Tiki-Kate and the Wonderful World of Tiki Mugs
Tiki-Kate's love affair with tiki mugs began in a thrift store in Berkeley in 1998. That first mug was an Orchids of Hawaii R-72, a simple and fairly common moai mug.
Kate started to pick up more and more mugs, and today her collection holds more than 1,000 items. The size of her collection is even more impressive considering she only collected mugs with actual tikis on them.
In 2005, I created a website for tiki mug collectors, called Ooga-Mooga. I didn't know Kate yet, so I really had no idea how big a collection could get. As the first users of Ooga-Mooga started adding their collections, there was this one that just. kept. growing. Kate worked on photographing and cataloguing her collection on Ooga-Mooga—seeming to not stop for sleep—for days and days. I was pleasantly astounded. So many mugs. So many mugs I'd never seen before. I didn't have mug templates available for most of her mugs.
Finally, after maybe a week, the number of mugs in her collection stopped rising. She'd finally managed to get them all in there. And then, disaster struck. Literally, in the form of a man behind the wheel of a stolen car, being chased by police, who smacked right into the front of her house—her tiki mug room.
Hundreds of Kate's mugs were broken, but thanks to the newly-created catalog on Ooga-Mooga, she had a record of exactly what was lost. Her insurance company was willing to use values determined by price sightings in Ooga-Mooga, which made it possible to file a claim for the loss of her mugs. It was terrific luck that Ooga-Mooga and Kate came together when they did.
Kate and I started working together to get proper templates and price sightings for the items in her collection. She found it fun, and she took to data curation like a duck to water. She kept making mug templates long past the time when her own collection was covered.
She thanked me often for creating an outlet for her tiki mug passion; she enjoyed documenting tiki mugs as a distraction from the world's cares. I completely understand—Critiki offers me the same outlet—but I always felt funny being thanked by her, when I felt like she was helping me out. It was a very good partnership. Frankly, it felt very intimate; I have not given anyone else that kind of access to the inner workings of my websites. In the Ooga-Mooga admin area, I could feel her presence, as though we were in the same room, even though we lived on opposite ends of the state. It's hard to convey how special it was to me, to be able to share that space with her.
It feels lonely now, without her. For years now, I have viewed my work on Ooga-Mooga through the filter of how Kate would feel about it. I saw new mugs and thought immediately about how much she would—or wouldn't—like them. She was my comrade and my confidante, and my Most Important Customer. I started Ooga-Mooga as a site for everyone, but to be honest, it really became the site I built for her. It always will be.
Holden Westland of Tiki Farm gave her many replacements for the mugs she lost in the crash, and people from Tiki Central and Ooga-Mooga rallied around and helped connect her even with more replacements. Through gifts and purchases, Kate was eventually able to replace nearly all of what she lost.
Kate developed close relationships with many of the tiki mug designers and producers. In particular, she was a huge fan and good friend of Dave "Squid" Cohen. She curated a retrospective of his tiki mugs, hosted at Don the Beachcomber, and featuring many pieces from her own collection. It was a beautiful exhibition, and she poured a lot of particular care into it, as she always did.
When the time came for Kate to begin planning the end of her life, she asked Squid to make her one last piece: a gorgeous urn for her ashes. It was the most difficult and beautiful work that Squid has ever done, and it's exacty what she would have loved. She got to see it before it was fired. It has been added to her collection on Ooga-Mooga as Tiki Kate's Last Tiki Mug.
Kate's impact on the world of mugs will be felt for many years to come. She helped to define the terminology we use to describe mugs through her creation of mug templates. I'm sure she will continue to act as a muse for those who create tiki mugs.