Patience rewarded for Good Samaritan

As to the item about Joshua Brody finding a lost wallet, no, he couldn’t have contacted the loser of the wallet in Texas, as many readers suggested, because the loser of the wallet seemed to have moved to San Francisco, where he was working for Instacart.

But lo, the evening the item was in the paper, Brody received an email from a support operations specialist at Instacart, apologizing for the company’s “lack of meaningful response. We’ve investigated the delay and learned a valuable lesson that will ensure no emails get caught in limbo again.” She said she had contacted the employee who lost the wallet, who is “relieved and thankful and will be in touch with you shortly.”

The next day, Brody received an email from the owner, thanking him and providing contact information to enable return of the wallet. High fives all around.

P.S.: A few readers suggested that Brody turn the wallet over to the police, and Rich Lo ,a letter carrier in Bernal Heights for more than 30 years, said when he comes across lost items, “Everything is brought to the big postal facility and sorted out. The wallets, purses, keys and badges are returned to their rightful owners and charged for the postage due.”

The theatrical troupe Word for Word has been performing for 25 years, a feat marked with “Anniversary” — reviewed by Lily Janiak — a performance of one story by Tobias Wolff and one by George Saunders. Both stories, “Deep Kiss” and “Victory Lap,” begin in high school; both are introspective. But during intermission, Nancy Shelby, one of the troupe’s charter members, said Wolff and Saunders share a long-standing relationship that brings the two even closer. She referred me to a New Yorker piece in which Saunders wrote that Wolff had mentored Saunders since 1986, when Wolff, then teaching in the Syracuse Creative Writing Program, first interviewed Saunders, an applicant.

One night at Syracuse, Wolff read aloud from Anton Chekhov; Saunders’ description of that reading seems particularly apt for the mission of Word for Word, which performs stories directly from the printed page.

“Suddenly, we get Chekhov,” writes Saunders. “Chekhov is funny . ... The story is not some ossified, cerebral thing: it is entertainment, active entertainment, of the highest variety. All of these things I’ve been learning about in class, those bone-chilling abstractions theme, plot and symbol ... are simply tools with which to make your audience feel more deeply. Toby’s reading of them convey(s) a notion new to me, or one which, in the somber cathedral of academia, I’d forgotten: literature is a form of fondness for life.”

At Z Below, just under the big theater at Z Space, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits Theatre Collective is performing “#GetGandhi,” Anne Galjour’s “Seriously Radical Feminist Comedy.” It’s directed by Nancy Carlin, and the cast includes her husband, Howard Swain, daughter Miranda Swain and Jeri Lynn Cohen, another charter member of the group performing upstairs, Word for Word.

So a lot of the people at Sunday’s “Gandhi” matinee, including retired Chronicle critic Rob Hurwitt, were the same people we’d seen at Saturday’s “Anniversary” performance; something like a progressive dinner, where you have salad in one house and then go on to the next for the casserole.

The hometown coziness was abetted by the play’s setting and plot, and crowd-pleasing mentions of familiar hometown icons: the Google bus, the statue of Gandhi behind the Ferry Building, Michael Smuin, the Cockettes. Although the play features no singing, the audience sang along.

Regarding last week’s quoted item from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s wellrespected public international broadcaster, about the old men who went to a heavy metal concert in Wacken: Reuters, which might be seen as a competing news company, calls it Fake News. A few days after the story appeared, notes reader Michael Jory, Reuters huffed that the two “elderly” men were 58 and 59 years old, and were not residents of a retirement home, but a facility for people with mental illnesses. They were allowed to leave for the day, but after they failed to check back in by curfew, they were found drunk at a bus stop. “Hardly an incident to spawn a thousand reports or offers of a movie adaptation,” reported Reuters.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I am an apex predator in a bonsai world.” Man to man, overheard in Cole Valley by Ted Weinstein