Jean Carson

            On Tuesday when I got up I had a pain in the joint where my right thumb meets my hand. I was worried all through yoga that I wouldn’t be able to hold a pick to strum my guitar during song practice but it turned out that the pain didn’t limit that particular action. The problem persisted throughout the day though.

I spent a lot of Tuesday getting caught up on my journal. It was early night by the time I got back to my essay and I did a bit of work on figuring out how to write my introductory paragraph without using clumsy phrases like "I will show...”

            I heated up my last chicken leg and had it while watching Peter Gunn.  This story begins with a late middle-aged man named Lester on a ledge with a crowd below. It looks like he is going to jump but when a man in a window tries to coax him inside, Lester asks him what time it is. Meanwhile a man in a TV repairman’s uniform appears on the opposite roof, takes out a high-powered rifle and shoots Lester. For some reason there was no autopsy and so the police conclude that he died from the fall. Gunn goes to see Lester’s wife Gussie and learns that Lester was a retired human fly. She says that Lester got a call about a job that might have involved climbing and had wondered if it had anything to do with their old partner, Samson the Great who now has a business renting out fishing boats. Gunn goes to see Sam, who says he hadn’t seen Lester and Gussie for several months but Sam’s attractive wife Pearl comes out to chat and casually lets it drop that they’d gotten together with Lester and Gussie last month. Sam tells her she has the brains of a two year old. After Gunn leaves Sam calls Chop, who is the man that shot Lester, to tell him that Gunn has been snooping around. Gunn goes to see Lieutenant Jacoby, who has found the rifle that Chop used. He tells Gunn that he thinks that Lester was shot. It turns out that at the same time Lester had been on the ledge and tying up traffic because of his audience below, a heist of $200,000 worth of uncut diamonds had been made in the same area. Gunn goes to see Gussie who tells him that she’s discovered that Lester wore his climbing shoes the day he fell. Gunn gets Gussie to call up Sam and to bluff him that she knew about the robbery all along and could use Lester’s share. Sam tells her to meet him at the pier. Gunn goes instead but Chop is ready for him. However, Jacoby is also there. He shoots Chop but also gets shot in the leg. Sam and Gunn have a fistfight that ends in the water but Gunn wins a little too easily for someone fighting a strongman.

            Pearl was played by Jean Carson, who is best known as Daphne, who along with Joyce Jameson’s character of Skippy, was one of the aggressive “fun girls” on the Andy Griffith Show. She also appeared in The Twilight Zone as Paula in “A Most Unusual Camera", a part that Rod Serling wrote specifically for her.