DID YOU EVER NOTICE the "Oooo waah, Oooo waah. . ." background harmonies the Beach Boys sing in California Girls when they sing the lyric, "I dig a French bikini on an Hawaiian island girl, by a palm tree in the sand."? I can almost see the hand movements of a Polynesian dance with each "Oooo waah. . ." It's one of those almost unnoticed visceral textures that Brain Wilson wove into Phil Specter "wall of sound" harmonies.

I was feeling in full "Oooo waah" mode when I saw this woman wearing a white skirt over her bikini bottom on the beach in San Diego just below where we were staying near Sunset Cliffs. It was all very chaste, but very appreciative, admiring a beautiful young woman with her family (I think she was a mom) who made a simple white skirt seem almost otherworldly.

As my son, Danny, said to me one morning as we walked along the bikini-clad pedestrianistas walking back on our way to buy a breakfast burrito on Newport Ave. in Ocean Beach, "It's like walking through a nudist colony. You're supposed to notice they're not wearing clothes, but your not supposed to stare."

Unfortunately, I lost most of my good photos from our California visit when I lost my camera after a visit to the sets used for HBO's John From Cincinnati at Imperial Beach, the last city in the United States on the Pacific coast before the Mexican border.

How did I lose my camera? Some things I know some things I don't. Or as John now says, "I don't know, Butchy, instead." Either way, that Snug Harbor Motel looks even scruffier in person than it does on TV. We even saw, what looked to be squatters, staying in one of the rooms. We saw the empty swimming pool and the plywood shuffleboard prop with the wrong numbers. I even appropriated (stole) a souvenir, a grubby styrofoam life preserver ring. And within the hour my camera had disappeared.

Karma calling?

As I look back from Philadelphia on our family trip to San Diego I think of the "Oooo waah" harmonies and the last lines of California Girls. "Well, I've been all round this great big world and I've seen all kinds of girls. Yeah, but I couldn't wait to get back in the States, back to the cutest girls in the world." Bah-Dum! I wish they all could be. . .