Deeds & Words

We passed the volcano Park and stopped at the Black Sand Beach.  This is the most of a turtle I’ve ever seen at one time.  It was headed back into the water after the adoring fans and paparazzi became too much for it.  I can act all virtuous and say that I was at least 20 feet away, following the law and showing respect for the animal, but the fact is that I didn’t see it until about six other tourists sprinted past me to get a better vantage point for a pic.

            “One of USA Today’s 10 Best in the Nation.”  That’s Ken’s House of Pancakes, in Hilo, Hawai’i.  Ken’s makes it into the Hawaii guidebooks too.  L has a friend who is a native Hawaiian who says “When I come to the Big Island I always have to stop at Ken’s.”

            The place doesn’t look special.  It’s on a corner facing the road that leads to the airport; a one-story building that looks like a Denny’s or a Shari’s or a Season’s except for the deep metal roof  that you see in tropical and sub-tropical areas.  Inside, the booths have yellow naugahyde seats.  You can also sit at the counter.  The booths in the center of the main room have low walls, so that you can rest your arm on them and talk to the people next to you, if you want to.  L and I had a nice chat with the two women sitting across from us. One of them, Melody, makes tagua nut jewelry which she is starting to sell at farmers’ markets.  Melody grew up in Mountain View, California.  There’s a Mountain View, Hawai’i as well, and she said she frequently has to explain that it’s not the one where she grew up.

            What do they serve at Ken’s House of Pancakes?  Well. . .you do not need to limit yourself to pancakes for breakfast.  Like most pancake houses, the breakfast menu also provides waffles, omelets, benedicts, and eggs with a variety of meats: steak, ham, sausage, bratwurst, hash and Spam.

            Of course I had pancakes.  I chose the “mac nut” (macadamia nut) pancakes and POG juice, which is passionfruit, orange and grapefruit guava.  The pancakes were delicious; fluffy with a bit of a buttermilk tang that was not overpowering.  Coarsely chopped mac nuts covered the top and added a crunch, a creaminess, and a nutty sweetness that wasn’t sugary.  Each table has a pitcher of maple and blueberry syrup, but the server also brings a trio of tropical syrups to your table.  I felt like Goldilocks (something I can honestly say happens to me rarely).  The coconut syrup was—well, I don’t like coconut. I had high hopes for the guava syrup but it wasn’t the right consistency for syrup and was a little too bland.  I tried the lilikoi—passionfruit—and “it was ju-u-st right!” 

            POG juice was good, but I think it was less a juice than a “juice drink.”  Next time I will go with one of the classics, orange or grapefruit.

            The coffee is good, served in old fashioned thick mugs with a Ken’s logo on the side.  Your food comes quickly and the servers are bustling.  Buspeople stop by to top off your water or coffee if you need it, and they hit just the right pace so you never seem to be waiting for anything but you don’t feel interrupted either.

            Good pancakes, good service and an atmosphere that is relaxed and fun. That’s Ken’s, the best pancake house in paradise.

On Friday night, September 19, L took me to a Democratic event at the Mooheau Bandstand in Hilo.  The Bandstand is downtown, right across the highway from the seawall, overlooking the bay.  I had walked through it once before at night, when it was empty, and I thought it was rather small, but it held over 300 people easily and another couple hundred spilled out onto the grass.

*

            We had music from the Honoka’a High School jazz band.  They were pretty darn good.  They had several good vocalists, and the best by far was the young woman who belted out “Respect” as the closing number.  I don’t love jazz, but I thoroughly enjoyed them.  The Downtown Swing Band followed.  They had a wonderful clarinetist, but were using the sound equipment set up for public speaking, not musical mixing, and their performance suffered. 

*

            At six, the political part of the event kicked off.  The master of ceremonies was a Hawaiian comedian named Andy Bumentai.  (www.andybumentai.com) He bounded onto the stage and began making fun of things right away.  His energy reminded me a little of L’s dog Roxie, only Roxie isn’t so acerbic. If he has been in any movies I will have to rent them, because this guy is funny.

            Obama should be president, “because we can’t have things going on like they have for the past eight years, and because I’d love to have a President named ‘Barack.’  I could do fifteen minutes on that alone.  We already have a mayoral candidate in Honolulu named Mufi.”  He waved at the various banners for local candidates that festooned the bandstand.  “And I don’t know any of these local people, but  Jet Heng! I want that guy to win!”

From a spot in the crowd, people began to yell and point.  “He’s here!”  Jet Heng, a good-looking young Chinese American stood up, grinning.  Bumentai rose to the occasion.  “There he is!  What, that male model thing isn’t working out for you?” And of course, as Jet sat back down. . . “Cool your jets!”

*

Bumentai introduced Helene Hale, who is a legend in Hawaiian politics.  She has been active in state politics since. . .well, actually, since before statehood.  She talked briefly about the “Democratic Revolution” in 1954 and her male companions, none of whom could be present that evening.  “Get well, boys,” she said.  She talked about Barack Obama, but mangled his name.  On the third try she got it right, and added, “Well, I’m ninety.” Applause from the crowd.

Hale introduced Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s sister.  They hugged at the podium for several minutes.  When Hale went back to her seat in the front row, Maya said, “Ms. Hale, my brother’s been called many worse things than what you said.”

Soetero-Ng spoke well, without using place-fillers like “um” and “uh,” a good clear speaker who knows how to match her message exactly to her audience.  She exuded sincerity and a kind of humility.

She talked about the spirit of aloha and the idea of spreading it to the entire nation. (Now there’s a powerful vision!).  She told us about visiting her brother in Chicago after he graduated from Harvard.  She went with him while he visited families who had been impoverished by the closing of the steel mills, connecting them with resources and getting them registered to vote.  Unlike the Republican convention audience, this crowd actually knew what a community organizer does. “And all this,” she said, “while he [Obama] was fielding many, many offers, and rejecting them. Many of them were lucrative, too, because he had been the editor of the Harvard Law Review.”

*

Bumentai on Sarah Palin:  “Lipstick on a pit bull, good.  Lipstick on a pig. . .bad? I’m confused.”

*

Soetero-Ng wants us to reach out to friends and family in swing states like Nevada and Colorado to carry her brother’s message. “We need to do the work and tell the stories, to carry our values to the rest of the nation.”

At some point the crowd began to chant, “Yes-we-can!  Yes-we-can!” This went on for several minutes and she let it.   Then she leaned into the microphone and said, “You’re a fun crowd.”  A man behind me started to chant, “Yes-we-are! Yes-we-are!”

*

The difference between George Bush and Sarah Palin, according to Bumentai?  “Lipstick.”

*

Earlier in the program, Bumentai announced that Brian Schatz, the chair of the Hawaii Democratic Committee, was late. Andy assumed a serious mien and said in a radio-announcer voice, “Tonight, the part of Brian Schatz will be played by Andy Bumentai.”  He then did several Palin jokes (see above) and tried a couple of McCain jokes, which weren’t that funny.  He rebounded well though.

Later in the evening he came to the microphone again.  “I just found out that earlier this evening someone was pretending to be Brian Schatz!”  The crowd obligingly went “Oooohh!” and Bumentai said, “I know! Anyway, here is the real Brian Schatz.”  This haule kid came out.  He’s in his late thirties, but looked more youthful to me. He was much more politically correct than the MC, but fiercely competitive.  He wants Hawaii to have the highest margin of votes for Obama of any state.  And, he said, “It’s not just Obama.  We want to run the table.  Every house and senate seat, we want them all!”

*

At some time during the program, when there was a round of thunderous applause, L leaned over to me and said, I thought, “Reach into the fire.”  I wondered if this was some sort of local volcano reference or a Hawaiian spiritual thing.  A few seconds later my brain corrected the interpretation.  She had said, “Preaching to the choir.”

*

On the mainland, John McCain’s age is fair game for any comic or political speaker.  Before a Hawaiian audience, the Philipino-Hawaiian Bumentai knew better than to even touch it.  When he addressed Helene Hale from the stage, he called her “Auntie.”  In Hawaii, elders are respected and revered. 

Fortunately for Bumentai, Palin is by no stretch of anyone’s imagination an elder.

*

As I said, there were banners for candidates fluttering all around the edge of the bandstand’s circular roof.  There were eight or nine candidates for the mayor of Hawai’i.  That’s right.  Mayor of Hawai’i.  There are no municipal governments in Hawaii.  There is a state government and then five areas that roughly correspond to counties in California, and the top administration person in each of those areas is mayor.  There is also a council for each county or area. It explains why people actually seem to participate more.  Elected officials, at least on the Big Island, are accessible.  It also creates some situations L and her friends are not happy with, such as one school board for the whole state.

*

Driving home, L said that hearing Maya Soetoro-Ng speak made Barack Obama “more like a real person.”  I would say that Maya Soetoro-Ng seemed like a genuine person, and she makes her brother real by extension.

*

Hawaii’s primary was the next day, Saturday.  It seemed like a strange day to hold a primary, but it probably makes it easier for people to vote.  L’s neighbor and friend was a polling place worker.  It was a full day for her, more than 13 hours.  Turnout was lower than hoped, but about what expected.  Everyone agreed that the November election, Obama versus McCain, would be the big one.

 Tokyo Godfathers

Directed by: Satoshi Kon 

            Tokyo, Christmas Eve.  An infant is abandoned, and the three people who find it are the least equipped to care for it.  Can they find the baby’s parents, and in the process redeem themselves?

In Satoshi Kon’s animated story, three homeless people; a self-styled “bum,” a transvestite and a runaway teenaged girl find a baby dumped in the trash where the three of them are scavenging. The city in winter is a place of danger for people on the fringes, people like Hana the maternal cross-dresser or Miyuki, a defiant and vulnerable teenager. The film is moving, suspenseful and funny, loaded with social commentary. The artwork is beautiful. 

On their “road trip” our three outcasts have adventures and meet strange and scary individuals.  Things aren’t what they seem. . .or they are exactly what they seem, it’s just that there’s more to them than what you see at first.  They help a wealthy man who’s stuck under his car, and he invites them to his house.  It turns out he is a powerful crime lord.  There is an assassination attempt, and the would-be assassin grabs Miyuki and the baby as he makes his getaway, but far from hurting them, takes them to a place of warmth, nourishment and safety. When we first see Hana, at a Catholic Christmas Eve service, she looks like an elderly, overly-made-up woman.  Then we find out she’s a man. The movie is all about looking beneath the surface, so it is no surprise that the baby’s parentage is not as simple as it seems either.

It isn’t clear why Hana is living on the streets, but we learn why Miyuki and Gin, the “bum,” are. Gin, the most bitter and realistic of the three, provides the voice of social comment.  We see that he was a regular guy who put himself on the streets because of his gambling addiction, a theme the movie returns to later.

Because it’s a quest, each outcast has to find an inner truth before the outer events of their lives can align.  Miyuki, touched by the connection with the Hispanic family she meets, sheds her “tough girl” armor long enough to attempt a phone call to her home.  Gin chooses to help his drag-queen friend instead of walking away, and is re-connected with his own family as a result. Hana, outwardly burlesque-feminine, ends up being the film’s action hero. 

The animation is lovely, strange and whimsical, whether it’s a frame of snow falling, or pinwheels spinning outside an elderly homeless man’s shelter, or Gin’s face as he talks about his family. The scene with Miyuki on a train, looking across at the other track and recognizing someone, is exquisite and had me holding my breath.

What is it about babies?  Not everyone likes, or is comfortable with babies, but we all get what they represent.  They represent the future.  They represent hope.

In 1948, John Ford released a movie called 3 Godfathers, starring John Wayne and Harry Cary Jr.  In it, three bank robbers flee into the desert, where they find a dying woman in labor.  They deliver her baby and promise the dying woman they will keep her child safe.  This means they have to return to the town whose bank they just robbed.  Not everyone survives in this movie, but the baby, the hope of the future, is returned to civilization.

Ford’s movie was a remake of a 1936 movie called The Three Godfathers, which has exactly the same plot. I usually roll my eyes at the thought of remakes, but the idea of a John Ford western— a John Wayne western—migrating to Japan, where it becomes an animated feature commenting on modern alienation and intolerance, just tickles me.

The Taming of the Shrew

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Jennifer King

By the end of summer I was jonesing for a live Shakespeare fix, so on August 31st I went to Ives Park to catch the final night of the Sonoma County Repertory Theater’s (aka The Rep) production of Taming of the Shrew.

            Every summer the theater company does Shakespeare in the park.  Even though this comedy is not one of my favorite plays, I had read a good review of it posted on the window of the Rep’s Main Street Theater.  Then a woman at work told me she had seen it.  She liked the pirate theme.  I decided I could probably tolerate the plot since there was so much else going for it.

            Harold Bloom, the High Priest of the First Church of Shakespeare, would like us all to know that Shrew is not in the least misogynistic, and that Kate and Petruchio are in fact one of the Bard’s happiest married couples, right up there with Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth.  He does go on to admit that while he wishes Kate and “her roaring boy” all the best, they aren’t the kind of couple he’d want to hang around with.  I almost never argue with Harold Bloom when it comes to Shakespeare.  The Rep didn’t argue either; they didn’t deal at all with the troubling subtext of the play; they just had rollicking good fun.

            Jennifer King chose to set the play, not in Padua, but on a pirate ship.  The picture of the set is one they graciously allowed me to take before the play started. (I say that seriously, because sets, props and costumes are all intellectual properties. It is usually not all right to photograph them.)

            Before the play got rolling, cast members in costume came out and warmed up the crowd, singing pirate songs and encouraging us to yell “Yarrr!” when we saw or heard something we liked.  The final “pirate song” of the warm-up show had the chorus of “You’re the worst pirate in the world, ’cause you’re a girl.”  Sounds like it shouldn’t be funny, but it was.

            The color palette of the costumes stayed in the orange, rust and burnt umber range, matching the boat set and making Kate’s fuchsia garb stand out.  Mary Gannon Graham, who played Kate, was outstanding, and she and Dodds Delzell’s Petruchio played off each other perfectly.  The actors leaped about the stage, slid down poles and executed full-body pratfalls with exuberant physicality. They got around Petruchio’s horrid treatment of Kate by showing us the moment when Kate (who is already in love with him) realizes that he is actually in love with her.  Characters exited and entered in boats they wore like inner tubes—and there was an actual, bright purple swimming-pool inner tube employed at one point.

            I don’t know if the energy of the play was high because it was the last night or whether this great cast managed to maintain that level through the whole run, but it is hard to remember when I wasn’t laughing. And because the relationship between Kate and Petruchio was so well defined, I had some realizations about the characters that make me think Harold Bloom is right.  Kate’s “shrewishness” probably comes from being the smartest person in her family, certainly the most spirited, and having to live every day knowing that her clueless father loves the simpering, manipulative Bianca (the real shrew,) more than Kate. Shakespeare understood jealously really well, and in this production, when Kate says to her father Baptista (he has a hook for a hand, in pirate homage) “I see, she is your treasure!” I had an “aha” moment.  Later, when the boorish Petruchio is dragging Kate away from her own wedding feast, he has a long speech that always irritated me on the page.  It goes something like, “She is my goods, my chattel,” (hisses from the audience, by the way) and then runs on. . .and on.  In the mouth of Dodds Delzell, the ending line, “She is my every thing,” had a different meaning.  What is it like for Kate, always devalued and unfavorably compared to the daughter who is the “good woman,” to suddenly be someone’s “every thing?”

            Mary Gannon Graham made Kate sympathetic and believable.  She and Dodds Delzell are equally matched. William Wilson was good as Baptista, and  Gwen Kingston and Dan Saski are likeable as the secondary set of lovers Bianca and Lucentio.  The “suitors,” Gremio and Hortensio were hilarious and played to the max by Chad Yarish and Miyaka Cochrane.

            A fun time.  Walking home in the dark, exchanging “good evenings” with the hordes of teenagers who were out, hiding their Mike’s Hard Lemonades on the floorboards as I passed, I imagined Kate and her boy-toy sailing the high seas, singing, as the cast had, “Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me.”