I spent a good portion of a Saturday riding public transit (and a cab back) to get this photo of Sunshine Biscuits factory, in Oakland, from the BART car at or near the Colisseum platform. This ritual was partly a tribute to Mary Armentrout and her site-specific dance project, about which I had written for Patch Palo Alto / AOL. I was reading “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at the time, and comparing a trip on BART to Huck and Jim on the raft. For the Patch post I had used a photo of Sunshine Biscuits found on wikipedia.

I had a longer version of this story, in my head, plus a bunch of notes scribbled on the Sports section of The Chron. I initially was going to omit mention of three interesting people I met, to put the focus on the quest or ritual itself. The three people were a defense contractor executive and baseball fan from Philadelphia, a MacDowell Fellow playwright from New York and San Francisco, who had just workshopped her project at Stanford, and a grad student and immigrant from Yemen, who used high technology to help me sight my target and get my shot without me having to leave the train (I was unplugged, and “stupid.”)

Sunshine Biscuits Factory as seen from BART train at or near Colisseum/Oakland Airport Station, July, 2011

edit to add, almost four years later: I re-read this, because the computer thought of this in reference to my article about Paly rooters taunting Gunn with Old Glory, and need to add that it was Marilee Talkington, the star or “X’s and O’s: A Football Love Story” that I met on the BART platform that day.