One woman started an organization that books free professional entertainment in hospitals, senior centers, special-needs schools, and prisons. Another founded an educational facility that aids ex-felons, prostitutes, alcoholics and addicts.

One guy has given away suits and ties to homeless men, as well as to poor ones with homes, to help them get jobs. Another challenged Major League Baseball’s restrictive “reserve clause,” action that led to players becoming free agents in all pro sports.

Those four are among seven who’ll be honored May 31 by a new Bay Area project, the Mensch Hall of Fame.

You may have heard the Yiddish word “mensch” but have some trouble pinning down its meaning. According to one online dictionary, it’s a label for a person of honor or integrity. Rabbi Yosef Langer, who has led the fervently orthodox Jewish San Francisco Chabad-Lubavitch community for decades, is happy to expand on that definition.

“A mensch,” he says, “is somebody who has the quality of caring for himself and his fellows, for the community and humanity, a person who’s honest, respects others, is compassionate and kind, and is genuine in who they are and what they do.”

Awardees of The Mensch Hall of Fame’s inaugural event will be three women and three men — plus another woman who’ll get lifetime achievement honors.

The awards dip into the worlds of philanthropy, social activism, charity, sports and politics.

Recipients are Mimi Silbert, Tiffany Shlain, the late Mimi Fariña, George Zimmer, Josh Becker and the late Curt Flood — with Dolores Huerta getting the lifetime award.

Though the 79-year-old Langer and his 38-year-old son, Rabbi Moshe Langer, run the project, it was the brainchild of Brian Webster, who volunteered for Chabad for a decade before he became a paid employee a few years ago. To stay with the theme, the elder Langer says of Webster, who once worked for the late rock promoter Bill Graham at the Fillmore, “He’s a mensch.”

Proceeds from the event will benefit The Giving Kitchen, which, according to Moshe Langer, “provides food for financially challenged people,” and the Bill Graham Menorah Project, which is responsible for lighting the huge menorah in Union Square each year and includes a new program “where we gave out 1,000 menorahs last year to spread even more light.”

Graham had financed the first lighting of the Union Square menorah, a one-day Chanukah event in 1975. The annual affair there now lasts the entire eight-day length of the holiday.

Chabad, adds Yosef Langer, is now also heavily invested in Noah’s Ark on the Bay, a project that fosters mensch-hood all over the globe, “outreaching beyond the Jewish community — to enlighten, not to proselytize.”

To determine who should receive Hall of Fame honors, the younger Langer says organizers “looked for people in the community that have shown a good deal of mensch-behavior (philanthropy, charity, volunteering).”

Zimmer — the suit-and-tie guy who started the Men’s Warehouse “from the ground up and created an environment where people were happy to come to work, and who started a fund to send the children of workers to college” — was the first selected.

The posthumous awards are going to Fariña, who started Bread and Roses, the organization that sends 1,000 musicians and performers each year to close to 100,000 isolated audience members, and Flood, who sacrificed his baseball career in pursuit of better negotiating positions for players.

The lifetime achievement award to Huerta, 93, recognizes her civil rights and labor activism, including co-founding the National Farmworkers Association, a predecessor of United Farm Workers, with Cesar Chavez.

The other mensch awards go to state Sen. Becker, D-San Mateo, who co-founded New Cycle Capital, a pioneer in building socially responsible businesses; Silbert, who founded the educational Delancey Street Foundation, which supports substance abusers and ex-convicts via academic, vocational and social programs; and Tiffany Shlain, an independent filmmaker and internet pioneer.

Chabad-Lubavitch of San Francisco, which has long been known for its creativity, is part of an international movement with roots in the Hasidic movement of the 18th century that runs an extensive network of educational and social services. Some 3,000 Chabad centers exist in more than 65 countries.

The Inaugural Mensch Hall of Fame Awards, VIP Reception, Auction & Dinner are at 6 p.m. May 31 at The Mint, 85 Fifth St., San Francisco. Tickets are $200. For details, call (415) 668-6178 or visit https://menschhalloffame.org. 

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/.

Satya Chávez displays anger in Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Photo by Kevin Berne.

Whipping back and forth onstage like a famished tiger about to pounce, Satya Chávez attacks her audience with passion and poignancy.

Along the way, she transforms into a one-woman band and chorus, a one-woman story hour, and a one-woman immigrant history lesson. And she’s mesmerizing in all of it.

In Where Did We Sit on the Bus? — a solo show at the Marin Theatre Company (MTC) in Mill Valley — she musically and verbally, comically and melodramatically traces how the daughter of undocumented Mexicans becomes a consummate performer.

Audience members clap, laugh aloud, and replicate her various rhythms with their toes as she talks, in character as Bee Quijada, about metaphorically being a composite Spanish soap opera, challah French toast, piñata, and, as Emma Lazarus’ poem is quoted at the base of the Statue of Liberty, an integral part of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

By far the most fascinating part of her performance is live looping, whereby she records vocals and/or instrumental riffs and, after hitting pedals or pushing buttons on a pad that contains software, instantly plays it back in real time. She uses that technique, which allows her to sing or play over the recorded track, throughout.

Lighting in Where Did We Sit on the Bus? is spellbinding. Photo by Kevin Berne.

The set itself — a deep cavern containing a series of linear flashing lights that she alternately retreats into and escapes from — also becomes a spellbinding element of the show.

As does the comedy, which ranges from her idol-worshipping imitation of Michael Jackson to her schtick about mythological big-jawed Latinos eating whole chickens, pigs, and cows.

So do her rapid mood changes.

To help set those feelings (and evolving thought patterns), she shifts from ukulele to two guitars, from mouth organ to recorder, then to keyboard. She switches musically from a variety of Latin rhythms to hip-hop to self-composing. Her vocals, sometimes at triple speed, move the plot-less, life-journey along (“everything is happening so fast,” she sings).

Yes, a word or a line can be missed unless a theatergoer is paying real-close attention.

It’s also possible to not fully grok Chávez’s perspective as an “intersectional feminist” — that is, one who can provide insight on the blending of a person’s varied social and political identities that in turn can create different modes of discrimination and privilege. The bespectacled performer actually points out her own multiple aspects, being a first-generation American Latina, partner of a White woman, and an actor/singer/instrumentalist/composer.

Satya Chávez is Bee Quijada in Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Photo by Kevin Berne.

As for change, she never alters her outfit — a white blouse, bland brown cargo pants, and white Nike shoes. They’re comfortable enough, apparently, to cover all bases, and to do a somersault in.

The first part of the show, penned by Brian Quijada and directed by Matt Dickson, rockets along, going from a womb-like experience and bomb-like birth through Sunday churchgoing to education in a white-bread neighborhood in Illinois (“all my friends are Jewish”) to the University of Iowa to a New York City relationship with a Caucasian woman. Opening night, however, the performance lasted 15 minutes longer than the advertised 90-minutes. A mistake. The excess was palpable while Chávez crammed in too much of a laundry list before hitting some fire-eating anger.

When it’s over, the performer has answered the title question (and its obvious reference to civil rights spearhead Rosa Parks) with a Latina perspective and depth that can’t help but be admired — and she emphasizes hope, even in situations where many underdogs have been so beaten down.

It occurs to me, upon reflection, that any review of this show may be superfluous: Where Did We Sit on the Bus? must be experienced to be appreciated. It’s that dense, that different, and that’s a good thing.

Where Did We Sit on the Bus? will play at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through May 28. Tickets: $25 to $65. Info: 415-388-5208 or marintheatre.org

Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.