The Great Clean North of my Bedroom Floor

            On Sunday morning during song practice there, much less pedestrian traffic outside than on a usual Sunday.

            I tried again to write down the lyrics for “Les filles c’est un flipper” by Serge Gainsbourg, but I couldn’t catch them all and so I moved on to Gainsbourg’s “J'aime les roses fanées” (I Love Withered Roses”). This one is actually kind of a nice song in praise of older women. I think it deserves a slightly better translation than the one I’ve worked out and if I can come up with one I might start singing this song. I memorized the chorus because it starts the song.

            I worked on my latest Food Bank Adventure.

            I finished washing the central part of my bedroom floor along the north wall. There was a lot of paint and plaster to scrape up. The only part of the bedroom floor left to do is along the eastern wall where all my storage furniture is sitting. I might have the whole bedroom floor cleaned before New Years.

            For lunch I had the other burger I’d made the night before.

I didn’t have time to do my afternoon exercises.

I stepped on the scale for the first time in a couple of months. I weighed 91.2 kg.

            I finished my food bank adventure.

            I had a fried egg with a toasted bagel and a beer for dinner while watching an episode of Racket Squad.

            In this story a husband named Stanley and his wife Vivian are at the track betting on horses. He bets a few thousand dollars but she advises him against betting that much. They lose and later she returns to give a long sob story and to beg Morgan, the owner of the betting house to give her back her husband’s money. Morgan finally gives in but warns to tell her husband not to ever come there again. But Stanley does come back. Morgan roughs him up and Stanley asks him why. Morgan says because of his wife. Stanley declares he doesn’t have a wife and he’d just met Vivian that day. Stanley has no idea where Vivian is but he happens to have a matchbook that she gave him in his pocket with the name of a hotel. Morgan plans to kill Vivian but his clerk Smiley wants nothing to do with murder and so he calls the police. Captain Braddock gets to Vivian’s hotel first. When Morgan gets there Braddock arrests him but Vivian escapes out the window. We learn that Stanley and Vivian do know each other and that they are con artists. He places bets and if he loses she tries to beg to get the money back. But when the cops get to the airport to arrest Stanley there is a different woman posing as his wife. She is arrested. Braddock leaves and tells Smiley to point out Vivian the officer on duty when he sees her he lets her pick up her “husband’s” tickets, get a refund on Stanley’s ticket and she catches a plane. That seemed odd for such a goody goody show.

            Vivian was played by Nancy Valentine, who was discovered by Howard Hughes. In 1950 she married an Indian maharajah and gave up acting to become a maharani.

            The unnamed second wife was played by Sue Casey, who started working films in 1946. Her parts were mostly as eye candy at first but she worked in film, television and commercials for six decades. She is best remembered as a star of beach party films of the sixties such as “The Beach Girls and the Monster" and "The Catalina Caper".