SANTA ROSA -- San Francisco may be the figurative epicenter of the 1906 earthquake and its upcoming centennial, but communities up and down the San Andreas fault want to make sure they aren't overlooked in the commemorative hoopla.

Take Santa Rosa, a former farm town where 119 of the 7,500 citizens were killed on April 18, 1906. The loss of life gave the city the highest quake-related death toll per capita of any American city before or since, a fact few people who live here now know.

The city's solution? Recruit 119 volunteers to dress in vintage garb and walk by candlelight behind a horse-drawn hearse to the cemetery where 15 earthquake victims were buried in a mass grave. For those who don't relish rising before dawn for a faux funeral march, a band playing dirges along the route will provide a wake-up call at 5:13 a.m., the time the notorious temblor struck.

"We thought it would make something kind of dramatic and interesting," said Bill Montgomery, a former city parks director who is helping to organize the event.

Bay Area residents and tourists will find plenty of opportunities -- parochial, commercial and artistic -- to participate in next month's centennial. From San Jose, which plans a geology exhibit called "It's Our Fault, Too," to the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, where an artist will render a sculpture of a quivering San Francisco neighborhood in Jell-O, the observances range from the slimy to the humorous.

Other anniversary activities include a new work by the San Francisco Ballet in which a dancer improvises her movements to real-time seismic data conveyed to the stage via the Internet and a city library exhibit about a lesbian doctor who traveled to San Francisco from Portland, Ore., to treat the injured in '06.

The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, more than 100 miles south of the city, hopes to remind people that the next "Big One" could strike anywhere in Northern California. The museum recently opened an exhibit called "Collateral Damage," showing photographs of the impact 1906 had on cities far from San Francisco.

To get enough pictures, archivist Esther Trosow said she had to extend the call for entries to three neighboring counties, since Monterey County, where Pacific Grove is, didn't suffer a whole lot of damage.

"We have made the exhibit more theatrical and dramatic by having a faux painter come in and paint the wall so it looks like bricks are falling down," Trosow said.

The hospitality industry is getting on the act, too. Guests who sign up for the Orchard Hotel's "once-in-a-century" overnight package will receive an emergency preparedness kit along with a copy of "1906," a new novel set amid the aftermath. Restaurants and bars, meanwhile, will be promoting mixed drinks with names such as Earthquake Cooler, Trembling Martini and the Quake and Fire cocktail -- a mix of sparkling wine, orange juice and raspberry liqueur.

The Great Quake and the firestorms that followed leveled 28,000 buildings and left 225,000 of San Francisco's 400,000 residents homeless.

Stephen Becker, executive director of the California Historical Society, said some of the events seem to trivialize the horrific event. He likens it to efforts by city fathers a century ago to deceive the public about the disaster's scope so as not to scare off investors, a fact exposed in several recent published accounts.

"What I see is another round of boosterism," Becker said of the upcoming events, including his own organization's free public "sing-along" of San Francisco-themed tunes the night before the actual centennial.

"It's one more round of being able to use this moment that defined us and do that kind of celebrating of how great San Francisco is, how swell we think we are," he said.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was mindful of the inevitable "taste" question when he instructed a committee charged with organizing city-sponsored observances that the goal of the centennial should be "to commemorate, educate and celebrate," said P.J. Johnston, a spokesman.

The city plans to observe the anniversary the same way it has for decades, with a 5:13 a.m. wreath-laying at a downtown fountain that served as a meeting point for those trying to find relatives after the disaster.

As in years past, remaining survivors (organizers say more than a dozen will attend) have been invited to take the stage and dine on the same breakfast the St. Francis Hotel served the morning of the quake.

New this year are a $500-a-plate fundraising dinner benefiting the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society and the Chinese Historical Society of America, as well as a four-day fire expo that will include hose-cart and bucket races, a fire truck parade and disaster awareness demonstrations.

"While we are certainly trying to walk the line of appropriateness here, this is San Francisco," Johnston said. "This is looking at our history and is looking at the Paris of the West's recovery over the course of the years following the earthquake, the decades and the century itself."