Julia Scott

If you could be at your own funeral, what would you like to do? How about dance and drink champagne with everyone you've ever known? A Bay Area man and his husband try to greet death in style. But they discover that death has its own agenda.

KALW contributor Julia Scott produced this radio documentary in partnership with the BBC World Service.

Bon Voyage

Joseph Luna woke up this morning in a sleeping bag under the Harrison Street on-ramp to Highway 101. He sleeps here when he needs to get out of the rain.

Luna does not sleep past eight because he'll get rousted by police. His sleeping spot is near a five-way intersection, in back of a city tow lot. In his morning routine, he will get up, stack the cardboard and shove his stuff into a big black duffel bag, the only bag he owns.

Life is pretty boring if you’re a salmon growing up in the Nimbus Fish Hatchery. After being incubated in a tray, you spend six months in a plastic tub surrounded by 70,000 fish just like you. Then, it’s graduation day. You’ll be scooped into a tanker truck and dumped into the Sacramento River. But for now there’s nothing to do but eat, and the only thing you see all day are the people who feed you, like D.J. Gervin.

A medley of people wait for the San Francisco Public Library to open in the morning. Students on a deadline. People who really need a library book. Retired folks. And people checking email.

As the doors open, patrons stream into the atrium at the main branch near the Civic Center in downtown San Francisco. Some head to their favorite reading nook; others to computers to start surfing the Web.

It’s crab season in California, and commercial fishermen can’t unload their catches fast enough to satisfy the crowds filling Fisherman’s Wharf. But out on the public piers behind the Embarcadero, away from the big boats, you’ll find a different breed of fisherman. They set out their poles, unroll their lines, add some bait, and wait quietly for dinner to arrive.