Comment on Artists, musicians missing in Oakland fire

Tied together through the Bay Area’s close-knit techno arts community, dozens had converged for a night of drinking and dancing at an underground rave inside a converted warehouse that served as an artists live-in wonderland. Many were students and service workers holding restaurant and retail jobs while trying to break through as entertainers, sustaining a creative culture that’s become scarce in the Bay Area as economic prosperity increasingly prices out the arts scene. Micah Danemayer, 28, was doing a light show for the party and he and his girlfriend, Alana “Jen” Kane, were among the missing late Saturday afternoon, according to Danemayer’s friend and bandmate Devyn Fordyce, 26. Danemayer and Fordyce had recently started an electronic music band, Red Cellar, playing synthesizers to create improvised rhythmic noises. The sound artist, whose stage name is Dialtedears, came to California from Iowa in 2005 to get his master’s degree at San Francisco Art Institute and never looked back, according to his girlfriend, Grace Lovio. “He’s really connected to the Bay Area art scene,” she said by phone Saturday afternoon, before boarding her flight to the Bay Area from France where she is studying at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Michela Gregory, among the missing Saturday afternoon as well, is a student at San Francisco State University studying child development, while holding a job at Urban Outfitters on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. “I’m in shock,” said her father, David Gregory, who was in Oakland on Saturday to try to learn the whereabouts of his daughter at the sheriff’s substation where the Red Cross was set up. Wadsworth was the entrepreneurial type, Tasoff said, and his latest venture was trying to start a cannabis salsa company. Since moving from Boston about three years ago, Wadsworth had taken an interest in art, making sculptures at the warehouse, Tasoff said. Vanessa Plotkin, a third-year sociology student at UC Berkeley, went with her roommate to downtown Oakland and likely stopped at the rave, too, said family members who had been texting her about her plans to go to a party and hadn’t heard from her since 11 p.m.