Olive Sturgess

            A Punky-Gothy looking woman with dark hair and dark eye make-up was talking to me while holding the edge of an empty dinner plate against her forehead and the other side against my throat. That’s all I remember of the dream.

I didn’t go outside at all on Sunday and just spent a lot of the day writing my journal entry for the day before.

            I had a couscous salad for lunch.

            That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason. In the story a strong willed heiress named Fran is frustrated by the conditions of will of her father who died two years ago. He left $1 million in control of her uptight and anal-retentive Uncle Edward. According to the will, Fran can’t have her money until she is 25 and now she is 23 and a half. She goes to Perry Mason to get him to help her break the conditions. Mason, while investigating the case uncovers that Fran is actually secretly married to an artist named Rod and that she wants her inheritance now because she is pregnant. The next day Rod goes to her uncle’s house. At the same time Edward’s lawyer Crinston arrives for an appointment. Shortly after that the police are called and the caller says he is Edward Norton and that his niece has threatened his life. They send out a squad car. Crinston leaves his client’s home and is going to give the butler, Graves a lift. But as they are about to drive away Graves calls out that he sees someone through the window behind Norton. They go back in the house and find Norton dead from a blow by a blunt instrument. Rod is found in the house and charged with murder. Mason defends him, figuring out that it was actually Crinston that killed him because Norton had discovered he’d been stealing money from him and had just started to phone the police.

            Fran was played by Canadian actor Olive Sturgess. She acted regularly mostly in television until the mid-sixties and was on twelve episodes ofthe Bob Cummings show. After becoming a mother she toned down her work and retired from acting in 1973 at the age of 40. She was the grand marshal of the rodeo for a while in Whittier, California. She’s 84 now and lives in LA.