Mission accomplished

Today I took two colleagues from the Long Island, NY office of the big company I work for, along with a local co-worker, to lunch at Bar Bambino in the city. Since the two visitors had done North Beach the previous evening, I was careful to explain that this was the Mission District, that it had been Irish and Italian for many years, and was now Latino and Young Bohemian. I explained how nearby Mission St. was working class like a busy street in Queens, while a block away Valencia St. was full of upscale bars and restaurants.

After listening to me expound for several minutes, one of the visitors said: "So... Mission District... does that have anything to do with Mission furniture?"

That led me to explain about the Franciscans and Mission Dolores and the scene in Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak into its cemetery, and that it was the only cemetery in San Francisco, since all the other cemeteries had been moved out of town to Colma which was, I said, on the other side of San Bruno Mountain from our office in South City. When I added that Colma was known as the City of the Dead for its predominant population of corpses, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard.

technorati: San Francisco, Mission District