March 23, 1996: I performed at the Cameron

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday evening I performed on the Spit Fridays open stage in the back room of the Cameron.

John Davidson

            On Saturday morning I finally memorized verse 20 of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian. There are 3 lines left to learn and they are short, so it shouldn’t take long to have this song done. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast. December 20 was the last morning when I was so easy on the scale. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune during most of my songs. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my electric guitars.

            Around midday I got ready to go to No Frills. On my way out to lock my bike before bringing my trailer down, my upstairs neighbour Jacob came down the stairs and stopped to give me a dirty look. I was about to descend the stairs while he was at the bottom when he turned to say, “Just so you know, it’s because of you I’m suing the landlord”. I assume this is because of the music that I play on my stereo, which he never asks me to turn down. Whenever I get some rarely clear indication like this that he wants me to turn it down, I lower my top volume. I’ve dropped it from -1 to -7 since he moved in. I gave him my phone number two months ago specifically so he could tell me if my stereo's too loud. It would have taken five minutes over the phone for me to adjust the volume dial until it was at a level that was comfortable for him but he never called me and I can’t read his mind. Later there was a message from the landlady that I should turn it down because Jacob claims he’s going to the Human Rights Commission. It would be interesting to see him try to spin this as a discrimination issue. 

            When I took my trailer downstairs and tried to attach it to my bike it wouldn’t clasp. I remembered that last week a pin fell out of the side of the clasp and I’d put it aside. I went back upstairs and found it but couldn’t attach it. I took it next door to Metro Cycles and Gordon was able to push it back in with some vice grips. He said if it pops out again I should get some J-B Weld from the hardware store. 

            At the supermarket I could only find three bags of firm grapes. I also bought two packs of raspberries, several avocadoes, some bananas, a case of 12 mangoes (but I took them out of the case to fit in my trailer bag, which caused some confusion at the checkout counter), a watermelon, Arm and Hammer toothpaste, mouthwash, kitchen bags, plastic wrap, a carton of soymilk, a jug of orange juice, two bags of plantain chips, a can of chick peas, and two cans of kidney beans. 

            I weighed 88.85 kilos at 15:00. I had a lettuce, tomato and avocado salad with maple Dijon dressing. 

            I took a siesta at 16:00 and got up at 17:30, too late for a bike ride. 

            I weighed 88.95 kilos at 17:50, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since last Saturday, though not as heavy as then. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:40. I tried again to digitize the cassette tape that has failed to record to Audacity for the last few weeks but it still recorded as noise with some of the under-recording coming through faintly. In beginning the timeline didn’t even move but I eventually fixed that. If it doesn’t work tomorrow I’ll try to figure out Ableton again. 

            I had a lettuce, cucumber, scallion, mushroom, tomato, and avocado salad with maple Dijon dressing while watching season 1, episode 13 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            The first skit depicts German actors in Germany trying to make a western cowboy film. Mickey Rooney plays Field Marshal Dillon, Carol plays saloon singer Kitty Marlene, and Harvey Korman plays Wilhelm the Kid. Kitty sings “The Boys in the Back Room” by Frank Loesser, made famous by Marlene Dietrich. Dillon and Wilhelm have a shootout and Kitty gets caught in the middle. She has a long death scene and keeps dropping off but then suddenly sitting half up to sing her song several times until Dillon and Billy shoot several rounds into her to shut her up. 

            John Davidson sings an annoying sleepy version of “There’s a Kind of a Hush” by Geoff Stephens and Les Reed, made famous by Herman’s Hermits. He then sings “Somewhere” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim from West Side Story. 

            Next is a parody of The Dating Game. The three bachelors are a hillbilly played by Davidson, a dumb TV star played by Lyle Waggoner, and a suave Casanova played by Rooney. Carol is dragged in against her will to be the contestant. She immediately wants bachelor #3 and still does after every question. She finally picks him but it turns out she dated him disastrously before. 

            There’s a long skit that starts in 1917 featuring the Funn Family of Broadway. The mother is Carol, the father Rooney, and the children are Vicki and John. They are playing the Vaudeville circuit and making $17.76 a night. They decide they need a patriotic song to make them stars so the father writes one. It might be original because I can’t find a match for the lyrics but it’s about the spirit of 76. A man comes into their dressing room and it’s the famous producer Ziggy Follfeld. He says he hear the song and there’s a spot in his next Follfield Follies for a patriotic trio. That means one of them has to go and so the father sacrifices himself and walks away. The trio become famous but everywhere they go there is a stage hand named Charlie always there to mop up and it’s really their father Mickie. The son leaves the group to become the president of the United States and the daughter leaves to win five Nobel prizes in medicine. The mother continues on to be a star on her own. Fast forward to present day and the mother is retiring with her final performance. The kids get up to sing with her one more time and Charlie reveals himself to be their father. 

            John Davidson earned a BA in Theatre Arts. He made his Broadway debut in Foxy in 1964. He was a regular on The Entertainers. He starred in The Kraft Summer Music Hall. He starred in the daytime talk show, The John Davidson Show. He co-starred in the sitcom The Girl With Something Extra. He co-hosted That’s Incredible. He was a regular on The Hollywood Squares and then the host of The New Hollywood Squares from 1986 to 1989. He guest hosted on The Tonight Show 87 times. He recorded 12 studio albums. He’s an atheist.

March 22, 1996: It was the last day of my 14 day fast

Thirty years ago today

            On Thursday it was the last day of my annual fourteen day fruit fast. I probably worked and then went shopping for salad ingredients to eat on Friday.

Jonathan Winters

            On Friday morning I gathered a couple more images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 228 now and I don’t think I’ll need more than another 20. 

            I weighed 88.15 kilos before breakfast. I drank Earl Grey tea for the first time in two weeks and was buzzing during song practice. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice and it went out of tune during almost every song. 

            I had planned on going for a haircut today but it was raining and if I’d ridden my bike up to Yonge and St. Clair I would have looked like a sewer rat that’d been doing the back stroke. So instead I stayed home and finished painting the first coat of “blue bliss” on my bathroom door frame. On the next painting day I’ll do the first coat on the bathroom door. The frame and door will probably only need one more coat but we’ll see. After that I have the bathroom rack to paint blue, then I want to mount it on the wall rather than keep it sitting on the back of the toilet. Then the lazy Susan needs to be painted and the bathroom mirror painted and mounted. When that’s all done there’ll just be the cleaning up of all the paint that got splattered on the tiles, the tub, and sink. 

            I weighed 89 kilos at 14:10. I was running late because of my painting and so I didn’t break my fast but just had grapes for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. I wanted to stop at Queen Fresh Market but I had to pee so I went home first. Then I walked back and bought two bunches of scallions. 

            I weighed 87.65 kilos at 18:35, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since December 16.

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:42. 

            I made a lettuce, cucumber, scallion, mushroom, tomato, and avocado salad with maple-Dijon dressing while watching season 1, episode 12 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            The first skit is the VIP interview show and in this episode Harvey interviews Santa Clause played with no beard by Jonathan Winters. He shows Harvey his buxom wind-up woman Pat Pending. Harvey asks how it works and Santa says, “A doll that looks like this doesn’t have to work”. 

            The second skit is another one based on Carol’s biography. Carol has planned a surprise birthday party for her husband Roger. All the guests are supposed to arrive before Roger and then wait in the kitchen until she calls out “Now!” and then to rush out and yell “”Surprise!” But Roger comes home early and Carol has to keep moving Roger away or distracting him so the guests can get to the kitchen before Carol calls out “Now!” and they all rush out. But when they do they hit Roger with the door and knock him out. 

            The second guest, Barbara Eden does a song and dance number to “Bend it!” by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley. The song is inspired by Zorba’s dance from Zorba the Greek and so the dancers and Barbara perform a Greek style dance. 

            In the third skit Carol plays Fran, the wife of an invisible man. She wonders what she ever saw in him. Her Aunt Martha says, “Looks aren’t everything” but Fran responds, “His looks aren’t anything”. Martha asks, “Are his parents invisible?” Carol answers, “His father is but his mother is only invisible from the waist up. It helps her in her work because she’s a topless waitress”. Harry comes home and he’s very handsy. He fondles Fran and gooses Aunt Martha. He does a tango with Fran and wakes up the baby. She tries to give her child its bottle but has trouble finding its mouth because it’s invisible too. Fran gets an experimental formula to make the baby visible but Harry says to try it on him first to see if it’s safe. Harry drinks it and then we see he looks like Leonard Nimoy made up as his character Mr. Spock from Star Trek. 

            The fourth skit interrupts the program Frontier Hairdresser for the documentary, The Wonderful World of Prisons. Walter Crankcase played by (Harvey Korman) interviews the warden Louis Hack (played by Jonathan Winters) at Leavenwurst Prison. Behind these walls are housed some of the most hostile members of our society: the prison guards. Hack says he worked his way up to his job from being a prisoner. Crankcase comments that the prisoners are very well behaved. Hack says they try to use psychology along with the constant beatings. He says he’s like a father to the prisoners and he is a father to one of them. His child inadvertently set fire to a house while burning his draft card. The men get lots of exercise because the guards have the dogs chase them so the dogs and prisoners get fit at the same time. 

            The next skit is part of the same documentary. Carol plays a wife visiting her husband with Lyle Waggoner playing a guard standing nearby. She says, “My darling I can’t take it any longer! I want to be with you! I can’t go on just looking at you when I want to touch you!” She finally jumps up and runs to the other side of the barrier into the guard’s arms.

            In another prison related sketch Crankcase interviews an elderly woman who comes regularly to visit the prisoners. It’s Jonathan Winters playing his character Maudie Frickert. She says she’s wearing her dad’s dress. She says, “I’m 86. Be nice to me or I’ll coldcock ya!” 

            Next Carol’s character the Charwoman is picking up trash in a playground and starts to play with the equipment and fantasize about her childhood. She sings “I Believed it All” by Jimmie Rodgers.

            Jonathan Winters had a lonely childhood and spent a lot of time in his room creating characters and interviewing himself with different voices. He studied cartooning at the Dayton Art Institute where he met his wife Eileen Schauser in 1948 and they were married until she died 60 years later. He won a talent contest which led to work as a radio announcer. He starred in a children’s show on a local Dayton station in 1950. He then hosted a game show and a talk show for the same station. When they denied him a raise he quit and with $56 moved to New York leaving his wife and kids in Ohio until he could send for them. Within two months he was getting bookings in night clubs. His TV debut was on Chance of a Lifetime in 1954. His first appearances on a nationally televised show were on Omnibus. He appeared frequently on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962. Jack Paar said that the 25 funniest people hed ever known were all Jonathan Winters. From 1967 to 1969 he starred in The Jonathan Winters Show, on which RCA broadcast the first demonstration of colour videotape. He was the first to use video to make himself into two interacting characters. He co-starred in the Twilight Zone episode A Game of Pool. He was a regular on the Andy Williams Show. He was a regular panelist on Hollywood Squares. In the mid-70s he did humourous film reviews for Good Morning America. He was a regular on the children’s series Hot Dog. He starred in The Whacky World of Jonathan Winters from 1972 to 1974. In the final season of Mork and Mindy he played Mork and Mindy’s child Mearth. He was a regular on Hee Haw from 1983 to 1984. He’s released several comedy albums and had eleven Grammy nominations, winning two. He co-starred in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe), The Loved One, The Russians Are Coming, Viva Max, The Shadow, Swing, . He co-starred in the sitcom Davis Rules (for which he won an Emmy). He was nominated for an Emmy for his appearance on Life With Bonnie. He was the voice of Grandpa Smurf on the animated TV series and of Papa Smurf in the two movies. He considered James Thurber to be one of his main humour influences. Robin Williams considered Winters to be his comedy mentor. He was an accomplished abstract painter and his work was collected in a book called Hang Ups. He wrote a collection of short stories called Winter’s Tales. He won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humour in 2000. He was one of the first performers to speak about their struggles with mental illness.

March 21, 1996: Brian and I rehearsed for our upcoming gigs at The Art Bar and Fat Albert's

Thirty years ago today

            Brian Haddon and I rehearsed for our upcoming gigs at Fat Albert’s and the Art Bar reading series. That night we went to Fat Albert’s and performed on the open stage.

Lesley Ann Warren

            On Thursday morning I collected more images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 225 so far.

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            During song practice I played my Kramer electric and it only went out of tune slightly once in the middle of the session. 

            I was behind on my journal and before lunch I worked on getting caught up, but didn’t make it. 

            I took a siesta and slept almost half an hour longer than usual so by the time I got ready for my bike ride it was too late to go downtown. I rode instead to Ossington and Bloor and on the way home stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of green grapes, a bunch of bananas, several avocadoes, some vine tomatoes, two packs of grape tomatoes, a pack of lettuce from Quebec, a pack of mushrooms, a bottle of Garden Cocktail, and a jug of orange juice. I did a price match on the grapes with the Walmart price of $6.55 and without my asking the cashier Reema gave me a lower price match on the avocadoes. 

            I weighed 88.1 kilos at 18:55. 

            I worked on getting caught up on my journal and it was half an hour after my normal supper time before I was. I had a tomato, cucumber, and not quite ripe avocado salad with lime juice while watching season 1, episode 11 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            During the audience warmup an audience member asks Carol who designs her clothes. She says Bob Mackie. She shows it off and then asks if they want to see the rest of her. Her cameraman Pat says, “No thanks I just had dinner”. She brings out her guest Don Adams. He says he used to be so self conscious that when he went to a football game and the players went in a huddle he thought they were talking about him. He talks about how glad he is that his catchphrase “Would you believe?” became part of the culture. He relates his experience playing golf in the Bob Hope Classic and actually playing against Arnold Palmer one day and Jack Nicklaus another. He was very nervous competing with the famous pros. 

            In the first skit a woman is obsessed with watching science fiction movies on TV. Her husband doesn’t like them and goes to bed. In a minute a man in a shiny green suit with antennae steps in from her balcony. He says he’s Zorel from Venus and needs to rest before he repairs his spaceship. Her husband shouts from the bedroom. Zorel asks, “Is that another Earthling?” Carol says, “No that’s a ding-a-ling”. Her husband asks, “Are you talkin to someone?” Carol tells Zorel he’d better hide but Zorel says that Venusians are invisible to male humans. Harvey comes out but only acknowledges Carol then goes back to bed. He tells her that men worship women on Venus but they aren’t as beautiful as she is. He would like her to come to Venus with him and she wants to. He gives her a levitation pill so she can fly with him to his spaceship. She steps off the railing and falls to her death. Her husband comes out and says to Zorel “I don’t know how you did it Charlie but I still think $50 is a little too high”, as he pays him. 

            The second guest Lesie Ann Warren does a song and dance number with a performance of “The Best Is Yet to Come” by Cy Coleman and Caroline Leigh. She’s a very good dancer. 

            The next skit shows what happens when the technical staff of a TV talk show goes on strike and the studio executives try to fill their jobs. The show is the Donny Bishop Show featuring Don Adams as a parody of Johnny Carson and Regis McMann played by Harvey Korman as a parody of Ed McMann. Regis laughs hysterically for too long at everything Donny says and Donny is clearly annoyed. Donny is sitting behind the desk in his underwear because the wardrobe department is also on strike. His guest is Sandy Saint Sweet (played by Carol) who keeps getting hit and knocked down by the boom mic.

            Next, two fathers (Harvey and Don) are sitting on a bench waiting to pick up their kids from school. Harvey says his solution to not be annoyed with his kids is to have activities for them to go to out of the house. On Sundays they’re in church from 9:00 to 17:00. Don asks, “Isn’t that unusual?” Harvey says, “No kidding, since we’re Jewish.” Don talks about the difficulties he has with his wife and he’s a marriage counselor. 

            There’s a parody of a TV commercial for Fresha (mocking Fresca). A husband and wife are sitting and when Carol drinks the ice cold drink, a large dump of snow suddenly falls on them. 

            Carol sings “Enter Laughing” from the Carl Reiner movie of the same name. The song is written by Quincey Jones and Mack David. 

            In the next sketch Don the husband had asked Carol the wife to stop at the bank and pick up some papers from their safety deposit box. But while Carol was out she lost her purse. When Don comes home he explains that the papers are his finance records from last year that will help him avoid paying $2000 in taxes. After some comical evasion of the issue Carol finally admits she lost her purse and the papers. Obviously Don is not happy and derides Carol for quite a while for being so stupid as to lose her purse, until a grocery boy shows up with Carol’s purse. Don goes to give a generous tip to the grocery boy but discovers he’s lost his wallet. 

            The closing number is a song and dance bit with Carol Burnett and Lesley Ann Warren singing the jazz standard “All God’s Children Got Rhythm” by Walter Jurmann, Gus Kahn, and Bronislaw Kaper. The dancers are also beating out rhythms on the floor and various objects. Carol has cymbals on the inner sides of her knees. 

            Lesley Ann Warren began training in ballet at 6. She studied at the High School of Music and Art and won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet at 14. At 17 she became the youngest student to ever be accepted at the Actors Studio and studied under Lee Strasberg. Her film debut was in The Chapman Report in 1962. The same year she made her TV debut on The Doctors. She made her Broadway debut in 110 in the Shade in 1963 and won Broadway’s Most Promising Newcomer Award. She co-starred in The One and Only Original Family Band, Pickup On 101, Harry and Walter Go to New York, Choose Me (for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe), Songwriter (for which she won a People’s Choice Award), A Night in Heaven, The Shore, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Victor/Victoria (for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar), Cop, Race for the Yankee Zephyr, Worth Winning, Life Stinks, Love Kills, Richie Rich’s Christmas Wish, Pure Country, The Limey, Peep World, 3 Days with Dad, Between Us, and It Snows All the Time. She replaced Barbara Bain on Mission Impossible for one season and was nominated for a Golden Globe. She won a Golden Globe for her performance in the TV movie 79 Park Avenue. She starred in When Do We Eat?, On TV she Bonda Jo Weaver on Dr. Kildare, played Jinx Shannon on In Plain Sight, and Millicent Prescott on Panhandle

March 20, 1996: The turnout was dropping at my open stage

Thirty years ago today

            On Tuesday night as usual I hosted my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage in the Art Bar of the Gladstone Hotel. The turn-out was starting to drop.