Song: “Échale Madera” by DJ Ricky Campanelli
When people think of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge is typically one of the first images that comes to mind, but for me the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge holds a special place in my heart.
I still have a vivid memory of when I first crossed the Bay Bridge, which was in 2009 when I attended my first salsa congress. Back then, the pre-party for the SF Salsa Congress was held at the legendary Cafe Cocomo in South San Francisco, and the actual salsa congress was held in the Oakland Marriott hotel. After the pre-party at Cocomo, everyone was loaded onto buses and ferried to Oakland over the Bay Bridge.
I can still remember clearly sitting in that bus, exhausted from a night of dancing but also excited for the three days of dancing that lay ahead, with the San Francisco skyline gradually being replaced with the night lights of Oakland.
The bridge back then was a somewhat foreboding, industrial structure, but in 2013 they built a new span with soaring silver spires and bright lights that lit up the bridge at night. I eventually joined a dance team in Oakland, so I made the trek over the Bay Bridge often, and I each time I was awestruck by its beauty.
A few years later they opened a walking path along the bridge from Oakland to Yerba Buena island, and I always wanted to check it out but never got around to it. I finally got my chance this year with the making of the video.
Shooting the video was quite challenging on the windy and noisy bridge, and passerby kept congratulating us thinking that we were getting married because of our all-white attire. The lightning siege of 2020 also happened during the 2nd day of our shoot, which pushed back production of our video by over a month due to all the smoke.
But we perservered, and captured some beautiful shots of the white bridge standing impossibly high over of blue seas, with the misty city of San Francisco in the background. I hope you enjoy our ode to one of the beautiful structures in the Bay Area.
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