From Vernacular to Official—and the Spaces in Between

Abstract

The shuffle function of my digital music library crafts an amusingly random soundtrack for casual household chores. As I swipe a dusty bookshelf, John Milton Hendricks’s voice pulls me into alert attention. On this track, which occurs on a four-year-old mix CD of the sort that sustains our long-term friendship, John narrates his walk to the Powerhouse to investigate a Mister Indulgence otter contest/fundraiser at this esteemed leather-and-more bar, possibly the first otter contest in the history of San Francisco. With a librarian’s training, an archivist’s instincts, and a dweller’s attention to thick description and detail, John shares the excitement of encountering the flier for the event, his characteristically brisk walking pace laboring his narration. A series of brusque edits shifts us from the street into the scene of the event and takes us across its entire span to the announcement of winner. Our intrepid reporter, himself an author of a chapter on the otter identity and its relation to the figure of the bear, probes with the important question of which came first—a celebration of the otter, or a fundraiser for the Marine Mammal Center? The two organizers and hosts of the event, Sister Anni Coque l’Doo (say it out loud, it goes without saying) and Sister Constance Craving (both members of the decades-old activist group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence), get pulled into the proceedings. Imagining them bedecked in the frocks, habits, and garish face make-up characteristic of their order, I hear the Sisters describe one of their colleagues’ ongoing work with