Willie Brown has an image to maintain, and his appointment secretary's personal homepage shouldn't hurt it much.
San Francisco's flamboyant mayor, routinely accused of preferring style over substance, is also known to appreciate attractive women staffers. Consequently, many of them are. Most just aren't as up-front about it as Esther Hwang.
So tongues are wagging in Baghdad-by-the-Bay today after the town's morning newspaper, the Chronicle (no stranger to the style-over-substance moniker itself), ran a nice centerpiece of Ms. Hwang -- make that the scantily clad Ms. Hwang -- using photos purloined from her homepage.
Hwang, it turns out, has interests extending well beyond her $40,951 job of keeping track of Hizzoner's complicated personal affairs. She's a former beauty queen (Miss Asian America), a model, and a budding actress. And she sees nothing wrong with putting her formidable portfolio online.
In a town like San Francisco -- that freethinker's paradise or a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, depending upon your point of view -- neither does anybody else. According to the Chronicle's city hall watchers, Phil Matier and Andrew Ross, in whose column Hwang is featured, Brown shrugged it off with a laugh. He even reportedly arranged to have some of her pictures printed up.
Still, don't get the idea that San Francisco only hires Baywatch babes to keep its civic engine humming smoothly. Matier and Ross plucked this example of a deeper, more thoughtful Hwang from her online bio: "Her future goals, besides pursuing her immediate modeling/acting career, are to attend law school and graduate school, teach literature, write books, get married 'to a wonderful man,' have a family, be champion dog breeder, and ultimately help others 'through my love for God.'"
San Franciscans might wonder why, given her expressed desire to work with dogs, Hwang isn't assigned to the city's public transit system. Obviously, her skills lie elsewhere.
Or do they? As Matier and Ross note wryly: "But can she type?"
