There's a classic painting of Louis XVI, locks tumbling past his shoulders, hosed leg thrust outward. To the right is chesty Kaiser Wilhelm II, glaring, tin-hatted, not far from a somber and reassuring picture of Queen Elizabeth II. At the end of the portrait display, in the largest frame, hangs the photo of a woman with flowing gray hair, a royal blue suit and bone-white scarf. Her deep-set eyes, hawk's nose, and blood-red lips assemble into an image more regal than the rest: Antoinetta III, the queen of Sixth Street.
A 200-pound transsexual with a monarch's stride, Antoinetta Stadlman has long dreamed of ruling over her South of Market neighborhood from the Baldwin House room she's occupied for the past five years.
"If we played our cards right, we would be a force few could oppose," Antoinetta wrote last summer in a daily chronicle she has kept since 1991. "We could end up ruling South of Market, and end up directing the inevitable changes that are coming to the area."
She's played her cards well. Through a series of crafty alliances and well-planned crusades, during which she insinuated herself into a feud between city-funded charities, Antoinetta has managed to put herself in position to help direct a 15-year, $75-$95 million redevelopment of the slums along Sixth Street.
The Court
The blighted Sixth Street strip between Harrison and Stevenson streets was designated an earthquake recovery zone in 1990; the city now plans to sponsor 2,159 new housing units, 164,890 square feet of commercial space, and 182,820 square feet of industrial space there. The city will fund those improvements through a variety of means, including a special type of bond sale allowed in such redevelopment zones; the projected yearly spending is expected to be between $8 million and $10 million.
Antoinetta Stadlman and a group of fleabag hotel residents, slumlords, pawnbrokers, homeowners, and charity executives have just been elected to a citizens' committee that will wield veto power over this overhaul. Antoinetta, like several of her peers on the committee, climbed to office by joining into a battle between charities that compete for city funding; she has leveraged that competition into votes and power.
Four of these committees -- political entities that California law calls project area committees -- have sprouted in San Francisco just this year. State law requires cities to form such committees when conducting urban redevelopment projects; the law was adopted, at least in part, as atonement for past redevelopment projects that displaced poor people against their will.
People familiar with the law's history consider Willie Brown to be its patron saint. As a freshman assemblyman in 1967, Brown co-authored a bill with George Moscone that would have created such citizens' committees. The bill didn't pass until a year later, when Moscone carried the bill without Brown's co-authorship. Brown again pressed for legislation in 1992 that would have made it more difficult for city officials to manipulate the makeup of the committees. The legislation failed in 1992 but passed the following year under another assemblyman's aegis.
If the experience of cities in other parts of the state is any guide, Mayor Brown's legacy may extract an especially dear penance from the city over which he now presides. These obscure committees are elected by residents and business owners within the project area, and the numbers of actual voters often doesn't exceed the constituency of a grammar-school PTA. But the committees can wield power over multimillion-dollar budgets, and they have become infamous for wreaking havoc on California city planning.
In Southern California, project area committees thwarted, distorted, and, in some cases, canceled hundreds of millions of dollars of redevelopment projects from Anaheim to North Hollywood during the late 1980s.
In Anaheim a redevelopment project was canceled in 1987 after members of a project area committee threatened to show up at a meeting with the redevelopment agency wearing Mickey Mouse and Goofy costumes.
In Hollywood, City Councilman Michael Woo dissolved a project area committee in 1989 after enduring three years of what he called "wacky behavior" that included shouting matches and meeting walkouts. Though formally dissolved, the committee holds regular meetings to this day. Woo, who has abandoned government and is now a high-tech entrepreneur, remembers the experience with sadness: "There were fistfights that broke out after PAC meetings. There was name calling, and it all resulted in the committee becoming totally ineffective. The meetings themselves became a form of torture."
San Francisco's zeal for microdemocracy has produced ridiculously extended planning warfare in the past. But previous citizen groups weren't imbued with the formal authority project area committees are given by law.
State law not only gives these citizen committees veto power over redevelopment plans; the law also requires a two-thirds majority of the Board of Supervisors to override vetoes by a project area committee.
Earlier this month, a special election in the Sixth Street-South of Market area -- where city planners hope to turn what is now an extension of the Tenderloin skid row district into a community of spiffy low-income hotels, small businesses, and family housing -- appears to have set the stage for chaos. The project area committee chosen in that election -- in which 592 votes were cast -- is already riven by personal vendettas, petty feuds, and grandiose, even regal, visions.
The Kingdom
Blame for the Byzantine political situation on Sixth Street can in part be laid at the feet of the redevelopment agency itself. In its zeal to atone for buy-it-and-bulldoze-it redevelopment projects of the 1970s, the agency has taken pains to paint itself as community friendly, even community driven. To this end, agency officials have given or sought to give hundreds of thousands of public dollars to Sixth Street area community groups that favor -- or at least are not hostile to -- plans drafted by the agency. This infuriates the unfunded opponents of official redevelopment plans because they see this distribution of funds as politically motivated largess.
The warring groups of Sixth Street can be divided, then, into two general camps: those who favor the construction of new low-income apartment buildings in the area, as the redevelopment agency does, and those who support preservation and/or renovation of the current stock of old, run-down hotels.
If Sixth Street south of Market is a kingdom, its quarreling dukes, earls, and lords are the people who work for charities. They are the nonprofit developers, indigent tenant advocates, community organizers, health clinics, homeowners' associations, tenants' associations, small business proponents, minority services providers, and employment agencies that seem to populate every block, every neighborhood planning meeting, and every discreet argument whispered in this island of blight in the otherwise booming SOMA area.
The Fiefs
Well-dressed and well-spoken, the feuding charity directors of Sixth Street come from a different culture than the Indian immigrant slumlords, the destitute hotel residents, and retired shut-ins who populate the strip. The charity types have, however, learned to blend with the strip's urban landscape; one must know where to look to spot them.
A visitor descending into this flophouse-liquor store-pawnshop corridor from the Highway 280 exit onto Sixth Street quickly spots the eight-story Knox Hotel, a tan-and-turquoise monument to the notion that poorhouses can look smart. Its builder, John Elberling, directs the nonprofit development firm known as Tenants and Owners Develop-ment Corporation, or TODCO; he won't hesitate to tell you he would like to erect more such buildings, perhaps with aid from the city's redevelopment agency.
Walking north for 20 yards, the visitor passes the Jesus Cares Gospel Mission, the Yerba Buena Market, which is a liquor store, and the wrought-iron screen gates of the Sunnyside Hotel.
The Sunnyside's foyer serves as the Sixth Street branch office of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which is run by prominent political activist Randy Shaw. The clinic has developed an odd, symbiotic relationship with downtown slumlords; it is technically the slumlords' greatest enemy, yet depends upon the continued existence of slums for its survival.
Much of the clinic's city funding supports its main function as a sort of middleman who receives government benefit checks on behalf of slum tenants. The clinic then pays rent to landlords, giving residents the remainder of the money. This arrangement was designed to keep corrupt hotel owners from misusing residents' benefit checks, and to keep the residents, more than a few of whom have drug, alcohol, or mental problems, from squandering their rent money. Clinic lawyers also sustain themselves by suing owners of substandard hotels on behalf of residents.
The Housing Clinic considers the indigent hotels of the Sixth Street area an important city housing resource, and is suspicious of those who would tear them down. At the same time, it is no friend to Elberling, whose nonprofit firm supports many redevelopment agency initiatives and who owns buildings with managers who collect their own rent, and do not want or need Shaw's rent brokerage services.
From the clinic's Sunnyside foyer, a visitor steps out onto Minna Street -- one of the "alleys," as they're called here, the enclaves of spiffy houses, upscale live-work warehouses, and well-appointed du-, tri-, and four-plexes. Half a block south from Minna on Natoma Street is the live-work video sound production studio of Jeff Roth, president of his self-styled Natoma/SOMA Neighborhood Association.
Roth also opposes plans by the redevelopment agency to erect more low-income hotels in the Sixth Street area; he believes more single occupancy units would further blight the neighborhood. A regular and outspoken participant at agency-sponsored community meetings, Roth is not just an opponent of the redevelopment agency. He reviles, and is in turn despised by, the agency and its charity allies.
Upon leaving Roth's environs and crossing the street to Gina's Cocktail Lounge, a visitor might turn right at Mission Street and encounter a brick building with the fading words "S.F. Loan Association" on its west side. No longer a pawnbrokerage, the building is home to the South of Market Merchants and Residents Association (SSMRA), a catchall charity run by Henry Perez, an out-of-business pawnbroker who commutes from his home in San Jose. The primary activity of Perez's group involves the recruitment of area business and hotel owners to participate in neighborhood improvement projects. The association also lends its space to an AIDS-prevention needle exchange and a part-time health clinic.
Perez says he would like to open another pawnshop someday. Right now, though, he is living off a $19,900 grant the redevelopment agency gave him to drum up support for a program known as Property Management and Livability Standards. If it is ever implemented, this program would provide hotel owners with more than $100,000 of agency help to spruce up their hotels. Elberling also supports the program; a final contract to implement the plan awaits approval from the redevelopment agency commission.
As part of his efforts to gain support for the plan, Perez has set up tenant associations in several hotels and claims to have garnered the cooperation of at least 10 hotel owners.
The Housing Clinic and Jeff Roth hate him for these efforts. The Housing Clinic hates Perez because the tenant groups he has formed impinge on turf the clinic has long claimed as its own.
Roth hates Perez because he believes the former pawnshop owner is in cahoots with SOMA slumlords. As a result, Roth spends much of his free time trying to stop the redevelopment agency from funding Perez.
Roth has been so tireless in this quest that Perez, whose banter is usually as smooth as a used car salesman's, as well as officials at the redevelopment agency, no longer mince words when they speak with him.
"Goddamn it, Jeff, you're pissing me off again," one redevelopment manager said during a recent phone conversation Roth recorded.
And during a public meeting Roth packed with his allies, Perez told him, "I know you're here to mess with me, Jeff, but I'm not going to let you."
Across Mission and past the New 6th Street Market Liquors, a new visitor to the Sixth Street area arrives at the Baldwin House Hotel, an aged brick building that advertises clean rooms and reasonable rates -- daily, weekly, monthly.
After passing an ID card into the hotel watchman's iron cage, the visitor is let into a dark, musty hallway. He climbs the oily-carpeted stairway, turns right down a hall, and at the end, finds a door, painted bright yellow. In its center, affixed with a tack, is a golden crown, cut from a photograph.
The room behind the door is home to Antoinetta Stadlman, a woman who has come to deeply understand the courtly rivalries of Sixth Street. And while she professes few opinions about what the redevelopment agency ought, or ought not, do to the slums in her neighborhood, Antoinetta has used her political understanding to become a member of the area's ruling elite, its governing class. Someday, she dreams, she will become its queen. She will do so by becoming a San Francisco supervisor.
"We've got to start thinking about district elections coming up," she says.
The House of Baldwin
Antoinetta's designs weren't always so grand.
Until she came to the Baldwin House five years ago in a fit of desperation, she lived a life adrift.
Antoinetta entered the Baldwin House after two decades of aimless schooling at San Francisco State University and several failures in the workplace, all of which occurred while she lived with a sexual identity that she felt was not her own. By 1991, Antoinetta III was suffering what she describes as a complete financial collapse. She applied to the city's general assistance program and got herself a hotel room. At about the same time, she says, she changed her gender.
"I tried to look into it 20 years ago, but they couldn't do it because of my size," says Antoinetta, whose thick hands and broad shoulders still belie her change of sex. "Fifteen years later attitudes changed, and I was able to go right through."
Once ensconced in the Baldwin House, Antoinetta III signed up for a job as tenant building representative for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. The clinic has representatives in many of the hotels, hoping they will channel tenant complaints to clinic employees.
Antoinetta III saw potential for much more, she says.
"They didn't have any real, formal job description, so I saw the job as sort of a blank slate to do what I wanted," she says.
Before long, most of the Baldwin House's tenants began bringing complaints about their rooms to Antoinetta, and she took their trust seriously. She spent her days monitoring work crews to make sure repairs were done right and on time. She kept city health inspectors apprised of possible code violations, and did what she could to expel drug dealers from hotel hallways.
This last task proved the most challenging, as menacing crack dealers were difficult to confront, and the Baldwin's owner, Nick Patel, didn't seem to be doing anything about them.
It was in the struggle to rid her hotel of drug dealers that Antoinetta III saw her power increase tenfold. Gathering 14 tenants into a class-action lawsuit in small claims court, she charged that Patel had let his hotel become a drug-infested public nuisance. Antoinetta won $5,000 for each of the residents -- a $70,000 judgment.
Before the lawsuit, Antoinetta III made suggestions; now, she made demands. Once, she had lobbied for the eviction of troublemakers; now, she banished them by edict. Nick Patel, a middle-aged, soft spoken Indian who had treated her as a nuisance, now treated Antoinetta III with deference.
"You see that crown? I put that there after I won the lawsuit," she says. "After all, it's not everyone who wins $5,000."
As part of her self-described ombudslady duties, Antoinetta keeps a daily chronicle, which she files in rows of faded, royal-blue binders that occupy two bookshelves in her tiny, cluttered, second-story room. She adds to the chronicle every day. And particularly busy days can require five or more dated and timed entries.
Antoinetta says she keeps the logs in case she later needs to bring events up with Patel, the clinic, or the courts. But given that the Baldwin is Antoinetta's entire life -- she'll tell you as much -- the logs read like a diary of her aspirations to sovereignty.
She lovingly recalls the apex of her reign over the House of Baldwin in an entry into the daily chronicle, labeled 6:10 p.m., Feb. 20:
"I noticed that yesterday it was exactly one year since Nick finally came up to my office in the wake of the Small-Claims case, and pledged himself to co-operate with me in getting the Hotel back on track. As I have been getting the feeling lately that Nick has been slightly less attentive to my concerns, I felt that this was an excellent opportunity to reinforce the ties that bound him to me. Accordingly, I went to the Multi-National and bought two beers, Miller drafts, Nick's favorite. Nick was in the back office at the Baldwin, so I went back and asked him if he knew what day yesterday was. He didn't know, so I told him, giving him one of the beers, and saying that the progress we made with the hotel in the past year deserved a toast. We sipped in silence for a moment while I let Nick reflect on the situation a year ago ... I then said that we ought to toast the next year of working together, and Nick agreed, saying that we would work together 'for always' as we clicked our beer cans."
It wasn't to last. At about the same time she shared draft beers with Nick, Antoinetta began feuding with Henry Perez.
This next epoch in her reign is one of war, and it continues to this day. The epoch finds its roots at a neighborhood meeting last fall, when Antoinetta III refused to endorse Henry's effort to gain neighborhood backing for the management standards scheme, which the redevelopment agency supports, and which would funnel some $100,000 of agency renovation funding to the hotel owners who are the bane of the Housing Clinic that employs Antoinetta.
After the meeting, Antoinetta wrote in her diary, "Henry said that he would not allow me to block four years of work, and if I could block the Problem Solving Council, that he would rally in the neighborhood at large to support his plan. If looks could have killed, Henry would be up for my murder a number of times over."
And so it came to pass that Henry Perez, with the help of members of his Merchants and Residents Association, set up tenant committees in several hotels, including the Baldwin House.
At the Baldwin House, recruiting alternate tenant advocates wasn't difficult. Janet Norman, a 200-pound transsexual who lives one door down from Antoinetta III, had bristled at Antoinetta III's heavy-handed rule, and jumped at the chance to form a tenants' association that would challenge the Queen of Baldwin House.
"We've gone to Toni and said, 'Let's solve the problems, lets work together,' " Janet says. "But she says, 'You're not legitimate, and I'm going to put you down.' That's the attitude we get out of Toni. Toni's approach has been the standard legalistic, political-machine kind of approach that hasn't solved the problems in the past, and it's not going to now."
Antoinetta III considered this encroachment a grave threat to her reign. If tenants went to Perez's organization with their problems, Antoinetta's reason to exist might be eliminated.
After much contemplation, Antoinetta III decided that her power would have to reach beyond the Baldwin House Hotel, if her reign were to prevail. She would have to cement alliances, plan crusades, plot against enemies, and wage bitter battle. She would need to expose her most dangerous enemy, Henry Perez, for what she believed he was: a vile, bankrupt pawnbroker, a Republican carpetbagger from San Jose, a taker of money from the hand of the state, a befriender of slumlords, a developers' ally.
And so it also came to pass that Antoinetta Stadlman found Jeff Roth, the Natoma Street property owner, Jerry Clark, a part-time bartender at the M&M Bar on Fifth Street, Eric McDougall, a Natoma Street public relations consultant, and a half-dozen residents of Sixth Street hotels. Together, they formed the Positive Futures Coalition campaign slate, and together they ran for the redevelopment agency's project area committee for Sixth Street.
From there, they hoped, they would banish Henry Perez from his building on Sixth and Mission to his home in San Jose.
Meanwhile, allies of Perez, including John Elberling and Janet Norman, organized a slate of their own, named Allies For A Better Community.
Antoinetta III recalled her slate's first strategy meeting at a tony live-work loft that is the home of Eric McDougall. "We all sat around what appeared to be a most expensive dining table set, and Eric served us all up glasses of wine," Antoinetta III wrote. "On an impulse, I caught one up and hoisted it, calling for a toast. This got everyone's attention, so raising my glass high, I proclaimed, 'Here is to the demise of the SSMRA!' "
The Crusade
If Sixth Street's politicos hated each other in the past, that hatred turned to loathing during the campaign for election to the neighborhood's project area committee. The organizations of both Perez and Antoinetta printed bales of flyers and counter-flyers, canvassed door-to-door, and called in favors and friendships.
Antoinetta III handed out flyers calling Henry Perez an interloper. Henry's organization distributed flyers that labeled Antoinetta III a cynical dissembler.
A week before the April 17 elections, Antoinetta III brusquely scans a sheaf of papers she has just brought back from the registrar of voters. The papers list the names of every Democrat in the neighborhood.
She's scouting the neighborhood, figuring out which voters fall within the boundaries of the redevelopment agency's Sixth Street project area.
Antoinetta III will post Positive Futures Coalition flyers on the door of every registered Democrat in the area, accompanied by letters denouncing Henry Perez as a carpetbagging San Jose Republican. To do this, she will enlist the election-day aid of Jeremy Graham, an articulate, shaggy-haired employee of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic whose rapport with San Francisco's skid row indigents is legendary. She will visit the squalid hotels in the area, calling on Housing Clinic tenant representatives, alerting them to the urgency of her cause.
"Hello? It's Antoinetta, from the Baldwin ... Jackie? Hi Jackie, how's it going," Antoinetta says, leaning toward the doorway of Jacqueline Benjamin, who lives on the second floor of the Sharon Hotel on Sixth Street. Antoinetta has recruited Jacqueline to run on her slate as a tenant candidate, but Jacqueline has had an allergic reaction to mosquito bites, and hasn't been able to attend Antoinetta's organizing meetings.
"This is a packet of stuff for you, for this hotel, and this is a packet of stuff for the Raymond Hotel right around the corner," Antoinetta says. "And, you know, any time you get a chance over the weekend, if you're feeling bad, take it easy for a day, but every room needs to get one."
Come election morning, Antoinetta is agitated. Wearing a light sun dress and a pair of cross-country ski boots, the large transsexual tromps between the Delta Hotel, where the election's first phase will be held from 9 a.m. until noon, to the Sunnyside, where the Housing Clinic is giving free donuts and coffee to area residents who vote.
At 9:30 a.m., the Registrar of Voters-approved ballot boxes are already a half hour late. The delay -- which is cleared up by 9:45 -- heightens the already tense atmosphere in this high-stakes battle.
Across the street from the Delta, at the South of Market Merchants and Residents Association, Henry Perez's helpers fold flyers for their slate. Henry is in a bad mood, his constant smile strained by what he fears may be impending doom. He's heard about Antoinetta's sophisticated political organizing, and word has come back that Jerry Clark, the M&M bartender, has dozens of friends in the retirement homes that ring the neighborhood's perimeter.
But Roth and Antoinetta aren't much more confident than Perez. Antoinetta doesn't have many personal friends on the strip, despite her work at the Baldwin, and Roth's enemies have painted him in their flyers as a self-serving yuppie.
In their desperation to win, both sides execute strategies designed to exploit their strengths.
Henry's clinic has been sending tuberculosis-test patients across the street to vote. "I was in for my TB test and they sent me over here," said one sporting, middle-aged man as he pushed through the Delta's glass doors.
Back at the Sunnyside, meanwhile, Jeremy Graham, the Housing Clinic caseworker, is working the street like a man born for politics.
Holding a sheaf of Positive Futures Coalition flyers in one hand and gesturing dramatically with the other, Jeremy runs from one passer-by to another, urging each to vote for Antoinetta's slate.
The fact that many Sixth Street residents, especially those loitering on the street at midday, are mentally disabled, alcoholic, drug addicted, or all three, complicates Jeremy's work.
"I swear, I'm trying to quit, man," said one twentysomething tattooed man with long, blond hair, pushing away Jeremy's flyer.
"I've got one right here," a rummy, older man responds, pulling a folded blue Positive Futures Coalition flyer from his pocket, drawing it to his mouth and kissing it once, twice, three times. "I love it. I love it. I'm always going to keep it. Always."
As things continue in this vein, the skin on Antoinetta's face tightens.
Someone has posted an anonymous hate letter around the neighborhood calling her a "two-face, two-life prick," and Antoinetta isn't sure what sort of effect it will have. Will voters realize such a letter could only come from the forces of evil? Or will they take it at face value and vote against Antoinetta III? Only time, and the final ballot count, will tell.
Late in the day, three busloads of Filipino retirees on their way to Reno cast even more uncertainty on the result. Their drivers have turned back because of mechanical difficulties and let them off at the Delta -- also home to the Philippines senior center. They all stream into the polling place and vote -- for whom, nobody knows. As residents of area retirement homes, they are beholden to neither side of the Sixth Street wars. Each camp fears its enemies may have gotten to the retirees.
By evening the turnout proves to have been fantastic. Nearly 600 people -- a mob in the world of project area committee elections -- have turned out to vote. When polls close, the results are completely in doubt.
For each side, a loss would be devastating, a fact that shows on their faces. A project area committee controlled by Antoinetta's faction would surely cancel the management standards plan, eliminating Henry's livelihood and squashing John Elberling's efforts to improve the quality of life in slum hotels.
For Antoinetta, a loss would bankrupt her dreams, halt her climb from the depths of failure, keep her from becoming the queen of Sixth Street.
The Victory
Finally, at midnight, city vote-counters look up from their tables, one by one. Antoinetta has made it onto the project area committee as one of four representatives elected in the hotel tenant category, but just barely. She registers fourth place. Her allies Jeff Roth and Eric McDougall are also voted in, gaining Residential Owner-Occupant slots. Jacqueline Benjamin, the Sharon Hotel resident whom Antoinetta had recruited, far outpolls the other hotel tenant candidates, garnering 215 votes. (Antoinetta pulled just 145.)
But Henry Perez's slate has polled nearly as well as Antoinetta's. Given the ambiguity of the myriad Sixth Street alliances, it's hard to tell who will have the advantage when the committee begins meeting next month. For all intents and purposes, the committee is split between the two slates.
So the wars will continue, and the word on the street remains conspiratorial. Jeff Roth's faction will reportedly try to get Michael Kaplan ousted from his job as South of Market project manager for the redevelopment agency. Antoinetta III will clamor for the cancellation of the Management Livability Standards. John Elberling, who has also been elected to the committee, will be able to push for increased low-income housing. Nothing whatsoever is settled.
The Tone of Things to Come
In Southern California, divided project area committees produced gerrymandered planning maps, pitcher-throwing tirades, and endlessly postponed neighborhood improvement. In cases where committees became consumed with personal quarrels, their yelling has made them useless. Government officials came to regard them as irrelevant brawling societies, and went ahead with redevelopment plans without their input.
Sixth Street below Market can scarcely afford this kind of chaos, if it is to become anything but the slum it has been. By any reasonable judgment, Sixth Street's smelly, decrepit, cramped hotels are an affront to human dignity. Its pawnshops, liquor stores, and cocktail lounges are monuments to the hopelessness that can trap almost anyone who has fallen on truly hard times.
Inside the bars, ancient people sit in the dark for hours at a time.
In front of the liquor stores, hotel residents holler in defiance of some vague imperative between tilts from a brown paper bag.
Outside the pawnshops, youngsters in droopy clothes nod at passers-by, hoping for a sale.
Because of special taxing powers bestowed by state law, San Francisco has tens of millions of dollars to spend to make this piece of skid row less of a dead end.
But that same state law has given Sixth Street a project area committee whose members have sweeping governmental powers -- and are absolutely consumed by petty personal vendettas.
Post election, Antoinetta III is hoping for the best.
"Hopefully all this slate identification will fade with time and we can all get together," she said. "We have a chance to get together and forget about all that and get together and get some things done. This is going to be kind of new for me, but hopefully we'll be able to accomplish something, and develop some ideas of our own that make sense."
Antoinetta's statements represent a dramatic change of tone from her vitriolic election crusade. But the change is not altogether surprising. It's the sort of measured, constructive tone one would hope for from a newly-elected public official. It is a tone almost befitting royalty.
