Our near & dear friend Fred Fallin will be performing that evening, and he's always a real hoot. So you should definitely go see him, if you haven't already. And if you're jonesing for more Chicago area 'ukulele action, there's always Ukulele Cabaret at Silvie's Lounge. The next show in that series is Saturday, August 1 ,so go check that one out as well. (We will be on a plane heading home from a big old vacation, so we won't be in attendance there.)

You know what to expect: workshops and vendor booths during the day, possibly an open mike stage, possibly a day list of performers, and an evening concert with all the headlining acts at night. There's a MySpace page for the festival, but no proper Website yet. Tickets for the evening concert are $20, and a full-day pass is $60 (see the MySpace page for details). We will probably be there in some capacity, so stop by and say aloha.

Oh, and: hello to 2009. Our Christmas performance at Chicago's MSI was a good one; hope you made it there. This year will be spent in preparation for the 2009 Hula Conference in Honolulu. More on that as the time approaches.

At any rate, it'll be very interesting to see what happens in October. Hopefully the opening will not be the weekend of October 10-11, because that clashes with the annual convention of the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association in Joliet, which I suspect I may be attending in some fashion. More on this later. (Ooh, exciting!)

I think the next festival that we'll be attending will be next year's Hula Conference on O'ahu. The majority of the events there will of course be dance-related, but we've heard rumors that there might be some music-related events happening at the same time. Plus, who wouldn't want to travel to O'ahu? More on this later.

On Thursday evenings for the next few weeks, the 'Ukulele Club of Oak Park is having practices for a record-breaking attempt to have the largest number of 'ukulele players on stage at one time. The performance is going to be at this year's Fest for Beatles Fans, and they could use all the help they can get. Practice sessions are Thursday nights at Eastgate Cafe in Oak Park (845 Lyman Avenue, near Harrison Street) from 7 to 9. All players at all levels are invited; they really need the numbers to have a chance to break the record, so if you think you might want to show up, show up.

I was kinda hoping that the Midwest Ukulele Jam Festival guys would have gotten a second festival together for this year, but I haven't heard anything about it, so with those guys and also the Midwest Uke Fest guys not having anything going on this year I suspect this will be the main event for Chicago area uke players this year.

So we're on the Friday night schedule of Southern California. The trouble is, they got the wrong name for the director. I sent emails to a couple people; hopefully one of them will be able to sort it out. Update: they did.

I'm starting to get a bit anxious about this performance, because there's a Hard Part in the performance. You know about that, right? The Hard Part is the one single part of a performance that you don't quite have mastered yet, but you've got to perform in front of a large crowd in a very short time. So you've got to cram and work hard on that one bit over and over, trying to crack it so you can perform it on stage and make it all look effortless. The whole other entire performance is okay; it's just that one Hard Part that's keeping you awake at night.

I won't tell you what the Hard Part of this particular performance is; you'll just have to come see for yourself. That's Friday, October 5, 2007 at the Southern California Ukulele Festival. We're on at 7:00 PM local time; be there or be unentertained.