Another warm day, another opportunity to attain ukulele bliss.  I got a late start and felt myself hurrying toward Bethesda Fountain, although I did stop long enough to record the anemone score:  4-14.

An Israeli woman and her 3 daughters sat at the fountain near center stage.  I was aware of the girls peeking at me while I set up my paraphernalia.  As always, the solar-powered hula girls were, well, magnetic.  When I stood to play and smiled at them, the younger ones, twins, turned away and hid behind their mother; the eldest smiled back.  After a few songs — and hearing me ask, more than once, if someone had time for a hula – the sisters approached and asked to dance.

At the end of the dance, collecting the leis, I said, “Tov meod,” which I thought was Hebrew for “very good.”  The girls looked at me blankly.  “Don’t the kids say ‘tov meod’ anymore?” I turned to the mother.

“They haven’t heard Hebrew for a while,” she explained.  “We’ve been here 3 weeks.”

Each kid put a dollar in my case.  I sang “I Wonder Where My Little Hula Girls Have Gone,” revising the lyric to “they’re no longer on the beach at Tel Aviv.”

A photographer took a video of me singing.  I gave him a big smile; he gave me a buck.

A family with a teenage son wandered past me to the lake.  The kid slowed and looked me over.  A moment later, he came back with a fiver.  He was from Colorado and played the guitar.  I offered him the uke, assuring him the chording was the same, and 33% easier, 4 strings instead of 6.  In a soft voice he said no, and meant it.

A family of 4 from Nashville stopped to hula.  The elder daughter, age 8, put on a lei, ready to go, but the younger wouldn’t dance unless Daddy danced.  Daddy put on a lei and danced an expressive hula with his elder daughter, to the delight of the younger, who had immediately reneged on the bargain behind Mommy’s legs.

Dad wanted to give me $5, but only had a 20.  There was $11 in my case, 2 singles in my wallet, and a couple of bucks in my pants pocket.  While assembling all these bills, I asked about business in Nashville.  “It’s booming,” he said.  “Companies are moving there like crazy.  No income tax.”

The next family was from Memphis.  Two daughters danced to the hukilau, while mom and dad beamed.  “Is there a group here from Tennessee?” I asked dad, who had laid his fiver carefully over the lone 20-dollar bill in my case.  No, they were travelling on their own.

A quartet of 50-something Chinese men had been chatting on the bench in front of me.  One of them came forward with a dollar, nodded to me, I to him, then returned to his friends.

Three Danish children, in the shade a few yards up the path to the Boathouse, were taking coins out their parents’ hands until they had enough, $1.55, which they brought to me for a hula.  The big brother, about 12, did a conscientious hula, while little brother and baby sister danced freely, if with less skill.

The last hula was danced by 3- or 4-year-old Elliot, who arrived at the fountain in a stroller with his sister and parents.  “Where you from?”

I heard an answer that sounded like “Navia.”

I looked up at his dad.  “Latvia?”

“Knoxville.”

“You’re the third Tennessee family to hula today.”  Unlike the other 2, however, they only gave me a buck, bringing the day’s earnings to $22.55.