A Curious George Saturday

We have had BEAUTIFUL weather lately in the Bay area- Saturday it was 75 degrees, even in San Francisco!! It was also the first weekend of the month, meaning that I get into select museums for free with my Bank of America card. William was such a sweetheart to come with me to see the "Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H.A. Rey" exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. I loved the Curious George books but I had no idea about the couple who wrote them. They actually spent some time in Brazil which is where their looking at all of the monkeys began to inspire them to create George. George was actually first named "Fifi" but the publisher changed it to Curious George, the name of one of the 9 monkeys named in their earlier children's story "Raffy (or Cecily G.) and the 9 Monkey's". H.A. Rey said that he initially placed tails on the monkeys in the illustrations in this story, but it was just too busy with all of those tails getting in the way. Thus, he just got rid of the tails. When the story was released in Great Britain, the book changed names again to Zozo since King George was the reigning monarch. It was their illustrations that they carried with them that helped to save them from punishment when escaping from the Nazi's in WWII. Their escape provided the basis for the Curious George books, where he is also able to save the day/work out the situation before getting in trouble. H.A. Rey was not formally trained as an artist; Margaret did attend art school but she ended up doing most of the writing of the stories. Given the limited printing process at the time, H.A. Rey would make each drawing 4 times and provide different colors on each of them to make one final composite image. Some of his original watercolors were saved and they have actually reprinted the first Curious George book using this technology. What I also loved about this collection was that they showed a few of their Christmas cards. H.A. Rey would design special ones highlighting interesting things that happened to them throughout the year. How fun would it have been to have gotten one of those cards. I bought the following book that illustrates their story "The Journey that Saved Curious George" since that seemed to be the special part about this exhibition.

On our way home, I really wanted to go miniature golfing at this place off the 101 called Malibu Grand Prix which has go karts and mini golf. It was just SUCH a beautiful day outside that I wasn't ready to just go home yet so William was kind enough to indulge me in some mini-golf :-) I am happy to report that the game ended up in a TIE between the two of us- and I even had 2 holes-in-one!! That usually never happens and I didn't even have to take the forced "6 stroke" maximum (I did hit 6 strokes once though but I wasn't over that limit :-) So I would like to think that I was improving. I actually like the Golfland course better, but what is fun is that when you turn in your putters, they give you a token and so we were able to play one round of Skee Ball each. Unfortunately, William schooled me in this.

We also tried Wing Stop for dinner. We got the Hawaiian strips- it's like a sweet and sour sauce- since we do not like spicy stuff and it was good, but William put it best by saying that it wasn't something that he would seek out/crave.

It was a fun weekend full of adventures, and fortunately, NOT the kind that George usually gets himself into :-)