Trailer: https://tinyurl.com/dfft5d48

I watched this two-part series about a month ago, and didn’t write about it then because no one would know what I was talking about. Kind of like when I wrote about “Hamilton” before the mania hit. There’s a delay. Even worse, this two-part series premieres tonight on MGM+, the streaming service formerly known as Epix, and how many people have a subscription to that? Ultimately, it will be available elsewhere, but the buzz will be gone, and sans buzz will it ever be seen?

So what you’ve got here is a maybe to be forgotten production about a fading era.

This is very strange for those of us who lived through it. Kind of like the Deadheads of today, whose knowledge seems to start with 1970’s “Workingman’s Dead.” But before that there was a journey into the universe, an exploration, yet what about the rest of the San Francisco bands? Like the Charlatans?

Completely forgotten.

The Charlatans were fronted by Dan Hicks, who ultimately had success in the early seventies with his band the Hot Licks. There was “Canned Music” and “I’m an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande).” But even more there was “I Scare Myself,” with Sid Page’s violin.

Here, check it out, and you should:

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/7zcu2chp

YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/yc6u9b79

Listening today you’ll hear a roughness we didn’t experience back in 1972, when it was released. You see back then it wasn’t about perfection, but a feeling, an essence. The music was not bulletproof, it connected on a soulful level, it lived and breathed, which is why we embraced it.

Like the Grateful Dead themselves. Who might have been the roughest of them all, even into the seventies. “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty” were anomalies. Mostly the band was one of experimentation, trying to find a groove that would hook the audience and lift the assembled multitude.

Now the funny thing is the pre-1970 San Francisco music scene is being forgotten. Back then there was almost no information. And there were few hits. The Dead had none. Nor Dan Hicks. The Jefferson Airplane broke through on “Surrealistic Pillow” with “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” but Quicksilver Messenger Service never had a hit. And it wasn’t until the seventies that Steve Miller became ubiquitous.

Now by time you hit the seventies, there’s music on TV, and tons of press, and that era remains alive. So the second episode of this production is less enticing, but the first…

There were no influencers, there was no social media, everything was positively local. And Grace Slick was two-dimensional, all you knew about her was her songs. Which made her even more iconic. Because you filled in the blanks yourself.

And Janis Joplin… Her backstory has faded, but even creepier, her music has faded. At this point, Joplin is mostly remembered for her rendition of “Me and Bobby McGhee,” if she’s remembered at all. But that first Big Brother album, “Cheap Thrills”… That was not background music. You listened to that record and wanted to get closer. Which is why you went to San Francisco, you wanted more of this.

Now this experimental ethos in music was superseded by the experimental ethos in tech, ironically also from the Bay Area. Used to be California was a different country, three hours behind. Cut loose from the east coast. A place where anything went. Today they say that’s Florida, but nothing could be further from the truth. Florida is about retro hedonism. Sure, there are a lot of loose nuts and bolts, but California has always been about moving forward, pushing the envelope, this is where Chuck Yeager made his sound-barrier breaking flights.

Yeager was made famous by Tom Wolfe, by his inclusion in “The Right Stuff,” which they even made into a movie. But the piece-de-resistance of Wolfe’s nonfiction output came earlier, in 1968, with “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. This was required reading for the college student of the seventies. This was inspirational. Here were a bunch of people rejecting conventional society, making fun of people who rarely got the joke.

So, Jerry Garcia is dead. Tom Wolfe too. When I talked to Dan Hicks in the nineties he was burned out, still singing for his supper, after all these were not people with IRAs, but living in the now.

And not only are so many of the musicians gone, now their audience is disappearing too. And their stories with them. This won’t happen to the modern era, everything is digitized, at your fingertips, but before that…

I highly recommend the first episode of this series. And if you’re younger than forty, stick around for the second too, it will be new to you.

But mostly the series bummed me out. Because I’d been there and done that and seemingly everybody has moved on from there. Warmongers employ the peace sign. Groupthink is prevalent.

But once upon a time it was all about being an individual, on your own trip. That was what the sixties in San Francisco were all about.

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Though a “letter of intent” ceremony is typically held when a high school athlete announces where they’ll go to college, one Kentucky high schooler had his own to sign with a plumbing company.

According to WDKY, Montgomery County High School senior Jacob Bradley signed a letter of intent to join Fast Flow Plumbing after his graduation this month. He’ll join the company as an apprentice and work under a master plumber for two years before earning his journeyman’s license.

It’s just more of my style,” Bradley told WKYT after signing with the Fast Flow Plumbing. “I was never really wanting to be an accountant or sit down.”

“I enjoy working with my hands a lot and just the environment and those types of people,” he added.

Bradley’s ceremony, which took place May 18, was the first non-athletic signing event for the high school, counselor Lacy Gross told WKYT.

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“This is something that we have done several times for our athletes who are attending college upon graduation,” Gross explained. “But this is something new here at Montgomery County High School, but I hope that this will continue.”

Bradley’s mother said she couldn’t be more proud of her ambitious son.

Local high school senior commits to plumbing career. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvPbx0jcdEE

FOX 56 News

“His dad and I are just over the moon,” Bradley’s mother, Angie, told WKYT. “Actually, he’s a great kid and we are very lucky.”

But plumbing isn’t entirely new for the graduating senior. Bradley spent half of every school day learning the trade since meeting Fast Flow Plumbing Vice President Ben Crum at a career fair.

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“We are willing to invest in anyone that comes to us,” Crum told WKYT of recruiting students into the field. “We want to make sure they have the opportunity in two years to get their journeyman’s license.”

According to US News & World Report, plumbers, on average, made about a salary of $56,000 in 2020, with some earning over $75,000. The median salary for plumbers has increased steadily over the last decade, the outlet reported.

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Bradley told WKYT that he one day hopes to become a franchise owner with Fast Flow Plumbing, “if [Crum] sees I work hard enough for him,” he said.

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Club Fugazi has grown into a jazz and poetry cabaret, with performers reading rousing lines from the beats before diving through a dangling hoop, each acrobat doing the twists and turns of the jump with his or her unique showmanship and aura zhushing leaves.

In another moment, the newly renovated North Beach venue has turned into a playground for someone with insect skills when a performer hops around the inner perimeter of the gleaming white proscenium – up the wall, then upside down, supported by fellow cast members.

“Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story” has taken the place of the longstanding “Beach Blanket Babylon”. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

In yet another scene, the former home of “Beach Blanket Babylon” became a place of performance art. Audio from a “Maltese Falcon” scene is played while the actors Devin Henderson and Natasha Patterson dance out the sexual tension with full-body affairs and convulsions that Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart limit in the film to glances and trembling voices – all while juggling up to five sparkling pearls the size of a crystal ball.

This is the next chapter in the Bay Area circus heralded by Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story, the new show from Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider, co-founders of Montreal’s famous The 7 Fingers.

San Francisco Mayoress, London Breed, greeted the audience on Tuesday October 12th, which was only exposed to hold the introduction of what she quipped that she had received permission from the Department of Health – and hailed the opening night as a turning point in the city’s fight against COVID-19.

“That will be a long time coming,” she said. “We have been in the house for almost two years.”

The Mayor of San Francisco London Breed speaks to the audience ahead of the premiere of Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story at Club Fugazi in San Francisco. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Dear San Francisco is a suitable flagship for the reopening of the arts. Presented as Valentine’s to the city, the show includes readings of actual love letters to the city, some anonymous, some from celebrities, others from the viewers each evening. Often these charming missives skilfully turn into action. A letter that says, “Thank you for being the place I felt safe to come out of,” doesn’t inspire a hand-to-trap (short for hand-to-trapezoids, a shape Carroll invented) with not -heterosexual pairings and groups.

But sometimes the potted homages to the city feel better for the tourist crowd, who may be trying to validate their pre-existing stereotypes of San Francisco, than for the fine art that the rest of the show aspires to. There are filler lines about how expensive the city is, how hard it is to find a parking space; it’s about psychedelic drugs, how many types of milk there are, and the fearful people trying to choose between them.

“Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story” premiered. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

In any case, the athleticism, precision and inventiveness of the actors quickly overshadow any brick.

Enmeng Song on the diabolo, which is derived from the Chinese yo-yo, can create the illusions of floating and locomotion; he can tear the axis of his device off the cord and then lasso it again in midair.

Junru Wang, who balances upside down on very tall stools, each as wide as the palm of a hand, appears to have radial symmetry, like a starfish; You’re looking directly at them, of course, but it’s like seeing them swimming in the ocean from a bird’s eye view.

The lavishly structured sound design by Jake Rodriguez only amplifies this effect; You can practically imagine how individual waves comb.

Melvin Diggs (below), Devin Henderson, and Natasha Patterson in Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

When you see circus in an intimate setting, you can see again how much power, discipline and grace there is in every effect – the way acrobats do with seemingly little more than a breathless breath, a look up and a wish then climb a trapeze; the way pectoral and even facial muscles twitch when one performer lifts two others onto their shoulders; how diaphragms pump in search of more oxygen.

You can feel the effects too. When artists land, with a boom or a pop, the reverberation sometimes ripples all the way to your seat.

Performers show their strength and agility in “Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story”. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Ultimately, “Dear San Francisco” is a love letter not only to the city, but also to the human body, reminding even the less supple among us that our arms and legs are tools and shapes that we may forget to use creatively .

As sleek and smart as Alexander V. Nichols’ production design is with its frequent use of projections, “Dear San Francisco” is refreshingly low-tech, with performers often contributing their own singing voices and instruments – accordion, banjo, drum. They express art and life in everything they touch: a pole, a teeterboard, a straw hat set, a unicycle, a telephone booth become small miracles.

n“Dear San Francisco: A Soaring Love Story”: Created and directed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider. Constantly. One hour 45 minutes. $ 35- $ 89. Club Fugazi, 678 Green St., SF 415-273-0600. www.clubfugazisf.com

• Lily Janiak
  Lily Janiak is the theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

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