No Small Affair

I had a few surprises up my sleeve for Kseniya this trip (including the Jelly Belly factory tour), but I saved the best for last. Well maybe not the best, but the weirdest and closest to our hearts.

In the movie No Small Affair, which is set it San Francisco, budding photographer Jon Cryer takes a few snaps of muse Demi Moore in front of a large whale mural. After a whole bunch of researching, I determined that the mural used in the movie was actually in Long Beach, and had been painted over to boot. But the artist who painted it, Robert Wyland, has painted a hundred Whaling Walls around the world, two of which are still up in San Francisco.











I'd bought the beret online right before our trip (you'd [probably not] be surprised to learn that almost no women's clothing stores near Union Square carry mustard berets) and had it shipped ahead to our hotel in Los Banos. When Kseniya opened that package, she had no idea what it was about. Luckily, she didn't figure out my plot until several days later when I walked her up to the whale mural. Even then, it took some explaining -- apparently the yellow beret and the whales hadn't stuck in her mind as much as it had in mine.

It took a lot of practice to get our timing right, but luckily we only burned one Polaroid on a bad shot. We took a lot more when I switched to my digital camera, and Kseniya was kind of exhausted by the time I let her stop jumping.