If you've been following my blog, you know that Tuesdays are for nostalgia, and that I've been looking back at those postings featuring Pearl's Ashes.
Last week it was Africa. Today, the island of Kauai, for a whole chapter of a possible upcoming book,
Pearl's Ashes, will occur on Kauai. To quote:
While she is from the Big Island, Kauai was where we mostly lived the first year of our marriage, and therefore might have been our most memorable stop. At the Kilauea Sugar Company where I was a trainee, we were provided a cottage with the slippery slide location of the movie South Pacific (right, where Bloody Mary sang Happy Talk to Liat, played by France Nuyen--and, amazingly enough, Pearl looks just like her, and they were even born in the same year--and Lt. Cable) as our backyard. Below in 1963 with Pepper, a mostly german shepherd she raised from 6 weeks old. He was so large that the only way I could wash him was to throw a stick into the river, which he retrieved, so I soaped him and threw the stick back into the water. It just occurred to me that a slight deviation of his swim pattern or stronger current could have swept him over the falls.
Almost half a century later, I returned to that waterfall, and dropped Pearl's Ashes #13 there. The person who took me around Kilauea that day was Misa Tamura, who lived in that town all his life. He is the son-in-law of the individual I mentioned in one of my blogs who came up to me in 1963 to tell me that he knew my grandfather. To further quote.
...in my search for Kenjiro's (name of my grandfather, who more than a century ago helped build a hydroelectric facility for this region) roots. To the right is Misa, then at the age of 92, at the gravestone Mr. Yoshimoto and his friends uncovered in 1963 of Kenjiro Takahashi (my middle name is Kenji, so I was named after him). Click on that above link to read the details.
Further:
My trip to Kauai in 2011 was to accompany my freshman roommate, Jim, here with Kathy and her son Chris. A spectacular sunset of Hanalei Bay from my room at the St. Regis. Here is where I tossed PA#14.
This is where Lt. Cable first landed in South Pacific, followed by Bloody Mary singing Bali Hai. A lot of movies have been filmed on Kauai, and just a couple of months ago I visited 25 production sites (60 films in all emanated from this island).
To close, watch Bloody Mary sing
Happy Talk. Actually, I just learned that Juanita Hall's voice was dubbed by
Muriel Smith (
left). Turns out that Hall was the original broadway actress and singer in the Broadway show of
South Pacific, but Richard Rodgers thought that her vibrato was frayed for the movie. So they used Smith's voice, who herself was prominent in those days, because she starred at that time in the Broadway
Carmen Jones. Muriel Smith played the role of Bloody Mary in the London production of
South Pacific.
Next Tuesday: Bangkok.
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