Vol. XLIX, No. 5
May 2025
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THE NOE VALLEY VOICE Sisters Take the Reins at Merchants Association Their Mission? Help 24th Street Ride the Winds of Change By Matthew S. Bajko
A
sister duo with long familial and business ties to the neighborhood is now leading the Noe Valley
Merchants & Professionals Association. They have been instrumental in the growing success of the monthly night markets held at the Noe Valley Town Square and are looking at ways to boost foot traffic during the summer, when many Noe residents head out of town. Since January, when they were offi-
cially voted into their positions by members of the business group, Kristen McCaffery has been serving as the association’s president, and her sister, Kathryn Gianaras, as vice president. No strangers to local commerce, McCaffery and Gianaras for the past decade have co-owned and operated the Greek-inspired restaurant NOVY at 4000 24th Street. The site was where their parents, John and Vi Gianaras, had operated the beloved Greek restaurant Panos’ for nearly 20 years. McCaffery also owns CONTINUED ON PAGE 7
Explore Twin Redwoods on May 17 Tour
A Secret Path: Walk back in time in the garden behind the oldest house in Noe Valley, one of 10 sites on this year’s Friends of Noe Valley Garden Tour. Photo by Art Bodner
Old-Growth Trees Stand Tall Among 10 Garden Sites
professional gardeners he has worked with since moving into the Victorian house with his wife, Corky, in the fall of 1982. “Oh my God, this garden is really nice,” Linda Lockyer recalled in first seeing it earlier this year. “He has a super well established garden. It was garden ready, and it could have been on a tour that day.” Lockyer, who helps organize the annual Friends of Noe Valley Garden Tour, told the Voice that the committee of gardeners that visits prospective gardens and decides which to include each year normally waits until seeing all the submissions before taking a vote on them. Yet, after seeing Cutler’s garden, they told him that day it would be
By Matthew S. Bajko
W 2025 Milestones: Not only did sisters Kathryn Gianaras and Kristen McCaffery (right) celebrate their restaurant NOVY’s 10th anniversary, they gladly stepped forward to fill the top jobs in the Noe Valley Merchants & Professionals Association. Photo courtesy Mike Norquist
Cancer Survivor Performs Black Comedy at Fringe Noe Native Finds Humor and Art In Chemo, PTSD By Emily Hayes
M
aybe it’s her Irish blood that runs deep. Or maybe it’s a survival mechanism. For whatever reason, actor
Next Stop Scotland: A bi-coastal actor living mostly in Brooklyn, Megan Timpane is raising funds to do her new solo show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August.
Megan Timpane has a penchant for gallows humor, inspiring her to create a successful one-woman show about her run-ins with cancer, disordered eating, and severe anxiety. And now she’s set to make her debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show—dubbed Lymphomaniac—is billed as a onewoman performance about “surviving cancer, laughing through the darkness, and finding our way through life’s challenges.” It’s set to run August 13–14 at the Just the Tonic venue in Edinburgh, Scotland. Timpane has been busy fundraising to finance the trip on the online Ko-fi platform, with the goal of raising $25,000 to cover accommodations, promotions, venue, and festival fees, among other expenses. The first part of the performance is about her experience getting diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer affecting the lymphatic system, at the age of 22. She was successfully treated with chemotherapy at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and has been in remission for over 10 years. The second half is about her struggles post diagnosis with overeating and anxiety, ultimately leading to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and treatment with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). “When we're sick, you can see it on CONTINUED ON PAGE 11
alking into the back yard of Richard Cutler’s house on 23rd Street just off Church Street, a visitor can’t help but be awed by the towering redwood tree that stands in the middle of it. Estimated to be 160 years old, its trunk has a circumference of 18 feet. Just behind it is another Sequoia sempervirens in the back lefthand corner of the yard. While it too stands tall over the 2,500-square-foot garden, the more-than-a-century-old coniferous tree is nowhere near as gigantic. Nonetheless, the two specimens of Sequoia add a unique element to the garden tended by Cutler and the various
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Playing With Politics: Students at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts are doing some serious role-playing in preparation for their May 29–31 performances of Assassins. The 1990 musical may be Stephen Sondheim’s most controversial work. See story, p. 13. Photo by Megan Robertson