Performance

 

       

            I spent most of Thursday getting caught up on my journal about what happened on Wednesday. When I was writing about how I'd quoted some verses by "The Last Poets" to George Elliot Clarke and him telling me about the movie “Poetic Justice”, which also guest starred "The Last Poets", I decided to download “Poetic Justice”; “The Last Poets’ eponymous album from 1970 and the soundtrack to the great film “Performance” starring Mick Jagger.
            The dishevelled middle-aged woman with the curly hair who panhandles outside my window was taking advantage of the warmer weather by not bundling up in her winter coat. The coat is so new and white that she looks much more down and out without it, though didn’t notice a single person give her anything in the five minutes while I was watching. She was speaking about herself as she begged but it was as the autobiographical data was only half directed at those from whom she was asking alms. She said things like, “I’m a mother! I got a fourteen year old! I gave birth to a healthy baby boy! I’m a mother! I don’t wanna bother anybody!”
            I made a pretty good hash for dinner out of onions, ground chicken, potatoes and gravy. I ate it while watching Leave It To Beaver. One episode was interesting because it had Eddie Haskell do something uncharacteristically honourable. He came by the Cleaver house to tell them that he had a girlfriend and asked Wally if he wanted to meet her. He took him to a big house in the rich part of town but Eddie didn’t ring the bell. They were about to leave when a woman opened the door and guessed they were there to see her daughter Caroline and so she invited them in. Caroline didn’t know Eddie any more than she did Wally but she liked Wally a lot. Later she called Wally with the intention of asking him to take her to the dance but he felt uncomfortable talking to the person that Eddie had claimed was his girl so he cut the conversation short. Caroline’s mother called June to arrange for Wally to take her daughter to the dance. Wally was upset because he thought she was his best friend’s girl. Eddie came over pretending to have a sore throat and asked Wally to take Caroline to the dance for him because he knew he wouldn’t take her without his consent, so he did. So Eddie was sort of being a nice guy for once even though he was still lying about Caroline being his girl.
            As I was washing the dishes I looked out my side window and saw a guy that I recognized from the food bank line-up. He was storming drunk and angry across O’Hara towards another guy and confronted him. The guy was not very responsive. He started walking up the street but the drunken guy charged and grabbed him again. Then a friend of the drunken guy crossed the street to talk to him and another man came from around the corner and they were all talked for a minute until the drunken guy put his arms around the guy he’d confronted and gently kissed him on the cheek. Then they both walked up O’Hara together.