Meet Joe Alioto Veronese...

SFist Rita is out of town for work, so we are donning our tiara and gown for this weeks Swells analysis. Tra-la-la! Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 57. Total number of people pictured whom we recognize/know: 23. This high number is because of the SF Library event with lots of writers, including Amy Tan, Vendela Vida, Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliot, Ben Fong-Torres, Michael Lewis, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam Barry,......

Ah, the Aliotos -- they run this town! Patriarch Joseph Alioto was the mayor of San Francisco from 1968-1976, in office not only during the building of the Transamerica Pyramid but also through the Zodiac murders -- while daughter Angela Alioto is a former Board of Supervisors president (and chicken-suit renter), while granddaughter Michela Alioto-Pier is a current Board of Supes member (and Hottest Supervisor emerita -- hm, maybe it's time for us to do......

Angela Alioto got the biggest applause line of the morning at the Gavin Newsom Fake Question Time townhall meeting last Saturday when she roared out, "Instead of sitting around in chicken outfits, what have you done?" So color her amused when she was reminded after the event that she had in fact rented a chicken suit from the exact same costume store and asked one of her consultants to dress up in it all......

There's no Swells society column today! Sad! So we're doing a Fake Question Time By The Numbers instead. Number of people in attendance: 200. Number of chickens: 6. Number of times Angela Alioto referred to "Bessie," a 94-year-old homeless woman she's befriended: 6. Number of questions Gavin collected: 2 inches of cards (We'd estimate maybe around 100). Number of questions Gavin read: About 10 (grouped into categories, except for our question, which he did not......

This morning, we dragged our flu-ridden butts all the way out to the Richmond hoping to see what had all the makings of a circus. We didn't get it. What we got, instead, was a serious policy discussion about the homeless. How do you prevent a circus from taking place? You bore the crap out of everyone. We have to give credit to Team Gavin. They defused any potential for the meeting getting out of hand with two brilliant gestures. The first one was to have it early in the morning all the way out in the Richmond. We expected a full-house full of the usual suspects but didn't get it, partly, we think, because saying you're going to go out to the Richmond at ten in the morning and actually getting up and going out to the Richmond on a very, very cold morning at ten in the morning is a completely different thing....

Oh, San Francisco Board of Supervisors Class of 1995 -- where are you now? ...