It’s always refreshing, and increasingly rare, to be reminded of how fun San Francisco used to be.
That’s what I found myself thinking as the lights came up after a screening of Carol Doda Topless at the Condor at the Roxie Theater. Made by directors Jonathan Parker and Marlo McKenzie, the documentary tracks the life of Carol Doda, widely credited as America’s first topless dancer, as her career skyrocketed from North Beach waitress to international icon.
The audience, mostly in their 20s and 30s and unlikely to have firsthand memories of the once-omnipresent Doda, laughed at every corny breast joke, of which there are many, often cracked by the striking Doda herself.
As I watched the vintage clips of frisky old-school San Francisco, a peculiar character occasionally popped in and out of the story: a press agent named “Big” Davey Rosenberg, who worked tirelessly to promote Doda’s career.
As the film explained, it was Rosenberg’s suggestion that Doda dance topless in the first place. Big Davey did all the heavy lifting. He staged publicity photos, engineered press appearances, represented nightclubs, and then seemingly disappeared.
From the glimpses of him in the film, he was a self-invented character from another era. Often in dress shirts and slacks, Rosenberg appeared sweaty, a big cigar clamped between smirking lips, his 400-pound girth stealing the focus in every photo. Strange as it sounds, even though Doda was the film’s attention-grabbing lead, I wanted to know more about Rosenberg, the guy behind the most famous topless dancer of all time.
By the early-’60s, North Beach was popping. Coltrane, Monk, and Cannonball at the Jazz Workshop on Broadway. Basin Street West featured acts like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. The hungry i booked Barbra Streisand, Tom Lehrer, and Lenny Bruce. The Purple Onion hosted Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers, the Kingston Trio, Bob Newhart, Phyllis Diller, and a young calypso singer named Maya Angelou. Finocchio’s packed them in with female-impersonator shows. The Committee, a counterculture improv group featuring a pre-sitcom Howard Hesseman, also known as Don Sturdy, had their own theater on Broadway.
And in the popular music clubs, go-go girls frugged, swam, and peppermint twisted onstage. Go-go would prove short-lived, but in that time period, in North Beach, it was a full-tilt happening. George & Teddy, two musicians from Detroit, landed a raucous R&B residency at the Condor, a bar on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, eventually recording a live album of soul covers there. The Condor was just another joint for conventioneers, tourists, and locals looking for a good time, but a few years later, it would become ground zero for America’s full-body swing into the ’60s.
To become that, though, it needed something big. Huge.
“Nobody remembers the Condor before Davey came,” recalls Carl Nolte, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who’s worked for the paper since 1961.
In January ’63, a young blond woman named Carol showed up at the Condor, fresh from a string of shit jobs. In those days, newspapers listed work opportunities as “Help Wanted: Female.” Secretary gigs, waitress shifts. The ceiling couldn’t get lower. Doda wanted more. A husband and two kids were already somewhere in her past, maybe near Sacramento. She had charisma, and she wanted to be famous. Sing, tell jokes, something. With a sly smile and movie-star looks, Doda started as a cocktail waitress and wiggled so enthusiastically that the Condor’s owners, Pete Mattioli and Gino Del Prete, put her onstage as one of the go-go dancers.
Around the same time, a chubby kid from the Richmond district had been hanging around the Condor. Davey Rosenberg was 27, and his brain was churning, but nothing had clicked. Dropped out of City College after one week. Lasted two days at SF State. A business promoting athletes—who were also his friends—petered out. His dad ran a newsstand, his grandfather had been a butcher. Expectations were not high for him, but Rosenberg knew the town and he knew how to hustle.
At the Condor, he spotted Doda right away. How could he not? Slinky, sexy, devastating with a wisecrack, and best of all, she was as restless as he was.
Pete Mattioli is 92 years old, sitting in his dining room in Santa Rosa, and still remembers Rosenberg. “Yeah, he liked Carol. I think he was in love with Carol, to tell you the truth.”
Big Davey was a man of excess. His weight tipped between 300 and 400. He guzzled up to 14 diet sodas a day. He had an excess of ideas as well. Maybe the Condor could be his shot at the big time. He knew newspapers, and he knew what would work. He offered to help Mattioli and Del Prete with promotion, call up some reporters, get some ink. They hired him in March ’64, at 80 bucks a month.
By this point, Doda had been dancing on top of the baby grand piano, wiggling along with the bands. But things were moving fast on the strip. The crowds were coming, and to keep packing ’em in, you had to constantly one-up the competition. One day, Rosenberg said to the owners, Hey, how about this? What if the piano descended from the ceiling, with Carol dancing on top of it? And when she finished, the piano rises back up? Nobody else is doing it. People will go nuts.
Why not? That damn piano weighed a ton, but Mattioli and Del Prete found a guy who could remove the heavy parts and lighten the load. Another guy installed some wires and a motor. Somebody cut a hole in the ceiling to connect the dressing room upstairs. Building codes? Yeah, we’ll deal with that later.
When it was finished in early June of ’64, Rosenberg promoted the hell out of the new gimmick. That first night, the band kicked into a tune, and the piano came down from the ceiling with Doda gyrating away on top of it. The crowd ate it up. Rosenberg smiled. There’s gotta be more.
On June 17, 1964, Rosenberg opened the morning paper and spotted the headline: “ Topless Swimsuit Makes Debut in San Francisco.”
Something called a monokini, designed by a European guy named Rudi Gernreich. The tiny suit had just hit town days before, and it was selling fast. Rosenberg came into the Condor and showed the headline to his bosses, who were sitting at the bar. That night, when Doda arrived for work, they showed her the news story.
Benita Mattioli, Pete’s wife, described the scene in her book Three Nights at the Condor:
“Wow, do you think I should wear that?” she asked.
“Yes, you gotta do it!” exclaimed Davey. “You’re a natural.”
Carol stared at the photo of the model wearing the suit.
“Carol,” said Gino. “You gotta do this!”
Carol smiled at the guys, thought for a minute, and then answered, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
Did it happen just like that? Who knows. But what is known is that Rosenberg went to Union Square, strode into the Joseph Magnin department store, shelled out $25, and walked out with the Gernreich thingy.
June 19, 1964. Rosenberg called his growing list of contacts, including Jim Lange at KSFO radio, a popular DJ who would soon also host a new TV show called The Dating Game.
Debut of the topless swimsuit, starring Miss Carol Doda, tonight at the Condor! You’d be a fool to miss this.
The Condor filled up early that night, with lines forming down the block. Nearby clubs were emptying out; people had heard the buzz and wanted to see what was going on. Inside the Condor, a frenzy of mostly men, elbowing up to the crowded bar.
The band started up, the piano descended, Doda removed a bit of clothing, and there it was. The topless swimsuit! And her breasts! The audience screamed and cheered. Rosenberg sat with his bosses at the bar, and they clinked glasses. North Beach would never be the same.
Within a week, the Off Broadway unveiled its own topless dancer, Dee Dee, the “champagne” dancer. Other clubs followed. El Cid. Big Al’s. Pierre’s. America overdoes everything, and Broadway was no exception. Herb Caen wrote in the Chronicle that “North Beach is fast becoming Mammary Lane,” unleashing a stream of bad puns that would continue for years.
With all of the sudden competition, Doda’s 34B breast size wasn’t quite measuring up to the other girls’. She decided to get silicone injections.
According to some, that was Rosenberg’s big idea, too.
With Doda’s bust size now straining at 44 inches, thanks to the needle of a doctor named Vincent Spano, Rosenberg wasted no time in revising the Condor promotion. “Carol Doda’s Twin 44s,” he called them. “The New Twin Peaks of San Francisco.”
Doda’s growing fame reached across the country. Tom Wolfe came to California on assignment and wrote a breathless report about her. His description of her body was pure New Journalism word-salad: “Two incredible mammiform protrusions, no mere pliable mass of feminine tissues and fats there but living arterial sculpture—viscera spigot—great blown-up aureate morning glories.” People don’t write like that anymore for a reason.
Warnings of a police raid circulated in April 1965. Rosenberg found a copy of the notice from SFPD and posted it outside the Condor to drum up business. Officers raided Broadway, arresting dancers and club owners, all of whom paid bail and were released. As the “Titty Trials” ensued, Rosenberg kept the press fueled with ideas, and the headlines clearly favored the clubs: “Topless—Back to the Old Grind.”
The following year, Rosenberg learned that North Beach dancer Yvonne d’Angers, a.k.a. the Persian Lamb, was in trouble. Facing deportation charges, she was about to be expelled to Iran. She worked primarily at the Off Broadway, one of Rosenberg’s clients.
His suggestion was not to go to an embassy or pursue diplomatic channels. That would be sensible. Instead, he staged a protest on the Golden Gate Bridge. Surrounded by reporters, Rosenberg wrapped chains around d’Angers, locked her to the bridge, and clicked the padlock. D’Angers punctuated the moment by tossing the key into the Bay. There didn’t seem to be any point to the stunt, but it worked. The press showed up. The deportation order disappeared, and d’Angers continued her career, posing for Playboy (and Diane Arbus) and touring nationwide.
“He was kind of sleazy,” remembers Nolte. “He was the kind of a guy who gives press agents a bad name.”
Like any publicist, Rosenberg served at the whims of his clients, but he also had to serve the media. “He had an in with Herb Caen,” recalls Pete Mattioli. “Herb Caen, whenever he needed pot, he used to come to Davey and me!”
“I love the thing about Herb Caen as a pothead,” says Doda codirector Parker. “I definitely wanted to include that [in our film]. That a guy as famous as Herb Caen, to find out now that he was smoking a lot of pot, is pretty funny. Herb would tell Davey to get him some pot, and Davey would tell Pete, and it sounded like Pete was the guy who got the pot.”
Not so fast, says longtime San Francisco publicist Lee Houskeeper, who knew Caen. “I tend to doubt it. I would take that with a grain of salt.”
With all of the buzz Rosenberg was generating, the Condor started seeing a stream of celebrities, curious to check out Doda, “the Susan B. Anthony of Stripping.” On any given night, the audience might include Liberace, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Clint Eastwood. Steve McQueen would stop by, so would Jack Palance and Sal Mineo. North Beach artist-plagiarist Walter Keane was a regular. (One of his waifs can be seen looking down at Doda with huge limpid eyes in a well-circulated press photo.) Stars kept coming: the Righteous Brothers. Andy Warhol. Trini Lopez. Lew Alcindor, a.k.a. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And the most trusted man in America.
“Walter Cronkite used to call me up, ‘Save me a seat,’ says Mattioli with a laugh. “There was a certain little seat that was secluded. And I’d say, ‘You got it, Walter.’ ”
In the decades before social media, when influencers could reach millions with a few swipes, a press agent proved a vital, oily cog in a city’s economic engine. It’s a thankless grind. But a necessary one to do business, especially back when reporters served as gatekeepers and tastemakers of the masses. The best ones practice the black art of the suck-up. In the words of Tony Curtis’s character Sidney Falco, from Sweet Smell of Success (1957): “A press agent eats a columnist’s dirt and is expected to call it manna.”
Rosenberg was a beast of instinct. He didn’t study the craft of publicity. He didn’t analyze spreadsheets. He threw spaghetti against the wall and saw what stuck. It was shoe leather and phone calls and cheap stunts and cocktails and weed and probably a few girls, and a lot of half-assed press releases. He billed himself as “the world’s greatest press agent.” In a shameless field, Big Davey was more shameless than most.
Rosenberg was a frequent source for Chronicle columnist John L. Wasserman, whose assistant, Joel Selvin, witnessed the publicity agent’s communications firsthand: “He sent out these illiterate press releases. Badly typed, misspelled words, bad margins. They were like an eighth grader’s press release. That led John, in one of his year-end columns, predictions for the new year, to write that Davey Rosenberg would misspell the word cat.”
Rosenberg didn’t care if reporters laughed at him. They called him the Father of Topless, but he preferred the name he came up with himself: the Mayor of Broadway.
Whenever he could, he posed for photos, a giant cigar stuck in his lips. He did umpteen interviews about topless and bottomless San Francisco, wore a succession of loud shirts, hideous wide lapels, his face glistening with a sheen of sweat. Screw those people who called him fat. And there were many who did, both in print and to his face. Corpulent. Obese. Gluttonous. “A belly closely followed by a man.” He was described as wolfing down lunch at Enrico’s, wearing wrinkled pants and a windbreaker. Eating a gallon of ice cream at a single sitting. He knew he was fat. He leaned into the character. Some insults he would repeat proudly as his own.
This was a different era, before health-obsessed California made thinness a shrill responsibility to Planet Earth. Hotels didn’t have gyms; they had bars, dining rooms with chefs carving meat off Flintstones-size bones. Portions were huge. People were too, eating and drinking like they had tapeworms. Tourist brochures featured photos of tables straining with “ethnic cuisine” in Chinatown restaurants. If Rosenberg ate too much and didn’t exercise, so fucking what? Nobody else did either.
“Everyone referred to him as Fat Davey,” says Doda codirector McKenzie. “That’s how people talked at the time. I always try to think about people’s emotional journeys. What was it like to be his size? Imagine what that would feel like, having your body mocked all the time. You’d have to mock yourself to be able to handle it.”
One of Rosenberg’s main targets was the San Francisco Chronicle. The largest newspaper in the city, flush with ads and buzzing with writers on deadline who needed material. He slipped items to Caen, Stanton Delaplane, Merla Zellerbach, Wasserman, and dozens more. At one point in the late ’60s, he figured it was time to thank them.
“Davey was a pal of John Wasserman,” remembers Carl Nolte. “We used to have office Christmas parties at the Chronicle, kind of cheesy. One day Wasserman and Davey brought in some topless dancers to the Christmas party. These topless babes were dancing on the copy desk. That was the height of sleaze. We were on deadline, the women in the office were furious as hell. They were outraged. The rest of us thought it was funny. Davey cooked that up. The family that owned the paper loved Wasserman, so they could get away with it.”
“OK, not quite right,” says Selvin, now an author and music critic. “It was the day after the ’69 strike. Davey sent a topless dancer, a cake, and a Saint Bernard with a barrel of booze around his neck.” Selvin produces a photo as proof. On the cake is scrawled, “Welcome back to the Chronicle from The Condor,” with a topless woman made of icing.
Whichever story is true, it was a memorable way for a press agent to extend a thank-you.
In December 1969, the Chronicle took the bait on another Rosenberg stunt. The headline read “Christmas Bust,” accompanied by a photo of a topless woman with “Merry” and “Xmas” scrawled across her chest. Rosenberg had placed Miss Lola Raquel at the corner of Montgomery and Bush Streets, sitting on the hood of a car parked in front of the EF Hutton brokerage firm, offering candy canes and free kisses to passersby.
The Chronicle casually noted that the stunt created “one of the year’s worst traffic and pedestrian jams.” Raquel and Rosenberg were arrested by vice cops, and each posted $65 bail. What must have caught the eye of Condor owners Mattioli and Del Prete was this line: “Taken into custody with her was the ubiquitous Davey Rosenberg, press agent for and co-owner of The Condor, a Columbus avenue night spot.”
Wait a minute: Fat Davey, a co-owner of the Condor?
“We owned the club!” says Mattioli, 55 years later. “Davey always complained that we made all the money. He thought he should be making more, like a partner.”
By 1970, Davey had been promoting dancers and clubs for six years. But other neighborhoods were making headlines: Haight-Ashbury, People’s Park, Altamont, the Fillmore. The inversion layer of weed, social consciousness, and the Vietnam War had landed upon the Bay Area. Paying a cover charge to see some nudity was pointless when naked hippies were twirling to Jerry Garcia in Golden Gate Park.
But Rosenberg and Doda were not done with each other yet. The stunts continued. In 1972, Rosenberg arranged for Doda and about a dozen other dancers to dip their breasts in wet cement in front of the Condor. More photos. In the mid-’70s, he booked Doda to be the on-camera spokesperson for San Jose’s Channel 36 KGSC TV station, cooing the slogan, “You’re watching the Perfect 36.” In 1974, as the world was briefly gripped by the trend of streaking, Rosenberg unleashed a topless Doda, frolicking around Marina Green, chased by leering photographers. The scene plays out in the Doda documentary like a grand salacious elegy. A final puppet dance between the performer and the press, with the agent pulling the strings. How many more times were people going to buy this?
Rosenberg was often included in the press coverage, enough for the city’s biggest paper to call him “ubiquitous.” But toplessness wouldn’t last forever. The Mayor of Broadway needed something new to throw his weight behind. People knew his name. He had the Rolodex. Why waste great gimmicks on other people? Why not himself?
In 1970, Rosenberg learned that Helen Gurley Brown, celebrity editor of Cosmopolitan, was on a nationwide hunt for the perfect man to be the magazine’s first male nude centerfold. He had an idea.
Rosenberg sent Brown a telegram stating that “the young generation wants big men. They are tired of skinny and anemic looking men whether they’re walking down the street or making love in bed. They are tired of looking for a needle under the bed-sheets.” Rosenberg then nominated himself to be the first centerfold.
Gay porn magazines of the day, including GAY and Vector, ran announcements of the stunt, under headlines like “Happiness Is a Nude Male Body” and “Press Agent Davey Rosenberg: A Chubby Chaser’s Delight.”
To further entice Brown, Rosenberg printed up and distributed copies of his campaign poster, a photo depicting himself fully naked, with a flower pot strategically placed in front of his genitals. He’s looking straight into the camera, the hint of a smile playing across his lips. Cute, cherubic, a chubby waiting to be chased. Here’s Rosenberg finally at the forefront, no longer the guy to the side of the photo.
The magazine’s first nude centerfold appeared two years later: Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, cigarillo dangling almost to his chest hair. Happiness might have been a nude male body, but this media moment wasn’t going to belong to Big Davey Rosenberg.
In 1974, he was photographed riding on an elephant, to promote the circus coming to San Francisco’s Cow Palace. The caption noted that “Rosenberg weighs 340 pounds and it took three circus hands and 15 minutes to mount him.” Also that year, he and North Beach restaurateur Leo Rossi (a whopping 501 pounds) took off their shoes and socks and stomped grapes in downtown San Francisco, an extraordinarily unappetizing way to promote a wine festival.
Rosenberg moonlighted as “the World’s Largest Santa Claus” at parties and charity events. He set up quirky photo shoots in San Francisco with professional wrestlers Pat Patterson and André the Giant. He appeared at the Stanford University communications class of professor William L. Rivers, who was known for his sense of humor and clearly had a soft spot for the publicist. Student Patricia Fels described one of Rosenberg’s mid-’70s class presentations for Stanford Magazine:
“There were some pretty big-name people: New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal, movie industry leader Jack Valenti, even advice columnist Abigail Van Buren. But none of them could compete with Davey Rosenberg. The San Francisco promoter didn’t bring his most famous client—topless dancer Carol Doda–but he did come with ‘guests’: a transvestite [sic.] singer and a stripper. The two performed in the small communication amphitheater as students packed the aisles and doorways. I don’t remember how far the show went, although I’m sure the stripper got down to a G-string. What I do remember is Rivers standing in the corner with a sort of cracked smile on his face. At the show’s conclusion we students witnessed a real first: Bill Rivers at a complete loss for words.”
Things were changing on Broadway, too. Clubs were sold and resold. New competition emerged in other neighborhoods. Full nudity and lap dancing popped up in venues like the Market Street Cinema and other no-alcohol clubs. Tour buses were now dropping off convention delegates at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre, near the Tenderloin, to sample the notorious “Ultra Room.”
The thrill of mid-’60s nude razzle-dazzle was long gone. The monokini was but a foggy memory in the mist.
By the end of 1977, the New York Times was referring to Rosenberg as a “former publicist for some topless bars on Broadway in North Beach.” Feeling political, he ran that year for city supervisor for District 7. The Mayor of Broadway lost mightily, coming in 8th place with 88 votes.
Rosenberg joined forces with a music promoter named Pete Marino, a former Warner Brothers PR man who drove a Rolls-Royce and had 200 suits, “the opposite of Davey,” as Selvin recalls. They formed a new agency, to fire up the old contacts and hopefully revitalize their careers.
The flamboyant Marino and rumpled Rosenberg shared an office in the East Bay, where the two men attached themselves to some unsavory businesses.
“Berkeley was an open city at that point,” says Selvin. “Massage parlors were all up and down University Ave. The massage ads were in the Berkeley Barb. Davey and Marino had an office upstairs in the Xanadu Pleasure Palace, right above all the hand jobs. Davey would call me up at the Chronicle and say, ‘Hey, you oughta come over and have a tune-up.’ Both of them were creeps.”
In 1980, a new nightclub named Soap, a lunchtime male strip joint for women only, opened in the financial district. No surprise that Marino and Rosenberg were promoting. Male strippers, male waiters wearing towels and nothing else. Davey, ever the hype man, proclaimed, “Male strip tease shows may replace female strip teasers!” The Oakland Post grabbed this low-hanging fruit:
“Lovely in a tight-fitting black gown, mistress of ceremonies Ruby Peterson makes a few wise cracks, sings and puts over seductive dances with finesse. Then she dances with one of the boys and they both get a big hand and cheers from the 300 gal customers. Five dancers from the Pacific Ballet appear on stage and dance as a unit and close the skit with only the bikini on. The gals shriek and yell for more.”
And with that, the curtain closed and reopened on the final act of the Mayor of Broadway.
As the 1980s began, the Condor churned on without him. It was featured, along with other Broadway clubs, in the 1982 music video for Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” the theme from Rocky III. And the following year saw the club’s final brush with infamy. Jimmy “the Beard” Ferrozzo, a longtime Condor employee, was discovered early one morning on top of Theresa Hill, who were both atop the Condor’s world-famous piano. Ferrozzo was dead; Hill, shaken, very much alive. Rosenberg, the man who thought to raise that piano in the first place, the man who helped make the Condor a worldwide destination, was not mentioned in any of the press coverage.
Topless, stripping, nightclubs—it wears you out eventually. Doda walked away from the Condor in 1985. Rosenberg was already out, back behind the counter at his dad’s newsstand on Geary Street, selling magazines and gum. He would flick through the daily papers. The columnists he once hounded, the favors he would procure. Was it all a long feverish dream? Topless was the only game that had ever worked for Big Davey. He rode the wave until it crashed, washing him up alone on the beach.
In September 1986, while riding in the back of a taxi, Rosenberg felt short of breath. The overworked Rosenberg valve, the same heart inherited from his old man. He must’ve known it would come for him, and here it was. The pains gripped his chest. The cab headed for Lower Nob Hill and dropped him at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. Big Davey Rosenberg, the Mayor of Broadway, the King of Topless, one of the last of a dying breed of midcentury press agents, quoted in Playboy, Life, and the New York Times, was gone.
Thousands of bare breasts and dancing girls, the cigars and sodas and ice cream, the international newspaper clippings, the elephant, the stunts and gags, the massages in Berkeley, the gay rags that kept his name in print, all of it lay on a gurney, all 400 pounds of it. There would be no parade, no Appreciation Day certificate from city hall. Davey Rosenberg, the world’s greatest press agent, no longer mattered. He was 49. And his dad buried him.
Out of all the clubs he represented in North Beach, almost all are shuttered or have been turned into other retail spots, hoping for another neighborhood revival. Some of the Broadway signs still blink as a museum of neon nostalgia. But only the Garden of Eden and the Condor remain topless.
In 2022, the Condor was officially added to San Francisco’s Legacy Business Registry. Inside the club, below the piano bolted to the ceiling, on the walls of memorabilia, two photos of Rosenberg might catch someone’s eye, if they were looking hard enough for them. One shows a reclining giant of a man in a chair, presenting a massive stomach and neck, the Seraph of Sleaze in repose. There’s also a group shot of topless club owners, celebrating a victory in court. Happy, toothy paisanos in suits and ties, waving and giving thumbs-up to the camera. Behind them, their bagman and PR flack for hire, the Mayor of Broadway, flipping the bird.
Doda died in 2015, soon to be enshrined as a legend of rascally San Francisco, with Rosenberg a mere footnote. Was this guy really the father of topless dancing? Maybe. Did he really dream up the descending piano, suggest the monokini, and the silicone shots? Sure, why not. Nobody really cares at this point. Press agents are largely extinct. But you have to give Rosenberg this: for a brief time, the entire world was talking about Carol Doda and the Condor because of a big man with big ideas and an even bigger mouth.•
Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is streaming now.
Jack Boulware runs the newsletter What Jack Boulware Fails to Realize. He was a cofounder and an executive director of San Francisco’s Litquake literary festival. He’s currently working on a novel based on his experiences as a travel journalist. He lives in West Marin.
