Julie Parrish

            Wednesday was quite a bit cooler than it has been lately. I didn’t have the fan on or open my door to let the breeze in from the back. I even had most of my windows shut from the late morning till mid-afternoon.

            When I took my bike ride at rush hour cycle traffic was crazy and there were an unusual number of those selfish riders that come up from the back of the queue at the traffic light and position themselves in front of the other cyclists on the line between the pedestrian lane and the intersection. 

            For the first time in a long time I didn’t even feel a twinge of a need to pee when I got to Woodbine, nor was the urge very strong as I climbed Pharmacy.

            I went up to Comstock, turned right and took it to Warden through a large industrial area of various companies.

            I went down Warden and stopped at the top of the hill looking down at Danforth Road. A middle-aged woman walked by and asked with a smile but without looking directly at me if I was waiting for the light. I laughed and said, “Yeah”.  She smiled some more and kept on walking while looking at her phone.

            When I got to the Starbucks on Danforth I still only felt a slight urge to pee but while locking my bike it suddenly became more urgent.

            Inside the coffee a shop was a skinny little bottle-blonde woman in her sixties with a gold handbag on her table. She was holding both of her hands palms down just off the table with her fingers slightly spread and tilted ten degrees upward. She’d obviously just polished her long nails a pearly golden hue and was waiting for them to dry. When I came back from the washroom she was still holding them that way.

            On my way down Yonge Street, just north of College my right pedal broke off and fell onto the road. I went back for it but it was too far-gone to fix. The metal spine of the pedal was still solidly attached. I thought that I might ride over to Bike Chain to see if it was still open and so I turned right on College. But as I rode I found that although it was slightly uncomfortable to pedal without the pedal, it still worked and only slowed me down a bit. I decided then to not bother with Bike Chain because I was confident that I could make it home without a problem and just go to Bike Pirates at noon the next day. I rode down Bay Street to Queen and then headed east.

            I stopped at Freshco to buy grapes, bananas, a loaf of chia bread and some yogourt.

            After I got home and put my stuff away I went back out to buy a can of beer. In the streetcar shelter was a clean-cut wheelchair-bound guy in his 20s drinking a big bottle of booze all by himself.

            I heated up two beef patties for dinner and had them with my beer while watching Dobie Gillis.

            Yvonne Craig, the future Batgirl, has played several characters on Dobie Gillis. In the first story she's back as Linda Sue, sort of a replacement for Tuesday Weld’s character of Thalia in being a girl who refuses to be with a boy that has no money because she’s the only one capable of supporting her family of losers. She even has the same catchphrase as Thalia: “Love doesn’t butter any parsnips”. Apparently this phrase is derived from “Fine words butter no parsnips” which goes back to England before the potato was discovered in the Americas and became an English staple. In those days parsnips and turnips were the main accompaniments for meat but they needed a lot of butter to make them palatable.

            So after 61 times of turning down Dobie’s marriage proposals because he isn’t wealthy nor does he have any attributes that would help him become rich, on the 62^nd time she says yes. Dobie wonders why she changed her mind and she explains that she has a younger sister named Amanda Jean who she has been training since she was small to be as money grubbing as she is. Now Amanda Jean has achieved a level of gold digging ability that makes her worthy of becoming the financial hope of the family so that Linda Sue can marry for love. But Dobie’s good fortune is short lived when his cousin Duncan and Amanda Jean meet and fall in love at first sight. Linda Sue can’t pass the torch to Amanda Jean if she’s gone soft. The only solution is if Duncan can be taught to be mean and rotten enough to become rich and so Linda Sue sets about training him. Duncan gets a job a rival grocery store and proceeds to connive to undermine his Uncle Herbert’s business. At the point where Herbert is about to declare bankruptcy, Dobie intervenes and says he doesn’t care if he loses Linda Sue, but he won’t allow his father to be destroyed. He forces Duncan to stop his enterprise. Linda Sue though declares that she is in love with Duncan because of his potential and so she will wait until he’s old enough and on his own so she can be with him. Amanda Jean also says she loves Dobie because he is good and kind. She’s too young for Dobie though so Dobie is once again stuck with Maynard.

            In the second story, Dobie wants to take US History because of a girl named Betsy Dolly Martha Trueblood who is obsessed with that subject because six of her ancestors landed on Plymouth Rock. For some reason Dr Burkhart is the professor of the course. She allows Dobie and Maynard to take an entrance exam to see if they have enough basic knowledge to be in her class. She leaves them alone in the classroom with the exam and her pet myna bird Binky. They know none of the answers but Dobie gets the idea that if they can delay the test and get a myna bird of their own they can teach it all the answers and bring it in to help them cheat of the exam. Maynard fakes an appendix attack and ends up in surgery till the doctor realizes that he’s already had his appendix out. They get a myna bird and teach it the answers but it flies away. Somehow Maynard begins acting like the bird and gives the answers in its voice but they are the wrong answers and they fail the exam.

            Betsy Dolly Martha Trueblood was played by Julie Parrish who was in the Elvis movie Paradise Hawaiian Style. I don’t think I ever saw the movie but the soundtrack for the film was the first Elvis record my sister ever had and I knew all the songs by heart. At the age of 40 Parrish went for a degree in Chemical Dependency Counselling and worked for nine years at a battered women’s shelter.