Who: Michelle Suenishi
What: Wildlife Manager, Hilton Hawaiian Village
‘Everybody thinks, oh, cool job, but it’s just like every other job,’ says Michelle Suenishi, the wildlife manager for the Hilton Hawaiian Village’s mini menagerie of birds and turtles. ‘There are valleys and there are peaks.’

But when yours is the only valley with eight penguins in it (and let’s face it–they’re pretty cute), how bad can things get?

For almost 20 years (16 of them under the eye of Suenishi), the hotel has been home to 23 different species of birds and turtles. And of the 90 animals, Piu, Malia, Shaka, Remy, Mana, Betty, Kalia and Icarus, the resident African black-footed penguins, are the hotel’s best-kept secret.

‘The penguins are by far the most popular attraction with our guests,’ says Suenishi. ‘But most locals have no idea they’re here.’

Suenishi wasn’t formally trained in animal care, that is, she doesn’t have a degree, but she’s been doing it for so long that it’s second nature to her now.

When she calls to the black-and-white birds–she claps rapidly for about 10 seconds to get their attention–they willingly gather round. Sometimes the young ones get aggressive and she has to scold them, but most of the time, theirs is a harmonious relationship. Suenishi she strokes the birds, nuzzles their beaks and talks to them. ‘They can get out of hand. They’re like kids–except I can’t slap them when they get naughty.’

Watching Suenishi with the penguins is like watching a teacher with her pupils, she’s loving but stern and she knows more about their personal lives than you’d think. ‘Betty and Shaka are gay. They’re both females, but when Betty’s male mate died she took up with Shaka. Female penguins do that if there aren’t enough males,’ says Suenishi.

And guess what? She didn’t like March of the Penguins.

‘It wasn’t worth $8. You can see better stuff on a National Geographic special.’
–Kawehi Haug

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Who: Matt Hodges
What: Owner and operator of Auto Works
According to stories he hears from his father, Matt Hodges was pointing at automobiles and saying ‘Look at that!’ when he was 2 years old. ‘By the time I was 7 I knew all the cars. It’s just me. It’s the thing I know and love.’ As the owner of Auto Works, a Volvo repair shop, Hodges spends his days talking to customers, taking care of diagnostics and inventory and overseeing quality control. He sees his job as a calling.

‘I love to take something broken and work on it until I can say, ‘Here. Check this out.’ I like to fix things.’ When he was a child, Hodges liked to take things apart. It took him 15 years before he began to put things back together.

Now he takes old things and makes them better than new. Besides excelling at the standard oil changes and brake jobs, Hodges rebuilds vintage automobiles. He built a dune buggy from a motorcycle engine just to see how it could be done. ‘I build to build. Not to have. I’m after the process, not the product.’ He sells most of the vehicles he rebuilds, though he does allow himself to keep special projects.

Hodges’ favorite car is his ‘everyday’ ride–a 1983 Volvo that he rebuilt with a Mustang V-8 engine. ‘I love taking an old car and putting in modern technology. I can smoke Porsche turbos with my Volvo now.’ He sometimes races a ‘79 Volvo coupe that he just finished redoing. ‘WellÖI got a 14-year-old daughter now, so I don’t have much free time, but I race it when I can.’ In fact, adds Hodges, ‘Raising my daughter, Nikki, is my first job.’

Does his daughter like cars? ‘Not at all. And that’s fine with me. A parent’s primary objective is to help his child find something to be passionate about. She’s an artist and that’s fine with me.’ –Timothy Dyke

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Who: A.A. Attanasio
What: Writer
Sometimes it’s best to let writers speak for themselves. ‘For at least 250,000 years, human beings have created art as music, dance, drama, sculpture and painting. Writing is a mere 5,000 years old. It’s a much weirder art form than the others because it’s an exclusively interior and elite experience, available only to those who know the code. That code–reading–is a portal into a mysterious realm that does not exist, and yet is real.’

As an author who views written language as a portal to mysterious worlds, as a man comfortable traveling in places simultaneously nonexistent and real, A.A. Attanasio is ideally suited to write science fiction and fantasy novels.

‘It still amazes me that this system of magical manipulation invented by exorcists in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilization still works in the cybernetic age!’ he says. Attanasio came to writing through reading. As a child he threw himself into storytelling just for fun. When it came time to make a living, he chose the genres of science fiction and fantasy. He has just finished his 20th novel, Killing with the Edge of the Moon, due out Oct. 1. As his first book published in the 21st century, it will be distributed not through his usual publisher, HarperCollins, but over the Internet through Prime Books (primebooks.net), where marketing and sales are done directly with booksellers and readers.

‘I went with a fantasy press because my novel is a contemporary fantasy of Celtic magic and teen romance, replete with dragon, witches and a scary tour of the supernatural underworld.’ And Attanasio still reads. ‘I’m inspired by the fiction of A. S. Byatt, Michael Chabon, Denis Johnson, Jim Harrison,’ among others. ‘Two master stylists I admire happen to live in Hawai’i–Ian MacMillan and Paul Theroux.’

Is there something about Hawai’i that lends itself to the writing life? Attanasio explains that writing novels involves four types of days–days of inspiration, writing, rewriting and lying ‘fallow.’ On most days it doesn’t matter where a writer lives. ‘But on that fourth kind of day, the fallow, laid-back day, there’s no better place I know to not write than Hawai’i.’ –T.D.

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Who: Brenda Ching
What: Executive Director of Screen Actors Guild Hawaii Branch
The Screen Actors Guild Hawaii Branch launched in 1985 with 396 members. Today, ‘We’re up to 700,’ says executive director Brenda Ching. Until 2000, when the branches were separated into regions (Hawai’i is part of the western region), Ching had a staff to help with administrative duties. Now she’s a one-woman office and SAG’s only paid employee in the state.

‘I do everything. I talk to everybody,’ says Ching. That includes ‘producers, directors, casting people, film commissioners, talent agents, people inquiring about the guild, contracts, ad agencies–you name it.’

Unlike SAG members, who generally hold day jobs and call in sick to fight for the few roles that spring up, Ching is not an actor. Glenn Cannon, president of SAG Hawaii and theater-director about town, has threatened to put her on stage but Ching has stood firm. ‘He tried to get me in something–anything, even in the chorus. I was like, ‘How much time do I have to give to this?’ He said, ‘Well you can’t just show up and go home when you want.’ It’s the same thing I tell the members! So, maybe when I retire.’
In the meantime, Hawai’i’s screen actors are fortunate to have this petite, energetic advocate maintaining her focus and objective. ‘[I] have to remain neutral. I represent all actors. Everybody gets the same amount of service.’

While Ching says the job is fun, it’s also ‘a lot of hard work, dealing with boards, going to national meetings…There was a chunk of time when I was hardly ever in the office. I was thinking I should have been a flight attendant because I came home one weekend, changed clothes, repacked my suitcase and went out the next week. I was exhausted.

‘I don’t want people to think it’s all about glamour because it isn’t. It’s about dedication, skill, commitment and hard work.’ –Becky Maltby

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Who: Neal Evanhuis
What: Director of Natural Sciences Department, Bishop Museum
Dr. Neal Evanhuis has discovered and named more than 500 species during his more than 30-year career as an entomologist. Right now he’s working on three projects funded by National Science Foundation grants; two of them take him to Fiji and French Polynesia a couple times a year to survey bugs. ‘I don’t spend much time being chairman,’ he says, happily. In the South Pacific, his typical day in the field sees him in a four-wheel drive, scouting for insects and spiders.

‘In Fiji, it’s not too hard to find some nice, pristine forests right outside of Suva on Viti Levu. The flies that I and a colleague work on occur around streams. We looked at the map, found out where all the streams areÖwe’d stop, walk around, collect things, put them in little vials and go to the next site.’

So he’s still finding new species? ‘Oh yeah! There are tons out there. There just aren’t enough taxonomists in the world to do all the new species. It’s called taxonomic impediment.’ Scientists estimate that there are millions of species yet to be documented. ‘So far only 1.2 million species have been described. This means there’s a heck of a lot of work to be done–and quickly–before the environment is changed where everything is going extinct.’

Hawai’i is a prime example of the urgency. With the development of Waikiki, ’some of the species that occurred in the wetlands aren’t there anymore. That’s such a common thing in the Pacific. Island ecosystems are so easy to ruin with all sorts of development, whether it’s tourists or logging–something for somebody to make a buck. So we’re trying to name [species] as fast as we can–[then] the resource managers can identify [them] and say, Hey, we’ve got X number of species that occur in this area, here are their names, we should try to protect them.’

It’s for his names that Evanuis, who until recently was the president of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, has garnered some notoriety. Earlier this year, the New York Times highlighted some of his playful monikers: The flies Pieza pi and Pieza rhea, for instance. A recent Evanhuis label is Carmenelectra shechisme, a prehistoric amber-trapped fly–electra is amber in Greek. Evanuis holds out the orangey 30-million-year-old teardrop of fossilized sap containing a black speck. ‘I was hoping Carmen might like to have a gift because it was named after her. Our PR people contacted her PR people, but they never responded,’ he laughs.

‘We’re trying to show there’s a lot of interesting things going on in Hawai’i with natural history. The funny names is taking what I consider a pretty boring subject–naming new species–and making it a little more interesting, because people talk about it, it gets in the New York Times, into magazines, and people realize people are doing this as a job. Without the names, we can’t as scientists talk about what is out there. So it’s important.’ –Lesa Griffith

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Who: Ephraim ‘Eddie’ Jose
What: East Asian Painting Conservator, Honolulu Academy of Arts
Ephraim ‘Eddie’ Jose had his own art-conservation business in Oakland, Calif., for 15 years, working with such prestigious institutions as Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. But in February he closed up shop to become the Honolulu Academy of Art’s East Asian painting conservator. The lure? ‘The Lane collection,’ says Jose, referring to the academy’s purchase of the late Japanese art scholar Richard Lane’s 20,000-piece ensemble of paintings, woodblock prints and other art. ‘[The academy] asked me to help create a conservation staff for them. The collection is more than 20,000 pieces, and most need to be restored. It’ll probably take aboutÖ1,000 years,’ the quick-to-smile Jose jokes.

In the academy’s new conservation center on Ward Avenue, Jose talks while applying a backing to a striking Taisho era portrait of a woman. Aided by two apprentices, Jose jumps down from a ladder then squats nimbly on a balance beam laid over the painting. He brushes flour paste onto a long strip of mulberry paper with sweeping, confident strokes, then peels the sheet off the table to meticulously smooth it onto the delicate silk work, which will be included in the show Taisho Chic at the University of California Berkeley next month.

‘The things I do here, I do many, many times,’ says Jose. ‘It’s very repetitious work. As they say–practice makes perfect.’ The drill works for him–about to turn 50, Jose possesses a boyish youthfulness. ‘In this job you have to,’ he says. ‘You use a lot of dexterity, hand-eye coordination, muscle coordination, everything.

Originally from the Philippines, Jose grew up all over Asia–his father was a journalist. After earning an economics degree, he pursued art conservation, going through rigorous studies and apprenticeships in Japan, finally training with Tatsuji Handa, whose Handa Kyuseido Co. is one of only 12 studios that the Japanese government uses to work on Japanese Cultural Properties.

The academy gig is Jose’s swan song. Restoring the Lane collection is a mammoth, lengthy undertaking and when he eventually departs, he will have in place a staff of seven fully trained conservators–all working in the Jose style. ‘This is a legacy I want to leave.’–L.G.

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Who: Louise King Lanzilotti
What: Managing Director of Honolulu Theatre for Youth
‘People in arts administration often fall into this kind of work,’ says Louise King Lanzilotti. She’s grateful that she landed at Honolulu Theater for Youth where she’s been managing director for three and a half years. As her job title suggests, Lanzilotti’s role is to do whatever is necessary to manage one of the most successful children’s theater companies in the country. On certain days she may be hauling boxes and answering phones. At other times she’s working to forge creative partnerships between the theater and participating organizations in town.

‘We recently moved into the Tenney Theatre as our permanent home. We also have a partnership with Kumu Kahua Theatre to produce plays. My job basically is to figure out what needs to be done and come up with creative solutions to make it happen,’ says Lanzilotti. While she often feels like her job is never over (’Sometimes I work 20-hour days’), she obviously derives great energy from labor that allows her to contribute to her hometown’s flourishing creativity.

Lanzilotti has always loved the arts. A musician, a former director of education at the Contemporary Museum, a frequent musical director of the Punahou Variety Show and a mother of two creative young women, Lanzilotti is driven by a lifelong passion for artistic expression. What is it that she finds most gratifying about her job? ‘I love getting art to children,’ she says. ‘I believe it makes them whole.’–T.D.

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Who: Scott Mitchell
What: Janitor, The ARTS at Marks Garage
Scott Mitchell already had a job, but when he saw a listing on craigslist.org for a janitor at a local community art center, he dropped them a line. ‘I had some extra time, and I needed to cover my health insurance,’ says Mitchell. Last month, he became the part-time custodian at the ARTS at Marks Garage.

There aren’t many points of comparison with his other gig as an eco-tour guide. ‘It’s pretty much just mopping the floors, scrubbing the bathrooms, that kind of thing,’ he says between mop strokes. Still, he says, he enjoys the cleaning. ‘The best part is that there’s so much cool stuff in here to look at.’

What’s Mitchell’s dirt-destroyer of choice? ‘Comet all the way, baby,’ Mitchell says. ‘My mother taught me well.’ And he was a good student–the art venue’s floors and bathrooms sparkle. We wondered if Mitchell brought his work home with him. ‘I have a different strategy at home,’ he says. ‘I pretty much let the house go all week, then handle it before anyone starts to notice.’–Ragnar Carlson