About Alan O’Hashi, Whole Brain Thinker

I’ve been involved with community journalism since 1968 when I wrote for my junior school paper, the "Tumbleweed," through high school and college and then wrote for the "Wyoming State Journal." I put aside my newspaper pen and began Boulder Community Media in 2005. There wasn’t much community journalism opportunity, so I resurrected my writing career as a screenwriter. My first short screenplay, “Stardust”, won an award in the 2005 Denver Screenwriting Center contest. I've made a number of movies over the years. Filmmaking is time-consuming, labor and equipment intensive. I recently changed my workflow to first write a book and make a movie based on that content. - Electric Vehicle Anxiety and Advice - This is a memoir travelogue of three trips covering 2,600 EV miles around Wyoming (2022) - Beyond Heart Mountain - Winter Goose Publishers released my memoir in February (2022) - The Zen of Writing with Confidence and Imperfection - This is a book recounting how luck planed into my signing a book deal after a 15-minute pitch meeting. (2020) - True Stories of an Aging Baby Boomer - War stories about living in a cohousing and lessons others can learn when starting their communities (2021) - Beyond Sand Creek - About Arapaho tribal efforts to repatriate land in Colorado (PBS - TBA) - Beyond Heart Mountain - Based on my memoir about my childhood in Cheyenne facing overt and subtle racism toward the Japanese following World War II (PBS - 2021) - New Deal Artist Public Art Legacy - About artists who created work in Wyoming during the Great Depression (PBS - 2018) - Mahjong and the West - SAG indie feature which premiered at the semi-important Woodstock Film Festival (2014) Over the years, I’ve produced directed, filmed and/or edited several short movies, “Running Horses” (Runner Up – Wyoming Short Film Contest), “On the Trail: Jack Kerouac in Cheyenne” (Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival, Top 10 Wyoming Short Film Contest), “Gold Digger” (Boulder Asian Film Festival), “Adobo” (Boulder International Film Festival), “A Little Bit of Discipline” (Rosebud Film Series), and two feature length documentaries “Your Neighbor’s Child” (Wyoming PBS and Rocky Mountain PBS), and “Serotonin Rising” (American Film Market, Vail Film Festival). He also directed and produced the award winning stage play “Webster Street Blues” by my childhood friend Warren Kubota. Boulder Community Media is a non-profit production company dedicated to democratzing media in all their forms - large and small screens, printed page and stage by providing sustainable and community-based content. I mostly work with community-based media producers, organizations, and socially-responsible businesses to develop their content via – the written word, electronic and new media, the visual and performing arts in a culturally competent manner – I’m what’s commonly called a niche TV and movie producer. Along with all this is plying my forte’ – fund development through grant writing, sponsorship nurturing and event planning.

Baseball

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Alan O’Hashi, Whole Brain Thinker

It’s baseball season.

I mentioned before that the main reason I moved to Colorado back in 1993 was because of baseball. Living in Wyoming for the first 40 years of my life, I’d been to exactly two Major League Baseball games.

One was at Wrigley Field in Chicago and the second was at Yankee Stadium – both in the late 1980s. Reggie was traded to the Angels by then and Ryne Sandberg was still the Cubs’ second baseman.

My neighbor Henry is a big Giants fan. I’m a third generation Yankees fan.

The last time I’d been to a game was around my birthday during early May 2013 when the Yankees were in Denver. I went to all of the four – game stand.

Today’s game was very exciting. I’m not much of a Rockies fan but being with three hard core Giants fans was a lot of fun. Colorado has a rich baseball history, but not much of a baseball tradition among fans or would-be fans.

The game was tied at the end of the 9th and the first wave of Rockies faithful headed to the turnstiles. The game was still tied at the end of the 10th and the next wave of fans raced for the gates.

The stadium was pretty much empty.

Then the Giants loaded the bases in the top half of the 11th and light-hitting Hector Sanchez launches a grand slam home run into the center landscape to take a 12 – 8 lead going into the Rockies half of the 11th. Bearded Giants closer Sergio Romo had a little trouble in a non-save situation and gave up a couple runs and eventually retired the side preserving the 12 – 10 win and avoiding the sweep.

Baseball is a strange game because of all the statistics. For instance, did you know the Giants have a lineup with three Brandon’s – Brandon Hicks, Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford? Add in the Rockies Brandon Barnes and I believe this may be a Major League record for the number of Brandon’s in a game between two division rivals in April.

Did I mention that the Rockies don’t really have much baseball tradition?

I’ve been to a couple minor league Denver Bears games back in the early 1960s. By that time, the Bears were playing in the old Mile High Stadium and were the AAA affiliate for the New York Yankees. Growing up in the Rocky Mountain West, I was baseball starved, except for the Bears and playing Little League.

This was taken back in the early 1960s. I’m wearing the Yenkees cap hat given to me by my grandfather. I haven’t changed my wardrobe over the years.

My grandfather brought me a Yankees cap from one of his travels and my dad was a Yankees fan, so that would make me third generation.

My Little League team sold pancake breakfast tickets for a fund raiser and my Uncle George who along with my grandparents ran the Hiway Cafe on the South Greeley Highway.

He sold tickets on my behalf and one year and along with my teammates we all sold enough tickets to earn a trip to Denver to watch the Bears play which was a lot of fun.

I don’t remember any of the particulars of that game but was surprised when my dad came home with tickets to watch the Bears play the Yankees in an exhibition game later in the summer.

We went with a bunch of guys from my dad’s work, including Tony Rizzuto, who was related to former Yankees infielder Phil Rizzuto. We picked a guy I didn’t know who was an airman at Warren Air Force Base who was a big Yankees fan. I’m thinking the game was in 1963 or 64 because first baseman Moose Skowron was traded to the Dodgers by then and Joe Pepitone was the new first baseman

Our seats were in the right field bleachers. Roger Maris played a couple innings in right field and Mickey Mantle was in center. Bobby Richardson was at second, Tony Kubek at short and Clete Boyer was at third.

I think Yogi Berra was the manager and Ralph Houk was the general manager by then. Seems like Jake Gibbs got most of the catching duty that game, but Elston Howard and John Blanchard were still the main catchers.

Seeing that game is a highlight in my life experiences.

This is the 1961 Topps card with Bill Mazeroski rounding the bases after winning the 1960 World Series with a home run.

I started following baseball when we got a TV set in the early 1960s. I remember watching the World Series that year and the Yankees losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The image of Bill Mazeroski rounding the bases is still etched in my mind and to this day – remember? He hit the World Series – winning home run,

I’m still not much of a Pirates fan. Anyway, the following season was the friendly duel between Maris and Mantle in their quest to hit 61 home runs to surpass Babe Ruth’s record of 60.

Many a baseball game was played at the Triangle Park in the Cole Addition of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The playground equipment is in the middle of what was our infield.

During that summer of 1961 my school mates played pickup baseball games at the Triangle Park in the Cole Addition of Cheyenne. Sometimes we played only with two or three on each side, but I do know that Husty Twitchell belted out 61 home runs well before Maris!

Part of my rekindled addiction to baseball – baseball cards.

I dug out a bunch of my baseball cards from storage. It had been maybe 15 years since I’d browsed through my collections. Back in the late early 1990s I traded all of my bulk collection for a start on the challenge of certain Yankees teams.

I started with the 1961 and 62 teams that won back to back World Series Championships, 1953 Yankees, which is my birth year. The toughest are the 1932 Yankees which still have Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on the roster.

My final Yankees collection is the 1919 team. I was surprised to learn that George Halas – founder of the Chicago Bears and the NFL was on that team.

When I stopped paying attention to my hobby, I started collecting the 1919 Yankees – which was the year of the infamous White Sox cheating scandal.

The main reason I lost interest in the hobby was because of the glut or cards on the market and rise of the internet, which took all the challenge out of run-of-the mill collecting.I did fill out the few cards in the 1961 set I collected using ebay. When it gets down to the last few items of anything in a collection, you just want to be done with it, right?

Now that ebay has become better, I have found that ebay is really the only way I can fill out the 1919 collection since the cards and autographs are so scarce.

Back to baseball tradition.

I supported the Rockies from 1993 to 1998 and gave up my season tickets after the All Star game. That was quite the event for Denver and I’m glad I was able to experience it.

Compared to the Florida Marlins, a team that came into the league the same year as the Rockies, that franchise has enjoyed much more on-field success than the Rockies. The Marlins still have trouble filling the stadium seats, but have had better success on the field.

I took my dad to the first game at Coors Field on March 31, 1995. It was the replacement Rockies playing the replacement Yankees.

The few times I’ve been to Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park in Boston, the air is electric. The fans are dedicated. Not only are all the seats filled, but the bars and restaurants around the parks are filled, too.

The Rockies are on track to have another mediocre season, but team management is poised to make a lot of money from the casual Rockies fans.

There’s no doubt that the New York and Boston markets have way more baseball tradition and only time can develop that.

I’m not sure how that will work out here in Colorado since the starting point of team ownership seems to be more about making as much money as possible and getting by with an inconsistent team on the field.

Although Rockies GM Dan O’Dowd is looking like a fantasy baseball genius by getting rid of Dexter Fowler and replacing him with Charlie Blackmon in center field.

Speaking of center field, it used to be that the upper center field deck was often times empty because no tickets were sold there because attendance was so low.

The Rockies previously didn’t sell seats in the right – center upper deck. This season, there’s a new “LoDo dining experience” call the Rooftop Bar up there now.

This year, additional seats were added and a premium bar – restaurant experience was added called The Roof Top.

My party didn’t make it up that far today, but it looked like everyone was having a good time.

I hope I’m wrong and the Rockies have a great season and make it to the World Series, so at least those patrons in the Roof Top bar will have something to cheer about.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for an autograph of 1932 Yankees coach Jimmy Burke, if anyone happens to have one laying around.

Northern Arapaho, Jews, Japanese, Passover, Kugel and Me

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Alan O’Hashi, Whole Brain Thinker

Passover is happening this week and next and how that relates to the Northern Arapaho Tribe, Jews, Japanese, Kugel and me is a circuitous and non sequitur route.

When I first started traveling to Boulder back during the Rockies’ first baseball season in 1993, I befriended a lot of Jewish people. In fact, the reason I stayed in Colorado was because of baseball, having been Major League Baseball starved for most of my life.

I don’t know the attraction, but at the time I was working for the Northern Arapaho Tribe on the Wind River Indian Reservation in west central Wyoming. This is the Arapaho flag.

There was a nonprofit group in Boulder – now defunct – called the Next 500 Years (N500Y) that had as its mission the repatriation of tribal lands. Turned out that was a bit lofty, but creating a “cultural conduit” between the rez and Boulder seemed to be a bit more doable.

At that time, there were a lot of art galleries on the Pearl Street Mall and the idea was to convince the galleries to dedicate some space for Arapaho artists and artisans. The project started to get some legs but the organization went out of business for a variety of reasons, none of which will be mentioned here.

The tribal cultural conduit went away, but I remained. Most if not all of the N500Y crowd moved out of Boulder.

My N500Y Jewish pals took me along to quite a few Jewish events, including Passover seders in my early days in Boulder. Back then, Rabbi Firestone was just starting up her reformed synagogue in her home and in the homes of members.

Some of my new Jewish friends had fallen away from their roots and I was more of a safety valve as they checked out what the reform movement had to offer. That congregation has grown to point that it took over my former Methodist church on 19th Street in North Boulder which was “deconsecrated” and otherwise went out of business a couple years ago.

To refresh your memories from Sunday school / Hebrew school about Passover, here is a very truncated version of the origins of Passover.

The descendents of Joseph (of the “Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat” fame) eventually decided to stick in Egypt. The Hebrews take on the Egyptians, for some reason. That was a hopeless cause.

I think for revenge, the Pharaoh put out a decree to find and kill the first born children of Hebrew moms. Upon learning of this, baby Moses’s sister, Miriam, hides him in a basket in the shallow the bull rushes. The basket and infant Moses are fished out by the pharaoh’s daughter who brings him up as an Egyptian prince.

Prince Moses gets into trouble – what he does, I can’t remember, but he ends up stealing out of town. He eventually returns after getting the word from God to free his people from Pharaoh Ramses.

Moses makes a demand to the Pharaoh to “Let my people go” – Charlton Heston’s Moses and Yul Brenner as the Pharaoh are probably the most widely recognized in American pop culture.

Unless he does, Moses tells the pharaoh that there will be a bunch of consequences – 10 to be exact – perpetrated by his God in the forms of polluted water, various kinds of frogs clogging up the waterways, bugs eating the crops among other plagues.

What finally convinces the Pharaoh is, after the 10th quid pro quo, his first born child dies after the Angel of Death passes over, but spares the Hebrew households that have smeared lambs’ blood above their doors – ergo, The Passover.

The bummed-out Pharaoh sends the Hebrews packing. In their haste, they don’t have time to let their bread rise and thus the sympolic use of unleavened matzoh during Passover.

Things don’t get much better, since the Pharaoh and his troops go after them, but get swallowed up after the Red Sea parts. Moses and his people are out wandering around in the middle of nowhere searching for the “Promised Land” having faith that Moses knows where he’s going. There’s more, but you can read the book of Exodus as well as I can.

As for myself, being a gentile, I was accepted at the Jewish ritual events, including Hanukkah (not-so-ritual) and Passover (very ritual), but haven’t really participated much in recent years, although writing all this reminds me about that old joke about Japanese Jews.

These two guys are walking down the street and wonder whether there are any Japanese Jews. They finally decide to put their debate to rest and wander into a Sushi restaurant.

One guy asks the Sushi chef, “Excuse me, but my friend and I are having a debate and wondered if you could help settle it. Do you know of any Japanese Jews?”

Of course in Boulder, there are plenty of Jewish Buddhists. When I ran the Boulder Asian Film Festival, a documentary called “A Zen Life” screened at the Shambala Center about a Japanese scholar named D.T. Suzuki. He is credited for bringing Buddhism to the west back in the early part of the 20th century.

The sushi chef thinks for a moment and says, “I don’t know, let me go back and ask the owner, he’ll know.”

A few minutes later the sushi chef comes back out and says, “Oh, no Japanese Jews, but we have orange jews, tomato jews, grape jews, but no Japanese Jews.”

Pretty bad, but generally gets a laugh.

World War II Exodus

There is another historic link between Japanese and Jews.

My friend Chris Tashima did a short movie that won an Oscar for “Visas and Virtues” about Jews during the World War II diaspora fleeing Germany through Lithuania many heading for Shanghai in China which also was a safe haven. I suspect this is where Jewish women began their interest in Mahjong.

The Japanese Consulate Sempo Sugihara (Chris Tashima), risked bad repercussions for his actions there when he processed hundreds of documents of transit.

I’m working on screening “Visas and Virtues” at the Heart Mountain Japanese Internment Camp Interpretive Center by Powell, Wyoming in June.

What next?

My colleague Michael Conti asked if I could help him on a live video stream from the house of a “Boulder Rabbi” next week.

Turns out it’s Reb Zalman Schachter, who I’ve been following around since I moved to Boulder starting with my stint on the Boulder Human Relations Commission.

He wrote a book called “From Aging to Saging” which is how I first got to know about him. I gave my dad a copy of the book when he retired and was figuring out what he wanted to do.

Reb Zalman can’t make the trip to a conference himself, but will be there via the internet. I am quite honored to set up this remote which will be happening next week.

Where does that leave my story …

Kugel. There’s a microwave recipe for sweet noodle kugel I’ll whip up today.

Sweet Noodle Kugel

Ingredients

1/3 cup white sugar
1 (8 ounce) package egg noodles
2 apples – peeled, cored and finely chopped
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup cottage cheese
3 eggs

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup raisins
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
2 tablespoons butter

Directions

* Fill a large pot with lightly salted water and bring to a rolling boil over high heat. Once the water is boiling, stir in the egg noodles, and return to a boil. Cook the pasta uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the pasta has cooked through, but is still firm to the bite, about 5 minutes. Drain well in a colander set in the sink.
* Grease an 8-inch square microwave-safe glass baking dish. Beat the eggs together in a mixing bowl. Stir in the cooked noodles, white sugar, chopped apples, sour cream, cottage cheese, cinnamon, salt, and raisins; mix until combined. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish.
* Microwave on medium high (70% power) for 7 minutes.
* Combine the brown sugar and chopped walnuts in a bowl, and cut in the butter to form a crumbly topping. Sprinkle the topping over the pudding. Return the pudding to the microwave and cook on medium high (70% power) until the pudding is firm in the center, 7 to 9 minutes.

Shabbat Shalom!

My scooter / motorcycle carrier and Holy Week – Maundy Thursday

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Alan O’Hashi, Whole Brain Thinker

I’ve been sitting in front of a computer screen the past couple editing, it’s a bit tedious and monotonous – cut and paste, cut and paste, render files. The rendering is taking awhile and in the meantime, I’ve been posting some items for sale.

I’m trying to sell my scooter / motorcycle carrier with a 2 inch tongue on craigslist and ebay.

I still have my Aprillia scooter, I just don’t have a need to haul it around, like I thought I would. One of the images I posted reminded me that today is Maundy Thursday – as opposed to Monday Monday by the Mamas and the Papas.

It is cross-like.

The bike carrier reminded me that Thursday commemorates the two betrayals of Jesus by Judas and Peter before the Last Supper.” (Remember Father Guido Sarducci of Saturday Nigh Live? He claimed to have the dinner check from the the Last Supper – what a relic that would be!)

"When

To refresh your Sunday school lessons, this was the day when Jesus called his guys together for a going away dinner, the last supper – a passover seder. He gave them some pretty good advice with the hopes that they would hang together. He said they should “love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another”.

For the most part they did stick together, but It still baffles me why Judas and Peter turned on Jesus at the last minute. It really didn’t matter, because the cops would have eventually found him, anyway – bad news travels fast in an oral culture.

Judas was supposedly smitten by satan. When the super natural is involved, there’s really no explanation when, as Flip Wilson’s Geraldine said, “The devil made me do it.” Judas must have been a skeptic from the get-go and went along for the free food – loaves and fishes went a long way in those days.

"David

Peter was just being human, too, and I think he had bought into Jesus’s rap about helping the marginalized people in society since he continued on and was the first Pope. The question is, did Peter ever get over denying he even knew his main bud?

Peter denied he knew Jesus not once, but three times when queried by total strangers. Maybe someone can enlighten me about the significance of the rooster crowing after Peter’s denials – seems like Jesus may have predicted it, now that I think about it.

Peter’s actions weren’t quite as bad, but I’d say a natural reaction when you consider Jesus was a wanted man.

I wonder if I would have stood up for Jesus considering the possible consequences. Back then, when Jesus was still alive, the denial of knowing a criminal was more of a survival tactic. There were no Miranda rights.

These days, it’s more about professing faith about Jesus rising from the dead and all that eternal life stuff, which can be risky, but not as risky as the possibility of being convicted as a co-conspirator and hung on a cross.

Jesus wanted his guys to remember him by breaking bread that was representative of his body and washing it down with some wine which was to remind them of his blood.

I think it’s amazing that all this caught on and continues to grow – in some good ways and some bad ways – after all these centuries.

Anyone need their feet washed?

Views from Behind the Lens

Random thoughts of a random life-long do-gooder and storyteller

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