Kaiokaikaika Correa rolled into town, heard about Denver’s People’s Fair, borrowed a ukulele and spent the weekend playing for the crowds passing the Pi’ilani Hawaiian Civic Club of Colorado’s booth.
“I’m delivering a load tomorrow in the morning, and I’m back on the road,” the 30-year-old truck driver said. But on Sunday, he added, nodding at the crowd: “I’m just like, dude, aloha.”
A driver for AGL Trucking, Correa lives in Twin Falls, Idaho, but he grew up in Hilo, Hawaii, he said.
He has been playing the ukulele since he was 6 years old.
And though the instrument’s popularity has put it in the hands of people who play rock, jazz and other types of music, Correa strums the style he learned as a boy. “I love my Hawaiian music, and that’s what I stick to.”
The Capitol Hill People’s Fair is one of the leading arts-and-crafts events in the region, and the annual event was first held in 1971.
Pam Martin came from her home in the Florida Keys to sell the humorous, tropically themed signs she makes with her husband.
“Man created beer God created pot, who you gonna trust,” said one sign.
“We do this all year, every year, all over the United States,” she said. The signs, which she hand-paints, “do pretty well; they’re different,” she said.
Melissa Bordwine, 35, came to the fair as a volunteer working the Rocky Mountain Great Dane Rescue booth.
She purchased two of the signs. “No working during drinking hours,” is emblazoned on one of them, the words sharing space with a parrot perched on a clock.
“They make me want to be near the beach. I will probably put them on the back porch,” she said.
Jim Mofhitz, 71, was selling humorous clocks he makes. He said he sells about 2,500 a year at a host of fairs and festivals throughout the country.
“When I’m not doing shows, I am making them in my studio,” the Wellington resident said.
“Left handed clock,” is printed on the face of one timepiece. The hands run backward and point to numbers that climb counterclockwise.
There was a “librarian’s clock,” with each hour followed by the order to “shh.”
Nearby was a “Cubs baseball clock.” In place of numbers are two words that Chicago Cubs fans have heard too often: “Next year.”
