On Monday morning I had a dream about a boy
in a barn that has just been told someone is going to come to kill him. He
takes a pitchfork for protection and holds it close to him as he lies down on
his side on the barn floor and goes to sleep. My thought while dreaming was
that he shouldn’t have gone to sleep.
It
was very quiet on the street during song practice. Hardly anyone came to the
donut shop downstairs and there were less trucks than even on a Sunday.
I
started formulating a thesis for my essay:
The child in
William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven” is the personification of nature. She
is a human portal created by the poet to show how humans can connect with the
natural world and thereby with unadulterated human nature.
I made cranberry
sauce in the afternoon. I boiled the berries with a cinnamon stick and added
brown sugar. I had it with a drumstick and some stuffing and a beer. The
dressing was horrible. I’ll never use corn chips to replace bread cubes in
stuffing again.
I watched an
episode of Perry Mason. In the story, a woman named Elaine is trying to move on
from a bad marriage to Harry. They’ve been apart for years and she has a fiancé
named Ross but he doesn’t know that she’s married to Harry. Harry is
blackmailing her that he will reveal her marital status if she doesn't give him
money. Mason is representing a hit and run victim who is in the hospital. He’s
placed an ad offering a reward for a witness to the hit and run. He receives an
envelope with a key and a note telling him that the licence number of the
guilty car can be found written in the back of an appointment book in a drawer
in Elaine Barton’s apartment. Mason goes there, knocks, and since there is no
response, he lets himself in, only to find Elaine asleep in bed. He leaves the
apartment and rings the buzzer. She wakes up and lets him in. She knows nothing
about the hit and run but she invites him to stay for coffee. While she’s in
the kitchen Mason finds the licence number in the book. Over coffee she tells
Mason that she needs a lawyer because she’s being blackmailed. For some reason
Mason thinks she’s trying to pull the wool over his eyes and he leaves. The
licence is traced to a Mr Argyle and Mason goes to see him. Argyle has an alibi
for the time of the accident and so does his chauffeur but the chauffeur is
Elaine’s husband, Harry. Harry later goes to Argyle’s club to give the security
guard $100 to pay for the alibi. Argyle offers Mason’s injured client $2500 to
settle. He thinks he should talk to Mason first but then after $1000 more is
offered he signs the paper. Elaine calls Mason, asking him to come and see her.
He reluctantly agrees. He confronts her about the licence number in her book
but she knew nothing about it. She shows her the reason she called him. Harry
is dead in her bedroom with Elaine’s gun beside him. Mason calls the police.
When Tragg begins to question Elaine, Mason says he’s her attorney. Visiting
Elaine in jail, Mason finds out that the ring that she’d been forced to give
Harry was the engagement ring given to her by Ross. Ross is nowhere to be found
and Elaine thinks he’s on business in Canada. Mason learns that Ross’s partner
Sheila was supposed to have picked up some of Ross’s documents from her
apartment and so she had left a key under her mat. The documents were gone and
so she assumed Sheila had come for them but Mason reveals that the key was
mailed to him. Mason meets Sheila and
she also says that Ross is in Canada. In court it’s revealed that Ross had
hired a detective to watch Elaine and he’d found out that she was seeing Harry,
though not that he was Elaine’s husband. On the stand, Sheila says she never
picked up the documents from Elaine’s place because the key was not under the
mat. When he presses her about Ross’s whereabouts she becomes upset and cries
that she can’t go on. Court is recessed till the next day. Mason's detective
follows Sheila to a telegraph office and hears her say Ross’s address. Paul
goes to Ross's cabin in Orange County and sees through the window that all of
Sheila’s telegrams are piling up under Ross’s door. In court Sheila is still
upset and won’t disclose Ross’s address. Burger calls an Orange County sheriff
to the stand who reveals that Ross has been found dead from a bullet to the
head. Both Elaine and Sheila become upset. It’s also stated that Ross was
killed before Harry. The next day Sheila goes to see Argyle. She calmly tells
him she is going to kill him and pulls a gun. She says that she knows he killed
Ross on the very same date that he’d falsely framed himself for a hit and run
100 kilometres away. Argyle is the one who took the key to Elaine’s apartment
from Ross’s body and planted his licence number in her book. Ross must have
discovered that Argyle had stolen the $180,000 that is missing from his account
and so Argyle killed him and removed the documents from Elaine's apartment.
Argyle throws his drink in Sheila's face and grabs the gun from her. He's about
to pull the trigger when Mason, Tragg and his men walk in. Tragg says, “You
don’t think we’d be silly enough to load it!” It was a sting.
Elaine
was played by Kipp Hamilton, whose older brother married Carol Burnett.
Hamilton was also a singer, who was in the musical “How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying”. She also appeared as a singer in the Japanese film “The
War of the Gargantuas" in which she sang "The Words Get Stuck in My
Throat" which was later covered by Devo.
Sheila
was played by Virginia Gregg, who started out playing double bass for the
Pasadena symphony before becoming a radio actress and then moving on to film
and television. She was the voice of Mrs. Bates in Psycho.
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