Makeshift Sandbags inside the Five-Star Hotel

Dr. Andy’s "Domino of Disasters" in San Francisco

Dear Friends,

I encountered with such an unusual series of mishaps at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency earlier this month that a friend asked me to write about my adventure in this week’s newsletter.

For the last 20 years, I have presented talks about writing, poetry, and literary events at the San Francisco Writers Conference. The conference took place about 14 years at the Mark Hopkins International Hotel, and the last six at the Hyatt Regency. I typically travel with my family, and they prefer the Hyatt because of the proximity to restaurants and small urban parks where we can walk our French bulldog, Margot. We also appreciate the views of the San Francisco Fery Building and its clock tower, as well as the Bay and the distant hills of Oakland.

This year when I arrived on a Thursday morning to register at the Hyatt, I saw that an army of employees had been mobilized to attend to an unlikely flood. Evidently an electrical short had sabotaged the fountain in the world-famous lobby (the largest in the world), so hundreds of gallons of water were pouring across the floor.

I saw bellhops with mops, maids with cleaning aids, and waiters tossing the nearby restaurant’s tablecloths onto the standing water like so many Indonesian penjala ikan (or net-throwing fishermen). I also saw black-vested employees with huge industrial cleaners they hoped would soak up all the water before it reached the halted escalators and the elevator shafts. Because the staff had no sandbags, some of those tablecloths were also bunched into thick, rolled mounds, forming makeshift sandbags to slow or divert the flow.

The electrical problems had just begun. Although they could keep the elevators working, a subsequent planned power cut (to repair the electrical problems) lasted not 20 minutes, as we were told, but the rest of the afternoon and evening. Managers with flashlights were handing out business cards and apologies, and a member of the staff was distributing those phosphorescent sticks like the ones I used to buy at Rehoboth beach for 50 cents in the late 1970s.

We went to bed early in our dark and unheated hotel rooms. As I tried to fall asleep, I heard an impossibly-loud car stereo on Drumm Street play the pop song “Like a G6” over and over again. I thought to myself that someday the rhythm (but not the content) of the song could be fruitfully adapted for a Dr. Andy poem.

The next morning, I performed a short breakfast pub quiz in a romantically-lit large ballroom. Like me, all of the attendees who had stayed in the hotel the previous night took cold showers that Friday morning. Luckily, both the power and the heat came on later that afternoon in time for me to introduce keynote speaker Tommy Orange.

Saturday the director of the conference joked about the “Domino of Disasters” that had been the experience of the conference attendees, but all of us were in good spirits. Fifty-three people signed up for the marathon open mic that I hosted Saturday night.

And then Sunday morning, as per tradition, I performed a just-written occasional poem to close out the conference. The words were original, but the structure and the rhythm of the poem came from a band called Far East Movement. I titled the poem “A Domino of Disasters.” Find it below.

A Domino of Disasters –

The Poem for the 2025 San Francisco Writers Conference

By Dr. Andy Jones

Flippin’ pages in the dark, reading thrillers

When the lights flickered out, we got chiller

The dragons in my book, they wield magic

Writers reading in the dark, under glow sticks

Under glow sticks, under glow sticks

I’m practicing my pitch under glow sticks

Under glow sticks, under glow sticks

I’m choosing stronger verbs under glow sticks

All the linens in this place, they’ve gone missing

The plumber in the crawl space yells the fountain is a hissing

The lobby is a mire beset by dehumidifiers

There’s a poet on her knees helping with her hair dryer

Fire Drill, Fire Drill

Light it up, glow stick-light it up

When poets start recitin’, they be actin’ like they tough

The jazz night poets all be actin’ like they tough

And all the novelists around me, they be acting like they stuck

Under glow sticks, under glow sticks

I can’t charge my phone with my glow sticks

With my glow sticks, with my glow sticks

I’m taking a cold shower with my glow sticks

We have falling dominos of disaster

We need a working mic for the quizmaster

She’s from Ithaca, he’s from Madagascar

The basement engineer is staring up at the plaster

The writing that we do is worth the hardship

We come here for a lift, for the kinship

We’ll make our readers read, we’ll make them click

On our funny stories about writing under glow sticks

Best,

Dr. Andy

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P.S. Three questions from last week’s pub quiz, to which you are invited to subscribe on Patreon.

1. Mottos and Slogans. Starting with the letter F, what insurance company uses the slogan "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two"?

2. Internet Culture. At the 2018 Webby Awards, what then new game from Epic Games won the People's Voice Award for Best Multiplayer/Competitive Game?

3. Newspaper Headlines. According to a February, 2025 headline in the New York Times, who has “Scrambled the California Governor’s Race Without Entering It”?

P.P.S. Our next Poetry Night in Davis is March 6.