At dinner last night before the performance of Copenhagen (play review later in the entry), Tom Becker highly recommended going to see San Miguel Arcangel near Paso Robles. Apparently, it is the only mission that hasn't been extensively renovated or recreated. The church still has the original interior fresco paintings by the converted Indians, or neophytes as they were called, who had been taught to paint by a Spanish artist. It would give me a real sense of the early mission days, and it was a day trip.

"Day trip! It's four hours from here!" I said indignantly. Tom made light of this and swore he'd done it and also visited Hearst Castle in a day. Tom, of course, is made of far heartier stuff than I am. I told him it was too much for one stupid project and I'd rather go someplace nearby. I briefly considered doing an operetta about the confrontation between the naked, acorn-gathering Indians and the unhealthy, ulcerated, obsessive Junipero Serra.

But I kept thinking about San Miguel after the show. I've been wanting to see more of California, this native state of mine in which I feel like a visitor. True, Paso Robles is 192 miles from here, but am I educating myself or am I just trying to pass my classes? If I'm going to see a mission then by God let's go see a mission that looks like it was built by the sweat and labor of the Indians who gave up their lifestyles and culture for it, not some romanticized reconstruction.

So I've committed myself to Mission #16 and I'll give up the operetta in favor of a well-written essay and some killer photographs taken by yours truly. I'm thinking of getting some infrared film and taking spooky black and white photos. I need something that evokes an otherworldly presence of ghosts, ruined lives, and hardship. The Salinan Indians may have, as is so often claimed on the websites I'm looking through, heard good things about the missions and wanted to be part of the system, but what choice did they have? Spanish, Mexican, and American colonists all considered non-Christian Indians to be savages who could be killed or raped with impunity, and the government looked the other way when it didn't actively encourage such behavior. The missions must have seemed like a refuge compared to the other invaders.

It's hard to be objective about a different century's cultural imperatives. I'll work on it.

Saturday night John and I joined Tom and Bill Humphries for dinner at Max's on the Square and to see Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen. The playbill says, "In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionised atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment, and ended in disaster.

"Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife Margrethe once again to look for the answers, and to work out, just as they had once worked out the internal functioning of the atom, how we can ever know why we do what we do."

They meet in the afterlife for this chat, just three people and three chairs as props. It's about physics, primarily, but also the mutability of friendship, science in a time of war, the morality of exploiting the physical implications of theory, competition, and ultimate responsibility. Lou Cariou and Mariette Hartley were terrific as the Bohrs but I found myself feeling like I was watching an audition piece for an MFA program whenever Hank Stratton emoted like mad. It didn't help that my knees were killing me from being crammed up against the back of the seat in front of me. Honestly, I'm five foot five, I'm not a tall person by anyone's standards today, so they must have been a whole lot shorter in the 20s when the Geary and Curran Theaters were built.

Today I've done homework and household chores, and thought about how to deal with the stress at work. I didn't react terribly well last week, though I tried very hard. I am going to the gym Tuesday and Friday to help me get some physical relief from dealing with the flood of work. I will email my Weight Watchers buddy Kymm after I get on the scale tomorrow and discover I've either lost no weight or gained some. I don't think it's possible that I lost weight because I had a patty melt and a cheeseburger in the same weekend, and I didn't stop eating just because I used up all my points each day. I'm feeling kind of lousy about losing my self-control. They didn't even taste that good.

Well, tomorrow my new week starts fresh with no negative points to make me feel guilty. It's not easy changing bad habits. Back into the saddle.

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