Oh oh oh for the love of a ukulele

It took me three years to sit down and really learn ukulele. And it wasn't easy. Not because uke is hard to learn or play, but because I mostly played guitar and learning the new chord progressions for songs I already knew, well, that was difficult.

Because the songs I knew on guitar didn't live in my head next door to the words, they lived in my hand. And using the ukulele chords was like using a different set of streets to get to my friend's house.

And ukulele is soooooo small. It's a clown car of strings tied to wood, and for grown-up hands a soprano ukulele is a crowded little driver's seat with no head-room.

It was precisely because it was small and could fit into my backpack next to my camera that I even packed the thing as I was flying from Connecticut to Florida for a weeklong playwright residency, which is fun, but can be lonely when you are not in rehearsal and in a strange city. 

And this residency ended up being extra stressful and lonely for me when I did not get along with the person directing the play. This was, in fact, the only time I have had a bad time with a director, and the tension at rehearsal left me feeling isolated for several days. 

That's when I turned to my uke, this little mahogany Kala ukulele that I didn't really know how to play. But I did know songs on the guitar. So each night I worked out a song I already knew and got it rattling on the little four stringed kleenex box of an instrument. By the time I arrived back home could play five songs from my guitar repertoire.

The weekend I got home I found the Ukulele Site in Hawaii and they had a custom American-made koa wood concert size uke with slightly wider fretboard marked down in price, and it happened that the dollar amount was the same as the money I got form the theater for being a playwright in residence. So that ukulele flew from the middle of the Pacific to my place off Long Island Sound in a week, and I'll tell you what, it has a voice that is a wonder.

And sometimes when I get ready to put it back in it's hard-sided case, I sing to it,.

"I loooove you, koa wood uk-u-leeeee-leeee..." and I'm pretty sure it winks at me.