Several of them are not long for this world, to tell the truth. The ones that are at least passable are going to be donated and the truly useless ones will probably end up at the curb.
The plastic ukes have a story attached. My wife and I had only recently started playing in early 2017, when we booked a cabin on the JoCo cruise. This is a cruise organized by Jonathon Coulton, a singer-songwriter from the East coast. It is a week of gaming, music, and all things geeky, but at sea. We debated long and hard about bringing our ukuleles (at the time we owned only 3, one terrible and two decent ones.) In the end, since we had to fly across the country, we decided to leave them at home. After all, there would be professional musicians playing all week, why would we be playing? (This was our first time on the JoCo cruise.)
Once we were in line to board the ship, we realized our mistake. Many of our fellow passengers had brought instruments of all shapes and sizes; ukes, guitars, banjos, melodicas, all kinds of stuff. We were pretty bummed that we had not. When we reached our cabin, there were two plain white cardboard boxes, in that distinctive trapezoidal shape.They were blue plastic ukuleles. We learned later in the week that they were provided to all of the passengers by one of the guys who invented Cards Against Humanity. He didn't play an instrument himself, but wanted to encourage music onboard. They aren't much, but we had an amazing time with them that week on the ship.
They don't take up much space, but they are a nice reminder of that trip. We learned a lot about playing that week from Molly Lewis, a musician who was running the "Ukulele Melee" onboard. By the end of the week, she had taught nearly two hundred of us to play "Hungry Like the Wolf" for Paul Sabourin (of Paul and Storm.) It was his birthday on the last sea day, and he *hated* that song.
