Moira Walley-Beckett

            When I got up on Tuesday the tightness in my right thigh didn’t bother me as much as the day before. After yoga though it felt worse and it seemed the discomfort had spread up to around my hip. My right arm started bothering me too so I think this whole problem might be tied up with the new exercise I’ve been doing for the last month of putting my weight for a minute only on my right arm and right leg with my left leg and arm in the air. It’s weird that it bothers me on that side because it’s actually easier to do it on the right while on the left maintaining my balance is more difficult.

            It’s strange tuning my guitar with the new strings because I’m so used to how the dull ones sounded when they were in tune that now that they are new and brilliant sounding it throws me off.

            When I checked my email at 9:30 there was a message from Enrollment Services asking me for my financial information before they could process my grant application. I spent two hours from the end of the morning to the early afternoon going through my files to find all the stubs from my social assistance payments and then to scan them. I also printed my pay statements from the OCADU website. I put them all in an envelope and rode downtown.

I stopped at Bathurst and Bloor to check with my doctor’s office to see if they’d phoned in my prescription renewals to the drug store. The receptionist said that my renewals had been approved but she hadn’t called my pharmacy yet because she had a large pile of similar calls to make.

At Enrollment Services there was a big line-up so I just put my envelope in the document box outside and then left.

I decided that since I was downtown already and since school was starting next week that I’d buy a notebook and some pens. I rode down Queen’s Park Circle to University, stopped at Dundas to take some money out of the bank machine and then rode down to Staples. I bought some pens and a purple notebook. I’d thought that the notebook was on sale for $2.99 but it rang up as $9.99. The 5 Star notebooks that were on sale were also single subject, 200 page notebooks but the cashier explained that the one I selected had a heavy duty cover and the ones on sale were not available in that colour. I was disappointed but I bought it anyway.

I stopped at Freshco on the way home and got a basket of Ontario peaches, some Ontario grapes and some BC blueberries. I also got a little hand mop for washing bottles and tall glasses, some stainless steel wool and a can of Comet.

I rode straight to Vina Pharmacy and they’d just gotten the call from Dr Shechtman’s office but it would still take ten minutes for my prescription to be ready, so I went home and had lunch.

The yogourt that I buy contains 750 grams of yogourt. Up until I found out my weight last week I’d always eaten half of a container for one serving. I’ve been trying to cut that down to a third but it’s taken me a few days to figure out the volume of 250 grams of yogourt since the container only shows the weight. After several meals of eating yogourt from a measuring cup I finally figured out that 250 grams works out to a little less than 200 ml.

I took a siesta at 16:00 and so it was too late for a long bike ride when I got up at 17:40. My ride downtown and back earlier hadn’t bothered my leg at all while pedaling but I was sore again in the leg, hip and arm when I woke up.

I went over to Vina and got my prescriptions.

            That night I watched the first part of a two part Mike Hammer, Private Eye story called “Songbird”. This story involves a jazz singer named Lila who is the girlfriend of a mobster named Johnny Dive. Johnny tells Lila to take his gun and run just before he gets busted. The cops give him no choice but to wear a wire in a meeting with the godfather of his mob family but he is caught. The cops raid the place just before they can kill Johnny and in the shootout Johnny gets away. Lila is also on the run because minutes after leaving a club with a piano player he is killed in the alley with her gun. Hammer tracks Lila down but before he can get any information from her the cops knock on the door. Hammer helps Lila get away and so the district attorney throws him in jail.

            There is a bizarre interrogation of the son of the mob boss, who has a very pronounced stutter. When the captain gets him in the interrogation room, instead of asking him about his father he says, “Seventeen people get on a city bus. The bus makes four stops before it gets to the cemetery. At all the stops seven people get on the bus and at every other stop one person gets off the bus, now the question I have for you is how many people are left on the damn BUS when it gets to the freakin cemetery! Answer me!" "I don't know what the hell you're talking about! Can you repeat the question please?” He repeats it. The son stutters “Six!” and the captain, imitating the guy’s stutter like an asshole says, "Wr - wrong!" “I don’t understand! What does this have to do with the case?" “Everything and nothing. You’re up to your twisted little tongue in this crap!” “I didn’t do nothing!" "Constantinople is a really big word. If you can't spell it you're a really big dope.” "I don't understand." "Constantinople is a really big word. If you can't spell it you're a really big dope!" He spells it "Constantipole!" "Wrong! 'It. I.T.’ If you can’t spell ‘it’ you're a really big DOPE!" “I don’t know!” Then they let him go. 

            The portrayal of mobsters in this show is pretty sad even if one doesn’t compare it to The Sopranos, which came out seven months later.

            Johnny Dive is played by Frank Stallone.

            Almost all of the jazz musicians are white and the woman who plays Lila, Canadian producer and writer, Moira Walley-Beckett is a good singer but she’s not jazz club caliber. Perhaps rather than have Beckett sing and act in this episode they should have had her write it because she went on ten years later to write some of the most critically acclaimed episodes of Breaking Bad.