All who were hungry bellied up on election day

Mayor London Breed was resplendent in gold pumps (for the media, “because I’ve got to be on point,” she said, or maybe “en pointe”) and Willie

Brown was resplendent in red shoes (“because I’ve always got to wear something red”). John Konstin, owner of John’s Grill, which hosted the annual election day party on Ellis Street, was just plain resplendent in hospitality.

“I’ve never seen so many people,” said a young man Joe Cotchett heard talking with two others as the three made their way to the lunch spread. “Who is giving this food away?” one said. “I have no idea,” said another.

There were no guardians with iPads keeping track of who was invited and who was not, and the crowd was totally mixed as to everything — age, race, sexual preference — except, probably, politics. There were particularly eager selfietakers, huggers and handshakers around District Attorney George Gascón and Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, both of whom recently announced plans to leave office.

Hayes-White said that she’d been inundated with good wishes since her announcement, and that a Muni operator had even stopped his bus in the middle of a block one day to wish her luck. “I thought someone on the bus was having a medical emergency,” she said.

She looked around at the crowd, as people surged around the mayor and the cheesecake. “This is the last election day that I’ll be conflicted about the occupancy rate,” she said, and she sounded cheerful about that.

After five years as director of the Museum of the African Diaspora, Linda

Harrison is leaving for New Jersey, where as of Jan. 1, she will be director of the 109-year-old Newark Museum. In her sunny office on the third floor of MoAD, a 24,000-square-foot facility, she talked about the gig she’s leaving and the gig she’s going to, in a museum almost 10 times the size that focuses not only on art, but also on history and science.

Our conversation took place a few days after MoAD’s Afropolitan Ball, a major annual fundraiser. This year’s honorees were Andrew Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander (formerly with the Ford Foundation) and Jenkins Johnson Gallery founder Karen

Jenkins-Johnson. This year’s ball grossed $1.3 million, said Harrison, and will net $900,000 and change for the museum. The first such fundraiser, eight years ago, said Harrison, raised $325,000.

The difference? “More committed stakeholders,” said Harrison. “That’s the real success story.” One big step in earning that commitment was becoming one of 180 partners with the Smithsonian Institution. There’s no direct financial benefit, but linking with such a respected institution left “different individuals and organizations feeling they could invest.”

Before she came to MoAD, Harrison had been a vice president of Eastman Kodak, and then was at Sotheby’s International Real Estate in New York. “My world was for-profit,” she said. During her MoAD time, she has presided over physical renovation (that led to more gallery space), organizational renovation and mission renovation.

Most important, “Now MoAD has a point of view,” she said. “We shifted from a history-focused museum to telling about those things through contemporary art . ... The goal is to be relevant and impactful and innovative and provocative with an expanded audience.”

She’s proud that MoAD just got its first grant from the Warhol Foundation for Coffee Rum Sugar Gold, an exhibition curated with selections from the Studio Museum of Harlem, an “anchor museum” in New York for black contemporary artists. “This is the first place that exhibition will land,” she said.

What will she miss? “San Francisco is a beautiful city. It’s just pretty.” Her plan is to live in downtown Newark, a city being revitalized, but “I’ll miss that joie de vivre that San Francisco has. People just love this city and come here . ... And I’ll miss the fog.”

At Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley on Saturday, Nov. 3, a week after the shootings in Pittsburgh, 11 seats were left empty, reports Judy Kunofsky. There was a sign taped on each of the seats bearing the name of one of the 11 people who’d been killed. Three people from Rep. Barbara Lee’s office were there, as well as a representative of the Sikh community and a pastor representing his church.

PUBLIC She: “Well, EAVESDROPPING of course, with the sun rotating around the Earth ...” He: “I believe it’s Earth that rotates around the sun.” She: “Oh yeah, well, I’ve never been into that science-y stuff.” Conversation between co-workers, overheard at a Menlo Park Starbucks by Jeremy Robinson