Culture Groups San Francisco

Discover SF - Haight Ashbury Street Fair & Comedy Day

The Haight Ashbury Street Fair is at its 47th year, 6 blocks, 3 stages, on Sun Sep 20th. The Haight is a neighborhood of rich histories. It is where the Summer of Love happened in 1967. Also Grateful Dead, Hippies, counter culture etc.. The Victorians are still there, and so are the record stores, the vintage shops, the head shops and the murals. It's a genuinely great six blocks to walk, and most people who walk it have no idea what they're looking at. **Our day:** coffee at 11:30, an easy walk up into Buena Vista Park for the view, then down through the fair with a few stops where we tell you what actually happened on each corner. At 2:15 we walk out the far end into Golden Gate Park for **Comedy Day** — a completely separate free festival that happens to land on the same Sunday, five minutes away, in its 45th year, with 50-plus comedians. Blanket on the grass for the afternoon, then dinner in the Inner Sunset for whoever's hungry. Two unrelated free festivals, one Sunday, five minutes apart. That's the whole reason we picked this date. ## What we'll stop at **Buena Vista Park.** The city's oldest park, 1867, and a real forest in the middle of San Francisco. The crest is where they lit the fire, and it's one of the best views in town. One more thing nobody tells you: when the city moved its cemeteries out in the 1930s, WPA crews lined the park's drainage gutters with leftover marble headstones. They're still there — you can read names and dates off the stones under your feet. **710 Ashbury.** The Grateful Dead's house from 1966, raided October 2, 1967, everyone arrested, front page news. Private home now, so sidewalk only and keep it down. **635 Ashbury** half a block up is where Janis Joplin lived. **The Psychedelic Shop on Haight.** The Thelin brothers opened it in January 1966, before there was a scene to sell to. It's where the funeral was organized, and where Ron gave away every last thing on the shelves the day it happened. **Haight & Clayton — the Free Clinic.** Opened at 558 Clayton in June 1967 on a single argument: health care is a right, not a privilege. Thousands of kids had arrived with no money and no doctor, so somebody built them one. The free clinic model spread across the country from this corner. Of everything the sixties made here, this is the piece that lasted — not a sound, not a look. An institution. **The Panhandle**, one block north the whole way, where the funeral ended. Free concerts on a flatbed — the Dead, Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, playing for nothing. The Diggers handed out free food here every afternoon, on the theory that if you can just give things away, you should. **Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight.** In a converted bowling alley since 1997, still one of the largest record stores anywhere. Not a plaque, not a museum — somebody's actual job. **And the fair itself,** which started in 1978 with Supervisor Harvey Milk's backing. That's a full decade after everything above, when the Haight had been through hard years and people were trying to bring it back. Worth knowing while you're standing in it. What's under your feet isn't the Summer of Love — it's the people who stayed after. *** ## The day **11:30 — Coffee To The People, 1206 Masonic Ave.** Right at the fair's east gate. Couches, bookshelves, been there forever. Say hi, get a coffee, meet a few people before we move. **12:00 — Up into Buena Vista Park.** A gentle climb through the trees to the crest. Introductions happen here. **12:45 — Down Haight Street** through the fair, stopping at the places above. Six blocks, no rush, nobody marching. **2:00 — Out at Stanyan.** **2:15 — Hippie Hill and Robin Williams Meadow.** Five minutes into Golden Gate Park. The slope above the meadow is Hippie Hill, where the drum circle has been going more or less continuously since 1967 and will be going on Sunday. We set up at the bottom of it for **Comedy Day** — a separate festival with its own organizers, in its 45th year, 50-plus comedians, noon to 5pm, also free. Blanket down, and that's where we are for three hours. **5:00 — Comedy ends.** **5:30 — Optional Dinner in the Inner Sunset.** Fifteen minutes through the park to 9th & Irving, which is nothing but places to eat. We'll pick on the day and split across a couple of tables. Come if you're hungry, peel off if you're done. No reservation, nobody counting. **Join [TownFlame](http://www.townflame.org/), Make Life Happen.** **Liability Waiver:** Participation in TownFlame events is voluntary and involves social interaction in public spaces. Activities are designed to be inclusive and respectful. Participants assume all risks and release TownFlame, its organizers, volunteers, and affiliates from liability for injury, illness, or damages, except in cases of gross negligence or intentional misconduct. By attending, participants acknowledge that photographs, audio, and video recordings may be taken during events, and grant TownFlame the right to use such media for promotional and marketing purposes, in any format or platform, without further consent or compensation.

Discover SF -- Italian Heritage Festival & Parade

Place holder, register if interested. The Parade begins at 12:30 pm at the foot of Jefferson and Powell Streets in Fisherman’s Wharf, proceeds south through North Beach on Columbus Avenue and ends in Washington Square in front of Saints Peter and Paul Church. Parade viewing is available throughout the entire route.

The Lives We Almost Lived: A Poetry Gathering on Choice, Chance, and Possibility

Every life contains other lives. The city we almost moved to. The work we once imagined doing. The place we never expected to call home. The friendship that began by accident. The door we opened without knowing where it would lead. Some possibilities disappear quietly. Others arrive without invitation and change the course of everything. A chance conversation. A missed train. An unexpected yes. A sudden departure. Someone entering our lives at precisely the right moment. Our lives are shaped not only by the choices we make, but by chance. By timing. By circumstance. By the paths we choose and those that close before us. By encounters we could never have planned. Years later, we sometimes look back and wonder how differently everything might have unfolded. Perhaps every life is accompanied by other possible lives. Selves we once imagined. Paths we chose and paths we left behind. Possibilities we lost—and possibilities we never knew to hope for. **The Lives We Almost Lived** is **a gathering devoted to choice, chance, possibility, and the roads not taken.** Together, we will explore the curious relationship between the life we once imagined, the lives that might have been, and the surprising life that somehow became our own. Across traditions, poets and writers have wondered about these turns of fate and possibility. C.P. Cavafy wrote of journeys and the lives formed along the way. Fernando Pessoa inhabited multiple selves and imagined identities. Elizabeth Bishop found entire histories inside departures and distant places. Wisława Szymborska returned again and again to chance—the astonishing accidents through which one life becomes ours rather than another. Agha Shahid Ali wrote across memory, migration, exile, and return. This gathering asks: **How have unexpected choices and chance encounters shaped the lives we are living?** **What possibilities opened when other paths did not unfold as we imagined?** **What parts of our earlier dreams and imagined selves still travel with us?** **How might the roads not taken help us see the road we are on differently?** We will read poems about choices and coincidences, missed encounters and unexpected arrivals, abandoned dreams and surprising beginnings, alternate selves, migration, love, friendship, and the mysterious turns through which a life acquires its shape. You are welcome to bring: * A poem about a choice, chance encounter, or turning point. * A piece about a road taken—or not taken. * A poem about a place you almost called home or someone who might have changed your life. * A piece about an abandoned dream, an earlier self, or a future once imagined. * An original work about the person you might have become. We invite poetry from all languages and traditions. Together, we will read, translate, reflect, and listen—allowing different possibilities and different lives to meet in the same room. As always with Kaavya Connections, the gathering may wander beyond the theme. We follow where the poems, memories, and conversations lead. Join us for an afternoon not about regret, but about possibility—the choices and accidents that shape us, the paths that disappeared behind us, and the mysterious life that somehow became our own. Bring a friend, a poem, an unlived possibility—or simply come to listen. **Above all, bring the roads you have traveled and the ones you still sometimes wonder about.** Please find more about us here — Kaavya Connections Website: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) Please also join the mailing list for upcoming gatherings and events: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) If you would like to volunteer to help organize future gatherings and performances, please email: [contact@kaavyaconnections.com](mailto:contact@kaavyaconnections.com) **Kaavya Connections**

Mini-Meetup: An Exotic Lunch at Middle East Cafe in Berkeley

Round Table Book Discussion September Meeting

Join us for an in-person, open discussion on the fiction or non-fiction book or podcast/movie/news article/cultural event that most engaged you. Give a brief summary of a book or article that interested you, and we will discuss it, along with the issues other participants select. Or just come to check it out. Find us by the Roundtable sign on the table. Thursday, September 17, 2026 at 6:30 pm **We are at our warm-weather outdoor location:** ### Caffe Strada 2300 College Avenue · Berkeley, CA

The Geography Within Us: A Poetry Gathering on Place, Memory, and Belonging

Perhaps home is not simply the place we come from. Perhaps it is a language in which our name sounds different. A kitchen where someone knows what we like to eat. A city whose streets our feet remember. A landscape whose seasons still live somewhere in the body. A person beside whom we do not have to explain ourselves. A song that returns us somewhere. Or a place where we arrived as strangers and, slowly, unexpectedly, learned to belong. We carry many geographies within us. The place where we were born. The neighborhood where we grew up. The cities we chose and the ones circumstance chose for us. The landscapes we left behind. The languages through which we learned to understand the world. The people who made unfamiliar places feel like home. Over time, these places become more than locations on a map. They enter our memories, our gestures, our food, our music, our language, even the ways we understand distance and belonging. Sometimes we leave a place and discover that it never entirely leaves us. And sometimes a place we never imagined belonging to becomes part of who we are. **The Geography Within Us** is **a gathering devoted to place, memory, and belonging, and to the many landscapes, languages, people, and journeys that quietly become part of our inner lives**. Together, we will explore not simply where we come from, but the more mysterious question of **what places have become part of who we are.** Across traditions, poets have carried entire worlds within their poems. Mahmoud Darwish carried Palestine through memory and language. Agha Shahid Ali recreated Kashmir across distance and longing. Derek Walcott explored the ways landscape, history, and identity become inseparable. Naomi Shihab Nye finds belonging in family, language, ordinary encounters, and the crossings between cultures. Joy Harjo writes of land, ancestry, memory, and our deep relationship with place. Their poems remind us that geography is not only something outside us. It can also become something we carry within. This gathering asks: **What places have become part of who we are?** **How do landscapes, languages, cities, and communities continue to live within us long after we leave them?** **And how do the places we discover unexpectedly change our understanding of where we belong?** We will read poems about childhood streets and adopted cities, familiar landscapes and distant homelands, kitchens and train stations, migration and arrival, language and memory, journeys and returns, and the unexpected places where belonging finds us. You are welcome to bring: * A poem about a place that has shaped you. * A piece connected to a city, landscape, language, neighborhood, or community you carry within you. * A poem about leaving somewhere, arriving somewhere, or unexpectedly finding a sense of belonging. * A song, photograph, recipe, memory, or passage that transports you to another place. * An original work about a geography, real or imagined, that has become part of who you are. We invite poetry from all languages and traditions. Together, we will read, translate, reflect, and listen, allowing the different geographies we carry to meet in the same room. As always with Kaavya Connections, the gathering may wander beyond the theme. We follow where the poems, memories, and conversations lead. Join us for an afternoon exploring the places that made us, the places that changed us, the places that surprised us, and the places that continue to live quietly within us. Bring a friend, a poem, a place, or simply come to listen. **Above all, bring the worlds you carry within you.** Please find more about us here — Kaavya Connections Website: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) Please also join the mailing list for upcoming gatherings and events: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) If you would like to volunteer to help organize future gatherings and performances, please email: [contact@kaavyaconnections.com](mailto:contact@kaavyaconnections.com) **Kaavya Connections**

BTS K-Pop Workshop in San Mateo!

**BTS Fans, this one is for YOU!** Join us for a Special **BTS K-Pop All Levels Workshop with Chloe** and get ready to dance to choreography inspired by some of their most popular hits! In this 2-hour workshop, you’ll learn fun, powerful moves, performance energy, and K-Pop stage attitude in a welcoming, beginner-friendly environment. Whether you’re part of the ARMY, a K-Pop fan, a dance lover, or just looking for something exciting to try, this workshop is for you! \*No experience needed — all levels welcome! Open to **teens ages 12+** and **adults 18+** who want to dance, perform, and have a blast. **When: Saturday September 19th, 2026** **Time: 2:00pm – 4:00pm** **Price per person:** **$55 Early Bird (until Sept 11th)** **$65 General Admission** Spots are limited —[ ](https://motionartscenter.com/kpop-workshop/)**[Sign Up Online Here](https://motionartscenter.com/kpop-workshop/) to save your place in class!** Registration required. No walk-ins. ✨ **Feeling inspired? Come dressed in your favorite BTS-inspired outfit or best K-Pop style for extra fun and photo ops!** 📍 **Location:** Motion Arts Center 217 S Claremont St, Downtown San Mateo, CA **Workshop Level:** This is an **all-levels workshop**, meaning no prior dance experience is necessary – just a love for K-Pop and a desire to move! Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to learn some killer moves, meet fellow K-Pop enthusiasts, and experience the joy of dance. | | | --- | |

Peña Manantial-Otoño

**The inaugural Peña Manantial will feature the group Manantial featuring the music heard on the album Manantial-Muchas Aguas** **https://open.spotify.com/album/6K1h8eP51nivNYbi1LCu90?si=JDF4oKFATmmwckcDYDERBg&utm_source=copy-link** **Musicians and poets, as well as visual artists are encouraged to be ready to share during tweener sets, in between the sets of the entertainment for the evening**

Adult Game Night- Survey Says and more (Online Game Night)

**\*TO ATTEND GET TICKET AT - [https://www.socialevents123.com/event-details.aspx?id=13723#tix](https://www.socialevents123.com/event-details.aspx?id=13723#tix)** (Multiple Meetup groups are co-organizing so the RSVP's shown are just a very small portion attending. ) This is the ADULT version of our very popular Survey Says game. There is nothing X-rated, but some of the questions would be considered R-rated or involve adult themes. HOW IT WORKS: This completely online event will be LIVE and you will be able to see and hear the other participants while playing. In addition you will get to meet and interact with other participants. At game time, your host will read off several survey questions on a variety of topics. Your goal is to come up with the number one answer to each question and write it down on your paper. Once the round is over (about 6 questions), we will go through the answers and determine who had the highest score for the round. The winners will get a raffle ticket for a chance to win a prize at the end of the event. Prizes will be an Amazon Gift card! HOW DO YOU FIND THE ONLINE EVENT ROOM: Zoom link will be emailed to you DAY OF THE EVENT. RSVPS on here are NOT reflective of actual attendance as this is a multi group event. Prepay required at **[https://www.socialevents123.com/event-details.aspx?id=13723#tix](https://www.socialevents123.com/event-details.aspx?id=13723#tix)**

Bollywood Nights - Salesforce Park - Free

**Bollywood Nights at Salesforce Park 🎉** Join Rang De Bollywood for some high-energy, outdoor, bollywood fun! This event is sure to leave you feeling loved, lighter, and delighted in excitement after every session. 🌈 Open to all ages, all levels, all backgrounds. ✨ Come casual or dressed, no pressure! 🎁 Free to attend – just bring your joy, your people, and your dancing feet! 🚶🏼‍♂️‍➡️Register for free so we can prepare at rang.eventbrite.com 🕔 5:30 – 7:00 PM – we’ll start with a beginner friendly dance lesson, followed by an open dance party! 💫 This is a repeating event, happening every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month, May through October and you can register for as many dates as you like. Register now: [rang.eventbrite.com](http://rang.eventbrite.com) **About Rang De Bollywood** Hailing from the dream dance city of Mumbai and Amritsar, which is also home to Bollywood and Holy Vibes, our energetic, charismatic, and fun dance instructors-performers-entertainers, Manpreet (Certified in Indian Folk by India's Best and also an author) and Amit (percussionist, actor, dancer), have spread Indian dance music and moves across the length and breadth of India, USA, and Europe. Their recent performances were at National Center of Performing Arts in Mumbai and Herbst Theater in San Francisco. **Important Notes:** * Enter through transit center building and take the elevator to rooftop. We will be close to the elevator. * No solicitors allowed. * Classes might be video taped for marketing purposes. * All choreographies are Copyrighted and Original Works of Manpreet Komal/Rang De Bollywood. *"I recently had the pleasure of attending Manpreet’s Bollywood dance class, and I must say, it was an absolute blast! Whether you're a complete beginner or an experienced dancer, this class caters to everyone's skill level. The highlight of the class was undoubtedly her teaching style. With a knack for breaking down complex steps into manageable chunks, even the most intricate routines felt attainable. The pacing was just right, ensuring that beginners didn't feel overwhelmed while keeping experts engaged. Highly recommend!" — Kavneet Bindra* **We can't wait to dance together, see you soon!**

French Film ‘On Call’ at BAMPFA, Alice Diop in Person

Please join the members of Bonjour! French Conversation Group for an evening of French film. In conjunction with her residency at UC Berkeley as 2026–27 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Pajus Distinguished Visitor in French Studies, BAMPFA presents a retrospective of Alice Diop’s cinema of formal rigor and ethical commitment. The film, ‘On Call’ is one of a series of films being offered. I chose this one for our group, but all these films seem wonderful, so if you are unable to attend on this date, please check out the other dates/films. One small medical office holds an eternity of stories in Alice Diop’s fly-on-the-wall observational documentary that bears witness to a doctor’s steady stream of patients—immigrants, refugees, and undocumented immigrants—as they reveal their physical and mental suffering. “To see On Call is a therapy against the reflexes of exclusion” (Olivier Barlet, Black Camera). 1 hour, 36 min run time GET TICKETS HERE: (prices range by type $5 to $18) https://secure.bampfa.org/33283/33312 A bientôt!

Noche de Español: Cultura, Juegos Y Buena Vibra. Sept 24

Bienvenidos a Noche de Español! Un meet-up relajado y divertido donde la cultura, los juegos y la conversación en Español se combinan para crear una experiencia única.
Aquí no importa tu nivel de español, desde principiantes hasta hablantes nativos, todos son bienvenidos. Jugamos, practicamos, nos reímos y compartimos en un ambiente amigable, mientras descubrimos nuevas formas de conectar con la lengua y la cultura hispana. para que nos encuentres fácilmente busca la mesa con los globos a rojos 🎈 🎈