Patricia Medina

            On Wednesday morning it was quiet on the street in front of my building for the first time in years. The people that I normally see walking in this direction either didn’t come at all or else they walked west to Tim Hortons. The only person that came was Margaret in her faded old leopard print coat. She’d either forgotten or hadn’t realized that the Coffeetime downstairs had closed forever. No one stopped their cars in the Dollarama parking lot to walk across Queen and get a coffee. It had been a daily ritual for years that the Ethiopian cabby in the Beck taxi would pull in to the lot and immediately his fellow countryman, my former down the hall neighbour, would leave his table at the Coffeetime to walk across and stand to chat for five to fifteen minutes. I wondered if they were meeting now at Tim Hortons.

I memorized a little more of "On n'est pas là pour se faire engueuler" (We Didn’t Come Here to be Shouted At) by Boris Vian and the first verse of “Nazi Rock” by Serge Gainsbourg. Nazi Rock tries to make Nazis ridiculous by painting them as dressing up in drag for the Night of the Long Knives. I guess maybe it’s kind of a Clockwork Orange thing but really, what’s ridiculous about dressing in drag?

Around 9:00 I started to hear the loud noises hammering, crowbarring and yanking of the deinstallment of all the Coffeetime equipment and furniture downstairs. Around 10:00 they started working under my window to take down the Coffeetime sign and were at it for a couple of hours. I also noticed that the hot water had been turned off but I assumed it was temporary.

I worked on typing my lecture notes from Monday.

I did my dishes with cold water and was just about to do some cleaning in the bedroom when I heard Benj and Shankar talking in the hallway. I went out and told them to keep the noise down because I was trying to hear the hammering downstairs.

Benji said they told him that they’d be turning the hot water back on in a couple of hours. We chatted about the changes that were going on downstairs. I said that if it’s really Popeyes that’ll be moving in they are going to do very good business in Parkdale because black people tend to love Popeyes. Benji said that it’s better than KFC but Shankar said he likes the gravy. I was surprised because Shankar is a Hindu and I thought that he would be a vegetarian. He said he’s not a vegetarian but he did recently give up beef. Benji, who is also of South Asian descent by way of Guyana said he loves pork. I asked Shankar what god he worships but he just said “the almighty”. I asked if he worships Siva because I know that some Sivites eat meat but he just started explaining that there are lots of gods to worship in Hinduism. I told him that I know all about it because I used to be a pujari. He asked where and I told him that I’d studied yoga at an ashram north of Montreal. He correctly guessed that it was the Sivananda Yoga Ashram and Benji was familiar with it too.

Shankar surprised me by telling me that he recognized me from the poetry scene years ago because he’s friends with Tom Fisher. He also knew Nik Beat. Benji said he remembers when I used to run my poetry reading out of a Brazilian place on College in Little Portugal. I forget the name but it was owned by a woman and the husband she was separated from. It was a nice place but they went out of business.

I cleaned the upper left shelf in the overhead storage area in my bedroom.

In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy gets a call from Charmaign Larue who asks him to take her to a dance even though she and her mother cheated him out of two tickets for a Caribbean cruise. He had intended to tell her off but as soon as she start charming him with her Georgia accent he melts. He agrees to take her to the dance but as the date approaches he receives a telegram from a woman named Floressa Jackson that he’d proposed to by mail. She says she would be arriving by train the same date as the dance. Since Floressa doesn’t know what Andy looks like he hires Kingfish to pose as him and meet her at the station. The plan is to get rid of her and so Kingfish tells Floressa that he has to leave for a dangerous scientific expedition in the Amazon and he probably won’t be back. Floressa decides to stay in New York anyway and ends up moving in with Charmaign. Kingfish and Andy plot successfully to get Floressa evicted but in the end Kingfish comes home to find that his wife Sapphire has rented a room to her.

In this show the announcer mentions television for the first time because he was shilling Christmas cards and wished they were on television so everyone could see them.

The noises stopped downstairs but the hot water did not come back on.

I finished typing my lecture notes and worked on getting caught up on the rest of my journal.

I had two slices of bacon, an egg and a warmed up loaf of naan for dinner with a beer while watching Zorro. In this story, Esteban (played by Cesar Romero) has proposed to the wealthy Margareta Cotazar and as he is overwhelmingly charming she has accepted without realizing that he is after her for her money. Zorro foils several attempts by Esteban to court Margareta. Esteban tries to outsmart Zorro by putting out the word that he will be serenading Margareta beside the lake. Zorro comes to stop him but the lady being serenaded is corporal Reyes in drag and Esteban and Reyes attack him. Sgt Garcia is nearby but he gets confronted by a skunk and doesn’t dare move. Zorro easily defeats the three men and they all get dunked in the lake.

Margareta was played by Patricia Medina, who was British but her father was Spanish. She had lead roles in films such as Stranger at the Door, Phantom of the Rue Morgue, Mr Arkadin and Confidential Report from the mid 1940s to the mid-1950s. When the film work started to run dry she began working in television and on stage. She was married to British actor Richard Greene who played Robin Hood in the old British TV series and later to Joseph Cotton. She and Cotten were close friends with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. She loved working with Lou Costello and considered him to be the greatest comedian she’d ever seen.