Women with Tools

After the food bank on Saturday I decided that rather than taking my food home I would try to make it to No Frills and back by 11:30. I bought two packs of Mexican blackberries. I’ve noticed that blackberries and raspberries shipped from Mexico tend to be of a much higher quality than the same thing from the United States.

I grabbed a loaf of multigrain bread, some mouthwash and a pack of paper towels. I had enough meat and dairy already and so it was a fairly short shopping expedition. I got home at 11:34. Nick got here a little over an hour later.

Nick sat down and visited for a while before we went upstairs with Nick’s bag of tools to rouse my upstairs neighbour David so Nick could put up some shelves for him. I rapped fairly loudly several times but there was no answer. David had assured me that he would be home all day. Nick had already decided to give up and run a more productive errand when I gave it one more try and started banging on the door like a cop and shouting David’s name. Finally I heard David stirring inside and he came to open the door. He wouldn’t admit that he’d been sleeping.

Nick set about to put up David’s shelves. I think I would have been in the way and besides I had food to put away and general tidying up to do downstairs and so I left them there.

After about half an hour I was about to make myself some lunch and went up to offer Nick a sandwich. He already had one shelf up and was about to work on the other. He turned down the sandwich because he said he was going to go get a slice of pizza when he was done. David suddenly said he would go get pizza. He asked what kind I liked and I said it didn’t matter. I went back downstairs and skipped making lunch. About half an hour later Nick came down and said he was done. Shortly after that David came in with two chicken shawarmas for us and a carton of fruit punch. He also paid Nick for the work he’d done. I invited him to join us but he declined. Nick and I ate our shawarmas at my kitchen table and shared the punch.

David came back down on his way out and called to us from the door that he was very happy with the shelves. He came back in a little later and gave us two bottles of Lesajsk beer before going back upstairs. Neither of us wanted to drink any beer right then and so I put them in the fridge.

Nick told me how a few years ago the daughter of a friend of his moved out on her own and Nick had given her a set of second hand tools. To this day she says it’s the best gift that she ever got. I can see how it would be empowering for a woman to receive a set of tools and to learn how to use them on her own.

After Nick left I did some writing.

That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason that started off spookily interesting but ended up like any other Perry Mason story. I think that the Perry Mason series was a quality courtroom drama but so far I don’t find it engaging enough to download the second season.

The weird part was at the beginning when two women, Martha and Rita are waiting to have their hair done at a beauty salon. The manager calls for Mrs. Joe Bradford and both of women stand. They are amused by the coincidence until they discover that both of them have the same address with the same keys. Martha tries to reach her husband but he avoids her and goes to his boat for a business trip up the coast. While Martha is alone in bed that night she hears someone enter the house. She comes downstairs with a gun and sees a woman’s muddy prints on the floor. We can see Rita hiding around a corner. The next day Martha goes to hire Perry Mason to locate her husband. Mason and Della go to Joe’s boat where they find his dead body, having been stricken in the back of the head with a fire axe. Since Martha had gone to the boat that night she is charged with murder and Mason defends her. In court we get the explanation for Joe having two wives. Rita had disappeared for two years after suddenly getting amnesia. During that time Joe had divorced her in Mexico and married Martha. Joe did not treat Martha very well and two of his employees, Jack and Larry were both in love with her. Larry tries to help Martha by confessing to the murder but Burger, the DA rejects his attempt and calls him a liar because the details he gives don’t match the evidence. Later, Mason reveals that Larry’s attempt to confess had been a ruse to throw the police off the fact that he really did kill Joe.
            There is always a light and often mildly comical final scene in a Perry Mason story. In this case Paul Drake comes to Mason’s office in a tuxedo asking to borrow $70 from Mason so he can take Rita on a date.

Martha was played by Nancy Gates who was a performing arts prodigy as a child and had her own local radio show for two years while she was still in high school. Her first movie was Hitler’s Children in 1943. In the next 26 years she acted in 34 films and 55 TV shows before retiring at the age of 43. She’s still around at the age of 92.

Rita was played by Doris Singleton, who started off as a ballerina. She played Lucy’s rival Carolyn Appleby on ten episodes of I Love Lucy.