Don Knight

            On Wednesday morning my cold wasn’t any worse than the day before so maybe that’s a sign it’s tapering. 

            I worked out the chords for the chorus of “Amours des feintes” (Feinting Romance) by Serge Gainsbourg. I think the rest of the song just repeats the pattern of the first two verses and the chorus, but we’ll see. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the first of two sessions. Since my Kramer is in the shop I’ll have more time to become familiar with the Gibson. 

            I weighed 87 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I sanded the lower left corner of the southern wall in my bathroom and that completes all of the walls. All that’s left to sand are the bathroom door frame and the door. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry iced tea. 

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

            I weighed 86.9 kilos at 17:45. 

            I spent about an hour going through Richard Olafson’s layout of my book with a fine toothed comb and found four more errors. I think once those are corrected we’ll be done. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 8, episodes 3 and 4 of Bewitched. 

            In the first story Samantha and Darrin are still on vacation and are visiting Loch Ness in Scotland. Their host is Darrin’s cousin Robbie who owns a hotel there. He says business has been bad lately because the monster hasn’t made any appearances. The three are having a picnic on the beach when the monster pokes its head and long neck out of the water. Both Robbie and Darrin faint but Samantha addresses it as Bruce and tells it to get back in the water. She understands its roars and answers, “I don’t know where Serena is”. The next day the Baron Von Fuchs arrives with a mini-submarine officially to take photos of the monster. But the baron tells Samantha he plans to capture the monster dead or alive to earn the $3 million award from Boyd’s of London. This upsets Samantha because she knows that the monster is really a warlock named Bruce who is an old boyfriend of Serena. Serena thought he was behaving like a monster and so she turned him into one. Samantha summons Serena and they row out onto the lake so Serena can go below and find Bruce. She enters a hatch at the bottom of the lake and descends a ladder into Bruce’s bachelor pad. She changes him back to a warlock but then he tricks her and changes her into a mermaid in revenge for the 40 years he spent as a monster. Samantha and Darrin take Serena back to their hotel where Samantha summons Bruce. He says he’s not going to change Serena back but then they hear from Robbie that international TV crews are coming to film the monster. Samantha says Serena as a mermaid will be just as good and she’ll be a star. Serena says she might even take over Bruce’s pad. Bruce says he’d rather be a star in the lake than a loser as a warlock and so he changes her back so she can change him back to a monster. Later when the baron tries to capture him he eats the submarine and almost eats the baron. 

            Robbie was played by Don Knight, who was born in Britain and later studied to be a minister in Montreal. He was ordained in the United Church and even during his acting career he sometimes served as a pastor. In 1965 he moved to Hollywood and began acting. His first film was Munster Go Home. He co-starred in the TV series The Immortal. 

            In the second story Samantha and Darrin are now in Pisa, Italy. Esmerelda has been babysitting Tabitha and Adam but she is upset because one disaster has followed another after another. Tabitha was rude to her friend Dinah and Esmerelda told her she was making Dinah sore so suddenly there was a dinosaur in the house. The dinosaur set fire to the curtains and Esmerelda broke the vase throwing water at the fire. In trying to call Samantha she ends up transporting herself to Pisa, which is where she made one of her biggest blunders. Esmerelda is the one who caused the tower to lean while she was dating the architect who’d just finished building it. Then Esmerelda meets Darrin’s client Count Bracini who finds her very attractive and invites her on a tour of Pisa. Afterwards she regains her confidence and decides to correct her biggest goof. She straightens the leaning tower, which of course is a disaster for tourism. Esmerelda doesn’t remember how she made the tower lean in the first place and so Samantha takes her back in time to Bonano Pisano’s studio. Bonano expects her to bring him his lunch. A tower special with roast beef, Swiss cheese and turkey and he says to make the meat lean. So she casts a spell saying “One tower and make it lean” and suddenly the tower starts leaning. So now that they know what she did in the past she can do it in the present and correct her mistake. 

            Bonano was played by Robert Casper, who studied at the Goodman Theatre School and then worked on and off Broadway. He played Gerry Girard on Room 222.