Blue Ribbon

My colleague, Al, has been on a mission taking me to authentic places in Honolulu where tourists are nowhere to be found.  I suppose as a 4th generation Honoluluan (?) he knows where they are.  We ended up at a place called Blue Ribbon.  It looked like a dive bar in Oakland from the outside.  I was the ONLY white person in this place.  If it were anyplace else other than Honolulu I would have been scared. 

Blue Ribbon is a karaoke bar where locals hang out.  Al got us a private (read:  SOUND PROOF) room and handed me a book of songs and a stack of quarters to load the karaoke machine.  The videos that accompanied the song lyrics were hilarious.  It was so cheesy it was GREAT!  The videos looked like early 1980's porn movies with the big hair and all the men with Magnum PI mustaches. 

About this time I needed to find the bathroom.  When I came out there was Al standing at the bar talking to everybody as everybody knows him.  He made an announcement that soon a bunch of 'haoles' (go ahead and google the term) would be coming into their bar, but to send them into the private room Al had reserved. 

Sure enough, many from my work-brigade soon showed up....and let me tell you....they are the most uptight a-haoles that ever walked the earth and I'm certain many orifices are also water-tight.  We are all sitting around cocktails in hand.  The energy in the room was stale and stiff.  Somebody had to get this party started.  I could only take so many songs with Fred the Analyst hogging the karaoke microphone in one hand and bourbon on the rocks in the other singing bad Englebert Humperdink.

Hmmmmmmm  what would get these people to loosen up a bit?  I know.  I put The Lion Sleeps Tonight on the play list and got a couple of extra microphones.  It worked.  Everybody had a part.  I then put Love Shack on the playlist and was not shy with my singing -- neither was anybody else.  The highest complement of the evening?  I got them up off their butts and got them to DANCE.  It does not matter that we all looked utterly ridiculous.  Everybody was having fun.  Innocent fun.  Clean fun.  FUN.  If I can get a bunch of stuffed-shirt haoles to loosen up I consider that a major feat. 

The next day at the morning meeting I had several colleagues approach me and say, "For 25 years you hardly ever even spoke.  Now you sing.  None of us ever knew until a couple of years ago that you could dance like a black chick.  What else have you been keeping from us?"

That's for me to know and for them to find out.