On Thursday morning I finished running through singing and playing “Ballad of a Dealer”, my translation of “Ballade de la chnoufe” by Boris Vian. I uploaded the song to my Christian’s Translations blog and began preparing it for publication.
I worked out the chords for the first verse of “Dessous mon pull” (Under My Sweater) by Serge Gainsbourg. All the other verses should have the same chords so tomorrow I’ll work them out for the chorus.
I weighed 89.8 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since March 4.
I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune most of the time.
I was a day behind in my journal again and worked on getting caught up.
I weighed 90.45 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back stopped at Freshco where I bought six bags of grapes but spent a lot of time picking through all of the grapes, removing the soft ones and putting the firmest ones from some bags into others. I also got a pack of raspberries, some bananas, a pack of pork souvlaki, a pack of honey garlic sausages, a big tin of Full City Dark coffee (I usually buy the smaller packs of the same brand because they seem to be fresher but the tin was $3 off with a Scene card so I thought I’d try it), shaving gel, Sensodyne toothpaste, and two-in-one shampoo-conditioner. I did a price match on the grapes with the real Canadian Superstore price of $3.95 a kilo but it took some time because my cashier Isabella got confused. They’re only supposed to price match on a limit of four items and I’d always thought it was just a count but it turns out that the computer does the counting of how many of the price match are weighed. So technically they can just pile up all the bags of grapes on the scale and the computer would read it as one item. She had to ask her supervisor if it was okay and she said it was fine to do that. Isabella said she’s scared of the people in charge. She weighed three bags and then another three.
I weighed 90.05 kilos at 18:50. March 7 was the last evening I pushed the scale that far.
In the morning I got a notice from YouTube that a video I’d uploaded on September 25, 2010 had been removed because it was hate speech. This was an audio of a poem by and recited by the late William Baker called “Requiem for a Queer” that was recorded during my first 20,000 Poets Under the League poetry slam in July of 1996. They said that I could appeal and I did but there was no comment window for me to explain why it wasn’t hate speech. When I got home there was an email telling me that the review confirmed that it was hate speech. It’s bizarre that a poem by a gay man that sheds a light on violent hatred towards queers would be considered hate speech. Here is the poem:
Requiem for a Queer
It’s a saxophone blues night
The skies relieve themselves
into
the steambath of the day
Grimy streetlights encourage shadows
and down the block Stiletto Heels
click signature on the nightsweat of the streets
There are no neighbours in this neighbourhood
Just ethnic rivalries
that stretch
across the alleyways like
Monday clotheslines
Squalid stairwells filled with smells of drying piss
lead up into the emptiness of overcrowded rooms
Stiletto Hells now stops to pose
and light a cigarette
Windows gape
encrusted with despair
and radios ricochet invasively
The alley walls serve well the spraypaint generation
“Suck” this
“Fuck” that
“Mary gives great head”
“Fags should die”
Stiletto heels moves on with flair
and from a darkened doorway
the orange glow from deeply sucked in heady smoke
invites Stiletto Heels to hesitate
A shadowed arm springs out and grabs his neck
A startled cry escapes
cut short by a single bullet to the head
Stiletto slowly slips off toppled heels
a rag-doll folding in the gutter
as up above
a radio signing off plays
“God Save the Queen”
William Baker, May, 1996
I was still behind on my journal at suppertime.
I roasted two pork tenderloins and had half of one with a potato and gravy while watching season 4, episode 5 of The Carol Burnett Show.
During the audience warmup someone asks Carol what the most embarrassing question she’s been asked. She says, “Whether or not I’ve had a sex change”.
A guy asked how long she’s had a driver’s license. She says it’s been about five years because she never got one until she came out to LA. She wonders why he asked and he says, “I’ve seen you drive”.
She introduces a couple of people in the audience: Jim Bailey, who she said she saw in Vegas and who was absolutely brilliant. She said he’ll knock everybody out when he’s a guest on her show. She doesn’t mention that he’s a female impersonator.
The other person is Jackie Joseph who she says hosts a show in LA and is nuts and a hoot. I remembers her from Little Shop of Horrors. She was also the wife of Ken Berry at that time.
The first skit features the Old Folks Burt and Molly played by Harvey and Carol. They are on vacation in Florida. Argue at first and then sing a song together, this time, “My Best Beau” but it doesn’t sound like the one by Jerry Herman from Mame.
Ken Berry sings and tap dances to “Mr. Bojangles”, by Jerry Jeff Walker but he literally whitewashed the song as he plays out the lyrics as if he was the famous black dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson, right down to dancing with a child made up to look like a young Shirley Temple who he famously danced with. The version Berry does leaves out the references to meeting Bojangles in jail and him dancing across the cell. They also wrote a couple of extra verses just for this performance. I didn’t realize until looking it up that the person Jerry Jeff met in jail was not Bill Robinson but a white guy who named himself after him.
The second skit features Carol as hyper efficient legal secretary Miss Farnham who serves faithfully and is probably in love with the lawyer Mr. Bradley, played by Harvey. He insists that she take a two week vacation because she hasn’t had one in eleven years. She interviews some temporary replacements but they are too good looking so she tells one she’s too short and the other she’s too tall. Then a woman named Myra Blitzer with thick glasses and wearing a lot of very conservative and modest clothing comes in (played by Nanette Fabray) and since she doesn’t look like competition she hires her right away. Then Myra takes off her hat, her glasses, her coat, and her long skirt to reveal a mini skirt underneath and she turns out to be dangerously hot. But Miss Farnham doesn’t notice before Mr. Bradley does and he’s very happy with the choice. Farnham tries to push Myra out the window but misses and falls.
Carol shares some artwork from the students of a local Grade 1 class who were asked, “Who is Carol Burnett?” Samples are: “Carol Burnett is a teenager with harder math papers”; Carol Burnett is a dentist who brushes your teeth”; “Carol Burnett is a skinny movie star”; “Carol Burnett is a Negro who plays Julia”; “Carol Burnett is a thin, happy nurse”; “Carol Burnett is a fat nurse and mother”; and “Carol Burnett is on TV and she is young and pretty”.
Carol sings a song about nice people still being around.
In the next skit Carol plays a flight attendant, Lyle Waggoner plays the hot pilot, Ken Berry plays a priest, Nanette Fabray plays a painted lady, Harvey Korman plays a brilliant brain surgeon turned drunk, and Vickie Lawrence and Don Crichton as the constantly necking honeymooners. Madame Nanette was a successful businesswoman at the age of 12. The priest is reading the Good Book, which is a biography of Danny Thomas. The plane is flying backwards and sometimes upside down in a storm. The flight attendant tells the captain to avoid turbulence because she’s pregnant. The pilot, the co-pilot, and the navigator all say, “Oh no!” at once. Nanette asks Carol that if anything happens to her look up the kid she sent though military school who’s now a general at the Pentagon. He never knew she was his mother. She gives Carol an envelope to give him containing $640,000 (which would be like more than $5 million now). Tell him she was a checkout girl at a supermarket. The co-pilot points out to the captain that #2 engine is on fire. He says, “Good. Maybe it’ll melt the ice on the wing”. They’re flying at sea level but the captain is able to get them up to 5 centimeters. Carol tells the priest she’s pregnant and he marries her to the flight crew. Suddenly all the engines are working and the doctor’s hands have stopped shaking. Carol asks the honeymooners if they are happy. Vickie stops kissing to say, “I certainly am! Aren’t you George?” He says, “George? My name is Stanley!” She suddenly exclaims, “I’m on the wrong plane!” and leaves.
In the final song and dance skit it’s the end of the US Civil War. Carol and Nanette are two southern belle sisters arguing over which of them the Colonel is coming home to. The Colonel asks Carol to marry him. Nanette is very upset but Carol says Nanette's been teched in the head ever since Grant took Richmond instead of her. They dance and have a tug of war with the Colonel. He decides he’s not going to marry either of them because he’s a coward.
Jim Bailey started performing as a young teen on The Children’s Hour. He studied opera at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music. His Broadway debut was in Fly Blackbird in 1962. In 1964 he started mimicking famous female celebrities both visually and with his voice. Judy Garland and Phyllis Diller loved his impersonations of them and became friends and mentors. After his performance on the Ed Sullivan Show he became internationally famous. He brought female impersonation into the mainstream. He performed for the queen in 1973 and for the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1992. He appeared six times on The Tonight Show. He appeared at Carnegie Hall 9 times and the London Palladium 17 times. One of his Carnegie performances was recorded and became a hit record. Performing as Judy Garland he and Liza Minelli recreated in Las Vegas the famous Judy and Liza concert.





















