The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 1 (S7E16)

Saoirse Grace was one of the first successful in vitro pregnancies in Massachusetts.

In this episode, Saoirse is joined by her Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play costar, Shane Zaldivar. The two share short versions of their respective life stories and how they got to the Bay Area and San Francisco. Then we dig into the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, followed by a conversation on the play about the riot, their roles in it, and the actual lived experiences of trans people today.

Saoirse, who plays Collette in the play, was born in Boston and grew up a little there, and a little in San Diego. But she got into some trouble in school and was sent to reform school in Austria, near her ancestral homeland in the Dolomites. After high school, not exactly wanting to come back to the US, she went to France for college, where she studied Spanish language literature.

This whole time, Saoirse was a professional actor. She started acting in third grade. By seventh grade or so, she knew that acting was something she loved to do. After about a decade of just acting, Saoirse joined an aerial circus, where she was a trapeze artist for a group in Texas called Sky Candy.

After a few years in Austin, working and doing circus performances, Saoirse came to San Francisco to go to law school. She says, perhaps half-jokingly, that she still wanted to perform, but to do so in a way that made more money than acting. She went to USF and did some police accountability work, but ultimately, practicing law didn’t work out.

And so, after a short time in Las Vegas doing porn and sex work, Saoirse came back to The Bay to do a PhD program to become a professor. It was another opportunity to have an audience, but to also make more money than other performing careers. But that also didn’t pan out.

This run with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play is Saoirse’s first foray back into acting in more than a decade.

Backing up a little, I ask Saoirse about her first move to San Francisco and what she thought of it. She shares the story of leaving Austin, packing up as much as she could fit on her bicycle in Seattle, and riding down the Pacific coast to get here. Wow. At the end of that roughly 1,000-mile ride, she arrived in The City during the Pride parade in 2013. The timing! She soon found work as a bicycle mechanic, something Saoirse still does more than a decade later.

Then we get to know Shane Zaldivar, who plays Rusty in Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Shane was born and raised in Florida, where she spent time between there and Belize, where a lot of her family is from. Her mom had Shane when she was relatively young, and so she spent a lot of time with her mom’s family, both in Belize and in the US.

Life in Florida was rough for Shane. She was bullied a lot early in life for her femininity. She says that when she visits now, she gets no joy out of the place except to be with family members. Belize was much more hospitable for her. She went to middle school and high school in the Central American country.

But she ended up getting a scholarship to attend college at Florida International University, which she says is a diverse place. It was at college that Shane had several awakenings—her sexuality, her love of doing drag. But she says her biggest realization, the one that led her to the Bay Area, was around cannabis. Where she had previously bought into the idea that weed was this terrible thing, from the first time Shane tried it, it changed everything for her.

Shane set out to learn everything she could about the plant and its medicinal, healing properties. She took a college class in Florida on hallucinogens and in that class learned about a school in Oakland called Oaksterdam University. That’s what led Shane to The Bay.

She raised money for the flight and registration at her new school. Once here, she patched together a liberal arts degree in Oakland, studying such topics as hospitality, theater, and anthropology. It was 2014, and she lived in Oakland, too. But it dawned on her later that San Francisco was only a bridge away. After moving around from hostel to hostel, she found an afforda