camp Potrero

I went to this design-school-graduate party on Saturday with my roommate - her industrial designer boyfriend just graduated and threw a rager at his Potrero Hill pad complete with keg and backyard campfire. That neighborhood is so crazy they can get away with a backyard campfire in the middle of the city. They called this “End of the Year Explosion at the Shack” on the pink 2x4 flyers that were distributed a month in advance. You have to love designers for the extra attention they put into everything.
First highlight of the evening was when we didn’t know where we were going on the bus and accidentally got off at the projects. We couldn’t quite tell – it looked like a yuppier version of the neighborhoods in the Presidio.
“Um, are these former military buildings or are these the projects?”
A passing SUV answered our question when he slowed down and yelled something to us about wanting to “hit that.” What a crazy neighborhood.
We walked for 20 more minutes and got to the party just as everyone was rolling in by carfulls.
Things got crazy, and next thing I knew my scalp had been sprayed neon green and I had absorbed that yummy campfire smell so thick it would take 2 showers to clean up.
This guy from the design firm IDEO who rides the Caltrain with me was there – I tried talking to him – “You ride the Caltrain?” but he wasn’t up to relating on our mutual commute. I guess the divide between the bike car scene and the other cars is bigger than I thought.
There were a few people there who weren’t designers or former designers. It took a couple of hours before I figured out the connection - they were freemasons who were friends with the designers. Freemasons? Yikes, I thought, being an immigrant raised in a middle class California suburb and taught to be vaguely skeptical of anything too VIP or exclusively prepschool.
Now as far as the Berkeley graduate student who had gone to UPenn, this was only to be expected from a former Ivy-leaguer, but designers from California? I was just surprised.
I knew my roommate had said something about wanting to join the women’s group related to the Masons, and I never really got into it with her why she was interested – she said she’s excited about the potential of the group to be politically or philanthropically active and stop being just a bingo club. It did sound kind of cool, but the nature of the actual social events-in-robe remain enshrouded in an eerie mystery.
As for the Berkeley graduate student – he gave me his phone number telling me to call, and then pulled a disappearing act. Was this a kind of freemason code-test? Evasion of awkwardness? Or did he just have to leave in a hurry?