Dorothy Hack

            On Wednesday morning I finished working out the chords for “Lost Song” by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through it in French and English. On Thursday I’ll check the translation one more time and then upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first day of four. It stayed perfectly in tune since the last time I played it.

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I rode up to the Bath and Tile Centre at Dundas and Sorauren to see if they have vinyl tiles but they don’t. They suggested I go to Merit at College and Shaw so I did. They didn’t have any in stock and were falling all over themselves looking for samples to show me. None of the samples they had were solid black but one was solid white. But I found out they only come in boxes of 45 and they are $7 a tile. So if I wanted both black and white tiles I would need to buy two boxes. Since I only need about twenty of each shade it would be ridiculous for me to pay over $600 just to tile that little area in front of my kitchen counter. I’m going to have to just keep my eyes out for tiles being thrown out. Or maybe I can glue some thin plywood down and paint it like a checkerboard.

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I’ve been at midday in eleven days. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I chiseled black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:30. I haven’t weighed that little in the evening in a week. I was caught up on my journal at 18:36. 

            In Movie Maker I finished editing the video of my August 5 performance of my song "Megaphor". I tried different balances of the interface audio and the camera audio. I found using the interface audio entirely sounds a bit canned but if I just add a little bit of the camera audio it sounds fine. I published the video but I’m not happy with the resolution, so I’m going to try it again at the highest. 

            I tried to search for video clips to correspond with my line, “It licks my face to test the flavour” from my song "Megaphor" but so far I haven’t found anything that I like. 

            I cut the strip of colour negatives that I scanned on Tuesday into strips of five frames each. I put them into a labeled envelope and filed them. I pulled another uncut strip from the wooden cabinet but decided not to clean it because it was almost time for dinner. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, a cut up slice of ham, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the series finale of Petticoat Junction. 

            In this story Steve is getting lots of work in his crop dusting business but is having trouble getting paid. The problem is that the people of the valley are all old friends of the Bradley family and he doesn’t want to be too pushy. Betty Joe decides to help out by opening up a day nursery at the Shady Rest. She doesn’t tell Steve because he disapproves of wives working. Bobbie Joe and Billie Joe help out but when Steve comes home early Bobbie hides the babies in a cabinet. The mothers come and are angry that their children have been put in a cabinet and so Betty loses their business. Steve is about to give Betty heck when suddenly Kathy Joe starts walking for the first time and Steve forgets all about Betty’s job. 

            One of the women on the party line gossiping about Betty Joe is played by Ann Urcan, who was a stand-in for June Lockhart and Cloris Leachman. 

            The other woman on the phone was played by Dorothy Hack who was a professional background actor. She appeared as simply “The Woman” on every episode of the sitcom Hudson Street. She also appeared as a Bajoran woman on several episodes of Deep Space Nine. Her first film appearances were as a baby in My Son My Son and in Invitation to Happiness. 

            The box set of Petticoat Junction episodes that I downloaded has some extras and one of them is a set of intros to the episodes of the first season by Linda Henning. In each one she gives an outline of the story and offers some of the stories behind the actors who appeared on the series. I watched the first ten of those and most of the information is stuff that I already researched. Linda Henning’s father Paul Henning created, produced, and wrote many of the episodes of Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres. He didn’t want his daughter on the show because he was afraid of being accused of nepotism but the star, Bea Benaderet convinced him. The Addams Family was shot on the same lot and so Linda used to like hanging out on that set because it was so weird.