Honolulu Day 2

We took it a little easy. Went into town, stopping to photograph the IBM building along the way.

Then onto the Honolulu Academy of Arts. What a great place. It's housed in a gorgeous old building, and its collections are personal and varied, so you can see a Picasso and a Bertoia sound sculpture and an exhibition on conservation of 18th century prints and discover yam cult figures from the Abelam people all in one visit.

The museum's Doris Duke Theater was showing a film we wanted to see, so we did that too, after an amazing lunch in their outdoor cafe. If you get the chance, see "Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock," a documentary about a blue collar woman who bought an ugly painting for $5 at a thrift store and believes it is a Pollock. She assembled a motley group of art experts and is trying to prove the art establishment wrong. To this date, she's refused offers as high as $9 million, because authentication means more to her than anything else. It was executive produced by Don Hewitt, so it does have a 60 minutes feel to it, but it's pretty wonderful. As the house lights went up, I found a hearing aid battery on the floor, which tells you the age group of our fellow filmgoers. It was fun to be the young kids in the theater. We were told we were the only ones who paid full admission price! Fine with us. Support the arts.

Then we met Girlfriend from uke class and her husband at the Marriott and saw Auntie Genoa. I think she was even better than last year. She's 88 years old, and still kicking ass on the gorgeous falsetto range she is known for. Here she is signing my work uke.



I made two requests, Kaimana Hila and At the Coco Palms, and they played both. No Huhu, also someone's request, blew our tiny minds. Sung mainly in pidgin, it was a comic song about a Chinese man whose wife was unfaithful. At the end of the song he thinks he plants a paka seed and gets a haole baby. You just could not sing that back home.

Only in Hawaii.