Painstaking Research

My friend John, the photographer, was in town for most of the month of June. This was fun because we hadn’t seen each other since the end of our trip last summer. His main rationale for coming was to take some Photoshop classes. One other goal, though, was to produce a joint-venture article or two, much like the Mission District article we sold to Malaysian Airlines’ in-flight magazine last year. We thought about doing one on markets, but neither of us found our way to very many.

This was because we were so busy researching an article on San Francisco cafes. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. As you can see from this photo, it was actually so tough that we had to recruit a friend to help us. (We didn’t ask her to wear the Mrs. Madrigal hat, but she couldn’t have been more appropriately dressed if she had bongos and a goatee.)

We ran into an old roommate of mine at a café in North Beach. (This is coincidentally the neighborhood we lived in back in the day.) I had the embarrassing task of explaining that I was not really sitting in the sun drinking coffee at 4pm on a weekday; I was actually doing research. Like I said, tough job. (I even had to eat a cannoli, because it’s the house specialty.)