Southwest Airlines teamed up with Guitar Center to surprise a flight from Long Beach to Honolulu with a 20 minute ukulele lesson.
When passengers boarded the plane, every seat had a Mitchell MU40 Soprano ukulele waiting for them, tuned and ready to play.
Guitar Center provided the ukuleles and three instructors.
The 180 passengers learned three chords — G, C and B7 — so they could play the century-old standard "Hello, Aloha! How Are You?"
One instructor Ryan Miyashiro said,
"The students — er, passengers — were able to pick it up very quickly. They learned how to put it all together. A chord sheet was handed out with diagrams of the chords themselves and mapped with slashes with each strum and lyrics, but no music annotation was needed."
However, when the videos of the flight hit the internet, the trolls that only wish they could have been on a flight to Hawaii playing a ukulele swarmed:
Even Amtrak took advantage of the situation for a little self promotion pointing out that they have a "quiet" car:
Of course the train to Hawaii is kind of a rough ride. Just ask Senator Mazie Hirono about the Green New Deal's plan to eliminate air travel and replace it with high-speed rail.
However, the people on the flight had a good time. No one reached for the emergency exit door handle to escape the music.
"Speaking for myself, to live a confident and happy life, I've given up trying to control the version of me that lives in other people's heads. A lot of life is perception," Miyashiro said. "If that's how they're going to perceive this event, if they're thinking negatively, then that's how they'll feel. It doesn't mean I have to let their perception affect mine. It was surreal to be on a flight where all these people took part in this one thing to create a collective energy and sound. Everyone on board was an audience member, as well as a performer.
"The reason we take trips is not to collect souvenirs but to collect memories," he said. "I feel like we definitely delivered on that."
In addition to the memories, at the end of the flight all the passengers got to keep the ukuleles courtesy of Southwest Airlines and Guitar Center.
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