{"id":78749,"date":"2014-08-12T13:15:03","date_gmt":"2014-08-12T17:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=78749"},"modified":"2014-08-12T14:48:54","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T18:48:54","slug":"our-clown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/our-clown\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Clown"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a stretch of highway US 101 a few miles north of San Francisco International Airport that includes a view of South San Francisco on your left and Candlestick Park and the beautiful San Francisco Bay on your right. For someone new to the San Francisco area, that is the first time you can have a look at our magnificent bay.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

To this day, each time I come home from travels and take that drive up 101, that first sight of the bay after being far from home is a vivid and lovely reminder of how blessed we are to live here. Two decades ago, this stretch of highway was once littered with trash. Yet that was changed when a benefactor paid for the cleanup of that stretch of freeway, a reminder of how wonderful it is to be here — which remains mostly pristine to this day. <\/p>\n

The benefactor was Robin Williams.<\/p>\n

Robin Williams wove himself into the fabric of our lives. He lived in the North Bay, in the exclusive town of Tiburon in Marin County. But he was San Francisco all the way. You could see him having dim sum in the Richmond District, or introducing the SF Giants — he was a big Giants fan — at the start of the National League playoffs, ending it with a flying chest-bump with Lou Seal — the SF Giants’ mascot: an overgrown version of our SF bay brown seals, named cleverly to appeal to our town’s gender-fluid demographic.<\/p>\n

Homegrown, he was ours, not Hollywood’s. Not New York’s. Ours. He was a fixture, not a bug, which, looking back — even with our home-grown pride — we took for granted a little. He was part of the scene that was, and is, us.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There is a certain arrogance about San Franciscans that anticipates and expects the kind of creative genius that he exemplified. Ours was the soil that birthed this child: the North Beach beat poets, Haight-Ashbury of the 1960s, the Transamerica Pyramid, the Castro District, and even ‘dot com’ one and two. San Francisco’s rich and loamy soil still nurtures a sense of adventure on every level possible. Ours is an area that is a bridge to everywhere in your mind, heart, soul. And yes, even your sexually creative urges.<\/p>\n

Today, while driving into town for work, I was listening to our local sports radio station like I always do. There were sound tributes for Robin Williams that played snippets of his work throughout the years, starting with Mork. Listening, I was struck by how every aspect of our lives was ripe fodder for Williams’ fantastical riffs on living life on Earth. The man could go from one foreign dialect to the next as well as dialects from other planets, and finish with a dead-on take of William F. Buckley for good measure — all in one smooth take. Looking back, it was to be expected that his first big break came as a space alien in a major network TV sitcom. He was born for the part.<\/p>\n

I don’t know why it took his death to realize what a gift the immensely talented Robin Williams was. I guess we don’t normally feel the shock and grief for the loss of clowns like we do for kings. But today in the San Francisco Bay Area — a place he loved and chose to call home, and a place he made beautiful by his existence — we’re reeling a bit as to this hole in the world his loss has created. Our clown is and always will be irreplaceable.<\/p>\n

Tonight, Eric’s podcast will focus on Robin Williams’ chart. There, as well in Elizabeth’s piece above, we encourage your thoughts and comments on the chart’s astrological aspects and the nature of his death. Here, in this thread, I encourage you to come up with your best recollections of Williams’ work. I think he would want us to remember him that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a stretch of highway US 101 a few miles north of San Francisco International Airport that includes a view of South San Francisco on your left and Candlestick Park and the beautiful San Francisco Bay on your right. For someone new to the San Francisco area, that is the first time you can … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}