Kitty Kelly

            I had to work early on Tuesday for Greg Damery at OCADU. He brought his 1959 Gibson acoustic in and asked if I wanted to play it. I said I would if it was in standard tuning. He changed the tuning back to standard. It’s a much bigger guitar than mine with a much fuller sound. I think I need a bigger guitar. He also slutted the guitar around to his students before class. I’ll bet he owns at least ten guitars. I think this one cost him over $1000 and it’s one of his cheaper ones.

            I posed with just my shirt off but he had me facing the wall. It’s actually a lot easier to get drowsy when looking at a wall than while watching students draw.

            On my way home along Queen I stopped at several places to see if they had sea sponges. The homemade guitar humidifier that I’ve been using for the last few winters is crumbling because the sponge I used as part of it is mostly made of cellulose. The heat was on in the morning for the first time this fall and so soon I’m going to need to take precautions again to keep my guitar from drying out. I stopped at a bed and bath place at Spadina and Queen but they had nothing like sponges. Further east was Shoppers Drug Mart but all they had was a luffa. The woman behind the encounter said Winners across the street would have sponges but they didn't. There was no place on the route home left to look but once I was back in Parkdale I suddenly got the idea to try Home Hardware. Sure enough they had sea sponges about the size of softballs for $7.11 after tax.

            That night I watched the last episode of Perry Mason from the first season. This one had some charm to it. In general, though the stories are interesting they are not engaging because there is no depth to them. The characters and their situations are created just to support a twist ending and so everyone feels artificial. Maybe don the road I’ll download the second season but for now I’m moving on to Peter Gunn.

            This story begins with a young woman named Donna trying to cash a cheque for $20,000. The teller is concerned and takes the cheque to the manager, who calls Willard, the nephew of the payer to ask about it. Willard's wife Arlene takes the phone and tells the manager not to cash the cheque. She says, “Tell her Daniel Reed’s as crazy as they come!” As she was speaking, Daniel walks in, takes the phone and says, “I don’t like the way you run your bank! I’m going to move my money elsewhere! You go ahead and cash that cheque!” Donna returns to a hotel room with the money. Two men are waiting for her, Maury Lewis and Dave Kemp. From the money Maury gives Dave $500. Dave is mad because he’d thought it would be a 50-50 split. Maury says, “I guess I can’t be trusted." Dave begins to go for his gun but Donna already has one pointed at him and he leaves. Donna and Maury kiss. Dave goes to tell Willard and Arlene that Daniel is being blackmailed, though he doesn't know why. Maury and Donna had hired him to find Daniel. Willard and Arlene have Daniel placed in a sanitarium.

            Daniel’s girlfriend Millie comes to Perry Mason to ask him to “spring Daniel from that coop”. She says the director of the sanitarium claims that Daniel has senile dementia evidenced by arcus senilis. Mason says they will get a petition for a writ of habeas corpus and present it to Judge Treadwell. In court, Treadwell is questioning Willard on the stand. Willard starts telling the judge about Daniel’s symptoms but Treadwell interrupts him and asks if he’s a doctor. Willard says he isn’t and the judge says, “Then let’s wait for the experts to testify.” Treadwell asks if Daniel wanted to go to the sanitarium. Willard says that he was in no condition to answer. “Was he conscious?” “Yes.” “Did he make any objections?” “Yes.” “How were these objections overcome?” “Two male nurses carried him in.” The lawyer opposing Mason tells the judge that Daniel is unable to come to court and that Dr. Norris will testify on that point. Dr. Norris claims that Daniel in his nervous state would be highly excited in court. Mason says, “A man of 71 is taken out for a drive by a trusted nephew and suddenly finds himself at a sanitarium where he is dragged out of the car by two male nurses and taken in hand. Yet you found him angry and incoherent. Wouldn’t that state of mind be perfectly natural?” Norris argues that it depends on the circumstances. Mason says, “If he hadn’t been angry you would have found him indifferent and diagnosed his condition as dementia praecox!” “You’re deliberately distorting my testimony!” “Now, now doctor, don’t you get angry! Mr. Reed did and you said he was senile!” Dr. Norris says there were other symptoms and brings up once again Daniel’s arcus senilis. Mason asks him to explain arcus senilis for the court. Norris says, “An arcus senilis appears as a crescent shaped ring in the outer periphery of the cornea.” Mason asks, “You mean like the ring in Judge Treadwell’s eye?” The doctor fumbles and says to the judge, “Arcus senilis is not in itself indicative of psychosis! It’s just a symptom!” The judge says, “In other words, if I kicked up a row when I was shanghaied you’d notice this thing in my eye and you’d have said I was senile!” The judge says that court will reconvene at the sanitarium to examine Daniel. When they come to the sanitarium the nurse tells Norris that Daniel has escaped. Daniel had asked for aspirin but when the attendant came Daniel hit him over the head with a sock holding a bar of soap. He switched uniforms with the attendant and locked him in the room. He told the receptionist he was the new laundry man and couldn’t find the service entrance. Mason says that no one can say that Daniel was incompetent in managing this escape. The judge agrees and grants the writ of habeas corpus.

            Next we see Daniel standing over the dead body of Maury Lewis. Daniel calls Millie to tell her to meet him. The papers the next day say Daniel is wanted for murder. Mason gets a call from Dave Kemp. Paul Drake tells Mason that Kemp used to be a private investigator but lost his licence. Kemp tells Mason that he should talk to Donna. Donna is drinking heavily and blames Mason for setting Daniel free so he could murder her boyfriend. Mason gets a call from Millie in Reno and she says Daniel is willing to talk. Mason goes to Reno and tells Daniel he’s a hard man to keep up with. “You should’ve seen me when I was sixty!” Daniel explains that Maury Lewis knew that he’d been a partner in a gold mine in Alaska thirty years before with Monty Sewel. They’d struck it rich but one night Monty tried to kill Daniel in his sleep. Daniel was a little faster and killed Monty. He buried his body in the snow and he and Millie left Alaska. Daniel used Sewel’s name and married Millie. She left him because he wouldn’t go to the police and they didn’t see each other for thirty years. Maury bought the shack where he’d killed Monty. He found the body and figured out what happened. Tragg walks in and arrests Reed. Mason is trying to figure out how Tragg knows his every move lately and starts to suspect that his office is bugged. Mason calls Della and makes up a story that Monty Sewel and Maury Lewis were the same person in order to throw off whoever is listening in. The problem is that the next day it is discovered that they really were the same person. Mason goes to see Daniel in jail and he explains that he really had thought he’d killed Monty. He says, “I know it’s complicated”. Mason says that their only hope is to make it even more complicated. In court Mason accuses Willard of killing Monty so that Daniel would be accused of the murder. That way he would get Daniel’s money. Willard admits it and explains that he just wanted to be free of the influence of Arlene.

            After the trial Mason, Della and Paul are trying to find the bug in mason’s office. Tragg walks in and unscrews the speaker on Mason’s office telephone, to show that a listening device had been installed there. He says he and Burger had no idea that the place was bugged. He only found out twenty minutes ago that Dave Kemp had broken in and bugged the phone. Kemp had been feeding information to an eager beaver in Tragg’s department who’d just seen Kemp as a stoolie. Mason says that it had been Millie that had shot Monty in Alaska thirty years before.

            Donna was played by Joan Camden.

            Arlene was played by Mary Anderson. She was one of the stars of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” and she also played a supporting part in “Gone With the Wind”. She had a unique beauty and she also seemed to talk with a lisp. 

            Millie was played by Kitty Kelly who was one of the Ziegfeld Follies dancers.

            It seems that HBO is planning a Perry mason reboot starring Robert Downey Jr.