Post #478204 by Hazel Chaz on Wed, Aug 19, 2009 6:08 PM

Hello there. I was the guy with the teddy bear ears. I drove down from Anaheim to help out at check-in, getting there just in time -- I was the Mug Kahuna for the evening, working alongside Charlie from "House of Tiki" and Pua (not shown) -- and after that I mostly spent the rest of the weekend taking pictures.

I took pictures of Hukilau Brown and Babydoe there in the lobby.

Like Chris "Colonel" Sanders and Chao Sanders, I walked into the Limoncello Lounge Friday night and was handed a little black tiki shotglass with limoncello over crushed ice.

And immediately recognized the opening strains when the Martini Kings started playing "Baby Elephant Walk," right there in the party room.

That party, and the Frankie's Tiki Room party upstairs, were standing-room-only. Both parties had people at the doors to let in more people from the long lines outside only when a matching number of tiki fans left. I did my part and moved on.

I met bartenders Kitty Cat and Scarlett Letter at the Pele Utu party. I got a "Blood of zombie tiki priestess queen" or something like that.

As Tiki Todd can vouch for, each drink came with a leechee nut/blueberry eyeball as garnish.

Everything's better in a tiki mug. Or with an umbrella in it. Or both. The cool thing to do is to have a tiki mug -- I bought a lovely volcano mug last year -- but this time I decided I wanted to go through "cool" and out the other side, beyond cool. Since I had the bear ears, and someone had given me a bear mug which holds one standard drink, I brought that. You can see it's rather modest and unassuming, next to the zombie mug someone bought last year.

At the check-in desk, I had heard Otto Von Stroheim's name mentioned all evening. (One way to get someone out of your hair for the rest of the night is to tell them they need to go get a note from Otto...) I was starting to wonder if "I'm a friend of Otto" was sort of the opposite of "I'm a friend of Bill W." and whether Otto actually existed and if he was still in town, or if he'd chucked all the tiki stuff and gone to Jamaica for some rum and reggae. Jay Marshak was looking for Otto, too, though, and he found him after midnight up in the same party I was at.

People were making music in the Pele Utu party, next to the volcano. There were a few other parties that night, too. Not a lot -- I missed the afternoon room crawl (I was still on the freeway) -- but as it happens, I think I drank more on Friday night than I had in the previous eight months put together. (And that's including Christmas and New Year's.)

As I headed down the elevator to mosey back to my little motel room, I met Stuart Johnson who clearly was a Martini Kings fan who wasn't done for the night. I was.

Do you guys want more annotated photos like this? Or should I just tell you where to find all my photos?