Mary Astor

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the first three verses of "My Chérie Jane” by Serge Gainsbourg. I shouldn’t have any problem finishing it on Wednesday morning and then start looking for the chords. I doubt if anyone posted them and so I’ll probably have to work them out myself.

            I worked on typing my lecture notes.

            I washed a small section of the floor on the east side of my kitchen hallway. In three more sessions I should have the floor cleaned in the hallway.

            I had a pork chop and some yogourt for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish learns that his wife has made friends with a very large woman named Opalescence. He says that any man that dances cheek to cheek with her would have to be shaped like a boomerang. But then he learns that she’s inherited $10,000 and decides to hook her up with Andy in exchange for half the money. Andy agrees to marry her but then Opal’s husband, who was declared dead ten years before shows up. Kingfish and Andy raise $500 to buy him off but the day of the wedding it turns out that he and Opalescence were con artists in cahoots.

            I finished typing my lecture notes.

            I downloaded the lecture slides and a pdf about wampum treaties from the Indigenous Studies Quercus page. The lecture slides are all in power point while I have nothing to read them with so I spent about half an hour using Cloud Convert to change them to pdf.

            I had three little potatoes, two small pork chops, broccoli and gravy for dinner while watching a United States Steel Hour teleplay from the 1950s.

            This story was called “The Thief” and it was set in Paris in 1907 and takes place in the home of Charles Lagarde where he and his second wife Isabelle are entertaining several guests. Two of the guests are Marie-Louise Voyson and her husband Philippe. Charles’s son Fernand enters the room and gives Marie-Louise a book before leaving again. In the book is a note. Marie-Louise says she is going to get a shawl and upstairs she meets Fernand. They have been friends since childhood but recently he has been writing her love letters. She tells him she is in love with her husband and gives him back all his letters. Later we learn that Isabelle has had large sums of money stolen that she keeps in an antique chest. It is revealed that one of the guests is secretly a detective and he reveals that he has discovered that Fernand is the thief. When confronted about it Fernand admits that he stole the money. Later however Philippe discovers that it was Marie-Louise that asked Fernand to steal the money for her so she could pay for her opulent fashion habits. When Charles tells Fernand he is sending him to his plantation in Brazil Marie-Louise admits to the theft.

            The best performance was of the character of Marie-Louise by Diana Lynn, who was a child prodigy on the piano at age ten. She had great parts in her early film career but later on television appreciated her more. She died of a stroke at 45 just as she was about to return to the movies.

            Isabelle was played by the great Mary Astor who was one of the few actors to have been both a silent film star and a star of talkies. She won an Academy Award for her part in Great Lies. She did 123 films, wrote five novels and two memoirs.

            Fernand was played I thought rather stiffly by James Dean, who was not very convincing as a young Frenchman from 1907.