Hawaii
Hudson in
the afternoonIF your routine has you waking up to "Hudson in the morning," you can now warm up to her as well. Hudson is the only name the early morning D.J. on STAR 101.9 uses, and she normally gets up at 4 a.m. to ready herself for her show. She's at the station until noon, and beginning this week has taken on the additional task of warming up the audience at the "Destination Stardom" tapings, the first at 1 p.m. and then again at 6. Social life? "What's that?" Hudson hails from New York, incidentally, and was named after the river. Good thing she's not from Pittsburgh or she might be known as "Monongahela in the Morning." ...
BOBBING right along at KCCN, replacing Bob Jones in the noon to 2 p.m. talk-show segment, is Bob Hogue, who doubles as sportscaster on KHON-TV. Hogue seems to be following in the sports-to-news footsteps of such other broadcasters as his Channel 2 anchorman Joe Moore, Channel 7's Russell Shimooka, Channel 4's Howard Dashefsky and now Sean Ching. Bucking the trend is Channel 8 anchorman Dan Cooke, who was a weatherman before taking to the news of the day. Hogue's early guests included another ex-jock, Arnold Morgado, Linda Lingle, Lynn Waihee and Andy Anderson, trying to sell his misguided Ferris Wheel at Kewalo Basin concept. Tomorrow he'll have James Wong tell how his Kakaako waterfront development is modeled after Pike's Place Market in Seattle ...
Stop the presses!
SHE'S been involved in assisting media people in Honolulu for years, but it wasn't until this week that Mona Wood actually heard a reporter say "Stop the presses!" Journalist Barry Markowitz -- representing the Danish daily "B.T." -- called the paper the moment the two missing Danish hikers, Marianne Konnerup and Anitta Winther, were found. It was two hours past deadline, but the presses came to a halt and a front page story about the girls missing in "Hawaii's jungles" was transformed into the happy news of discovery ...THE activity around the home of Richard and Kirsten Melcher of Portlock had to be unlike anything they'd seen before. Kirsten, who is Danish, has long provided a home-away-from-home for Danish travelers, but the past week the place was a whirlwind of activity with media folks all over. Even crews from "Inside Edition," "Extra" and "Dateline" were vying for the hikers' personalized story. VASH, the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii, was extremely helpful to all. The two are handling the situation so well that they're still talking about continuing their planned travels to Australia and Thailand ... And if rescuers Jim Pushaw, Thomas Yoza and Ken Suzuki ever plan a trip to Denmark, let the people there know. The three are heroes over there ...
There's a script in my soup
THE showbiz shibboleth that all waiters and cabbies are actors or screenwriters has some basis in truth. (The funniest scene in "Shakespeare in Love" had the boatman taking the Bard down the river saying, 'I had Marlowe in my boat once,' and then offering him a script to look at.) Bet you didn't know that James Grant Benton's wife, Hawaii Convention Center food and beverage director Debbie Benton, once worked as a "bunny" in one of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Clubs. It helped pay her way through Juilliard, where she received an MFA in ballet, packed away her bunny ears, and went on to dance with the New York City Ballet before relocating to Hawaii ...
Dave Donnelly has been writing on happenings
in Hawaii for the Star-Bulletin since 1968.
His columns run Monday through Friday.Contact Dave by e-mail: ddonnelly@starbulletin.com