Elvis and Me!

Hey, check this out.



Flashback. Phoenix Theatre, Saturday afternoon, Blue Hawaii, back row, sucking on Chinese lollies and feeling so immensely proud that the Pacific was featuring so large in an Elvis Presley movie, and when he did a really quite weak version of the Fijian song "Bula Malaya", only in English, it was "Oh my god, Elvis is singing a Fijian song!" and that was so great, such an honour, it didn't have to be fabulous. Indeed, just doing one was enough and the audience sat in awed silence.

But then at the end, he did this song again with all different groups of Pacific Islanders and with a Pacific Island beat, energy and lots of drumming, and it shot up into the stratosphere and we all cheered wildly ... but then he charged over to join ... "Wow! Look! Fijians! Fijians on the BIG SCREEN!" and we went bonkers ... but when the language switched to Fijian, oh man!, didn't the audience go completely and screamingly crazy.  Us, right there, Fijians singing an Elvis Presley song!!!

I think we were all so proud, weren't we?, to be just so insanely COOL!

And I'm loving how, on youtube, with only 16,000 hits so far, we already know the names of several of the dancers.  "Look, that's Aunty Ofa on 1.41." and I've got no doubt that, by the time this reaches a million hits, we'll pretty much know the names of everybody!