{"id":903,"date":"2016-11-03T20:41:05","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T03:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/?p=903"},"modified":"2016-11-03T20:41:05","modified_gmt":"2016-11-04T03:41:05","slug":"my-first-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/my-first-audience","title":{"rendered":"My first audience!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s start this off with honesty. Total honesty.<\/p>\n

I play ukulele with great enthusiasm\u2014but not a whole bunch of skill. But I rarely stop smiling when I play. So perhaps that explains what I\u2019m going to relate here.<\/p>\n

I played ukulele\u2014to an appreciative audience. Of strangers, even (I mean, really, family doesn\u2019t count when they<\/span> appreciate you playing, do they? The whole blood\/family ties thing pretty much means they have to give you kudos. Unless it\u2019s 10:20 pm and you\u2019re still playing \u201cYou Are My Sunshine.\u201d Again. But I digress\u2026).<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the story: Mark and I were heading home from a couple of weeks in Hawai\u2019i. I\u2019m never the happiest heading home because, well, we\u2019re heading home. But the outdoor gardens at Honolulu Airport make the transition a little smoother. Since we had plenty of time between our flight from Hawai\u2019i Island to our connection from Honolulu, I scouted out a shady bench in one of the gardens near the inter-island terminal and opened my ukulele case.<\/p>\n

No one was nearby (well, except Mark, but we\u2019ve already been down that conversational path) so I didn\u2019t worry about upsetting any passengers who were looking for a quiet, non-ukulele-music interlude. I plucked and strummed and even sang some favorite Hawaiian tunes. Then I realized I had an audience.\"ha-employees\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It turned out my shady bench was near a lower entrance for Hawaiian Airlines<\/a> staff and a group of new employees-in-training who were on a break had stepped up behind me to watch and listen. Geesh, was I embarrassed. But they smiled and all clapped heartily. Gee, do you think Hawaiian Airlines hires employees who are tone deaf for a reason?<\/p>\n

To keep the honesty thing going: I didn’t really get all that money from playing at the airport. Those are bills from Mark’s wallet in my open ukulele case. Just in case you didn’t know<\/em> \ud83d\ude09 And the other picture? Well, the birds really did come and sit on my feet as I played. And I did not<\/span> bribe them with any food. Really!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"birds\"<\/a> \"bird\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s start this off with honesty. Total honesty. I play ukulele with great enthusiasm\u2014but not a whole bunch of skill. But I rarely stop smiling when I play. So perhaps that explains what I\u2019m going to relate here. I played ukulele\u2014to an appreciative audience. Of strangers, even (I mean, really, family doesn\u2019t count when they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hawaii_travels","category-performers","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/busking.jpg?fit=768%2C1024","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Wqkt-ez","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}