Kipp Hamilton

            On Sunday morning I published “My Tears Flood the Yangtze”, my translation of “J'ai pleuré le Yang-Tsé” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog and also posted the lyrics on Facebook. I tried to find an audio file online for his song “Hey Mister Zippo” but all I could find was an excerpt from the middle on Apple Music. I pieced together the rest of the song based on that and then I memorized the chorus. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Kramer electric guitar. 

            I weighed 87 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I planned on touching up the black squares I’d painted on my kitchen floor in front of the counter. I thought there might still be some black paint left in the can but it was all dried up. So I just put away all the painting stuff I’d used up until the end of the summer and threw away the painting garbage. My next project is to start sanding in the bathroom but there was no time today. If I start I want to get the ceiling done in one session. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back and didn’t need to wear my motorcycle jacket. I could have gone without the shirt that was under my hoody too. I was looking out for camera stores but there are no longer any on Yonge south of Bloor. Thirty years ago there were at least three around Yonge and Gerrard. I’ll have to start looking off my regular bike route. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            In the Movie Maker project for the song “Joanna Dancing (Electric)” I worked on synchronizing the Audacity audio with the video and got them within a second of each other. I should have them lined up tomorrow. 

            I searched for a Greta Garbo clip to correspond with the line, “that night I listened to your song” for the Movie Maker project for my song “Angeline”. I didn’t find anything this time but I think she did a movie called The Torrent in which she plays an opera singer. There might be something I can use there. I checked it later and I found one full version of the film without a watermark and it does show her pretending to sing in a silent film, so I’ll download that one. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episodes 25 and 26 of Bewitched. 

            In the first story Samantha and Darrin have a beautiful new next door neighbour named Pleasure O’Reilly. She’s a model with a lot of trophies for different parts of her body such as her lips and her legs. She is in hiding from her very jealous ex-boyfriend the star football player Thor “Thunderbolt” Swenson who has threatened to kill her. Thor forces the mover to reveal the neighbourhood where Pleasure moved but he doesn’t give him the exact address. When she finds out that Thor is on his way she wakes up Samantha and Darrin because her phone has yet to be installed. Samantha takes Pleasure back home while Darrin calls the police. When Thor knocks on Pleasure’s door Samantha answers and he thinks he’s got the wrong house. He asks if a beautiful girl lives next door and she says yes. He goes to bang on Samantha’s door but before Darrin answers she makes Darrin look like an elderly woman so Thor won’t punch him. Then Thor bangs on the door of the Kravitzes. Abner answers and Thor asks him, “Do you have Pleasure here?” When he responds, “Not very often but sometimes” Thor punches him, just before the cops arrest him. Pleasure’s court case against Thor gets so much public attention that the mayor hires Pleasure as Miss Urban Renewal for the city. Now it seems she and Thor are inseparable. 

            In the second story Darrin wants Samantha to learn to drive but he has a such a hard time trying to teach her that he signs her up for lessons instead. But all of the competent teachers at the Reliable Driving School are busy and so the boss has to send his nervous and very clumsy brother in law Harold Harold who is not even a very good driver let alone instructor. Samantha asks if he’d care to join her in a cup of coffee and he asks, “Do you think we can both fit?” When they are on the road Samantha is either too far to the left, the right or the middle. When the traffic cop puts up his hand to signal stop she thinks he is waving at her and waves back as she drives on. She drives into a moving van and turns around inside to drive back out frontwards. He tells her she is going the wrong way so she makes a U-turn but has to make a car disappear so she won’t hit it. Then she moves the car sideways to park in an impossible place. Then Samantha’s mother Endora starts appearing and disappearing in the back seat for not purpose it seems other than to drive Harold insane, and it works. He leaves and abandons the car. That causes him to get fired but Samantha insists to the owner of the school that she only wants instruction from Harold. It seems to help to cure his nervousness. 

            Harold was played by Paul Lynde who would later return as Samantha’s Uncle Arthur. 

            Pleasure was played by Kipp Hamilton, whose first film appearance was a supporting role in On Our Very Own in 1950. She won the title Miss Optometry in 1953. She was named a Deb Star of 1955. In her first major role she co-starred in Good Morning Miss Dove. She was also a singer, and had a nightclub act at Lou Black’s Living Room in Montreal. She was in a touring production of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for almost a year. In her last movie she appeared as a singer in the Japanese film The War of the Gargantuas in which she sang "The Words Get Stuck in My Throat" which was later covered by Devo. Her older brother married Carol Burnett.