Hello. I am Michael
Thomas Angelo. Today is 11/16/2013. We
are at the Presidio branch of the SF public library and I am talking to my
friend Judy Strebel…
Judy: And I am Judy
Strebel.
MTA: Hello and thank you. I’m so happy to have an
opportunity to do this.
Judy: …. What would you like to get out of this journey
today?
MTA: Well I am a StoryCorps facilitator, a volunteer
facilitator and hearing other people’s stories, after hearing a few of them I
thought, “You know I think I want to do this myself. I have a story to tell and
I think this would be a great opportunity… I’m from the South bay originally.
Judy: What year were you born?
MTA: I was born September 15, 1973. So I’ve been 40 for two
months now. Two months and a day.
Judy: And looking like 20.
MTA: Oh thank you
(laughs) except for my grey hair. I have salt and pepper hair.Judy: You look like
George Clooney or Richard Gere
MTA: Oh thank you. It’s nice living in a city like SF,
especially in my neighborhood because it has so much history… I’m really
getting into the history of the neighborhood which is changing. Having been
here for almost 15 years now I feel like I’ve been around and am actually one
of the old school people compared to the Twitter tech boom crowd which is
moving in and who are mostly under 30. They don’t really have a sense of what
it was like and I know I sound like an
old fogy saying that but even at 40 I think I have a … well for my scene
anyway, when I came out, I’d consider myself a pioneer… Well, I wasn’t around for the early AIDS
epidemic because I was 11 years old when that took place and obviously not living in the city but I
grew up in the shadow of that and I guess I’m kind of Phase II as far as that… but I’ll get into all that later.
Judy: Well let’s start with your history. You were born…
MTA: I was born on September 15, 1973 in San Jose, CA which
is the South bay. I was adopted. The story of my birth, I didn’t know, for half
my life. I didn’t find anything out until I was 21. I had always known I was
adopted. My adoptive parents were high school sweethearts… They went to high
school together and were each other’s first love… they married in 1965 <stage whisper: My mother was actually
pregnant but nobody knew.> And…she
miscarried. The baby was born three months premature in 1966 and so she
miscarried. Back then… I mean if that would have happened now, of course they
would have been able to save it but they didn’t have the technology in
1966…back then. You know she tried for
years…for almost 10 years to have children with my father but she was never
able to conceive…she had a total of about 7 miscarriages. They divorced once in
like 1970 or 1969…after about 5 years or so, I’m not sure… they were divorced a
couple years actually when my mother realized she really wanted a child and she
knew she would never be able to have one on her own so she rekindled something
with my father and they went to Reno and got married again and tried to make it
work again. But they just couldn’t bring a child to term…. They tried adopting. They had started trying to adopt for years
before I came about and it took them a long time… They had even been promised
another child who they set up the nursery for and everything but then that
child’s parents decided to keep it and my parents were absolutely devastated.
It was like another miscarriage. My mother said that’s when she had decided to
divorce the first time and she was prepared to put it all behind her and just
move on and be single but the need to have a child was just too powerful and too great so by the time all
that transpired and I came along…. I was
very…. <Voice cracking into a stifled sob> I was very…valued, I guess. I try not to get emotional <tearful voice> …I’m sorry, I
didn’t know this was going to happen…. I
get emotional because with my mother… I feel like I grew up with… I feel like I
really don’t deserve the love that she has for me… what I represent to her, you
know? That’s just the way I feel… that she loves me so much that it can be
overwhelming because I don’t deserve something like that. Anyway, I was obviously an only child and
they divorced immediately after acquiring me.
When I came along, I was 14
months old so I had already been living in foster care for a little over a year of my life and the reason why I was in
foster care for so long was because my biological mother wouldn’t relinquish
me. She wouldn’t sign the papers... The story of my birth, which I found at age
21, was that my biological mother was schizophrenic. She was from a Sicilian
family that had immigrated here to San Jose from Chicago. Their name was
Domino. Well, her mother’s mother’s family name was Matalone which was one of
the founding families that started Contadina Foods during WWI. And her mother,
(you know they were Sicilian immigrants) married a Chicago bar owner that beat
her up so she divorced him. This would be my biological grandmother. She came
to San Jose working in a tomato cannery. One of those Contadina canneries. So
yeah she was able to come here with her two children which were my biological mother
and my uncle… in the 1940s. They settled in Willow Glen, which is a nice suburb
in San Jose and my uncle went to Bellarmine high school which is a local boy’s
Catholic school for future rulers of business and industry and my mother Kathy
was very beautiful…a very beautiful Sicilian young woman who started to exhibit
behavior problems… I guess when she was in high school which is what I was
told. They just had a terrible time with her. Back then there was an
institution…well there were a lot of institutions. There was an asylum called
Agnew Insane Asylum which was in San Jose.
You see when Reagan was governor of CA, he actually shut down all of the
asylums back then, under the LPS Act which is the Lanterman, Petris and Short
Act and they shuttered all of these mental health facilities which were
asylums. It was basically just a huge
fortress. It predated the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They all but lobotomized people back then.
There were movies that document the types of conditions like the Snake Pit and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That film was actually used as an
example during the hearings when they were trying to get the legislation
passed. That film was used as an example of the conditions and as an exhibit of
the inhumane treatment that went on in the asylums while they tried to get them
shut down… So when they shuttered that asylum…all of those people that were in
there were let out into the street and wandering around the Bay area unmedicated…
Judy: And your mom was?
MTA: --Yes, she was
one of them, yeah. So what they did is they washed up on the shores of these
halfway houses. You know, they just opened up halfway houses to house them all.
So she inevitably ended up in this decaying Victorian halfway house for board
and care in downtown San Jose near San Jose State (university) and that’s where
she met my father... And you know my father actually ended up there
because…well this was the late 1960s, early 1970s. He was kind of a hippie
coming from New York, bopping around, into drugs, you know, travelling, and a
drifter. He checked himself into this halfway house because he needed a place
to sleep after coming down from a run, like a drug run. Speed, he was on speed,
he said, so he talked himself into a couple night’s stay at this place, fell
out and when he woke up, he said he was surprised to find himself in a house of
women. That’s how he met her there… I have no idea…well she was obviously there
as a ward of the state and had been left there to depend on her board and care…
It was hard for me to understand. You
see, because when I met her she was lucid but it was hard for me to understand
because she talked in tangents and it was very difficult for me to track her
conversation or to focus her but then I kept thinking that well, obviously she
must have been lucid enough to be able to have had this relationship with a man
for as long as she did. They dated for a while before she conceived…well, uh,
she got pregnant for the first time in 1971. My sister was born in August of
1971 and they thought they were going to get married but he said he realized it
was so hard; they just couldn’t do it because her behavior was so erratic. He
said he would come home and all the dishes would have been broken so he
realized…that he had to just break it off. He would leave, you know…he was in
construction so he would leave for extended periods of time…and when he would
come back, they would rekindle or whatever and so I guess it was during one of
their “on” times that I was conceived.
Judy: Was your sister also---
MTA: My sister was given up for adoption also yeah. You see,
because when she was born, my father said that he tried to come to the hospital
and was very excited but they wouldn’t let him in because he was absent. You
know fathers had no rights back then. And my mother’s family…well… my mother’s
family…. They weren’t really even acknowledging it. Because of the
circumstances… here was their daughter who had basically hooked up with
somebody she met at a halfway house for the mentally feeble and… you
see….(pause) the way my mother’s family handled her mental illness was just amazing
to me because they just sent her away. They just sent her away to that asylum
and then they moved. They didn’t want to let her know where they were living.
Because she had caused them so many problems.
My mother’s mother… because there was no father and because they were
Sicilian and that’s what immigrant families did back then…they lived together…
their mother lived with my mother and uncle and his wife and they just had a
terrible time with my mother. Her brother kind of took over the legal role as her
guardian. He was an attorney in San Jose and had actually been District
Attorney and a judge at one time. His
name was Fred Domino. He had a wife Ruby, whom he had been dating since high
school and I actually just had dinner with her not too long ago, maybe a few
months ago, back in March actually because my Uncle Fred recently passed away.
But anyway, when I met Kathy, my biological mother, I was in college. I had
always grown up knowing I was adopted and had actually begged my mother about
wanting to find out everything I could and my parents were actually very
supportive of me wanting to identify as an adoptee interested in searching.
When I was 10, my adoptive mother actually called the county of San Jose or
Santa Clara County and requested that a waiver of confidentiality be submitted
into my file which would allow anyone who was ever trying to find me… that you
know, that I gave my permission to be contacted but no one ever did. So when I
was 18 and in high school I went through a very difficult time. I became
obsessed with my identity because when I would look in the mirror, I wouldn’t
be able to see past my eyes. I couldn’t look into my eyes. I wasn’t able to see
past my eyes …they say the eyes are the window to the soul but I would get this
far and not be able to see what was inside… so I was having a very difficult
time with it. I kind of shoved it under
the rug and put it aside because when I started asking questions and…you know
it was just very difficult…because after all of this time… you know my mother
had always told me that…after growing up when she was always telling me she was
very supportive of me finding out but when I started to actually do the work,
she was all of a sudden a little insecure and so I just.. .I just kind of put
it away for a while until I was in college…for two years…my sophomore year…
when I was 20. I decided to… I was in
Los Angeles at USC and I decided to do it then.
It was 1994. I contacted an organization that I found in the back of a
book called Lost and Found, which was an adoption support book by Betty Jean
Lifton, a pioneer of adoption writing… and there was just this little section
in the back that listed resources according to area and I looked at the only
one listed under San Jose which is where I was born. It was these two women
that ran it out of their living room, I think. They were just these search
angels. So I sent them a letter I had received from the county of Santa Clara
which was basically just a brush-off letter saying they couldn’t tell me anything
with a face-sheet they had included that listed all of the non-identifiable
information because in place of the information that I wanted to know, there
were big splotches of white-out that had then been Xeroxed so I really couldn’t
see anything. So I called the county and said, “What’s up with this?” and the
guy is telling me, “Well,” He actually
had my file open before him while he was on the phone with me and he says, “I’m
sorry, I’m looking right at it but I can’t tell you what’s in it.” And I was like “(WTF?”) But then he let it slip that my birth mother
was born in Chicago and I don’t know if he meant to do that or whatever but it
was the piece of information that I took to my searcher who was then able to
track down my family within maybe about a week of me telling her that
information. And I remember the day she called me with a name. It was in March
of 1994 when she did that. Because it was over a weekend, I wasn’t able to
contact her brother or track him down at his law firm and I’m glad I wasn’t
able to do that because had I done that, he would have most certainly
discouraged me from calling her. So when I called my mother out of the cold for
the first time, I had called a few numbers before tracking her down at this
board and care halfway house and when I got her on the phone, she said, “How
did you get this number? Then, I’ve been thinking about you for a long time.
Which she immediately followed up with a request for me to send her some
money….!! Or cigarettes… and I was just
a little bit, you know, taken aback…
Because when I said I wouldn’t be able to she said, “But I thought you
went to a rich family,”
Judy: Wow!!
MTA: And she sounded…well, when I met her of course, I
understood but when I met her, she sounded, well she looked like what I liked
to call basically a Tenderloin Tessie, you know, basically like a bag lady and
she lived in this halfway house where she roomed with a…with another bag
lady…and she pushed this shopping cart around downtown San Jose… She was just
eccentric…very eccentric. She had this white hair… which was different from the
way she looked in a picture I saw of her when she was in her 20s and gorgeous
when she was normal. She was Sicilian and had beautiful olive skin. But by the
time I met her, of course, she was just torn down. She had been living as in indigent for years
and years and years for over 30 years...
Judy: Did you find any recognition in your features…
MTA: Not at first, you know because of. Well…time…but in her
younger pictures, yes. People tell me that all the time but mostly with my
father… because you see…because she had stayed in contact with my father off
and on throughout all of those years, after I found her…he was able to be found
as well… and when I saw him for the first time, I mean it was so amazing
because I looked so much like him… Let’s see, I found my sister about 3 or 4 months
after I found my mother… no… that’s not right…. Yes, actually I found my sister
about 3 or 4 months after finding my mother and then when I actually met my
mother in person for the first time I was with my sister… In that interim
period after finding my mother, I found my sister…who had been adopted into a
different family and had her name changed…
Judy: How did you find your sister?
MTA: (pause, laughs) I have NO idea. I didn’t even think it was going to be
possible because all it said on the face sheet was “Sister” and everything had
been whited out except for the year 1971 but the birth date and the name had
been whited-out so I had nothing to go on. But my mother had told me that she
had named her Sally but of course that name had been changed…so I just… well I
told my searcher that I didn’t even hope to search because I honestly didn’t
think it was going to be humanly possible and my searcher said, “no”, that she
really wanted to do this. I don’t know how she did it. I have no idea how she
tracked her down but all of a sudden after a few long months that summer, one
night she calls and says we could zero in on her general whereabouts. That was
such a difficult process because of the address… the address we had was a place
she had once lived with this guy who worked as a big rig operator who was gone
for extended periods of time so my searcher personally staked out this one
house in San Jose for week and then would call me with news of having no
news. She was interviewing neighbors
until she realized that people were giving her the cold shoulder, probably
assuming she was a bill collector so they were being very protective of leaking
information about my sister’s whereabouts. Well, when I finally got her on the
phone after months of trying and false starts and stops and starts, she said
that she had heard through some neighbor that she had had a brother that was
looking for her… which was of course all very overwhelming because she had no
idea about any of this… since she was the oldest so she didn’t know anything…
Judy: Did she know that she was adopted?
MTA: She knew she had
been adopted but that was it. She didn’t know much of anything. And I had grown
up with minimal information… I mean my adoptive mother had kept the records
from when I was in foster care...there was a book kept on me that was like a
journal kept by the foster parents about me that recorded and kept track of my
feeding schedule and my habits for the
first 14 months of my life. And it was touching… My name was Tommy… Thomas
Charles… of course the surnames were secret.
My father’s name was Thomas Smith; so of course, I would have been
Thomas Charles Smith. I laugh and say,
Oh my God… I can’t believe I narrowly escaped a fate of being named Tom
Smith. My name is Michael Thomas Angelo
which is so much better.
Judy: You’re not stuck in obscurity…
MTA: No, I’m not. Nor anonymity… Actually, I probably would have been Thomas
Charles Domino-Smith--- but they still call me Tommy, my mother still calls
me Tommy…. Well, everybody called me
Tommy actually because that was my name for the first 14 months of my life and
when my parents adopted me, my father wanted to change my name to Michael to honor
his father’s brother, a commercial artist named Michael Angelo. And my mother
said, “No, you can’t name him Michael Angelo because he’s going to be teased
his whole life…” Which I was. So they
compromised and decided to go ahead and name me that Michael Thomas Angelo
which would be my legal name but they wouldn’t call me by it. They would just
continue to call me Tommy because that was just me. My adoptive mother loved the name Tommy
because her father and brother are both named Thomas. That’s the way it is. The name of my soul,
my innermost soul, the name I answer to myself is Tommy so that’s what I go by. Michael was just my legal name that I hated
while growing up especially when I would start school every year after the
teacher would call out roll, she’d call out Michael Angelo and everyone would
laugh and so I saw it as just something that I had to endure. Until I was 18 when I went to college at USC
and suddenly because it was my legal name, Michael Angelo was on every piece of
paper and I got tired of having to explain to everybody, “Yes I really go by
Tommy,” so I just decided to give up and say, “Okay, go ahead and call me
Michael Thomas Angelo.” It was a novelty that seemed to make an impression on
people anyway so I just gave up and that’s how I became Michael Angelo in my
adulthood. But everyone who has known me since before I was 18 calls me Tommy.
So that’s the story of that.
Judy: Do you still have a relationship with your biological
mother?
MTA:
Unfortunately…well…. You see, after I found her, I let 15 years pass
because I was so overwhelmed with the experience that I let 15 years pass
without contacting her because I just couldn’t deal with it. I barely contacted her for that whole
time. During those 15 years I was going
through a lot of my own growing pains…
Judy: …which we’ll come to…
MTA: Yes… where I wasn’t able to… well, I just couldn’t be
present. And I have since done a lot of reading about the post reunion
experience about what to expect after wards since my reunion and I wish I had
been privy to that before as I was going through it because I would have been
able to deal with it a lot better. There are stages people go through over
time. They liken it to what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identifies as the five stages
of grief that someone goes through after a death in a mourning process. It was
so overwhelming because I had been obsessed with it my whole life and after
taking this mammoth search on and then being successful in finding every single
member of my biological family who were then coming out of the woodwork.
Everything I was dealing with…the range of emotions…not to mention the guilt I
harbored for having done it…because I couldn’t share it with my adoptive
mother… It was just such a sore subject and she acted so hurt by it which I
couldn’t understand…that I couldn’t share anything… But I was…I was so excited
about it… You know adoption has always been a major part of my identity and I
have always been fascinated… when I hear adoptees talk about how they don’t
really want to know or don’t have any desire to search for their family, I
think they’re lying. They’re lying to themselves because you have to want to
know where you came from. I wouldn’t be who I am had I not had that…but now I
know… I mean it wasn’t pretty…but I found out…and it didn’t turn out the way I
wanted it to… I didn’t have a relationship with her (Kathy) the way I would
have wanted to because I let 15 years pass without having hardly any contact
with her until one day in 2007…. I had been living in an apartment South of
Market and had just moved to a new place in the Tenderloin and was going
through a period of cleaning house, so to speak. I had gotten rid of some bad
influences and was taking inventory of my life and where I was at and I decided
to revisit the issue. I started to look
through some old letters where I found her address and then called her. She
still lived in San Jose and I found out she had been simultaneously looking for
me. She had just shown up at the apartment I had just vacated south of Market.
.. She had just shown up there a month after I moved out looking for me… She
said, “there was this Filipino man” and I knew that my neighbor was Filipino and she had actually talked to
him about where I was and it was amazing, I mean, after all of that time of us
not talking to each other, she shows up on my doorstep a month after I had
moved out of the building. How amazing. I thought, my god, the Universe works
in mysterious ways. … So anyway, we reconnected… I guess she took the Caltrain down from where
she lived in San Jose to my apartment in San Francisco every other weekend or
so where we would just sit and jibber-jabber. She would always bring her
boyfriend type figure, an older, eccentric black man that she lived with. He
was just an old, eccentric coot who would just sit there and talk to her while
I watched the two of them talk to each other because they were almost like this
hilarious comedy team. She was so… funny… I mean, she would say something was a
miracle and then she’d go, <nasally,
character voice, “Miracle… It’s a miiiiracle”> <rapid,
low pitched voice, as if Kathy was
talking to herself> “Who played Helen Keller in the Miracle
Worker?”
And then I’d say, “Oh it was Patty Duke…and then we’d go on
from there. I mean, it was just from one thing to another…and it was so funny.
And she always brought me all of these little gifts that were individually gift
wrapped. I think she had probably stolen them from Walmart or wherever but they
were just little doodads and gewgaws that she had brought, you know…kitschy
little things, that were so precious like little picture frames or a little
flashlight or a swatch of embroidered flowers that was stuck in a little frame
which I hung in the bathroom. There were huge temporary tattoos of flowers and
butterflies that I applied to the door in the bathroom. It was all so precious…
And I wanted to know so much. I wanted to know everything I
could soak up about what her life was like, about her courtship with my father
and their love story, and her childhood and about growing up as she did in
San Jose, you know, everything… but it was just so hard to pin her down… So when
I was finally comfortable enough, you see by that time I was 33, I mean I
wasn’t 21 anymore so I had done some living and I had developed more tolerance
where things weren’t such a shock to me.
The first time I met her was just such a shock to me… I mean to
encounter this schizophrenic woman in this halfway house and duh-duh –ta-duh.
You know I was so sheltered and had never experienced anything like that… but
by 33, I had kind of been around the block and I was living in the Tenderloin
so I had a lot more exposure which led to me developing a lot more tolerance
for those people. So I just took her at
face value and accepted where for where she was. So… Mother’s
day happened… By this time we had been back in contact for about three
months… When Mother’s day, came, she visited me on the day. We had spent a
wonderful day meandering around the Civic Center and just talking. She would
sidle up to these winos around the Civic Center and say <in nasally Kathy voice, “Hey do you
gotta cigarette?”> and then she would sit right down there on the sidewalk
and cackle and just say <as Kathy,
“Jesus loves you, ha hahhhaaa”> And I
just thought she was just a hoot, know what I mean, because it was just so
funny to see that… I would say, “This is my muthuh---ha ha ha because I love
that kind of thing, know what I mean.
She would try to light a cigarette in the wind and she wasn’t able to do
it so she would try over and over and over again and it was just hysterical… Anyway, the next day, early the next
morning, I received a call from my sister who I had just recently resumed
contact with and I picked up the phone, said Hello and my sister simply said,
“Tommy she’s gone”. < deep breath, pause, shaky voice> Just like that she had died in her sleep the
day after Mother’s Day.
Judy: <speechless> Wow----
MTA: So a hasty funeral was planned. Her brother planned a hasty funeral…which was
an opportunity that I got to see my sister.
My sister actually drove with her two girls, she has three girls, but
she drove with the two youngest girls from where she had been living in Oregon to stay with me in my
little studio in the Tenderloin and we had a slumber party. And then I rode
with my sister and nieces to San Jose the next day to attend the memorial
service. It was at this little chapel in
San Jose and when I walked in, I felt like Oh my god, it’s the Sopranos, you
know, it looked like this big Sicilian contingent in there with her brother…who
was there with everyone she had grown up with and her family…and so I was able
to say something. It was very…well the
memorial service was hasty because the priest there didn’t know her and it was
just thrown together and frankly, I mean, I don’t even know where her body was.
I mean there was no casket or anything and I actually asked my aunt what where
the body was and she said she didn’t know. So I don’t know what happened. I
mean I have no idea what happened. I mean, I think it was…well, I have no idea.
I don’t know if she ended up in Potter’s Field or what happened…
Judy: Wow!!
MTA: I mean, yeah, nobody knows…
Judy: And in Sicilian families, there are things you don’t
talk about….
MTA: Exactly. That’s exactly the way it is. I mean my uncle
was very reluctant to give me any information and I didn’t find out a lot of
what I know until after he died. I was able to really interview his wife Ruby
and just this past few months, when I had dinner with her after he died, I was
able to sit down with her and really grill her about everything she knew and
remembered because she had been dating my uncle since they were in high school
and so she saw my mother Kathy go through the change and spiral into mental
illness.
Judy: Oh, so she knew
her for her whole life...?
MTA: Almost. She had
been dating her brother since they were in high school and her brother is older
so…she kind of saw Kathy grow up. And so
I wanted to know everything.
Judy: Did you mom have other children?
MTA: <pause) Yeah, I’m laughing because there was another
child. David. But we don’t talk to him. … David was born 7 years after me from
another man although she claimed for years that he was from our same father but
we all had DNA tests and it turns out it wasn’t. He was from somebody else.
David had had behavioral problems from an early age so he wasn’t adopted from
foster care until he was like 5 or 6 years old and so imagine how traumatic
that must have been to have been in foster care for that long. His parents that
adopted him were an older couple on their second marriage. They had been having
problems in their relationship, had both had kids of their own from each
respective marriage and had decided to adopt him as kind of like their pet
project. It didn’t work. He was
seemingly very troubled by the time I met him when he was 15 and I was in
college. His adoptive mother had heard about me because she had been in contact
with our bio mother off and on
throughout almost his whole life because his adoption was handled out in the
open. Whereas my sister and I experienced a closed adoption where our records
were sealed I had to do a lot of teeth
pulling to get any information because it was all sealed but David’s adoption
was out in the open so our mother Kathy actually visited him in his foster home
regularly until he was adopted and then he ended up in the same town, which is
Morgan Hill where our uncle and his family lived. So he always knew where he
came from.. So, over the years, I’ve
tried more than once to have a relationship with him but he’s just very
troubled. He’s a very troubled young man…. He’s very angry and I just had to
cut him loose. I blocked him on Facebook and I warned my sister about him.
Interestingly enough, about a year ago, I was posting on
ancestry.com about being part of the Domino family and I got an email back from
a guy who it turns out is a distant cousin I guess, from the Domino side, my
grandfather’s, which is my mother’s fathers side, the Domino. He’s about 10 years older than me, and lives
in Chicago which is where the whole original Domino clan is from. He’s a tour
guide who speaks fluent Italian and conducts tours in Sicily in the same town
that our ancestors are from. He has actually researched the whole Domino family tree incessantly.
He’s completed a comprehensive complete family tree. He has welcomed me and taken me under his
wing. You see, until I met him, I had always kind of half identified as two
different people from having grown up adopted. I mean there was me, Michael
Thomas or Tommy, as I know myself and then there was this half-baked Thomas
Charles figure that existed somewhere in the murky depths of my subconscious ,
that person that never really had the chance to develop and there was always
kind of a conflict… So when I met him, I
introduced myself as Tommy Domino…who just happens to have been adopted and
raised with the name Michael Thomas Angelo and he just accepted that at face
value. He didn’t blink an eye or bat an
eyelash. I couldn’t believe it. I mean for him to accept me like that and not
even make it an issue that I was adopted…so you mean I could be these people, I
could be the same person I was before I was adopted was so liberating and I
mean, he didn’t even realize the effect it had on me, that finally, I could
just mold these two identities of nature vs. nurture and just be myself. And
yes, I am adopted. I am Tommy Domino. I mean I was Tommy Domino, that’s just
me…Regardless of whether or not I was adopted, I will just be me as I know
myself and well they always talk about nature vs. nurture and I just think that
I know myself now and I just think there are certain things about me that would
have been me regardless of whether or not I was adopted. I mean, my environment was completely
different from the way it would have been had I not been adopted. I’m so grateful to have been adopted from
foster care… I mean, I really think I got the best deal out of the situations
dealt among us, all three of Kathy’s children. My sister and brother didn’t
have as savory conditions….or let’s just
say they had less savory conditions compared to the type that I experienced…
things like a lower socio-economic bracket, some trauma, my sister had it so
bad she wasn’t able to complete high school as a teenager and was forced to
drop out because of the conditions taking place in her adoptive family.
Judy: Tell me about your adoptive family,
MTA: Well, my adoptive family life was completely the
opposite. I was raised in privilege. My mother and father divorced when I was
three years old and my mom and I moved from Sacramento back to San Jose. My
father stayed in Sacramento which is where they had grown up and gone to high
school. He settled in Sacramento and I
remember him telling my mother, I’m
willing to let you and Tommy go. He had started this electrical contracting
company named Angelo Electric, the year I was born in 1973 and it became this
booming business that was very successful. I do remember my parents and me
living together. I don’t know how that could be possible but I do remember us
living together in the same house. I remember doing things together like saying
my nighttime prayers, kneeling at the…well, we weren’t religious but I would
say my “now I lay me down to sleep”
prayers you know what I mean and I would always say Amen and my father would
say “and a lady” and that was just kind of our thing. I just remember
that. And I remember leaving. I remember
my father standing in the driveway and I remember my mother and I waving or me
waving goodbye to him and I think that was the
last time, well I think that was the day we left. I don’t know how old, I mean, god, I must
have been so young but I do remember that. So we left and my mother and I moved
to San Jose and she got a job at Atari which was a new company at the time, it
was 1976 or 1977 and she was hired in the secretarial pool. She identified with
Nolan Bushnell who started the company
because they were both from Utah. My mother was a pioneer in a lot of ways. I
liken it to what is going on with Google today, the enthusiasm that was
happening in Silicon Valley at the time, the rush of excitement that was taking
place and me being the only kid…because they were all in their early 30s or
late 20s. My mother was a divorcee with a kid in kindergarten and she called me
the Atari Kid. I remember her going to
bars after work with her Atari crew where she would always kind of tuck me
behind her in the booth so I would fall asleep. It was just funny because they
were young and very enthusiastic and they knew they were part of this new
thing, this new technology that was going on.
My mother rose to… well I always admired her because she never accepted
alimony from my father. She denied alimony .She was just very independent. I
mean, he sent a pittance child support payment but later on in my teenage years
she would just give me the whole check and I would spend it on clothes, know
what I mean, because she obviously didn’t need it anymore . She had risen from
the secretarial pool to middle
management when she met my stepfather
who was her boss when she was in Sales.
He was VP of Sales and Marketing and they had this office romance. I
remember them dating and then they moved in together. Prior to that, my mom and
I were so poor when I was in Kindergarten and first grade. We lived in this
duplex and I remembered that year because it was very sad. I remember she had gone grocery shopping and
she would always place the bags on the kitchen floor so I could help unload
them. This one day, I pulled this one
bag off of the counter to the floor so I could help unload them but the bag
contained eggs which all completely broke and <fighting back tears> I remember it was so sad because she just
stood there over the sink crying and she said, “Oh, Tommy, how could you do
that?” And I just remember how awful and
helpless…<crying…> wow… I just remember being struck by
that… <renewed
voice sans tears> but then she met Frank
and I remember how our lifestyle improved when we moved in with Frank. They bought a house together in
Los Gatos and I was taken out of public school and started attending Catholic
school for second grade. I would stay in private or parochial school for the
rest of my school career throughout 12th grade from that point
on. I went to St. Francis Cabrini in
Santa Clara for my second grade…for third grade, I had decided or I ended up somehow living
with my father who by that time was in his early 30s, living in Sacramento
where he had married his secretary’s 18 year old kid sister. She had big boobs
. He married her in a quickie Las Vegas ceremony and then put her through her
undergraduate college education at UC Davis. She was this 18-19 year old
coed—setting up housekeeping at this homestead 10 acre ranch property he owned
out in Roseville when I went to live with him.
He would go on to have two kids with her, a boy and a girl born in the
early 1980s. I just hated living with
him. I was never sold on the idea and I never clicked with him but I was too
afraid to say anything because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. If they
had only asked me, but they put me into therapy with a child psychiatrist when
I was in the third grade and I didn’t know at the time that he was there to
help me try and decide who I wanted to live with. I just thought he was this nice looking man
that paid a lot of attention to me and loved t hear me read aloud. I would read
poems from Shel Silverstein’s A Light in
the Attic book of poems which I loved. I remember him correcting my
pronunciation of St. Tropez which I pronounced
like a Pez dispenser. I was devastated to have gotten it wrong but what
the hell did I know? I was in third grade.
But I digress… anyway… I was always flying back and forth between
Sacramento and San Jose to stay with one or the other parent. I was always an
unaccompanied minor since I was 5, 6, or 7… I remember one time I had fallen
asleep on the plane and I missed my connection so I didn’t get off the plane.
My mother was there to pick me up and when I didn’t get off the plane of course
she was horrified because she thought my father had kidnapped me so she called
him up and he said, “Well Erin, (his wife)took him to the airport” and my mom
said, “Oh really, I didn’t know she was old enough to drive,” <laughs>
That was just my mom’s sense of humor. I ended up surfacing in Ontario and
luckily she had a friend of a friend there who picked me up and helped me find
my way back home. I remember my mom was so pissed that the stewardess didn’t
wake me up.
Judy: We’re at 36 minutes…
MTA: Okay, gosh have
we talked that long already? I guess I should fast forward. My childhood with my mom and stepfather was
very wonderful. We moved to Seattle when I was 10 so my stepfather could work
for Nintendo. He was an executive, like a
VP of Sales and Marketing at Nintendo so I was basically growing up in
the video game industry surrounded by all those early video games. We had a
room full of video games in our house which was great for me but I was so tired
of them and hated that all the kids in
the neighborhood would want to come over and play video games. I didn’t really
like them or get along with them all too
well so I would basically ignore them
and be reading my book when my mom would come up to me and say, “You’re being
very rude. You should be out there entertaining your guests and I would say,
“They’re not here to see me. They’re here to play video games. “ I knew they
didn’t really like me and that I didn’t have fun playing with them because they
were just banal and beneath me and I had other interests. I was gay and didn’t know that but was always
teased for that and was sick of the way they would flip the script whenever
they wanted to come over and play video games. I put up with a lot of fair-weather,
fickle friends, the kind that I learned how to recognize very early. I lived in
suburban Seattle until I graduated high school. My stepfather left Nintendo in
1988 when I was in 8th grade and started his own company called
Fabtek and my mother joined him in working for that so they had their own
empire with that and became a corporate power couple of the video game industry
and very successful. Fabtek had many successful
coin-op arcade games under its name. Dead Angle was the first one…it was
a shoot-em-up Mafia game. Very fun…it was very successful right out of the
gate. I went to Eastside Catholic high
school in Bellevue WA with kids I had gone to school with since the fifth
grade. We didn’t wear a uniform in high school.. The community in Bellevue was
very white, very suburban, very upper middle class. Bill Cates was from
Bellevue. I was raised with everything
under the sun. That’s how a baby sitter had once described it to me. She meant
it as kind of a slur but then I realized that yeah, I actually do have
everything under the sun. I’m spoiled,
so sue me, <laughs> I was an
only child so I had a room full of video games and a room full of toys. My
parents were contemporary executives in business so I didn’t have those
traditional, do I wanna say...not values but
I guess traditions that my classmates growing up in traditional Catholic
households had to abide by where they couldn’t watch TV past a certain time or
they had all of these restrictions. I
just transcended all of that. I was very lucky in that respect. I went to college at USC, the University of
Southern California, and I didn’t’ come out as gay, well officially, which is
hard to believe… until my sophomore year, which is unbelievable because knowing
myself as I do and knowing the way I was
which has always been the way I am, it’s amazing that it was all lost on
me. I guess I was just kind of in denial and I compartmentalized everything
because I knew I was attracted to men… I just didn’t acknowledge it… I just put
it in the back of my mind. Just like when I became HIV positive, 11 or so years
ago, the reason it happened is because when I was learning about sex growing up
in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, we
were told to use a condom every time, use a condom every time, so of course
we’re going to do that right… so when I started becoming sexually active with
men when I was like 18 or 19, of course, I was going to use a condom every
time…except when I didn’t want to and then I would just pretend that those
experiences never happened so you know of course, I couldn’t imagine how I
could have contracted HIV because I was totally safe… not realizing that, yeah
it was safe except for all of those times that I didn’t use a condom that I
wasn’t acknowledging. I was really able to lie to myself is what I’m saying. I
was really able to compartmentalize everything where I lived this reality but
then I also lived this alternative reality kind of on the side that I didn’t
really acknowledge and by not acknowledging it I could fool myself into
believing that it never really happened.
That’s how I justified what was going on, is what I’m saying. That’s how
I lived the behavior that led to me becoming HIV positive. But anyway, at USC I
was very active in the queer student group. I won a scholarship my senior year
for being a role model, well they called me a role model, for being an
undergraduate role model, which is funny to me because I was just myself. I was
really into pushing the envelope because I would receive a lot of attention at
the time because I looked like a girl. Not that I was trying. People don’t believe me when I say that, but
it was because people called me pretty so then I thought ,oh, this is kind of
interesting and I decided to see how far I could push the envelope so I would
start to present myself with really tweezed eyebrows which led to me doing drag. You know the
Crying Game had just come out. So that was really popular in Hollywood and
there was this whole new side of the entertainment industry that was opening
up. There was this new talent agency and Rupaul and all that was just coming
out at the time. This was in 1994-95 so I took advantage of that. One, because I had always wanted to be an
actor and I was in LA with this talent agent who was representing me in
drag. I had to go on these auditions in
drag which led to situations where I would have to pull my car over and change
clothes in a Starbucks bathroom, go in as a boy and emerge in drag, and it was really funny. These were heady times. I
did a couple indie films I was never really
able to take advantage and become an actor the way I wanted to because I was
forced to leave LA prematurely because I
had gotten sick. I had always kind of
dealt with this eating disorder, kind of had this body dysmorphia issue since I
was a teenager and the way it manifested when I was 23 was when my stomach
started to get gangrene from me not eating….
I was in the hospital for like two
months hooked up to feeding tubes and I got down to like less than 90 lbs.
or so. It was very traumatic. It just changed everything. I went from living in
LA trying to be like this little glamorous, well what I thought was glamorous, narcissistic,
self-centered, model/actor/whatever type to all of a sudden being committed to
a hospice after I was released from the hospital where I was hooked up to
feeding tubes forbidden to consume solid food. I was being kept alive by this
fluid that was being pumped through tubes that were sticking out of my stomach
and because I didn’t want to gain any weight, I learned how to unhook the tubes
from the machine when the nurses left the room and I would dump the contents
down the sink drain and then hook myself back up before the nurses came in to
check. I had the routine down like clockwork and that’s what I did while I was in
the hospice. When I was finally released
from all of that after multiple operations, it would take me a long time before
I was able to digest food again. My mother by this time had divorced my
stepfather and she was running a company in San Jose called Data East. It was a
video game company and she was Senior Vice President working under the Japanese as the only female
executive. She was still tying loose ends
up with Fabtek back in Seattle and primarily living in this corporate
apartment in San Jose during the week
while she ran Data East. So I ended up
moving in with her into that corporate apartment when I was released from the
hospitals and we just weren’t getting along.
I had really wanted to go back to LA so for my 24th birthday
week, I bought a plane ticket, went back there and immediately started using
drugs irresponsibly again. I was living out of a suitcase, living between
nightclubs, living a shallow, club-kiddy kind of tweaker lifestyle that was
very erratic. My mother said, “This
can’t go on anymore. I don’t want any part of this. You have to go find other
living arrangements” so I went and started staying with my stepfather who had just been divorced from my mother and
was living in San Francisco actually in this neighborhood, right down the
street on Presidio at Clay. He let me
come stay with him in 1997 in October of 1997 when I got out of the hospital
which is how I ended up living in San Francisco. I’m really disappointed that we don’t have
that much time because I wanted to get into…
Judy: No, we do…
You’re now on 44 minutes. Keep going.
You’re on a roll.
MTA: Okay… well coming to San Francisco after having been in
LA and having this idea of how my life was going to go and then all of a sudden
arriving here and I didn’t want to be here when I got here. I was only here
because I had no place to go so I just ended up here. I had nothing left for me
in LA because my parents had packed up my apartment and quit my job when I was in
the hospital and everything was in storage so I had nothing to go back to. When
I got out of the hospital, I was in San Jose right across the bay and since
this was the closest city I could come to… because my stepfather had let me
stay with him…and I just really ran through the poor man’s life and wrecked it.
Here he was taking me in after being divorced from my mother. He was the only
father figure I knew since I hadn’t had
a relationship with my own father since I was 13. I really feel badly for what
I did to him. Here I was showing up
wearing all this makeup and all of these little club-kiddy outfits and being on
crystal meth and staying out for days at a time, coming back and sleeping for
days, tromping around like Clydesdales in my platform Fluevogs at all the wee
hours, making noise to upset his boozhy neighbors in Presidio Heights. There
was glitter everywhere. Everything was infused with glitter because I would put
it into a salt shaker and then just tilt my head back and sprinkle it over my
face just to give me that, you know, essence… <laughs> I was a sparkly
boy, know what I mean? That’s <laughs-laughs> how I was walking
around here. So this glitter would get into the hardwood floors and you’d think
you’d have it all up and the wood was porous so it would just become embedded
in the wood and if the light would catch it a certain way, it would start
sparkling. So it was a big mess. Frank, my stepfather actually ended up
changing the locks. He threw me out, you know and I ended up finding my own
apartment in another situation. Within a year after getting that apartment, I
was evicted. I had so many people over there. People were using the fire escape
as an entrance and exit. I just let anyone and everyone move in. I had no
boundaries. No boundaries whatsoever. I would like, let anybody move in. If you
were homeless, I was like, sure, come stay with me, (especially if you had a
big dick) and people took full advantage. I think I had like 12 people staying
in that studio apartment. And people
totally took kindness for weakness. Well, I wanted to be accommodating, you
know what I mean, because that’s how I was raised. Well, I was taken in. I was
turned out as they say, After a year of living that way, I decided to pack it
in and go to drug treatment and well… <takes
breath, pause> my relationship
with drug use has been interesting because there’s that whole thing when you’re
in drug treatment about the 12 step culture and I know enough about it for
having been through all that to be grateful for not having to be in it
anymore. Because it’s such, excuse my
language, BULLSHIT. A lot of the work
I’ve done in San Francisco around social justice is to advocate for practicing
harm reduction, to show drug users that they have human rights and how to
exercise their right not to be powerless over their own behavior. Because
that’s what they teach you in that 12 step bullshit—is that you’re powerless,
you’re a victim. I think that is just ridiculous. How can you be powerless or
made to feel powerless over your own
fucking behavior. You know a lot of that is rooted, I happen to know that a lot
of those beliefs from the 12 step thing
are rooted in this ancient , Christian Oxford ideology. That’s where all that
garbage stems from. I know this because I researched it and having grown up
Catholic and having always thought critically about everything, I’ve never been
one to just accept things at face value. I researched it so knowing that, I
just don’t believe what they’re (12 step
groups) are selling. I had to sit through all of those incessant meetings with
these pitiful people that were always beating their breast and bemoaning their
miserable lives. They were white-knuckling it just to get through the day so
they wouldn’t use and then celebrating that they had this many days… and I
thought, oh my god, just use for god’s sake, it’s not worth it, it can’t be
worth it to be that fucking miserable and I just decided that one’s life didn’t
have to be lived in constant fear of falling over the edge of relapse because
if you do “quote, unquote” relapse, who the hell cares? Know what I mean? So I started
volunteering at the Needle Exchange here
in the city. When I started, of course I was still under the spell of the
school of thought that addiction is this disease…. And when I discovered that
that wasn’t true and that you didn’t have to become powerless over your
behavior that none of what they were selling was true--- that it was all based
on just one model of addiction that had
no basis in real science and was no better than armchair psychology
along the lines of Scientology…. Or in
other words, a crock of BS I was
grateful to be able to look critically at all of that and really examine it
from an academic perspective which I found very liberating. I don’t have to believe in it. It was a shame
because I had really good friends in that program, friends that I had known for
15 years that I no longer speak to because they are afraid to associate with
any dissenting opinions outside of their group-think-cult-speak song and dance.
I don’t live my life under those restrictions. I don’t refuse to do drugs
because I accept that drugs play a part in my life because I’m a sexually active gay man living in San
Francisco. Of course, I’m going to run into drugs. I’d have to be a monk or
celibate not to accept that and that just ain’t me, know what I mean? <country accent, laughs> The whole party and play culture is something
I run into quite a bit but I don’t denigrate it and I accept it for what it is
and I know how to manage my behavior. I never let it get out of control. I’m
not one to throw the baby out with the bath water like some of my friends I
have known that go to pieces if they use. They quit their job, they’re
homeless, they’re living out in the streets and I think it’s just ridiculous. I
mean, why would you do that to yourself? Manage your fucking behavior. Grow up.
You know what I mean? I don’t know… maybe I’m just… I know that everyone does
it differently and everyone has their own path, but I have no tolerance for…
I’m not going to let those customs rule me. I refuse to become a cliché. There
is a reason a stigma exists around drug users. It’s because of people like that
who don’t know how or think they can’t manage their own behavior. They don’t
represent very well. If I make a
decision to use drugs, I have to say that I am going to represent myself as I
would like myself to be represented. I
don’t make it a part of my regular…
Judy: You’re not
beating your breast.
MTA: Exactly. It’s not a regular behavior, certainly not
like it’s been at various stages in my life but it is something that I do take
part in once in a while but if haven’t learned a thing or two about how to
manage it by this age, then I…well how tragic would that be… And that 12 step culture where you’re always
going to meetings talking about how
you’re not using forces you to obsess about using which leads to using.. Exactly---.
Judy: So we’re at 51
minutes.
MTA: So I’ll wrap it up…
Judy: No, go for 9 more minutes…
MTA: Okay, I’ll wrap it up. Well make it an even hour. One
more thing. What I was struck by…you
know I live in the Tenderloin. I love living in the Tenderloin. What’s
happening right now with this gentrification of mid-Market under Mayor Ed Lee
which is being called the Twitter tech boom. There are tax breaks that are
taking place for these tech companies when they move into our
neighborhood. The area of mid-Market where I live and the
Ambassador Hotel on Mason and Eddy are all very historical. Mark Ellinger has done a lot of documenting
and archiving for his wonderfully comprehensive and thorough website called
upfromthedeep.com. Every building in my neighborhood, including the one I live
in has a historical value of almost 100 years. I am overwhelmed walking around
the neighborhood on daily basis thinking about all of the stuff that took place
before me. I mean just right across the street from where I live there is this
hotel that was once a Gold Rush whorehouse. It’s documented in a book called Madams of San Francisco. I read
that where it talks about how plush and luxurious the carpets were and I see it
now and it’s just this crack house, this hovel, this SRO. And I think about how
not one person inside that building today probably has any idea of how grand
this place was back 100 years ago and it just
kills me. I mean, people are living on top of this gold mine of culture
and they have no idea. So I make it a passion of mine. I really want to know
everything. I can feel the energy of these people. Even the building I live in now, the
Ambassador was actually a makeshift AIDS hospice in 1994 when the city was just
over run with the epidemic when they had no place to put these people that were
dying and a lot of them ended up in that hotel where they were just forgotten.
They were forgotten by their families and they just died there.
Judy: How
devastating.
MTA: Oh yeah, of course the building has been completely
renovated since then, but the ghosts are still there. It’s just amazing to me
what has taken place. … I consider
myself to be old-school. At 40, I’ve
kind of had this transition because my 20s and 30s were kind of messy… Ask my
mother. She’ll attest to that. I was lost. After growing up as the kid who
never did anything wrong with everything under
the sun, kind of in denial about my sexuality and everything then I kind of had this <unintelligible>
college…on a certain path… and then graduating from college and having
everything that happened with my stomach and then well you know I just lost my
way for a lot of years. I was just…very…lost. I was living in the Tenderloin…what
I put myself through with all the boys, always at the brunt end of abusive
relationships and just always, always struggling. At 40, I just… well… for the
past few years, I was kind of bouncing around. I gave up the apartment I had
been keeping on Turk and Leavenworth three years ago because it just came to be
too much. I ended up being homeless. I wasn’t homeless on the streets. But I
was homeless staying with people, couch surfing… and I got into some situations
where I was taken advantage of because it was very difficult to live under such
conditions. I had an opportunity over
this time to really examine myself… I had to keep it together because I had a
cat. My doctor was telling me to just go to a treatment center for the free
housing and I was incensed. I’m not going to go check into a treatment center
because yeah, then I’ll have free housing for a few months which is what they
were suggesting that I do and I said, Hell no, I have a cat. I have a child to
take care of. I have to take care of
Tippi. Tippi is my tabby who I’ve had since she was 8 weeks old and she’s 8
years old now. What’s going to happen to her? I had to keep it together for her
sake. For Tippi. I did hold it together, know what I mean? I endured a lot of horrible things until I
was finally able to get housing at the Ambassador which is an SRO. And I had
never lived in an SRO. Of course I had worked for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic
as a desk clerk of various SRO hotel
properties but I had never personally lived in such a place. That’s been a
little bit of an adjustment but I do appreciate the structure because there are
visiting restrictions which prevents me from just letting any cute boy with a
big package come over and stay which they will.
You invite these boys over to stay… and after the first night, they’ll stay , especially if they don’t have another
place to go which a lot of them don’t. Especially these little hustler boys,
the 30 year old little hustler boys that I’ve always had an affinity for and
I’m a sucker for…well you know…they just show up and stay and since I have no
boundaries, before you know it you have
somebody living with you. But in a hotel
you can’t do that because they have to leave at a certain time. And I like that because it’s given me a
little sacred space that I have with my
kitty and it’s our space and if I want to play I can go out and go to somebody
else’s house and I don’t have to always bring it back to my own. I was living right in the belly of the beast
at Turk and Leavenworth for years and now I’m on Mason and Eddy right across
from the Bristol Hotel which has been closed for renovations and vacant for
what’s going on a year now. They’re
gentrifying it to attract a tourist clientele which I am leery over just like
they tore down that historical St. Francis Theater across the street at 5th
and Market to build this mall project which I am sick over. The Renoir hotel
has been closed to be renovated to attract a tourist clientele. There are
buildings that have sat vacant for 30 years that are now under
construction to be renovated to attract
tourists which I am a little bit leery of . It’s going to be really interesting
in the next five years to see what’s going to happen to mid-Market. I hope that I represent the old school
values… of the Season
of the Witch era… ,,, <Unintelligible>
are coming up on the anniversary of the Milk/Moscone assassinations and the
whole Jonestown suicide massacre—which all happened this month in 1978. It’s a very weird time…they’re actually
having a march coming up in the next couple of weeks to honor those events….
So I’m happy to be living in San Francisco at this time, a
part of that, living in the Tenderloin around all of this history. It’s a
wonderful, beautiful city and me as a gender-queer, adoptee, HIV positive, old-school faggott. It’s great
to be here.
Judy: Well, to sum up though, where do you see yourself
going…
MTA: Well, where am I going now… after having this epiphany
and knowing myself better I’m trying to get a foothold into community outreach
to be able to pass on what I have. I’m a writer ready to write and have my
narratives published. I’ve received a lot of accolades for the way I write and
record my life’s narratives. I do try and keep a blog which isn’t really
faithful because It fell into the wrong hands one time and somebody that I
didn’t mean for it to see read it. So I’m a little bit leery about how much to
tell because I do write very frankly and candidly about my life.
The blog is called Gay as Paint and the address is http://gayaspaint.blogspot.com I want to publish my memoir and be
working/volunteering to champion the SF
AIDS Foundation and advocate for the marginalized populations of San Francisco,
the drug users, the less fortunate, the people with AIDS, the mentally ill, the
ones who can’t speak up for themselves. And I really want to advocate for the preservation of the historical
architecture of San Francisco, maybe volunteer as a tour guide to talk about
history for
In unison: MTA and
Judy together : Keeping history alive!
Judy: And on that note… thank you very much.
MTA: No thank you Judy. I’m so glad you could do this for
me.Storycorps
