"An Adventure"

by Mary Yeany

Recently Don Shenk and I went on a spur-of-the-moment trip to the State Capitol, a place neither of us had ever visited before. The weather was great, a warm 52 degrees with a magnificent blue sky.

We spent over an hour just circling the building, taking photos of the statues, carved doorways, staircases and reflections. Don even climbed up on a balustrade to get a different angle of view. Minutes later, he casually mentioned that he lost his 100-400 IS lens -a mere $1400 item!!!! Me, I'd be frantic! So we spent about 10 minutes looking all over for this lens. We both searched around where he climbed up on the ledge but saw nothing. Don decided to go back to where we were earlier but I knew I had seen it in his vest pocket near where we stood. I went back to the balustrade for a third time, looking and not seeing anything but leaves. I walked into the leaves and noticed that I was ankle deep in them. So I kept walking and finally saw a tiny one-inch patch of grey among the brown leaves....his lens case. It fell out of his pocket and was swallowed up.

This disaster averted, we entered the Capitol. WOW! It was quite a sight. We had to walk through the metal detector and our equipment had to go through the scanner. Not many people were there at 3:30 on a saturday afternoon, which is good, because in order to get a shot of the rotunda without leaning so far back we'd wind up in traction, we had to lie on the floor. A lady passing by even asked the supine Don to take a picture with her camera! What a gentleman.

By this time we were ready to head to City Island...Don had never been there either. When we got near where the truck was parked, we noticed some bags on the parking meters which said "no parking - film shoot". I said to Don, "see they know we're here". It turned out that an HBO movie was being filmed right there. A member of the film crew told us that we could hang around and take pictures if we'd like. Perhaps he thought we were really important with all our camera gear - little does he know!! Its title will be "Ralphie Bruce" and it's about a politician who is involved in a hit-and-run accident. (sound familiar?) In this movie though, the politician is hit by a red Jeep driven by his own daughter. A rapper, Penhead, also appears in the film. His manager asked us to take some photos of him and Penhead - free publicity. If anyone is interested in him or snippets of his rap music, go to www.higherrealment.com.

Now the sun had set. We went over to City Island anyway, since we were so close. Took some night shots of the walking bridge all lit up and the Capitol in the background. It was time to head home.

And to think that all this excitement took place in a mere 3 1/2 hours!!