July 25, 1996: Brian and I rehearsed "Portrait of My Quicksilver Headdress"

Thirty years ago today

            On Thursday Brian Haddon and I rehearsed for my feature at the Art Bar reading series in three weeks. We were working out a performance of my long musical poem “Portrait of My Quicksilver Headdress”.

July 24, 1996: Brian and I busked on Bloor

Thirty years ago today

            On Wednesday Brian Haddon and I busked on Bloor and had lunch and beer together. Later I performed on the Art Bar reading series open stage.

Riki Lindhome

            On Wednesday morning I finished revising my translation of “La complainte de Bonnot” by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it, then upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publishing. 

            I organized about half the text of “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg and separated the two voices. On Thursday I should have that finished and I’ll start memorizing the song. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the second of two sessions and it went out of tune all the time as usual. I shortened a lot of the songs so I could finish in time to brush my teeth and leave at noon for my first appointment with my new periodontist Dr. Lambert. 

            I got there at 12:45 and didn’t even have time to open my book before Serena the assistant called me. When I first started getting treated at the U of T School of Dentistry, Dr. Xia has been in charge of my case, but he graduated. It felt weird to be suddenly assigned a new periodontist and to fortify my confidence, Serena told me that the University of Toronto has the best school of periodontics in Canada. They only pick three students a year out of hundreds of dentistry graduates for the periodontistry program. I met Dr. Lambert and he has an accent that doesn’t fit with the hard “T” that people use when they pronounce his last name. I asked him about it and he says he’s from Quebec. So I said his name must be pronounced as “Lambare” and he confirmed that’s correct. He just lets people use the hard pronunciation to make things easier. He says I can call him Martin. Martin said that my bone graft healed exceptionally well and suggested that it helped that I didn’t wear my denture. He said we’ll be starting the process of me getting my implant in September. He took a full set of 3-D images of my teeth and gums and will use them to make a surgical implant stent that will be put in my mouth before surgery. I had to pay $190 for the stent. They don’t have a date yet for when I’ll be coming in for surgery but it will be in September sometime. 

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home to buy toilet paper and Sponge Towels. 

            I weighed 90.6 kilos at 15:10, which is the lightest I’ve been in the early afternoon since last Wednesday. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade.

            I weighed 90.5 kilos at 17:50. 

            I was still a day behind on my journal and worked on getting caught up but I was still behind at suppertime. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with rosée tomato sauce, tomato pesto, wedge oven fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching Wednesday season 1, episode 7 on Discord with my daughter Astrid. 

            The story begins with the funeral of the mayor of Jericho who was killed at the end of the last episode. Wednesday is scanning the crowd because she’s sure the killer is there. She sees a dark figure leave and she chases him into the woods. When the enemy turns and Wednesday readies her umbrella to do battle he voices how proud he is of his favourite protegee and we see it’s her Uncle Fester. This is the first time we’ve seen Wednesday smile. She takes Fester to Eugene’s bee house and has to stop him from eating the bees. fester has a reunion with Thing who is mad at Fester over him running out on Thing during a heist. Wednesday catches Fester up on the mystery and shows him one of Xavier’s drawing of the monster. Fester says the monster is a Hyde as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He tells Wednesday that there is a secret diary of a man named Faulkner in a secret place in the Nightshade Club’s meeting place in the basement of Nevermore. They go there and Thing cracks the safe to get the diary. The diary explains that Hydes are artists by nature born of mutation. Their monster sides are mostly dormant but can be triggered by trauma, chemistry, or hypnosis. That means the Hyde always has a master. She is still convinced that Xavier is the monster. While spying on him she sees that he is having secret meetings with the psychiatrist Dr. Kimbott. Wednesday returns to her room to find it’s been ransacked, the diary stolen and Thing has been pinned to the wall with a knife. . Fester uses his electrical powers to try ti defibrillate Thing but after several tries he gives up and says he’s gone. Wednesday won’t accept it and says to do it again. Finally Thing comes to life and Wednesday swears to make the attacker pay. She confronts Kimbott with the accusation that she is the Hyde’s manipulator. Kimbott thinks that Wednesday is losing her mind and recommends that she be sent to a psychiatric hospital. Wednesday says if she was she’d be running the place in a week. Wednesday leaves Kimbott, who hears a strange sound in another room. She opens it and is attacked by the monster. She later dies in the hospital. Wednesday learns that Principal Weems has known about the Hyde all along but has not notified the authorities to protect Nevermore. Wednesday goes to see Tyler and kisses him. The kiss triggers a vision that shows her that Tyler is the monster. I saw that coming. 

            Fester is played by Fred Armison. he’s okay but he’s no Jackie Coogan. 

            Dr. Kimbott was played by Fred Armison’s wife Riki Lindhome, whose first break came when Tim Robbins cast her in his play Embedded at The Public Theatre in New York City. She made her film debut in Back Seat Detour. She made her TV debut in the sitcom Titus. Then Clint Eastwood cast her in Million Dollar Baby, which was her feature film debut. She wrote, directed and co-starred in Life is Short in 2006. She is the front half of the comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates with Kate Micucchi. They had their own sitcom for a season and were nominated for an Emmy for their TV special. They appeared in The Big Bang Theory and wrote a song for the episode. She co-created and co-starred in the sitcom Another Period. She co-starred in Duncanville, Hell Baby, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, My Best Friend’s Girl, The Last House on the Left, King Tweety, Nerdland, Queens of the Dead, She played Fozzie Bear’s human girlfriend on The Muppets. She was the voice of Poison Ivy and The Wicked Witch of the West in The Lego Batman Movie. She stars in a one woman musical called Dead Inside. She starred in the short film Imaginary Larry.

Sheena Queen of the Jungle

            On Tuesday morning the bedbug situation was even worse than before. I could see bedbugs walking on top of the diatomaceous earth without any apparent harm, but supposedly they are killed by it eventually as they are dried out. We’ll see. I think that when I’ve finished my bathroom project soon, rather than renovating the kitchen right away I need to do something to seal up the baseboards and the walls in the bedroom. I also need a better vacuum cleaner. 

            I revised my translation of the fourth verse of “La complainte de Bonnot” by Boris Vian. There’s only the second chorus left and then I’ll be done. 

            I weighed 91.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice and as usual it was always out of tune. 

            I did some more touch-ups of blue bliss around the edges of the four floral reliefs on my future bathroom mirror frame. Next I’ll clean the glass and put it back in the frame. Once the mirror is mounted I might do some slight touch-ups. 

            I weighed 91.9 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon it was raining when I started on my bike ride so I just rode one block and then turned around. I decided to take the opportunity of being home early to apply Proofide to my Brooks leather bike saddle. 

            I weighed 92.1 kilos at 16:50. 

            I was still a day behind in my journal for the 13th day in a row and even though I had an extra hour to work on getting caught up I continued to be a day behind at suppertime. 

            I grilled ten chicken drumsticks and had two with a potato and gravy while watching season 11, episode 8 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            During the audience warmup someone asks Carol the diameter of her mouth. She repeats the question but doesn’t answer it. 

            Someone asks her to do the Tarzan call and dislocate her hip at the same time and she does. 

            A 16 year old named Kevin says his friend Tim wants a kiss. Tim says Kevin wants a kiss. Carol invites them both up but only Kevin comes. She finds out his age is 16, calls him jailbait and gives him a kiss on each cheek. 

            The first sketch is at a dog obedience school where all the dogs and the instructor are invisible but the owners can be seen. Tim mimes leading a dog that is very hard to control and pees on things in the room. Vicki carries her dog in her purse and it fits in the palm of her hand. Dick’s dog is enormous and perhaps twice as tall as Dick. Dick’s dog eats Vickie’s dog so he has to hold its jaws open while she pulls it out. Class is dismissed but the instructor tells Dick he doesn’t want to see him or his stupid dog again so Dick has his dog attack the instructor. 

            Dick goes to a dressing mirror and his reflection is played by Carol. They sing the 1926 song “It All Depends On You” by Ray Henderson, Lew Brown, and B.G. De Sylva while getting dressed in clown costumes and makeup. Then they step out from both sides of the mirror and dance together. 

            Carol plays Rhonda Hughie an insurance inspector investigating a hospital and she is brought to see the head resident Dr. Fisher (played by Tim) who is conducting an operation with an assistant behind the reception desk. Carol says she knew this hospital was crowded but didn’t know it was this bad. Then she sees he’s just making a submarine sandwich. She tells him that a lot of malpractice lawsuits have been filed against his hospital. He shakes her hand while holding a hypodermic needle. He takes her hand to treat it and puts something on it that hurts, She asks what it is and he says it’s mustard. She asks why he would put mustard ion an open wound and he says because he doesn’t have any mayonnaise. A nurse announces that a man on the 8th floor just collapsed. Fisher says to give him 8 CCs of paramyosin. Rhonda asks how he can prescribe that when he doesn’t know the symptoms. Fisher explains that they have a surplus of paramyosin. A patient is being wheeled by on a gurney and Fisher stops the orderly to check him out. Fisher declares him dead but the patient argues that he feels fine. Tim says, “He’s not only dead but delirious”. Rhonda tells him she’s cancelling their insurance policy but then she gets knocked down by a nurse pushing a patient in a wheelchair. She’s hurt her leg and can’t get up so he helps her and gives her two crutches with one upside down. Both crutches break and she falls again, hurting her hip. He says he’s taking her to surgery but she protests that she hasn’t been x-rayed. He puts her in an electric wheelchair and when she tries to operate it she crashes through a wall. She asks for something for the pain and he says he’ll giver her 8 CCs of paramyosin. She says she’s getting out and stands to walk but gets knocked down when a nurse opens the door. The nurse tells Fisher it’s time for his golf game so he leaves Rhonda there. 

            They do a spoof on the 1945 film The Enchanted Cottage. Carol plays Edda Weaver an ugly person with one eyebrow and crooked teeth. When she knocks on the door of the remote cottage she gets smashed in the face by the upper half of door by Tim’s character John Dinhill, a man who’s not blind but hard of seeing because he’s lost his glasses. John is a famous piano player. Edda says she answering a want ad for an ugly maid. Edda knocks again and Vicki’s character Agatha Bennet answers. She lets her in but makes her look away when she talks to her because she’s so repulsive. Agatha says a sullen and gloomy man who wishes to escape life and live in loneliness has just leased the cottage. His name is Oliver Lawrence who was once a handsome millionaire playboy but he was wounded in the war while shaving. The blade he used had been borrowed earlier that day by a worthless peasant girl who shaved her legs with it. Oliver arrives (played by Dick), covering his face. He says to never touch him. When he sees how ugly Edda is he is willing to uncover his face. There are just five blood spotted tissues covering shaving cuts but Edda almost throws up from looking at him. John returns and makes his way to the piano, which he plays without lifting the keyboard cover. The music makes Edda and Oliver fall in love and they embrace. He asks her to marry him and they want to do it right away. It turns out that Agatha is a justice of the peace. Edda runs to put on her mother’s wedding gown that she brought with her. Several hours later Edda descends the stairs in wedding gown that includes a veiled paper bag over her head that has been in her family for generations. Agatha pronounces them “hag and hager”. After they kiss the enchantment of the cottage is activated and they are transformed into an attractive couple. Agatha explains that in the cottage those who are truly in love become beautiful. Agatha tells John that the spell only works inside the cottage but if they leave it will be pig city again. Edda and Oliver poke their heads out the window to wave at a woman riding by and she screams. Oliver goes out to get driftwood and finds John’s glasses. They go into the cottage and call for him. He and Agatha emerge from the kitchen with their clothing disarray. Agatha says he was sampling her cookies. John goes out for sa walk and almost falls of the cliff. Edda and Oliver run to help him but then they get a look at each other and let him drop. He asks if she’s always had only one eyebrow. She says she had two but plucked the top one. Oliver runs to the cottage and locks her out. John returns after climbing back up and he’s lost his glasses again. Since he only saw her as beautiful, that’s the way he will see her from now on in his mind and so he and Edda become a couple. 

            Carol says the biggest hit on Broadway is Annie, based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. Right now they are shooting Superman, the most expensive movie ever made. Also Wonder Woman is back on TV. Carol says that when she was a kid the funnies were the most real thing in her life. The final segment shows Carol at 13. She sings a song about being too old for toys and too young for boys and so the funnies were her reality. It was her Prince Valiant came home to. It was her Orphan Annie would turn to. It was her Captain Marvel would rescue after Billy Batson said “Shazam!” When Sheena Queen of the Jungle swung in on her vine “It was me and the world was mine”. Then we see inside 13 year old Carol’s fantasies as she is attacked by barbarians and Prince Valiant (played by Dick) comes to the rescue. But he gets speared and Carol calls for help. Annie arrives (played by Vicki) and has her dog Sandy attack the barbarian. A villain passing by puts a bomb in Carol’s hands and Annie says she needs a Mysto Magic Decoder Ring so they pour a big bowl of Super Flakes but there’s no ring inside. Then Captain Marvel (played by Tim) arrives. Then they are surrounded by gangsters with machine guns and so they throw the bomb at them. Sheen Queen of the Jungle arrives (played by Carol). She beats all the bad guys and then does her Tarzan yell. 

            Sheena Queen of the Jungle was created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in 1938. Eisner said her name was inspired by the novel She by H. Rider Haggard but Iger said Eisner had nothing to do with it and he was thinking of the derogatory name “Sheenies” that people sometimes called Jews. The first explanation makes more sense. She first appeared in the British magazine Wags #46 in January 1938. She appeared in the states in Jumbo Comics #1 in September 1938. With the comic Sheena Queen of the Jungle #1 in 1941 she became the first female comic book character with her own title, beating Wonder Woman #1 by three months. She acquired the leopard skin bikini that became her regular costume in Jumbo Comics #10. Her origin is similar to Tarzan’s in that she was a white child orphaned in Africa, but while Tarzan was raised by apes, Sheena was raised by an African witch doctor. In 1955 a TV series was produced starring Irish McCalla. It ran for one season. In 1984 a film adaptation called Sheena was released starring Tanya Roberts. It bombed at the box office but is now considered to be a cult classic.

July 23, 1996: Brian and I rehearsed at my new place

Thirty years ago today

             On Tuesday Brian Haddon came over to my new place and we rehearsed for our upcoming gigs. Later I hosted as always my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage in the Art Bar of the Gladstone Hotel.

Busby Berkeley

            On Monday morning I revised my translation of the third verse of “La complainte de Bonnot” by Boris Vian. 

            I posted “I Love You. So Do I”, my translation of “Je t’aime. Moi aussi” by Serge Gainsbourg on Facebook and then looked for the next Serge Gainsbourg song that I’ve yet to translate. The last song listed in my 1972 Gainsbourg document is “Une chanson de cour” but it was just written for a TV show skit and doesn’t seem to exist online. I looked in the 1973 Gainsbourg file and found only one unfinished translation. That’s “Shylock” and it was written for a TV show called Top a, starring Petula Clark in that episode. She and Gainsbourg do the song as a comical duet. There’s a video of it on YouTube so I downloaded it and looked for an app to transcribe it because my free minutes on Sonix have been used up. I tried Turbo Scribe and it claimed to have transcribed the audio but I couldn’t find the text. The same thing happened with Quickwerx and Whisper. I finally got it done with an app called Eleven Labs. I copied the text and I’ll have a look tomorrow, then edit it and compare it to the audio. 

            I weighed 90.8 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since June 15.

            I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune until after I sat down and played part of a song while sitting in front of my computer. For some reason that end or level of the room causes all my guitars to go out of tune. 

            I weighed 92.25 kilos before lunch. I think that’s the most I’ve ever weighed since I’ve been weighing myself regularly. 

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

            I weighed 91.6 kilos at 18:10. February 20 was the last evening when I was so cruel to the scale.

            For the 12th day in a row I was a day behind in my journal and was still behind at suppertime. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a reheated T-bone steak while watching season 11, episode 6 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            In the Tudball-Wiggins sketch, Mr. Tudball is preparing his offices for painting. Mrs. Wiggins arrives three hours late and says it’s because it took a long time to get into her overalls. She takes off her leopard print coat and is wearing a very tight pair of coveralls with high heels. She asks the time and he says noon so she starts walking out the door to go for lunch but he makes her come back because there’s no lunch today. She suggests he take off his watch before they get started and he does. She takes it from him but then drops it into the paint bucket. He gets her to paint the wall to the right of where he’s painting and she starts painting his right hand where he’s leaning. She climbs the ladder in her tight coveralls and stilettos and needs Tudball’s help getting up there. He says “From the back you look like Dolly Parton from the front”. He holds the tray for her while she dips the roller but as she swings her arm up and over to reach the wall she rolls it over his face. He shouts that she’s wasting paint when they have all of these walls to do. She swings up her arm in surprise, knocking Tudball and the paint bucket across the room and now all the paint is gone. 

            Carol and Dick introduce Ken Berry. He does a song and dance number that might be called “Girls” with the male dancers. They are portraying miners waiting for women to arrive and when the girls come they all do a dance. One girl is not dancing as she holds a suitcase with her name “Emily”. Ken comes and dances with her as a recording of his voice sings “Emily” by Johnny Mandel and Johnny Mercer from the 1964 film The Americanization of Emily. 

            Dick plays a once famous piano player who is now out of work and Carol plays his dedicated wife. It’s winter and they are burning all of their things in the fireplace to keep warm. He’s burning all the newspaper clippings that Carol saved of his concerts when they come across a $50,000 insurance policy on his hands. He decides to injure his hands to collect. He asks her to bring the hot poker from the fireplace down on his hand. She turns away and swings around to say she can’t do it but in doing so ends up poking him in the ribs. He next asks her to drop his bowling ball on his hand. She pulls it down from a high shelf but it’s heavy and her arms swing with it to hit him in the left knee. He asks her to try again but she can’t do it and throws the ball down but it hits his right foot. Next he puts his hand in the door jamb and tells her to slam the door on it. But before doing it she says, “Honey?” and he brings his head forward to ask “What?” then she slams the door on his head. Then they get a call from his agent saying they want him in Vegas at double Liberace’s salary. With all of his injuries he goes to sit at the piano to start to play badly, so Carol slams the keyboard cover on his hands and calls the insurance company. 

            They do a movie spoof called Stolen Serenade but I don’t know what movie they are actually parodying but it’s maybe the 1939 musical Broadway Serenade because it’s directed by Busby Berkeley and Tim plays a parody of that director named Buzzy Berkeley. Vicki, Ken, and Dick play an act called Winnie, Werner, and Woe. They sing a song that warns not to grab a rose by the thorn. Buzzy tells Winnie he’s going to make her a star but the star of the show Lily du Lane (played by Carol) arrives. She tells them they can’t be in Buzzy’s show but she wants their song for her own act. She says she’ll make it the biggest hit on Broadway. Woe is all for it but Werner argues they wrote the song for Winnie and if she can’t sing it no one can. Lily kisses Woe and brings him over to her side. Werner angrily tears the song music in half and gives half to Woe then he and Winnie leave. Woe regrets losing his friends but Lily introduces him to two new partners: her and a bottle of champagne. Six months later he’s a slave to the bottle and Lily as he serves as her piano player. She finds him disgusting and is tired of singing his rose song. Opens for Lily and does a song while drunk. She makes her entrance and wants him to lift her onto the piano but it’s a real struggle for him to get her up there. She sings the rose song while Woe accompanies her but he keeps seeing tiny versions of Winnie and Warner dancing on the piano and singing the song. Five years later Winnie and Werner are ragged beggars singing on the street in the winter in front of the theatre where Lily is doing her show. They sing the rose song and rich passersby condescend to throw them a coin. As they are trying to pick it up before it freezes to the sidewalk Lily and Woe come walking along and Woe trips over Winnie. The three embrace in a happy reunion. Lily gives Woe an ultimatum and suddenly he becomes sober. He hands Lily his bottle and says, “Who wants to live in luxury and comfort when he can starve with his friends?” Lily takes a drink and leaves them to go inside. Woe and Werner haven’t written a song since they split up but now that they are back together they are inspired. They write a dance song about shivering and shaking in the cold called “The Slush”. Buzzy happens to be passing by and thinks it’s sensational so he immediately puts them in a show. Lily comes out on stage drunk but Buzzy carries her off. Winnie, Werner, and Woe are now Broadway stars and they do a charity benefit at a hospital for the poor where they sing for terminally ill patients so they can die happy. There they find among the patients Lily. As Lily lies there coughing Winnie and Werner laugh at her but Woe says they should be compassionate, but then he grabs some snow from the window and rubs it in her face while they all laugh. Lily says, “My pulse just stopped, call the doctor!” The trio thinks that line is a great idea for a song entitled “Call the Doctor I’m IN Love” and so they start to sing and dance to it. At the end of the song Lily dies and her bed begins rising up and floating above the room and Lily sits up in her room and flaps her angel wings. Carol sings her theme song from the floating bed while coughing. Then the cast crawl into bed with her.

            During the 1920s Busby Berkeley worked as a dance director on Broadway. His earliest films were Eddie Cantor musicals and he was less concerned with choreography than with having his dancers form kaleidoscopic patterns. He was not the first to do that but elevated it to a high art. He directed dance routines for Florenz Ziegfeld’s shows A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Whoopie. Then he did the choreography for the film version. His short dance segments often cost more than the films in which they appeared. His fame skyrocketed during the depression with the film adaptations of five musicals: 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Golddiggers of 1933, Dames, and Fashions of 1934. When musicals lost their appeal he turned to directing dramas like They Made Me a Criminal and Forty Little Mothers. He directed the “I Got Rhythm” segment of Girl Crazy. In the 1940s he designed the finales for Esther Williams movies.

July 22, 1996: Keith's tip blew out the truck window

Thirty years ago today

            On Monday I worked for Keith Anderson Moving and Storage. Keith was driving the truck and in the end the customer gave us a tip. Keith kept $5 for himself, which I though was shitty of him since he owned the company. He put it in his shirt pocket and it seemed like poetic justice when we drove over a breezy bridge and the wind blew his bill out the window.