A Day of New Friends

All of this went down on Saturday, but this is the first chance I've had to sit and type.

I needed to get my hair cut. I hadn't had one since I left Rochester. So this was going to be the first time since I was...oh...12-years-old that someone other than Tony had cut my hair. So I looked to see what there was in the telephone book. Uh, not much and nothing that close. I guess dudes go to salons here, I don't know. So there was this place that was relatively close to the radio station, in Wailuku called Ed's Barber Shop. I doubt it's the Italian hot-spot that I'm used to, but I figured I'd give Ed a shot.

I pulled up to Ed's and was not impressed. It was this tiny room at the end of this old powder-blue building. Old style shingles, roof not looking all that great. The building had that kind of lean to it. But I figured that if it picked this moment to collapse, well, gotta go gotta go. I walked in and everthing in the room was from 1974, except Ed, who was from 1934. The chair was patched up, the scissors & electric shearers looked maintained, but old. And Ed...dude may have given the first hair cut - ever!

He talked slow and with a little bit of a Hawaiian accent, but he looked a bit more Japanese. So I told him that I needed a haircut, I got in the chair and away Ed went. It took a while, Ed's not moving like he used to (I'm assuming). His hands shook a little and once in a while he'd rest the heel of his hand on my head as he was cutting. But we talked for a long time about the island, the state of barbershops in Hawaii, what Maui was like after the war, baseball, New York and more. It was a cool way to spend a half-an-hour. I guess Ed's my new guy now.

Later that night I went to a party I was invited to. One of my Spam consultants who I met online - the MySpace page for the podcast. So I was invited to a party in Makaweo, which doesn't seem that far, but it actually is a good 30 minutes away. So I got there only knowing the host, but ended up meeting a few really...uh...interesting people. There was Caine, a fellow teacher who's at Baldwin High. He's a little bit younger than me. He had lived here for a year before, but went back to Rhode Island. They just called him to offer him the job so he just got back and is new there.

I also met these 4 Russian guys. It was like a foreign version of Newhart: there was Nitkita, Sergei, his other brother Sergei and Ernie the Mongolian. They were chain-smoking kids - early 20's. But they were pretty funny. We exchanged phone numbers and might get together to check out some music. There was this gorgeous drag queen there and I was pretty sure it was a guy, but as the night went on (and Caine kept making drinks) I started having doubts. I didn't stare or do anything rude, but the next day, Keziah helped me figure it out for sure. I also met Lisa. We started with some small talk. Then she started leaving all of these little flyers around the house. Turns out she's a pain-in-the-ass activist whose currently fighting a new condo development in some park land in S. Kihei. Well, then we REALLY started to talk. I was supposed to go to a protest yesterday, but ended up working at school, but I'm leaving in a few minutes for a meeting at the Community Center about it.

It was a good night.