October 22, 1995: I enjoyed another autumn Sunday with my daughter

Thirty years ago today

            I enjoyed another Sunday outdoors with my daughter.

Patricia Crest

            On Monday morning I memorized the fifth verse of “Au revoir mon enfance” (Goodbye My Childhood) by Boris Vian. There are four verses left to nail down. 

           I memorized the third verse of “À poil ou à plumes” (Naked or in Feathers) by Serge Gainsbourg and revised my translation. There are two verses left to learn. I revised my translation of all but the final verse but I have an idea how to finish the song. 

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around 13:00 I packed my laundry into my bike trailer and took it to the laundromat. I brought it home at around 15:00. 

            I weighed 89 kilos at 15:24. 

            I took a siesta at 16:00 and got up a little before 17:30. 

            I walked over to Queen Fresh market and bough three bags of red grapes. 

            There’s a woman living in the nearest bus shelter and she’s made it into a home. She’s got a lot of milk crates set up with the built in metal bench to support a little mattress and all of her things are very tidily arranged. 

            I weighed 89 kilos at 18:08, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since October 2. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:10.    

            I re-digitized the cassette tape of my recording session at what I think was Cherry Beach Studio on August 4, 1994. The copy I made last night had too many skips so I made sure I copied it a couple of times. 

            I finished my “I Love You. Neither Do U” Movie Maker project and published it. I started a “2024-10-09 Song Practice” project. I synchronized the audio with the video in part A but then deleted part A and so I left off for supper with the audio behind again. 

            I mixed the sauce from the herbed potatoes I made on Thanksgiving with the rest of my gravy. I had some with a potato and a slice of roast beef while watching episode 5 of Cain’s Hundred. 

            Cain goes to a club where sex workers are employed and picks up a girl at the bar. She takes him to an adjacent motel room where he locks the door and calls her by her real name of Millie. She tries to get away but he’s got the key. He tells her that her father has cancer and wants to take her back but he mainly wants her to testify against Frank Andreotis the man who is behind the prostitution ring that she’s caught in. She says they’ll kill him but he says they won’t because he’s federal. I wonder if that’s true. He grabs her arm to look at her track marks then gets her to tell the story of how she ended up there. She went to Chicago to try to get into modelling. She met a woman named Bunny who brought her there from Chicago and they got her hooked on heroin. She tries to leave with Cain but sees Bunny and says she can’t go. He tells her he’s at the Mirador Hotel. Bunny talks to Millie and says she knows Cain. When Cain goes back to his hotel room Frank is waiting for him. They know each other from when Cain was a lawyer for the mob. Frank hands him $100,000 but he refuses to take it. Frank threatens him but again Cain says the Syndicate won’t allow Frank to kill a Fed. Bunny contacts Cain and they meet. She talks about how they knew each other before. She tells him his contacting of Millie was very dangerous for her. She says she’ll bring Millie to him. Millie is put in a hospital for withdrawal under guard. Someone posing as an orderly gets in through the window and tries to kill her but the guard shoots him. Bunny is taken for a ride and her body is found on the beach. Cain has Frank’s innocent daughter picked up and brought to the hospital where he forces her to see Millie going through cold turkey. He tells her about her father and his sex ring of junkies but she doesn’t believe him at first. But when she realizes it’s true she goes home and starts wrecking all her expensive things. She scratches her father’s face. Frank contacts Cain and says he will confess to tax evasion, conspiracy and gambling. Anything but the prostitution rap but he wants Cain to tell his daughter that what he told her about him wasn’t true. Cain refuses and so Frank comes out firing his gun and is shot down by the feds.

            Millie was played by Patricia Crest, aka Linda Vargas, who was half Cherokee and half Irish. She worked as a model in Chicago. She was the Playboy Playmate of the month for December 1957. She went to Hollywood with very little training as an actor but was sure she was going to be a star. She approached Jerry Wald and walked out of his office with a movie contract and a part in the film The Best of Everything. She appeared in a few films and TV series but didn’t become a star. She died of a drug overdose on May 26, 1973.

October 21, 1995: My daughter and I went to the playground

Thirty years ago today

            Saturday was a cool day but my daughter and I might have still gone to the playground.

Phyllis Love

            On Sunday morning I memorized the second verse of “À poil ou à plumes” (Naked or in Feathers) by Serge Gainsbourg and revised some of my translation. There are three verses left to squeeze into my head. 

            I weighed 88.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I applied some more primer to the bathroom door. I painted the white tiles again of the checkerboard pattern on my kitchen floor in front of the counter. I was very careful this time to only step on the black tiles but before it was fully dry I absent mindedly stepped on one of the white tiles with my black socks. There’s still some primer left and maybe I’ll finish it on Friday. 

            I weighed 89.5 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the early afternoon in a long time. Hard to believe I ate a kilo for breakfast though. 

            I took a siesta from 14:30 to 16:00 and when I got up it was raining heavily. I decided to finish washing the large bookshelf that I hauled down from Brock and Bloor with my bike trailer a couple of weeks ago. When I have time I’m going to place it to the left of my computer and move the smaller shelf on top of the shelf that’s to the right of my kitchen table. 

            I weighed 88.4 kilos at 17:08. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:23. 

            I reviewed my digitization of the cassette of the February 6, 1995 Christian and the Lions concert at Lee’s Palace. The machine didn’t shut itself off after recording and so it recorded it twice by the time I stopped it. That worked out okay because it had skipped in a few places during the first recording. 

            I reviewed the next tape on the pile and it turned out to be a recording of the session Tom Smarda and I did in the recording studio in the east end for Rocco (Rocky) Capano on August 4, 1994. It was my first time in a professional recording studio. Rocco wanted me to sing a song he wrote but he only handed me a lyric sheet. So I just started making up the music as I sang while a session drummer and a session guitarist played along. I don’t remember if Tom played on that song but if he did it was just rhythm. Then I got to sing my song “Me and Gravity” with professionals backing me up. It was a fun session and I hadn’t remembered that I had a recording of it. The other side of the tape was a Christian and the Lions rehearsal, I assume it was in my living room on Wineva in the Beaches. I digitized the tape at least twice. 

            In my “2024-10-08 Song Practice” Movie Maker project reached the final take of “I Love You. Neither Do I”. I saved the project as “I Love You. Neither Do I” and isolated the song. I started separating the different voices with colour effects. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, the rest of the scalloped potatoes that I made on Thanksgiving, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a Creemore while watching episode 4 of Cain’s Hundred. 

            The mob owns a piece of a big produce market and it also owns the foreman Herbert Lorgan who is a bit of a bully. The merchants are forced to pay protection money. One of them is Vincent Orlatti. His daughter Cele works in the office and is having an affair with Herb. Vincent’s partner is Dave Michaels and he was on his way to talk with Nicholas Cain when he was jumped and beaten on the street and so now he won’t talk at all. The real boss is Lenny Bircher who lives a lavish life in the suburbs. He feels untouchable as Herb is not appointed by the Syndicate but elected by the Merchants Association. It turns out that Cele let it slip to Herb that Dave was going to see Cain. She didn’t know he would be beaten. Vincent tells Herb to stay away from his daughter. Later Cele tells her father she’s pregnant. She tells Herb and he asks her to come over to his office but he’s drunk. He says he’ll marry her but isn’t romantic about it. He keeps drinking and she leaves in anger. She decides to go and see Cain and says she’ll testify. She’s placed into protective custody at a certain hotel but Lenny learns the place and the room number and tells Herb to take care of (meaning kill) her. Herb picks her up but changes his mind. He almost runs over Lenny’s men and takes her back to protective custody. Herb goes back to the market, takes on Lenny’s thugs and challenges Lenny. He shouts to the merchants that he’s going to testify and encourages them to do it too. They are all cheering. Lenny is arrested. 

            Cele was played by Phyllis Love, who was friends in high school with Cloris Leachman. She studied at the Actors Studio in New York and her TV debut was in the Actors Studio TV series. Her film debut was in So Young So Bad in 1950. She co-starred in Friendly Persuasion and The Young Doctors. She had her greatest successes on Broadway, appearing in 8 shows. She starred in the original production of The Rose Tattoo. She changed her first name to Osanna after retiring from acting in the 70s.

            I uploaded Batgirl 26, edited from season 3, episode 26 of Batman, featuring only the scenes with Batgirl. This one wasn't blocked, which is good because it was the last one. 

October 20, 1995: I posed all day at OCA and then performed at Spit Friday

Thirty years ago today

           On Friday I posed from 8:30 to 15:30 in studio 353 of the Ontario College of Art. In the evening I performed on the Spit Fridays open stage in the back room of the Cameron.

Peter Mark Richman

            On Saturday morning I memorized the fourth verse of “Au revoir mon enfance” (Goodbye My Childhood) by Boris Vian. There are five verses left to learn. 

            I memorized the chorus of “À poil ou à plumes” (Naked or in Feathers) by Serge Gainsbourg. There are four verses left to nail down. 

            I weighed 87.25 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since last Saturday. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where I bought three bags of grapes, a pack of raspberries, bananas, a small tomato, two packs of five-year-old cheddar, a boneless New Zealand rib steak, some freezer bags, a jug of iced tea, a jug of orange juice, two containers of plain skyr, one container of berry skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. I did a price match on the grapes at $4.39 a kilo. 

            I weighed 88.3 kilos at 14:23. I had saltines with tomato slices, five-year-old cheddar and black olive paste with a glass of iced tea.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. It’s much more pleasant riding on Richmond on a Saturday without all the frantic traffic of rush hour cyclists jostling for position in the bike lane. 

            I weighed 88.55 kilos at 18:30. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:24. 

            I reviewed the cassette of the recording of the Christian and the Lions concert we did at Lee’s Palace on October 6, 1995. Barzin was our drummer and he used the kit that belonged to Brainbox. I started digitizing it but I had a hard time getting the tape converting machine to start recording as it kept turning itself off. 

            In my “2024-10-8 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I eliminated another audio take of “I Love You. Neither Do I" before supper. I don’t know if the next take is the final one but I’ll find out tomorrow. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, some of the sliced potatoes, chopped ham, and cheese from the herbed scallop potato casserole I made on Thanksgiving, plus five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 3 of Cain’s Hundred. 

            Edward Hoagley is a big time bootlegger and has been in business since prohibition. He owns several legitimate businesses that support the illegal one, such getting sugar from his candy factory; yeast from his bakeries; land for his stills from his real estate companies; transportation for his alcohol from his trucking companies; and the installation of the needed equipment by his construction companies. He’s a lone businessman with support from the syndicate. They don’t like that he’s not more imbedded with them but he’s too good at what he does. One of his employees gets a broken back from a fall and is promised insurance but they cause him damage by moving him out onto the highway where he is told to say he was hit by a car. Nicholas Cain is a former friend and lawyer of Hoagley but Hoagley is now part of Cain’s vendetta against the mob for killing his fiancé although he had nothing to do with it. Cain learns about the man with the broken back and that he’s an employee of one of Hoagley’s candy factories. The doctors say he’s lying about the car accident. Knowing that Cain is on his case Hoagley wants to shut down the business but the syndicate won’t allow it. A truck full of cans of 190 proof alcohol overturns and is abandoned. Cain investigates and determines the delivery point must be nearby. Cain finds a likely place and pretends he’s out of gas. While the watchman is getting him some, Cain ducks inside to see that it's Hoagley’s biggest booze factory. Hoagley happens to be there and sees him. He orders the stills shut down for now. Hoagley’s plant manager is his syndicate connection and he calls in an assassin named Charlie Chin just in case they need him. Cain runs into former governor Stapleton at his hotel and meets his 35 years younger wife Jenny who turns out to be an old girlfriend of Cain’s. Jenny reveals she brought the governor there so Cain could see him. She says the governor is Hoagley’s friend and so is she and she wanted Cain to see what happened to Hoagley’s friends. One of Hoagley’s henchmen is waiting outside Cain’s hotel room and escorts him to see Hoagley at a restaurant where he is the only customer. Hoagley offers Cain all the incriminating information he needs and he’ll put it in a safety deposit box to open at the appropriate time, but he doesn’t know when that time is yet. Cain is not interested. He accuses him of buying the governor but Hoagley says he likes that old man. Hoagley says he needs time so he can get something he’s always wanted. Hoagley goes to see the Stapletons in the big house he paid for and plays backgammon with the governor. Later Hoagley orders the stills back to work and says falsely that he’s made a deal with Cain. Hoagley goes to the governor and tells him he’s taking him to the Caribbean with him where they’ll be free of the syndicate. Jenny tells Cain and is surprised to hear he made no deal with Hoagley. Cain and the feds raid Hoagley’s main still. This is very much like a modern day untouchables with Cain playing the role of Eliot Ness. But it’s very unrealistic to have someone who has had a long career as a lawyer suddenly becoming a two fisted crime fighter and leading FBI raids. Hoagley lies to the syndicate that he paid Cain $185,000 and that Cain double crossed him. Jenny calls Cain and he goes to the house where Hoagley is getting ready to leave with the governor. She wants Cain to stop them but I don’t see why. Hoagley tells Cain he’s got everything he wanted but Cain says he still needs to bring him in. That doesn’t make sense either. What’s the point of putting the old man in prison when he’s given up his crimes? Chin the executioner arrives. Cain had thought he was gunning for Hoagley but he’s after him. His gun is pointed at Cain and Jenny as Hoagley and the governor walk away. Cain fights with Chin and his gun goes off, shooting through the window to hit and kill Hoagley. But before he dies he gives the $185,000 to the governor. 

            Nicholas Cain is played by Peter Mark Richman in a reprisal of playing the same character in the films The Murder Men and The Crimebusters. He graduated from college as a qualified pharmacist. He worked for a while in that field but his first love was theatre and he’d already made his stage debut. He studied under Lee Strasberg. His film debut was in Friendly Persuasion in 1956. He co-starred in Jason Takes Manhattan. He was the voice of The Phantom in the animated series Defenders of the Earth. He played Ralph Offenhouse in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone". He co-starred in Longstreet. He played C.C. Capwell on Santa Barbara. He played Chrissy’s father the Reverend Snow on Three’s Company. He was also a successful figurative expressionist painter.

October 19, 1995: I posed all day at a high school then rushed to work at the art college

Thirty years ago today

            On Thursday I posed from 9:00 to 15:20 at Northern Secondary School and then rushed down to the Ontario College of Art to pose for a Design class in room 206 from 16:00 to 19:00. My notes in my planner said “Light medium dark” but I don’t remember what it meant. Maybe it was a costume request.