March 18, 1996: My daughter and I made mud pies

Thirty years ago today

            On Sunday it was relatively warm so my daughter and I made mud pies in the back yard. My landlady Helga accused us of using her baking pan but I had the exact same kind.

Gloria Loring

            On Monday morning I collected more images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 214 so far and I think the end is in sight. I should have enough at least by the end of the week. 

            I weighed 87.65 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice and it went out of tune during most of the songs except for one in the middle and the last few. 

            At 13:42 I headed downtown to the U of T Graduate School of Dentistry for my post op appointment with Dr. Xia. I brought my denture but it still doesn’t fit because the bone graft has changed the shape of the gap. He showed me an image of the retainer that I could get made but said it would only be cosmetic and wouldn’t help with my chewing or singing. It looked to me like it would impede my singing. I asked if my present denture could be altered to fit and he said possibly but he was not allowed to do it because it wasn’t made at the school. I suggested I could see if my dentist could do it but he advised me to wait two months until there is further healing of the bone graft because fitting a denture could agitate the area. He says he’s graduating this year and so when I see him on May 20 it may be the last time and then another student will take over. It feels weird to get used to a periodontist and then have them just go away. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos at 16:10. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos at 19:00, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since December 16.

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:30. 

            I tried to record again from cassette through audio interface to Audacity the same tape I’ve been trying to digitize for over a week. I just tried to record the live performance of my song “Megaphor” which has been recording as just noise with bits of an older recording coming through. It’s still just noise. I tried it in mono but it’s the same. I changed a few more settings and I’ll see tomorrow if they made a difference. 

            I had a tomato, cucumber, and avocado salad with lime juice while watching season 1, episode 4 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            During questions from the audience someone asks Carol her measurements. She says, “38-26-30 but I won’t tell you in what order”. 

            The special guest is Lucille Ball and she is in the first skit with Carol. They play two women on their lunchbreak who try an exotic looking place called Café Argentine. The maître d is dressed like a German officer from WWI and he immediately barks commands at them. They are afraid to stay but more afraid of trying to leave. The menu has only German food. A periscope rises from the middle of the table next to them and turns towards them. When they try to leave a German soldier in a WWII uniform points a gun at them. When they demand to see the manager, Hitler comes out so they scream and run. 

            The second skit could only be understood if one was familiar with TV commercials of 1967. Carol is loading a washing machine when a fist reaches up from inside and punches her. That’s probably a parody of the Action chlorine bleach ad in which a muscular hand rises from the machine. She has to wrestle with it to load everything. Then the machine elongates upwards and money flies out. She opens the window and a bunch of pigeons fly in. She eats some margarine and gets an enormous crown. That’s definitely the old Imperial Margarine ad. She goes out to hang up her laundry and is pierced by a knight’s lance. That comes from the 1965 Ajax laundry detergent commercial featuring a white knight wielding a lance and riding a white horse. 

            Next is a song and dance number featuring Carol and Vicki in 60s mini dresses singing and dancing to “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” by Paul Stookey (of Peter Paul and Mary), James Mason, and Dave Dixon. 

            The third skit features Tim Conway as a news anchor at a station where the news machine is broken and the production is poorly organized. When taking calls from the TV audience the only call he gets is from his wife giving him a grocery list. 

            Next Carol and Lucy come out and Lucy wants to meet Lyle Wagonner the announcer. When he comes out he and Lucy begin kissing and say they’ve been practicing all day. 

            The fourth skit has Carol and Lucy as competing airport car rental clerks. Carol works for Mavis and Lucy for Gertz. Tim Conway comes to rent a car and they fight over him. He is physically and mentally pulled back and forth as the two women make counter offers. Finally Tim takes the bus. 

            Next, the musical guest Gloria Loring sings “Goin Out of My Head” by Ted Rendazzo and Bobby Weinstein; and “Try To Remember” by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. Her facial expressions act out the words of the song annoyingly as she sings. 

            The fifth skit shows the life of the wife of a superhero. Carol is married to Superguy who comes home from work but doesn’t know his own strength in the domestic setting. Casual movements smash things. He kisses her and sucks all the air out of her body. When he laughs she is continuously blown away and sucked back. When they go to bed her pajamas are a suit of armour. 

            The final part is a 19th Century saloon themed song and dance number with Carol and Lucy dressed up as old style saloon girls. The song is “Belly Up to the Bar Boys” by Meredith Wilson from the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown. 

            Gloria Loring started her professional career as an entertainer at 14, singing with the folk group Those Four. She made her TV debut on The Carol Burnett Show in 1967. Her first single “Brooklyn” made it to the top 100. She has recorded 12 albums and had a hit record with “Friends and Lovers”. She co-wrote the theme songs for Different Strokes and The Facts of Life. She recorded a meditation record. She played Liz Chandler in 748 episodes of Days of Our Lives. She’s a spokesperson for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, a keynote speaker. She’s the author of six books, most of them about parenting a child with diabetes. She has a book about coincidence. She published the Days of Our Lives Celebrity Cookbook for diabetes research. She had a musical show of TV theme songs. She created a musical motivation seminar called Life Doesn’t Have to Be a Soap Opera. She was married to Canadian actor Alan Thicke.

March 17, 1996: My daughter and I went to the playground on Dundas

Thirty years ago today

            On Saturday my daughter came to my place for the weekend. We went to the nearby playground on Dundas.

Vicki Lawrence

            On Sunday morning I gathered a few more images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 206 so far. 

            I weighed 88.25 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice and it went out of tune during most songs, except for “The Deserter” and a few at the end. 

            Around midday I rode to Freshco because yesterday I’d forgotten to buy high acid vinegar at No Frills. When I came back I used some of it to clean the warm mist humidifier that’s been running all week. 

            I weighed 88.75 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 88.45 kilos at 18:35. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:36. 

            Once again I tried to record from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity my rehearsal of “Me and Gravity” and “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” with Brian Haddon and Arjan. The result was just as distorted as before despite my turning off “inst” and “air” on my Scarlett 2i2 audio interface and having downloaded and installed the driver for the Scarlett. I’ve always had the 48v button on because I didn’t know what it does. Apparently it provides a power boost for microphones and it’s unnecessary for what I’m doing and could cause distortion. So tomorrow I’ll try again with that turned off and hopefully that will solve the problem but it hasn’t been a problem for previous digitizations of tapes. I don’t know what else to do. 

            I had a tomato, cucumber, and avocado salad with lime juice while watching the first episode of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            The show begins with Carol herself warming up the audience. Normally a standup comedian or a professional MC would be hired for that kind of job but Carol got the idea from The Gary Moore Show to do it herself. She introduces the show’s announcer Lyle Waggoner and pretends to be enamored with him. When he does a sample of his announcing she says, “Did you hear those shoulders?” 

            In the first sketch Carol plays former child star Shirley Dimple, who even though she’s married with two children, still dresses and talks like a little girl and lives with her fairy godmother. 

            The first guest who became the traditional first guest of every season of the show, was Jim Nabors. He sang “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” in both English and Italian (“Io che non vivo”) by Pino Donnagio and Vito Pallavicini in Italian with English lyrics by Vicki Wickham and Simon Napier-Bell. 

            The second sketch involves Carol and Jim as two people forced into inactivity at a ski lodge because Carol’s arm is in a cast and Jim’s leg is in a cast. They are both very clumsy and keep hitting each other with their casts until they give up and crawl away in separate directions. 

            Next Carol and Jim do a song and dance skit that’s also a sample of Broadway songs. 

            The third sketch was based on Carol’s own life. She raised her younger sister Christine from the age of 12 until she was 20. It became difficult when she was 16 because Carol got married. In the sketch Harvey Korman plays Carol’s husband and it’s about how annoyed he is over living with a teenager.

            The 18 year old Vickie Lawrence plays Christine. Harvey complains she’s always at home and wonders why she doesn’t go out and protest. Carol says, “Not so loud. She’s very sensitive about being sixteen and never having been arrested”. Carol has invited the neighbour Willie Kessler to take Christine for a walk. Christine asks, “What am I? A dog?” Carol had to pay Willie a dollar. Christine is taller than Willie so Carol tells her to slump. Christine says, “First you ruin my evening and now my posture”. After they leave Carol and Harvey start to worry about Christine but she comes home after dropping Willie in a mud puddle. 

            Next Carol’s character The Charwoman is mopping a very hip discotheque called The Angry Hand after closing time. She turns on the various lighting effects until she starts fantasizing that the place is crowded with young mod dancers and she are dancing to rock and roll with psychedelic camera effects. She finishes by sitting on her bucket and singing “Georgy Girl” by Tom Springfield and Jim Dale. 

            Vicki Lawrence started singing and dancing at an early age. She was a cheerleader and was voted “Most likely to succeed” by her class in high school. She sang with The Young Americans from 1965 to 1967 and appeared in the Academy Award winning documentary of the same name. She sent Carol Burnett a newspaper clipping showing their two pictures side by side to show how much she resembled Carol. She asked Carol for advise on how to win the Miss Fireball Contest she had entered. Carol had been looking for a teenager to play her sister in the “Carol and Sis” sketches for her upcoming variety show and so she attended the contest, which Vicki won, and after several auditions by others, she was hired. She was nominated for six Emmy Awards and won one for her performances on the Carol Burnett Show. In 1973 she had a hit record with “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia”. She also had lesser hits with “He Did it With Me” and “Ships in the Night”. She put out a disco album called Newborn Woman in 1979 and had a minor hit with “Don’t Stop the Music”. After her 11 years on The Carol Burnett Show she starred in Mama’s Family from 1983 to 1990. She then hosted Win Lose or Draw and became the first successful female game show host. She was a celebrity contestant 90 times on The New $25,000 Pyramid, 44 times on Super Password, 45 times on Hollywood Squares, and 49 times on Password Plus. She appeared on five episodes of Laverne and Shirley and five episodes of Hannah Montana. Her talk show Vicki! ran from 1992 to 1994, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. Her husband Bobby Russell wrote “Little Green Apples”, “Honey” and “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”. She says that performing on The Carol Burnett Show was The Harvard School of Comedy for her, with Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman serving as her mentors. The character of “Mama” was written for Carol but she wanted to play Eunice and for Vickie to play Mama. In 2001 she started a one woman show called “Vicki and Mama: a Two Woman Show”. In 2019 she co-starred in the sitcom The Cool Kids.

March 16, 1996: Brian Haddon and I rehearsed for our gig at Fat Albert's

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday Brian Haddon and I rehearsed for our upcoming feature at Fat Albert’s. In the evening we performed on the Spit Fridays open stage in the back room of the Cameron.

Beth Brickell

            On Saturday morning I gathered a couple more images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 87.95 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the first of four sessions and until the last few songs it went out of tune during every song. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where the grapes were $3.90 a kilo so I got seven bags but had to really look a long time for firm ones. I also bought two packs of raspberries, some bananas, several vine tomatoes, several avocadoes, a bag of limes, a bottle of Garden Cocktail, and a jug of orange juice. 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos at 14:40. 

            I took a siesta from 15:30 to 17:00 and it was too late for a bike ride. 

            I weighed 89.6 kilos at 17:20, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since last Saturday but not as much. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:39. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and then extracted to my hard drive side 2 of a recording of a rehearsal of some of my songs with Steve Lowe and Arjan. On this tape the songs were “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” and “Thin Red Line”. But the recording is distorted and unacceptable just like side 1. I searched online to try to find a solution. The problem can’t be with the tape because Audacity should record exactly what I’m hearing when I play it. I tried removing the distortion from the Audacity recording in effects but that just made it worse. I saw that some sites say that when recording from line-out of a tape player it can’t go to mic because that’s too sensitive. It has to go to line in. I posed the specific question about recording from tape to my Scarlett 212 audio interface where there is nothing that says “line in”. The answer was that “instrument” is the equivalent of line in, so I guess “air” is the same as mic. I changed that. But then later I saw that neither “inst” or “air” should be switched on. It was advised to also update the Scarlett driver. I found out I didn’t have it so I downloaded it. I won’t know if anything I did helped until I try again tomorrow. 

            I ate some grapes while watching the series finale of Captain Nice. 

            Carter Nash and Candy Cane are leaving an exhibition of lab equipment where they went on a date. She’ll go anywhere with him. Candy notices a car that’s illegally parked and tells the driver to move. He tells her to beat it. When he sees her pulling out her badge he knocks it out of her hand and starts to drive away. Carter leans into the back window as the car starts going and he is carried with it.

            Candy is trying to retrieve her badge when two guys come out of a building and one wonders what happened to their getaway car. The other says, “I guess it got away”. He says he got the driver from an agency and he’ll call them tomorrow. 

            Several blocks away Carter finally falls free of the car and ducks behind a mailbox to change into Captain Nice. 

            Sergeant Candy pulls her gun on the two hoods but the getaway driver pulls up behind her with a gun and she has to put her hands up. Kincade the leader says he’ll take care of the cop as the car drives away but Captain Nice arrives and arrests him.

            The scene changes to Club Medulla, which we saw in a previous episode. It is owned by the mentalist Medulla and he and his assistant Renata are in the middle of a performance. But we see the club only has one customer who isn’t even watching the show. 

            Then one of the thugs from earlier and the getaway driver come in and sit with the customer. They discuss Kincaid’s situation in jail. He has asked to take a lie detector test at the police lab because it will be easier for them to break him out from there. 

            The men leave but Medulla sees that they’ve drawn their plans on his tablecloth. He goes to the city hall and tells Mayor Finney, Chief Segal and Carter that he had a premonition that there will be an attempted jailbreak today of Kincaid from the crime lab. 

            During the lie detector test Kincaid’s men break the window of the lab and toss in tear gas. They successfully break Kincaid out and so Carter resigns because he feels it was his fault. 

            Carter and his mother Esther go to confront Medulla about where he really learned of the jailbreak. Kincaid and his men arrive to get the tablecloth on which was written the plans. Medulla tells them the tablecloth is at the Ajax laundry so Kincaid forces them all to go there. 

            They are tied up in the laundry room but Medulla has a switchblade in his pocket and cuts his ropes and those of the others. Carter goes into the dryer room and climbs into a machine to transform into Captain Nice. Someone turns it on and he starts spinning but he breaks out and the crooks are caught. 

            Later the Medulla is with Finney, Segal, Esther and Carter. He tells them he can prove his powers are real. He says he knows that one person in the room has a terrible secret. He turns his back and counts to five for them to reveal themselves. When he turns back around everybody’s gone. He tells the fourth wall, “Works every time!” 

            Renata was played by Beth Brickell, who earned a BA in History and Political Science. While travelling in Europe she had an audience with Princess Grace of Monaco (Grace Kelly) who inspired her to become an actor. She trained with Lee Strasberg and was accepted as a member of the Actors Studio. She co-starred in the TV series Gentle Ben. She co-starred in the movie The Only Way Home. She was nominated for Emmys for her guest appearances on Bonanza and Hawaii Five-O. She taught acting for three years at the Lee Strasberg Institute. She then attended the American Film Institute and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Directing and Screen Writing. She produced, directed and co-wrote A Rainy Day, and Summer’s End. She wrote, produced and directed Mr. Christmas. She directed two episodes of Knots Landing, She wrote for the Arkansas Gazette the series “Mystery at Camden”. She’s served as the chair of the Directors Guild of America.

March 15, 1996: I learned my dad died and I was looking forward to some money

Thirty years ago today

            On Thursday I got a call from my brother Allison telling me that my father died on March 6. I wasn’t broken up about it. Hearing a parent has died just makes you remember things about them. Allison was even less close to him than I was but it seemed to mean more to him because he was a traditionalist. My sister Sibyl was executor of his estate. I talked to her on the phone later and she said there were dad’s debts to pay but I would be getting about $15,000 in a few months. I was looking forward to that.