I realize that using the words “zany” and “San Francisco” in the same sentence may seem as if I am being redundant and repeating myself, also, too, as well. The City is a rather crazy place, which makes it my kind of town.

We often book our airline flights and hotels on Travelocity. Last summer we were planning a family trip to San Francisco to visit my son. We discovered that sometimes you have to make a quick decision. If you snooze, you lose.

We were looking for a hotel in the Union Square area of San Francisco. Though we didn’t want it to be too pricey, we didn’t want a sleaze bag hotel where we would get bedbugs. Bedbugs were in the news last summer—and had been reported in hotels in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and the like. Though there was no guarantee that we wouldn’t find the critters in an upscale hotel, we thought we may as well find a place we could enjoy while being bitten.

The first hotel we investigated had no rooms available for the time we would be there. Neither did the second. We found a hotel we thought would be just right. It seemed in our price range, and it had a few rooms available. Because we were booking two rooms we needed to discuss whether we would choose the least expensive rooms or the moderately priced ones. We talked about it and went back on line to book the rooms. In the fifteen minutes we had been talking, the rooms had gotten booked!

Since we already had non-refundable airline tickets, we needed to do something about rooms in a hurry. I started scanning through the list on-line and found a place called the Hotel Triton. It was billed as a “boutique hotel.” One look at this picture of the lobby, and I was sold.

Well, in truth what really sold me was that the website said there was complimentary wine in the lobby during the evening and a tarot card reader on the premises. I booked our rooms immediately.

The Triton is on the corner of Grant St. and Bush St., directly across from the Chinatown Gate, and it’s location makes it easily accessible to many of the different areas of the city which we enjoy. It’s a very zany hotel throughout, because it was designed by artists. The rooms have every amenity you can imagine, including wireless internet and, though they are not inexpensive, they are well worth the price.

If you like, you can stay in a room designed by the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Or you can stay in the “Black Magic” Bedroom that is an homage to Carlos Santana. Since our visit, there is a new bedroom called “Kathy Griffin’s D-List” which promises that it “combines sleek elegance and chic sensibility with a touch of sex appeal for the guest who desires life’s finer pleasures.” I have a hard time equating Kathy Griffin with sleek elegance, but you never know.

We didn’t get a celebrity suite, but were quite satisfied with our more humble rooms. This is what they looked like.

We didn’t mind “slumming” it.

If you’re going to San Francisco, the Hotel Triton is an excellent home base during your vacation. There is even a Starbucks Coffee directly across the street, if you are as addicted to caffeine as I am. But use Starbucks as your emergency fix. In that area of San Francisco, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a coffee house.

Will we be going back to the Hotel Triton? You betcha, we’d be crazy not to stay there again.

The word “storytelling” conjures an image in most people’s minds of a librarian reading a book to a group of wiggling small children, showing pictures as she reads. Or, perhaps, they remember chilling ghost stories around a campfire. Others remember Grandpa and his cronies spittin’ and chewin’ on the front porch as they gabbed on a lazy summer day. Some people think of Garrison Keillor on his Prairie Home Companion radio show. All of these are forms of storytelling. However, until you have experienced the magic of a storytelling festival, you can’t know the true allure of the art form.

From the time that humans first formed words, there have been stories. Ancient cultures used the tales as entertainment, as teaching tools, and to preserve their history.

In our technological world, we don’t tell stories as often as we did even a few decades ago. Where once people gathered around a glowing fire and talked, we now gather around a glowing television and say nothing. Couch potatoes and their little tater tots have lost the art of storytelling.

Thirty years or so ago there was a Storytelling Renaissance in the United States. From humble beginnings in Jonesborough, Tennessee, a “movement” developed. Storytelling festivals sprouted up all over the country. Some of those are gone now in the wake of the “911 disaster.” People didn’t want to travel, and the festivals went belly up.

I’m not well versed in all of the festivals that are available these days. There are a few noteworthy ones in the next few months in my neck of the woods—which is North Texas:

February 15th-17th 2007. The Winter Tales Storytelling Festival in
Oklahoma City, OK is produced by The Arts Council of Oklahoma City and is held at Stage Center downtown. In addition to excellent concerts throughout the day, this festival offers informative workshops on how to tell good stories and how to incorporate storytelling into everyday life.

March 2nd-4th, 2007. The Squatty Pines Storytelling Retreat will be held in Tyler, Texas on the shores of Lake Tyler. The East Texas Storytellers Guild hosts this one. They haven’t updated their website for this year, but we will hope they do that soon. I’ll be telling there this year, so come on down.

March 29th-April 1st, 2007. The Tejas Storytelling Association hosts the Texas Storytelling Festival in Denton. Again there is the opportunity
to take a workshop or two, as well as hear concerts throughout the day.

There was a story going around several years ago. A village in an African country was finally connected to electricity, and a large corporation donated television sets to every household in the village.

Later, a visiting anthropologist found all of the televisions stacked in a hut. He asked one of the villagers why the people weren’t using them.

The man replied, “We have a storyteller.”

The anthropologist said, “But, the television knows thousands of stories.”

The villager smiled and said, “But, the storyteller knows us.”

If you have never been to a storytelling festival, give one a try. You might be surprised to find that you get hooked on the experience.

Out flew the web and floated wide-
The mirror crack’d from side to
side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
“The Lady of Shalott” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Whew! I tripped on the enormous oval mirror that stands in our bedroom. Fortunately, I caught it just before it crashed. As big as that thing is, I know it would bring a curse of more than seven years of bad luck if it cracked.

As I sat down with a sigh of relief, I wondered about that silly superstition. Where did it originate and why? I began researching and reflecting on mirrors. I found so many superstitions about mirrors that I can’t see how people kept up with them.

When ancient people saw their reflections in pools of water, they thought it was a vision of their soul. They believed the soul leaves the body and enters the reflective surface. From this idea stem many of the superstitions that various cultures have had about mirrors.

When people were sleeping or ill, mirrors were covered to prevent their wandering souls from entering the glass and becoming trapped—thus causing their death. If a person died, the mirrors had to be covered to keep the dead person’s soul from entering the mirror instead of going on to the afterlife. Worse, the departed souls might snatch away any living person who was reflected in the mirror. In some cultures, a mirror or a jar of water was buried with the dead to keep their souls safely in the grave where they belonged.

Remember “Bloody Mary?” She might have been a queen who was beheaded, or perhaps a witch. “They” say she can be called from a mirror, though why anyone would want to do that, I can’t say. I also want to know who “they” are. The rituals differ, but kids for years have gone into a darkened room and stared into the mirror chanting “Bloody Mary” several hundred times. Supposedly, she will appear in the mirror. I never chanted long enough because I’m a chicken, so I don’t know that for a fact. Besides, the only Bloody Mary I care about has vodka tomato juice, and a stalk of celery… and chanting before a mirror has not yet caused one to appear for me!

Because a vampire has no soul, there is no reflection in the mirror. Perhaps that is because there are no vampires. Long ago, people believed that if you looked in a mirror and saw no reflection it meant that your death was just around the corner. Or, could it mean you are a vampire? Surely that is something you would already know.

Old wives’ tales rumored that a baby should not be allowed to look in a mirror until they were a year old. Doing so could variously stunt the child’s growth, result in crossed eyes, cause epilepsy, make the child stutter or result in early death. It’s bad luck for a cat to look in the mirror, though it will keep them occupied for hours. If anyone gazes into a mirror for too long, they are sure to see the Devil’s face staring back at them. And, I thought that was just me getting old!

Mirrors were believed to be gateways to another world, therefore were used to tell the future. The practice of “scrying,” or gazing in a mirror to divine information (remember the Queen in Snow White?) was common throughout the world for centuries. In Europe during Elizabethan and Jacobean times, scryers could be found at any fair or market. Supposedly, Queen Elizabeth’s court magician, John Dees, predicted the Gunpowder Plot to kill King James in 1605 just by looking in the mirror. If you believe that, I have a bridge you might be interested in purchasing.

Another superstition is that a woman could look into a mirror while eating an apple and brushing her hair to see the face of her future husband over her shoulder. I’m not making this up. Or, she could go out on night of a full moon with a mirror. She must stand on a stone on which she has never stood and look into the mirror with her back to the moon. She might see the real moon and many smaller moons. If she counted how many moons she saw in the mirror, it told her how many years until she would marry. I’m presuming a lot of brides got married in one year.

Actors and actresses supposedly believe it is bad luck to have a mirror on the stage. I’m not sure why. But, then actors and actresses have so many superstitions to remember that it’s amazing they can remember any lines.

Any couples who meet after seeing one another in a mirror are destined to be together. However, a bride who sees her reflection in full wedding regalia on her wedding day will have an unhappy marriage. Once safely married, if a bride and groom gaze at each other in the mirror they will live happily ever after.

That “seven years of bad luck” superstition may have originated with the ancient Romans. They believed that life renewed itself every seven years. Breaking a mirror was “breaking one’s health,” and it wouldn’t be renewed for seven years.

On the upside, that curse can be overcome in several ways. You can avert bad luck by grinding all the glass shards to dust so they can never reflect anything again, or wash the broken pieces in a south running river so the bad luck flows away, or bury the bits and pieces deeply on sacred ground under a full moon. Better yet, don’t break the mirror in the first place.

I’m glad I’m not superstitious. Although I would consider that it would be bad luck to believe in those tales.