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.

Jo Anne Worley

                                              

            On Friday morning I finally memorized the nineteenth verse of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian. There are eleven lines left to learn. 

            I continued to search for images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg but only found one this time. 

            I weighed 87.55 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since December 24. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it stayed in tune the whole time. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic. 

            Around midday I finished painting the second coat of “blue bliss” on the trim that runs along the north, east, and south walls between the walls above and the tiles below in the bathroom. I think two coats will be enough and so on Tuesday I can start painting the door frame with the same colour. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride but it was snowing wet snow and so I decided to only go as far as Dovercourt and Bloor. I went south to Queen and west to home. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos at 17:35. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:47. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and extracted to my hard drive side one of a tape of an early Christian and the Lions rehearsal with Steve Lowe on guitar and Arjan on bass. Steve was teaching Arjan how to play my songs on bass. This is the one I’ve been struggling with all week and the recording is just as distorted as the first time I tried. Previous tapes have not come out that way and I’ve digitized more than fifteen with this system. Maybe it’s the old tape but the recording I made with the same cassette to MP3 converter is cleaner, albeit with skipping. I can’t think of what settings to change. I’ll try recording side two tomorrow. 

            I renamed some images in my Photos folder and deleted some others. 

            I had a salad with grape tomatoes, avocadoes, mini cucumber, and lime juice while watching the penultimate episode of Captain Nice. 

            Captain Nice attends the opening of a new Apple club in Bigtown. Apple clubs are similar to Playboy clubs in this story and the owner Lloyd Larchmont is clearly a parody of Hugh Hefner. He’s so extremely self absorbed he doesn’t remember anyone’s last name. 

            Part of the club opening ceremony involves Larchmont biting into the ceremonial apple but Captain Nice stops him because he notices a particular discolouration on the platform where the apple had been sitting. He crushes the apple and sulphuric acid drips out. Larchmont is somewhat indifferent to being targeted for death and is disappointed that now he won’t know what his last words would have been. 

            He says his clubs are not a business but the fulfillment of everyone’s dreams. Everyone deserves to eat, drink, and make noise while surrounded by girls who smile endlessly no matter what. 

            Carter fingerprints all of the Apple girls. One of them tells him she’s really a magazine model and not a waitress. Carter asks what magazine she models for and she answers “The Waitress Weekly”. Another girl tells him her hobbies include phoning the weather bureau, reading the Dead Sea Scrolls and training gold fish. She prefers to date either middle North Americans or men from foreign nations. In her spare time she is studying to be a nuclear physicist (but she pronounces it as “physikist).

            Larchmont introduces the person who trains all his Apple girls and who’s been one of his closest advisors and his faithful right arm for many years: “Rusty… (and he forgets her last name)” She says “Davis”. He then introduces his attorney Lionel Barrot, “Without whom I could not have created my new project”. Lionel says, “You would have achieved greatness without anybody’s help”. Larchmont says, “You’re absolutely right”. 

            His latest project is the Lloyd Larchmont Foundation where his disciples will rise at dawn, live on roots and herbs, and study the teachings of Lloyd Larchmont. There will be only two rules: Each man must strive to achieve a oneness with the universe and each girl must kick back 50% of her tips.

            Sergeant Candy Cane is going to go undercover and become an Apple Girl, with only Larchmont knowing who she is. The mayor asks Carter to go for dinner there to hear her report. He takes his mother Esther and his father Harvey. It’s the first time we’ve seen Carter’s father out of his easy chair and out from behind his newspaper but he is behind the menu instead. 

            Candy is shy about wearing the skimpy costume. 

            Larchmont shows her a picture of his parents who made every conceivable sacrifice for his success. Candy asks where are they now and he answers, “Beats me”. 

            Lionel runs secretly to Rusty’s arms in a storage room. She tells him they can’t keep meeting like this. He asks why and she says “Because I don’t like you”. They discuss their plot to kill Larchmont. She says if Larchmont found out he wouldn’t speak to her for days. 

            Rusty says she wants to talk with Larchmont and guides him under a chandelier. Candy sees that the chandelier is about to fall and pushes him out of the way. 

            Carter wants to check on Candy but Esther convinces him that it would be better for her to do it. They’ve got Candy running the souvenir counter. She tells Esther that Rusty’s part of the plot to kill Larchmont but then Rusty steps up with a gun and takes them both to Larchmont’s apartment where they are tied up. Then Larchmont is tied up as well. Lionel rigs a tape recorder with a bomb. He presses “play” and his recorded voice counts backward from 20 and when he reaches 1 it will explode. 

            Carter goes looking for his mother and Candy. One of the Apple girls says she saw them go upstairs with Rusty. At the backward count of 10 Carter enters the room and unties everyone. At 5 he’s alone in the room. At 3 he drinks his super power formula and at 1 he shields the explosion with his body. Rusty and Lionel are arrested. 

            Rusty was played by Jo Anne Worley, who was known as the school comedienne in high school. After graduation she apprenticed with the Pickwick Players. She won a two year Dramatic scholarship to Midwestern State University in Texas and then moved west to study at the Pasadena Playhouse. She made her professional debut in a production of Wonderful Town. She made her TV debut on The Many Loves of Dobey Gllis in 1960. She made her Broadway debut in Billy Barnes People in 1961. Her film debut was as an extra in Moon Pilot in 1962. In 1966 she was starring in a nightclub act in Greenwich village when she was discovered by Merv Griffin. She appeared over 40 times on his TV show. That led to her being cast in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. She was very popular on the show and became a star. After Laugh-In she became a star of musical theatre. She is president of Actors and Others for Animals.

March 14, 1996: I was offered a feature at the Art Bar reading series

Thirty years ago today

            On Wednesday evening I went to the Art Bar reading series and Pierre L’Abbé invited me to do a feature there in the summer.

Dick Curtis

            On Thursday I thought for sure I would be able to finally memorize the nineteenth verse of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian but I was plagued by memory lapses. I would forgot a line from the middle of the song that I usually breeze through. I would repeat it to get it back in my head and then I’d start the song again and get that line right but forget another one. I finally made it all the way through and even got verse nineteen right but then I saw that I’d forgotten one line from verse fifteen. Some days are just bad memory days and then everything comes back the next day so hopefully I’ll be able to nail the nineteenth verse down tomorrow. I spent over an hour on this and so I didn’t have time today to gather images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time.

            I renamed some images of the same people so they would move together in my Photos folder. 

            I weighed 89.05 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown but should have worn long underwear. I stopped to pee at the Yonge and College McDonald’s. On the way home I stopped at Freshco where the grapes were super cheap and firm and so I got seven bags, I also bought a pack of blueberries, some bananas, several avocadoes, three mangoes, and a bottle of cranberry-raspberry juice. 

            I weighed 88.5 kilos at 19:10. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:07. 

            I tried to record from the same cassette to Audacity again that I’ve been attempting to digitize for the last few days. The clip of Leonard Cohen before my band starts playing still has no waveform but when my band is playing there is a waveform. It was like that before and the recording sounded distorted. I tried a restart but it didn’t help. I didn’t have time to fiddle with it tonight because I got home too late so I’ll try again tomorrow. 

            I ate some grapes while watching episode 12 of Captain Nice on archive.org because that episode didn’t come with my download. 

            Carter Nash is helping his mother Esther shop when she notices the well known gangster Harry Houseman entering the post office. She wonders how he got out of prison and Carter explains that he was paroled because two politicians gave him excellent references. He knew them because they had been cellmates. They look in the window of Houseman’s car and see it’s full of guns. So Carter drinks his last bottle of formula to turn into Captain Nice. He confronts Houseman and looks into the box he is about to mail to find more guns. But it turns out that the guns are all toys. One of them is a cap gun and Sergeant Candy Cane asks if there’s a law against carrying one. Chief Segal says he’s been carrying one for years. 

            Now Carter is out of his formula and he can’t make a new batch without sodiumphenocarbolate. There’s only one place in the country that has it and he sent for it a month ago through the mayor’s office. He leaves his mother in the lab and goes to the mayor’s office to find what happened. He is told to go look in storage for his requisition form. When he returns to the lab and finds his mother has washed the evidence from all his microscope slides because she thought they were dirty. 

            Carter tries to add to the formula the closest thing to sodiumphenocarbolate, which is salt. He drinks it and transforms but not to a hero. Now dogs are chasing him because he smells like hamburger. He makes more of the hamburger odour and throws it out the window to draw the dogs away and it works. 

            On their way home they pass the post office where they see Houseman and his henchman Bostic getting let into the locked post office by an inside man. Carter and Esther are going to go call the police when they are stopped by Bostic, who pulls a gun and forces them inside. They are tied up in the mail room. Houseman goes to look through the mail to see if there is anything of value to steal. Esther tries to appeal to him and asks, “What do you suppose your mother is doing right now?” He says, “Ten to twenty for kidnapping”. 

            Houseman finds a package addressed to Carter and tosses it to him. He thinks it’s amusing because he won’t live to open it. He leaves and Carter’s hands are just free enough to open it. It’s the sodiumphenocarbolate he ordered. The incomplete bottle of formula is in his briefcase and they are able to complete it but Carter’s hands aren’t free enough to drink it. However one of the toy squirt guns is nearby and Esther is able to load some of the formula into it and aim it at Carter’s mouth. He transforms into Captain Nice, breaks free and captures Houseman and his gang in mailbags. 

            Chief Segal arrives to arrest them. He asks Esther why he always sees her around crime and violence. She says she guesses it’s because she doesn’t get enough of it at home. 

            Bostic was played by Dick Curtis, who started in Hollywood at the age of 8, running errands for actors. He became a singer, dancer, and nightclub performer and cut two record albums. He joined the Marines during WWII and afterward returned to entertaining, starting with The Jack Benny Show. He was a regular castmember of the Jonathan Winters Show. He was the voice of Motormouse. He did commercials for Blitz-Weinhard beer. He wrote for Revue 61 and The Spade Cooley Show.

March 13, 1996: My landlady complained my guests and I talked too loud

Thirty years ago today

             On Tuesday evening I hosted as always my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage. Afterwards I brought some people back to my place for coffee. My landlady Helga complained about the noise of our conversation.

Felice Orlandi

            On Wednesday morning I gathered a couple more images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 201 now. 

            I weighed 87.65 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin acoustic for the second of two sessions and it went out of tune during almost every song. It liked yesterday’s weather but not today’s. 

            Around midday I finished painting the first coat of “blue bliss” along the trim between the bathroom walls above and the wall tiles below, plus I painted the plate of the wall outlet. They’ll need another coat when I return to the project on Friday. After that I’ll start the door frame and the door with the same colour. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back stopped at Freshco. I had to pee really bad and was considering going home first because the Freshco washroom had been out of order for weeks. But I took a chance and went straight to the supermarket where I found they’ve finally fixed the washroom. 

            All the grapes were too soft and so I just bought two bags of oranges and a pack of Sponge Towels. The towels were more than $2 cheaper because of my Scene card. I weighed 88.35 kilos at 19:20. I was caught up in my journal at 20:34 so it was too late to try digitizing the cassette tape that failed the last couple of times I tried. 

            I ate three oranges while watching episode 8 of Captain Nice on Archive.org because it didn’t come in my download of the series. 

            The police have a gang of bank robbers surrounded but the crooks are firing machine guns through the window of the bank at the cops on the street. They can’t get them to surrender but as soon as Captain Nice arrives and speaks to them through the megaphone the crooks give up. 

            They get off because they confess to the crime without a lawyer present. It was their leader Lucky’s idea. 

            At city hall the counsellors argue that the police force is useless because all of the crimes are being stopped by Captain Nice. A decision is made to cut the police force in half and so Carter Nash loses his job as police chemist and Sergeant Candy Cane also gets the shaft. When Carter tells his mother Esther that he’s been fired along with half the force, she is very upset. 

            When Carter goes to his room she takes his costume and his super power serum and heads to the Fashion Centre because tonight the Selma diamond will be on display. She plans to steal it in order to teach the city council a lesson. But Lucky and his gang see Esther in the alley and grab her because they think she’s competition. Then Lucky finds Captain Nice’s costume in her purse and he thinks she must have some connection to the super hero so they hold her hostage while they enter the museum. 

            Carter realizes his mother is missing and so is his costume and serum. He concludes that she must have gone to the Fashion Centre. He tells Candy to round up as many ex-cops as she can find and meet him there. 

            Carter sees his mother there with Lucky’s gang but she denies knowing him. She tells Lucky that Carter is her dentist. They lead her away and she tosses her purse behind her to Carter and it contains his costume and serum. 

            The gang steals the diamond. 

            Captain Nice arrives and one of the councilmen demands to know where he’s been. Nice points out that the city pays him nothing and so they are lucky he drops in sometimes. Then Candy and several of the fired cops arrive, having done a citizens arrest and taken Lucky and his gang into custody. The councilmen are reminded that the police are necessary after all. 

            Lucky was played by Felice Orlandi, who was married to Alice Ghostly, who played Carter’s mother Esther Nash. It was one of the rare occasions they worked together because his focus was drama while her’s was comedy. They were together for 52 years until he died. He earned a Theatre-Arts degree at Carnegie Tech. He made his Broadway debut in The Girl on the Via Flaminia in 1954. He made his film debut in Killer’s Kiss in 1955. He co-starred in The Pusher.

March 12, 1996: I was on the fourth day of my annual fruit fast

Thirty years ago today

             On Monday I probably worked somewhere. I was also on the fourth day of my annual fruit fast and feeling a little weak.