Salome Jens

            On Wednesday morning I finished memorizing “My chérie Jane” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            Around midday I cleaned off the top of the antique dresser in my bedroom, rolled it into the living room, vacuumed the area where it sits and then washed a six-board section of the floor. 

            While working I listened to a collection of rare recordings of Bjork. One of them has a great live version of “Satisfaction” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Another three sessions and I should be finished with the floor in that room.

            I had a ham and cheese sandwich on a toasted English muffin for lunch and a piece of strawberry rhubarb pie with maple yogourt.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Amos and Ruby are about to have their third child. Andy and Kingfish are particularly excited because they’ve been told that they will be co-godfathers of the child. Additionally Andy will be honoured with the baby being named after him if it’s a boy. On the big day they come to pace with Amos in the waiting room at the hospital and they are more nervous than he is. When it is announced that Amos is the father of a baby girl Andy is a little disappointed until Amos tells him that they planned for this and had decided that in the event that it was a girl they’d name her Amosandra. Suddenly Andy says he’d been hoping it would be a girl all along. Next however Andy and Kingfish are disappointed to learn that the hospital would only allow the parents to see the child for the first week. A week later they decide to get the jump on everyone and to be there when Ruby, Amos and the baby come home from the hospital. But what they don’t know is that Ruby and Amos’s neighbour, Mrs Jackson, who has a bigger apartment but only one ten month old baby has switched apartments with Ruby and Amos. Andy and Kingfish come to Ruby and Amos’s old place where they find Mrs Jackson’s child alone because Mrs Jackson is cleaning up in the old place. Andy and Kingfish think the ten-month-old baby is their one-week-old godchild. They panic when they see no one there and they take the baby to the hospital to be fed. At the hospital they run into Henry, who tells them about the change of apartments. They take the child back. On the day of Amosandra’s christening however, Andy and Kingfish can’t come because they’ve picked up the measles from Mrs Jackson’s baby.

            I read over half of the paper that Professor White posted about the two row wampum belt.

            I had my last two strips of bacon, an egg and a toasted English muffin for dinner with a beer while watching a United States Steel Hour teleplay from 1961 called "Man on a Mountaintop".

            Gerta Blake comes from Iowa to a low rent area of New York City to move in with her artist brother Charlie and his wife Betty. When Gerta arrives there is a party going on and the life of it is Charlie’s friend Willie. Willie is asked to go out to buy more beer and he takes Gerta along but when they are in the hall he remembers he needs money and he goes back in the apartment, leaving Gerta in the hall. An older man is knocking on the door of the apartment next door but the voice on the other side tells him repeatedly to go away. Finally he does. The man inside briefly opens his door, sees Greta and then closes it again. When Willie comes back she asks about the man next door. Willie is contemptuous and dismissive of him. He says he is an anti-social prodigy named Horace Mann Borden. After buying the beer Willie and Greta stop at a café where Horace is a waiter. Willie teases Horace and gets him to answer a difficult math question in three seconds. Gerta calls Willie a monster and apologizes to Horace. At first he tells her to leave him alone but over the next few weeks she persists in trying to be his friend. They begin going to movies together and he comes to trust her. We learn that the man that had knocked on Horace’s door before is his psychologist father. Horace’s mother died while giving birth to him and his father used theoretical methods to turn Horace into a prodigy from the time of birth. Horace graduated from university at the age of twelve and was a professor at nineteen. He could not connect with normal people and so he withdrew. Horace’s father tries to get to Horace through Gerta and she arranges for a meeting. The father thinks it's an opportunity to convince Horace to use his genius to become the next Einstein. Horace just wants his father to answer if he ever loved him but he can't answer and leaves. Gerta asks Horace to begin life with her. He doesn't answer and so she leaves. After a few minutes we see him symbolically stepping out of his room and closing the door.  He stands in front of Gerta’s door and says, “Gerta, I want to come in.”

            Gerta was played by Salome Jens, who much later played the nameless female changeling five seasons of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

            Betty was played by Julie Bovasso who wrote and directed experimental plays. She founded the Tempo Playhouse, which won the Obie Award in 1953 for best experimental theatre. In 1969 she won a triple Obie Award as playwright, director and actor for her play “Gloria and Esperanza".