I memorized the third verse of “Ophélie” (Ophelia) by Serge Gainsbourg. That’s more than half the song.
I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar for most of song practice but near the end my E string broke so I switched to the Kramer.
I weighed 84.55 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I finished sanding the widest part of the inside of the bathroom door frame. I sanded the bathroom side edges of the top and upper sides of the mid-part of the inside of the door frame. I won’t have time to work on this project again until Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I might be finished with the sanding or close on Thursday.
I weighed 84.55 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 84.7 kilos at 18:19.
I was caught up on my journal at 19:15.
In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Seven Shades of Blues” I cut all thirteen one second segments of my rainbow wave in half to speed up the animation. I then made and added another fourteen segments and cut each those to the same time as the others. The wave is a little longer than the synthesizer intro so I’ll shave all of the segments a little bit until they end when the guitar joins the intro. At that point I’ll add another, and hopefully more dramatic animation of a rainbow wave.
I had a potato with gravy and my last two chicken drumsticks while watching season 2, episodes 17 and 18 of Branded.
In the first story McCord finds a man and a woman who have been tied to stakes in the ground. The man is dead but he rescues the woman. They make camp and he is attacked by Les, the man who tied the man and woman up. McCord beats him and he claims that the woman belongs to him and so he and his two brothers taught her a lesson for running off with the other man. McCord ties Les to a tree and plans to take him to the sheriff in the nearest town. The woman is white and blonde but her name is White Fawn and she was raised by the Kiowa. Les and his brothers Jud and Clyde are Wolfers who trap wolves for a living. Ten days ago she was bathing near her village and the Wolfers kidnapped her. She says they brought her great shame and so the implication is that they raped her. Her blood brother Keelo tried to rescue her and they captured him and tied them both to the stakes. That night Les escapes and goes to his brothers. White Fawn wants to go back to her people and so McCord takes her toward the Kiowa. They rest in a cave when the Wolfers find them. They begin firing and McCord shoots Jud, who soon dies. That night when McCord sneaks to the stream to get water he is attacked by Clyde, who has a knife, while McCord is unarmed. In the struggle Clyde is killed with his own knife. Meanwhile Les has gone into the cave to get White Fawn. But she has McCord’s pistol and when Les tries to grab her she kills him. The next day when McCord steps out of the cave he is attacked by Kiowa. They are about to kill him when White Fawn intervenes and explains that McCord saved her. One of the men is Young Hawk, her intended. She follows her heart and goes with him.
White Fawn was played by Zeme North, who was a dancer from an early age but later also took up acting and singing. She joined the June Taylor dancers. Her TV debut was on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town in 1948, singing a duet with Sal Mineo. Her TV debut as an actor was in the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady. She went to Hollywood where in 1961 her first TV role was on 77 Sunset Strip. Her film debut was a supporting role in Zotz. She co-starred in the short lived sitcom The Double Life of Henry Phyfe.
In the second story McCord has come to work as an engineer for the Gold Nugget Mining Company but discovers that it is out of business. Needing work to tide him over he responds to a sign on the street asking for a body guard. He enters the hotel room and finds a long line of applicants. The job is to be a body guard for Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Booth’s butler Hannibal narrows down the prospects by rejecting anyone under 183 cm and under 30 years of age. Booth hires McCord and he travels through the west with him as he performs his one man show of Shakespeare recitations. In one town McCord is gang beaten by some men who hate both his legacy and that of Booth. Booth has Hannibal nurse McCord back to health and he also fires McCord not because he failed him but because Booth is trying to track down one particular body guard. The one who failed to protect Abraham Lincoln from his brother and thereby brought shame upon his family name. The man he’s looking for is John F. Parker, and he plans on killing him.
In the real story Parker had been released from duty by Lincoln until the end of the play. He went to a tavern and got drunk. He was charged with neglect of duty but the charge was dismissed and he was still employed as security at the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln always blamed him for the death of her husband. He was fired from the police force in 1868 for sleeping on duty.
Booth has Parker’s picture and he has been auditioning body guards to smoke him out. Finally he finds him. He takes him to a balcony box similar to the one Lincoln was shot in and reveals that he knows who he is. He points a gun at him but McCord arrives and tries to reason with him. He says Parker is a pathetic man and there would be no satisfaction in killing him and being hung for it. Booth gives in to McCord’s argument and lowers his weapon.
Edwin Booth is considered by many to have been the greatest US actor of the 19th Century. He later saved the life of Lincoln’s son Robert, not knowing who he was at the time. When he found out he had saved a child of Lincoln it relieved for him some of his shame over his brother’s actions.
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