Lance Kamaka, Cool Cat; Voice from the Disability Community

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This is an interview with Lance Kamaka, a Hawaiian deafblind musician. It is a part of the Cool Cats: Voices from the Disability Community series, in which Meriah interviews cool people from the disability community so you can get to know them.

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Lance Kamaka

The clip that Lance mentioned at the end of his interview, in which he plays Queen Liliuokalani’s piano at the Iolani Palace

Here is Lance singing in a praise worship with a friend of his:

Transcript of Interview:

Lance Cool Cat

Meriah: [00:00:00] I wanted to thank you for meeting with me and for agreeing to be the very first cool cat in the Cool Cat video series, which. Really seeks to introduce interesting people across the disability spectrum, and I ask the same set of questions to everyone and the differences in the responses really emphasize how different we all are and how we.

Meriah: Our perspectives on things and what we enjoy and and all the rest of it is that’s all. Okay.

Lance: Sounds good to me.

Meriah: Okay. Thank you. So first of all can you start by introducing yourself?

Lance: Sure. My name is Lance Kamaka. Actually, my whole name is [00:01:00] Lance. Like the night of the round table and Lance Kamaka, my mom named me at that.

Lance: So blame it on my mom. But I prefer people to call me Lance ’cause it sounds more ordinary Hey Lance, some people will call me Lance a lot like my stepdad. Like he’s addressing the king or something. I like, one time I told him, bow the knee, and he says, no, I don’t bow to anybody.

Lance: Yeah. I have been born blind and as I, when I graduated, I started to lose some hearing. But at that time, only my doctor and my mom knew, and at that time they told me that there was no [00:02:00] cure for my hearing loss. It’s sensory neuro. At that time I was in denial, but it was so gradual that.

Lance: Hardly anybody knew. Only, like I said, only my mom and my doctor knew about it. I kept it on the wraps for I say eight to 10 years. Until it became noticeable. And then people started saying, I would try to block my way through by thinking I could hear when I. Here, and people would tell me things like, aren’t you paying attention, Uhhuh?

Lance: And I would rather, I was thinking, man, I would rather have a hearing loss than, having a brain loss, not paying attention. So that, and [00:03:00] certain people who persistent. That I try wearing hearing aids. I decided I’m gonna do that. And I was with a a vocational rehab counselor at that time, and she said that I would they would get me one hearing aid.

Lance: Which is not really looking at hindsight. Wasn’t a good thing because after all we hear we are two ears. And being blind, I rely so much of my ears not only to hear, but to perceive where I am in relation to where other things are. There’s that spatial awareness of direction. So when I got one hearing aid, I only wore once. I put it in the drawer and that was it. Then my counselor, why did she only

Meriah: give you one? I’m [00:04:00] sorry? Was there a reason she only gave you one? Why did she only give you one?

Lance: I don’t know. I’m not sure if it was just like try out kind of thing.

Lance: I don’t know. But then she kept asking me, have you been using your hearing aid? I said, I can’t. I can’t because when I wear one hearing aid, it throws me off. I get disoriented. And so she said would it do better if we get two, another one? I say, yes. Try that. So I got another hearing aid.

Lance: And then I decided I’m gonna get used to the hearing aids because after all, our brain adapts to what we hear. So I decided, okay, I’m gonna wear these two hearing aids as long as I can all day. Every day. Except when I take a shower or [00:05:00] go to sleep. And I found it to be pretty good actually.

Lance: But then through the years I started to get better ones and when I in 1990, I got digital hearing aids and that was okay. I needed to get used to. And to the present. Now my hearing has gone. From mild to moderate. Severe. And that’s where it is now.

Lance: And I now wear ak Nadia. Paradise. Anyway. And I’m a musician. I play music, Uhhuh. I used to have a job playing at a restaurant bar called La Mariana Uhhuh. And

Meriah: We’ll, maybe we could, we’ll get into that just a little bit further into the, to the questions, but, [00:06:00] so the because I definitely wanna hear more about your musician history and all of that.

Meriah: I, I. I love your music, you know that, and I’m I want everyone watching to know that at the end of this we’re gonna have a performance. By Lance one of his songs that he’ll be singing, not during the interview, but we’re gonna add it in afterwards. Okay. But yeah, Lance is an incredible musician and he is a wonderful artist and a obviously very great storyteller too.

Meriah: But so Lance, the next question that I ask everybody is do you prefer Star Trek or Star Wars?

Lance: Oh, I prefer, definitely Star Trek.

Meriah: Right on. Yes. So fantastic. Lance right behind my head. I have a little I have the Star [00:07:00] Trek emblem right behind my head. It’s hanging on my wall. Oh, yes, I too prefer Star Trek.

Meriah: So in the next question that I ask everybody is, if you could live in any other country for two years, where would you go?

Lance: When I,

Lance: till maybe about couple years ago, I was, I wouldn’t mind going to Africa. And that’s because as a musician, I love rock and roll. And I heard the roots of that kind of music. Rock and roll, rhythm and blues. The blues, jazz, all that has its roots in Africa. And I wouldn’t mind going there but.

Lance: A couple years ago I met a friend who I’ve [00:08:00] become pretty close to and she lives in New Zealand, Uhhuh. And I wouldn’t mind going there Yeah. For a couple years or something.

Meriah: Yeah, that sounds great. And if we had a big community party and everybody was bringing a dish, like a potluck. What dish would you bring to our community?

Meriah: Picnic potluck?

Lance: Oh, I’d bring raw fish. They call it Hawaiian pokey because you have I like raw fish. I like the limo. I like to show you little bit to show you a little bit of salt and yes, I’ll bring that.

Meriah: Sounds

Lance: delicious. Oh can I go back to the Star Trek one? Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I like the original Star Trek.

Lance: I grew up [00:09:00] listening to it. And because a lot of these old shows have more dialogue. In fact, back in the old days, way back, they didn’t have TVs. They had radios. You can use your imagination, but as with the adv, advent of television, and then you have color tv, then you have video, and then you have all these different platforms that have Netflix all that stuff. They reared away from using much dialogue. So it’s all it’s a lot of, it appears to the eyes. So it’s with the Star Trek, there was a lot of dialogue. Then when it got to like the next generation, it became more visual, deep space nine, all that stuff.

Lance: And then also with [00:10:00] the ongoing of Star Trek. The things that they had were more far out, it wasn’t like Star Trek with the they had the communicator. Now we have cell phones, uhhuh that are closed, Uhhuh, and then with artificial intelligence, now you get those you can get, like I hear they have these wearable devices now that kinda tell, you can tell you pretty much everything.

Lance: You have medical, your phone does that too now. So Star Trek, the classic was more I guess near future, it was right in our, right around the corner. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So that’s my take on that. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah,

Meriah: I love Star Trek because it’s such a cool vision of the future, and I also have found it to [00:11:00] be really inspirational by way of disability.

Meriah: I’ve loved that the chief engineer and next generation is blind. I love that they, they have interpreters that were deaf, like translators that were actually deaf, and they, there’s just they. Really saw things in a completely different way and I really love that.

Lance: Yeah, that’s cool. I found books that I could read about the next generation. And so it was a lot better than the actual program ’cause I could read. A lot of things are better reading. All the movies that I, that I viewed. I like reading them. I think the exception really the one that scared me the most.

Lance: And I didn’t have I heard it and that was in 19 76, 73, and it came out with the Exorcist. Oh. [00:12:00] Oh. To me, that was the scariest movie of all time and I didn’t have to read it to be scared. All I gotta do is hear there were all these sound effects. I was thinking, wow, Uhhuh, I wonder how they got away with recording doing all that stuff.

Lance: Yeah.

Meriah: One of the things that I really love about talking with you is that you always make me think about things that I hadn’t thought about. And for me, you’re right. Star Trek is super visual and I think that’s why I liked it so much is because I am profoundly deaf. And and and I’ve, I don’t remember a time when I was not, so I love things that are super visual and you are right.

Meriah: It is very visual. And I hadn’t thought about,

Lance: they call that same difference, yeah. It’s the same that we’re, we have disabilities, but different that, like you are [00:13:00] deaf most of your life. I was blind most of my life.

Meriah: Yeah.

Lance: Yeah. Yeah.

Meriah: Yeah. Same difference. Yep. Same. Same. But different.

Meriah: Yeah. So can you move into talking a little bit about your background as a musician? Just your career trajectory, how’d you get started? How, where, how did it unfold? I’d love to hear more about that.

Lance: As long as I can remember. I felt like I had something. I know my mom.

Lance: My mom, she, she used to sing in nightclubs. And I remember one time my relatives took me to see her and I heard her singing, but when, I guess when I was eight years old I went to my. Cousin’s [00:14:00] house and they had a piano. And I could actually go on the piano and I could hear what people were singing and actually play.

Lance: Now it was very basic. I didn’t know anything about chords. I just played the note that they were singing and I didn’t realize what it was called. Until later on, and it was called, it’s called Perfect Pitch. Wow. There’s, I think one out of a million, a thousand or something. I don’t know, I forget the statistics, but the are people like myself who are born with perfect pitch where somebody can play something and you can.

Lance: Tell them as I got to know what the notes were or in my [00:15:00] small kid time, I could just play, do the piano and I could hear what other people were singing and just play the note I was singing. And I could also listen to the radio. And do that. Now I have two other brothers who are also born blind and they also have hearing impairments.

Lance: And three of us, we were musicians at a very young age. We used to listen to the radio and we used to pick up on songs and we used to sing and I was the one that used to. Like to arrange things and tell people what to do, I was like the leader. So I would tell my brothers, okay, I want you to sing this brother.

Lance: I want you to sing this other brother and would start singing and would harmonize wow. And my [00:16:00] mom then would come in and she’ll like. Oh, I gotta tell them your stepdad this. Wow. Listen to these guys. So they come in and they’re like really surprised and they’re saying Uhhuh Wow.

Lance: That in the pigeon there was a shot, which is terrific. Great. Wow. You guys sound sharp. Sure. As we got older it, it’s a long story, but we got to the point where we actually had instruments and we used to play for parties, small family parties. But at that time we were just playing rock and roll. The late sixties right to the early seventies, there was like, there were like Motown groups that came out the Jackson Vibe. My younger brother could sing just like Michael Jackson. So it was like the ace of our group [00:17:00] and, as my friend would say, this was Michael Jackson before he this is when he was black.

Meriah: Yeah. When

Lance: he was black, because after a while, his skin color of his skin change yeah. To the, yeah. To his prison, to his death. But yeah, we started playing music and then I asked my mom, my stepdad and my my cousin, my uncle joined us and we had a, like a big assembly group formed together, a family group, and we called ourselves the three jewels and a pearl.

Lance: Now the three jewels was my mom’s. Making, she said she read a book. It was about this queen who had three sons, and she called them her jewels. My mom said, oh, that’s a good idea. I’m gonna call them the three [00:18:00] jewels. So that’s how we got the name. Three jewels. And then my cousin, had a drum set. He played drums and. He had a prom made drum set. So that’s how the three jewels and the pearl came about. That’s nice. So we laid on, so the pearl

Meriah: was actually the drums? Yeah, the pearl was the drums. Yeah, it was prom made drum set. Oh, that’s funny.

Lance: Okay. And my cousin started when he was like, he was only like seven, eight years old.

Lance: Wow. That’s very young, huh? We young. Yeah. But wow. We had that gift music. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We played music for many years then yeah. Personnel changed. My cousin grew up went on his own. My uncle, he had problems with. Alcohol and that kind of got in the way.

Lance: Then we had [00:19:00] to my, my older brother hearing got to the point where he couldn’t hear anymore, felt isolated and decided to give up. Yeah. Yeah. So I pretty much the last one to keep on playing music right now. I play keyboards. I play ukulele. I used to play some guitar. When I was in intermediate, I played drums.

Lance: High school, I played a little bit of saxophone. Wow. And I sing. So music, I can’t imagine my life without music. I think to myself, how many friends will I have? If I wasn’t playing music, I think music has really got me connected. Yeah.

Meriah: Yeah. Wow. Thank you. Yeah, and I love your music. I love your voice and I love your playing style.

Meriah: It’s always just you [00:20:00] really do have a gift. So I’m wondering next question on the list, the same set of questions, right? The next question is it’s really about the near future. Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Lance: When I was younger I used to think about those things. Uhhuh, I used to think, oh yeah when I grew up I want to be a scientist. ’cause I was interested in science or technologist. ’cause I was interested in technology, but music has always been the one that rule out everything. But right now, I’m not sure. I want to continue my music as long as I can, even though right now it’s just playing for mu church and then, some of my friends will get together. We have jam sessions. I like to keep that going, but really I think I just want to take one [00:21:00] day at a time and see where it leads.

Meriah: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds very present centered, huh? Just one day at a time and see where that leads and let the doors open as they will, huh?

Lance: Yeah, exactly.

Meriah: Yeah. So the next question is not to be morbid, but what do you want people to remember about you when you’ve gone.

Lance: I want people to remember me as

Lance: a talented musician. I want them to remember me, at least my friends. I want them to remember me as, somebody who tried to be nice to people. I think I my mom just passed away [00:22:00] about a year ago, and her legacy, I’m sorry, is I like to carry on that legacy and that was my mom was very loving.

Lance: She is always smile. And I think that kept her young, that kept her young. She loved music, of course. But she loved to smile and she forgave people that she had misgivings with, I think. The bridges between her and others were never teared down. I think the most thing is she would leave them alone, but whenever they meet they would hug and they would be forgiving and I wanna be.

Lance: I wanna be that kind of person. Yeah. I wanna be forgiving. Yeah. I want to be loving just like my mom.

Meriah: Yeah.

Lance: I don’t like to hold grudges.

Meriah: Yeah. [00:23:00]

Lance: Really?

Meriah: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve, no, I’ve noticed that about you. And the years actually that we’ve been friends now is just how positive and loving you really are, and you just really seem to uplift people around you because you just seem to really focus on positive things,

Lance: yeah. And over the years, I think. A few regrets that I’ve had is that I’ve taken some of my friends for granted. Yeah. So now I don’t wanna do that. Yeah. So every chance that I get, yeah. I wanna tell them Yeah. How much I love them. Yeah. Especially the really good friends. Yeah. I’m not talking about acquaintances.

Lance: That’s different. But friends who I’ve become really close to.

Lance: I want to tell them

Meriah: Yeah. That

Lance: they’re [00:24:00] well loved and needed and that kind of thing.

Meriah: Yeah. Yeah. That’s so important and so beautiful. So from the heart yeah, it’s. So I was wondering about about disability, which is the next section on the questionnaire is because, we go through these different places in our lives, I think with regard to disability, where we learn and we grow and we develop.

Meriah: And there’s different times in our life maybe when we struggle more than other times, and I was wondering if you could say something to yourself. That is the you that was really struggling with something related to disability, what would you say?

Lance: I would say, Lance, when you first started losing your hearing, you could have, you should have [00:25:00] grabbed the reins.

Lance: Really? Just go all out. But I didn’t think, I thought that I would, I didn’t think that even with my brothers, my older brother, losing his hearing almost completely. That I didn’t think it would happen to me. So I would’ve told myself, Lance, you need to live to the hilt.

Lance: Just live it. Live it out. And I don’t mean by eating, drinking, and being merry. Take your music to the next level, do the best you can with the hearing that you have. I would’ve told myself that. I still could tell myself that

Meriah: I still could. Yeah.

Lance: Uhhuh, I still do have enough hearing uhhuh, but there’s some accommodations that trying to make [00:26:00] with the lack of hearing that I lost.

Lance: Hearing go. Being blind, really? It’s no big deal. Yeah. The only big deal about being blind is that when people, like I’ve had people who who would tell me there’s this one lady, she had a YouTube channel, and she’ll say, oh. She’ll email me and she’ll tell me, oh, Lance’s my friend.

Lance: I, I hope you can see this video. And I told her numerous times, I’m blind, I can’t see. So a lot of these videos that she send, sometimes I don’t comment on them ’cause I can’t see them. Yeah. The only thing I can appreciate is the music, but there are some videos. That I can actually hear that she sends that are more than just seeing [00:27:00] it.

Lance: And I will comment on that. I will let her know that, hey, this is cool. I like this. So yeah. But I tell myself, yeah, just live your life to the fullest.

Meriah: Have you left your fullest? Left to the fullest besides eating to the

Lance: fullest?

Meriah: Yep.

Lance: Yeah.

Meriah: What do you like about your particular disability?

Meriah: And I realize you have more than one, so you know that you can choose which one you like more.

Lance: I think not being able to see I can do things that people cannot do in the dark. I could read. I don’t need no light. I don’t need no food screen. All I need is braille. Dots, I can read them. [00:28:00] In fact I used that to my advantage while growing up when I was boarding in school bedtime at eight o’clock.

Lance: And sometimes I didn’t feel like going to sleep. So I would grab a book, put it under my pillow under my sheet, and I would start reading. Wow. And then when I hear the, I would hear somebody walking up the hall coming towards my room. I would stop and act like I’m sleeping. And when the footsteps would die out, then I would start again.

Lance: And yeah. And then lately, as far as hearing, maybe the thing I like about not having my hearing loss is getting involved in gossip. Yeah. And sometimes, people talk about other people other things. Yeah. I I don’t like to talk about that, so I’m blessed in a way that I can’t hear.

Meriah: Yeah.

Lance: Of course I [00:29:00] won’t be bothered by other people snoring when I. I, I used to, when I was small, I used to board in the dorm and I used I was, me and my brother used to be in the same room and I could hear him snoring. And I it used to keep me awake about for a while.

Meriah: Yeah. So did you, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like you, ’cause you’re, you said dorm and you’ve said boarding. So you where did you, where’d you go to school and how long were you there for?

Lance: Oh, I, okay. I entered grade school it was called. At that time it was called Diamond Head School.

Lance: But it. Over a hundred times or many times, actually a hundred times in a little bit of exaggeration. But they, uhhuh they called it when I left, they called it Hawaii School for [00:30:00] Deaf and Blind, and then they called it Hawaii Statewide Center. But yeah, I went to that school for six years. And, I actually, in my seventh grade year, I went to Washington Intermediate, but that year I also went back to boarding at the dorm at diamond Head School, Hawaii School for the Deaf and the Blind. But that was the last year, and then they shut down that dorm and they just had it for.

Lance: Because I think they started to go mainstream where the blind would actually go to the school in their districts. In my days diamond Head school grade that was my grade school. And then intermediate was Washington Intermediate, and then high school was McKinley. [00:31:00] Those were the only schools that provided the facilities like Braille, writers, braille books.

Lance: Line. But as the years went by, it started to go mainstream where you can go to a school in your district. And they had all the facilities for the blind, which I think it’s good because then you start to. Mingle with other people. You’re not just limited to just deaf blind, you mean others?

Lance: I think you, you become less sheltered. I think I know other people who would testify to that other blind people. That in, in our days, my days. School was a school just for deaf blind. And I think it was pretty nice to go mainstream with some of my [00:32:00] young kids are,

Meriah: yeah.

Meriah: Yeah. That’s, yeah, that’s really interesting. What, i’m still so curious about more things about the school, like when you were, and I’m wondering if we could talk just a little tiny bit about it before we move on in the questions. I was just wondering, did you go home on the weekends or and your brothers Yeah.

Meriah: They were there with you in the school? Yeah. My

Lance: brothers. My brothers and I would stay, actually we would come on Sundays, Sunday nights. To go to the dorm and they will stay there from Monday to Fridays. Friday after school, we’d go home. There would like a special school bus that would take us home, or sometimes my mom would come and pick us up, Uhhuh, because all men would spend the weekends at home.[00:33:00]

Meriah: Did what? Why did they have. Kids dorm because it was on your same island, right? You So why did they have

Lance: A lot of it was, there were other people from outer islands that came and so the dorms really suited them well. For us, my mom wanted us to be in the dorm because my mom had to work.

Lance: Okay. And so that’s why. She had my brothers and I bored in the school. And we liked it. Yeah, I liked it. Yeah. I liked it better than home, really. Yeah.

Meriah: Yeah. Yeah. I can believe that. I know my brother and I would’ve loved something like that.

Lance: Yeah.

Meriah: Yeah. Moving on in the question list.

Meriah: Because I know you and I, we can really talk stories for a long time and get a little diverted. But is there is there any one thing that you wish [00:34:00] people would get that they would really understand about disability that they don’t understand? They don’t seem to get

Lance: Yeah. A couple of things. One thing to be both deaf blind really makes a difference. Really makes a difference. I’ve had a friend who told me your friend is losing his hearing, but my friend can see. And that makes a difference when you have both like me, where I was born blind.

Lance: Yeah. And I use my ears as my eyes. Yeah. Then starting to lose my hearing, yeah. Yeah. I wish people would understand that it’s I. I don’t mean, I [00:35:00] just mean them to understand. I don’t ask for pity or anything like that. I was brought up asking, believing you shouldn’t have people feel sorry for you. Although people will, it’s a given. You can’t stop that. But what you can do is you can live by example. Showing them, hey. I’m just like you. Except I do have dual disabilities. And I, I get by with technology with things that would help me. Accommodations made hearing aids, assistive listening devices. Those things. The other thing that I would wish people would understand. Is that I guess I, I covered that about feeling, sorry. People say, oh, poor thing. Like I remember when I used to ride [00:36:00] the city bus when I had more hearing, I was on the bus one time and this guy.

Lance: I know you was Chinese ’cause you had that accent. Yeah. So he started saying, Hey, I’m gonna give you a $5 bill. I said, I don’t need it. He goes, oh, you’re blind. You’re blind. I need to give you, I feel bad for you. And I said no. I don’t need that $5 bills. You keep it. And I kept insisting. And then he kinda, I don’t know, I think he got angry with me upset.

Lance: I. Yeah, just don’t like people doing that. Yeah. It’s it’s patronizing. Oh yeah. Saying, oh yeah. Oh, poor thing. This guy, he has a dual disability, so we’ll treat him extra nice. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the things. Oh, Moran, I need to ask you something. Yeah. I’m not sure if I have until 1230 Uhhuh.[00:37:00]

Meriah: Okay. Yeah, so we are, right now it’s 1215, I think. Yep. 1215. So we only have I, just two more questions. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay. Okay. The next one is a fun one. What single piece of technology or what technology makes your life easier?

Lance: Oh, yeah,

Meriah: I know you, you like your tech?

Lance: I do.

Meriah: Yeah.

Lance: The thing that the actually, there are two things, Uhhuh, that really, I don’t know, it just opens up worlds for me.

Lance: Back in 2011, I I had quite a bit of money to buy myself an iPhone. And Siri was the novelty. I heard about Siri and you could ask it all kinds of stuff. I heard it on the news. They were talking about they had a demonstration of [00:38:00] cwe and I said, oh man, I gotta get this phone.

Lance: One of my blind friends, who is a tech whiz works for a company called Island Skill Gathering. He told me, oh, Lance, you need to get an iPhone. The iPhone will tell you everything. It’s very accessible. The only thing, only problem is you can’t get it to shut off. They’ll talk to you. And I said, wow.

Lance: So I decided to get one in 2011. And I was having fun with Siri. I would ask her, crazy questions and then when I wanted to do texting, I used to text my girlfriend and I used to talk to Syria and she used to say, but my girlfriend just say, who’s Iris? I said, I didn’t say that. I [00:39:00] said Siri.

Lance: Siri is saying that, one of the I am really surprised to this day. Siri has not improved a bit. But anyway back to the two piece of equipment, in 2012? I had enough of Siri using Siri because Siri would get it wrong. So I learned to do, to use gestures on my phone.

Lance: Hand gestures and I would have to use my headphones because they didn’t have Bluetooth at that time. Which really was a game changer. Okay, so in 2012 they had this program called the ICAN Connect. Which is sponsored by the National Helen Keller Center for the Deaf and Blind and the FCCA

Lance: the federal Communications Service. They offered [00:40:00] this program that you can get. Provided that you have a low financial income they’ll give you free telecommunications devices. Provided that your deaf line hard of hearing like me blind. And so that’s when with my iPhone I got my braille note, which is.

Lance: Pretty much like this equipment that I have here. On how does

Meriah: that work?

Lance: How does that work? It has a bra display, uhhuh, so I just turned it on, so I read whatever’s on the screen. Now in addition to that, with my phone, I learned to go into settings. And I could, pair my my brail machine, my braille note to my phone, and [00:41:00] that would allow me to read whatever’s on the screen on my phone, be it texting, email, Facebook Messenger, what have you, anything.

Lance: I could read on my phone and then when I send text messaging, I could write on the keyboard, which is on this thing, I have a keyboard, I could write a text to somebody, they would receive it. And that they would send me text messages and I would get notification and I could read it in brail.

Lance: Now those are the two. Things that I value so much. And I know from experience by when one day I forgot my phone at home, I was like, oh my goodness. This is something you almost cannot [00:42:00] live without. Yeah. It still my right arm, yeah. Yes, my phone and my bra display.

Meriah: Yeah.

Meriah: Yeah those are really incredible. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, I, it’s, I didn’t realize how much they help us communicate because, you and I have been on the phone together, we’ve been on Zoom chats together, we’ve really communicated ’cause because we live on different islands, right?

Meriah: So you’re on Oahu and I’m on Hawaii Island. And so I don’t, we, it’s always this virtual communication and then that one time that I actually met you in person. And it was so surprising because you couldn’t see me and I could see you, but our hearing aids were not tuned into the technology, so we couldn’t hear each other.

Lance: Oh, that, that’s another [00:43:00] thing.

Lance: Bluetooth capability has been a game changer. So I had that Yeah. As a third piece of technology.

Meriah: Yeah. Yeah. I have to agree with you. Yeah. But yeah, so go to the last that, that’s so cool. Yeah. So the last question is it’s just where else we can find you online. And so I was gonna put the link in there to your YouTube channel.

Meriah: Is that okay?

Lance: Yeah, sure.

Meriah: Okay. Okay. And that’s it. And thank you so much, Lance.

Lance: I wanted to add, I wanted to add real quick. Yeah. Last week I went with a bunch of friends, actually a couple of friends and my brother went to visit the Ani Palace and I met Uhhuh. This lady who knows, my mom who knows me, she works there and she asked me if I wanted to play the piano for the [00:44:00] Queen.

Lance: The piano actually made the Queen’s piano, and it was an awesome experience. I played a song called Queen Jubilee. Now it’s on my YouTube channel. You could share that one. Oh,

Meriah: thank you. I can’t wait to listen to it and to see it myself. Thank you Lance.

Lance: Sure. Thank

Meriah: you.

Lance: You’re welcome. Okay.

Meriah: Okay, take care. Bye-bye.

Meriah: Bye-Bye bye.

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