Serialized gem / siren song Tales of the City drew many folks to SF. Well, it brought us here, anyway. And the character of Mary Ann Singleton acted as a temporary stand-in until many of us arrived. To wit:

Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time. She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her Mood Ring was blue and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.

(This Cleveland place is somewhere in So Cal, right?)

Laura Linney brought Singleton to life with brilliance and wide-eyed, no-so plain Jane beauty in the '90s PBS and Showtime mini-series Tales of the City. Next week she will help celebrate Tales' 31 years along with a local literary lineup of such talented key tappers as Amy Tan, Andrew Sean Greer, Michelle Tea, K.M. Soehnlein, Susie Bright, and...Father Guido Sarducci . Litquake will fete the anniversary of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City with a reading by Laura Linney and the aforementioned. You hear that? That's (almost) Oscar-gold talent, folks. Drink it in. (Also, someone named Eve Batey will host one of the pub crawls. Get blackout drunk at her crawl, and win a prize!)