Betty Blythe

On Saturday after the food bank I took my food home, put it away and then headed back out to No Frills where I bought three bags of black grapes, a jar of peanuts, a big bag of salt and vinegar kettle chips for $2, three containers of Greek yogourt, mouthwash, shampoo and Murphy’s oil soap.

After I took those groceries home I went back out again. Earlier in the week my upstairs neighbour David knocked on my door to give me a $50 gift certificate for Metro or Food Basics. Since there’s a Metro at Queen and Dufferin I went there. I didn’t want to go outside again until after Christmas and so I wanted to get all my shopping done while I was dressed for the outdoors.

Everything is more expensive at Metro but their raspberries, although the same brand as one can get at the cheaper stores, were in better condition and so I took the deal of two half pints for $5.

I added up all my purchases in my head and my plan was to go just a little bit over $50 and pay the difference in cash in order to clean out the gift card. I bought mostly meat. They actually have two meat sections at Metro. One is for regular meat and the other for organic. It also seems to be the friendliest part of the store, as I could hear pleasant conversations about meat going on between the butchers and their customers. I traditionally have bacon and eggs on Christmas morning and so I picked a pack or organic bacon. I got a small pack of freshly ground lean beef, a small pack of hot Italian sausages, two steaks, and a pack of lamb chops. I finished by grabbing a small piece of very expensive three-year-old Agropur Grand Cheddar from Quebec. I thought for sure that everything that I bought would take me over $50 but I ended up with 26 cents left on the gift card.

I had a toasted bagel with cream cheese for lunch.

I took a late siesta and woke up too late to want to do my afternoon exercises.

I worked on writing about my food bank adventure.

That night I made two burgers out of the ground beef and had one of them on two halves of a slice of toast with tomato, ketchup, mustard, relish and scotch bonnet sauce. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Racket Squad.

In this story a talented artist named Jess who had been in prison for counterfeiting is visited by Lou, his former cellmate, who just got out of the pen. Jess is painting a model named Virginia for a pin-up job he’s doing. Unknown to Jess, Virginia is Lou’s wife and she’s there to soften Jess up. Lou shows Jess a newspaper photo of a man he says is his uncle and says he’ll pay Jess $200 to paint a portrait from the photo, but he needs it done fast. It turns out it is not Lou’s uncle but the photo of a wealthy man named Burton who died recently. Unknown to Jess, Lou is running a scam of selling paintings of dead rich husbands to bereaved widows. But Jess overhears Lou talking about the scam to Virginia and bursts in on them to demand the painting back. Lou knocks the much older Jess down and gives Virginia a gun to hold on him while he goes to sell the painting to Mrs Burton. After Lou leaves Jess holds his chest, calls out, "My heart!" and then goes still. When Virginia comes forward to check on Jess he takes the gun away from her and holds it on her while he calls the police. Meanwhile Lou shows up at Mrs. Burton’s door and tells her he is an artist and that Mr. Burton had hired him to paint a portrait as a gift to her but then he had died. He’s come to collect the fee of $2000. She gladly writes a cheque and he is about to leave when he is busted by the racket squad.

Virginia was played by Adele Jergens, who made it into films after work as a showgirl and a Rockett but tended to get work as tough dolls in B movies. She was a popular pin-up girl during WWII. She played Marilyn Monroe’s mother in “Ladies of the Chorus” in 1948 even though she was only nine years older.

Mrs Burton was played by Betty Blythe who gained brief fame as a sex symbol in silent pictures and was one of the first actresses to appear nude in a feature film. She was topless in The Queen of Sheba. She made $3.5 million when she sold a piece of land that became part of the Sunset Strip. She lost her fortune during the stock market crash of 1929.