Lesson 11: Learn English from this funny story

The speaker is a very famous comedian and movie director named Woody Allen. This animation is better than watching the real man speaking, because we can learn vocabulary from the pictures. See the text below with Teacher Joe's comments added.

I was the sensitive kid - poet. There were tough kids in my class. There was a kid in my class named Floyd. With a black, leather jacket... boots... zipper... acne and everything. Floyd used to sit in the dumb row in school - vegetable mentality. (So, Floyed thought like a vegetable - which means he wasn't very smart!)

I made friends with him years later, when we got older - I removed a thorn from his paw. (This comes from the famous story from Aesop, called "The Mouse and the Lion". A "paw" is the foot of an animal, so this is a funny way to say that Floyd is like an animal.)

Once, I was on my way for my violin lesson when I was a kid. I was one of those kids who "took". (When he says "took", it sounds like he is saying he "took drugs", but he is making "take lessons" sound like something that bad kids do.)

And I'm walking past the poolroom and Floyd and all his friends are out, you know they're swiping hub caps... from moving cars. ("Swipe" means to steal something. Some bad kids do take hub caps off the tires of cars, but never like Floyd! They take the hub caps from parked cars, not moving cars!)

Amazing! And I'm walking past and he yells out to me, "Hey Red". I was a cocky kid. I put down my violin. I go up to him, I said, "My name is not Red. If you want me, call me by my regular name. It's Master Haywood Allen." (Long pause...) I spent that winter in a wheelchair. A team of doctors labored to remove a violin! Lucky it wasn't a cello. (A cello is a very large, tall stringed instrument, perhaps three or four times bigger than a violin.)