HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – Hilo’s Palace Theater October 14, 2008
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND, Hawaii Travel , 1 comment so far
HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
Hilo’s Palace Theater
Back in the 1920s, going to the movies was a big occasion. People dressed up to see and be seen; they chatted in the lobby, about the latest films, and enjoyed a sense of being guests in a fabulously decorated . . .
well, palace.
The Palace Theater in downtown Hilo, which opened in 1925, is one of only two “picture-palaces” still open in Hawaii. (Honolulu lost its exotic Waikiki Theater to demolition, leaving only the grand Hawaii Theater near Chinatown.) As with other surviving picture-palaces around the country, nowadays, a not-for-profit organization – the Friends of the Palace Theater – is responsible for upkeep and restoration. And like those other theaters, too, the Palace hosts film-festivals and classic movies: on Halloween night, it will screen the 1920 silent “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” with live theater-organ accompaniment.
But Hilo’s Palace does much more than just show films: with 450 seats, it’s an important local venue for theatrical presentations, a variety of performing artists, and even community meetings.
Take musicals. For the seventh year in a row, the Palace is presenting a full-scale Broadway-style musical (last year, it was “The Wizard of Oz”), with a huge cast of local actors, including children and teenagers. 
If you can get to Hilo in the next two weeks, you’ll be able to see “Once Upon One Nodda Time.” It’s a pidgin-inflected musical of fractured fairy-tales, wherein the Three Little Pigs are chased by a huffing-and-puffing mongoose; Snow White gets both a poisoned apple from “The” Wicked Queen and a poisoned papaya from “Da” Wicked Queen; and there’s a croaking chorus of (what else?) cane-toad bufos and coqui frogs.
Performers who make concert appearances on the Palace stage range from Honolulu slack-key stars to internationally renowned classical violinists to world-music percussionists. Every Wednesday at 11 a.m. there’s a 45-minute program of Hawaiiana that’s free for kids. And one evening last month, the Palace hosted a town-meeting on the subject of downtown improvement projects, with real-time opinion polling by electronic touch-pads. (FYI: most people want to see new housing built downtown, and a naturalistic park along the Wailuku River.)
In short, there’s no place in town like the historic Palace Theater. And Hilo is darned lucky to have it.
HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – Seeing Hawaii When You Aren’t Here October 6, 2008
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND, Hawaii Travel, Updates , add a commentHERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
Seeing Hawaii When You Aren’t Here
People have a tendency to see what they want to see. And if you want to be in Hawaii, don’t be surprised if more and more things start you thinking of Hawaii.
I don’t mean the ads and articles in travel magazines. Whether you’re a longtime subscriber (to what I heard a frequent-flier call “travel-porn”), or just back-date browsing in a waiting-room, those articles and ads are deliberately intended, designed, tweaked and polished for the purpose of making you think about coming here.
I also don’t mean “Hawaii 5-0,” or “Lost,” either. Nor the mystique of “tiki” that has likely propelled a million visitors into the Pacific. Ever since Trader Vic’s first opened, thousands of bamboo-torches have lit up back-yard bars. And upscale establishments with superficially thatched roofs (like the Tonga Room in San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel) have been popular for decades.
No, not those things. It’s little things I mean. You’ve just seen a mai-tai on a passing tray, and suddenly you think of the first mai-tai you had on your first visit to Hawaii. There’s a palm-tree on the breast-pocket of someone’s sport-shirt, and you remember looking up under a real one, to see if the nuts might fall. (Actually, in Hawaii’s public parks, coconuts are removed so they don’t.) Your menu has a less-familiar Hawaiian word, like “haupia,” and because you know that means there’s coconut in it, you start wondering what an airline ticket costs now. Maybe it takes only hearing or reading the word “coconut” . . . ?
There’s a wonderful feature in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s online edition called “The Search for Signs of Hawaiian Life.” People send in digital photos from all over the world — pictures of mainly (and literally) SIGNS: for restaurants, shops and other businesses that somehow echo things Hawaiian. There isn’t much surf on the Adriatic coast, but here’s a picture that a friend took, just outside of Dubrovnik, in Croatia. Makes you want to hang ten, doesn’t it?
Incidentally, in light of my recent blog asking if you are ready to live here, a new book may be a cautionary tale. It’s called “Off the Grid Without a Paddle,” by Lynne Farr, who moved to the Big Island with her husband before they had really checked the place out.
