Bethel Leslie

            I was in a swimming race with a guy that looked like Jason, the physiotherapist that I saw for a few weeks five years ago at the U of T Sports Clinic. I was aware in my dream that this was a strange match-up since Jason is an all-round athlete who was on the national volleyball team while I am not a jock and I’m also not a very strong swimmer. I was very surprised then to find myself jumping way ahead of him in this race to the other end of what was much longer than an Olympic length pool. I was doing the breaststroke while Jason was using the front crawl. I heard him behind me engaging in conversation while swimming with another guy. I saw the other end of the pool drawing near and then suddenly I heard Jason’s stokes become faster and faster. As he passed me we were no longer in the pool but on dry land and running. He made fun of me after he won.

            I finished reading “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” out loud and I got a lot more out of it that way.

            I spent about an hour working on my essay. There’s less than five days till the deadline. My thesis and my conclusions are there but I just have to prove my arguments with the text.

            I finished reading the required selections from Wordsworth’s preludes a second time out loud. I don’t get why many consider the Preludes Wordsworth’s crowning achievement when many of his poems are more finely crafted works of art. The Preludes are well written and poetic but they mostly just convey Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature in a straightforward manner.

            I watched Perry Mason. In this story a Dr. Morris wants a divorce from his wife Janet so he can marry his nurse Gladys. Janet has been refusing but just before he’s about to fly his plane to Salt Lake City she meets him at the airport and says she’ll set him free. She has brought him a thermos of coffee. Morris goes to the operations shack to get ready for his flight and Janet puts the thermos in the cockpit. The plane crashes and it was found that the burned body had traces of morphine sulphate. Janet is charged with murder and Mason defends her. The wife of Morris’s friend Kirby reports her husband missing and Mason’s detective Paul goes to the crash sight on a hunch. There he finds a medallion belonging to Kirby. It is now concluded that Kirby, rather than Morris, died in the crash but Janet is still being charged with the murder. Mason goes to see Gladys’s family and pays her brother $100 to reveal where she’s gone and he tells him the name of a town in Mexico. Mason goes there and finds that Gladys and Morris are together and married there. Mason wants Morris to come back to LA to testify on behalf of his wife but he can’t force him. However, when the DA forces the couple to return and they appear in court, Mason objects, pointing out that a Mexican divorce is not valid in California, which means that Morris and Janet are technically still married in LA and the testimony of a spouse against a spouse is not valid in court. Burger argues that Mason would have argued towards Morris testifying if he’d been successful in persuading him to do so. Mason says that he does not make the laws but he has a right to use their provisions to protect his client. The judge agrees with Mason. When Mrs. Kirby is on the stand Mason points out that though she claimed to have bought the medallion for her husband before she’d reported him missing, she'd actually made the report and then gone to see him off at the airport. She gave him a bottle of whiskey spiked with morphine sulphate to cause him to crash the plane. She'd specifically bought him a medallion made of platinum so it would survive the crash because it had his name on it and that would be enough for her to claim his life insurance and his military service insurance. Suddenly Mrs Kirby admitted it. She and her husband owned a diner together but she did all of the work and she figured the only way she would get anything out of it is if he died.

            Janet was played by Bethel Leslie, who had a long career on Broadway and soap operas. She was a writer for The Secret Storm, which was one of my mother’s favourite shows.

            Gladys was played by Maxine Cooper, who played Mike Hammer’s secretary, Velda, in "Kiss Me Deadly".