Abuzz In The City

• “I guess we all have a little bit of that Green Girl inside us,” said this composer/lyricist of Wicked, the Broadway musical now playing at the Orpheum Theater:
  a. Frank Baum
  b. Judy Garland
  c. Stephen Schwartz
• True or false: You can hop on a riverboat leaving the Ferry Building at 6:30 p.m. and arrive in Sacramento at 5:30 a.m.
• Along Herb Caen Way, where Broadway meets the waterfront at Pier 7, you can read one of the many inscriptions exhibited on the public promenade,  including, “San Francisco is a city where people are  never more abroad than when they are at home,” which is a quote by:
  a. Walter Cronkite
  b. Rudyard Kipling
  c. Benjamin Taylor
• This Russian president hailed San Francisco as such a beautiful city that, if he were mayor, he would levy a special tax on people desiring to reside here.
  a. Mikhail Gorbachev
  b. Nikita Krushchev
  c. Vladimir Putin
• San Francisco–born champion jockey Robyn Caroline Smith was 44 years younger than her famous actor/dancer husband:
  a. Mikhail Baryshnikov
  b. Fred Astaire
  c. Gene Kelly
• Once upon a time the Amoeba Recordsbuildingon Haight Street was the site of:
  a. The Park Bowl
  b. Joe’s Mexico City Café (since 1907)
  c. The Chutes
• This hardboiled, crime-fiction writer served as an ambulance driver in WWI—as did Ernest Hemingway. Unlike Hemingway, a city street com- memorates this foremost mystery scribe who penned The Maltese Falcon.
  a. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  b. Dashiell Hammett
  c. Agatha Christie
• With an eye on his party’s presidential candidacy,  an endearingly charismatic Barack Obama  delivered a rousing speech during the primaries at:
  a. The Commonwealth Club
  b. The World Affairs Council
  c. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
• Around Hippie Hill, a stone’s throw from the  Golden Gate Park tennis courts, the environs  abound with pushers hawking “bud,” drug-culture lingo for:
  a. opium
  b. marijuana
  c. lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)
• With his/her first column published in the Chronicle in 1956, then appearing in 1,400 news papers worldwide, this writer made a fine art of giving advice to legions of clueless readers caught in life’s rough-and-tumble predicaments.
  a. Pauline Phillips
  b. Count Marco
  c. Herb Caen

Answers:

• c (Wicked is based on a novel by Gregory Maguire about the witches in The Wizard of Oz.)
• False. (Overnight riverboat service from San Francisco to Sacramento aboard the Delta King and Queen lasted from 1927 to 1940.)
• c (A distinguished journalist, Taylor reported on the American Civil War for the Chicago Evening Journal. He made an overland journey by train to San Francisco.)
• a
• b
• a
• b
• c
• b
• a (aka Dear Abby)

Victor Turks grew up in San Francisco and lives in the Richmond with his wife, Michiko, their three boys, a pug, a cat, and a tankful of goldfish. He teaches English at City College.