{"id":6843,"date":"2011-05-19T16:04:19","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T20:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=6843"},"modified":"2011-05-19T15:39:39","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T19:39:39","slug":"denzel-washington-receives-honorary-penn-degree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=6843","title":{"rendered":"Denzel Washington Receives Honorary  Penn Degree"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>PHILADELPHIA &#8212; <strong>Denzel Washington<\/strong> confessed to a bit of stage fright in his latest role: Commencement speaker at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n<p>Addressing about 5,000 graduates at the Ivy League school in Philadelphia on Monday, the Oscar- and Tony-winning actor said the academic ceremony was &#8220;a little overwhelming and out of my comfort zone.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And that was his reason for accepting the invitation to speak, he said.<\/p>\n<p>The 56-year-old star of &#8220;Malcolm X&#8221; and &#8220;Philadelphia&#8221; delivered a humorous speech with a sobering truth: Failure is inevitable. Yet instead of having something to fall back on, he said, graduates should &#8220;fall forward&#8221; &#8212; learn from their mistakes and keep going.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Thomas Edison<\/strong> had countless failed experiments before succeeding with the light bulb, he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Do you have the guts to fail?&#8221; <strong>Washington<\/strong> said. &#8220;If you don&#8217;t fail, you&#8217;re not even trying.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PHILADELPHIA &#8212; Denzel Washington confessed to a bit of stage fright in his latest role: Commencement speaker at the University of Pennsylvania. Addressing about 5,000 graduates at the Ivy League school in Philadelphia on Monday, the Oscar- and Tony-winning actor said the academic ceremony was &#8220;a little overwhelming and out of my comfort zone.&#8221; And [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}