We already know Willie was out and about sampling fried chicken for his personal Best of the Bay showdown, but there's another piece of history was on Da Mayor's mind this week: Bay to Breakers. On the 100th anniversary of the race Willie Brown remembered the Bay to Breakers of yore. The Bay to Breakers he knows and loves from his own heyday, back when the Marina crowd knew how to celebrate in a style that didn't come straight out of a beer-soaked American Apparel fire sale. As he remembers it:
"Some people would come on BART; some came in limos that picked them up at the end of the race and whisked them over to the Balboa Cafe for Bloody Marys."
And while he's on the subject of Bay to Bourgeois Willie doesn't seem to mind that the prize money for the race was apparently set by a bunch of racists. As he says, "It was always a given that the other Obama brothers were going to win, so the prize money was kept low." (No one named Obama has ever won a Bay to Breakers, by the way, so we assume "the other Obama brothers" is just a term we're tossing around now to refer to Kenyans? That seems a little un-PC even for Willie.)
In somewhat related distribution-of-wealth issues, Willie thinks it would be a fine idea to do away with public financing for this year's Mayor's race and put that $6 or 8 million dollars towards a city-sponsored Bay to Breakers. Either way, the city still gets to watch a publicly funded shitshow, so it's kind of a win-win.
Willie also decided to step in and take sides in the Shriver-Schwarzenegger breakup this week. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pointed out that Willie might have been hinting at a secret affair with the first lady of California by calling her "a fox" at the inauguration. To which Willie responded gayly, "If I had anything going with those two, it would be with Arnold." Now there's an Arnold rumor we'd like to see TMZ follow up on.
Time for the mea culpas: After Willie endorsed Subway sandwiches dissed mediocre banquet food last week, the Chronicle ran a photo of him at a Red Cross dinner. And now everyone thinks the Red Cross serves terrible food! (To be fair, emergency rations are hardly on the same level as McCall's.) So to correct the error, Willie issued a public non-apology by telling the world he has nothing to do with the photos the Chronicle runs. Bafflingly, there is still no mention of his deal with Subway.
No movie reviews from Da Mayor this week, but he did head up to Sonoma County to expound on how much he dislikes term limits in the State Assembly. "It took me 16 years before I became the Speaker," he told the crowd, "Now it takes six weeks." The Press Democrat also seems to think he slipped in a hint about a possible run for public office when he complimented the crowd on their collective financial and political power, but we all know Willie would never be so subtle.
At that same evening in Sonoma County, a classmate of Willie's from Hastings delivered a first hand account of law school-era Willie's shady political dealings. It seems he somehow managed to do $50,000 dollars worth of damage to an elevator at the law school. Which: A) who knew Willie was such a rager in law school? And B) How did he ever pay that back when he was probably saddled with student loans? He did what any budding young politico would do: he became Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and appropriated $50,000 to the law school. Obviously.
