Carol Stone

            On Sunday morning I memorized the third verse of “Variations sur Marilou” by Serge Gainsbourg, but there’s lots more to go.

            For the fourth video recording of my daily rehearsal I tried putting the camera at the east side of the room rather than the south. In previous videos I’ve faced the window and the light has been even on my face. I wanted to see how it would look with it coming ion from my right side. The front legs of the tripod this time were on my dresser and I shortened the back leg so it would stand on the mantel. With the mirror behind the camera I was able to see the reflection of the viewscreen at the back of the camera and so I could more easily adjust the tilt so that my head wasn’t at the top of the frame and my guitar was not cut off at the bottom. Judging from my reflection in the mirror I think the shadows created by the side-arriving light made my face look aesthetically more interesting.

            When the battery ran out I turned around again to face the window because I’d rather look at people on the street than stare at myself while I’m singing.

At one point I bit my tongue while singing. I’ve nipped at my licker several times since I had the tooth removed a couple of months ago and it’s getting very annoying because it never gets a chance to heal.

Around midday I rode down to Freshco to use the ATM to take out my last $20 so I could do the laundry. While I was there I bought some dish detergent. When I got home I grabbed my laundry and went to the laundromat. I was surprised that it wasn’t that busy on a Sunday.

I had a cheese, tomato, lettuce and cucumber sandwich for lunch.

In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story was similar to a previous episode in which Kingfish thinks that Sapphire is pregnant. This is 1953 and so it seems they couldn’t say “pregnant” on the radio and so after Kingfish finds pabulum in the cupboard and gets a call from the baby laundry he says that Sapphire is going to have “a blessed adventure”. The reality is that Sapphire’s sister is coming with her one year old daughter to stay for a while. Even when he gets a call that the baby is arriving on flight 5:48 he doesn’t get it and concludes that babies really are delivered by storks.

I wasn’t going to take a bike ride because I’d already been riding around the neighbourhood in the heat earlier. But I decided that I was pretty much caught up on my writing and that I should take advantage of the weather to get some exercise. It was a fairly pleasant ride. There were lots of people downtown and quite a few attractive women.

I watched the videos of my rehearsals for yesterday and today. It’s weird that Windows let me rename today’s video to June 21, 2020 but the one for yesterday froze every time I tried to rename it to June 20, 2020. Maybe when I restart on Monday it will work.

The new angle with the window light coming in on my right side makes for a much more aesthetically pleasing video and so I’m going to shoot all of the other videos this way. I made mistakes on most of the songs but one or two might have come through all right.

I had an egg over easy and toast with a beer for dinner while watching “The Eye of Truth”, which is the twenty-third episode of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957-1958 TV series. There are glitches in the video because this one only downloaded 49% and it’s not available for streaming and so I missed a few details. In this story Gregg Carey has just paid $1000 for a middle aged couple to sign a letter that will help his son out of a jam. He is bringing the letter home when he stops for a hitchhiker who pulls a gun and robs him. He only fights back when the man wants to take the letter and ends up severely beaten because of it. When he looks at the police photographs he recognizes the face but does not confirm to the police that Buddy Ladoga was his attacker. But the detectives make small talk about the fact that Ladoga is not only a psycho but he’s also a very good piano player who sometimes works in some clubs. Carey wants the letter back and so he hopes that Ladoga will try to blackmail him. He goes looking for Ladoga in various jazz joints and finds a woman named Lena that is familiar enough with Ladoga to know some of the joints where he's worked. He pays her to take him to the places where she’s seen Ladoga and she says the money will pay for one of her sessions with her analyst. She says she doesn’t like the cats at these clubs. She says something about her analyst referring to them in relation to substitute gratification in the Freudian sense. At one club the beatnik owner knows Carey by name because Ladoga had already said he’d be looking for him. Later Bodega lets himself into Carey’s house, since his key is one of the things he’d stolen. He takes Carey at gunpoint to an abandoned nightclub. Carey offers Ladoga $5000 for the envelope but Ladoga wants Carey to become his partner in a new nightclub. He says that he can't put his name on a lease or get the liquor license because of his record. Carey shoots Ladoga enough to incapacitate him, takes the letter and then calls the police. At first he tells them that he shot him in self defence and the police accept that. But as Carey is leaving he turns around and tells the cops the truth. He explains that Ladoga said some things to him that made him reflect on himself. He says if we can’t stand examination by men like that we aren't worth very much.

            Lena was played by Carol Stone, who played Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings of “Big Nose Kate”, the common law wife of Wyatt Earp in the series, "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp".