Goodness Gracious Sakes Alive

This is a post that I started to write in the spring after legendary basketball coach John Wooden passed away but for one reason or another didn’t manage to get posted.

Coach Wooden doesn’t quite make it into the pantheon of Less is Enough heroes, but only because his field of expertise isn’t particularly relevant to my core interests. (Or at least the core interests of this blog—basketball could arguably be called one of my core interests.) But he was an amazingly successful coach and from all accounts a remarkble person.

I remember reading a few years ago about how the first thing he’d do when a new class of players came in was to teach them how to put on their socks and tie their shoes properly. He would tell them, “You don’t want your socks bunching up around your toes, it will give you blisters, and you want to make sure your shoes are tied tight so they’ll stay tied. You can’t play with blisters or with your shoes untied.” So he’d teach them how to put on their shoes and socks properly (mind you these are college freshmen, not eight-year olds), and this was a famous and oft-repeated example of his focus on fundamentals.

My brother saw Coach Wooden speak and said he was one of the most inspiring people he’d ever heard. He said he could totally understand how he won so many games, he said just listening to him made you want to do your best.

After Coach Wooden died in June, there were a number of stories about him in the paper, and several of them noted that he never swore. This was especially interesting to me given that many college basketball coaches today can barely make it through a press conference without using words that cannot be printed in a family newspaper. (Roy Williams is especially partial to the word “frick” and its many variations.)

So I really loved this quote:

[Keith] Erickson recalled that practices in the old men’s gym were no-nonsense under Wooden. “He’d blow that whistle and everybody would turn,” he said. “He’d say, ‘Goodness gracious sakes alive,’ and everybody knew we were in trouble.”

Goodness gracious sakes alive.

Love it.

Free Art

The Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia

I decided to not let the fact that I don’t have anything to say get in the way of putting up posts. It doesn’t seem to stop anyone else.

I managed to make it through my coupon obsession without actually setting up a database to track the Dollar a Day coupon guy’s purchases, and thankfully his project is now over. (He did a lot of foraging and he used coupons to get a lot of things that he didn’t actually eat, and I really wanted to see how much he spent on the food he actually ate. But in the spirit of finishing projects I will get paid for before spending hours and hours on things that no one else but me is even remotely interested in, I decided to hold off.)

But I was waiting for some files to copy and looked at Coupon Guy’s site to see if he was up to anything lately and looked again at his Penny Experiment site, where he’s trying to parlay a penny he found on the ground into a million dollars in food donated to local food banks.

This is obviously a very generous project and he’s putting a lot of energy into it and that’s great.

However I have one quibble.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed this except my mom is an artist and I have friends who are artists and through them I’ve become aware of how undervalued the work of artists is in our culture. If you talk to anyone who has ever sold art to the public, you will hear a story about people saying to them (or rather saying around them, it’s usually not said right to the artist’s face) something along the lines of, “I could do that myself” or “I could get that for $5 at Pier One.” (That’s a particular favorite of my mom’s, she’s a basketmaker, so she hears variations on that with some regularity.)

So I’m reading about the Penny Project to find out how it’s supposed to work, and how it’s supposed to work is that he found a penny on the ground and tried to think of how he could turn that into something more. He offered the penny for sale for $10 and found a taker — someone who supported his idea and wanted to be part of his project. So now he had $10 to buy food with.

He then put out a call for artists:

I’m looking for artists that would be willing to donate a bit of their time and talent for the penny experiment project. What I’m hoping to find is 100 different artists who will each create one postcard size piece of art that incorporates a number of their choosing (between 1 and 100) and a penny. In return, the artist will get (if desired) a bio on this website under the image of their artwork, a link to their own website and the knowledge that they helped out a lot of people in need during these difficult economic times.

The size of the art should be somewhere between 3 inches x 5 inches and 5 inches x 8 inches (a small to large postcard) on postcard type material incorporating both a real penny and the number that you choose. The style, color scheme, etc is completely up to you.

The art will be sold with 100% of the money going to purchase food for food banks.

So, the way to turn a penny into food is (…drumroll please…)

GET ARTISTS TO DONATE FREE WORK THAT YOU CAN SELL FOR CASH.

Okay!

Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

But whatever, artists are a generous bunch and he found many takers who were happy to participate in his project. I just thought it was kind of funny since if the plan was to have people he didn’t know give him free work that he could sell, what was the point of that first penny? It seems like that wasn’t really necessary at all. Though I guess every project needs a hook.

And, for my friend Ann, I will ask the question she always like to bring up, which is why is it always the artists who are asked to do their work for free? How come no one ever asks accountants or plumbers or auto mechanics to donate their work?

The next silent auction I go to I’d like to bid on tax preparation and oil changes and drain repair, with all proceeds going to the local food bank (or better yet, to local artists!).

I’ll be waiting for that one