When I got up on Sunday there was snow on the ground and still more coming down although it looked pretty wet. It was still clinging to the slanted roof of the Catholic Church down on Dunn Avenue and to the roofs of all the cars. The tops of cars love snow and want to keep it for as long as they can. Churches are just natural refrigerators of the mind and so it makes sense that snow wouldn’t melt as fast on their roofs.
In the afternoon my next-door neighbour Benji knocked on my door to tell me that there was water leaking downstairs and asked me to check if I had something overflowing. I looked and saw that there was nothing. About an hour later the landlord knocked hard on the door and opened it right away. He already had his body past the threshold when I came to the door. He wanted to check for a leak. I let him in but told him that I'd already checked. He looked in my bathroom and then pulled a lot of stuff that I have stored under the sink in order to check there. He told me not to put so many things under the sink because it could affect the pipes. I told him that in 22 years it hasn’t and besides it was none of his business whether I store things under the sink. Besides, I think he just said that because he was too lazy to put everything back where it had been. As he was leaving I told him to apologize for barging in and effectively calling me a liar when I’d already checked my apartment and found no leaks. He got angry and the last thing he said when he headed for the stairs was, “Bastard!”
This was the tenth day of my fourteen-day fast and so I had tomatoes and avocadoes again for lunch and dinner.
I watched The Rifleman. In this story Lucas encounters a group of riders from a wagon train forcing a young couple, Lisa and Derek to go to North Fork and get married. Their leader, Aaron Pelser recounts that he first encountered the couple when his wagon train came across them after their buckboard broke down. Lisa was dressed as a man and they said they were brothers and so Aaron took them on but then another of the crew, Ma Wilson found out that Lisa was a woman. They told Aaron that they were going to Yuma to get married but the old man didn’t think it was appropriate for them to be travelling together without being married. Also with the group are some cowhands led by a man named Chet. After the couple are married Chet says they are going to have a shivaree after a little drinking.
A shivaree is a post-wedding ritual that goes back hundreds of years. The neighbourhood gathers in front of the house where the bride and groom have come to rest after the wedding. They bang on pots and pans with spoons or ladles and shout or in the modern era honk their car horns. They try to make as much noise as they can until the couple come out. When my brother married his first wife Anne there was a shivaree in front of our house. There is also a tradition of the groom’s friends kidnapping the bride after the wedding so that he will have to pursue them to get her back. That happened just after my brother’s wedding too.
In this case Lucas smelled trouble and so he offered Derek a job and invited him and Lisa to stay at his place.
That night Derek explains that he’ll be sleeping in the barn because he and Lisa don’t consider themselves properly married until they get married in Yuma. His father is a preacher there and they want him to marry them. Soon the revellers from the town, including Chet and Ma Wilson arrive banging pots and demanding that the couple come out for the shivaree. Lucas tells Lisa, Derek and Mark to go in the bedroom while he goes out and tries to send the crowd away. He tells them that normally he’s not against the fun of a shivaree but this time it’s different. Jerry, one of Chet’s men asks, “What makes it different?” and Lucas answers, “My telling ya!” While Jerry is arguing with Lucas, Chet and one of his men sneak around the back of the house, go in through the back door and grab Lisa and Derek. They take them to town and separate them. Chet has Lisa in the saloon and is trying to make her drink whiskey while several others are out on the street dunking Derek in the horse trough. Lucas takes the saloon and the marshal takes the street. When Lucas walks in Chet lets go of Lisa. When Micah walks up to the revellers that are dunking Derek and tells them to stop they back off but by this time Derek has been drive over the edge. He hits Micah and takes his shotgun. Keep in mind that Micah loads his shotgun with slugs rather than shot. He goes into the saloon and shoots Chet in the legs. He promises he’s going to make both Chet and Aaron crawl for the rest of their lives. No one dares come near but Micah disarms himself and talks Derek into not ruining his own and Lisa’s life.
Lisa was played by Luana Anders, who started out as a bike messenger at MGM studios along with Jack Nicholson. She got Jack to join her improv class and some of their classmates were Sally Kellerman and Richard Chamberlain. Her first films were B movies like Reform School Girl. When she was acting in Roger Corman’s The Young Racers in 1963 the soundman asked her to star in his first direction effort. The movie was Dementia 13 and the director was Francis Ford Coppola. She was the skinny dipping hippy girl Lisa in Easy Rider. She died in 1996 but Jack Nicholson mentioned her in his Oscar acceptance speech for As Good As It Gets in 1998.
Ma Wilson was played by Olive Carey (nee Olive Fuller Gordon), who started out in 1916 at age 18 in a silent picture called “Tess of the Storm Country”. When she worked on the movie Trader Horn in 1931 she spent several weeks in dangerous conditions in East Africa but only got paid $300 all together and then got fired because MGM had opted to scrap the film. Later though the studio decided to try to save the film and they needed Olive to re-enact her part in the studio but only offered her another $300 for a five-day shoot. Olive demanded $1000 a day and Louis B. Mayer gave in to her demand.
She had made friends with a young junior executive at General Motors named Marian Morrison and thought that he should be in pictures. She sent him for a screen test but he was rejected because he had an ugly walk. She kept on pushing and her young friend finally made it as John Wayne. They were friends for the rest of their lives.
She went back and forth from retiring to acting several times and her last film was Dracula Meets Billy the Kid in 1966.
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