A PCC job offer: In May 1968, I was approached in the CCH cafeteria by Warren Trueblood, technical manager for the PCC night show, who asked me if I planned to “stay in Laie for the summer.” I told him I was here for good. 

 He asked if I would be interested in working on the night show stage crew. I told him I was. (Even though I had work plans during the day, the night show hours were a good time for me to have another “side hustle.“) He told me to report to the theater the next day at 10 a.m. 

 Jack Regas, the Hollywood choreographer who was then putting together a new night show, and Trueblood met me and several others at the appointed time backstage of what is now called the Hale Aloha luau theater. Then, of course, it was PCC’s only theater. 

I never knew who was originally supposed to be stage crew manager, but when whoever that was didn’t show up, Regas and Trueblood appointed me as the new stage manager on the spot. 

 Night show pay: I was a little surprised but also thrilled, mainly because the job paid $1.50 an hour — 50-cents more than the minimum wage in those days, and it also matched the most I had ever been paid up to that point for a wage-job.

I can still remember him teaching us the “KIS” principle — “keep it simple.” 

 I spent approximately the next two years doing that job (while attending CCH classes during the regular school year and UH/Mānoa summer classes). It was a wonderful, unforgettable experience, and I loved being part of the night show ‘ohana of student workers. 

 Oh, and like most the other student workers during that era, I got a five-cents-an-hour raise after each six months on the job (although all the other night show cast members soon went onto a different pay schedule). 

 After that, most of them got a flat $5 a night if they danced in the overture and finale plus one section in each half of the show (e.g., Hawaiian and Tahitian). 

 Some cast members, however, got extra pay based on particular skills or assignments. For example, girls assigned to climb up the steep slippery ladders attached to the back of the “volcano backdrop“ to wave leis during the opening, knife dancers, fire walkers, and musicians all got extra payfor each performance.  

 The stage crew: Sadly, the new pay program did not affect the five or six of us on the stage crew (i.e., most of them made about $3 a night). We didnʻt have uniforms either in those days, and one of the cardinal work-rules for us was if “caught on stage during a section-change when the lights came up, just walk not run off-stage as if we were not making a mistake. 

 Sorry, I’ve forgotten most of my crewʻs names, and naturally, there was also the usual student turnover; but I do remember there were a couple of Tongan guys, Albert “Lee” Lianter (from Pohnpei, I think, who married a Sāmoan girl and became a doctor), and Jagen Lal from Fiji, (who married an Australian girl, and they moved there after they finished school).  

 Also, Jim McCormack (who eventually married a Tongan girl, and became a military attorney years later); and I married one of the Hawaiian night show dancers, Sally Ann McShane, but we actually started getting interested in each other when she also worked summer day shifts in the PCC snack bar and I would stop by occasionally for one of their delicious mahimahi burgers. 

 A couple of other things still stick out in my mind from my first work experience at the PCC: 

 The “drawbridge”: As part of the night show opening, Jack Regas choreographed some of the cast to come through the back of the audience and walk over a retractable bridge that ran across the lagoon to the middle of the sand-covered stage. The bridge started in the out-position, and theaudience-end of the bridge had two sturdy metal legs with wheels that were in the lagoon, while the stage end simply laid on the sand. 

 The challenge? That bridge was heavy, and only one of the Tongan guys was strong enough single-handedly to pull it on stage at certain points in the show. He was a former boxer in Tonga who also played rugby for CCH; and when he was off, we had to assign two other stage crew members to shift the drawbridge. 

 The PCC “water curtain”: Remember, this “technology” took place in the 1960s, and otherwise there was nothing in the amphitheater separating the audience from the stage, except the extension of the lagoon, a low rock wall, and the occasional water-curtain effect. When it rained during the night show, the cast (and some of the audience) got wet. On those rainy nights, the wardrobe “mamas” in the back knew they were going to have lots of extra laundry to do the next morning. 

 Larry Nielson, a professional entertainer and returned missionary from Samoa and the Cook Islands who became the PCCs first full-time stage manager in 1963, said the unique water curtain “added extra drama, and it really knocked the audience out, and many people in the audience commented on both the production and the water curtain. They thought of it as an extension of the entertainment.” 

 [Interestingly, when the PCC opened the new Pacific Theater in 1976, a small section of the lagoon and a water curtain was also included in the design, but both were soon removed, and today the front-row of seats are just a few feet from the “beach” sand leading onto the stage.] 

 “The audiences were always fascinated, oohing and aching. They didn’t even seem to mind when a breeze blew-back some of the spray,” Nielson also said; and the author, who succeeded Nielson as stage manager at the PCC, recalled some tried taking pictures of the “curtain,” which just “whited out” the spray and temporarily blinded everyone around them and on stage (i.e., the “no flash” policy has been around for a long time). 

Within seconds of a stage crew member cranking the valve, the “curtain” could shoot several hundred individual jets of water as high as 20-feet which, when combined with colored spotlights reflecting off them, more waterproof colored “footlights” in the lagoon, and the stage lights being turned off, masked most of the cast and prop movements on stage between show sections. (Holes had even been strategically drilled in the “drawbridge” so it didn’t block the effect.) 

 The plumbing part of the “curtain” surrounded the audience-side of the lagoon that surrounded most of the theater stage. It consisted of a large, approximately 4-inch pipe mounted onto the water-side of the low wall, and it had quarter-inch holes drilled about every inch on top, each with a small jet-nozzle that enhanced the effect. 

Listening to music cues first, several times each show night a stage crew member was assigned to hand-crank the large valve wheel inside the “volcano” as fast as possible after also receiving a verbal cue from a small speaker connected to the control booth above the back of the audience. The open valve kicked a large water pump on and off. 

Nielson explained that Mike Grilikhes — the award-winning television executive from Los Angeles who helped start up the PCC (and also brought in Jack Regas), “had a lot to do with the design of the new theater, and he brought in the water curtain,” although some people thought the effect was “borrowed” from the “dancing waters” show at Disneyland (which had opened eight years earlier in 1955). In any case, Nielson added, he thought it was the first water curtain that size in Hawaii. 

I also remember every several weeks one of the stage crew guys would have to use a small wrench to make sure every water-curtain nozzle on the big pipe was cinched tight (so water didn’t leak around it), and a small brass brush to clean out every nozzle, so the spray continued to work effectively without any gaps. 

Changes in our schedule and the stage: Every night after the show, the cast left quickly, while the stage crew straighten up props, raked the sandy stage, and generally got everything prepared for the next evening — except on Saturday mornings: 

Several of us were then authorized to spend extra time some weeks working on props (e.g., I remember collecting fresh ti leaves from the community and wherever else I could to make fresh ti-leaf skirts for the hula dancers, and when those started to dry out, the Samoan fire walkers would recycle them until they fell apart. 

Finally, on some of those Saturdays, participating stage crew guys also freshened the landscaping around the theater; and I particularly remember there was one live coconut palm tree near the Hauula side-tunnel to the backstage that I could trim its fronds by hand. By the time I left that job (to go to graduate school at UH/Mānoa), I had to use a ladder, and the last time I noticed, that palm tree is still there, but it is now over 30 feet tall.