Vol. XLVI, No. 11
November 2022
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THE NOE VALLEY VOICE It’s Time to Go With the Holiday Flow
Major Hurdles On the Road to Electric Cars
Sparking Our Town Square With Chi and Other Energies
Public Charging Stations Still Few and Far Between
By Kit Cameron
By Matthew S. Bajko
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he Noe Valley Town Square will be aglow with LED lights, a sparkling Christmas tree, music performances, and Flow Arts dancing on Saturday, Dec. 3. There might even be treats, along with an introductory song from a surprise Noe talent. The merriment starts at 5 p.m., and everyone is invited. Local residents Chi Energy and Leslie Crawford, the elves organizing the Town Square events for the holidays, promise an extravaganza of activities for adults and children. They have invited the Mission High School cheerleading squad to lead audience members in a countdown to the tree lighting at 5:30 p.m. Jaime’s Martial Arts students will give us a demonstration of their skills, and local a cappella group the Loosies will lead the singing of familiar carols. But the most festive moments may come when Flow Arts practitioners direct the crowd in dance movements set to holiday grooves, using LED hoops, wands, and scarves. The Town Square will be bathed in black light,
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most recent event in August attracted scores of grade school kids, who played bingo as they mastered the flowing dance moves. In the noncompetitive spirit of the sport, everyone was a winner and got a prize, he says. Energy, who often volunteers as a
or Adam Gill, one of the advantages of driving a Model 3 Tesla, which averages 310 miles per a full charge of its battery, is that California of any state in the country has the largest number of charging stations for owners of electric vehicles to use. But, as Gill lives in an apartment on Elizabeth Street in Noe Valley without access to a garage, being able to easily charge his electric vehicle near his home has always been a concern. As he first told the Voice for a story in the November 2019 issue, the city lacks adequate EV-charging infrastructure in Noe Valley and across the city. Three years later, the neighborhood continues to have just one publicly accessible charging station, located in the parking lot adjacent to the Walgreens on Castro Street. There are no immediate plans to add charging stations to the city-owned parking lot on 24th Street. And the city has yet to truly look at designating on-street parking
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Lighting Up the Night. At the Dec. 3 tree lighting in the Town Square, there will be cheerleaders, a holiday sing-along, a taekwondo demonstration, and glow-in-the-dark flow dancing led by performers like Chi Energy and Sue Laurita (shown). Photo by James Fitzgerald
and everyone is encouraged to wear UV-reactive clothes (think a bright white T-shirt or a fluorescent orange hoodie). Chi Energy, whose chosen name shows his desire to reflect “the energy inside and outside [that] holds us together,” has been bringing Flow Arts to the Town Square since 2021. His
Rasa Gustaitis: Her History Is Ever Present
day, “I would want to write a personal story about my father, who disappeared in one of Josef Stalin’s prisons in 1941. As a daughter and a writer, I felt an obligation.” That day arrived last fall. Gustaitis celebrated the publication of Flight: A Memoir of Loss and Discovery by an Aviator ’s Daughter, a 306-page book detailing not only her father ’s and her own odyssey from their home in Lithuania but also the history of their beleaguered Baltic country in the 20th and now 21st century. The book, available in Noe Valley at Folio Books, has been praised as “a treasure,” “an exceptional story of grief and resilience,” and “a delicately woven tale that’s so relevant today, as Europe again cascades through a cruel darkness.”
Author Mines a Painful Past To Tell Lithuania’s Story By Kit Cameron
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he hallway of Rasa Gustaitis’ house on Jersey Street tells you that an artist and an internationalist made this their home. A hat stand, made by Gustaitis’ late husband, sculptor/musician Mel Moss, is a repurposed headboard. A fabric portrait of Mother River Nagara, a gift from poet Nanao Sakaki, hangs over the stairs. In the home, purchased in 1973, Gustaitis and Moss raised two daughters: one, Tara, from his previous marriage, the second, Usha (“goddess of dawn” in Sanskrit), born in 1970. A study off the hall archives the books and materials Gustaitis used in her 62 years as a journalist and teacher. Her remarkable career stretched from writing for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1960s; to penning Turning On (1969), a bestseller on the Human Potential Movement; to teaching at San Francisco State and Berkeley from 1986 to 2010; to editing the significant Coast and Ocean, an environmental journal published by the California Coastal Commission. All along, Gustaitis knew that some-
A Traumatic Past
A Lithuanian Migrant: Noe Valley resident Rasa Gustaitis will appear at the Nov.. 7 Odd Mondays series at Bethany Church to talk about Flight, her book recalling her family’s sevenyear journey to the U.S. after Russians invaded their country in 1940. Photo by Beverly Tharp
Gustaitis was only 6 years old in 1940, when Russian soldiers marched into her Lithuanian town, she reveals in Flight. Her father, Brigadier General Antanas Gustaitis, who headed the Lithuanian Air Force, was arrested by the Soviet leadership and later executed. Lithuania was occupied by the Nazis throughout World War II and then again by the Russians from 1944 onward. As their homeland was torn apart, Gustaitis and her remaining family, three generations of women, embarked on a torturous journey leading CONTINUED ON PAGE 11