To love it, to love it not — a portrait of the town

San Francisco tradition has it that when the Castro Theatre organist breaks into “San Francisco” at the end of every pre-movie recital, the crowd breaks out in rhythmic applause. And Chronicle tradition has it that every once in a while the true-blue columnist — stumbling along in the path of the beloved Herb Caen — climbs (figuratively) to the top of Twin Peaks and proclaims the wonders of the city.

Whether to join the chorus was on my mind this weekend.

On Friday, July 20, the YouTube video made by San Francisco cops — savvy sync-ers, suave dancers, cheerily making fun of their love for doughnuts — for the national law enforcement Lip Sync Challenge inspired me to spend a half hour looking at videos from other towns (ours was best). Then I went to the Irish Cultural Center for

page-mate Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s 60th birthday party, where the gang hailing the honoree and his husband, Brian, included a nun who said the pre-dinner grace.

Emerging from our house Saturday, July 21, intending to sweep, I found a guy on the sidewalk rousing himself. “I’m embarrassed,” he said. He’d intended to move on earlier, but because of the gray day, had overslept. Please don’t leave cigarette butts on the sidewalk, I said, because finding them reminds me of my sister, an avid smoker killed by cancer. His grandfather, a devoted smoker, had lived to 95, he said, before pausing and promising there’d be no more butts.

Report on Nextdoor, from someone living near Buena Vista Park who’d been kept awake by “howling” in the park: “When we got up this morning, we found two purses and a suitcase strewn through our garden, our neighbors’ garage is pried open . ... Our garbage cans were pulled out and dumped on the sidewalk. Why, by all means, let’s have more services for these miscreants ...”

I walked by the Panhandle, where a couple of San Francisco cops and Park Patrol officers were watching as a homeless man gathered his belongings, apparently in response to their request. I overheard the officer’s last words to the man: “Now you take care of yourself today. No more trouble, right?”

Another Nextdoor report comes from someone who’d attended a gathering at the Cliff House, and upon leaving, came across a van being broken into, an incident that happened so fast that the observer had time only to snap a picture of the license plate and call police. The van’s renters came upon the scene a few minutes later, and said they were with their son on a Make-a-Wish trip. One of the things missing was the boy’s Beats headphones. The witness exchanged contact information with the victims, and the parents texted him the next day that most of their stuff had been recovered, and Officers Presley and Travinsky of the Richmond Station had chipped in to buy the boy a new pair of headphones.

I spent much of Saturday and Sunday, July 22, at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, seeing “Blue Note Records — Beyond the Notes,” about the company and the affection/respect between jazz musicians and jazz-loving Holocaust refugees who founded the company; “Budapest Noir,” set in the prewar era with fascism looming; and Austria’s 1924 movie, “The City Without Jews,” a chilling fantasy about hatred for “the other.” Sobering stuff. And after one of those movies, when a volunteer asked a patron to exit the theater at the side door instead of the front — to make room for entering crowds — the patron, apparently not all that sobered, screamed “f— you” so loud it could be heard throughout the lobby.

Meanwhile, crowds and performers streamed out of the Opera House late Sunday afternoon, after the final performance in the 40th annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, spilling out all over the Van Ness Avenue sidewalk. Packed together, brandishing cell phones aloft like cheerleaders’ batons, a throng of euphoric people of all nationalities jumped and twirled as if embodying the words on the program cover: “Uniting Us Through Dance.”

I walked from the Civic Center to the Castro, stepping around the encrusted feet of people passed out on the sidewalk, passing shiny cranes stilled for the weekend on building sites. Over drinks at the Twin Peaks after the Austrian movie, two visitors, retired college professors from Kansas City, said this is a wonderful town.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING Child 1: “I want to go wine tasting.” Child 2: “What does that mean?” Child 1: “I don’t know, but my mom says it all the time.” Conversation overheard at Fairyland in Oakland by Nick Mitchell