Tag archives: Jeff Wing
This week I join the ranks of Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Tolstoy. Like these towering, culture-affecting giants, I offer my Confessions to a waiting world, to posterity. You see, we great thinkers must ultimately unburden ourselves. What choice have we, huh, Tolstoy? By opening our hearts in this act of generous self-abnegation, we defang […]
Editor’s note: The following letter remembers Pedro Rivera, the longtime Santa Barbara and Montecito bartender who was struck and killed by a car on Coast Village Road on August 2. My family (Cheri, Garret and Sierra) enjoyed talking with Pedro at the restaurant, Teddy’s by the Sea, every other week for the past two years! […]
Hullo. I’m the local columnist whose carefully crafted words are the last thing your drowsy cockatiel sees every evening as he nods off on his little trapeze or whatever. My name is Jeff Wing, but since around third grade people have mis-addressed me as Jack Wayne, so feel free. Now, I don’t want to sound […]
Walking onto the wedding site I’m struck by the sense of happy commotion, energized folk crisscrossing the rural property with buoyant industry, faces prone with unconscious half-smiles as they each set to the task at hand. These striding busy bees wear a variety of tats, indelible ink mostly dedicated to soft-spoken renderings of the plant […]
I’m a man of a certain age but you wouldn’t know it to look at me – in part because the very idea of looking at me frightens you. But guess what? I arise at 5:30 in the morning and go to a gym and it shows! On any given day, gather your courage and […]
Oh, my dear Jeff!I’ll be the first to confessYour acerbic finesseSinges my skin like a spark to a dress. But your piece on Ms. Flagg–Well, on that I will brag!I laughed out loud–truly cackled, by gag!Every phrase, every turn,Had a bright comic burn;What a picture you painted–what language! What swag! So bravo, good Wing–Let the […]
I’ve been wearing the same outfit – a black short-sleeved HEMA® tee-shirt and Levi’s – every day since April 2016. This is a fact. Please note the happy-go-lucky photo parked at the end of my every column. That photo was taken several years ago and I am wearing that tee-shirt or one of its cousins […]
Only Jeff Wing could walk us through a crash course in evolution biology, anatomy, AND his own colonoscopy in the stand-up comedy mode, all the while lying on his side. LOL! The lesson: our gut health is so integral to the gut-brain axis, but pooping will always be hilarious. Sincerely, LeeAnn Morgan A Lasting Lesson […]
There are eight million stories in the naked city, but only 8,600 or so in our own sun-soaked jungle, baby. How do I know this? Because I’m your town crier, baby; your chronicler, your truth-teller and tour guide to the dark underbelly of this coiled serpent we call Montecito. Me? You never saw me, you […]
You’re the top, you’re Mahatma Gandhi. You’re the top, you’re Napoleon Brandy. You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary. You’re cellophane. Cole Porter’s famous lyric was surely written about the human race. Yeah, we’re the top! [cut to outdoor shot – two strangers on Coast […]
When I was about 14, my sister, Jill – an award-winning equestrian – took me horseback riding. I was uneasy with the whole deal because I’ve always been scared of horses. Always. As a seven-year-old I’d lived on Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. That being Cowboy Country (and Missile Country, but that’s another […]
When we yet had the luxury to do so, my friends and I chose art, with the result that one evening in the bar-spangled early 1980s I found myself in the restroom of a chicken sandwich joint, dressed in a New Wave rock n’ roll getup and helplessly retching over the single sink. Ah, I […]
I occupy a very particular demographic; balding older men who don’t know how awful they look in skinny jeans. We are many. It’s nearly an epidemic. A teary woman in the Vons’ parking lot shakily pointed her finger at me and used the word “plague,” which I thought was going a bit far. And for […]
2025?! Oh ha ha ha. If this is 2025, that makes this the distant future, and to be honest I never thought I’d make it here. As a kid I was lousy at math (no, I did not outgrow this lousiness), but I did glean a despairing sense of a universe statistically likely to do […]
Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept […]
“It wasn’t a mutiny. It was the bone-weary ship’s crew selecting – by voice vote – a new captain, one whose brusque nature and laudable transparency in speech gave them hope of precisely the rigorous captainhood the increasing stormy seas obliged. There were trifling misgivings. “The gentleman had been captain once before and had acquitted […]
Often I think my poor oldheartHas given up for goodAnd then I see a brave new face,I glimpse some new neighborhood..– Mancini/Mercer And here we are again. Another …. New Year?! This is a reportedly cyclical occurrence, begat by an explosion that, for reasons I’ve stopped trying to grasp, gave birth to both Time itself […]
Christmas day of ‘68 began like most days; with a guy bellowing singsong prayers in the dark from a mosque somewhere just off base. The mounted lo-fi bullhorn gave the already mysterioso liturgy a surreal 1930s radio feel – think “Libyan Rudy Vallee” if that helps. If that doesn’t help, I get it. Though we’d […]
By 1973 I had a red Panasonic ball radio parked in the darkened little hutch that was built into the headboard of my bed, and was discovering both the inchoate power of music, and words like ‘inchoate’. I’d bought my first LP with my own money, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, played McCartneys’ RAM album till […]
Our friends were out of town and had graciously loaned us their home while ours was being bombed for termites—a species we’ve completely conquered in the Darwinian Race To the Top®, except for the poison-filled circus tents we’re occasionally obliged to flee with our belongings. On the third day the tent was removed and that night […]
