Pineapple Parlor

05/29/2026

Friend Queen Pictoria is busy this weekend. Every picture will bring a smile to your face.

Looking forward to seeing you this weekend, Monmouth County!

05/26/2026

At 14, she became Disney's first Pacific Islander princess. And she couldn't fully speak the language of her own people. And she almost didn't audition at all.
Auliʻi Cravalho grew up on food stamps in a one-bedroom apartment in Mililani. She slept in the bedroom. Her mom, Puanani, a single mother working as an administrative assistant, slept on the couch.

A talent agent spotted her singing in a charity contest on Oʻahu. She was a freshman at Kamehameha Schools, a soprano in the glee club. She wasn't chasing the part - there were "already so many great submissions," she figured, that she didn't think she needed to try. She was the LAST of hundreds to audition.

Then she met Moana. A girl told never to cross the reef. A girl who crossed it anyway.

By the time the world heard her, Auliʻi was barely 16. A kid from a one-bedroom apartment, suddenly carrying a whole ocean of people on her back.

So she bought her mom a house. "I bought my mommy a house. She's happily retired," she said. The woman who slept on the couch never had to again.

But here's what nobody told her at 14. That role made her the voice of a people who had nearly lost their own.

In 1896 - three years after the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown - the new government banned Hawaiian as the language of school. Children were punished for speaking it. In their own islands, in their own mouths, it became ILLEGAL.

It worked. By 1983, fewer than 50 children under the age of 18 still spoke ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. A language older than the United States. Down to fifty kids.

The language her own kupuna could have been punished for speaking was nearly gone before she was ever born.

And here was the part that should have stopped her. Auliʻi wasn't fluent in Hawaiian. She knew every line of Moana by heart - in English. Saying them in Hawaiian, she admitted, was "an entirely different ball game."

So she learned the language of her ancestors. And she gave Moana back in it.

In 2018, she re-recorded the entire film in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. Every line. Every song. The first Hawaiian-language Disney movie ever made.

"While I still flub on the words, because I'm not 100 percent fluent," she said, "speaking Hawaiian just feels like coming home." There was joy in it, she added - "with them being in the language of my ancestors."

Then they gave it away. A free copy went to every accredited school in Hawaii, pre-K through college. Not the version made for the mainland. The one in the language those same schools had once been forbidden to teach.

In 1983, fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian. Today, more than 26,000 people do.

In February 2026, the sequel premiered in Hawaiian at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, during Hawaiian Language Month. A room full of families. Children watching a Disney hero speak their language out loud, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. "There are few moments in our lifetime where we get to witness the power of our language being uplifted on a global platform," Auliʻi said.

She knew exactly what she was doing. Navigating by the stars, she said, was indigenous knowledge that was almost lost too, before Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson brought it back. "These stories," she said. "We own those."

And the role that started all of it? In 2023, Disney announced a live-action Moana. Auliʻi - the girl who originated her - chose not to play her again.

"I'm truly honored to pass this baton to the next young woman of Pacific Island descent," she said. She found the path. Then she stepped off it, so the next girl could follow.

Moana was a story about a wayfinder. A girl told the safe thing was to stay behind the reef. Auliʻi Cravalho almost stayed behind hers.

She almost skipped the audition. And a language her own people were once punished for almost stayed silent.

Instead, a girl who grew up on food stamps put her ancestors' language back into every school in Hawaii - and onto screens all over the world. That's not a Disney princess. That's a wayfinder.

Mahalo

05/22/2026

🖤🖤🖤

Ʉ₦Happy World Goth Day!
Summerween's about to get as hot as Drac's speedos.

Our annual posting of this classic summerween illustration from our talented friend
(do I get credit for adding the Spooky Cats?)

05/21/2026

Can you help us spread the word about Bottoms Up Midcentury Show? Whether sharing a post, telling a friend or helping circulate posters and rack cards, it’s very much appreciated! The countdown is on!

05/21/2026

Soon!!

We’re trying, I promise. It’s coming soon.

05/21/2026

The year was 1943, and the North African desert was a graveyard of broken steel and shattered dreams.

High atop the craggy slopes of Takrouna, Tunisia, veteran German machine gunners looked down from their limestone fortress.

They held the high ground, an impregnable honeycomb of stone and fire that had repelled every Allied attempt to break through.

But as the pre-dawn mist clung to the rocks on April 19th, a sound began to rise from the valley floor.

It wasn't the rumble of tanks or the whistle of incoming artillery.

It was a low, rhythmic thumping—a vibration that felt like the earth itself was developing a heartbeat.

Then came the voices, a guttural, terrifying roar that sliced through the desert wind.

The 28th Maori Battalion was beginning their Haka.

Eyes wide, tongues out, and hands slapping thighs in perfect, violent unison, these indigenous warriors from New Zealand were invoking the spirits of their ancestors.

To the German Afrika Korps, it sounded like a demonic ritual; to the Maori, it was the preparation for the inevitable.

When the cry ended, the silence that followed lasted only a second before the Maori surged up the cliffs.

They didn't just attack; they hunted.

Fighting with bayonets, grenades, and sheer physical dominance, they cleared the machine gun nests in a frenzy of close-quarters combat.

One Maori soldier, Sergeant Haane Manahi, led a small group that scaled a sheer 500-foot cliff under heavy fire to seize the summit.

By the time the sun rose, the 'impregnable' hill of Takrouna had fallen.

German survivors spoke in hushed, terrified tones about 'the ghost battalion'—men who fought with a supernatural fury they had never seen on the European front.

The 28th Maori Battalion was a unit that almost never existed.

At the start of the war, the New Zealand government was hesitant to form a separate indigenous unit, fearing the loss of their young leaders.

But the Maori leadership insisted, demanding the right to prove their 'mana'—their prestige and spiritual power—on the world stage.

They would go on to become the most decorated New Zealand unit of the entire war, but the cost of their bravery was staggering.

Over the course of the conflict, the battalion suffered a casualty rate of over 600 percent.

This meant the unit was effectively wiped out and rebuilt from scratch six times over as reinforcements arrived from the islands to take the places of the fallen.

From the mountains of Greece to the mud of Monte Cassino, they became the spearhead of the Allied advance in Italy.

In September 1944, near the neutral republic of San Marino, the mere sound of their Haka caused German lines to buckle before the first shot was even fired.

Soldiers who had faced the finest paratroopers in the world found their nerves shattered by the sight of the Maori warriors.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Bennett, the battalion’s commander, noted that his men weren't just fighting for the British Empire or a flag.

They were fighting for their tribes, their families, and the honor of a warrior lineage that stretched back centuries.

Every charge was a message to the world that the Maori people were second to none.

When the war finally ended, the survivors returned to a New Zealand that had been changed by their sacrifice.

They had earned seven Victoria Crosses and more individual bravery awards per capita than any other formation in the New Zealand Division.

They left behind a legacy of fear in their enemies and eternal respect in their brothers-in-arms.

They were the men who brought the fire of the Pacific to the gates of Europe.

They were the battalion that transformed a traditional dance into a harbinger of certain defeat.

Sources: New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage / National Library of New Zealand / 28 Maori Battalion Archives
Photo: Photo: Unidentified New Zealand official photographer; Restoration by Adam Cuerden (Public domain) • Wikimedia Commons

05/19/2026

I’ve been there!

05/18/2026

Some from Queen Lili‘uokalani, the first and last queen of Hawai‘i 🌺

05/18/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1869gsFuk8/?mibextid=wwXIfr

When she was born, in a small wooden house called Hale Ola in the village of Haniumalu, in the Kaʻū district on the southern tip of Hawaiʻi Island, on the twentieth of April 1895, her grandmother delivered her with her own hands.
The grandmother's name was Naliʻipōʻaimoku. She had been a hula dancer in the court of Queen Emma. She was a kahuna lāʻau lapaʻau — a healer of the old Hawaiian medicine — and a kahuna pale keiki — a midwife of the old Hawaiian way. She came from a line of priestesses that had served the volcano goddess Pele on that island for six centuries.
She sat at the feet of her American son-in-law and looked up at his face and asked him, very quietly, in Hawaiian: E Hale, nāʻu ka moʻopuna? Is the grandchild mine?
The son-in-law's name was Henry Nathaniel Wiggin. He was a sugar plantation manager from Salem, Massachusetts, descended from the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Governor Simon Bradstreet and from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet.
He touched his mother-in-law's shoulder and answered her in Hawaiian: ʻAe, Mama. Nāu nō ka moʻopuna.
Yes, Mama. The grandchild is yours.

So she was given the longest name a child can carry.
Mary Abigail Kawenaʻulaokalaniahiʻiakaikapoliopele Naleilehuaapele Wiggin.
It meant the rosy glow in the sky made by Hiʻiaka who was raised in the bosom of Pele, the earth-consuming woman. It meant the lehua-flower leis of Pele. It bound her to the goddess of the volcano her grandmother had served.
They called her Kawena.
For the first six years of her life her grandmother taught her everything. The songs. The chants. The prayers to Pele. The names of every wind that crossed the lava fields. The names of every plant that healed.
Her mother spoke to her only in Hawaiian.
Her father, fluent in Hawaiian, spoke to her only in English.
She was bilingual before she was three.

When her grandmother died, Kawena was six. The grandmother had told her, before she went, that the language was dying and that the child must save it.
The kingdom of Hawaiʻi had been overthrown by American businessmen two years before Kawena was born. The new American territorial government had begun, by the year she started school, to forbid the speaking of Hawaiian in any classroom on the islands. The native Hawaiian population, which had numbered about three hundred thousand before the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778, had fallen to fewer than forty thousand.
The language was going with them.
By the time Kawena was a young woman, only a few thousand people on Earth still spoke fluent Hawaiian. Most of them were old.
She started writing it all down.

In 1921 a young woman named Laura Green introduced her to the staff of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu. The museum's anthropologists had been trying for forty years to record the dying knowledge of Hawaiʻi. They had been doing it badly because most of them did not speak the language.
Kawena did.
She joined the Museum staff in 1937 as a translator. She stayed for twenty-six years.
In 1949 the museum's director, Sir Peter Buck, asked her to begin work with a young linguist named Samuel Elbert on a new dictionary of the Hawaiian language. The dictionary then in use, published in 1865, was inadequate. It contained errors. It did not mark the ʻokina or the kahakō — the glottal stop and the long vowel — without which a Hawaiian word can change its meaning entirely.
They worked for twenty years collecting words from the last living speakers and for another eight verifying every entry.
The Hawaiian-English Dictionary by Pukui and Elbert was published in 1957.
It was the first dictionary in human history to mark the proper sounds of the Hawaiian language.
It is still in print sixty-nine years later.

She wrote more than fifty books. She composed more than a hundred and fifty songs and chants. She conducted hundreds of hours of audio interviews with the last fluent elders of the islands and the tapes are kept at the Bishop Museum to this day.
In 1976 the State of Hawaiʻi named her a Living Treasure of Hawaiʻi.
In 1978, the people of Hawaiʻi voted in a constitutional convention to make Hawaiian the second official language of their state — restored a full century after it had been forbidden in the schools.
She lived to see it.
In 1981 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She died at the age of ninety-one on the twenty-first of May 1986.
Every Hawaiian schoolchild today learns to spell the names of their islands using the marks she put on the page.
She once said she would need several more lifetimes to translate all the old Hawaiian newspapers stored in the basement of the Bishop Museum.
She had said her grandmother's words.

05/07/2026

Over on the ol’ Poshmark I’m having a sale on my inventory. If you see this post let me know if there’s anything specific you’re looking for if you don’t see it there.