JS at Just a Pose talks about feeling homesick. When I watched "Lilo and Stitch" a couple of weeks ago, I felt so homesick.

First of all, Lilo and her sister live on the island of Kauai, where I was born and spent the first eighteen years of my life. Secondly, the music and the flower dress Lilo wore called a muumuu were so familiar to me. I wore muumuus all my life growing up, and I was taking hula lessons as soon as I was able to walk. Talk about being homesick! I wanted to head to the local store and make myself some poke, a local raw fish dish that trendy restaurants are calling ahi tuna tartare.

The movie however, also had an SF Bay area connection. The guy singing the opening theme song and the surf song, David Keali'i Ho'omalu, is someone whom I've heard in person here. I think he lives somewhere in the East Bay, and I've seee him and his hula troop at hawaiian festivals in Alameda and out at Fort Mason. I'm sure it's the same guy, because his voice is so unique.

The first time I heard him was at a hawaiian festival in Alameda. When he started walking to the stage, everyone started clapping and was so excited to see him like he was some local rock star. As soon as he chanted and sang, I realized why he was revered. His voice sent shivers down my spine. There is something so powerful and ancient in his voice, like he was channeling the ancient hawaiian spirits or something. His dance troup does hula in the old style, where it's more like religious rituals and not flowery songs. Some of the hula reminded so much of hula for men, where it's more like choreographed fighting techniques.

My only criticism of the movie is Lilo didn't speak with a hawaiian accent, which they call "pidgin english' in Hawaii. I think all of the other hawaiian characters did, but not Lilo. For Kauai, that would not be normal. If the show took place on the island of Oahu, the pidgin accent wouldn't be so noticeable, but on the outer islands the pidgin is very thick and of course, varies from island to island.

When I was growing up, the pidgin accents drove the teachers nuts and we all went through "elocution' lessons. I've pretty much lost my accent, so that most people can't tell I'm even from there, although if you pay attention to that kind of stuff you'd know. I've taken Speech for Stage classes, so my accent has been smoothed over, although I think it will always be there. And when I go home, it only takes a few days for it come back. My mother can't understand me, unless I speak in pidgin, or at least that's what she says. I think she just likes me to talk the way I did when I was a kid, because it's familiar to her. You can't fake the hawaiian pidgin accent either.

My cousin who was born in Michigan, and spent the first four years of her life in Minnesota, picked up a serious pidgin accent because she lives and works in Hawaii, but I can tell she's not native born. She pronounces certain words in a way that a native Hawaii born person would never pronounce.

My accent is all mixed up anyway. I've been told I've picked up some midwestern speech patterns, because I went to college in Iowa. I also spent some time in Southern California and NYC, so my brother keeps saying I sound like a valley girl and my acting teacher got freaked out because I had some NYC speech patterns. Then just to complicate things, I took an acting dialect class on how to speak with a proper English dialect, called RP or received pronuncation or BBC english, and how to speak Cockney, so some of those speech patterns have slipped into my accent as well. I was thinking of trying out for the play "Major Barbara" one year, and I thought taking the class would give me an edge in auditions. I never tried out for the play, but I can still do the accents quite well, although I mix them up constantly and ended up sounding like high pitched american Michael Caine.