Connie Russell

            On Sunday I got up at 5:00 as usual and did my yoga, but after that, since it was my birthday, I broke my regular schedule. I did my song practice but often chose different songs according to preference and spent a little more time working out the chords  to one particular song.

            On a normal day I would have spent an hour in the morning writing in my journal about the previous day and since on Saturday I’d gone to the food bank I would have come back to it later in the day to finish it. I decided this time to just get it all out of the way in the morning and so I wrote for three hours until it was finished. I had my usual Sunday breakfast of a piece of cinnamon toast with margarine and a bowl of spoon size shredded wheat with milk and honey, except that today I had an extra piece of cinnamon toast.

            I looked at some porn for a while, shaved and showered and then rode up to The Dufferin Mall to buy a pillow at Walmart. The pillow that I have is fine in terms of comfort but I sometimes pick up the odour of insecticide left over from when I had bed bugs four years ago.

            They had some pillows on sale for $5 but I was drawn to one for $9 with a cotton shell that was firm and which was said to be ideal for side sleepers. While I was there I also renewed my sock supply and get ten pairs for $8.

            I then went down to Freshco to buy some vanilla Hagen Das and a small tub of sour cream.

            On the way home I stopped at Home Hardware to buy a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap to clean my wood floor.

            I bypassed my place and went to Ali’s to buy a spicy potato roti for lunch. By the time I got home it was 15:00. I started eating the roti with lemonade but that was gone fairly quickly because the roti was so spicy and so I had to eat it with a beer. The roti was delicious.

            I watched an instalment of Last Week Tonight that I’d downloaded a few weeks ago. In it John Oliver interviews Monica Lewinsky and tells Jay Leno to go fuck himself for all of the slut shaming jokes he told about Lewinsky over the years.

            I took a late siesta siesta and tried out the new pillow. I woke up after two hours with a stiff neck. Maybe I could get used to it but I think I’ll just stick with my old pillow for now. I’ll keep the new one for when my daughter comes to visit.

            I watched some more porn and then went out to Six Point Pizza across the street and bought a pepperoni slice for dinner. This was the first time I’d tried the pizza there since they opened over a year ago and it sucked. I could get a better slice from Pizza Pizza.

            I watched an instalment of the Steve Allen Show from April 5, 1959. This was after he’d co-founded and hosted the Tonight Show. It was an interesting format with some regular players like Don Knotts who went on to become famous from doing other shows. The regulars played characters in sketches. One of them involved an interview by Steve with a mob boss and the funniest line was that he made the most of his money from selling protection to the United States Army. There were two singing guests. One was Connie Russell, who was attractive and had a strong voice. The other was David Allen, who had more range but less of a stage presence. Both of them did uninteresting songs but I was impressed with the dancers and the choreography that accompanied them. The comedy guests were the Three Stooges and Lenny Bruce. Steve Allen joked that there is no type of satirical humour that will not offend someone and so he’d decided that once a month he would book a comedian that offends everybody and get it all over with. So he introduced Lennie Bruce. Lennie’s sketch consisted of an explanation of how he became offensive. He said he used to come to school drunk when he was seven or eight and he’d anger the teacher by calling Columbus a fink. Then listed words that offend him, such as “segregation”. He did a skit about an eight-year-old kid sniffing glue but gave the child the voice of George MacReady, who had a famously snooty voice. Then he outlined a fake musical he’d written about a couple that had broken up and gotten back together so many times that it was driving their kid nuts and so they decide to break up for the sake of the kid. The Three Stooges did a silly skit in which Curly played a Maharaja with special talents and Moe was his promoter and Larry was the one who had the knives thrown at him. Whenever Moe addressed the Maharaja he’d say “Maha!” and Curly would respond “Aha?”