Honeymoon Five-0
_Casual Honeymoon Five-0 It may be the 50th state, but come on! For those of us who grew up on the East Coast and never joined the Navy, Hawaii is more myth than reality. It's smack dab in the...
...But mostly he made jokes about how old he was (67), about how easy his life was (he golfs mostly...
...We decided to take in Don Ho's nightclub act after seeing his name on a bulletin board in the lobby of our Honolulu hotel above the delightfully named "Pleasant Activity Desk...
...After the applause, he looked out at the room and said in a low mumble, "We gonna sing it again at the end of the show...
...Well, the joke was on me, because Don Ho and his audience both proved to be very much in on the joke themselves...
...then a Japanese guitarist sang Hank Williams songs...
...then a 7-year-old girl hula dancer did her thing...
...The show lasted almost two hours and was an unalloyed delight from beginning to end...
...It's smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for God's sake...
...The mere mention of his name inspires knowing and patronizing giggles among those of us at the tail end of the baby boom...
...We thirtysome-things are obsessed with pop-culture kitsch...
...Surely Don Ho would surpass even Allen and Rossi for sheer show-biz has-been pathos...
...He came on stage with a five-piece band behind him, sat down, and began to sing his signature song, "Tiny Bubbles...
...Yes, Marty Allen did say "Hello dere...
...You can call us Hawaii skeptics the "ice people," in tribute not to Leonard Jeffries but to the frigid temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, in which we have painfully tried to bathe every summer...
...Have you heard of Daniel Akaka, its junior senator...
...John Podhoretz...
...Every now and then he would sing—I was especially happy to hear "Ain't No Big Thing," which he had performed on an episode of I Dream of Jeannie I had watched at 1:30 in the morning on Nick at Nite a few weeks earlier during a bout of insomnia...
...These sitcom episodes had their commonalities: a visit to Waikiki Beach, a shot of the Diamond Head volcano, and an inevitable guest appearance by the Hawaiian entertainer Don Ho...
...I have just returned from an eight-day honeymoon in Hawaii, and I can safely say that it is the nicest place on earth: Its beauty is welcoming, not forbidding, the people are really won-drously nice, and even the Japanese smile at you in the hotel elevator...
...I have spent my adulthood discovering that every single idea held by the majority of people in the northeastern United States is wrong, and now my Hawaii skepticism has been mugged by reality as well...
...And off he went, making jokes in the offhand, throwaway manner of Dean Martin (who was one of the smoothest and funniest live performers America has ever produced...
...Mostly, though, I was wrong about Don Ho...
...How could Hawaii be a state when you've never seen a license plate with the word "Hawaii" on it...
...Hawaii is the place a million miles away where a world war began in earnest half a century ago, the subject of ancient novelty songs about little grass shacks, the home of small-screen characters like Dan-o of "Book 'em, Dan-o" fame, and the temporary setting for sitcoms that were running out of steam and needed a little sun and surf to appeal to audiences quickly growing bored with them...
...We sat down at 5:30 p.m., ushered from the bright sun into a dark room off the patio at the Waikiki Beachcomber Hotel that looked like a retooled disco from the early 1970s...
...That's the way it's been—twice a night, every night, for 27 years...
...he simply gestured to the crowd, and the crowd sang with his prompting...
...About a hundred times...
...I will actually, honestly, and without irony, treasure it...
...And in the 90 minutes before the show, it looked like I was about to get my wish...
...Dinner was slapped down on the table in front of us—two slices of prime rib that looked as though the rib dated from Adam's time...
...Or rather, he didn't sing it...
...A pretty hula dancer with the astounding name of Haumea Hebenstreit who spoke with an Australian accent did a dance...
...I remember feeling as though I had found a first edition of Dickens at a yard sale when, on a trip to Las Vegas, I went to see the 1960s comedy act Allen and Rossi, who had apparently been embalmed and were still performing nightly for a $6 cover charge at a hotel called Bob Stupak's Vegas World...
...then Don's best friend sang an aria with great relish out of tune...
...I was suddenly very sorry I had come, because the truth is that trolling for kitsch is more entertaining in the contemplation than in the execution...
...We had our picture taken with Don Ho in the lobby...
...He autographed it...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 39
