Dear San Francisco is a story of the city by the Bay. San Francisco is as much a myth as it is a city. It’s a story of its own. Or many stories. A land of free thinkers, hippies, and poets, of many cultures and overwhelmingly liberal. A place you left your heart, where you put flowers in your hair, where the hills wore you out and the views took your breath away. A city of booms and busts, all the way back to its founding.

The 7 Fingers’ style is not traditional plot-driven storytelling. Their form works on a structure of resonance and rides an emotional arc rather than a narrative arc. Each scene in this show is grounded in a memory or an emotion invoked by the city for its authors, Gypsy Snider and Shana Carroll.

Gypsy and Shana are both natives of the Bay Area who came of age in the city of 70’s and 80’s. Their form is contemporary circus, emerging as they did from The Pickle Family Circus of the 80s and 90s. Work began on Dear San Francisco in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. All of these timeframes are present all night.

For people who are eager to ‘read’ their story, as well as ‘ride’ it, here are some scene-by-scene touchstones that can orient you to the San Francisco our authors are celebrating with this show.

A note before you begin: Not all scenes appear in the show every night, and not all scenes appear in the same order all the time. This is a loose chronology — read it more like a glossary than a map.

Prologue

The opening introduces the mythic and epic storyline of the city. From the 1906 Earthquake to the radical poets to the ‘revolutionary Milk’ that flows through our veins and the bridges and islands of Angels and Treasures. The poet calls the performers as well as the audience to come out again. To transform the city yet again. Together. To love this city is to live in this city. Not alone in your home. Not staring at a screen or out a window, but feeling it on your skin, in your breath, and under your feet. The pandemic had made us shut-ins. Relentless negative press about the city kept us there. It’s time to come out again.

Fire

If you were in the city in October, 2020 you remember the day the sky turned orange and the sun never came through. You remember the fire season that year. The CZU fire. The Glass fire. The LNU fire. The North complex fire. All within days or weeks of each other. All the while, another fire was raging: the global pandemic. We wore masks against both the smoke and the virus. We became shut-ins. Or we ran for our lives from the flames. The lyrics here tell the tale. “From fire to ashes; from ashes to tremor; my city is calling. From fire to ashes, from ashes to light, my city is rising.” Dear San Francisco was made in the aftermath of that season, opening in the Fall of 2021. This segment speaks to the collapsing and rising that has been San Francisco’s reality since before its founding. The entire town burned down - twice - before it was even incorporated.

Newcomers

The little text segment around the phone booth introduces the energy of the city’s new arrivals. The news is always reporting on the people who leave. Little is said about the constant flow of people who come.

About that phone booth: this is a clue that the whole show lives in a liminal time and space. A pay phone throws us backwards in time. A San Francisco before cell phones. But the acrobats are speaking of things of their lives today. Burning Man. Orange skies. AI Customer Service. This is a sign to not work too hard to nail anything down tonight. It’s a feeling, not a fact.

Wind

Now the soundtrack and the visual land you in an urban wind tunnel. (Listen to the soundtrack on Bandcamp and you get the full sense of the wind’s role in this scene.) This is a common state of play for the financial district. White paper, which began as ash in the final phone call, is now confetti swirling out of the sky. For decades on the last work day of the year ‘FiDi’ workers in the office towers shredded the accumulated paper from the year and tossed it out their sky-high windows. And the act itself whirls and swirls. Whether it’s a unicycle (as it was originally) or straps or hula hoops, the act is carrying the sense of wind. And again you are in a liminal time - people are walking around with their heads buried not in their phone but in the newspaper. Watch those newspaper readers on their way to work transformed into unhoused people on the sidewalk, covering themselves with these broadsheets. This is all of the financial district across all time in a single mashup.

Love Letters

This is the moment the show rushes into the immediate present. This room. This day. This audience. It puts us all in the show and in the same moment in time. We are in this city and writing its story together.

Love is Love is Love

From the letters we slide into an exploration of San Francisco’s open embrace of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s emotional declaration at the Tony Awards that “love is love is love is love”. San Francisco is famous for this attitude. It’s part of our myth as well as our daily life. The trapeze work keeps reshaping the coupling to celebrate this freedom here.

An Immigrant’s Tale

This segment introduces the city’s strong and powerful cultural diversity. Built originally on the story of Chinese emigres, the section takes its time to carry the audience into the details of an immigrant’s life. It won’t always be a Chinese immigrant. But it will always be a culturally specific moment. This person came from somewhere other than San Francisco and is on this stage, tonight. When you go outside, there are people from all over the world making their home here. We are a city of immigrants, of intact cultures. It’s not a melting pot, this city. It’s many pots on a single stove. The accompanying act will always emanate directly from the culture of the performer who’s telling their tale.

Hearts

When Hearts is in the show, we are celebrating the city as a source of, and backdrop to, classic romance. The projection is a photo of Cupid’s Span, the sculpture on the Embarcadero of a giant bow and arrow rising out of the ground. At the back of the room, a projection of the heart sculpture that sits nearby at the foot of Market Street. On stage, an acrobat is crooning I Left My Heart in San Francisco. All the while a merry band of mischievous cupids expands the theme in surprising and delightful ways. People fall in love here, especially people experiencing it for the first time. It’s the most romantic city in the country.

Summer of Love

Few eras in San Francisco made as indelible, and durable, a mark as The Summer of Love. Fueled as much by a free spirit as by mind-altering substances, the hippie era still reverberates around the city and thrives in its Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The wild and carefree nature of the stage movement here, up down and around the Chinese poles, paired with the psychedelic projections aims to capture a bit of that essence.

Trivia

With this segment, we are again ‘back in the room’. It’s this audience, this night, and this city. By the time the whole audience is singing along to “Lights”, by Journey - a local band, by the way - we are all at Oracle Park with our beloved San Francisco Giants. This singalong happens at the eighth inning break at every game.

Hats

When Hats is in the show, the visuals display murals from all over the city and we are now celebrating the range of the city’s diversity. Where we’d spent time on a single story, we now flood the zone with many stories. The lyrics do a lot of the work here, as do the projections. “Hats” is a list song, ticking off the many different people and origins that are living together comfortably here. The hook: “I’ve got 49 problems but my neighbor ain’t one.” The diversity of the city’s murals tell more of this tale if you can tear your eyes off the performer to catch them. The act is breezy, upbeat. We love it here and we want you to feel that.

Poets

This is one of the more legible moments in the show, celebrating the Beat poets who read on this stage in their day. Less obvious is the jazz score and how that recalls the era when jazz was being recorded and performed at Fugazi. The poets quoted here both read at the Club and were published by City Lights Publishing and Booksellers, Club Fugazi’s North Beach neighbor.

Maltese Falcon

When this act is in the show it’s an homage to the great San Francisco writer Dashiell Hammett and the classic 1941 film noir made from his novel, The Maltese Falcon. The soundtrack is a remix pulled from a scene in the film where Sam Spade is being played, in dizzying fashion, by the dangerous beauty Bridget O’Shaughnessy. Bridget O’Shaughnessy is the only fictional female to have a commemorative plaque in the city, still installed at the site of the fictional murder of Miles Archer at Burritt Alley.

Note: When this act is in the show you’ll know on entering the theater, as a replica of the Maltese Falcon sits on the table on stage. Watch closely and you may notice it gets swiped, as in the novel, and reappears later in the show for a stealthy moment.

Existential Crisis

This is another quick text-based moment that ricochets around the room. Young San Franciscans wrestling with elements of the present moment in the city, from “practicing radical self acceptance” to searching for a politically correct substitute for milk.

Earthquake

This segment is doing a lot of work for the authors.

When the teeterboard is in the show, the act tilts, literally, toward the cataclysmic earthquake that was the AIDS pandemic of the 80’s and 90’s in San Francisco. Two men grappling with each other, with mortal risk, and a shaking earth. Anyone who lived here in the height of this tragedy still carries the shocks in their bodies. So many men. So much loss. When the aria from Cosi fan tutte sneaks in, an aria that most certainly had been sung in the early days of this theater, it’s underscoring the operatic scale of the grief of those days that swamped the city.

When the teeterboard is not in the show, the act tilts directly toward the history of literal earthquakes in the city. The opening choreography, a call back to the first segment, is now jagged and frantic and cast members are thrown and crumpled by the shifting faults under them. The act becomes a different kind of homage to loss, as a duo struggle to maintain their strength and balance against the crumbling backdrop.

Storm

The final act, every performance, is the rising promised in the opening number. The city’s flag is a phoenix. The city’s history is one of rising and falling. It will continue to be. The words that are written on the phoenix are words of loss and pain that belong to the falling. The falling is the storm. The lyrics here hold the promise “After the fog clears up from your eyes; a sudden smell of water from the sky; raindrops have washed away your tears; the earth stays still; something is