Susan Watson

            On Monday I spent a lot of time catching up on my journal.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride.

            At Ossington and Bloor I saw Dennis from Bike Pirates. I assume he was working on a project at Site 3 coLaboratory, which is in that area and that he stepped out to take a smoke break. He told me to be safe because he’d almost got clipped three times while riding his bike on Bloor earlier that day.

            At a traffic light in Korea Town a young man crossing the street while looking at his smart phone tripped over my back wheel. After he apologized he continued across Bloor while still looking at his phone.

            Further down the road the only part of a dead pigeon that wasn’t squashed was its wing, which caught the wind and stood erect to sway back and forth as if it were waving goodbye.

            The only cyclist that got ahead of me was a skinny middle-aged guy with glasses on the Danforth. I passed him again shortly after that. I was approaching an intersection with a yellow light counting down and suddenly he rode up beside me, turned his head to me, smiled and called out, “We can make it!” We did, with two seconds to spare. After that I jumped ahead of him again and he must have turned off the Danforth because I didn’t see him any more.

            On the edge of a park west of Woodbine, a little boy that had been walking with his mother suddenly sat down to play in the grass. An elderly woman that was passing exclaimed, “Oh to be young again! Just plop down anywhere!”

            I rode to Warden and Danforth and then I took Warden north to Danforth Rd, turned right and then right again on Scotia, which immediately turned to Milne Avenue. I followed Milne east to where it curved north to Mack, which goes through an industrial area and at one curve looks like it’s going nowhere because there are just bushes and open space, but it took me to Birchmount. There are a lot of big spaces between streets in that section of Scarborough and the next street south of Mack along Birchmount was actually Danforth.

            When I got home I put the still partly frozen rack of ribs I’d bought a few days before into the oven. Two hours later I had five of them while watching two episodes of Dobie Gillis.

            The first story featured the second and final appearance of Mary Miller, this time as a fellow student of Dobie and Maynard named Emily. Maynard is using the music room for a place to sleep when Emily comes in an sits at the piano to sing Henry Sullivan and Harry Ruskin’s 1929 song "I May Be Wrong But I Think You're Wonderful". Suddenly Maynard wakes up and is inspired to become Emily's manager. Maynard trains her hard, finds her an agent, an arranger and even picks her clothes. The agent insists that Emily Klauper is not a good stage name and so they change it to Kitty Fontaine. Maynard also plays a cymbal with a brush while she sings. One night on the road Maynard is on his way to Kitty's dressing room when he overhears a big time manager trying to get her to ditch Maynard so they can make her a big star. Maynard only cares about Kitty’s success and so he pretends that he doesn’t care about her so she will move on. After that they are both miserable. Maynard smothers his sorrows by hanging around in bars and eating seven-decker sandwiches until he looks like he has a beach ball under his shirt. Finally Kitty can’t go on and so Maynard comes back to her.

            Mary Miller had quite a good voice, though she sang in a typical staccato style that a lot of female vocalists used in which they'd jump up an octave for one quick note like in "Stupid Cupid" by Connie Francis.

            The song “I May Be Wrong” was written for John Murray Anderson’s 1929 Broadway Review. The story goes that he believed that the best songs are written under pressure and so he locked Henry Sullivan in a room and refused to let him out until he'd come up with a killer song. "I May Be Wrong" was the result and it was the best song in the review.

            In the second story Dobie and Nancy Sue, the girl of his dreams fall in love with one another at first sight and he proposes to her after one day. She says she would accept his proposal immediately if not for the tradition in her family that the younger sister can’t get married before the older one. Her older sister is Dr. Imogene Burkhart, one of the professors at Dobie’s college. This has got to be the most inconsistent show I've ever watched. At the beginning of this fourth season Dr. Burkhart was portrayed as a beautiful married woman. They’ve jumped back and forth with these episodes, sometimes showing her as attractive and sometimes making her nerdy and plain, depending on which story they want to tell. Now suddenly she’s unmarried and never has been. In this story she's had the same nerdy accountant boyfriend for 14 years and he has never proposed. Dobie, his parents and Maynard set about to make Dr Burkhart over so her man will ask her to marry him. They make her gorgeous but it has no effect on him. Finally they arrange for a handsome man to pretend to make a play for her but when he sees her he doesn’t have to pretend. She dumps her boyfriend and decides to play the field. So does her sister.

            Nancy Sue was played by Susan Watson who did a lot of work on Broadway in musical theatre.