David and Ben, aspiring writers in their mid 20s, meet at a restaurant for a victory celebration. One just broke through. Now you'd think it'd be David. He's dressed more for success -- looks like …

Around the turn of the century, a theatrical movement spread through San Diego that's still growing. Every company in the county, it seems, is doing staged readings. With only one or two rehearsals, three max, …

Gabriel and Chantelle have been affianced for a long time (too long, suggest some of their friends, who speculate about the delay). They have an "open relationship," which means, in their case, Chantelle has remained …

One of the unwritten rules of theater: never let the audience get ahead of the story. If they can anticipate where you're going, you've lost them. Coughing bouts break out. Programs crackle. Chins nestle on …

In Cervantes's great novel, Don Quixote, the don interrupts Master Pedro's Moorish puppet show. "You've put church bells in mosques", the offended Don exclaims. Pedro, the puppeteer, replies, "Don't be looking for trifles, Señor Quixote, …

Just across the courtyard, without fanfare, the Globe staged one of the year's gems. I suspect I'll remember 2006 as much for its disappointments as achievements. This was the year Claudio Raygoza's Ion Theatre and …

Last March 28, as the sun fractured behind iron-gray clouds, six Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet gazed in awe from Sacatone Overlook. Three miles east, on terrain bleak as Sinai, railroad trestles perch 1000 …

At Times It Was Like Shared Music, at Times Like a Skin Graft or Root Canal — Stephen Dobyns I do at a coffin sale — Dorothy Stewart A Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Cake …

Saying "I do" was the easy part. There used to be this redwood church, A-frame, about halfway between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz on Highway 17: some rough-hewn pews, but no altar, no icons, just …

My first day in school was really my second day — Jangchup Phelygal The Radiators That Ticked Heat into the Room — Laura Rhoton McNeal Rear Rank Rudy — Jim Morris Forget-me-nots — Rosa Colwin …

When the fall quarter began in 1972, I vowed to make no new friends at school. I was a third-year graduate student in literature at U.C. Irvine. I was finishing coursework and would take qualifying …

In 1803, Coronado’s North Island was a brown hump across the channel from the tip of Ballast Point. Ships entering the bay had to navigate through acres of kelp offshore, then a bottle-neck between the …

Another Boston trader anchored in the bay? That’s four in the last three years. What is this, a plague? And the captain will need wood, provisions. Or his ship may have sprung a leak and …

“Merchant navigators” — a polite phrase for “smugglers” — William Shaler and Richard Cleveland agreed on almost everything. Both were New Englanders, born in 1773. Both went to sea as teenagers. Shaler, whose ancestor Thomas …

"Careful, Ma; don't spill your soup," I warned. "First time you spill, that's it — you're going to the home.” Mom's reply was immediate. "I know. I've picked out what I want to take with me."

Betsy was a piece of work. There's a scene in Amadeus: Mozart scribbles strings of notes. Salieri gasps. Mozart feathers in complex tones. "Genius! Perfection!" shouts Salieri. "Oh no," says Mozart. "Now we put in …

After leaving San Diego the Betsy went south, cruising the lower California coast for furs. In a letter to his brother in Boston, Captain Winship boasted that he’d been stopping in Spanish ports, hoodwinking authorities.

I didn’t see the forest ranger who got trapped with the Marines,” recalled Colonel William Hastie, whose 10th Cavalry helped rescue burn victims from the Hauser Canyon Fire of 1943. “I heard he felt terribly. …

The Santa Ana winds died around 2:00 p.m. October 2, 1943. Hershel Higgins could finally drive his D7 bulldozer down into Hauser Canyon, where a 113-Marine crew was fighting what was about to become one …

In the fall of 1943, soldiers in San Diego’s backcountry had to stop gunnery practice before noon. After that, the heat became so intense the targets would seem to dance. On October 1 — the …

“Of all the dilapidated, miserable looking places I had ever seen, [San Diego] was the worst The buildings were nearly all adobe, one story in height, with no chimneys. Some of the roofs were covered with tiles and some with earth.”

The column tried to stay motionless to surprise Pico at Mule Hill. But Duvall, the Portsmouth's surgeon, found the camp “rather a bad place to escape observation, on the top of a high mountain destitute of trees.”

Kearny looked at Beale’s head wound, bandaged with a torn army shirt, and said no. Too dangerous. Beale argued that Kit Carson could be his guide. Kearny vetoed Carson. Carson was far too important to let go.

“Forty balls struck him, I was told,” says Griffin, “yet he did not fall.” Soldiers drove the mule up the hill and butchered it, along with two others killed in the rush. Three fat mules were a “godsend.”

General Kearny’s “Army of the West” had straggled 2000 miles from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The day before in the Ballena Valley, 101 “wet to the skin” dragoons joined with 39 mountain men from San Diego.

A large American army to the east, soldiers from San Diego on his trail, horse thieves who’d kill him out of self-defense, and his slow-moving party an easy target, Coronel was boxed in.

It was hard to tell which group was worse off, Carson’s alkali-caked express or Kearny's glum dragoons, riding "jaded beasts,” eating half- rations spiked by cacti, and harassed by swarms of mosquitoes and buffalo gnats.

About the only certainty: the creator of the Rancho Bernardo style never considered him- or herself an artist in the traditional sense. The designs — so abstract, schematic, intricate — look like nothing in nature.

Kelly came outside, firing. “As the revolver had only three loads, I concluded the best plan would be to run; and so I did.” He crawled under the store and stood in Campo Creek, which ran in a manmade culvert, for almost an hour.

Until 1940, Campo was the center for Customs and Border Patrol. To avoid U.S. “line-riders,” smugglers came to the store in darkness. They traded “gold, silver, whiskey, you name it” for manufactured goods.

In what became the “battle of the telegrams,” E.H. Harriman, president of Southern Pacific Railroad and funder of earlier efforts, and President Theodore Roosevelt haggled about who should finance the operation.

Nature had dug two deep, 40-mile-long ditches for the Imperial Valley. They carried to the Salton Sea four times the sediment excavated for the Panama Canal. And the Colorado River flowed unchecked.

The banks of the cut began to cave in. On August 9,the entire Colorado made a right turn at the Mexican cut, powered through the breach, gushed down the Alamo canal into the valley, and created the Salton Sea.

The skies turned oceanic, or seemed that way. Dams and reservoirs filled beyond capacity and burst. Flash floods barraged every canyon and arroyo. They carried off barns and houses, some rolling head over heels on the rapids.

The trunk of the Acacia cyclops has a rubbery, spongelike quality. When Watson declared it a potential buffer for cars out of control, the state planted tens of thousands along its most dangerous hairpin turns.

In 1850, people poured into California, greedy for gold. Fortunes bulged. All of this led to planning on a grandiose scale. Entrepreneurs envisioned cities on bare patches of dirt — or better sites for what …

The spot came to be known as Punta de los Muertos, “Point of the Dead,” or just Punta. Gray camped at Punta and saw the obvious: protected, accessible to ships, deep anchorage, “the logical location for a port city.”

Father Mercado would answer that the immigration would be dangerous; that they would pour in by the thousands and overrun the country; Protestants would swarm here, and the Catholic religion would be endangered...

Diego turned the convent into a hospital. During the plague, he was”caught kissing the sores of those affected with a contagious disease, he replied that it was the best way to treat this kind of illness.”

Travelers from San Diego to Los Angeles had to drive west around Mt. Soledad, through Pacific Beach and La Jolla. On December 13, 1930, the Rose Canyon Highway opened: a five-mile shortcut on the east slope of Soledad.

Sacagawea carried him all the way across the country and back again. When she rode through rapids in a dugout canoe, she rode with her baby; when food was scarce, both she and her baby went hungry.”

Guest lists were hush-hush. But word circulated around town that John Wayne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, or Elizabeth Taylor had been spotted — or Betty Grable, Jimmy Durante, or Joan Crawford. “Crawford always carried her own flask of vodka.”

In 1950, he had a “chance meeting” with Miguel de Ulloa, who claimed to be a descendent of Francisco. Miguel said two members of the Trinidad expedition survived. One of them wrote a document about the odyssey.

On November 25, the Los Angeles County judge, Augustin Olvera, advised Juan Antonio to contact Garra about the uprising. “If Garra could explain his grievances,” Olvera wrote, “the problem could be settled without further violence.”

“War cries woke Warner. Phillips: “Rifle in hand, he ran to the doorway and discovered that the two horses he had tied near the house had been cut loose. Seeing Warner, some 20 Indians took cover.”

"Garra sent his son to San Diego with cash, but it, too, was short of the assessment. Few Americans or Californios in San Diego County realized how deeply the Indians of the region resented being taxed.”

He’d love to write national ads for the Chamber of Commerce, claiming that La Jolla is “pestilence-ridden, scourged by locusts, swamps with water-moccasins and cottonmouths, and typhoon tidal waves resulting in chickens in the bedroom every Friday.”

Max Miller (1899-1967) was a journalist, author, and world traveler. He served in the Navy for three wars and lived most of his life at 5930 Camino de la Costa in La Jolla, just south …

The club’s most memorable award was given by the Royal Order of Mudhens. The perpetual trophy — donated by the Jessop brothers — went to anyone who fell overboard or capsized a skiff while fully clothed.

Most members lived on the “mainland” — Mission Hills and Point Loma (especially the Roseville/La Playa area, which runs west from the old Marine Corps recruiting depot) — and most moored their boats around the Roseville Pier.