Monthly Archives: January 2017

“Just the Alternative Facts, Ma’am”

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!

“Just the Alternative Facts, Ma’am”

Have you ever felt like kicking yourself when, after the moment has passed, you later come up with a reply or answer you wish you had said?

This happened to me recently when I was interviewed on a book talk show. At the time I felt good about what I offered about my life and my writing, but now I wish I had dished out some more interesting “alternative facts.” Here, belatedly, are some things I wish I had shared . . .1facts

One of my all-time favorite cartoons ran in The New Yorker and shows two couples sitting in a living room and one of the husbands says, “That story reminds me of the time I walked on the moon.” I guess I love this cartoon because it reminds me of my own lunar stroll.

I once defeated Mike and Bob Bryan in doubles. It took me three sets, but that’s only because I played them one-against-two.

Warren Buffet, now and then, asks me for stock tips.

Sometimes doctors, who have been asked by a patient for a second opinion, come to me for my first-rate opinion.

I am so modest to a fault that I keep my Pulitzer Prize tucked out of sight in a drawer. I’m not even sure which drawer, that’s how little I care about awards.

Now that I think about it, I think my Pulitzer might be in my sock drawer – alongside my Olympic silver medal for the marathon. I hate to make excuses, but I would have won the gold if the media’s lead motorcycle hadn’t led me off course causing me to run an extra mile.

I have a sandwich named after me – The DagWoody – but it’s only available on a “secret menu” at a restaurant that remains top secret.

Each morning I wake up and am frustrated to see that my most recent book, “Strawberries in Wintertime,” isn’t on the New York Times Best Sellers List. This isn’t right because I know I’ve signed one million, maybe a million and a half, copies for people.

A lot of people, really smart people who read lots of books, have told me my memoir “Wooden & Me” is better than “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

Murray, my 10-year-old boxer, won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show and was also a world Frisbee champion when he was younger.

Basketball’s 3-point line: my idea.

The second time I reached the summit of Mount Everest was not as thrilling as the first time. Both times, of course, I did so without aid of supplemental oxygen.

My wife was not only a senior homecoming princess at Granada High School, she was later Miss America.

Wrestling an alligator may be dangerous, but it isn’t all that challenging in my experience.

In an open-water swim around the Ventura Pier and back to the beach, I beat Michael Phelps by 10 meters.

I celebrated New Year’s Day by performing a Chumash-inspired rain dance. I’m just saying.

If I’m being totally honest, sometimes I egotistically wish Beyonce and Taylor Swift would give me credit for helping them write song lyrics – but mostly I’m just happy to have played an unsung role in helping their careers.

Jack Dorsey, my fellow co-founder of Twitter, won a coin toss and that’s why a Tweet can have 140 characters instead of the 150 maximum that I suggested.

Few will argue that Tom Brady throws a tighter and more-accurate spiral – even with a fully inflated football – ever since I showed him my method for gripping the laces.

I was more than happy to offer Denzel and Viola some acting tips for their roles in “Fences.”

All modesty aside, I think the musical “Hamilton” is as great as it is partly because I helped Lin-Manuel Miranda polish the lyrics.

I can spell the last name of Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.

And those are, as “Dragnet’s” TV character Sgt. Joe Friday would say, “Just the facts, ma’am – the alternative facts.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

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Add Circus to Memory Lane

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!

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Add the Circus to Our Memory Lane

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! BOYS AND GIRLS OF ALL AGES! WELCOME TO TODAY’S ‘GREATEST COLUMN ON EARTH!’ I AM YOUR RINGMASTER, WOODY. LET THE READING BEGIN!”

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced that, after a 146-year run as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” it is folding up its big-top tents for good in May.

Another piece of Americana bite the sawdust, but the wistful handwriting was on the wall when the pachyderms packed up their trunks a couple years ago and moved off to retirement villages. Some people are angry at animal rights groups for breaking up the band, so to speak, but I applaud the efforts of PETA and others.1elephant

As a wide-eyed young boy going to the circus, I marveled at the trapeze acts and the flying man shot from a canon and the lion tamer, but I was most mesmerized by the elephants. However, as a man taking my own children – once, and only once – I felt deep remorse at the servitude of these grand animals for our amusement.

Without elephants on the marquee, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus pretty much became “The OK-est Show on Earth.” Replacing the majestic march of elephants with sequined performers riding a caravan of camels was like replacing a tour of the Giant Sequoias in Yosemite National Park with a visit to a Christmas tree farm in Somis.

It is joyless to say goodbye after nearly 150 years of memory-making history, and yet it seems well past time to do so. Sure, the trapeze artists can still provide a thrill, but let’s be honest – you can witness more thrilling gravity-defying acts at any local skateboard park or parkour gathering.

Lion tamers? Again, the once death-defying act has lost its adrenaline rush as the big cats have become more lethargic than an aerophobic passenger made calm by Quaaludes. A more energetic example of animal training is to watch dogs in an agility contest where they jump through hoops, walk across seesaws, and zig-zag through slalom poles.

On and on, all the acts of the famous three rings can be found outside the big top – often in even more exciting forms.

As for the clowns, we still have Washington, D.C.

1clownAll that said, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was a national treasure and to have it close shop brings a sense of loss. And if the biggest of the big tops folds up, it is hard to imagine the smaller circus companies surviving much longer either.

This pending extinction of the circus brought to my mind some other heirlooms of my youth that now exist only in memories and attics. It is strange to imagine that the circus joining these artifacts, not to be experienced by future generations. Things like:

Wood baseball bats, wood tennis rackets, wood drivers.

Manual typewriters and the pleasing feeling striking the keys with a little oomph.

Rotary phones. What I most remember is how long it took a “0” to rotate back when you dialed it, and of course a “9” nearly as long, and how frustrating it was when your finger would slip out prematurely when dialing one of these numbers and you had hang up and start anew.

LP records and 45s; 8-tracks and cassettes; movie projectors and VHS tapes.

Filling station attendants who cleaned the windshield and checked the oil.

Glass soda bottles that you could return to the store and get back a 5-cent deposit. And using a “church key” to open a can of pop.

The milkman, who left your regular order in an insulated milk box on your doorstep. And if you wanted something different, you tucked a rolled-up note halfway in the top of an empty milk bottle.

Three TV channels. And the “remote control” was the youngest sibling in the room. And rabbit ears.

Newspapers delivered by boys, and sometimes girls, tossing strikes while riding bikes.

“NOW SAY GOODBYE TO THE CIRCUS, BOYS AND GIRLS! AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, DRIVE HOME SAFELY.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

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A Few Drive-Thru Lines to Chew On

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!

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A 700-Word Homework Assignment of Jottings

According to scholars, Emily Dickinson’s poems – she wrote nearly 1,800, although only 10 were published during her lifetime – often began as notes, scribbled in pencil, on scraps of paper she kept in her dress pocket while gardening or running errands.

She would later cull from these jottings when composing formally in ink on stationary late at night in her bedroom.

While I am no poet and certainly no Dickinson, I also make notes while out and about, perhaps waiting in a “drive-thru” window line. However, instead of pencil and paper, I usually send myself a text on my smart phone.

Later, I combine and expand on them, such as for this 700-word homework assignment of random thoughts.

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1TunnelTreeIn 1948, the In-N-Out in Baldwin Park is believed to have become the nation’s first fast-food restaurant to have a “drive-thru” window featuring an intercom for ordering. However, an even more historic “drive-thru” was created seven decades earlier when a tunnel was cut through a giant sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

Sadly, this “Drive-Thru Tree” was felled by a storm last Sunday. Like most everyone who ever visited the famous tree, I was spellbound by the experience – and I would happily see every fast-food “drive-thru” window in California permanently closed in exchange to have the tree standing again.

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Add giant “drive-thru” sequoia: To paraphrase Joyce Kilmer – I think that I shall never see, / Even a Dickinson poem lovely as that tree.

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To keep or discard the Electoral College is a legitimate debate, but the argument that if you take away California then Donald Trump would have won the popular vote is as ridiculous as saying that if LeBron James’ points didn’t count then the Golden State Warriors, not the Cleveland Cavaliers, would have won the NBA championship last season.

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Nobody asked me, but I thought Jean Cowden Moore’s article headlined “Do Kids Need Homework?” in the Star last Sunday was terrific and important.

As a Baby Boomer who can’t remember having homework until high school and even then not very much, and as a parent who saw his two children loaded down with homework in middle school and then buried with it in high school, I vote for no homework until high school, and then sparsely.

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Add homework: Mark Twain said, “Don’t let school interfere with your education.” It seems to me traditional homework does precisely this by making youth dislike school rather than fostering a love for learning.

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Gripe No. 37 on homework: High school teachers are not always on the same page and too often many will assign a boatload of homework on the same night resulting in students being up past midnight – and even later if they play a sport, study music, or have an after-school job.

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Four exceptions for “homework” I would applaud being assigned regularly: community service, reading for pleasure, reading for pleasure and reading for pleasure.

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Although I never had him in school, one of my all-time favorite teachers was Chuck Marshall (my sister-in-law’s father) who seemed to make every conversation both fun and educational. Sadly, he passed away last week and in his honor I would like to share some wisdom from another Chuck – Chuck Thomas, the late, great philosopher who wrote so wonderfully in this space before I tried to fill his shoes:

“If there’s someone whose friendship you treasure, be sure to tell them now – without waiting for a memorial service to say it.”

Ditto for a teacher you treasure.

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Coming full circle again to Emily Dickinson: although “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” is perhaps her best-known poem, I am partial to “If I can stop one Heart from breaking”:

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain;

“If I can ease one life the aching, / Or cool one pain,

“Or help one fainting robin / Unto his nest again,

“I shall not live in vain.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

 

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Friend in Deed to Those in Need

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!

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Belated Christmas Story to Warm the Heart

In the masterpiece novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch offers this sage advice to his daughter, Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. . . . Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

I have a dear friend whose skin no one would want to climb into, for she has battled an array of skin cancers for two decades. Her health issues have taken a toll, but in return they have given her an understanding of others who are facing their own hardships.

1_feed200I knew my friend had a kind heart, but the depth of her empathy more fully revealed itself this past Christmas when she surprisingly turned down my invitation to join us for dinner. She is a single mom whose college-student son was out of state visiting his girlfriend’s family, and we didn’t want her to be alone.

It turns out she wasn’t. Instead of in my home, she spent Christmas evening outside in the cold with the homeless. I learned of this not from my friend, but from a shared intimate. In fact, my friend seemed embarrassed that I had found out about her charitable excursion because she is not one to seek recognition.

While honoring her privacy, here is her Christmas story that echoes the ideal expressed by Mother Teresa: “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

My friend did not feed 100 people in need on Christmas night, but she did feed far more than just one.

She began by buying a dozen cheeseburger meals, asking the server to wrap each in an individual bag for dignity’s sake, and added bottles of water. She would later return to buy a dozen more burgers and would have gone back a third time if necessary.

“I hope it’s because the shelters, or family or friends, were taking care of the homeless since it was Christmas,” she explains, “but thankfully there were fewer homeless people out on Christmas than on a typical day.”

It turns out my friend has done this not only on Christmas evenings past, but on many “typical” days and nights in between as well.

Too, I learned, she has for years organized a food drive in her apartment complex, personally knocking door-to-door collecting canned goods, with the donations going to a different shelter each year.

Back to this Christmas. My friend admits that despite staying in well-lit areas, mostly store parking lots where she regularly sees the homeless, she was at times a little fearful for her safety.

“These were places I knew of in my area that I did feel pretty safe to go to, even at night,” she points out. “But honestly, I wouldn’t have gone to someplace like Compton, especially alone, and that makes me sad because the homeless in Compton most likely needed a hamburger and bottle of water more than anyone in Camarillo does.”

She had one hair-raising moment, however, when a man startled her by popping out of the shadows. He angrily confronted her asked what she was doing.

“When I explained I just wanted him to have something to eat, his face lit up,” my friend shares. “His face went from kind of scary to gratitude.”

As Atticus Finch knew, point of view means everything. What from the outside looked like a lonely Christmas evening for my friend, through her eyes had turned out to be a masterpiece.

“If anything,” she explains, “doing this was selfish on my part because I drove around for over an hour and a half and the response I got time and again from a simple cheeseburger meal and a bottle of water was, and in my Christmas memories always will be, priceless.”

When I again praised her for her act of goodwill, my friend humbly responded, “I wish I could do more. There are so many people out there who need help. It breaks my heart.”

Her Christmas story warms my heart.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

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