Meet Your Neighbor - Michelle and Leo Sheridan

Who are you and what do you do?

Michelle and Leo Sheridan and we are the president and vice-president of San Leandro Girls Softball.

What do you love about San Leandro?

We love the tight knit community,  anything you want to do,  people you want to know, you see them at one sport you see them at another, you see them in the coffee shop. It's just wonderful to have such an tight knit feel to a community.

Girls softball is a brand new league, why was that need?

We have an 8 year old daughter we have been coaching her in soccer and in softball and we have seen there are no girls sports in San Leandro. We have had tons of interest. People came up to us as say "Why don't we have girls sports in San Leandro?" We totally agree, why don't we? So we decided to start a league.

When will it start, When can you sign up and is there a Facebook page and Web site.

LEO - Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/Sanleandrogirlssoftball and website is http://www.sanleandrogirlssoftball.com/

MICHELLE - Registration is open now, it opened on Friday. Opening day is March 4th 2016. Girls can register online until the middle of January. We will also have 2 or 3 registration sites available.

What are the Ages?

LEO - Girls from 4 to 14 of all playing abilities.

And a travel team?

San Leandro is the home of the Nitro. We are excited to do a competitive team. Usually competitive teams are after rec. So rec teams first, then have tryouts for the Nitro to bring a competitive team to San Leandro.

Fields Yet?

MICHELLE - No official fields yet, we have an unofficial home.

LEO - The city has been working with us and is helping to find us a home.

You are also very involved in the your girls school

MICHELLE - I am PTO president of James Monroe Elementary, Leo is Dads Club President. We have been doing that since our daughter was in kindergarten. Leo is also on school board.

LEO - We are very involved in the community.

MICHELLE - We just want to make our community better, we want to make it better for our kids, specifically girls because we do not have enough activities for them.

LEO - In San Leandro the Diamonds are dominated by boys, we don't have an equitable share of girls on these fields.

MICHELLE  - We want to give the Girls softball.

You also work in San Leandro?

MICHELLE - I work for Bank of the West, I am a security investigator. I have worked for Bank of the west for 15 years. Leo works at San Leandro Color so we are completely into the san Leandro community

Any words of Wisdom?

MICHELLE - It's super important for everybody to get involved. You hear in other communities that people like to complain, they want changes but they are not willing to man up and to really get involved. You have got to get involved, that is the only way you can make change. That's what Leo and I practice and preach.

Thanks you so much

Meet Your Neighbor - Lord Blood-Rah (Frank Wallace-Ailsworth)

Who are you and what do you do?

     My full name is Frank Wallace-Ailsworth.  I'm 52 and was born and raised here in San Leandro.  I'm married to my wife Chris and have two sons, Gavin, who lives in Boston and is the drummer for popular art rock band Bent Knee, and Ben, who lives at home and teaches drums and bass as well as performing all over the Bay Area and recording with musicians like Jay Lane formerly of Primus.

    

     For the last 6 years I have hosted Horror and Sci-Fi films at various venues all over the Bay Area.  I started at the Chouinard Winery in Castro Valley in 2009.  My wife and I are close friends with the winemaker, Damian Chouinard, and his family.  Damian was interested in showing movies at the winery, specifically older genre films.  We put a show together with someone else hosting and, though the show came off well and was well attended, there were some quirks that made Damian not want to rehire the host.

     The next day, Damian, my wife and I were sitting in my kitchen having a glass of wine when he said he wanted to do a series of movie shows every September, but didn't want to use the previous host.  I said I really didn't know of anyone else to suggest, whereupon my wife Chris turned to me and said "Why the hell don't you do it?"

I had no answer, so the following year in '09 I began hosting the shows under the title Lord Blood-Rah's Nerve Wrackin' Theatre. 

     I became Lord Blood-Rah, the High Lord of Geekdom, (a self proclaimed title):  A proud Geek who loves nothing so much as sharing these great old classic and craptacular horror and sci-fi films with like minded Geeks. 

     This last September marked the sixth year of Lord Blood-Rah's Nerve Wrackin' Theatre at the Chouinard Winery which runs every September weekend. 

     Soon after, I began hosting shows at other venues across the Bay Area including The Bal in San Leandro, The Parkway in Oakland, The Rheem in Moraga and, most recently, the Peirano Winery in Lodi.

    

     Three years ago, I was approached by Sujoy Sarkar of KCTH Comcast 27 out of Chabot College to do a TV show, basically a Creature Features type horror host show.  I dove in and began filming episodes on a set I built in my home. 

     Just a few months later, a good friend of mine in Peoria, Il. Bryan Wolford, who works at WAOE My59 TV, said their station wanted to run a horror host show and to send a sample episode for consideration.  I met Bryan while submitting material for his horror themed podcast Drunken Zombie. 

     I sent a link to an episode on Youtube and within a couple of hours I was told they wanted to run the series!  Shortly after, two other mid-west stations. WISE MyTV Fort Wayne in In. and WHTV My18 in Lansing Mi. picked up the series.

     You can find episodes of my show, as well as the first appearance of Lord Blood-Rah at the ever at the Chouinard Winery from 2009 on youtube.com/lordbloodrah.

    

     My connection to Bryan also lead to me hosting the Drunken Zombie International Film Festival in Peoria for the last four years.  It's an independent horror film festival that features submissions of short and feature length horror films from all over the world.

    

     Lord Blood-Rah's Nerve Wrackin' Theatre is now in it's 5th Season and airs locally on KCTH Comcast 27 Friday Nights at 10:30pm and Saturday nights at Midnight, and on Comcast 28 10pm Wednesday nights and 12:30am Saturday Nights as well as the afore mentioned mid-west stations.

     The show can also be found on various online horror host sites such as Kreepykastle.com and The Vortexx at horrorhost.net.

      I have also made numerous pop culture and comic book convention appearances and next year will be the Master of Ceremonies at the 2016 Con-volution Convention at the Hyatt Regency SFO, as well as presenting a panel on the connection between Tiki Culture and Monsters at the 2016 Tiki Oasis Convention in San Diego.

     This Halloween Night I'll be hosting the Werewolves of London Halloween Party at Trader Vic's in Emeryville.  We're having a Bay Area's Best Werewolf Contest with some great prizes supplied by Trader Vic's and myself!

     All this and a day job make life quite busy!

What do you love about San Leandro?

     As I said, I was born and raised here.  I love the convenience of living here.  Everything is quite easily accessible and there is a great small town vibe to the town, even though San Leandro has grown quite a bit since I was a kid here!

Tell me about the BAL?

I did a series of shows at the Bal theatre featuring classic films.  We showed the original Frankenstein and Dracula there, an evening of Gamera films, Psycho, a tribute to Creature Features, etc.  The shows were great fun and drew a small, tight attentive audience, but the financial realities of the Bal at the time, owned by Dan Dillman, made continuing there impossible.  We just were not drawing the numbers he needed to see to make it viable.

     The first CreaturesCon, the Creature Features convention, was held at the Bal.  It was a great success, but even at that first event we could feel that CreatureCon was outgrowing the venue.  CreaturesCon now is a part of the Big Wow Comic Book Convention which next year will morph into the Silicon Valley ComicCon.

     The Bal looks to be doing primarily music now.  I may perhaps approach Dan again with a pitch for a show, but with the TV show and other live shows lined up, it's hard to tell when.

Finishing Words of Wisdom

     To quote the great Bob Wilkins of Creature Features, "Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong!"

Meet Your Neighbor - Tom Blinn

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Tom Blinn and I am a retired teacher and businessman and I work in a youth program in Oakland.  My spare time goes to the San Leandro Historical Railroad Society.

Very Cool.  What do you love about San Leandro?

I just love it because they (the City of San Leandro) are so open to new ideas and they are really supportive of us as a railroad museum but also our approach into the schools in training kids on how to be safe around railroad tracks.

There was something fairly recently when somebody got hit in San Leandro on the railroad tracks.

We generally get involved when there is an accident and we go to the schools and talk to the kids, and sometimes the counselors will get involved, but we are part of a larger organization called Operation Lifesaver which is all around the United States and was started by Engineers in 1949.  We have thousands of people that are presenters, like myself, and we go to schools to speak.  On October 14 we will be presenting to the 6^th grade classes at John Muir School here is San Leandro.

Oh, very cool!  Now you guys have your museum at Thrasher Park.  The building that you are housed in has a little bit of history.  Please tell us about that.

The building we are in was built in 1898 and it was built with heartwood grade redwood, full dimension so a 2X4 is a 2X4!  The building sat on the corner of Davis St. and the railroad tracks for a long time.  It was 22 years ago that we moved it over to Thrasher Park.  We bought it from the railroad.  We had enough money to move it and the City of San Leandro allowed us to place it at Thrasher Park.  We sold it to the City and we lease it back from them on a 20 years lease.  We generally have 2000-3000 people coming in every other month so we have a lot of community involvement.  Most of our visitors are young people.  Some kids don’t have a long span of attention but around trains they do!  So for parents, sometimes the worst part of the visit is trying to take their kids home because the kids want to stay and they cry. 

Right!

But we have a museum, we have a HO scale display and we have an outdoor display for larger trains.  We also have an area just for the kids.  They can go run trains, they can crash them and do anything they want!  They have fun doing that.

You do special Halloween and holiday events?

Yes, we have a special Halloween event on 10/27.  We will have trains with Halloween cars on it and the whole place will be decorated up!  We really look for kids to participate and they will have a great time

.

Great.  What are your normal hours of operation?

Saturday mornings starting about 9:30am until about 1pm.  On Tuesday nights we are open 7:30pm until 9:30pm.  We have about 35 members and we are all very avid about trains.  Sometimes we ask ourselves why we like trains and we don’t know but we really like trains!  (Laughs).

That’s wonderful!  My son and I have visited and we really loved it.  Do you have any last words of wisdom?

Well, our passion is to our trains but even greater than that is that people are not hurt by trains.  A lot of people don’t give enough attention to trains and the tracks and always be aware that the train can come at any time.  We want no one to be hurt.

Thank you for your time today Tom.

(thanks to Patricia Minnis for Transcribing the interview)