Delphi Lawrence

            On Tuesday morning I finished memorizing "Raccrochez c'est une horreur!” (Hang Up! This is Horrible!” by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. Nobody had posted them and so it looks like I’ll be the first after I work them out.

            Since the flies are only around for a season I’m not usually bothered by them but lately they’ve been landing on me a lot and making me feel creepy. Today I finally started killing them by snapping them with a dirty undershirt.

            Around midday I returned to sanding the former exit door in my bedroom. This time I just focused on the lower left part of the frame and did it without a sanding block so I could get into the grooves of the woodwork. I think I made some progress but there wasn’t a lot of plaster dust to sweep up afterwards.

            For lunch I had a lettuce and tomato salad with mayonnaise and ketchup dressing.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story was recycled from one I’d heard before. A wealthy woman named Bathsheba Washington comes looking for Andy at the lodge hall. When Kingfish mentions her name to Andy he faints. When he comes to he tells of how twenty five years before he’d been working at a summer resort and had almost drowned. Bathsheba pulled him out of the water and gave him artificial respiration. Andy said, “If this is artificial respiration I can’t wait to have the real thing!” Their romance lasted the summer. Andy is all prepared to rekindle it even though Bathsheba is now much heavier than she used to be. It turns out however that Bathsheba doesn’t even remember Andy and she was only looking for him because he had placed an ad in the paper looking for a job. She wanted to hire him as a chauffeur/gardener. When Andy hears of this his pride in his abilities as the Casanova of Lennox Avenue is injured. He takes the job and winds up in this version of the story smooching with Bathsheba in the back seat of the limo while someone else drives it. The other version is funnier because he tries to rekindle their romance by jumping in her pool and having her save him again, not knowing she’d had the pool drained for cleaning.

            I didn’t take a bike ride because it had rained a lot earlier and I could see a big puddle out of my window on Dunn Avenue so I assumed there would be more on Bloor and Queen.

            I started a new video project in Windows Moviemaker and began synchronizing the camera audio and the voice recorder audio of my July 3 rehearsal. Once they’re together I’ll edit out and publish the video of me performing “Person” and then upload it to YouTube.

            I had oven fries, sautéed pepper and onion, two drumsticks and gravy for dinner while watching two episodes of The Adventures of William Tell.

            In the first story two Swiss traitors come on a mission from the Austrian emperor to assassinate his brother, Prince Carl. But Landburgher Gessler double crosses them after they’ve completed their mission and have them arrested for murder. He gives them a chance however to save their lives if they will also kill William Tell. Gessler lets leak the information that the two Swiss “patriots” that killed Prince Carl are being taken back to Austria for trial. As predicted William Tell and his men ambush the soldiers and rescue the “heroes”. They are brought as guests to Tell’s cave where he and Hedda and Walter now live as fugitives. They try to sneak into the cave that night to murder Tell but they trip an alarm made from bells on a string and Tell wakes up. They say they’d come to alert him that they saw lights approaching. Tell is now suspicious of the two men and keeps watch all night. The next morning Tell invites them to go hunting but tells them he only has one extra crossbow and so they’ll have to share. Later Walter wakes up and is disappointed that his father didn’t take him hunting as he normally would have and so he goes to look for him. While Tell and the men are hunting, when Tell’s back is turned one of the men aims the crossbow at him but Tell turns and shoots him. The other man draws a knife and they fight. Tell disarms him and knocks him down but the man throws a large rock that hits Tell and causes him to fall about four meters. I wonder if this is the fall on set that caused Conrad Philips to permanently injure his knee. The man continues to throw large rocks down at Tell while Walter arrives with his crossbow. The man retrieves Tell’s crossbow and is about to shoot Tell when he sees Walter in the bushes. The man and Walter have a crossbow standoff while Tell climbs back up and grabs a large rock. Just as the man is about to shoot at Walter, Tell throws the rock and hits him in the head. Tell says to Walter, “I thought I told you to stay at home” but Walter says, “It’s a good thing I didn’t” and Tell smiles. This seems like a blooper, since Tell didn’t instruct Walter to stay him as he left before Walter woke up.

            In the second story the beautiful Baroness Albrecht comes to ask Tell for help because her bailiff has been robbing her estate and she can’t take him before a judge because he threatens to expose her for having sheltered a resistance fighter. Tell goes with her but Hedda is suspicious and follows them. When Tell and Albrecht reach her castle we see but Tell does not that the baroness is a traitor and has lured Tell into a trap in the service of Landburgher Gessler. Meanwhile Hedda arrives to talk with some of the serfs on Albrecht’s estate. She learns that the baroness is a cruel ruler who taxes her serfs heavily and that she has no bailiff robbing her estate. The baroness is planning the final details of her trap and so when she hears a minstrel outside she hires him to sing and play the lute for Tell during dinner. The minstrel is Hedda but strangely William does not recognize the singing of his own wife even though logically she must have sung for him before during their relationship, since she’s very good. She sings a song that might be a variation of an old folk song:

"Master Fox went out at eventide looking for his supper / to the farm’s henhouse did he stride looking for his supper / Oh a lovely plump hen in his glances did he see … Master Fox said I love you so much I could easily eat you … But my mother told me to give no to any suitor who could not crow / So you see Master Fox you couldn't do 'cocka doodle doo ooh …"

Albrecht drugs Tell’s wine and then Landburgher Gessler and his guards; and General Bullinger and several soldiers arrive. Tell puts up a fight but then the drug takes effect and he collapses into unconsciousness. Bullinger wants to kill him then and there but Gessler insists that he be thrown in Albrecht's dungeon before being taken back to town for a public hanging. Still posing a boy minstrel, Hedda takes the rest of the drugged wine from Albrecht’s table and brings it to the dungeon guards. They ask the minstrel to sing them a song while they drink, so she sings,

“Follow the drum / Follow the drum / Wherever someone takes the flag just follow the drum / Leave wife and child / Leave on a crumb / Your emperor demands it so you follow the drum / You hear the beat, the beat through rain and thunder / Rumtumtum rumtumtum rutatumtumtum / A life of strife and spoil and a little plunder / Rumtumtum rumtumtum rutatumtum / Follow the drum deaf, blind and dumb …"

When the guards conk out she drags them down to the dungeon and buries them under some straw. She finds the key and unlocks Tell’s cell. It takes her a while to wake Tell and even then he is too groggy to fight even as they hear the guards approaching. He's able to drop a ball and chain on the head of a guard outside the cell window and help Hedda through the bars. All he can do then is hide in the dungeon. Gessler thinks he must have escaped and so he and his guards leave the castle where they are surrounded and captured by Hedda and the serfs. General Bullinger searches the dungeon and finally captures Tell. They are about to hang him outside when Hedda calls to the general to show him that she and her helpers also have a noose around Gessler’s neck. She proposes a prisoner exchange and the general reluctantly gives in. Tell goes to Hedda and she cuts his bonds. He asks if she forgives him and she says “No” but laughs and embraces him.

Baroness Albrecht was played by Delphi Lawrence, who was nominated for the Joseph Jefferson Award for her theatre performance in “Separate Tables”. She made her first film in 1952 and performed mostly in British B movies in the 1950s and 60s. She had a crucial part in "Beat Girl" but was left out of the credits.