Even though the postal strike is over there is a backlog that has made it so no one in my place has gotten any mail in a few weeks. Ontario Works sends me an income reporting form with a postage paid envelope every month but they send it early in December because they issue the cheques before Christmas instead of at the end of the month. I should have gotten my form last week but it didn’t arrive and so on Monday I used a PDF of the form that I’d downloaded. I didn’t have any postage paid envelopes though and so after filling out the form and attaching my pay statements I rode up to their office on Dundas and hand delivered it. The receptionist gave me a few forms and about five extra postage-paid envelopes just in case Canada Post has any more problems doing its job.
On my way home I stopped at the big No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas. I bought grapes, raspberries and a few Spartan apples. At the apple bin an old Portuguese man was picking a lot of apples. When he saw me picking apples up, looking at them and putting them aside it seemed to bother him. “Is good!” he argued. I told him that a lot of them have little dents. I got a package of mixed nuts, a strawberry rhubarb pie, margarine, yogourt and old cheddar. I took advantage of the fact that this store has a pharmacy section and I bought a bottle of alcohol, some lip balm and a pack of little dispensers of Purell that I can carry in my backpack for those moments when I shake snotty hands.
The express cashier was a young woman who looked both like she had a cold and like she was bored. She didn’t smile at anyone ahead of me when she gave them their change but she smiled at me.
I got caught up on my journal.
I finished my second reading of the first act of Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound".
That night I boiled six mini-potatoes and two carrots and sautéed some mushrooms. I had them with gravy and a small chicken leg and watched a very intense episode of Peter Gunn. This begins with a comedian named Danny Holland doing his act. He’s doing one of those talking on the phone skits. The actor playing Danny is the real life comedian Shelley Berman and this is actually the tail end of one of his own skits. In the complete bit he works in an office building across the street from a department store and he sees a woman hanging by her hands from a ledge on the eleventh floor. He calls up the department store to alert them about the situation but he keeps getting put on hold and transferred to other departments until finally he gets through to someone. The part that appears in this story takes place while he is calling to the woman and reassuring her while she is waiting for help. She is also holding an umbrella and he tells her that if she falls she should open it. At the end of the skit the woman has been pulled in but the complaints department operator is now hanging from the ledge.
Peter Gunn is at the show and comes to see Danny in his dressing room because Danny had called him. Danny tells Gunn that his wife Ann is trying to kill him. He gives the details of several attempts that she has made on his life and tells Gunn that his wife is quite insane. Danny says that when he suggested that Ann she see a doctor she blew up and he wants to hire Gunn to protect him. Gunn goes to talk with Ann. She is a very nervous woman and she also claims that her spouse is mentally ill. She has tried to get him to see a doctor but he refuses. She begins to cry and Gunn gives her his handkerchief. Gunn goes to consult with a psychiatrist who says that it’s very difficult to tell which one is lying but whichever one is telling the truth is in grave danger. Gunn goes back to see Ann but as soon as he steps through the door someone hits him over the head and he is knocked out. Ann is in Danny’s dressing room when Danny walks in and tells her that he killed the man she hired to follow him and also the man that she’d arranged to meet in her hotel.
He tells her she’s crazy and grabs her by the throat. Danny is introduced by the MC and he comes out onto the stage looking disoriented. At first the audience does not know what to think and they begin whispering. The whispering is amplified in Danny’s mind until he briefly puts his fingers in his ears and it stops. He begins exaggeratedly adjusting the microphone height with facial expressions that make the audience laugh with relief. He accuses them of being conditioned and brainwashed in laughing at him doing absolutely nothing and it makes them laugh even harder. He asks if they’ve considered that when the host called him one of the best comics in show business that he just may be a pathological liar? Again they laugh. He says, “Fortunately for you he was telling the truth!” They laugh and nod. Meanwhile, Gunn and Lieutenant Jacoby are in Danny's dressing room investigating a smashed mirror and a trail of blood. They follow the trail out of his dressing room. Meanwhile Danny is doing a skit about a gangster trying get his gun out of his coat pocket but it’s stuck. Gunn and Jacoby follow the blood into the alley where Gunn finds the handkerchief that he’d given to Ann. Gunn opens a small door in the alley and Ann’s dead body falls forward from inside. Just as we switch back to the close-up face of an audience member hysterically laughing. It's a masterful bit of juxtaposition.
As Danny continues his act, this time talking about how humans exhale poisonous gas that is nourishing to flowers, he sees that the police are standing at the back waiting for him to finish. Danny finished by telling the audience that no matter how mean, rotten or sinful they have been through this day, “Every time you breathe out you make a little flower happy". The audience laughs and applauds as Danny’s face becomes increasingly more intense and desperate and it the frame becomes a shrinking circle surrounded by black until the whole screen is black and the end music comes on. This was the best executed of the Peter Gunn episodes so far in terms of direction.
Ann was played by Patricia Donahue.
Shelley Berman started out as an actor but in the mid 50s became a sketch writer for Steve Allen. He joined a Chicago improv troupe called the Compass Players, which years later became the famous Second City. Berman's first record, "Inside Shelley Berman" was the first gold record in comedy. He plays Larry David’s father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He accused Bob Newhart of stealing his telephone act but Newhart says it was already a comedy tradition before Berman started doing it.
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