In response to recent items about Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee while the national anthem is played, Sayre Van Young emailed about the Berkeley City Council practice.

That body always begins its first post-summer meeting by reciting the pledge of allegiance. At this year’s session, on Sept. 13, the roll was called, council members stood and faced the flag. Mayor Tom Bates told the assembled attendees that it was OK to stand or sit, and that the pledge could be ended with the appended words “some day.”

“And all — the Berkeley neighborhood activists, union members, issue mongers and the slightly deranged — solemnly recited the pledge,” says Van Young, “in unison (many going silent on ‘under God, but that’s another issue) ending ‘with liberty and justice for all ... some day.’”

Jeffrey Toobin, whose new book, “American Heiress,” is about the Patty Hearst case, was guest of honor the other day at a book party hosted by his old friends John and Tina Keker and the law firm Keker and Van Nest. Toobin’s first book, “Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer’s First Case — United States v. Oliver North,” was published in 1991, and Keker, chief prosecutor in the Iran-Contra case, was a major figure in it. They’ve been friends ever since and that was reflected in the warmth of this gathering, which took place in Keker’s office around a table heaped with homemade food.

There were lawyers a-plenty, and people who had played important roles in the Hearst case, including Lowell Jensen, district attorney of Alameda County when Hearst was kidnapped, private investigator David Fechheimer, who worked on the case for the family, and lawyer Patrick Hallinan, who had turned down the chance to defend Hearst because his busy schedule had no room.

Toobin, who has been doing many book appearances — a City Arts & Lectures conversation with David Talbot, a guest gig on Michael Krasny’s “Forum,” NPR’s Terry Gross show and others around the country — has polished his answers to a sheen. Talking, for example, about trying to get Patricia Hearst to participate in the book, he told an anecdote about their one conversation, which had followed many overtures.

He was able to procure her phone number, and he called and said, “Hi, Patricia, this is Jeff Toobin.” She said, “Oh, God,” and then there was a click. “So I was getting all these mixed signals from her,” joked Tobin. The line and its presentation were so perfect I expected to hear a drummer’s rim shot. That said, he knew what details would be piquant — the judge was obsequious to Hearst’s family and gave them a courthouse parking spot for the duration of the trial — and that made for an entertaining presentation.

The people who made the recent O.J. Simpson series have taken an option on the book, copies of which party guests were snapping up.

P.S.: Carol Pogash, a former San Francisco Examiner reporter, was in the City Arts & Lectures crowd the other night when David Talbot interviewed Toobin about the book. Pogash recalls that when covering the Hearst kidnapping, reporters were banned from calling “the Hearst house in Hillsborough ‘a mansion’; nor were we permitted to call Patty ‘an heiress.’”

•The African-American Shakespeare Company has announced it is leaving the Buriel Clay Theater at the African American Art & Culture Complex in the Western Addition. The company’s “Cinderella” will be at the Herbst Theater in December; other productions are scheduled at the Marines Memorial and Taube Atrium in the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera. The company had been at the Buriel Clay Theater for 13 years.

The official reason for the performing space move (the company’s offices will remain in the complex): “In order to implement a plan that will see it expand its audience as well as scope.” In fact, there were disputes over such matters as the amount of rehearsal time the company used in the theater.

• Eric Kujawsky, director of the Redwood Symphony, says freeway-driving musicians are taken with the sign, “In A Minor Crash? Pull to Shoulder.” Bill Clark of Sacramento even wrote a four-measure ditty — in A minor, of course — using the words.

Open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @leahgarchik

Public Eavesdropping

“I’d never buy

a piece from an artist playing

John Denver

in his stall.”

Woman to friend, browsing at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival and overheard

by Roger Thornhill