Which way is which in San Francisco?

At a corner of Van Ness and Bush, Terence Clark was facing Market Street (south) when he noticed a message scribbled on a lamp post: “Rich” was written with an arrow pointing right. “Poor” was written with an arrow pointing left.

“Small Mouth Sounds,” which is at ACT’s Strand Theater (through Dec. 10), is about six people who attend a week-long silent retreat. There’s not a lot of talk in it. Opening night was Oct. 25, writes artistic director Carey Perloff ,and while the dinners preceding opening night performances are usually “pretty rowdy,” this one, like the play itself, was somewhat quiet.

Four of the people at Perloff ’s table had spent time at Spirit Rock meditation center, and “it was the calmest, most mindful, most Zen opening night we’ve ever had,” said Perloff. Table conversation was about getting the “frenzied techies” of mid-Market “to walk through the doors of the theater and to still their minds long enough to experience a play.”

Have attention spans of theater-goers changed in the last 20 years? “It does seem much harder to capture attention spans now, because people no longer have the experience of reading novels,” she said, “or concentrating on longer forms of expression. Having said that, the hunger for immersion is huge.” Which, she said, “probably explains binge-watching.” The play, she says, explores the search for mindfulness “to combat stress and anxiety . ... And I say, what is theater if not applied mindfulness?”

The Museum of Modern Art in New York curated “Being Modern: MoMA in Paris,” for the new Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton museum. The exhibition, open through March 5, includes 200 works from the New York Museum’s collection. As to the home team, a scan of the list revealed that there are two artists who live in San Francisco:

Trisha Donnelly and Lynn Hershman Leeson (represented with 11 works from her “Roberta Breitmore” series).

1 The Hall, a one-time mid-Market billiards hall, that morphed, eventually, into a food mall, which has now closed in preparation for the building to be razed, has — until the tear-down in December — become the Canvas, an indoor graffiti space. The idea is for groups of people to use the space, by appointment, to learn how to create graffiti and then to go ahead and paint the night (or day) away. According to its website, www.thecanvassf.com, this can help in “team building.” It costs $75 a person for a group of at least 20 to participate (other packages for 15 to 30 would-be artists cost $30 per hour per person).

The building’s going to be torn down, and graffiti artists often create urban splendor. But is graffiti-training encouraging the outdoor art that the city already spends $20 million a year to clean up? Maybe they ought to relabel it “mural-making.”

Thinking about everything lost in the recent fires, it occurred to Country Joe McDonald that musician fire victims left without their instruments, and without the ability to play would be traumatized “beyond words. I had a couple of guitars I was not using, and also some small things that in a time like this would be golden, like guitar picks, guitar strings and musical tuners.”

He called Bread & Roses, which has been playing for the victims, and they put him in touch with Charlie Cowles ,who for 30 years has owned Tall Toad Music in Petaluma. Since the fires, Cowles has been collecting instruments for redistribution to musicians. It “took a while for people to get over the initial shock,” he said, “but it’s heartwarming, the people who have come in. One guy came in with blisters on his arms from the fire, his daughter in the hospital with second degree burns. He needed a guitar to center himself. We were able to fix him up with a guitar and a small amp.”

Cowles gives donors a form for tax purposes. They get something else: “Our concept,” he said, “is to have each person who donates something get an email from the person who got it. To complete the circle.”

He said that McDonald had given him “a couple of real nice Yamaha guitars like the one he played at Woodstock. We fix ’em up, make sure guitars have new strings, etc.” The project’s just getting going. Cowles is reachable at (707) 529-2410.

Sports fan Ellen Newman’s been collecting a list of favorite high-achieving athletes whose uniforms bear the number 35: Giant Brandon Crawford; Dodger Cody Bellinger; Warrior Kevin Durant; and Astro Justin Verlander. The list, she says, is growing.

Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @leahgarchik