Christine White

            I had almost all my flexibility back during yoga on Saturday, though my back still ached a bit during leg raising.

I didn’t go to the food bank on Saturday and probably won’t go next week either, because both the line-up and writing about it are time consuming and I need time to work on my essay.

            Around midday I rode down to No Frills. Among a few other items I bought Mexican blackberries, bananas and Canadian Courtland apples but I also broke my boycott of US fruit and bought some green grapes. I lifted my boycott because the trade deal has been signed and because the grapes were super cheap.

            The possibly homeless woman with the Slavic accent who sometimes gives speeches at the corner of Queen and Dunn was shouting outside the donut shop below my window in the early afternoon. There was a man with well-trimmed dark beard, wearing a blue jacket and bright blue running shoes standing at the corner and waiting for the light. She was pointing him out to people and telling them loudly that he is a sexual predator. Just before he crossed she assured him that the cameras recorded him.

            During my afternoon Siesta I dreamed I was Jackson Browne or at least someone watching him closely. I/he passed through someone’s backyard and garden on my/his way to a house where I/he got drunk and did things that I remember were rude but I don’t remember what they were. When I/he left I/he had my bike and the area that I/he’d traversed previously on foot was now a meter deep lake and I/he cycled across it through the water. I/he was also naked and did handstands in the water with my/his butt crack in the air a few times to sober my/his self up. I could see myself or him from above while this was happening or maybe I saw the photographs afterwards because I saw it in freeze frame.

            The Perry Mason story I watched begins with a young woman named Nadine having just gotten engaged. She comes home and tells the news to elderly and paternal Captain Hugo, the property handyman. But Nadine lives with her Uncle Martin who is a mean old prick. He shows her some documents relating to inherited traits and threatens to show them to her fiancé John if she goes through with the marriage. She begins to cry and he begins to laugh. John is a chemist and Nadine goes to his lab where she sees a bottle of cyanide tablets. She takes some when John is not looking and puts them in a saccharine tablet bottle. When she gets home, Martin's other niece, Marian and her husband Lester are there. Martin reveals to Marian that he's going to leave all his money to the Hartford Medical Foundation. She is very disappointed. When she goes downstairs she sees Nadine making Martin’s hot chocolate. On the counter Marian sees the saccharine bottle and the pills look odd. She smells the contents and it looks like she recognizes the odour of cyanide but she says nothing. Nadine serves Martin his hot chocolate and minutes later rings the buzzer. Nadine goes to his bedroom. Martin says, “You poisoned me!” and then he dies. Nadine screams. Next we see Nadine in a psychiatric hospital being questioned under the influence of sodium pentothal by a psychiatrist and a nurse. In her doped up state she sounds like she might be confessing to her uncle’s murder and of throwing the evidence in the lake. The psychiatrist goes to see Mason and plays him the recording of what Nadine said under truth serum. Mason goes to talk with Nadine and plays her the tape. She doesn't know why she said those things. Mason is given the tape recorder and the tape. The psychiatrist had thought that he could trust the nurse but she calls the police. Mason has someone dive into the lake and retrieve the saccharine bottle, which had been weighted with lead shot to make it sink. Lieutenant Tragg confiscates the tape and recorder. It turns out that the bottle does not contain cyanide but saccharine. The police search the lake and find the cyanide. Nadine goes missing from the hospital. Mason confronts John but he says he won’t testify against Nadine. Della tells him that if they get married he won’t have to testify against her. The police apprehend John and Nadine as they are trying to go to Mexico. Mason goes to talk to Lester and he lets it slip that he knows about the bottle of saccharine even though that information hasn’t been made public. Lester says he did throw a second bottle in the lake to give Nadine a 50-50 chance but he will deny it in court. Nadine reveals to Mason that what her uncle had threatened her with was evidence that her father was criminally insane. Mason tells her that criminal tendencies are not inherited. In court Mason shows that the two saccharine bottles: the one with cyanide and the one with saccharine had two different types of lead shot in them for weight. One of them did not come from a gun but from a weighted penholder from Lester’s office. He admits to throwing the second bottle and did so to protect his wife. She denies that she killed her uncle. In the end Mason tells Captain Hugo that he knows he killed Martin. He pleasantly admits to it and says he came out ahead anyway.

            Nadine was played by Christine White, who played William Shatner’s wife in the classic Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”.