Geraldine Page

            On Friday my hip was bothering me more than ever. It's not painful and I’m not limping but there’s an ache and tightness there. I decided that I wouldn’t take a bike ride that day. A cyclists website calls it “wallet syndrome” and it supposedly comes from overworking the gluteus maximas muscles.

            I finished the second draft of my bed bug diary. For the third draft I started taking out the dates so it’s less time-specific and more compatible with prose. 

I weighed 89.1 kilos in the afternoon.

I managed to clip the beginning of my July 22, 2017 song practice video to the place just before I begin singing and playing “L’alcool”. Next time I’ll clip the end and then render the video.

I translated part of “Les ramparts du Sud” by Boris Vian. The story gets increasingly absurd as it goes along. A guy chops down a tree with a monkey wrench and then cuts it up into sticks.

I grilled a pack of chicken drumsticks and had two with a potato and gravy while watching the Playhouse 90 made for TV movie Portrait of a Murderer from 1958. It’s based on a true story about Donald Bashor, who in the process of committing two separate burglaries bludgeoned to death the women that caught him in the act.

The story begins with a documentary style re-enactment of Bashor’s arrest, trial and execution and there are actual recordings of his confessions and interviews with the press. Then it switches to the dramatization of the story as ex-con Bashor tries to live a normal life with his girlfriend Florry but at night he drinks and then commits burglaries. His mother was an alcoholic and now he can’t stand to see women drink although he drinks a lot himself. He refuses to let Florry drink. He’s extremely generous and any time someone asks him for money he gives it to them but of course most of his money comes from crime. When he is caught during a burglary he runs and is shot in the arm. At the station he confesses to two murders and although his lawyer says that in cases of first-degree murder the defendant always has to initially lead not guilty, he refuses. Although it is determined that he was schizophrenic it was found that he was sane at the time of the murders. That assessment is in itself insane or at least stupid. He felt like another person committed the murders and his last lines before going to the gas chamber are that he wished doctors and judges could have just killed the bad half of himself and left the good half alive.

Bashor was played by Tab Hunter, who was a teen heartthrob in the 50s who also had a hit record with the song “Young Love” but he wasn't a great singer. He put in a very good performance in this movie but he didn’t get many challenging roles like this one and so after he lost his teen appeal he didn’t get as many starring parts.

Florry was played by Geraldine Page, who was considered to be one of the greatest actors in the history of the United States. She was married to Rip Torn, who is Sissy Spasek’s cousin. Page was the first woman to be nominated seven times for an Oscar without winning but with her eighth nomination for A Trip to Bountiful, she won.

            Another character in the story who stood out was Sandra, who was a dancer that Bashor leant money to but whom he began screaming at when she tried to invite him home because she’d been drinking. Sandra was played by Barbara Turner, who was the mother of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Turner became a screenwriter and wrote the adaptation that became the movie Pollock.