MySpace a place for friends

My future x-wife, Paul Weller, David Bowie, Noel & Liam Gallagher, David Beckham, Winona Ryder, Felix Vicious, Amy Winehouse, Keira Knightly, Kristen Kreuk, Naomi Watts, Alexa, Rose Byrne, Joanna Angel... & all the ggdub gals!

-

***1st Annual Lu'au-au-go-go***

What goes around comes around. Call it coincidence, fate, harmonic convergence whatever, but Honolulu hosted twin two-wheeler rallies yesterday, the 12th annual Harley Owners Group's Hawai'i State H.O.G. Rally, and the Lu'au-Au-Go-Go vintage scooter rally, planned as an annual event. - And although one rally wound up yesterday where the other began, organizers and participants at each event were pretty much unaware of the other's existence. - Both kicked off Friday and end today. The H.O.G. Rally started the day at the colossal 40,000-square-foot, multilevel Cycle City building at Pu'uloa Road and Nimitz Highway. There, hundreds of bikers aboard Harleys in the 1,200-cc to 1,500-cc range, roared off in groups of a dozen or so to visit each Harley-Davidson dealership and clothing store on O'ahu. - Their day ended with a scavenger hunt starting at the Pacific Harley-Davidson clothing store at Ala Moana Center. "Harley Owners Group is a worldwide organization with almost a million members," said Larry Holu, H.O.G. Rally coordinator, who added that more than six dozen participants flew in from outside Hawai'i. - Holu said he hadn't known about the scooter rally until someone at Cycle City called to tell him. "It's no problem because their events are separate from ours, they're doing things at different times," he said. - If everything about the Harley rally was huge, huge crowd, huge building, huge bikes and huge bikers (Holu, for instance, tips the scales at a cool 300 pounds) the Lu'au-Au-Go-Go scooter rally represented the opposite end of the scale. - That rally billed as three days of scooters, beer and punk rock began the morning at the Like Like Drive-In on Ke'eaumoku with fewer than a dozen scooterists riding diminutive two-wheelers in the 100-cc to 150-cc range, epitomized by the Italian-made 1950s-1960s era Vespa and Lambretta scooters. - The first-ever Hawaiian Scooter Rally was not intended to be a large happening in any way, although organizers expressed high hopes it would attract scooterists from around the world within the next couple of years. - "There's people all over the world that are into these things," said Morgan Parker of Waikiki, who was riding a spiffy 1966 Super Vespa and who said he has attended giant scooter rallies on the Mainland. "They're just like the Harley guys they'll go anywhere." The stylish scooters took a more or less leisurely journey around O'ahu's southern shore before making their way in the late afternoon to Cycle City for a lu'au on the building's roof. - Joe, coordinator/founder of the scooter rally, said he had no idea the Harley rally was happening the same weekend. But he said it's all part of the existential scheme of things. "This is a very underground kind of thing," Joe said. "It's a whole different cult. "The person who rides a Vespa or a Lambretta is more into the '60s culture, more into the British culture, more into a European way of life. I guess they're mostly mods." - That cultural clash, said Joe, might best be summed up in the 1979 British film "Quadrophenia," The Who's rock opera about teenage gang battles between mods and rockers in the early 1960s. - But neither the bikers nor the scooterists voiced any animosity or disdain toward each other. Holu, who's a senior legal assistant for the state Attorney General's Office, described H.O.G. members as your basic fun-loving bunch of men and women who include doctors and lawyers, construction workers and laborers. - Vespa rider Shawn Murphy said "one hallmark about scooter riders is that they're pretty much accepting of anyone punkers, heavy-metal types, skinheads, mods and even normal people." - And veteran cyclist Michele Opiteck, sales manager at Cycle City which happens to sell Vespas as well as Harleys says she's equally at ease with either biking extreme. "I can ride anything on two wheels," Opiteck said. "I think I'd actually be drawn to the Vespa right now." - What scooterists and bikers have in common is a bit of renegade subculture, according to Joe. They both came about during the post war era, but took totally different directions. - He doubted that he and his fellow scooter riders would actually encounter the big guys during their rally road trips. Then again, he said it could happen. - "If it does, we'll probably just stop and wave at them," Joe said. "and most likely they'll just laugh at us." -

Will Hoover at whoover@honoluluadvertiser.com.