Adriana Ciccone
At the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in Embarcadero on a warm Saturday morning in June, the people of San Francisco are hustling. Everyone is eager to get their hands on the freshest produce, their conversations an electrifying noise amplified with the cries of seagulls overhead. The air is thick with the familiar scent of the ocean—a salty tang mixed with the occasional whiff of fish from the nearby bay—but today, it’s layered with the smells of freshly baked bread, ripe fruit, and vegetables still dewy from the fields.
Amid the hustle, Adriana spots a crate of bright green mizuna and tells me that she once tried the vegetable, and immediately felt nauseated.
“Well,” I laugh, “I guess we won’t be eating that today.”
We are here because Adriana will later make us lunch at her place, which, one might reasonably assume, implies that Adriana knows the specific meal she will make. But that is not the case. Unlike me, she is an exceptional cook and can create a top-notch meal on the fly, starting from a single ingredient and ultimately producing a gustatory masterpiece. So that is what we are doing at the Farmers Market: perusing fresh produce, searching for inspiration. It’s when we pass by a crate of serpentine cucumbers that Adriana lights up.
“Okay,” she says, “I am starting to form a plan.”
She gets a bunch of herbs and veggies, and says we need to go find apricots. Apricots never gave her a severe reaction but, she admits, they were an acquired taste. Mostly for textural reasons.
“I have an issue with mushy fruits,” she specifies.
I nod emphatically.
“I am with you on that one. I love white nectarines and Granny Smith apples. But mushy peaches and those soft apples? Blah.”
“Yeah. I grew to like apricots now that I live in California,” she continues, “but, in general, I am not a big fruit person.”
Twenty minutes later, with apricots, turnips, zucchinis, ricotta, and a bunch of other things in tow, we are ready to take the bus from Embarcadero and go to Adriana’s place, which is great timing because I haven’t had coffee yet and I am already running on vapor. But Adriana decides we do a quick detour first.
“I want to show you something,” she says, her eyes glistening with the kind of curiosity that usually means I’m about to see something interesting.
Rather than heading straight back to her place, she leads me to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, just a short walk away. I’ve passed the building countless times but never imagined what was inside: a Guinness-world-record atrium that looks like something out of a dystopian, but oddly chic, sci-fi brutalist megalopolis.
“Wow, it really is impressive,” I gasp when we get there, observing the interior architecture with both awe and fear. “Don’t you find brutalism depressing a bit, though?”
“It can be,” Adriana answers. “But I still like the architecture. As is the case with other forms of art, like music for example, I like to experience all emotions. Even if they are unpleasant.”
We do a quick photoshoot in the atrium, and then take the bus back to Adriana’s place. The journey doesn’t take long, and as soon as we arrive, Soba, her black Puli, is already waiting at the door, brimming with excitement. It’s a sight of chaotic joy, much like the Farmers Market, but this time, it's furry.
Adriana gives me a few toys to keep Soba entertained while she prepares the ingredients for lunch, but I ignore Soba at first, because I am a bit disoriented. I can’t figure out if Adriana rearranged her living room.
“Wasn’t this couch facing the front door before?”
“Oh, yeah,” she laughs. “I had to change things to make space for Kris’s stuff.”
Kris, Adriana’s boyfriend, is moving in with her soon, which is adding a few extra layers of complexity to the otherwise streamlined way she runs her home office. And because Adriana works from her apartment full-time, every inch of space matters. She’s a Partner at Demand Side Analytics, an energy-consulting firm that provides data-driven insights to help utilities and their stakeholders understand the impact of energy efficiency and other demand management programs, and to help them plan for a greener grid. In practice, this means that Adriana and her team act as third-party auditors specialized in energy assessment. Utilities and regulatory agencies hire them to conduct independent analyses of utility programs; for example, seeing how different electric rates change consumption patterns of commercial buildings.
“I think I forgot to ask you,” I say, as she begins to slice turnips in the kitchen, “what exactly do you focus on within that space?”
Before she answers, Adriana signals that we move to the kitchen, so I go sit at the dining table and Soba comes along. I want to ask Adriana what she is making, because I still can’t comprehend how she can improvise meals, but she is somehow multitasking effortlessly, slicing turnips and detailing her job.
“I work in demand-side management,” she says, “which, if you think about an electric power grid, for example, is really about managing the levels of electricity demand from users like you and me. There is also supply-side management, which is about building more grids or optimizing existing grids. So, on the demand side, we work a lot with companies that are figuring out how to make a more efficient power grid by incentivizing users to consume less. Just as an illustrative example, since we live in California, you probably have seen incentives from PG&E asking you to enroll in a program, in which you agree to use less power at peak times in exchange for credit on your bill.”
“Uh huh,” I answer, “but I never quite connected the dots there.”
“So,” she continues, “in that example, the idea is to use very granular electric usage data from the people that enroll in the program to model how much they actually save, and to ultimately model the overall demand on the grid. That’s really where we come in. While this sounds doable, the reality is that energy data is very hard to analyze, there is a lot of noise, and we have to ensure that the savings measured are actual savings, not natural volatility.”
Adriana has worked at Demand Side Analytics for over six years, and her commitment to the job is unsurprising. She is highly conscientious and rational, which means she always chooses to do the right thing, even if the right thing won’t please everyone around her.
“I feel like this has been your thing for a long time,” I add. “If I remember, your Master’s was also in Environmental Science and Public Policy? How did you get into it?”
“I have always been environmentally conscious,” she says. “I grew up in nature. My earliest memories are those of being left on my own, in nature. So, I think it was something that was always in the back of my mind.”
Adriana grew up in Canada, and a fun fact is that one side of her family traces roots to the region in Italy where Michael Bublé’s maternal great-grandparents lived. Which, after doing some research, happens to be a fun fact on my end as well, because his paternal great-grandparents are from Dalmatia, where I was born.
“That’s my family’s claim to fame,” she says.
“Well,” I chuckle, “that, and the fact that you and Madonna have the same last name.”
“Yes,” Adriana laughs, “that too.”
By the time Adriana was born, her parents were living in southern Ontario, which is where she spent most of her early childhood (aside from a brief stint in Montréal as a kindergartener). At the age of nine, she moved to the US—to Ohio—and, four years later, moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where she lived for one year before coming back to Ohio. Then it was Boston for college and her first full-time job, then Chicago for grad school, and then San Francisco.
“That’s a lot of moving. Was it hard growing up like that?”
“Um, I mean,” Adriana says, “it’s just the way it was. We had to relocate often for my dad’s job, so moving around is just how I grew up. Some parts I loved. Like, I loved the one year I spent in Switzerland. It was easy to be a young, independent kid in Geneva and it was cool to be around other international kids at such a young age. But, for example, it was really hard moving back to Ohio after that, and I didn’t like that period as much.”
“How so?”
“It was a strong contrast. Shortly after I moved back to Ohio, 9/11 happened. It was shocking to witness the aftermath, how the American public started to perceive people from the Middle East. I had friends from the Middle East, and suddenly, in America, they were turned into monsters. It was a change for me to be in that type of environment after the very cosmopolitan, worldly experience in Geneva.”
After high school, Adriana moved to Boston to attend MIT. The two of us met in Boston, and we both think that it was likely sometime in late 2011, and the only reason we do not know with certainty is because Adriana was already in the second year of her post-college full-time job when I started college. When she met me, I was barely nineteen. A decade passed before we actually started hanging out, which was just about the amount of time needed for me to grow up, grow up some more, and move to San Francisco, where Adriana ended up as well after her Master’s program.
The reason we met in Boston, even though we did not overlap in college, is because we ran in the same social circles, simply as a result of living in the same, long standing co-ed living group on campus. It was a very particular social environment, one that came with its own social hierarchy and culture and one that was all-consuming. I mention that I definitely had my own process of adjustment while I was there, but that I am curious how this chapter of life was for her.
“It was definitely strange at first,” she says. “I did make good friends, but it took me some time to figure out the dynamics and how to build friendships in that sort of environment, in which you’re always socially ‘on’.”
“It makes sense,” I say. “Do you think it would have been easier if your childhood wasn’t so nomadic? If you grew up in one place?”
Adriana shrugs.
“I honestly don’t know,” she answers, “you can’t really run a counterfactual.”
At the risk of being just slightly too on the nose with this simile, one could say Adriana is a bit like Cady Heron from Mean Girls. Now, to be clear, Adriana doesn’t say jambo, no one assumes she spent her childhood spelling xylocarp, and she has never really been about infiltrating queen-bee cliques. Still, like the iconic character played by Lohan, Adriana seemingly has all the attributes (as Janis Ian says, “a regulation hottie”) to neatly fit into society’s matrix of expected behaviors, and yet, she doesn’t. In this matrix, she is a glitch.
“I never could quite grasp the unspoken social norms of the world,” she continues, “so for sure that made the adjustment somewhat difficult. College was also the first time I was living with other people and the first time I got to assess my own upbringing. Because I moved around so much, I did not have long-term friendships by that point, so I didn’t have a way to calibrate whether my parents’ rigid rules were actually right.”
I tell her this is actually not how I think of her. The Adriana I know is highly attuned to the nuances of social interactions, she is a confident and eloquent orator (likely as a result of being the voracious reader she is), and she is someone who knows how to host and entertain a group of people. Come to think of it, if I ever had a dilemma about a particular social etiquette, Adriana would be the first person I would ask for advice.
“Yeah, but I had to learn that,” she says. “For me, it was an active process of learning how to read social situations.”
“I would have never guessed. You always seem to enjoy hosting people and actually being a host. You know, going around from person to person and making sure everyone is having a good time.”
“Well, actually,” she continues, “hosting people for me is a fun way to have a controlled environment in which I can manage my anxiety. Whenever I host, I am much better at understanding the implicit social hierarchy that forms. I can figure out who is dominating the conversation, or who is retreating in the conversation, and I can identify where I fit in.”
Adriana never became famous via her covert connections to Michael Bublé and Madonna but she did achieve public recognition in 2018 when she became a contestant in the highly popular American TV game show Jeopardy!. There is the obvious reason: Jeopardy! contestants are known and revered for their trivia prowess. And then there is the less obvious reason: in the era of anonymous, chronically online fans, Jeopardy! contestants—especially female contestants—receive a lot of unsolicited scrutiny on the Internet.
“I mean, how do you even go about deciding to go on the show? Did you study for a long time?”
“No,” Adriana shakes her head, “I just have a sponge brain. People always ask me if I studied for Jeopardy! and the answer is no. The knowledge just accumulated over the years.”
The process to get on the show is not as simple as one might think. Adriana first had to apply and then pass an online 50-question quiz, in which she had only 15 seconds per question. She passed the test in March 2018 and then got invited to audition in San Francisco in July 2018, almost four months later.
Applicants who qualified for the audition took another test, this time in person, which, Adriana thinks, was a way to ensure the contestants didn’t cheat on the online version. Once she passed the in-person knowledge test, Adriana had to do a screen test.
“Which is—” I ask.
“A way to test your presence on TV,” Adriana says. “I don’t know exactly what they were looking for, but if I had to guess, they were probably evaluating a contestant’s ability to be on camera and answer questions at the same time. To ensure that you are someone who is good on TV.”
After the audition, Adriana entered what she calls an “active roster of possible, pre-approved people” for the actual show night. She was ultimately selected to be a contestant and three months later, in October 2018, she went to the studio and officially competed in Jeopardy!. The three episodes she was part of aired that winter, and Adriana officially became immortalized by the TV industry. She now even has an IMDB page.
“How was that experience? Being in the public eye?”
“I tend to be very heads down and focused on the task during any experience,” she says, “so I am only able to process and feel emotions later. So, I wasn’t necessarily stressed during the show, but I definitely was afraid of being turned into a meme by the internet. Which, luckily, didn’t happen.”
That doesn’t mean the Internet wasn’t waiting to pounce.
“I knew it was going to be weird,” she continues. “There’s all sorts of people watching the show and I knew that I would receive unwanted attention online. And, it was hard for me to have all that attention on me, I felt like I had to actively think how I might come off. Women in the public eye have all their choices questioned, so I designed my Jeopardy! persona to be as bulletproof as possible.”
She’s calmly telling me this as she layers the final slices of turnips onto the sandwiches, her multitasking as seamless as ever. As she plates them, it occurs to me that her approach to everything she does, much like her Jeopardy! persona, is about creating something flawless while somehow making it all look effortless.
“Okay, ready?” Adriana says, setting the plates down in front of us.
I’m silent for a moment after the first bite, savoring the layers of flavor. The sandwich is nothing short of delicious.
“Incredible. So do you have a name for this?”
“Uh, I don’t know. California—” she sighs, prolonging the last syllable, “Bullshit Fancy Toast.”
The California Bullshit Fancy Toast, like the modern culture of the state in which it originated, is vibes-based and, as such, does not follow a rigid set of rules. The ingredients you need to make this open-faced sandwich are:
Fresh sourdough bread
Fresh arugula
A few cloves of garlic
A fresh lemon
A tub of your favorite ricotta cheese
A pack of your favorite parmesan cheese
Two or three zucchinis
A handful of raw turnips
Salt, pepper, and olive oil
To make it, you:
Slice the zucchinis in thin-to-medium circles and sauté them in a pan in olive oil. Add salt and pepper as needed.
Slice the turnip whites into thin-to-medium circles and set them aside.
Make pesto in a blender using arugula, turnip greens, parmesan, lemon juice, diced garlic, and olive oil. It’s all about the vibe: aim for an exquisite, vibrant green pesto that is both zesty and herby. It should be pasty, not grainy. This will help you decide the quantity of each ingredient.
Cut however many slices of sourdough bread you want. Then lightly toast them.
Then build the sandwich:
First, spread a layer of ricotta on the sourdough slice.
Spread a layer of the homemade pesto on top of the ricotta.
Add a layer of sautéed zucchini.
Top it off with a layer of raw turnips
Et voila! C’est le California Bullshit Fancy Toast.
After lunch, we go for a stroll through Lafayette Park with Soba and continue through the Pacific Heights neighborhood to the Lyon Street Steps, and then walk up Lyon Street and marvel at the grandiose mansions around us. Some are truly breathtaking and some are, frankly, just nonsensical. One house, in particular, stands out in the gorgeous sea of colorful Californian opulence: an overly geometric, metallic, and sterile feat of design that reeks of architectural pick-me vibes.
“I call this one the Modernist Dishwasher,” Adriana says.
I crack up.
“Oh!” she exclaims. “There is something else I want to show you.”
We go further up the street until we get to a four-way intersection, where I will have to take the bus to go back to my place. Adriana points at a large circle, formed by red bricks that have been—literally—cemented into the street.
“Is this an artwork or something?” I ask.
Adriana laughs.
“No, actually,” she says, “it’s San Francisco’s cisterns. There are more than a hundred of them in the city, and they are bodies of water that are kept underground in case of big fires, because the city had many major fire outbreaks in the past. So, it’s sort of a last-resort option for firefighters. The cisterns are disconnected entirely from the city’s water supply.”
Many questions immediately storm through my head: is the water down there cold? do algae form? do rats reign in the cisterns? how do they even access the cisterns if there is an emergency; wouldn’t it take forever to drill out this circular part of the street?
“I mean, how does this even work?” I ask, completely puzzled. “What, they come and drill as the fires are ravaging the city?”
“Uh,” Adriana giggles, “good question. Something to look into for the magazine?”
“Hey,” I sneer, “maybe that’s why they built the Modernist Dishwasher here.”
Well, it turns out that no drilling is needed and that the Modernist Dishwasher is, genuinely, just a questionable choice of aesthetic. Instead, the firefighters simply remove the manhole cover that is within the brick circle and pump out the water with a hose attached to the firetruck.
It also turns out that the fire hydrants in San Francisco are colored (blue, red, and black) according to which reservoir they belong to: Jones Street, Ashbury Street, or Twin Peaks, respectively. And, apparently, if the cisterns were empty, they would be the safest place to be during an earthquake.
The day after our hangout, I want to text Adriana about all this cistern trivia, but then it occurs to me that I would be sending trivia to the trivia queen. She probably already knew all this and wanted me to enjoy falling down the rabbit hole of trivia research, and even if she didn’t, she probably looked it all up the moment she got home.
