An envisioning. 1958 and the apartment in Port Victoria at midnight, with the sun shining away.

Oh to be here.

Alaska a treat, what with getting to watch seabirds sway in their own seabird dance, looking for snacking options with fins to take back home to their children for breakfast or a bedtime snack should the snacks appear sooner.

All of that fun, but knees that ache going up and down stairs. Feet that can still dance up a treat but only from a seated position on a sofa and not a studio with a barre or even no barre.

But yet . . . grandchildren who visit and trying to be as conservative a grandmother as possible, what with no child being able to imagine that anyone had a life before they came along that did not involve cutting out chocolate chip cookie recipes from the newspaper.

No . . . dancing classes down the street back home in Santa Monica and more nearly every afternoon in high school . . . the Great War arriving and dancing for boys headed for the trenches in France followed with a year of not much of anything once the hula craze went out . . . but a decade after dancing in a Matson troupe on their cruises to Honolulu in a bra made from a Polynesian looking print and a grass skirt made from something that looked like shredded wheat if shredded wheat came two feet long . . . a handsome fellow in the front row catching the leis at the end of the act turning into a handsome husband for life with a big house and no hula-ing at all, but the whole thing a memory for sure . . .

REFRAIN

Oh won’t you come with me, lots of pretty little things you’ll see;

Hu-la, Hu-la maid-ens dressed in shredded wheat. When they dance they sel-dom move their feet;

You’ll hear a steel gui-tar, Play the prettiest mel-o-dy by far;

The Hula Band will play a tune they call the Wa-ke-kee. Couples prance-ing ’round the hall, When they play the Uk-u-le-le, You’ll start in dancing gaily at the “Hu-la Hu-la Ball.”

Sheet Music for “At the Hula Hula Ball” with words and music by Billy Vanderveer, the photograph in the center of the cover with palm tree graphics flanking each side. Published in 1917 by Charles K. Harris. Collections of the University of Michigan via the Haithi Trust here https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015070637478&seq=4. The cover can also be found here https://www.louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/lsm-jaz%3A14847 where it is part of the New Orleans Jazz Collection at the Louisiana State Museum.