Agnes Moorhead

            On Monday morning I finally memorized the first five verses of “Variations sur Marilou” and I reworked some of my translation based on better understanding the rhyme scheme.

            I shot the eleventh video recording of my daily song rehearsal but I would definitely have to free some space on my hard drive in order to be able to upload it from the camera’s memory card. I played a couple of songs twice because of mistakes. I do certain of my translations well almost every time and my own “One Hundred Hookers” comes through all right about have the time but the four of my songs tend to end up with at least one major error. “One Hundred Hookers" is my most difficult song to play but I have been playing it every day for three years , whereas each of the other of my songs only get played every four days. The extra practice has paid off and so if one of the versions of “One Hundred Hookers” is good enough to upload then I'll graduate one of my other songs to play every day.

            After the twenty nine minute charge on the camera battery ran out I turned to face the window and started playing the next song but stepped onto a staple. The only explanation I can think of as to how a staple got into my living room might come from the fact that there are staples that I’d gunned into the corner of one of the drawers of the antique dresser in my bedroom in order to try to hold it together. One of the staples probably was probably jarred loose and fell on the bedroom floor when I took the mirror off to clean it on Sunday. So on Monday morning when I brought the microphone and stand out of the bedroom to begin recording the cord probably dragged the staple out to the living room. The back of the staple must have fallen into a crack between two floorboards, with the teeth pointing up. If one deliberately tried to make that happen it would probably take a million tries. There was a little bit of blood and so I put socks on until it stopped.

            Around midday I washed and scrubbed part of the kitchen between the table and the filing cabinet. It’ll take me another two sessions to get that whole passageway cleaned and then I’ll have to move the cabinet and think about getting rid of the clothes dryer that’s balanced on the stand above it. Maybe I’ll aim to put that out for garbage night a week from Thursday.

            I think I actually forgot to have lunch that day. I remember only eating some yogourt with honey but it slipped my mind to have anything substantial. I didn’t notice myself being hungry anyway.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish gets a new phone in his office with a number that used to belong to a stock broker. He gets a call from someone offering a tip on a company called United Consolidated. He says the merger is on and that the stock is going to jump seventy points tomorrow and so buy as many shares as possible. Kingfish pawns enough stuff to raise $200 and gets Andy to put in another two c-notes but there turn out to be several companies with the name United Consolidated and so they go to the broker’s office to find out which one in which to buy shares.

The broker asks, “Which United Consolidated do you want?”

“The one that’s going up seventy points tomorrow.”

“How can I tell today which stock is going up seventy points tomorrow?”

“It’s simple. We’ll just leave the money today and the one that goes up seventy points tomorrow, that’s the one we want.”

“But if it goes up seventy points it’ll cost you more money tomorrow.”

“We don’t want to buy it tomorrow. We want to buy it today. We ain't even gonna be here tomorrow. Would you please sell us the stock?”

“What stock do you want?”

“The stock that’s going up seventy points tomorrow.”

“How will I know which stock is going up seventy points tomorrow?”

“Ain’t you gonna be here tomorrow?”

“Of course I’m going to be here tomorrow!”

“Well if you’re here tomorrow you’ll know which stock is going up seventy points won’t you?”

“Of course I will!”

“Well that’s the one we want.”

“You’re crossing your bridges before you come to them!”

“No we ain’t. We goin home on the subway.”

“Look, you can’t buy tomorrow’s stock at today’s prices because you don’t know which stock you wish to buy until you have tomorrow’s prices!”

“But why should we pay tomorrow’s prices when we is here today? Tomorrow, today will be yesterday and if today is yesterday you can’t charge us tomorrow’s prices for a stock we bought two days ago.”

“You can’t buy tomorrow’s stock today because the price of tomorrow’s stock is different today! If you want today’s stock tomorrow you’ll have to pay tomorrow’s prices!”

“Will you stop hollering about tomorrow? We is here today, so sell us the stock!”

“Which stock?”

“The stock that’s going up seventy points tomorrow!”

Kingfish finally finds out that the call he’d received came from someone at United Consolidated Televisions. They buy the stock and it goes up twenty points overnight but Andy hasn’t seen the paper yet. Kingfish gets greedy and decides to convince Andy that the bottom has fallen out of the television market. He says that since television started a new generation has been born and they’ve found out how the medium has affected heredity. Since future parents had been spending so much time squatting down to tune in their television sets that now babies are being born without the ability to stand. He says television will soon be extinct and so he’ll sell Kingfish his share for $50. So Kingfish ends up withy Andy’s shares but the next day the stock drops thirty points and Kingfish loses everything.

I took a bike ride. I noticed that the homeless person that lived in a tent on the middle barrier on Yonge Street south of College is gone. I don’t know if the cops moved them out or if they got a better tent in a better neighbourhood.

I had to make room on my computer in order to upload the video that I’d shot earlier and so I deleted three episodes of the first torrent of “The Adventure of Robin Hood” that I’d downloaded. That torrent has enormous files of 855 megabytes an episode whereas the second torrent that I found has episodes between 74 and 97 megabytes.

In the morning I’d taken a chicken out of the freezer and put it in the main part of the fridge to thaw. I would normally have taken it out in the last few hours to thaw at room temperature but I forgot and so I couldn’t cut the chicken up before roasting it. I just put the whole thing in the oven at 19:15 and it was done by 20:45 anyway.

I had a chicken leg, a potato and gravy while watching “Protégé”, which is the thirty first episode of the 1957-1958 Alfred Hitchcock produces TV series, “Suspicion”. This one had only downloaded 31% and so it shot through to the end quite quickly. I found it on Daily Motion and watched it with Rice Crispies and Play Station commercials popping up at inappropriate moments.

In this story Katherine Searles is a former star of the theatre who had ruined her career with alcoholism. She has been running a school in a small town and has only recently tried acting in summer stock. A playwright named Jason has heard that Katherine is back on the boards and he goes to see her perform. He finds her to be better than ever and he invites her and Eli, the director of the summer stock play to take his new play to Broadway. Katherine is reluctant because she is afraid that big time pressure would drive her to drinking again. Her protégé, Pam convinces her to take the part and Katherine agrees if Pam can also have a small part in the play. The rehearsals are going amazingly well and Katherine is amazing but then Pam begins to plot to take over. Katherine has not had a drink for years but Pam tells Eli and Jason that she is drinking again. She plants a bottle in Katherine’s dressing room for Jason to find. With just forty-eight hours left before opening Eli decides to secretly rehearse an alternative play with Pam in the lead in case Katherine doesn’t pull through. The night before the opening Katherine leaves the theatre and goes home but has forgotten her keys. She goes back to the theatre to overhear Pam telling people that Katherine is drinking now more than she did ten years ago. The shock is too much for Katherine and she goes to her dressing room and finds the bottle that Pam planted. She gets drunk and Pam feels triumphant but Katherine convinces Jason and Eli that she can still do the part. She does it and she is better than she’s ever been but in the final scene Katherine’s character is supposed to shoot herself in the head. Perhaps Pam had earlier put real bullets in the gun because she behaves as if Katherine is going to kill herself on stage in order to not incriminate herself. But there are blanks in the gun and Katherine makes the play a hit with her performance. Jason is sure she will never drink again now that she’s conquered Broadway.

Katherine was played by the great Agnes Moorhead, who started out as a child singing in church and later became a dancer and singer in the St Louis Opera. She earned a Doctorate in Literature. In the late 1920s she became involved radio acting and was the voice of many famous characters. When she signed a contract with MGM pictures she insisted that she still be allowed to work in radio. She was so versatile that she was impossible to typecast. She was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Magnificent Ambersons and then three more times after that. She was the first woman to host the Oscars. One of her most acclaimed television roles was in The Twilight Zone episode, "The Invaders" in which she plays a mute woman alone in a remote prairie farmhouse being confronted by tiny aliens from outer space. Her most famous part on television was that of Endora the witch on Bewitched.

Eli was played by William Shatner, who was incredibly handsome in those days but a little too relaxed for this part.

Jason was played by Jack Klugman and when I watched him interact with Shatner I could really see that Klugman would have made a great Dr McCoy on Star Trek.

Pam was played by Phyllis Love, who went to high school with her friend Cloris Leachman. She acted on several TV shows but had her greatest successes on Broadway. When she retired from acting she changed her first name to Osanna.