Antique

            On Friday morning I shot the sixteenth video recording of my daily song practice and I think it went well. The few mistakes I made were at the beginning of songs and so I didn’t have to do anything twice. I might have even nailed one of my own songs.

            Around midday I used wood soap to wash the antique dresser in my bedroom. I still want to put some polish on it. I would love to renovate it, fix all the drawers and make it functional again but that would be very time consuming.

            I had tuna with salsa and potato chips for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. It was a similar story to ones they’d run before about Kingfish and Sapphire both finding an old love letter that Kingfish had written to her when they were courting. Neither of them recognize it and so Sapphire thinks that Kingfish is writing love letters to a young woman and Kingfish thinks she is getting love letters from a young man. Some of the jokes were funny. Kingfish calls his mother in law a "saggin old dragon". Sapphire tries to start acting younger to compete with the young woman she thinks Kingfish is writing to and since this is 1953, acting young involves dressing like a bobby sockser and using Hipster jive. She’s wearing a sloppy joe sweater, a skirt and bobby socks and a poodle haircut. She says, "Don’t ya dig me square? I'm cool as a mule and crazy as a daisy! The trouble with you is you ain't real joy! Get with it Jack! Bebop-a-rebop zazoo zazoo!” Kingfish asks where she go the crazy outfit and she responds, “Man, this ain’t crazy, it's gone! It’s so far gone it was never here! This is what all us Jills is wearin! And this is the new poodle cut all the slick chicks is featuring!" Andy says, "That might be a poodle cut but I think you got a little Mexican hairless in there.” Sapphire says, "I gotta be takin off. If I stand round with you weary cats I'm gonna flip!" As she leaves she's singing Hank Williams’s "Jambalaya". I hadn't known that was popular with bobby socksers but I guess it was a cross over hit.

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor and then down to Queen. The guy who lives in a tent at Queen and Bay was out in his blue underwear. He had a bucket of soapy water and he was using a brush broom to give the sidewalk around his home a good scrub.

            I cleared some space on my computer and uploaded the video that I’d shot that morning. There’s not much more space I can clear and so I might have to stop recording soon and start editing.

            It was again too hot to use the stove. I was going to have some cold chicken but the chicken looked like it needed to be cooked a little more and so instead I had a cold burger with barbecue sauce, potato chips, salsa. I had it with a beer while watching “The Way Up to Heaven", which is the twenty-ninth episode of the 1957-1958 Alfred Hitchcock produced series, “Suspicion”.

            In this story Esther is preparing to travel from New York to Paris to visit her daughter and to meet her two grandchildren for the first time. But her husband Eugene resents her wanting to leave the United States for even a holiday because he is against travelling to foreign countries and interacting with foreigners. Because of this he makes every effort to sabotage Esther's chances of catching her plane. The first time he takes some unprescribed pills and makes himself sick so that she will have to delay her departure. He takes advantage of the fact that Esther is a very nervous person, especially regarding time, and manipulates her by hiding things and then telling her she is forgetful. Before seeing her off at the airport he will stall by looking for things or saying that he forgot something. He also makes use of the fact that the elevator in their house has been malfunctioning and sometimes gets stuck between the second and third floors until someone pushes an outside button to start it going again. On the third or fourth try at making it to the airport on time, Eugene is stalling again. They are in the limousine and about to leave, with very little time for Esther to make the plane, when suddenly Eugene says that he forgot a little gift for her to take to give to his granddaughter. He goes back in the house but minutes pass and Esther goes to the door. She hears him calling from inside that the elevator is stuck but she goes back to the car and tells the driver to take her to the airport. She has a wonderful six weeks in Paris with her grandchildren and she had written to Eugene to ask for more time but he had not responded. That was not strange because he was very much like him. She returns to New York, finds letters piled up inside the door and wonders why Eugene hasn't picked up the mail. She sees that the elevator is stuck between the second and third floors and she calls a repairman. Then she calls the police. That last part seems odd since she hadn’t shown prior to this that she understood that Eugene had probably starved to death in the elevator. This teleplay was adapted from a story by Roald Dahl and from the synopsis I’ve read, in that version Esther does not call the police and the smell of Eugene’s rotting corpse has permeated the house. In a sense it’s a perfect murder but, as is the case with a lot of the bad people in Dahl’s stories, Eugene is made so unlikeable that the viewer does not care that he’s been killed.

            Esther was played by Marion Lorne, who is best known as the bumbling Aunt Clara on Bewitched. Aunt Clara was a collector of doorknobs and so was Lorne. Most of her career was spent in theatre and in particular, on Broadway and the London stage. She owned her own theatre in London called The Whitehall where she starred in plays written by her husband, Walter C Hackett, and none of them ran for less than 125 nights. She was sixty-eight when she made her film debut in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”.

            Eugene was played by Sebastian Cabot and he put in a good performance of a dislikeable character, but his British accent betrayed his character’s pro-US xenophobia.