presents one of our “related bands” —

Hula Girl

Their story, as recalled by Leo Eilts:

Hula Girl includes five musicians and two dancers. This band started out as a marketing decision. My company Total Entertainment had two groups which it turned to for requests for Hawaiian entertainment.

One was the Aloha Puhamini dancers (Kainey and Debbie) who danced to recorded music. The other was a family group called Medley Key, and they were my "big" Hawaiian act. Unfortunately, they were too laid back, wouldn't sign contracts, insisted on cash payments, and considered 2:30 as a completely satisfactory time to start a performance scheduled for 2:00.

When I stopped offering their services, I was still getting calls for entertainment of that sort. So, I asked Roger if he was interested, got Jeff Elsloo on-line and then approached the dancers, who immediately expressed their interest. I knew that Betse Ellis had recently purchased a banjo-uke and that Carl Anderton played uke, so they were naturals.

We stared out by charting and learning the recorded music that the dancers provided us, then started assembling charts for other songs that we wanted to include. We started working on our book in August of 1998, had our first full band rehearsal in December, and our first performance in March of 1999. In January of 2000, at the request of our dancers, we hired a coach, bought drums and began teaching ourselves the Tahitian drum numbers that the dancers wanted to perform.

The Hula Girl show now features a complete drum segment, with a change of costumes. The group still includes the seven original members.