Have any parking tickets lying around? Musician Olive “Pants” Panthofer will take them off your hands — if they’ve been paid off, of course — for her latest project: Making a dress from these burdensome pieces of paper.
Her plan is to photograph the dress as Spotify cover art for an upcoming diss track about the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, set for release in late December.
Until last March, Panthofer, 26, worked as a research associate at Vicinitas Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotechnology startup.
When the company went under, she suddenly found herself with nowhere to drive to every morning, a nightmare for those who own a car in the city without a parking permit or designated spot.
“I’m out of a job. And now, because I can’t [re]park my car every two hours, and because I’m not leaving at 8 a.m. every day, I got $800 worth of parking tickets,” said Panthofer. It was about eight tickets in total.
To make matters worse, within days of losing her job, her landlord asked her to move out because he wanted to take over the unit himself.
To pay off her parking tickets, Panthofer signed up for an SFMTA program that lets volunteers work with different nonprofits in the city. But at least half the hours must go toward cleaning city buses.
She was appalled when she found out that SFMTA requires an enrollment fee between $29 to $84 to participate in the community-service program.
“The shifts start at 4 a.m., and every hour you work, you get $20 off your citation amount. So I ended up working 21 hours,” said Panthofer. “It really sucked, but I didn’t have a job.”
Frustrated beyond measure at the problems stacking up, she eventually turned to the one constant in her life: Music. One day she sat down at her piano and started composing:
SFMTA, I’ve got a strongly-worded letter with some things to say.
I’ll admit, you’ve really got a special talent for ruining my days.
What makes you think I’ve got 100 spare dollars I’m willing to pay?
“I’ve been taking piano lessons, so I had a fun chord progression in my head. I guess this song is going to be about how annoyed I am by how much money I owe this goddamn city,” said Panthofer.
Panthofer has been playing music for live audiences since she was 16. Even when she was working in biotechnology, she would have at least one musical gig every weekend. Panthofer and her friend Romzoni, who often produces her music, perform at art galleries and opening events.
They also try to make quirky cover art for streaming platforms like Spotify, said Panthofer. The initial vision for the SFMTA song was to fill a bathtub with parking tickets and photograph herself in it.
But one day, she saw a fashion mannequin for sale in Chinatown. She knew she had a white dress she never wore in her closet back home, and the idea of a “parking tickets dress” struck her.
Once she settled on her vision, she realized she would need far more parking tickets than she had managed to accrue herself. So she spent the last few months on a side quest soliciting paid parking tickets.
She got the word out, starting with her friends, and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to collect tickets.
“It’s become normal for me to go to a party and someone will greet me with a hug and then immediately slip me one or two parking tickets,” said Panthofer.
One friend donated a “collage of parking tickets” they had created to support Panthofer’s cause. Another friend collected parking tickets from her coworkers. Her clients at a yoga studio in Nob Hill where she teaches would bring her “stacks of 12, $100 tickets.” They often came with notes like “make them pretty!”
Other sources who knew about the project from social media surprised Panthofer.
After she posted on Nextdoor, the neighborhood app, a user reached out with a whole roll of parking tickets that he had seen a parking meter enforcement officer drop on the ground. Another Nextdoor user in Lower Haight regularly finds discarded parking tickets in his driveway and collects them for Panthofer.
“It randomly turned into a kind of community art project,” said Panthofer. She feels good knowing that, when some people get a parking ticket, she has contributed some “giggliness” to the situation because they think of her.
Before this dress, Panthofer had never sewn anything, calling it a “learning curve.”
For each ticket, she sewed buttons onto the dress, then folded tickets into accordion-like shapes with electrical tape and glued them onto the buttons. The sweetheart neckline has tickets fanning out like starbursts, and tickets flare at the hemline, reminiscent of flapper-era style.
“Every time I sew one on, it will pinch a little bit of the fabric into the button. The dress has been getting tighter and tighter — I hope it still fits!” she said.
She now has more than 100 parking tickets on the dress. With the piece almost finished, she decided to make some accessories with the leftover tickets: A hat covered with overlapping tickets, and a small necklace.
The project has ignited conversation in the comments section of her TikTok videos documenting the dress about the perils of having a car in the city, said Panthofer.
Especially for musicians and artists who have equipment that has to be lugged from gig to gig, a car is imperative. But those are often the same occupations that can’t always afford the multiple parking tickets, she said.
“San Francisco has such high fines for parking citations, and they say it’s to promote this transit-first idea, but simultaneously, they are actively defunding Muni,” Panthofer said.
Panthofer is currently working multiple jobs as she settles into a new creative career. Along with her sessions at the yoga studio, she performs and teaches music to students of various ages.
Eventually, Panthofer hopes to sell this “collector’s item” parking-ticket dress to someone for the total cost of all the parking tickets sewn onto it. She is also working on getting a parking permit in the city.
She has no inclination ever to return to biotech.
“This used to be an artistic city. But now, with tech and everything, it felt like the stereotype was that there weren’t any living artists left here,” she said.
But, as she’s letting the “wind take her wherever,” she has met more creatives who love their work and have managed to stay.
Her parking ticket struggles, though, seem far from over. In the weeks since Mission Local spoke to her, she got two more. To pay them off, she’ll be cleaning buses again.