Punk Family Values

George also attended the school (he now goes to San Francisco State University). He has a sharp wit, and shares his father's penchant for warped comedy. The young tech whiz made a name for himself with his quirky film projects, which have occasionally starred his sister (he has directed Lou Lou in movies since he first dressed her up as Godzilla at age 7), and landed him in the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Danville International Children's Film Festival. George's pièce de resistance while at the arts school: "Urban Frankenstein," a slapstick short about microwaving a delinquent hamster.

Eberhardt has taught both Rosenthal kids. "Lou Lou is more of an exhibitionist," he says. "You'll notice George doesn't have any piercings and his hair isn't dyed. He's more of his father's son."

After Henry screens "Easter Morning" for Lou Lou's class, he announces the finale — "Android 207," a stop-motion short about a robot trapped in a torture maze. Only this time Eberhardt is safe. No fluids — motor or otherwise — will be spilled here. Lou Lou, who's been quietly watching the presentation, breaks her silence when Henry says the last title, offering a brief "Yay" and a muffled clap.

Daddy's twisted little girl.

For his part, Henry Rosenthal was daddy's twisted little boy. He was raised in Cincinnati, the son of George Rosenthal, a photographer who made a comfortable middle-class living playing the stock market. George Rosenthal died of severe asthma and extreme allergies at age 44 when Henry was 12, but not before making a deep impression on his son about the art of subversive behavior. His father was an early pop art collector, filling the Rosenthal home "with incredible modern art where the paint was still wet." At age 7 Henry was giving museum tours through the family home — and beating experimental composer (and his father's poker buddy) John Cage at chess.

Carola grew up in Cloverdale, the daughter of a choir director mother. "We were the kind of family who would sit and play chamber music in the living room on Sunday afternoon with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins," she says. "My family's always been very classically WASPish. My dream was that I was adopted. The more I found out who I was, the less I fit in in Cloverdale."

The couple met on the campus of New College, back when the alternative New Age school was still in a Sausalito warehouse. Ever the early adopter, Henry found the college through an ad in the back of Rolling Stone. He enrolled in 1973; Carola arrived a year later. They each earned a bachelor's in humanities, New College's sole degree at the time.

Henry spent the next ten years proposing to Carola. Each time she would accept and start compiling a list of what she calls "a few hundred close friends and family" for the wedding. And each time, they got distracted by "so many other interesting things we were busy doing," she says. They agreed to get married later, when they had more free time. Eventually the two eloped at City Hall in 1986.

The couple initially fell in love when they performed together in two plays and a medieval music group. Their union helped produce Other Music, an experimental music ensemble whose members made their own instruments based on a special tuning system, Just Intonation, that requires a 76-page primer to explain. Three-chord punk this ain't.

Not that they were punk-averse. Carola played sax in a fashion-conscious trio called Vs. in the late '70s. Henry became Hank Rank, the drummer for Crime, San Francisco's self-proclaimed "first and only rock 'n' roll band." Crime formed in 1976 and played loud, scuzzy rock, building the band's rep by dressing in cop uniforms, performing at San Quentin, and refusing to open for anyone but the Ramones (which they did) or the Sex Pistols (whom they famously turned down). The group also released the first U.S. punk single, "Hot Wire My Heart," which was later covered by New York art punks Sonic Youth.

In 1979, at the tail end of Henry's two and a half years in Crime, Henry and Carola went shopping for a house. Carola wasn't a white-picket-fence type. They looked at a number of places before stumbling upon a vacant warehouse across from the old Weinstein's department store. Carola thought it was perfect; Henry was skeptical. She won. "This building is really Carola's vision," he says. "When we looked at it, I didn't get it. I've been following Carola's mad vision all these years."