A do-ahead column gone awry

by Pat Laster


By now everyone who regularly reads the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette knows that Jay Grelan’s Sweet Tea column is history. Too bad. He knew how to hook the reader at the very first sentence. I often thought “I wish I could write like that.” Many letters-to-the-editor have ensued and one of them caught my notice. It said, “His column is not always about him.” She meant the thrust of the column, I’m sure, since he wrote pieces about other people. Of course, he did have a connection to the subject of each column.
Anyway, nearly every other columnist I read writes about him/herself. But since my last several pieces have been about myself, I’ll give both me and thee a break. Of sorts.
For my 75th birthday, my sis Carolyn not only gave me a gorgeous music-motifed scarf, but also a Hallmark gift book, “GREAT at any age: who did what from age 1 to 100…and beyond.”
How interesting, I thought, and after I'd finished a column listing one name/accomplishment for each year up to 21, I looked on the back of the title page. "No part of this book can be reproduced, etc. etc."
I emailed the web site requesting permission for using what I had typed. "Unfortunately, we cannot......" So you'll never know that toddler Mickey Rooney was a part of his family’s vaudeville act. Or that as a 2-year-old Judy Garland began her stage career.
Or you may already know that Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was three. Or that Andre Agassi--at age four--impressed tennis great Jimmy Connors as they rallied for a quarter of an hour. And every one of a certain age knows--or has heard--that five-year-old Charlie Chaplin performed with his mother on the vaudeville stage.
And who doesn't remember that at six, Ron Howard began his run as Opie Taylor on the TV classic The Andy Griffith Show. We don't need a book to tell us that, now do we?
I won’t go on. For one reason, I can’t access the finished column (computer woes). Instead, I’ll continue with journal jottings from the first few days of August. How about a paragraph or two of trivia, called BY THE NUMBERS?
130 million = the estimated number of books that exist worldwide.
A $1.6 million Missouri lottery win is only worth (ONLY?) a cash payout of $800,000.
96 = the age Katharine Hepburn died.
12= the number of Oscar nominations for Hepburn.
4= the number of Oscars won by her.
3,280 feet tall=the height of the planned Kingdom Tower to be built in Jeddah, a port city on the Red Sea (Saudi Arabia), making it at least 563 feet taller than the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
76=the age of Dame Judy Dench, one of my favorite British actresses.
115=degrees of temperature around parts of our (and surrounding) state(s) with more to come.
It’s awfully hard to write a column without bringing yourself in to it.
Folks, stay inside while this heat prevails. #