Last night was the first meeting of this season’s Hawaii Chapter of the American Guild of Organists—it was the debut of our Orgelkids pipe organ kit. To refresh your memory on what Orgelkids is, I refer you to my previous post: Orgelkids coming to Hawaii!

The members of the board decided that we should try to put it together first before trying to show kids how to do it! (Good idea!)

But first things first! We feasted on five different kinds of pizza plus a caesar salad. Our Chapter Dean, Karl Bachman, made two kinds of brownies for dessert, called North Korea and South Korea—one had nuts and the other did not. You can figure out which kind most people liked!

Everyone was directed to the nearby restrooms to wash their hands afterwards and Karl even threatened us with an app on his phone which could scan for any grease!

There were three long tables set out with the many parts: frame, toeboard, pipes, wind supply, etc. We were told to divide up into groups of four to stand around each pile.  Then we were instructed to read the directions which were on laminated sheets. “The frame should only take a few minutes,” he said. (Hah!)

It was intended that everyone would watch each group try to assemble its defined section, but of course, people did not listen and jumped right in. When we came to assembling it, sometimes the next group ended up undoing the work of the previous group! Like when our one child visitor had carefully arranged the keys in the right order, the next group got them all out of order when inserting them into the frame. Someone said, “This is like buying an organ from IKEA!”

Yikes, how many organists does it take to assemble Orgelkids?! Especially those who do not listen to instructions!

It had taken us all of 50 minutes, but in the end, we put it together!  SUCCESS, as you can hear from these video clips.

The first performance of the finished kit, as demonstrated by Karl Bachman.

Then Jieun Newland improvises.

What fun!