Barbara Eden

            On Tuesday morning I finished memorizing “Nicotine” by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords but no one had posted them and so I started working them out myself. I figured out the ones for the instrumental intro and on Wednesday I should have the verses done. 

            I re-read a couple of more chapters of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and had twelve pages left at lunchtime. 

            I had kettle chips with salsa and yogourt for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride. It had snowed overnight but it had melted and so there were puddles to swerve around. On Maple Grove one pedestrian was walking off the sidewalk and on Brock a guy was walking slowly almost in the middle of the road. Just south of Bloor a jogger was grunting heavily as he ran. I went to Ossington and Bloor, down to Queen and home but I think most of the exercise I get from a winter bike ride comes from putting all my layers before the ride and then taking them all off afterwards. 

            I finished re-reading Northanger Abbey. I picked up a little more of the subtle humour the second time around. One can see her influence on Oscar Wilde, although he took that kind of parody through exaggerated praise of the upper class to a far more artful and hilarious level. 

            I re-read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems "The Cry of the Children" and "A Curse for a Nation" a couple more times each. The first one is a protest against child labour in England and the other is against slavery in the United States. 

            I had a potato, a curried chicken leg and gravy while watching Andy Griffith. In this story an incredibly gorgeous manicurist named Ellen Brown comes to Mayberry from Nashville and sets up a table in Floyd’s barber shop. At first none of the men want manicures because they’ve never had one. Ellen is ready to give up when Andy steps forward for a manicure. Then he makes Barney get one and convinces the mayor as well. That sets the ball rolling and soon the men are lining up. But that causes their wives to get jealous and make their husbands cancel their appointments. Andy tries to tell Ellen that she would need to be married in order to not upset the wives. Ellen thinks Andy is proposing to her but tells him she has to turn him down because she's going back to Nashville to marry her boyfriend Pierre. 

             Ellen was played by the amazing Barbara Eden, who looked twice as good in a tight dress on this show than she did in the harem costume she wore when she began starring on “I Dream of Jeannie" three years later. She is also a singer and appeared on a lot of TV variety shows and travelling musicals over the years. She’s still working at the age of 89. Her singing is fine but her choices of songs were always pretty middle of the road. She has always been more appealing as an actor.