It was a moment during a surf trip with my oldest surf buddy. We've known each other a long time. We were in seminary together. We were hospital chaplains together. We were chaplains in two Episcopal Church schools at the same time. I was his best man, he was mine. Every year, depending on personal schedules and income, we surf either Orange County, California or Ocean County, New Jersey, with occasional side trips to Narragansett or Long Island's south shore.
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| The bar at Duke's |
We have, over the past 37 years, come to develop a particular manner of communication, often based on pre-verbal grunts. On this day, we were slightly more eloquent during an early dinner at Duke's, a restaurant named for the "father" of surfing and well-situated at the foot of the pier in Huntington Beach, California. I was about to devour a huli huli chicken dish when he started.
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| The fabled huli huli |
"You see that grandmother over there?", he asked, pointing his chin towards the restaurant's front door.
"Which one?" It was a Tuesday in the early evening and nearly every patron other than ourselves would have satisfied that description.
"The short one." Again, not really narrowing it down.
"The woman in the tropical print?"
"No, the shorter one."
"In the Polo stuff?" It was true, the woman was head to toe in silhouetted ponies and helmeted riders.
"No, the even shorter one."
"On the left?" If so, she was short. Under five feet.
"Yes", he said.
"I see her."
"That's her." There was a revelatory tone to his identification. I was puzzled. I was trying to remember what diminutive, older women we had been talking about at some point over the decades that had now entered his consciousness.
"Is it? Her who?"
"You know."
"I don't." I didn't.
"From the thing...way back. You know. The movies; the TV show."
"I Dream of Jeannie?"
"What? Barbara Eden is here?" He jerked around in his chair, monetarily forgetting the grandmother in question. Barbara Eden has a certain hold on the imaginations of men of my generation.
"I don't know. Who are you talking about?"
"The surfer girl. What's her name? Gadget."
"Gidget?"
"Yes. That's Gidget. The real Gidget."
"No."
"Yep."
"Is she the hostess who seated us?"
"Yep. She's the hostess of aloha."
"Wow. Wait, the what?"
It's true. Kathy Zuckerman, nee Kohner, is still the Tuesday night "Hostess of Aloha" at Duke's. [No one really knows what that means, so just go with it.] Her father, a Hollywood scriptwriter, who was entertained by her stories of days spent on the beach in Malibu in her fifteenth summer, wrote them all down, with some fictional flair, in a slight volume released the same year as was Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas became so popular that it spawned an entertainment industry, helped to define a "lifestyle", and made its protagonist the stereotype of all women surfers.
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| Mrs. Zuckerman today |
Other than the location, its view, and the huli huli chicken, that's about all that is special about Duke's, one of a chain of similarly-named restaurants near beaches in Waikiki, La Jolla, Lahaina, and, of course, Malibu. It has little local history, and its cache is the product of market studies and focus groups.
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| Nice view, though |
