Aloha, My Friend,

You cannot imagine my shock when so many years back I discovered that not only did Walt Disney deliberately lie to us but he did in a very cruel and unusual way.

And he got an Academy Award  for crying out loud!

You know about that Lemming myth, right? You know, the one where all of those cute little rodents scurry off and commit mass suicide by jumping off of a cliff in Norway, falling to their death into the Arctic Ocean? That was a packaged creation by Disney for a 1958 movie called White Wilderness.

The truth crushed my youthful spirit unlike anything since the truth of Santa Claus was revealed.  In 1982 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation discovered and documented that the whole shebang was actually filmed at the Bow River in Calgary.

Now here is the fun part, not only were the lemmings that were flown in for the movie of a species that did not migrate, the ultimate disservice to the little buggers was that they didn’t even leap off the cliff into the river but, much to their surprise, they were flung off of a spinning turntable into a watery death.

Damn you Uncle Walt.

Obviously he is not the kind of person I would want at my Thanksgiving table.

“Who might be invited?” you ask.

Well, it would be you, of course, and all of our friends of BALI HI.

For almost 4 years now Elaine and I have reveled in the good fortune of our growing community of friends.

Blessed is a word that I feel comes closest to our sense of happiness at know you all.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and to all you love.

And if it weren’t for our 4 unruly dogs we would make room for you at our table, but just so you know, Elaine and I will raise a glass of wine or two saluting you and wishing you well for all of your days.

Aloha,  My Friend,

Spanning the globe to bring you a constant variety of entertainment for your Railroad Square visits I have happened upon a tuba quartet made up of some FSU School of Music students.

As I was reckoning this was a unique sensory delight for your eyes, ears and funny bone I happened to reflect on an old friend from my Seattle days, Tuba Ed. At that time I used to manage a video arcade disguised as a pub and college student dive.

In the early middle of a weekend evening Tuba Ed would come in from a long afternoon of performing. Really on any day of the year that there was a sports event you could find Tuba Ed at work, his stage was  a simple spot on the sidewalk leading up to the Kingdome for Mariner Baseball or Seahawk Football or across town by the Space Needle at the Key Arena for Sonics Basketball or Thunderbird Hockey. You would hear his deep, thick notes long before you would see him and often he was hidden in a circle of friends and fans that he had cultivated and accumulated over his 2 decades of performing for tips.

Sometimes, at the end of his “shift”, he would gather up his horn and his busker’s hat full of dollars and change and for reasons I never could fathom, he would take a bus cross town to my humble suds hole. When he would arrive we would clear a space at the end of the bar for him to sort his paper money and his quarters and dimes and whatever. He would make small piles for each denomination and when he had made his tally I would convert it into a more manageable stack of &1, $5’s and $ $10’s.

At around 6 feet tall and 350 pounds, wearing thick, black Buddy Holly glasses, it is kind to say that Tuba Ed was a teddy bear of a man in heart and stature.  And he was genuinely polite. His greeting was always, “Good Evening, Bill” or “Good Evening, Steve”, never a clipped “Hi” or “Hello”. His voice was as cavernous and bassy as the instrument that he played and his speech pattern was slow, halting and deliberate as though he wanted to sure and careful to use only the shiniest words to construct a nice sentence.

Some people wondered aloud if he might be “simple” or, as the band Los Lobos sang in a song, “ Little John of God”. In the obituary that I read that wasn’t worth mentioning. What they did say was that in his younger days he the principal tubist for the Bellevue Philharmonic and played for the local symphony before he decided to bring his music to the streets.

One story that I read about Tuba Ed was that outside one of the arena’s someone asked him if he had ever attended a game in the stadium. When he said that he had never been inside friends bought him a ticket and throughout the game hot dogs, peanuts and drinks were bought for him by friends, fans and strangers throughout the house.

One night in October, 2008, Tuba Ed was walking the last couple 100 yards to his home when he was assaulted by 5 teenagers who beat and kicked. At first everything seemed OK, under the circumstances. He spent a few days in the hospital and was released only to die alone in his apartment of an apparent brain hemorrhage.

He was just 53 years old. Dead, now there’s a 4 letter word for you.

He would have laughed his bottomless chuckle if he only knew what a tragic impact his death had on a large portion of Seattleites. There is even talk of putting up a statue of him with his tuba outside of the new stadium.

He loved to laugh. It is honest to say that I heard him laugh more often than speak.

In the Los Lobos song the liner notes tell the story that “Little John of God” is what the nuns used to refer to abandoned, disadvantaged babies.

Ed McMichaels was neither. In the end Tuba Ed had tens of thousands of friends and we all envied his rich love for everyone – His heart was truly the size of Texas.

I will quote a line from the song because, well, it seems right.

“He Came To Us From Up Above
  To Touch Our Hearts With A Special Love
  With A Special Love, Little John Of God”

Aloha, My Friend,

When I first moved to Seattle after spending a considerably amount of time and money at FSU I began working at what at that time was the 2^nd largest microbrewery on the West Coast, Red Hook Brewery. At that time Sierra Nevada Beer was still categorized as a micro so we were in an impressive and limited crowd.

One of the characters working there was a spunky chap nicknamed Bhagwan. He had a mystic’s twinkle in his eyes and the trimmed beard and attributes of Rasputin. He was the Red Hook brewing team leader by day and the sole sales rep by night.  Now a-days you can get Red Hook in all 50 states, Florida to Hawaii. I’ve even hoisted a cold Red Hook on the island of Guam.

After Bush’s war in Iraq started, Red Hook wanted to do their patriotic duty so Al The Brewmaster called me to see if I could help them out. At that time I was working for a U.S. Navy education program in Hawaii. I titled myself “The Dean of the Pearl Harbor Campus” and Al’s intentions went straight to a salty sailor’s heart.

He told me that irregularly the brewery would get large shipments of out of date returns from the distributers. Ordinarily they would just crush the bottles and recycle the glass but because the beer was really still good for almost 2 months after the expiration date Red Hook wanted to donate it to our men and women in uniform. This beer was shrink-wrapped with 66 cases to a pallet and, at first, Al’s only requirement was that the recipients made their own arrangements to get the beer. That was until one of the brewery shareholders called him to say that they had seen a 2 ½ ton Navy vehicle driving down I-5 North loaded to the brim with Red Hook cases of beer. At that point Al suggested everyone use tarps.

Red Hook gave several hundred cases for the christening of two submarines, the USS Virginia and the USS Hawaii. Every Army and Navy base within 100 miles of Seattle received a couple pallets and one navy aircrew flew a training mission from Virginia to Connecticut and back to test the load balance of 330 cases of Red Hook.

I mention Red Hood and Bhagwan because 25 years ago this month Bhagwan’s namesake, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashram cult in The Dalles, OR, imploded. Let’s call him BSR for short, and he really was kind of short in stature anyway. BSR was a charlatan swami of the first order. Born in India, he relocated to Oregon in 1981. BSR occasionally  preached sexual abstinence although he was referred to by the press as the “sex guru.” He advocated poverty, and to insure that he kept his loyal followers in poverty he accepted their donations until he had 99 Rolls-Royces that he ostentatiously paraded on the compound grounds all the while the devotees, sannyasins, had their matching orange robes.

He warned of “outsiders”, the residents of The Dalles, OR, who were a threat to the ashram’s way of true life. The cult spent incredible sums of money to influence elections; they brought in people from surrounding states to intimidate local politicians. BSR was a proponent of unregulated, unrestricted big business, forced birth control and avoiding paying taxes. The cult took over news programming so that they could control the direction and tenor of the information disseminated to the viewers and they were pretty much on their way to controlling The Dalles community until the cult attempted a couple assassinations and the contaminating of some food stuff with salmonella and blaming it on the non-believers to strengthen their control by fear of “outsiders”.

When Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh died in 1991 one of the last things on his tombstone reads, “ Only visiting this planet”.

Is it just me or does it appear that there are quite a few of those fellow visitors still around here these days?

Aloha, My Friend,

OK, so we are not moving from Midtown after all. Last month when I told you that we were packing our bags and turning off the lights at 1123 a lot of you guys took it pretty hard. We are flattered and honored to have such a loyal and supportive band of friends.

But believe you me, it is not the end of the world – Maybe if Douglas Adams got you a really good seat at Milliway’s you could see the end of the universe – but that is another story.

Elaine and I are elated about our decision too. I guess that even life decisions are like a multiple choice question test, if you are not sure of the answer just go with your gut feeling and you’ll probably do alright.

As I write this missive there are elections being held in Kenya, a place that the New York Times calls one of the most corrupt places on this planet other that the office of the Governor of Illinois. What they are attempting to do you would think would be rather simple and basic; they are voting on the creation of a constitution and a Bill of Rights, a weakening of the dictatorial powers of the president and expansion of local authority. Opponents   of these civil liberties are blocking traffic in the major cities and dragging people out of their cars and beating them to death if they suspect that the victim supports the constitution and human rights. People are literally dying to vote over there.

Recently both Elaine and I voted by mail and had to suffer the 50 foot walk to the mailbox.

Everybody has an opinion on how our community, or nation should be run or how some issue should be resolved but 75% to 80% of those eligible don’t vote and many aren’t even registered. A candidate endorsed by the Democrat has voted only once before and that was nearly 10 years ago.

Register. Get knowledgeable. Vote. Period

That said. Elaine and I believe that exciting things are about to happen in the Midtown sector and we want to be party to it all. So, instead of telling tales out of school let me wisen you up on what BALI HI is scheming.

Of course we will be open in Railroad Square for First Friday. And I have a cold Hawaiian beer  for just saying the magic word – Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. As usual, we will be closed in Midtown that night.

And Elaine says that we need a vacation, even if it is a staycation. We have been on a BALI HI binge for nearly the full 365 days and if we keep having this much fun we won’t fully appreciate Heaven when we get there so we are taking a few days off next week.

BALI HI in Railroad Square will be closed from Sunday, August 8^th until Tuesday, August 17^th.

The Midtown BALI HI will be open our regular hours, Tuesday – Friday 11am – 6pm and Saturday 11am until 5pm.

This First Friday, August 6^th, the Midtown location will be closed, as usual and the Railroad Square BALI HI will have a split day.  Railroad Square will be open from 11am until 3pm and then close for a short break and reopen at 5pm and be available for your shopping pleasure until 10pm.

And certainly the teak furniture sale continues through August so give into your impulse buying urge.

Best Wishes & Peace.

Elaine & Bill Grace
BALI HI Trading Company
aloha@balihi.us
www.balihi.us
850/ 766-7175

Aloha, My Friend,

Every 4^th of July that I share with Laine is better than this poor city boy truly deserves, so, of course, it stands to reason that the best 4^th of July weekend that I’ve ever experienced was spent with my sweet Laine and we spread it butter thin between Nashville & Memphis, Tennessee.  

You are asking yourself, why did Bill & Elaine stretch themselves like a licorice stick across Interstate-40? Well, let me take this moment to tell you. A few months prior to all of this I was in an airport bar sharing drinks and swapping stories with a U.S. Marshall. In all of this she let it slip that the best fireworks show that she had ever attended was a picnic style celebration along the Cumberland River in Nashville. And, buddy-boy, let me tell you, she sure was right about that. Even before noon the good folks of the community start setting down blankets on the fresh mowed grass of the Riverfront Park. Apparently only tourists and wussies wait until sundown to start drinking for this occasion. With big name musical acts performing all afternoon and 100,000 of my dearest friends elbowing me and laughing with me I discovered that this was a 4^th of July of a much higher order than I was used to.

But what about Memphis? Let me tell you straight up, while there were a million oohs and ahhs at the fireworks display that Friday night, the Sunday morning services at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis was truly a religious experience with the whole proceeding led by the Rev. Al Green. Yes, the same Al Green whose 1970’s Soul Music helped define the rhythm in the heartbeat of half a generation of teenagers in puppy love.

If you should ever get the chance to have a holiday weekend like that grab it with both hands. If you are only able to choose one take in Memphis and the Full Gospel immersion – it is bigger than Elvis and will fit you perfectly.

Elaine and I would like to wish you and your families a wonderful and safe 4^th of July.

And, if you find a quiet moment in your day and in your heart hear yourself say to the many who have served in our military, to the many who are currently in our military and to the too many who have died, “Thank You for the Service.”

On Google I noticed that one of the unusual dedicated days in July is called, “Cheer Up The Lonely Day”. The idea was originated by a gent in Detroit, Francis Pesek, to remember the infirmed and shut-ins every July 11^th. How wide spread it is beyond his family and friends I couldn’t tell you, but now you know and you can decide what to do with your newly acquired knowledge.

But if this day has a theme song it is probably called, “Hello In There”, by John Prine. Here is the chorus:

“Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there. Hello.”

And when you have your own lonely moment, as we all surely have and will, hopefully you will remember that Elaine and I say Hello.

Please join Elaine and I for 1st Friday at Railroad Square.  We are pleased to feature Cindy Sbrissa of Mystic Mosaics who has once again worked her magic to create some amazing and functional mosaic art including an almost 2 ft. long tree frog to guard your garden, a Buddha for luck, frames and a box for magic or moonlight! We still have some great art by Patty Maney and some new jewelry artists with very affordable hand crafted pieces to make your summer sparkle.  In Midtown we are featuring “Gifts from the Sea” beautifully crafted ocean gems by Anne Peery. Wear her pearls, shells and gems on Anne’s unique sterling ear wires to honor our injured sister sea. Other new artists are Leak Clark who has some lovely eyeglasses holders so you can keep up with those sunners and eclectic gems by Gretchen Greenwood! 

 Once again we are open on 1st Friday at Railroad Square until 9:30 PM but will be closed there on Friday 7/3 from 3-5 PM.  Regular hours there are Tuesday-Sat. 11-6 PM and 12-5 PM on Sunday even on the 4th!  The Midtown store is open Tuesday- Friday 11-6, Sat. 11-5 PM. We will be open early at 9AM on Sat. 7/17 to help Lucy and Leo’s celebrate their 1st anniversary with a benefit for the Animal Shelter Foundation. Call for more information, 766-7175, http://www.balihi.us/.

 There are also some changes afoot at Bali-HI so look for future posts with more information and a HUGE sale!

 Best Wishes & Peace,

Elaine & Bill Grace

BALI HI Trading Company
565 Industrial Dr. – In Railroad Square
1123 Thomasville Rd – In Midtown
850/ 766-7175
aloha@balihi.uswww.balihi.us

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