The 234 Apartment

Cities are neighborhoods writ large . They ebb up and down, depending on who is moving in and out. They proclaim their attractions, hide their warts, burnish their numbers. After all, real estate values ride on the telling. In the chest-thumping of the Bay Area, San Jose has always sought to distance itself from Oakland. San Jose was bigger, richer, safer. With one horrible event last week, however, a piece of that myth vanished. And we’re left pondering the irony. I’m talking about the killing of off- duty Oakland firefighter Jake P. Walter, 30, who was shot to death last Thursday night outside a night market on the edge of San Jose’s Japantown. Police called it a random and unprovoked attack. In San Jose, we suppose things unfold very differently.  A random attack like this might occur elsewhere in the Bay Area, but not in a vibrant San Jose neighborhood filled with upscale apartments. And it would never take a firefighter, one of the good guys. Under former Mayor Ron Gonzales , ...

Comedic dynamo (and Amy Schumer squad member ) Bridget Everett has made her name as the go-to gal for raunchy laughs. Anyone who’s seen footage of her live performances — or her recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon   — knows that she is, quite simply, a force. An Amazonian beauty with a powerhouse set of pipes and a penchant for chardonnay, the woman known as the Cabaret Hurricane runs around the room motorboating and mounting audience members , whether they like it or not. (They usually like it.) The word confident might spring to mind, though it feels like a little sissy of an adjective given the off-the- wall artistic cataclysm that is a Bridget Everett show .  But when it came to playing the hard-living, not-always- nice Barb Dombrowski in the drama Patti Cake$ — about a young woman trying to escape her dead-end New Jersey town by becoming a rap star — Everett felt wobbly. We caught up with her on a rare day off. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I spoke to [ Patti ...