If this title isn't clickbait, I don't know what is ;<)
When you enter your local bar/grocery story and the first thing you see on TV is a group of grannies playing the ukulele...
and when this happens only an hour or two after you almost mistook grazing goats for plant eating dinosaurs, something must be wrong, right?
wrong
Not right
Is this what they call a heatstroke?
Have I mayhaps stared at the sun for too long?
I should never have 'listened' to that earwig of a song by U2!
Am I delirious?
Whatever's the nutcase,
the above happened yesterday...
I entered the bar and the TV was on ( as per usual ). On the screen, I witnessed a group of older women who were making music.
I couldn't help but smile and make a bit of fun of it
and I wasn't the only one.
I apologize to older women who read this and play an instrument. Not really sorry, because I make fun of a lot of things and people - including myself - as there's too much seriousness in this world, these days, and that needs to be countered, or we all get depressed.
Anyhow,
back to that scene
I read the words/headline underneath the broadcast and translated it to:
grandmothers uniting to play the cavaquinho
I then looked up the word cavaquinho and discovered that it was Portuguese for ukulele. It was only then that I noticed that all of them were playing this type of 4 stringed mini guitar.
To my defense:
The TV is small, I am slightly short-sighted and the instruments are tiny.
Fun fact: I do have an ukulele of my own ( since 2022 ).
So now I know that I, who moved to Portugal in 2018, play the cavaquinho, an originally Portuguese instrument, without having being aware of its origin.
just learnt that Portuguese immigrants brought it along with them, to Hawaii, in the late 19th Century, almost 150 years ago.
I bought mine in The Netherlands, weeks after my dad's passing and after having taken some online lessons - that I have forgotten most of, by now - I now merely play it, intuitively, to relax. on an almost daily basis.
Correction on the above. The ukulele and cavaquinho are related and the latter stems from Portugal or Madeira.
cavaquinho is to be pronounced, more or less, as cough-a-keen-you
Hope you enjoyed this little free write/history lesson. I felt like sharing it ;<)
And for the older women or easily offended people who are reading this...
After realizing that the grandmothers were playing the ukulele, I told one of the women in the bar ( who is over a decade older than I am but still looks fairly young and mentioned she liked this kind of music ) that I actually own an ukulele myself. She either was distracted or just not interested so I gave up not trying to impress her and sat down again to sip my drink.
Now let me end this with a picture of my local river beach, where I seem to have had a little bit too much sun on my head, yesterday afternoon. On the other side of the river, behind the treeline, grazing goats made the trees and bushes move ( and reminded me of the famous Jurassic Park scene with the giant herbivore dinosaurs ).
