Stars Rarely Get Discovered Anymore

            For lunch I decided to thaw out the sausage that I’d gotten at the food bank. I put it into the oven until I could slice it, but it didn’t slice like any sausage that I’d encountered before. It seemed loose like ground meat but it was still partially frozen enough to make a few fragile slices. I put one of them back in the oven and turned up the heat. After fifteen minutes I was eating it and realized that this had been raw meat before I’d started cooking it. There were still raw parts in the center of the slice and so I put it back in the oven for a few more minutes. It was tasty and well-spiced meat but I could have used some warning about it having been raw.

            As I began my bike ride the sky was mostly overcast and a lot cooler than the day before but I was still comfortable in my summer clothes once I got moving. I passed every cyclist until Broadview and Danforth where a couple of guys that were ahead in the queue stayed ahead for a while after the light changed. I eventually managed to pass one of them but the other couldn’t be caught.

            I rode to Birchmount and Sadler and rode it the two blocks until it turned into Marta and curved north. I decided to just turn around and take Sadler back to Birchmount because Zenith, the next street north would take quite a bit longer to explore and I could save it for a day when I wouldn’t have to stop at the supermarket. I went down Birchmount to Danforth Rd and took that to Danforth Avenue. Westbound at that hour I find that sometimes I don’t see another cyclist until I’m back in Greektown.

            I stopped at Freshco and got some more grapes and peaches. Most of the hard peaches that I’d bought a few days ago went rotten because I miscalculated how long it would take for them to ripen. I noticed that they had Ontario pears, so the apples can’t be far behind.

            I pressed the spicy “sausage” into burgers and made sure they were cooked properly this time now that I knew they were raw. I had one for dinner while watching an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. One of the regular pictured characters in the opening credits, though he rarely plays a major role in the story and sometimes doesn’t appear at all, is Deputy Mayor of New York, Barry Lawrence. He’s presented as a relatively honest politician who also happens to be an asshole. He and Mike Hammer share a strong dislike for one another. In this story Lawrence is running for district attorney and one night he receives a call at campaign headquarters from his hot but unstable girlfriend, Tracy, demanding that he come to her right away or she would tell his wife about their affair. He leaves campaign headquarters and next we see Tracy backing away from someone just before she is killed. Tracy’s parents come to Hammer and ask him to prove that Barry Lawrence killed Tracy. Hammer says they don’t have to worry about money on this case because he would pay them to put Lawrence away. While investigating Tracy’s apartment Hammer found one fake fingernail. He checked to see if Tracy was missing any nails but she wasn’t. He found out that the nail belonged to Lawrence’s campaign manager of fifteen years, Lucille. She had been worried that Tracy would ruin all of her work as she built Hamilton up from deputy mayor to district attorney to mayor and beyond and so she’d killed her.

            Tracy was played by Alexandra Bokyun Chun and Lucille was played by Karen Moncrieff. Both of them are also writers and directors. This is something interesting that I’ve noticed from looking up the supporting actors in this 1997 series and comparing them to those from 50s shows. In the 50s and before, supporting actors were usually just actors, whereas now a lot of them are doing everything. Most actors now go into the business with a degree while in the 50s people were discovered. Really, it doesn’t seem that the acting graduates are any better at acting than the ones that were just plucked off the street or from a drug store like Lana Turner was while she was skipping her high school typing class. People that worked in theatre for a long time and then got into television and movies tend to be better actors than those with drama school experience.