Nancy Kelly

            On Sunday morning I memorized verse eight of “Si ca peut te consoler" (If it’s any Consolation) by Serge Gainsbourg. I have one more verse to learn.

I worked on updating my journal.

I went on Twitter for the first time since I lost the Internet on Tuesday, so it took me all morning to get caught up on the main people that I follow.

I had a ham, cheese and cucumber sandwich for lunch.

In the afternoon I went out to line up to get into the liquor store. As soon as I took my book out to read it began to rain. It was about a ten minute wait to get inside where I bought a six-pack of Creemore.

I worked on my journal but Word started to freeze me out again and so I switched to Open Office. Open Office continues to be full of formatting glitches but we seemed to adjust to each other as I struggled with it.

I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story begins with Sapphire complaining about Kingfish's laziness. She says, "You spend every waking hour trying to avoid work! Night and day you are thinking new ways to gyp people! You spend thirty six hours a week shooting pool and you is always running all over town borrowing money from people!" Kingfish responds, "How can you call a man who is that busy 'lazy'?" That night Kingfish is visited by his conscience, who insists that he get a job. The next day Kingfish starts looking for work and he finds a job preparing and delivering cars to the docks to be shipped out of the country. He convinces Andy to apply with him. Andy is put in deliveries and Kingfish is working in the warehouse. Andy is told to deliver a sedan in lot 15 to a ship heading for South America. Later the boss brings his Cadillac into work and since Andy has moved the sedan out of lot 15, he parks his Cadillac there. But when Kingfish sees the Cadillac in lot 15 he thinks that Andy didn't do his job and so he takes it upon himself to deliver the Cadillac. Later when Kingfish realizes what happened he blames Andy. He tells Andy that he is always doing something stupid and so it was natural for him to expect him to have done so this time. Andy admits that by that logic it must be his fault. They go to the ship to try to get the Cadillac back but while they are on board the ship leaves the dock. They don't want to get caught as stowaways and so they hide. After the ship docks they jump overboard, prepared to spend the rest of their lives in South America. They discover that they are at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I had two strips of bacon, a fried egg and warmed up naan for dinner with a beer while watching the first episode of the 50s TV series “Suspicion”. I started downloading some of the shows from this series almost a year ago but only recently had the premier fully materialized. I waited until it had uploaded the same number of megabytes before watching it so I can delete it as soon as I’ve written about it.

This story was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Paul is a watch repairman who thinks that his wife Fran is cheating on him. He sees food in the refrigerator that neither of them eat and yet it gets eaten. Bottles of beer are being drunk even though she does not drink beer and he sees cigar remains in the ashtray. After the rain he sees the dry outline of a car that has been parked in front of his home, even though he takes the bus. Paul has decided that he is going to kill his wife and her lover. During his spare time at work he is constructing a time bomb using an alarm clock, electrical wires and explosive chemicals. He takes the bus past his home early one day just to be sure and sees the man’s old car parked in front of their house. He calculates that at 16:00 every day they are together in the house and he sets the timer on his device accordingly. Over the next couple of days he brings the parts of his bomb home to store in the basement. On the fateful day he comes home early and goes into the basement and sets up the time bomb, setting the alarm for 16:00. He then goes up the basement steps to the main floor where he is immediately grabbed by two young me who are in the process of robbing his house. They take him back down to the basement where they gag him and tie him up. The one doing the knots tells him that he just got out of the navy and there is no way he will ever get out of the ropes until someone finds him. The men finish robbing the house and leave Paul tied to a post, facing his alarm clock as it ticks toward the fateful hour. Above him he hears Fran come home from grocery shopping. He tries to make a noise to get her attention but he can’t moan loud enough through the gag. A few minutes later there is a knock and Paul hears the man that his wife has been seeing arrive. There are two hours left before the bomb goes off. At this point he is willing to forgive everything. He is older than she is and it’s understandable that she would want to take a lover. As he hears their conversation he learns that the man is Fran's brother. She has kept his visits a secret because he has just been released from prison and has been having a hard time shaking the stigma of being an ex-con. Paul again tries to get their attention and Fran thinks she hears something but Dave doesn’t and so they let it pass. Fran decides to call Paul at the shop but there is no answer and so she and Dave drive downtown to meet him. Meanwhile Paul sees that there is half an hour left. He hears the gasman come to read the meter but the basement door is locked. With fifteen minutes left a little boy retrieving his ball looks in the basement window and sees him. He tells his mother he sees a funny looking man but his mother pulls him away and tells him not to look into other people’s windows. This is a very suspenseful story. We see the second hand move towards the twelve at the end of the final hour. Everything fades to black and next we see police cars in front of the house and Paul bound with a straight jacket as Fran and Dave stand nearby. The bomb did not go off because the fuse blew in the basement earlier that day and so the part of the bomb that needed to be plugged in did not work.

Paul was played by E.G. Marshal who I saw on TV on various shows and movies throughout my childhood. He played a lawyer on the show The Defenders.  

            Fran was played by Nancy Kelly who had been an extremely successful child actor in Hollywood. He success continued in adulthood and she won a Tony award for her role in The Bad Seed and was nominated for an Oscar for the same part in the film version. She had the ability to do different voices and on the radio she sometimes played male characters. She was the sister of Jack Kelly, who was one of the stars of Maverick.