Annette

            On Tuesday morning my B string broke during song practice but fortunately I had another and it didn’t take long to put it on.

I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I finished memorizing “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg and started working out the chords.

            Since I got my new birth certificate on Friday I planned that Tuesday I would take it to Service Canada to renew my Social Insurance card. Before going there though I decided to swing by Long and McQuade to buy three each of new B and E strings for my guitar.

            The Service Canada office at 559 College was very quiet and there was only one person ahead of me who only had a photocopy of her birth certificate and so she was told she needed some certification from an adult Canadian citizen with proper ID to vouch for her identity.

            I’d thought that since I had my birth certificate that it would be a cinch but I was told they have gotten a lot stricter and that I need to show my health card because it’s government identification with my picture. I was directed to a Service Ontario office nearby just down at 846 Dundas West. I hadn’t even known there was a Service Ontario office in the west end. There was a big line-up at Service Ontario. I did some close reading of the Rossetti sonnets for my Aesthetic and Decadent Movements course while I was waiting for at least twenty minutes. The west end Service Ontario office is decorated with license plates from all over Canada and even has the back of a vintage car on the wall. Since my health card is already still valid they have my photo on record. I had to fill out a form and was handed a paper to use in place of the card and was told I’d get the new one in four to six weeks. I guess I’ll get my Social Insurance card sometime before Christmas.

            When I got home I went to the deck to take in my bucket, my wash cloth and my undershirt that I’d put out to dry after washing my floor but they were gone. I saw my landlord down on the street and shouted to ask about my bucket. He said he had it with the garbage because it was broken. I can’t imagine how it could have gotten cracked at the bottom. I went downstairs to talk with him about it but he’d already driven away. I called him a few minutes later to ask about my washcloth and my shirt. He said he’d found them on the roof and so he thought they were garbage. I told that they had obviously been blown off the railing like the bucket by the wind but he couldn’t just throw my things away. He insisted that if it’s on the roof it’s garbage. I told him he needed to compensate me for throwing out my possessions but he seemed to think it was funny. Later I talked to my next-door neighbour Benji and he said he had been there when Raja picked up the shirt and the cloth and had told him they were mine but he threw them away nonetheless. I’m going to talk to Parkdale Legal about deducting the cost of a new washcloth and shirt from my rent.

            In the afternoon I did some exercises and listened to Amos and Andy. This story was the first of a two-part episode. Andy has pretended to his smart new girlfriend that he’s a successful businessman. It’s also tax time and so he asks for his girlfriend’s help doing his taxes. He figures that if he claims that he made $7000 to impress her and if she does his taxes he can just change it later to the $250 that he really made. He goes down to her place of work to pick up the paperwork but it turns out she works at the Internal Revenue office and after doing his taxes for him she filed them and so now he owes $1200.

            I did some more homework for Aesthetics and Decadence.

            I had a small potato, the rest of the squash, three pork ribs and some gravy for dinner while watching four episodes of Annette. These stories were fifteen-minute segments of the Mickey Mouse Club featuring a sixteen-year-old Annette Funicello as Annette McCloud who arrives out of the blue at her Aunt Lila and Uncle Archie’s house, which is run by their housekeeper Katie. Annette has lived on a Nebraska farm her whole life and Archie and Lila didn’t even know she existed. One weird set-up is that Archie and Lila are unmarried middle-aged brother and sister living together. Archie is a doctor of philosophy. They don’t know what to do with Annette and so Archie wants to send her to a boarding school but as she settles in that decision loses momentum. The first installment is actually an introduction to the first ten episodes told by Katie.

            In the second episode Annette meets a girl her age named Jet who delivers eggs and chickens to the McClouds. She’s a farm girl like Annette and they become friends right away but Jet is not part of the popular in-crowd in town.

            Annette had arrived with only one pretty but out of fashion dress and so in the third episode Lila takes Annette shopping. At the dress shop she meets Mrs. Abernathy, the mother of a popular girl named Val. Mrs. Abernathy invites Annette to her daughter’s party.

            The series was based on the young adult novel Margaret by Janette Sebring Lowrey, who also wrote The Pokey Little Puppy.

            For such short episodes the pace of the story development is very slow.

            This show had a surprising amount of familiar actors, considering how bad it was.

            Richard Deacon, who would later play Mel on the Dick Van Dyke show played Uncle Archie.

            Sylvia Field played Aunt Lila.

            Katie was played by Mary Wickes

            Mrs. Abernathy was played by Doreen Packer, who was the principal on Leave it to Beaver.

            Shelley Fabares played a girl named Moselle.

            Annette sure was beautiful!