September 26, 1996: I bought a motorcycle jacket and a leather jockstrap

Thirty years ago today 

            On Thursday I went to Northbound Leather and bought a motorcycle jacket. I also bought a leather jock strap.

Julie Andrews

            On Monday after midnight I lint rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room and picked up several bedbugs. I also lint rolled my pillow and the top of my bed and a bedbug turned up there as well. I put some more carpet tape along the edges of my mattress where the older tape had gotten less sticky. I went to bed at around 1:30 and got to sleep after 2:00. 

            I dreamed that the whole top-right side of my teeth came out as if they were a set of dentures. I got up with the alarm at 5:00 and did my yoga.

            After yoga I checked for bedbugs and didn’t find any.

            I posted a picture on my Boris Vian fan page of Vian climbing into his Brasier Torpedo car in 1911. 

            I posted the lyrics for “Come Young Gendarmes”, my translation of “Venez donc voir” by Boris Vian on my Boris Vian fan Facebook page and on my personal Facebook page. The next Vian song on my list is “Les bienfaits de la pratique” (The Benefits of Practice) and I found the text but there is no audio available. So I’ll just translate the lyrics without memorizing them. 

            I finished memorizing “La fille aux claquettes” (The Tap Dancing Girl) by Serge Gainsbourg. On Tuesday I’ll finish revising my translation and then I’ll start working out the chords. 

            I weighed 90.85 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and went out of tune more than half the time. 

            I called Jamal Logan, the bylaw officer assigned to my complaint about bedbugs. I had been told by the city that he would get in touch within ten days but it was now 17 days. He said the ten day promise was very unrealistic because there is a backlog of cases and he is a month behind. He asked me to send him pictures of the bedbugs. I was disappointed to learn that he can’t force the landlord to treat the entire building and only has the power to make the landlord deal with the unit of the complaining tenant. He told me I would have to contact Rent Safe to force an inspection of the entire building. 

            I weighed 91.75 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 91.5 kilos at 18:10, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since last Monday. 

            I was still a day behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had a potato with gravy and some pork ribs while watching a video of Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews’ opening number at Lincoln Centre in 1971; a 1978 promo for A Special Evening With Carol Burnett; a preview of The Carol Burnett Show Reunion; a Show Business Tonight countdown of Carol’s favourite sketches; and a Carol and Company backstage tour. 

            For the Carol and Julie show Ken and Mitzi Welch wrote all the music and stuff. The night before the show Carol decided it would be nice to put some highlights in her hair. She went to an all night drug store and bought a bottle of peroxide. She put a little here and there on her hair and then went to bed. The next morning her husband looked at her in shock and exclaimed, “What did you do?” She looked in the mirror and all of her hair was the colour of straw and very dry. When she went to the dress rehearsal the hairdresser exclaimed, “What did you do?” He fixed it as best as he could. 

            Carol and Julie come out in similar gowns of different colours. They say the last time they did this was at Carnegie Hall and they vowed they wouldn’t let another birthday go by before they did another show together. Carol says, “Just think, that was ten years ago.” “And here we are, both one year older.” Julie asks Carol what she’s been doing with herself all these years. “Are you still in entertainment?” “I’m on television.” “Oh, what a shame!” “What have you been doing?” “I’ve been working in motion pictures.” “Talkies?” “I went out to Hollywood to do The Sound of Music.” “Did it ever come off?” They both admit they were kidding. Carol asks Julie to “Promise you won’t cut up tonight like you did at Carnegie Hall!” “Me?” Carol begins a song about how they shouldn’t misbehave tonight. Julie joins in and sings how they must be “Ladylike tonight”. They’ll sing “Nothing cheaper than Strauss tonight”. Julie says “This means no Charwoman!” Carol says, “No Cockney!” “Try to keep your gown down tonight!” “Me? I’m the mother of three!” They are dancing and at the end of the song Carol pulls Julie’s skirt off so she’s standing in her panties before they both run off stage. 

            There’s nothing special about the 21 second promo for the 1978 special. 

            The preview just has what the reunion has, which I’ll be covering later. 

            Carol, Tim and Vicki are guests on Entertainment Tonight for the countdown of Carol’s favourite sketches. #5 is the No Frills Airline in which Tim is the only discount passenger one seat behind Harvey, who is in first class. Tim is treated like shit and somehow gets turbulence while Harvey doesn’t. Vickie says they just lucked into an amazing chemistry among really good friends. #4 is when Vicki as Mama improvised some insults about Eunice’s sanity such as, “You got splinters in the windmills of your mind!” The video I have doesn’t show #s 3, 2, and 1. 

            In the last video Carol leads a tour of Studio 33 where her show was taped 25 years before. They shot all 11 seasons there. Vickie says the studio still smells like CBS. Carol says that the cue card boys were gourmet chefs and on Thursdays they would cook meals. Lyle says the crews were amazing and they could set things up in no time. There were five cameras. The cameramen were funny guys. Pat the cameraman was often making cracks to Carol during the her question and answer segment. A little girl in the audience asked, “If he’s a smart guy how come you don’t fire him?” Carol says they had a 28 piece orchestra, which would be impossible today. Now they just use synthesizers. Vicki shows us the star dressing room. Where the flat screen TV is now there was a piano and Vicki often found Red Skelton tinkling on it because they used to share the stage with him when they first started. He listened to her whole story about how she met Carol and how she was going to be on her new show. He used to love to write music to relax and he had a piece of sheet music he was working on. He scribbled “Vicki” across the top, signed it, gave it to her and said, Good luck!” Carol says Bob Mackie made 60 to 70 costumes a week, which is also unheard of today. He would get the script for the following week on Friday night and made the costumes in his workshop outside the studio. Vicki says in 1971 Sonny and Cher premiered on the stage next door. If you wanted to find out what Cher was wearing on a given night you’d walk through the shared ladies room to the other studio. Jim Nabors, Glen Campbell, Merv Griffin, and The Smothers Brothers were all next door. Carol show the room where the writers and the producers would sit and watch the dress rehearsal while making notes. Then the cast would get the notes and make improvements for the second show at 20:00. Lyle says he used to spend a lot of time in the booth with the directors, watching them shoot the show. Carol says when Sue Vogelsanger came out of the audience to ask her to perform her song and Carol told her they’d do it next week, the people in the booth were waving frantically to try to signal her not to do it. For weeks after that they got people sending in songs but they never did it again. 

            Julie Andrews’ parents were vaudeville performers who noticed early on their daughter had a four octave singing voice and put her on stage with them in music halls throughout her childhood years and teens. She could sing notes only dogs could hear at the age of 7. She studied ballet, ballroom and tap, which gave her strong stage movement and rhythm for her later work in acting and in musicals. She made her West End debut in 1948. At age 12 she gave a royal command performance for King George VII, Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), Princess Elizabeth (the future queen) and Princess Margaret. She co-starred on the radio program Educating Archie from 1950 to 1952. At the age of 20 she made her professional stage debut at the London Palladium in Cinderella, which was written for her. She made her Broadway debut in The Boyfriend in 1954. She made her television debut in High Tor in 1955. She became a star in 1956 when she played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Her debut album was The Lass With the Delicate Air in 1957. Between 1956 and 1962 she appeared on several top variety shows, including Ed Sullivan. She made her film debut in Mary Poppins in 1964, for which she won an Academy Award. She starred in The Sound of Music (for which she also won a Grammy Award), Thoroughly Modern Millie, Star, The Tamarind Seed, Duet For One, Darling Lili, S.O.B., Victor Victoria, The Princess Diaries 1 and 2, Eloise at the Plaza, Eloise at Christmastime, Hawaii, She co-starred in The Americanization of Emily, Torn Curtain, Little Miss Marker, The Man Who Loved Women, That’s Life, 10, The Princess Diaries 2, Shrek 2, Shrek the Third, Shrek Forever After, Enchanted (as narrator), The Tooth Fairy, Despicable Me, Despicable Me 3, The King’s Daughter (as narrator), Minions, She starred in The Julie Andrews Hour (for which she won an Emmy), Julie’s Greenroom, She is the narrator for Bridgerton (for which she won an Emmy). She won $30 million when she sued over the botched throat surgery that temporarily ruined her singing voice. After recovery she sang “Your Crowning Glory” in The Princess Diaries 2. She wrote Home: A Memoir of My Early Years and The Very Fairy Princess. She won a Grammy for A Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies. Queen Elizabeth made her a Dame in 1999. She has a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland and every year she pays for the town’s Christmas lights and presents the prize in July for the Gstaad tennis open. She had a bumper sticker that read “Mary Poppins is a Junkie”. Before she met her husband Blake Edwards she heard that he’d said of her, “She’s so sweet she probably has violets between her legs.” She sent him a bouquet of violets. She’s won three Grammy Awards and three Emmy Awards.

September 25, 1996: I bought a couple of Goth shirts

Thirty years ago today

            On Wednesday I made appointments with the optometrist and the dentist. Now that I had the money from my inheritance I could afford to get some glasses and to get my teeth fixed. I also bought a couple of nice shirts at the local Goth clothing store.

September 24, 1996: Our featured poet was Phil Onious

Thirty years ago today

            On Tuesday I posed from 9:00 to 16:00 for a portrait class in room 356 at the Ontario College of Art. I went home for a while and then in the evening I went to the Gladstone Hotel to host my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage. Our feature that night was Phil Onious with his unique guitar tunings and his quirky songs and lyrics. He was always entertaining with his weird theories about humanity and apparently absurd claims like that he wrote all the Beatles’ sons. But I think he meant his generation wrote them.

Zero Mostel

            On Sunday after midnight I added more carpet tape to the side edges of my mattress. I lint rolled the top of my bed and picked up a couple of bedbugs. I lint rolled both sides of the curtains between the bedroom and the living room and caught at least twenty. A lint roller is an essential tool for fighting bedbugs. I went to bed at around 1:40 and slept fairly well until 4:15 when I got up to pee. Then I went back to bed and slept until the 5:00 alarm. After yoga I found a couple of bedbugs stuck to the tape on my mattress and I caught three more on the curtain with the lint roller. 

            I published “Venez donc voir” (“Come On and See”) by Boris Vian on my Christian’s Translations blog and then found some photos of Vian with his Brasier Torpedo car in 1911. 

            I memorized the third verse of “La fille aux claquettes” (The Tap Dancing Girl) by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s just one chorus left to learn and I should have that done on Monday. 

            I weighed 90.75 kilos before breakfast.

            I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune all the time. 

            Around midday I went over to Home Hardware where I bought two more rolls of carpet tape. This time they had more of the longer indoor tape which is more expensive but easier to peel than the outdoor tape. I asked the guy at the cash if business has picked up since Dollarama closed but he said not that he’s noticed. The customer behind me asked what they are going to put there now and I said I think they’re tearing it down to put up a complex. The cashier said he thinks there’s going to be condos with some low income housing but they’d probably be small units. I looked it up and the plan is for The Parkdale Hub, consisting of a West Block where the Dollarama is now; a middle block where the library and 1313 Queen is now; and an East Block at the corner of Cowan and Queen, which will house a new library and a new community centre. 

            I weighed 91.95 kilos before lunch. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

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

            I weighed 91.3 kilos at 18:25. 

            I was still a day behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I made pizza on a slice of 7 grain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a burger sliced in half edgewise, and a slice of five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching Carol + 2, a 1966 television special starring Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball and Zero Mostel. 

            Zero asks, “Why must the openings of all television shows be so ridiculous? The guests are so surprised to see each other! Lucy! Carol! Carol, Zero, Lucy, Carol! Zero, Zero! Why must show business be so phony? Do three plumbers meet on a job and say, “Sam! Irving! Irving, Ari! Sam! What a lovely wrench! Is that a new plunger? The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous!” Lucy says, “Zero’s right about the openings of these shows! They’re ridiculous!” Carol says, “I know that but what else can ya say?” Lucy says, “Say what millions of people out there are saying right now: Why don’t they just shut up and go to work?” 

            Lucy comes out in a short pink outfit with top hat and a banjo and starts strumming “Way down upon the Swanee River”. I didn’t know she could play but she’s really forming the chords. Carol stops her and says, “Lucy, that’s enough. Zero’s ready.” 

            Carol and Zero play Florence and Fielding, a married couple on their tenth anniversary. They live in a run down apartment. He’s on the couch snacking and reading the paper while she’s behind him ironing and complaining about what a horrible ten years it’s been. She says she should have belted the justice of the peace right in the mouth. As she continues to rant Fielding repeatedly shouts, “Shut up!” to which Florence always responds, “Drop dead!” She says, “The least you could have done for our tenth anniversary is give me a little present like stepping out in front of a truck!” She is wearing a long slip and as she walks in front of him he says, “Can’t you put something on? I’m eating!” The phone rings and it’s Fielding’s brother telling him that the justice of the peace who married them didn’t have a valid license. That means they aren’t really married. Florence suddenly screams and covers her slip. She says she’s got to go stay with her mother. He says they’ll get married in the morning but she says, “What about tonight?” Suddenly he’s attracted to her again and starts to pursue her. She resists but she’s being coy and likes the courtship game. He becomes very romantic and she loves it. He leaves the room and sings, “Some Enchanted Evening” while Florence dresses as seductively as she can. He comes out with an unfinished bottle of champagne left over from last New Years and imported from Japan. She finally gives in to his advances and they are about to kiss when the phone rings again. It’s Fielding’s brother telling him it was all a prank and they really are still married. He knocks her off the couch and sits back where he began. She goes back to the iron and resumes complaining and they return to repeating “Shut up!” and “Drop dead!” It’s later and Fielding is asleep on the couch while Florence looks at their wedding portrait. She sings “You’re My Reason” by Mitzie Welch. He affectionately tells her to “shut up” and she sweetly replies, “Drop dead”. 

            Zero pushes a grand piano out on stage, then sits down and plays a classical flourish. He sings, “Millard Filmore is dead! Nobody came to the funeral!” Carol stops him and says, “That’s enough. Lucy and I are ready.” He pushes the piano back off stage. 

            Carol and Lucy play sisters Alice and Rita on the street near a bus stop. Alice is pushing a baby carriage. Rita has just visited with Rita and she’s about to catch her bus because she’s leaving to Miami for her first ever vacation. Her bus comes but Alice wants her to say goodbye to the baby so she can hear it say “goodbye” back. Alice won’t let her leave until the baby says goodbye but it doesn’t and so Rita misses her bus. She says she guesses it doesn’t feel like saying goodbye. Alice says that’s because it feels the hostility. “What hostility?” “You hate me!” “You’re my sister! I love you!” “Tell it to the baby” “She’s my sister, I love her!” “Try it now!” “Goodbye baby!” but there is no response. The next bus comes but Alice still won’t let Rita go. Rita starts walking away but Alice shouts, “Jack the Ripper, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly!” “How did they get into this?” “They’re just some of the others who were rejected by their aunts when they were 8 months old!” Alice wants them to reenact their visit but this time include the baby more in their conversations so he feels she’s interested in him. They catch up and Rita says “Goodbye baby!” but there is still no response. Alice still won’t let Rita go and she misses her third bus. Alice decides it’s because babies live in a horizontal word and can’t relate to adults who live in a vertical world. So she gets Rita to lie down on the sidewalk to talk to the baby and get it to say goodbye. Because from his point of view he’s standing up and Rita’s lying down so there’s no reason to say goodbye because if she’s lying down she can’t be going anywhere. She lies down and says goodbye but he still doesn’t say it. Rita tell Alice that she doesn’t think he’ll ever know how to say goodbye even if in a few months he recites the Gettysburg Address. Rita starts to leave but now Alice won’t say goodbye. Rita says, “I’m your sister!” “I have no sister!” Alice tells Rita she’s made the baby insecure and begs her to bring back the baby that says goodbye. Rita gives the baby her plane tickets, her money, and her hotel reservations and the baby says, “Goodbye” Alice says, Now he’s going to Miami! Goodbye Rita” and she leaves with the baby. 

            Carol and Lucy ask Zero to sing “If I Were a Rich Man” by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock like he did in Fiddler On the Roof on Broadway. He says he’s wearing a tuxedo in a Hollywood studio so it would be impossible to get into the mood. But the music starts up and he is taken over. He sings the song. 

            Zero plays a psychiatrist and Carol plays a woman who comes to him about her brother because he thinks he’s a frog. “Every time we’d go into a French restaurant he’d hide his legs!” She details all of her brother’s behaviours as a frog but notices that the doctor isn’t writing anything down. As she’s talking she rubs herself under the nose and the Doctor asks, “How long have you been doing that?” “Whenever it itches” and that’s the first thing he writes down. She continues talking about her brother and tries not to scratch her nose but it starts to drive her nuts. She rubs her nose on his sleeve, on the couch and on everything as she keeps on talking about her brother. She finally asks what’s wrong with her brother and the doctor tells her that what’s wrong with him is that he has a crazy sister. 

            Carol plays a seamstress at The Bunny Club and all the girls have gone home. Zero plays Eddy the bartender who comes backstage to see her. She likes him and is glad for the attention. He tells her it’s great to look at her after seeing all those gorgeous dames all night. He asks if she’s busy tonight and she excitedly says she isn’t. But then he hands her his jacket and asks her to fix the lining. Then he leaves her alone again. She looks in the mirror and sings the 1905 song “Wait Till the Sun Shines Nelly” by Harry Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling. 

            We see a shot of the office door of The William Morris Agency. We hear the voice of Lucy saying, “Certainly I’d like to have Cary Grant in the picture but not for $1.5 million and 60% of the profit!” Then we hear Carol argue, “What’s a million and a half dollars? Cary Grant’s name alone is enough to bring in an extra 3.5 million at the box office!” Then a door opens and we see Carol and Lucy are cleaning ladies at the agency. Lucy says she can tell them right now they’re gonna go $2 million over budget. Lucy and Carol are stealing booze from the office bar and then filling the bottle up with water. Carol says she’s heard they want to do Joan of Arc with Jane Mansfield. Lucy says Jane as Joan would take a long time to burn. Carol says she’s engaged to the doorman at the Paramount and knows Lucy doesn’t approve. Lucy says, “You know how I feel about show business marriages!” Carol says she thinking of quitting. “You mean leave show business? You can’t! It’s in your blood!” Carol says, “We’re just cleaning women!” “I don’t like that kind of talk! We’re just as important as anyone in show business because we got something special that sets us apart from the crowd!” “What is it?” “It’s called chutzpa!” They sing a song about having chutzpa probably written by Ken and Mitzi Welch. 

            Then Carol, Lucy and Zero sing a “Bye -Bye” song. 

            Zero Mostel’s early interests were drawing and painting and he used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to copy paintings. He copied John White Alexander’s Study in Black and Green Every Day. 

            He entered a Masters program in Art at New York University. He dropped out after a year and taught drawing and painting at the Y. He gave lectures at museums for the Works Progress Association and they were so humorous that he was hired to perform at private parties. 

            He got hired as a comedian at the Café Society at the start of WWII. 

            He made his Broadway debut in Keep em Laughing in 1942. 

            By 1943 he was performing on radio and touring nightclubs throughout the country. 

            He made his film debut in DuBarry Was a Lady in 1943. 

            He joined the army but was discharged for not being fit and spent the rest of the war entertaining the troops. 

            He made his TV debut on Off the Record in 1948. He appeared on Toast of the Town in 1949. 

            He was a leftist but not a communist but to the US government they were the same thing. He testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and told them he worked for 18th Century Fox. He refused to name names on religious grounds. He was blacklisted from movies pretty much throughout the 1950s but there was no blacklist in the theatre. 

            He won a Tony Award for his performance in Rhinoceros in 1960. He won his second Tony in 1962 for his performance in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum. He won his third Tony in 1965 for Fiddler on the Roof (He created the cantorial sounds for the song “If I Were a Rich Man”), which ran for eight years. 

            He starred in the film adaptation of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, The Angel Levine, Mastermind, The Producers, The Great Bank Robbery, Once Upon a Scoundrel, and Foreplay. He co-starred in The Front, Panic in the Streets, The Enforcer, Great Catherine, Marco, Rhinoceros, Journey Into Fear, Hollywood On Trial, Watership Down, and The Hot Rock. 

            He played Spell Binder on 650 episodes of The Electric Company. 

            He considered himself to be a comic genius and often clashed with directors and other performers. He frequently improvised during performances and caused confusion among his co-actors. He would dominate the stage whether he was the star or not. This is apparently why he was not chosen to reprise his role of Tevya in the film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof. When Mostel first met Gene Wilder for The Producers he embraced him and kissed him on the lips. They remained close friends for life. 

            He spoke Yiddish, Italian, and German.

September 23, 1996: I got my inheritance and thought I was rich

Thirty years ago today

             On Monday my inheritance from my father appeared in my bank account. $15,000 was the most money I’d ever had and I thought I was rich. The first thing I did was to look into how to change my name legally to Christian Christian. I went to Service Ontario and got an application form. I filled it out and sent it in with my birth certificate and a cheque for $137.

September 22, 1996: I spent Sunday with my daughter

Thirty years ago today 

            On Sunday my daughter’s grandparents dropped her off at my place and after a day of play I gave her back to her mother.