WOMEN’S VIRTUAL VACATION TO ITALY LIFTS SPIRITS
Mira Mesa resident used Photoshop to mimic canceled trip
For nine days in April, Jannette Soriano Kutchins entertained her friends and family on Facebook with a daily travelogue of dozens of photos chronicling her ongoing trip to Italy’s holy sites with three of her girlfriends.
Photos captured the 63-year-old Mira Mesa resident posing with pals Virgie Baltazar, Pat Tan and
Carmen Suspine near the altar in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well as at churches, landmarks and sacred sites in Assisi, Monte Sant’angelo, Cascia and Pietrelcina.
In reality, the women canceled their trip nearly two months ago when COVID-19 shut down travel in and out of Italy. But Kutchins wanted to lift the spirits of her quarantined tour mates by hilariously creating a virtual vacation photo album with the help of Photoshop and Google Images. Her doctored photo galleries became an online
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mini-sensation.
“We canceled because of the pandemic, but I refuse to be cooped up. With my imagination, I can go anyplace,” said Kutchins, a retired social worker, veteran world traveler and passionate shutterbug. “I thought I would entertain and amuse a few people and it turns out a lot of people followed it.”
Among the friends who enjoyed the daily travel reports from April 20 to April 29 was Peggy Goldsmith-gastaldo, who said her friend of 25 years is always thinking outside the box when it comes to finding ways to do things for others.
“She’s the kind of person who can make things happen,” said Goldsmithgastaldo. “She’s very jovial and positive and gets the most out of life.”
Kutchins said she came up with the idea for the travelogue on April 20, when she realized that was the day she and her friends would have flown to Italy on their trip.
“I thought that we’re all here instead of where we planned to be, so I’m going to put us there,” she said.
She asked the ladies to email her full-length photos of themselves in different outfits, so they wouldn’t appear to be wearing the same clothes every day. She cut out the figures with the Photoshop software on her phone. Then she inserted them into travel photographs of her own from previous trips to Italy. Whatever tourist site photos she didn’t have, she found them on a Google search.
Because she has no training in photo editing, some of her first images were hilariously awkward, with the women’s pictures vastly out of scale with each
other, standing in strange poses and sometimes missing limbs and portions of their heads.
“I wasn’t trying to make it look real. It was just the best I could do,” she said.
But over the next week, her skills became so good that by the end of the trip it’s nearly impossible to tell where the original photos ended and the virtual ones began.
She placed the foursome in different pews at a church, merged three photos into one to create a realistic dinner party, and superimposed the women’s bodies over those of passengers on a bus and an airplane for their travel days. She also added shots of the women inside their imagined hotel rooms and photos from Google Maps of Italian landscapes they would have seen through the windows of their tour bus.
Suspine, Tan and Baltazar enjoyed the “trip” and the attention the pictures generated, often adding comments below the posts about how they loved their hotel rooms and other places they “visited.”
“They loved it,” Kutchins said. “We’re Filipino and Filipinos are hams. I’m the hammiest of them all.”
Although the trip was clearly labeled on Facebook as a joke, some followers didn’t seem to realize the photos were doctored. One person recommended a side trip they should take one day during their travels. And when follower Aurea Mateo wrote that she wished she could’ve gone on the faux trip, too, Kutchins added her in on day eight, starting with a manipulated photo of Mateo running to catch the tour bus carrying a cartoon suitcase and travel pamphlet.
After Kutchins retired from her job at San Diego County Child Protective Services six years ago, she
took up several hobbies including line dancing, steampunk design, costume-making and travel. On her 60th birthday in 2017, she decided to celebrate by visiting 60 places in 21 countries, starting with the Rose Parade in Pasadena and ending with a European river cruise with her husband of nearly 23 years, George Kutchins.
Over the years, she has assembled dozens of folders of travel photos on Facebook, so finding photos to illustrate her virtual vacation was easy. Working from the guided tour’s plans, she’d get up each morning and work for hours to create photos to match each day’s itinerary. The trip concluded with a doctored photo of the now-quintet’s celebratory return to the San Diego.
The virtual trip was just one of many ways Kutchins has been volunteering her time to help shut-in women in her community during the COVID-19 crisis. On Easter, she organized giftbasket deliveries for older women who have been staying inside due to the stay-at-home order. She also started the “Tiara Divas” messaging loop to keep older women in the Filipino community with limited English skills up to date on the coronavirus pandemic (tiara comes from the word “crown,” which is “corona” in Spanish).
Kutchins documents all of her community efforts on Facebook, where Goldsmith-gastaldo said she’s constantly amazed to see how hard her friend works to brighten people’s days with laughter in this gloomy time.
“She’s a very energetic, happy-go-lucky person who will do anything to help others,” Goldsmithgastaldo said.
pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com