Sunday, Dec. 25, 2005 MIDNIGHT MASS was something of a virtual experience. I had dinner with my Peruvian neighbors, who are two are two socially talented sisters attending university here. Among their friends were a few guys from Peru and Argentina collected from around Europe, and one who made an extremely complicated two-day air trip to be here all the way from South America (and there was one guy from France, the token French person who did appreciate the humor of this). Travel tip: if you want to have a good time, party with people from Spanish-speaking countries. It is true that the girls are usually still doing their hair at 11 p.m., but then once things get started, it's fun. Actually this started earlier -- we had dinner at 10, due to various airport delays. I followed the advice in my own blog and rounded up another neighbor, Elena, whose family is in Australia and was otherwise going to be spending Christmas Eve alone, and invited her up. She is actually Spanish, so everyone was old friends in five minutes, jabbering away. (Live in Europe and you actually get used to not knowing three-quarters of what anyone around you is saying, but like a dog, you understand the important stuff.) Then by midnight people had convinced themselves to make the 15 minute excursion to Notre Dame to see what was up. I gathered my ballistic nylon camera bag and my monopod and we headed over, walking along the Seine on Quai de la Tournelle. When we got to the cathedral, there was an eerie glow. I forgot they would have a big television set up, which I had not seen since the pope's funeral in the spring. At first it seemed like an enormous crowd was there, but it turned out to be a special effect. It was a fairly modest sized mob. But there was a long line to get into the cathedral, due to the fact that they had a security checkpoint set up by the doors. They also had one last year, but it was at the back of the plaza, so if you wound up getting a full search, at least you were out of the way. I decided I wasn't going in; with a flashlight, keys and the usual stuff I schlep around to take pictures, I was not going to bother emptying my pockets. Plus, I am something meekly verging on offended by security checkpoints in places like this. Not because I don't believe in safety -- but because I think they're dumb and mainly there to show tourists how safe the city is. Even if they're plugged in, they actually do very little, because anyone who wants to get around the checkpoint can, which is usually the case, but with a cathedral it's really easy, and lots of things aren't metal. So I'm not even sure what they deter. I think it's just that everyplace has to have a checkpoint now. However, this was not nearly as bad as a friend in the UK who wrote in this morning saying that you had to have pre-ordered tickets to get into her local cathedral to sing Christmas carols, for which you had to surrender your name, address and occupation on a form earlier that day. Anyway. The big TV provided some interesting lighting and a bizarre kind of "spiritual metaphor" as everyone stared up in unison, larger-than-life altar boys swung the little incense burners, and someone I called the French Pope (Archbishop So & So) gave the mass. I went and talked to the electronic ministers who were in charge of the TV set (technicians, that is) and discovered that it had a 640 x 800 resolution, was made in Canada, was the same technology as the NASDAQ board in Times Square, and that the pixels were really big, from what I gathered, 1cm each, with smaller elements 20mm wide in each pixel. When I asked if it had a proportionally large remote control, carried by several people, they even let me into the little trailer where they processed the signal into the display. Yes, it all came down to a yellow coaxial cable on the floor of a trailer, which is why they could stand around basically doing very little until the program was over, posing for the cover of Planet Waves. For those who write in commenting on my proposed "nude photo session at midnight mass," I was kidding. Honest, I was!