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hazelchaz
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Tiki Oasis 9: Friday Afternoon (14-Aug-2009)
Tiki
Oasis 9: Saturday (15-Aug-2009)
Tiki
Oasis 9: Sunday (16-Aug-2009)
I drove down from Anaheim to help out at check-in, getting there just in time -- I was the Mug Kahuna for the evening (right), working alongside Charlie from "House of Tiki" and Pua (not shown) -- and after that I mostly spent the rest of the weekend taking pictures.
I took pictures of "Hukilau Brown" and "Babydoe" there in the lobby
(left). Hukilau has a badge and a wristband (not visible). Babydoe has a
red "all-access" wristband, and no namebadge -- nobody who paid for their
admission had nametags, only us volunteers who worked a shift to get in
free got one.
Hukilau, whose volunteer badge said "Mateo" (he changed it later to show his tiki name as well as his nickname), was the volunteers coordinator. I talked to him to find out how the convention (which had about 1400 people) is run. There are a cadre of volunteers -- about fifty -- that are recruited for a single shift, each, and they're trained on the fly by the senior staff. Which amounts to about four people. Hukilau's one of them. The chair and treasurer are "Otto Von Stroheim" and his wife Babydoe. I'm not sure who the fourth person is, but I think it's the person doing the scheduling.
Hotel negotiations are, I believe, handled by Otto. They use the entire Crowne Plaza, 417 rooms, and they drink the bar dry. The Islands Sushi and PuPu Bar restaurant did its best business this weekend in the entire history of the hotel. And their room rates are $179 a night. It seems to me that this could possibly be negotiated downward...
I spent a lot of time talking to Hukilau about con-running philosophy. He said that this year -- Tiki Oasis's 9th year -- they're starting to realize that it's actually a convention now, and not just a big backyard mug party. (Hello? You didn't notice, when people started booking rooms at overflow hotels in the area, that it would need a little more structure?)
He said that he'd like to appoint me as Official Convention Philosopher. I told him I have a number of suggestions for the convention, but none of them are minor.
Most of the evening activity at this laid-back convention revolves
around drinking and parties. You can think of it as a weekend with a
thousand amiable drunks.
I walked into the
"Limoncello Lounge" Friday night and was handed a little black
souvenir tiki
shotglass with limoncello
over crushed ice.
Limoncello is a strong lemon-flavored liqueur. Drink all you like, your
breath will smell like Lemon Pledge.
A lot of people were already
carrying a drink -- you can see that Chris "Colonel" Sanders and Chao
Sanders here have three drinks between them.
The Martini Kings
started playing, right there in the party room.
A three-piece band
complete with xylophone. I immediately recognized the opening strains of
"Baby Elephant Walk." I stayed to listen that and for half of the next song.
That party, and the Frankie's Tiki Room party upstairs, were standing-room-only. Both parties had people at the doors to let in more people from the long lines outside only when a matching number of tiki fans right. I did my part and moved on.
I met bartenders Kitty Cat and Scarlett Letter at the Pele Utu
party. (left)
They had a little bar menu, showing three or four alcoholic drinks on one side, and a similar slate of virgin drinks on the other.
I got a "Blood of zombie tiki priestess queen" or something like that. It
was a pink drink.
As Tiki Todd can vouch for, each drink came with a leechee nut/blueberry
eyeball as garnish (right).
Everything's better in a tiki mug. Or with an umbrella in it. Or
both.
The
cool thing to do is to have a tiki mug -- I bought a lovely volcano mug last year -- but this time I decided I wanted to go through "cool" and out the other side, beyond cool. Since I had the bear ears, and someone had given me a bear mug which holds one standard drink, I brought that. You can see it's rather modest and unassuming, next to the zombie mug someone bought last year.
At the check-in desk, I had heard Otto Von Stroheim's name mentioned
all evening.
(One way to get someone out of your hair for the rest of the night is to tell them they need to go get a note from Otto...) I was starting to wonder if "I'm a friend of Otto" was sort of the opposite of "I'm a friend of Bill W." and whether Otto actually existed and if he was still in town, or if he'd chucked all the tiki stuff and gone to Jamaica for some rum and reggae. Jay Marshak was looking for Otto, too, though, and he found him after midnight up in the same party I was at.
People were making music in the Pele Utu party, next to the
volcano.
There were a few other parties that night, too. Not a lot -- I missed the afternoon room crawl (I was still on the freeway) -- but as it happens, I think I drank more on Friday night than I had in the previous eight months put together. (And that's including Christmas and New Year's.)
As I headed down the elevator to mosey back to my little motel room, I met Stuart Johnson who clearly was a Martini Kings fan who wasn't done for the night. I was.
