Philobolus

Last night, Saturday night, we went to town. That’s what you say when you drive from the North Shore to Honolulu. It takes forty minutes in normal traffic. About the same as driving from Ashland to Grant’s Pass. You go up the long hill out of Haleiwa and cross the plateau where the pineapple fields are, stop and go through the grungy town of Wahiwa, pass Schofield Barracks and Wheeler Field, catch the freeway and race down the hill past Mililani. You begin to catch glimpses of Pearl Harbor, Tripler Army Hospital (a large pink edifice on the mountain side), and in the distance the buildings of Honolulu’s business district, the incongruous multistory condos behind Waikiki and beyond them the very familiar profile of Diamond Head. Honolulu is pretty big and the traffic is often heavy with cars creeping along the freeway and peeling off to take the H-3 over the mountain to Kaneohe or the older Likilike Highway. It was an extraordinary afternoon. Not a cloud anywhere. We were heading to Chinatown for dinner and then a show at the Hawaii Theater, one of those restored Pantages type extravaganzas. We ate at Little Village, a restaurant so good that folks were waiting out on the street to get in. Fortunately, we had reservations. Back in the seventies I was assigned to Hickam AFB for reserve duty and for four years in a row spent two summer weeks in Hawaii. This was before Bart even moved here so I didn’t know anyone. Every night I would catch The Bus in front of the Bachelor Officers Quarters and ride into Honolulu. I had to change buses in Chinatown on Hotel Street, a street notorious at different times in its history for nefarious activities involving mostly booze and sex. There was usually a thirty minute wait for the bus that would take me over toward the University District to the Lauilima Vegetarian Restaurant, my home away from home. So, I always had time to take a little walk in Chinatown and enjoy the strange smells and weird people who congregated there. It looks pretty much the same as it always did with lots of restaurants and curious shops. But now they have the restored Hawaii Theater as a focal point for cultural activities and on the two occasions we have been there the art galleries in the neighborhood were busy and festive. We came to see Pilobolus, the dance company and, as is often the case when Bart buys the tickets, had seats in the front row.
I was disappointed in Philobolus. The six dancers were strong, acrobatic, enthusiastic and energetic. They performed machinations of physical interaction that were hard to believe and impossible to describe. They rolled and looped and leaped and fell. They hopped, lifted, carried, flipped, shook, jumped, slapped, slipped and shimmied. They pas de deux’d and pas de six and were often clumped together like one huge twelve legged organism. The audience gasped and laughed and mostly stood when they were done. But I ended up wishing they had danced.