{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"What a Creep\u2019s Sonia Mansfield, Part 2 (S8E13)","description":"In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Sonia\u2019s life right after her stint at community college. She left the Bay Area to attend college up north at Chico State. Widely known as a party school (perhaps rightly so?), they also had a reputable journalism department and an award-winning newspaper. This attracted Sonia, of course. But some friends also attended, and that didn\u2019t hurt. Once in Chico, Sonia joined said college paper and got a job (where else?) at a movie theater. It was her first time to move out of her parents\u2019 house. She lived with a couple of roommates in Chico. That was one culture shock. Another was that, well, Chico isn\u2019t The Bay. And then there\u2019s those foothills winters. It also gets hotter in the summer there than it does in Concord. Sonia wrote for every section of the school paper, and even did some online writing, thanks to Chico State\u2019s early adoption of the internet. She even developed a little campus fan base. Sometimes walking around, she\u2019d get shout-outs. There was even a Sonia character in one of the local comic strips. It was another phase of finding her people. She thinks that because all her roommates in Chico were men, she got really exciting to hang out with young women. She graduated after three years, in 1996. That Bay Area magnet snatched her back after that, and she moved in with her parents again in Concord. That gave way to an apartment she shared with her sister. Sonia got a job at the Martinez News-Gazette around this time, a three-day-a-week paper where she earned $213 per week. Anywhere she could find free food, she pounced. At the newspaper, she more or less did it all\u2014cops, local and community news, school board meetings, and, of course, a humor column. I ask Sonia who her humor influences and inspirations are, and she immediately cites George Carlin (this is probably a big part of why we\u2019re friends). Her dad loved Carlin, too, and Sonia says the old man also has a wicked sense of humor that rubbed off on her. Another source of jokes was none other than Bugs Bunny. And lastly, Alan Alda\u2019s Hawkeye in M\u2022A\u2022S\u2022H is another humor muse. That newspaper job led to her time at the San Francisco Independent, a paper owned by the Fang family. Sonia did a neighborhood beat on that job, reporting on school board, planning commission, and other community meetings. We rewind for a minute so Sonia can share early memories and impressions of San Francisco, having grown up across The Bay. When she was a kid, her grandma would take her to see The Nutcracker. She\u2019d visit on other special occasions, but it wasn\u2019t until she was an adult that The City really grabbed hold of her heart. There\u2019s a hilarious story about showing up to dance at The Palladium wearing a \u201cRoss Perot for President\u201d T-shirt. Years later, with that job at the Independent, Sonia found herself in San Francisco most days. Though she had to write only three stories, the money was better and the circulation bigger than her previous job in Martinez. The beat was familiar\u2014school board and planning commission meetings. She and her sister had bought a house for themselves in Concord, where they lived with her young niece. Eventually, the paper transferred Sonia to its Burlingame office, but it was to start writing movie reviews. Eventually, she even convinced the Independent to let her write TV show reviews. When the Fangs bought the San Francisco Examiner, they kept Sonia on to be their TV critic and moved her back to The City, to an office above the Warfield. She\u2019ll be the first to admit that when you\u2019re getting paid to watch TV, it\u2019s not so fun anymore. The paper cut Sonia, but brought her back three weeks later, this time to be the A&E editor. The Examiner was a slimmed-down, tabloid version of its former self. That\u2019s how it was a few years later when, fresh out of journalism school at SF State, I got a job there as a copy editor. I distinctly remember one of my favorite daily tasks was editing Sonia\u2019s celebrity gossip column\u2014Scoop, which happened early in my shifts, around 4 p.m. or so. In the episode, I riff about how much I loved reading Scoop every day, even though I\u2019ve never been good at or cared much for celebrity news. I also let Sonia know that I also appreciated her presence off the page, in the newsroom. She describes her time at The Examiner as something she loved, but it was also hard. She shares that, after working long days for little pay, she\u2019d go home and play The Sims. Once, around 3 a.m., playing the game, her character was going to a party. And it clicked: Sonia couldn\u2019t remember the last time she went to a party. She needed to make some changes, and one was leaving The Examiner. First up was an HR temp job where her mom worked, in Vallejo. Next was a job writing press releases for a real estate company. Then she found work at a printing company in Oakland called PS Print. (Our lives intersected again around this time, but that\u2019s another story.) She helped them create a social media presence. Outside of work, Sonia had a blog (which she still has) called The Sonia Show. Check back tomorrow for Part 3 with Sonia. We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt ","author_name":"Storied: San Francisco","author_url":"http:\/\/www.storiedsf.com\/","html":"