Susan Kohner

            On Monday morning I shot the fifth video of the first half hour of my daily song practice. I’m still making mistakes on most of the songs but there might have been one or two songs worth keeping.

            Around midday I washed the second quarter of the area under my kitchen table. Now someone would have to be in my door and halfway down the hall to see where the floor is dirty. I should have about half the kitchen floor done in two weeks but it might take the rest of the summer to finish the whole thing.

            I had tuna and salsa with chips for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy has decided to stop dating attractive women and settle for someone comfortable. He begins dating Jane “Cuddles" Winslow, who is a very big woman. As they are leaving a dance together someone makes a crack about her being an elephant. She insists that Andy confront the man but the guy is bigger than him and he backs down. Cuddles decides that Andy is a coward and says she doesn’t want to see him anymore. Andy begins working out at a gym and becomes a muscleman. Then when he goes out with Cuddles someone whistles and she asks him to go and tell the person to stop. But it turns out that it is an attractive woman who was whistling at Andy and so he tells Cuddles to get lost.

Cuddles was played by Ruby Dandridge, who worked on Amos and Andy in the early years playing Sadie Blake and Harriet Crawford. She played Sally in the movie “Hole in the Head”. She was the mother of Dorothy Dandridge, who was the first black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.

I uploaded and watched the video that I’d shot this morning. I think that a couple of the songs turned out okay but I think visually I was too far toward the right side of the frame. I’ll stand more to my right next time so I’ll be more centred.

I scanned a set of negatives of my daughter from the summer of 1993. I won’t be able to post most of them because she is naked but there are some of her in a diaper and playing down at Kew Park in the Beaches. Some of the negs were bent and hard to get through the scanner. I had to cut the corners off of a few of them just to get them in. For a lot of my negatives digitizing them is the only thing that will preserve the images because they are deteriorating. That set of negatives put a strong chemical smell on my hands that I had to wash off before dinner.

For dinner I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy while watching “The Flight", which is the ninth episode of the 1957-1958 Alfred Hitchcock produced TV series, “Suspicion". My download was only at 22% and so it jumped through the story too fast to make sense. I found a commercial free version on YouTube and watched it.

Bartolo, the publisher of a Spanish newspaper in New York City is abducted, drugged and taken to a small airport. These men with Spanish accents fool a pilot named Gordon into believing that Bartolo is ill and wants to be taken to Bermuda to recuperate. The pay they are offering is handsome and so Gordon agrees to take them there, but after take-off they tell him Bartolo has changed his mind and wants to go to Tampa. Once in Tampa they say they Bartolo now wants to go home to Puerto Columbo (a fictional island nation in South America). They instruct Gordon to land in a remote area but where he lands there is no place to refuel. As they are preparing to remove Bartolo from the plane, for a moment Gordon and the Bartolo are alone. Bartolo regains consciousness and gives Gordon a ring. He is asking him to send a message back to the United States when Gordon is hit over the head. Two weeks later Gordon seems to be living a contented life in Puerto Columbo. He is under a type of arrest but they let him work for them as a pilot, and they pay him well but never give him enough fuel to leave the island. He is getting Spanish lessons from an attractive woman named Gina who plays piano in the bar of the hotel where he lives. The two are moving towards romance but when Gordon shows Gina the ring that Bartolo gave him she becomes much more aggressive in initiating a relationship and kisses him. She says that her uncle had a ring like that but he disappeared. Gordon is not sure he can trust her and so he tells her that his father gave him the ring. In the bar Gordon meets Hayes who used to be a newspaperman in the States but now works as a propagandist for the Puerto Columbian government. He shows Gordon a newspaper article about how Bartolo escaped from Puerto Columbo because he opposed the dictatorship. Gordon confronts his employers about having killed Bartolo but they take Gordon to the sanitarium where Bartolo is being held. Bartolo seems to have been brainwashed and he tells Gordon that he is happy there. But when Gordon lights a match Bartolo flinches in terror and puts his bandaged fingers to his face. After returning from the sanitarium Gordon is knocked out and taken into a car to headquarters of the country’s resistance. Gordon does not seem upset at all about being conked on the head and just tells them that he’d been looking for them all along. One of them is Gina who is upset with him because he worked for the government. She warms up to him after he tells them his plan for rescuing Bartolo. Around that time, Hayes coincidentally decides to join the resistance and he and Gordon stage Bartolo’s escape by convincing the government that it would be good propaganda to have a photo of Bartolo and Gordon together.  They take out the guards and escape with Bartolo. Gina and the resistance get away on a boat while Gordon and Hayes take Bartolo to the airport. Hayes dies covering their take-off. I don’t understand why they didn’t all just get on the boat.

The story was lame and unrealistic. It was written by Gene L Coon, who is best remembered as a major writer and show runner of the original Star Trek series. He created the Klingons, The United Federation of Planets, Starfleet, the bickering between Spock and Bones and the concept of the prime directive. The whole idea of Star Trek being “Wagon Train in space” came from Coons, who had written many of the Wagon Train scripts.

Gina was played by Susan Kohner, who was nominated for a best supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Imitation of Life and won a Golden Globe for the part. She is the daughter of Lupita Tovar. She retired from acting in 1964.