Mimi Aguglia

            Friday was the warmest morning so far this summer and I had the fan on during song practice.

            There’s an old man with an old off-leash golden retriever who every morning gets a coffee at the Coffeetime and then crosses Queen to stand and drink it in the parking lot near the entrance to the Dollarama while his dog lies down a couple of meters away. He smokes a cigarette and then tosses the dregs of his coffee on the concrete before walking south through the parking lot with the dog following slowly about five meters behind. This morning the dog didn’t follow him because another dog had stopped to say hello. The old man was halfway across the lot when he realized his friend wasn’t following. He had to call impatiently a few times before the dog reluctantly and more slowly than usual headed after him.

            I started posting “Pour des haricots" on my translation blog. At first the text indicating the chords tends to show up enlarged and emboldened to the size of “H3” and so I have to go into the HTML and remove all the  "H3"s and the "/H3"s in pointy brackets. But after doing that the text disappeared. It was all still there in HTML and so I had to go back in and figure which bracketed signals were causing it to vanish. I deleted them but it took about fifteen minutes to find them all.

            I edited the second and third stanzas of my poem “Memo to the Heart of Insecurity”. The second began: “I can hear you there in surgery pruning the stems of your dreams / while in this lounge I wait with my reality bursting at the seams" but Albert Moritz wrote, “I don’t like ‘bursting at the seams'. It is dragged in for rhyme and the meaning of the common phrase ‘too full’ is not what you are trying to say”. It kind of is what I’m trying to say but I compromised: “I can hear you there in surgery pruning the stems of your dreams / while in this lounge I wait where my reality nearly bursts its seams".

            In part of the third stanza: "You’re both holding your ground / and retreating to a place your mind can’t be found" Albert suggested that I just add “where” after "place”. But that would throw off the rhythm and so I changed it to: “You’re both holding your ground / and retreating where your lonely mind can’t be found".

            I pulled my green bookshelf that’s near the living room entrance away from the wall and washed the floor behind and just in front of its normal position. About a third of the living room floor that’s viewable from where I usually sit or stand is clean now. But now the green bookshelf looks cruddy so I’ll have to wash that next.

            I had my last piece of chicken cold and some yogourt with honey for lunch.

            I took a siesta but still felt groggy when I got up.

            I did my afternoon exercises and took a bike ride to Dovercourt and Dundas, south to Queen and then home.

            It wasn’t until I got back in my building that the sweat started pouring from my face.

I worked on my poem “I Saw My Reflection in an Open Wound”. Of the opening stanza: “I am the still wet crimson mirror / that sits forever at the spiralling centre / of the open wound that is the rock and roll night / Another captive in a tangled cat’s cradle of light” Albert just wrote "Overdone?" I don't know but it made me rethink the logic of the verse. I changed it to: “I am the spilled fresh crimson mirror / that’s still forever at the spiral’s centre / in the open wound that is the rock and roll night / trying to weave a cat’s cradle out of dying light”.

            I thawed and grilled the pack of hot Italian sausages that I’d bought a couple of weeks ago. I had two with a potato, a sautéed zucchini and gravy while watching The Untouchables.

            A New York artichoke dealer named Terranova has thugs that shake down vegetables stores to force them to only his artichokes. The Cestari family are holding out and so the father is gunned down by Terranova’s henchman Yale. Terranova hadn’t wanted Cestari killed and he confronts Yale about it but Yale confidently declares himself Terranova’s partner now. Terra Nova goes to Chicago and hires hit man Felix Burke to kill Yale for $20,000. Felix makes Terranova sign a contract and after the killing uses the contract to blackmail him and get double. Terranova says he'll pay and invites Felix to a party at The Roman Gardens. But Terranova has hired five gunmen from Detroit to put on Halloween masks and rob the party with the ultimate goal of killing Felix. Felix escapes and I guess is gunned down by the Untouchables. The scene was so dark it was hard to tell. Eliot Ness finds the contract and arrests Terranova. We are told that he later committed suicide.

            Sophia Cestari was played by Argentina Brunetti, whose mother Mimi Aguglia was a famous actor as was her grandmother Giuseppina Aguglia who gave birth to Mimi onstage. 

Argentina played Mrs Martini in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. She wrote and acted in radio plays, wrote articles, books and music. She was the co-founder of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

            Mrs. Terranova was played by Meg Wyllie, who played the first Star Trek villain, the Talosian Keeper in the pilot episode.

            The real Ciro Terranova was born in Corleone, Sicily. His family came to New York in 1893 when he was five with his brothers Vincenzo and Nicolo. Their half brother Giuseppe Morello was already there. When they grew up they formed the Morello crime family and became the top gangsters of Italian Harlem. In 1916 when gambling racket gangster Joe Dimarco challenged the Morellos they joined forces with the Navy Street Gang to eliminate him. The hit job was given to Mike Fetto, who after a few failed attempts managed to kill DiMarco. In 1920 Joe the Boss Masseria had Vincent Morello killed. After that many of Ciro’s men switched sides to work for Masseria including Ciro’s half brother Peter. Ciro now ruled Upper Manhattan while Masseria was in charge of the Bronx. The robbery of the banquet at the Roman Gardens in 1929 may have been staged by Ciro in order to get back a contract he’d signed for the murders of Frankie Yale and Frankie Morrow. Ciro had only paid $5000 but after the hit he hadn’t paid the other $25,000 and so the hit men had threatened to turn to contract over to the police. During the Castellammarese gang war in 1931 Ciro started losing his nerve and power. He reportedly became poor and in 1938 died of a stroke.

            Frankie Yale was a Brooklyn gangster who first hired Al Capone as a bouncer and later sent him to Chicago. Yale’s worst enemies were rival Italian crime families. He was shot while driving on 44^th street and it was the first time a machine gun had been used in a New York hit.