Who’s wearing furs in Colma?

In full FOMO, I am gnashing my teeth over not being invited to the Dec. 4 grand opening of the renovated Town Hall in Colma. Deep gratitude for these details goes to reader Bonnie Jones ,who as a friend of woodworker John Mitracos (who worked on the council chamber cabinets and bookcases) attended the celebration.

Candy bars handed out informed revelers that Colma was originally called Lawndale, that the town has 17 cemeteries, and that the building that was renovated had been built between 1936 and 1940. And, of course, there were the usual jokes (“It’s great to be alive in Colma.”).

But in a season of holiday celebrations with the usual post-party reports — “Oh, she looked very good,” “Could you believe how much he drank?” — the showstopping fact that Jones harvested at this one was that

Tina Turner’s dog is buried in one of Turner’s fur coats in the Colma pet cemetery.

P.S.: Every year, Susan RoAne, author of “How to Work a Room,” issues an annual list of tips for behaving at office holiday parties. She’s sent word that this year’s amendments include a specific provision: “Don’t go into a hot tub.”

Glenn Lovell, who teaches an introduction to cinema class at De Anza College, says that when he gave a quiz in which his students were asked about the meaning of the word “rosebud” in “Citizen Kane,” one answered, “It’s the name of Kane’s childhood snowboard.”

Spurred by news of the marathon reading of “Moby-Dick” in October at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, Gene Kahane has scheduled a marathon reading of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” at Books Inc. in Alameda. This will start at 1 p.m. on New Year’s Day, in celebration of the 100th birthday of Salinger, Jan. 1, 1919. Kahane is looking for volunteer readers, each portion to take about 15 minutes.

Bumper sticker seen by Patricia Coyle in Concord: “What’s wrong with him?”

The Rosanne Cash/Ry Cooder concert on Wednesday night, Dec. 5, was the first of two scheduled by SFJazz but performed across the street at the much bigger Opera House because there was so much demand for tickets. The whole feel of both the show (no programs, a straight-through performance without intermission) and the audience (down home) was different from the venue’s usual opera and ballet fare.

The two performed the songs of Johnny Cash, and to me, the most delicious of those were the ones turned sideways. Perhaps not incidentally, those were Cash’s biggest hits, so familiar to the audience that twisting and reinventing them made musical and sentimental sense.

With the rhythms changed, it took a few measures to realize that Cash was singing “I Still Miss Someone,” “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line.” The two made those good old songs good fresh songs once again. (But readers, if you were there, was I the only one who felt the ampedup sound fuzzy? I was glad to be there, but I missed the intimacy of SFJazz’s own cozy place across the street.)

“Of Iron and Diamonds V3: Alone Together” was the title of the work choreographer Catherine Galasso created (in collaboration with composer Dave Cerf), which was based, written materials said, on Boccaccio’s “The Decameron.” Reading about the source, and knowing that the work was third in a series of Galasso pieces that I hadn’t seen before, I took my seat at ODC on Friday, Dec. 7, wondering whether I’d be up to the challenge of appreciating/accessing something so complex.

Created for the ODC site, “Alone Together” turned out to be one of the friendliest dance pieces in memory. The performance space was set up as a rectangle: on one side were the theater seats that are always there; facing them were bleachers in which the audience sat. So we, the viewers, faced rows of what looked like empty seats; in the course of the piece, the seven dancers used those seats to flit, hop, slither and drag themselves and each other up, down and across the rows.

If its handle had sounded heavy and dark, the work itself was light and light, and all the more enchanting for it, bursting with ideas and invention like a treasure chest so packed with jewels that the lid won’t stay down.