Not because we were in need of anything but distraction, we attended the preview of the Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale on Sunday, Jan. 29. If you are a collector/amasser/art lover/hoarder/appreciator of all the swell things life has to offer, those very things are for sale here, secondhand. The money — a great chunk of it every year — goes to the museum, so you come away not only with treasures but also with the feeling that you’ve helped support a worthy institution. (That’s what this plug is intended to do, too, by telling you that the sale takes place the first weekend in March. That will be two weeks past Valentine’s Day, but beware, love may still be in the air.)

I made my way through the vast warehouse in search of an item. “Perhaps an ugly lamp?” a volunteer had suggested, so I was headed for the electrical department. It didn’t take 30 seconds until I saw it:

Bronze (probably fake), stone (probably fake), glass (probably plastic), in the shape of a monkey with its hindquarters raised in perhaps a friendly “Hello, sailor” greeting. Dangling from its shade was a fringe of balls and beads. This just suited my purposes. My plan was to jeer at that lamp in print, scoff at its hodgepodge design, use it for my journalistic purposes.

And then I fell in love with it. Not 10 minutes after encountering it, I was forking over $15 and making mental plans to clear away other stuff from my Chronicle desk to make room. I’m looking at it right now (and you can, too, if you read this column online).

I believe in Darwin; perhaps this object depicts one of my primate ancestors. Perhaps not. As they say, the heart wants what the heart wants.

Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow’s documentary “Company Town” focuses on the 2015 supervisorial race for the Third District between Aaron Peskin and then-incumbent Julie Christensen. Peskin’s win was seen as a victory for the left and especially for long-term renters feeling threatened by Airbnb’s efforts to monetize housing.

Shooting started months before the election. “We had no idea that Aaron would win,” said Snitow, after a showing of the movie at the San Francisco Art Institute on Saturday, Jan. 28, with Peskin — much applauded — in attendance. Peskin said that he’d agreed to participate partly because he’d seen it as a “good luck charm.”

“Whenever you see one of these documentaries,” he said, “you always know they’re going to end right.” (By right, of course, he meant left.)

“I thought you all might be at the SFO demonstrations,” Snitow told the large audience at the beginning of the Q&A session. There was much talk about housing and Uber and Lyft. The so-called sharing economy has nothing to do with sharing, said Peskin, and everything to do with making money.

In the Bing Studio at Stanford University on Friday, Jan. 27, Alan Cumming performed his “Sappy Songs” cabaret show. It was Cumming’s 52nd birthday, and after the show, he performed a DJ set at an after-party in the lobby. That party went on until 1 a.m., and included Cumming bodysurfing through the crowd.

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was Friday, Jan. 27, Mark Leno was invited to speak at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati on Sunday, Jan. 29. Leno had been a rabbinic student there 40 years ago; he dropped out and, much later, entered politics. He was honored at the college for his work raising money for the LGBT exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

President Trump’s executive order of border restrictions was announced on Remembrance Day, and “particularly in the Jewish community,” said Leno, there was remembrance of the United States having turned away Jewish refugees in 1939. The audience in Cincinnati was a “beautiful ecumenical gathering of faith leaders: an imam, Baptist and Methodist ministers, priests, rabbis. In the context of what was going on, everyone was motivated to join hands and share a commitment to resistance. ... As diverse as they were, they were unanimously opposed to the executive orders.”

Leno quoted a statement from Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect (U.S. partner of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam), who said the president “is beyond the wrong side of history ... driving our nation off a moral cliff.”

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

Public Eavesdropping

“Well, I guess being drunk isn’t as glamorous as it used to be.”