My Tutu Ladyʻs Dress

I love this dress. I no longer own this dress. I remember when my Tutu Lady, my Grandmother - my Fatherʻs Mother - gave me this dress.

She said it was because I did not have any dresses that she particularly liked. What that meant was that she did not see any of these specific kinds of dresses in my closet. Only the ones that I got here at a Hilo Hattieʻs in Las Vegas, NV.

And I realize that there are probably a million and one stories about a girl in love with her grandmotherʻs dress. Of course, I would be that girl. No longer on the outside, but absolutely on the inside - I am still that young girl, all of about 14 years old, crying in my Tutu Ladyʻs room, because I had just been told that my Kupuna Wahine - my Great Grandmother - had passed away.

My cousins left to the beach.

I was at home, with my Grandmother, crying my eyes out.

My Kupuna was gone. And I dearly loved her. I pushed her around in her wheelchair after sheʻd suffered a stroke and had to come to the mainland to live with my momʻs mom. That was her daughter, my other Tutu Lady.

We took Puna to church, and I sat next to her, helping her hold the hymnal in her frail hand, and laughing with her when she would cuss out loud in church. Thinking about it now, I can see the two of us in the front row. I am all of 12, and of course, there is my Tutu Lady, my dadʻs mom, in her very best Sunday best (of course she had to be dressed to the nines because her eldest son was giving a sermon) on the other side of Puna. The two of them singing church songs, sharing a Bible, and holding hands while Sunday prayer closed services.

I recall the empty feeling that, when you are that young, you do not realize that you are losing someone very important in your life. I remember my Tutu Lady not being able to say much to me, and I recall her wanting me to eat lunch but I couldnʻt.

My cousins bailed on me, and my Grandmother could not console me. I could hear music, and I could hear the kahea of the other kids in the neighborhood. They were across the street, and they were dancing Hula.I went across the street to the park to dance Hula with the kids in the summer fun program.

My Tutu Lady never saw any of her Grandkids dancing actual Hula, to actual Hawaiian music (not this Don Ho stuff or anything Disney or with too many steel guitars- the actual music that my grandfather played, which was Hawaiian slack key guitar, all my life) until the day that my Kupuna died.

It was a lot of years later, after my kids were born and after our house had been foreclosed on that I ended up helping my parents take care of my Tutu Lady. When I arrived there she still knew my name, recognized my face, could talk in well understood phrases. Alzheimers had not yet happened with her.

She was able to do things on her own still, but then one day, a long time later, when I think about that very last year that I spent tending to her that the one thing that hung in her closet that I, myself, had put there, so that she would have something to remember her life by that meant so much to us both.

I recall the dress becoming mine because I was the tallest of all the girls and my Tutu Lady knew that it would fit perfectly.

Apparently, she also knew that I loved that particular dress.

She really loved all of her dresses, and she wore them so well, with so much style and grace. It was made better when, on Sunday, at church, she would sing with my dad and the band. Kupuna was always front and center.

My grandmother was always so very well dressed.

She was absolutely the most beautiful Tutu Lady I had ever put eyes on, especially when she was all dressed up in her best Sunday Muʻumuʻu - and no, not all muʻuʻmuʻus are the horrifically ugly kind. They are not all the sort that look like they leave way too much to the imagination. Some of them are very lovely.

They have to be - you will not ever see any hula dancer in anything that you would purchase at your local Walmart store, ever. (Unless it is a pair of shorts and tank top and they are dancing at a family party in a park or their Auntyʻs house)

What you will see are beautiful articles of clothing that seem from another time in history.

It says one thing, for sure, about us Maoli Wahine ....we do things elaborately, even if it seems sort of understated.

We are not trying to make any statements. This is simply how we do things. This is simply our Maoli Wahine Sunday Best....even if it is Friday or Saturday.

We wear huge sprays of floral arrangements in our hair, most of the time real flowers and greenery, and we do not wear things that show a whole lot of skin at all, and to believe that the things that we are dancing about are anything other than a story being told, anything other than pure poetry in motion is to believe Hollywood and everyone who is not Hawaiian.

It used to bother me that no one realized that ours is an actual culture. It used to bug the hell out of me that I would see "Hollywood" Hula and things called "Hawaiian" and these parties that were supposed to be luaus but looked nothing at all like the thing that I knew were the real thing.

And all Hawaiians know the real thing. There are still a whole lot of us who are very easily made upset, not when people do things apart from the culture that they are spoofing, but, when we hear that it is not a big deal that anyone has.

There is a certain sadness that washes over me when I think about the way that my culture has been made to appear as something that it has not ever been. The one thing that I have been very happy to represent the correct way is what an actual Hawaiian person wears to do anything. I can be seen more often than not in a Led Zeppelin shirt and a pair of leggings, far more than I have ever been seen wearing all of the things that people think we actually wear, or assume that we wear all the time (you would be amazed).

Of everything that we actually wear when we are being our Kanaka best is something that looks very much like what is being worn in the photo. This is the last time that I put eyes on this dress. I have no idea where it is. I have no clue what happened to it. It was lost in a storage a while ago. I thought that I would not ever see it again.

Then I saw it posted in a friendʻs Instagram.

It took me very much by surprise because until that moment, I missed that dress and everything it meant to me, everything it stood for and still stands for. It was my Tutu Ladyʻs dress.

She stopped wearing sleeveless dresses and even some short sleeved ones when she started to decline.

I will not ever forget the second time that she gave me this dress. I knew that she did it because she had forgotten, due to her declining memory, that she had already given it to me not very long before that.

She even remembered my name.

The day came when she stopped calling me by my first name.

It sucked.

Then, one day, not long before she passed, she called me by the name that she called me when I was a child.

Mapuana.

I was 39.

I am still called that by lots of people.

I still answer to it.

I still call myself that, because that is me.

I did not wear that dress for a very long time after that moment, not until 2017 when it graced the stage for an Equity center presentation for Mt San Antonio College in Walnut, CA.

Of course, I represented Hawaii.

I hope that whoever now has my dress will see these words one day and know for real that at one time, the dress was passed down from a beautiful Hawaiian songstress to her eldest childʻs eldest child, who, for those almost 4 minutes, was dancing with her Tutu Lady, in my Tutu Ladyʻs dress, one last time.

#Hula #Hawaiian #MuuMuu #Maoli