whole city of San Francisco," I thought. Yet, as we all sat under the fragile sky blue ceiling of the concert hall, close by, beneath the homes of the elite, the sides of the San Andreas fault line were grinding together to bring on another earthquake some day. (One of my pals claims the reason for the elan of the San Francisco person is the rumbling, earth-shaking destiny lurking in the city's under berth.)

At intermission, a polished attendant assured she would see that a cab picked us up after the performance. For a bow, I substituted the deepest nod possible, to avoid scraping my chin on my starched collar. My cup of decaf looked ordinary in such high style of thin flutes filled with sparkling wine. But I continued to hold in my stomach, smiled the way Mother said to do among strangers, and allowed my imagination to feed on a true story...

September 19, 2002

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