Carmen Phillips

            Having gone to bed a little over an hour early on Thursday night I woke up at around 3:30 on Friday morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. My left ear felt a bit plugged so I got up, boiled my rubber syringe and flushed out the wax. I went back to bed but still couldn’t sleep but I stayed in bed because I figured I’d be exhausted at around noon if I didn’t at least rest until 5:00.

            When the alarm went off I got up with a lot of cold symptoms, though it didn’t really feel like a cold. I was coughing, sneezing and my eyes stung a bit. After a while it occurred to me that I might be having an allergic reaction to a fragrance from something that I’d bought on Wednesday. The smell was nice but it was really filling the living room from where it was sitting on the shelf. I wondered why I hadn’t had a reaction all day on Thursday but I noticed that the humidity was considerably higher today and theorized that it caused one of the products to send more vapour into the air. I moved the four products into my entryway but the draft from my front door was still sending the smell to the passage between my kitchen and my living room. Finally I put everything in a plastic bag and tied it in a knot. That diminished the effect.  I think that the product natural but with some artificial fragrance.

            I freed up some space on my hard drive for my download of the latest season of Doctor Who for my traditional Christmas holiday binge watch. I downloaded the first four episodes of the current season. I’ll probably download all ten before I start watching them. The season finale comes out on Sunday and there’s a special on New Years day. From what I’ve read they won’t air the next season until early 2020.

            I finished a second reading of all of the John Keats poems required for my course.

            I had my last piece of chicken, some mini potatoes and a cob of corn for dinner and watched Peter Gunn. In this story a man in a suit walks boldly into the police station, finds Lieutenant Jacoby’s office and kidnaps him at gunpoint. The cops get notice later from Bert Fisher that Jacoby will die one hour before midnight if Bert’s brother gets the electric chair at that time. Gunn goes to see a badly scarred trumpet player who can still play but will never perform again. He’d flirted from the stage with a woman that belonged to a big time gangster and wound up getting his face cut up in an alley. Gunn needs a line on Bert but Dean says he wants to live. Gunn is walking away when Dean plays a few bars of a song called “Mary”. Gunn goes to the payphone in the hall and calls the police to check on any friends of Bert Fisher with the name Mary. Suddenly there are gunshots from Dean’s room and Dean is killed. From the window, Gunn manages to wing the killer but he gets away. Gunn finds from the cops that the only member of Bert’s gang that had a girlfriend named Mary was Lew Baxter. Gunn goes to a lounge where Manuel is playing piano with a parakeet on his shoulder. Manuel is an old friend and collaborator with Dean and he gives Gunn Mary’s address. Mary is flirtatious but reluctant to let Gunn in. He goes in anyway. He asks her where Lew is and she says she doesn’t know but it might be fun if Gunn were to twist her arm. Gunn goes to a closed door, opens it and is whacked over the head by a gun-wielding Lew. When Gunn comes to he is alone in Mary’s apartment. Beside the phone is a notepad and he uses the old trick of shading the current page to bring out the indentation left by the message that had been written above it. In this case he finds an address. He goes there and an old man comes out to tell him he’s not taking any more patients tonight, although this is not an official doctor’s office. Gunn hears a noise inside the door and forces his way in. Mary is there and Lew is running out the back. He'd come there to get treated for the bullet Gunn had put into him earlier. Gunn chases Lew through the back door but when Lew runs into the street he gets hit by a car. In Lew’s pocket Gunn finds a matchbook with “Chino’s Café” written on it, with the name Chino Amalo underneath. He checks Amalo’s record and finds he did time for armed robbery. Gunn goes to Chino’s Café and asks the waitress for Chino but Chino tells him to beat it. Gunn leaves and Chino calls Bert but Gunn has snuck back in and puts a gun to Chino’s head. Gunn forces Chino to tell him that Bert is in a cabin not far away. The cops are called. They surround the cabin and Gunn forces Chino to shout for Bert while Gunn stands beside the door. When Bert comes out he takes Bert’s gun and forces him to call for his accomplice. But when Les comes out Bert pushes him into Gunn and runs. There is a shootout and both kidnappers are shot. Jacoby emerges from the cabin mostly unharmed. It's 23:00.

            Mary was played by Carmen Phillips. She worked as a showgirl in New York and Vegas. She had a scene with Jerry Lee Lewis in High School Confidential but it was cut because of the scandal over his recent marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. She was cast for the film Bells Are Ringing and was actually standing in front of the camera when she was told she was out because she was too sexy for the part. She was cast to be Dean Martin’s girlfriend in Ocean’s Eleven but they had to cut several things from the film in order to finish the movie before an actor’s strike, including her part. She had small roles in 15 movies including Easy Rider and 20 TV shows. She was a close friend of Diane Ladd.