Ziva Rodann

            On Tuesday morning when I got up it felt like I had a cold. I figured I’d caught it from the tech guy at the Help Desk at U of T who kept coughing on his hand before touching my keyboard.

            I continued working on memorizing the first verse of “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and memorized the first four verses of  "La noyée" by Serge Gainsbourg.

            At 9:30 I took a siesta because I had to work that afternoon and didn't want to nod off while posing. I got up at 11:00 and felt a lot better.

            I ate a cold steak for lunch.

            I worked at OCADU for the first time since March 29. The instructor was a TA named Shevon and new to me. The job was pretty average, starting with short poses and increasing to fifteen at the end. During breaks I used my laptop to work on my journal.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco to buy two $2 watermelons.

            For the second day in a row I skipped my afternoon exercises because it was so late when I got home.

            I had my last steak with a potato and the last of my gravy while watching the first two episodes of “Mr. Lucky”. This was a show that I’d started downloading a year ago but only 56.5% made it into the folder. I tend to give a show a year because sometimes they take a few months. Watching it was pretty choppy and with a lot of gaps but I caught most of what was going on.

            In the first story Mr Lucky is running a casino in an unspecified Latin American country with a sketchy political climate. Lucky’s friend and right hand man Andamo is a native of this country and has been secretly helping the revolutionaries to overthrow the president. The president encounters a beautiful woman named Elena at the casino and arranges to have dinner with her. But it turns out she is one of the rebels and while necking with him she pulls a small knife from her hair and kills him. The shit hits the fan and so Lucky and Andamo buy a rowboat for $5000 and hightail it out of there.

            Elena was played by Israeli actor and mime Ziva Rodann. She was the first Israeli actress to sign with a major studio in Hollywood.

            Somehow between the first and second episode Lucky and Andamo become crewmen on a freighter. They arrive in the States and run into someone they know who is on his way to a costume party on a boat. The boat turns out to belong to a notorious conman named Julius Rutherford Shank. Lucky recognizes Julius and saves one of his victims from falling for a mica mine scam but it puts Julius, his wife and their daughter Maggie into a precarious position because Julius owes money to the mob. Lucky goes to the mob boss and says he wants to open a casino there. The mobster says it’s out of the question because the syndicate wants to keep a monopoly. Lucky borrows money from the mobster and then uses it to win a lot more at his casino. He buys Julius's boat from him and opens a floating casino called the Fortune 2. These first two episodes were basically an origin story. The boat is the centre of Mr. Lucky’s operations from this time on with help from Andamo, Maggie and Julius.

            This show was a Blake Edwards creation like Peter Gunn, also with music by Henry Mancini.

            Maggie was played by Pippa Scott, whose father wrote all of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. She co-founded Lorimar, one of Hollywood’s most successful production companies. In the 80s she founded IMI, an organization that tracks down evidence of war crimes.

            Andamo is played by Ross Martin who would become famous in the 60s for playing Artemis Gordon, another sidekick, in Wild Wild West.