Tricky Wicky Wacky Too - our second - Vancouver Community Network

The start
The Vancouver Ukulele Circle was formed in September 2000 after Ralph Shaw,
Vancouver's own "King of the Ukulele", and Virginia Ise put a small ad in a local
newspaper.
Who we are
The Vancouver Ukulele Circle now has about 120+ members but still has no goals or
objectives except to provide a place where ukulele enthusiasts can meet, play some
songs and have a few laughs. About 30 people show up at any one evening.
The members come from a wide variety of musical back grounds. Most of us use the
GCEA tuning but other tunings are also welcome...and we have one or two baritones uke
players too. Players play wooden ukes as well as banjo-ukes, chrome resonator
ukuleles, plastic ukuleles.....you name it. If it has 4 strings and sounds like a ukulele then
it is completely permissible.
Other instruments are also welcome as they provide wonderful accompaniment to our
plonking. So far we have had 2 steel guitars, an electric bass guitar, a trumpet, a banjo,
a fiddle, a saw(!) and a normal guitar.
How it works
The VUC meets on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. Meetings were originally held in the
common room at Ralph's place, but for a few years now they have been at Our Town, a
very informal cafe at Kingsway and Broadway. Some of us meet at 6:15 pm for dinner
and others join for the strumming that starts around 7:30pm.
We have a new compilation of 120 tunes from which we select tunes to sing together for
the first half of every evening. The songbooks are available from Wendy or Peter at the
meetings for $10. After the break, we have short performances (now limited to one tune)
by whoever is willing, followed by a few more tunes sung as a group.
There are no membership fees, but we occasionally pass a hat for loonies at the
meetings to cover things like photocopies, parties and purchases of items of interest to
members.
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