Feinstein and My Mother

The moderate politician and the raging progressive

I have heard some people on the far left of the liberal spectrum talk smack about Dianne Feinstein, whose death Friday hit San Francisco like an out-of-control driverless car and caused political angst across the country.

Feinstein, 90, was a moderate Democrat, pretty far from your typical “progressive,” a term that generally refers to far left Democrats or, as Republicans like to call them, the woke mob. She did, however, have at least one progressive friend that I know of — my mother.

My mom, Joan von Briesen, died Sept. 27 2022, almost exactly a year before Feinstein, which seemed kind of appropriate since my mom was also a year ahead of Feinstein at Stanford University, where they first got to know each other. One might say that my mother helped get Feinstein started in politics at The Farm.

The relationship went something like this: It was summer and Feinstein was president of the Associated Students at Stanford. She had no one to help her, given that it was summertime and no students were around, so she went out looking for a vice president to lend a hand. She found my mom.

"I went to summer school so I could go ski in the winter and she went to summer school for a different reason — because she had an important role,” my mother told me in a tape recorded conversation before she died. "I sort of knew her before, but not well... She needed a vice president and I needed something to do.”

My mother, a tennis-playing, dumpster-diving recycling pioneer and free spirit who filled her Cole Valley home with nude paintings and sculptures and a wild assortment of drift wood, wigs and odds and ends she had collected, was at that time still trying to conform to society’s norms and standards of respectability, so she accepted the role.

Student government gave the two women a chance to get to know eachother.

"I don’t remember doing anything. If there was something to do I was supposed to do it, but there didn’t seem to be much going on,” my mother told me. “She’s the one who did the work.”

Feinstein, she said, was running hither and thither doing all kinds of student-body-oriented things that my mother had zero interest in or aptitude for.

"She was serious about getting ahead. She always was ambitious,” said my mother. Meanwhile, "I essentially didn’t do anything."

My mother later worked as a secretary for Pan American Airways and said Feinstein worked in the same building. By this time my mother was working on her tennis game and painting skills, developing her quirky bohemian ambitions and honing her progressive, activist credentials. Feinstein, meanwhile, was doing the mundane, seemingly pointless work that would eventually get her gigs as San Francisco supervisor, mayor of San Francisco and United States Senator.

"We were on diverging paths,” said my mother, chuckling. "She was heading up the social ladder while I was heading down."

One day, years later, my mother joined a protest at City Hall to demonstrate against an outlandish policy decision impinging on certain civil rights that nobody can now remember. She was, for reasons lost to history, dressed head to toe in a white, spotted Dalmatian suit, including a great big dog snout with a black nose at the end. Feinstein, who was mayor by this time, walked past the group of shouting demonstrators and nearly bumped into my mother, who was hoping her old friend wouldn’t recognize her.

Feinstein, however, stopped in front of the dog-suited entity, rolled her eyes, shook her head and sighed.

"Hello Joan,” said the future senator wryly as she scanned her college friend's outlandish costume with an air of lighthearted disapproval, but, ultimately, with acceptance. “Fancy meeting you here."