Sue Ane Langdon

            I had a pretty good song practice on Tuesday morning and my guitar stayed in tune longer than usual. I was belting out the songs, I felt connected with the lyrics and I made fewer mistakes. It’s interesting how some days just pop up like that.

            There was a chance of rain in the late afternoon and so I decided that I wouldn’t take a bike ride. The Weather Network switched the time of that possibility to after I would have gotten home but by then it was fifteen minutes before I would have wanted to comfortably leave. Since I had writing to do I decided to just stay home. I’ve managed to avoid getting soaked all summer and I like being dry.

            I looked out my window and saw Du Juan, whom I hadn’t seen for a few months. He stood underneath my window while I leaned out and we chatted. He told me that he’d had a nervous breakdown four months ago and hasn’t worked since. He’s living off Employment Insurance right now.

I got caught up on my writing.

I had a chicken leg for dinner and watched two episodes of Mike Hammer, during which the rain came down hard for a while.

In the first story a guy named Gus that Hammer had put away for eight years has just gotten out of prison and has sent Hammer a tape promising that he is going to kill him. Hammer has a good laugh and then leaves for the vacation on the beach that he’d been on his way to when he got the tape. But when Hammer gets back, the word on the street is that Hammer turned chicken and ran when his life was threatened. Hammer wants to settle this once and for all and so he tries to track Gus down through his estranged wife Gladys, who runs an arcade. She arranges for Hammer to come to the arcade after closing time to meet Gus but when he arrives he is ambushed. Hammer ends up shooting Gladys’s boyfriend Max and finds Gus tied up in the back room. The plan had been to shoot Hammer with Gus’s gun and then to shoot Gus with Hammer’s gun. Gus had not really planned on killing Hammer but when he’d heard that Hammer was scared he started bragging around town and Gladys thought she’d take advantage of it.

Gladys was played by Barbara Stuart, who played Bunny, the girlfriend of Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle. She was married to Dick Gautier, who played Hymie the robot on Get Smart.

In the second story a showgirl named Ruby Duval comes to Hammer for help because she’s been assaulted by her future sister in law, Joyce Conroy, who does not want her brother Phillip to disgrace the family name by marrying someone like Ruby. Hammer goes to the Conroy mansion to tell Joyce to lay off and finds her to be the dominant figure of the family and she refuses to back down. Phillip, on the other hand is meek and his only act of defiance ever against his sister has been his decision to marry Ruby. Joyce has offered Ruby $5000 to give up on Phillip and Ruby calls Joyce to meet her at the club and talk it over. But later that night Hammer comes to see Ruby and finds her dead in her dressing room. Of course Joyce is the prime suspect and she is arrested for murder. But as Hammer thinks about it he sees Joyce as someone that might have hurt ruby with her bare hands but not shoot her. He suspects that the stage manager, Hugo might have let someone else back to see Ruby. He drops the bate to Hugo that he suspects someone else to be the killer and then outside the theatre he hides because he knows Hugo is going to meet the killer. In an alley outside the theatre Hugo meets someone we can’t see and asks for money but he is attacked. Hammer opens fire on the attacker and puts a bullet in Phillip’s leg. At the police station and in a wheelchair Deforest Kelly, the future Dr Bones McCoy of Star Trek, refuses to make a confession until his sister is present. When she arrives he rolls around in his wheelchair and gives a striking performance as he confesses to having only romanced Ruby just to hurt Joyce. Everything that has happened to him and will happen to him is worth it because he will be satisfied to know how thoroughly he’s soiled the Conroy family name.

Ruby was played by Sue Ane Langdon who had a respectable career as a sexy comedic actor in film and television. She was a regular on Arnie for two years and had a shot at her own sitcom called When the Whistle Blows in 1980 but it failed, one of the reasons probably being that it was an hour long sitcom.

Joyce was played by Frances Robinson, who was apparently one of the most sought after acting coaches in her time. Katherine Hepburn would not begin a role until she’d first rehearsed it for a week with Frances Robinson.

By the end of the second story the rain was falling again, but this time like an avalanche. It must have knocked some branches down around the city. It was so thick it was almost like looking through fog and for some reason two small geysers were shooting out of the manhole cover in the middle of Dunn Avenue until a car ran over it and the little waterspouts stopped.