By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Staff Writer
I keep telling him he should be the one to write about this. The story is his, the words should be his. He could publish a book and call it, "Confessions of a Hula Father."
Opening line:
"I never thought a jock like me would end up making skirts for keiki hula."
But he just shakes his head at the idea. "Nah," he says. "Get planny guys like me." Even so, he agrees to let me write about his experiences, though I have to promise keep his identity a secret.
He is a manly man who has two daughters he dotes on. Whatever they need, he’s there. So when his eldest needed a ti leaf skirt for a performance, he was on the job.
"My first skirt took me 24 hours," he recalls. His hands stretch and writhe as if remembering work. "My second one, I got it down to eight hours. Then my daughter tried and made one in two hours." He shakes his head.
"I hear this one lady can make one in 15 minutes." He bows his head in reverence.
Being a hula father meant quite a bit of hunting and gathering. "If the kumu said we had to go to the mountains to pick stuff, I would go to the mountains to pick stuff."
Saturday mornings before a performance would have him cruising Kaimuki, Kapahulu, McCully, all the way to the airport looking for flowers. If he spotted someone outside cleaning their yard, he’d ask, "Eh, can pick some stuff for my daughter?" They almost always said he could.
He did this for 13 years, taking care of costumes and foliage while his wife did the driving.
He went to Merrie Monarch five years in a row. He had a good time.
"Too bad neva have pictures of all the kine stuff we used to do," he says, briefly considering the idea of going public with his experience. But he follows it up with a classic tough guy line: "But I never allowed pictures at the time."
It’s not that he’s ashamed of the experience. Not at all. He talks of his days of ti leaves and hala and lei needles with a certain shine in his eyes, a sparkle that says he knew what he did was special, he knew what he did helped his girls, and he knew he did a good job.
No, my friend doesn’t want to divulge his identity because he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t want a lot of fuss made over him.
There are lots of hula fathers out there, and ballet fathers, and Boy Scout mothers for that matter, who step far out of their comfort zones and areas of expertise for the sake of their children’s learning experience.
Plus, he doesn’t want a pack of neophyte hula fathers calling him up. Let ’em learn the way he did. The hard way.
Lee Cataluna’s column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com
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