John Dehner

            On Friday morning I didn't get to bed until a little after 1:00 and so I had less than four hours sleep and felt bit spaced out when I got up. 

            I memorized the fourth and fifth verses of "Quand ça balance" (When Off Balance) by Serge Gainsbourg and almost the sixth. 

            Insufficient sleep hit me a bit during song practice but afterwards when I had a cup of black tea, which was my first caffeine in two weeks I didn’t feel sleepy at all. 

            I weighed 90.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            I took a siesta from 12:20 until 13:30.

            I weighed 89.5 kilos before lunch. I broke my fast with a lettuce, scallion, tomato, avocado and dill salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. On the way back along Queen Street I found some books that had been thrown out, but I only took Crime and Punishment. 

            I took another siesta from 17:05 to 18:20 and when I got up I weighed 89.6 kilos. 

            In the next hour I finished gathering quotations from “The Decay of Lying” by Oscar Wilde:

            “Art is a veil, rather than a mirror. Hers are the forms more real than living man, and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. Art can work miracles at her will.” 

            “Life is the mirror and Art the reality."

            “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.” 

            “Realism inevitably makes people ugly. We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art. Life is Art’s best and only pupil.” 

            “Fact tries to reproduce fiction.”

            “Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose." 

            “The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.” 

            “the basis of life is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them.” 

            “One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.” 

            “Art never expresses anything but itself.” 

            “Art is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols." 

            “the more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age." 

            “The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music." 

            “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” 

            “the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.”

            “we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.” 

            “The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great deal of the artist.” 

            “It is only style that makes us believe in a thing.” 

            “Most of our modern portrait painters never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything." 

            “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is lying in Art.” 

            “far from being the creation of its time, art is usually in direct opposition to it." 

            “Sometimes art entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to understand.” 

            “To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.” “All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.” 

            “Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything." 

            “As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. Any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.” 

            “The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.” 

            “Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.” 

            “the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.” 

            Now I can harvest these quotes from George Eliot and Oscar Wilde to support my argument as I write my essay. I puttered a bit with the wording of my paper before dinner. 

            I had a lettuce, scallion, mushroom, dill, tomato, avocado and scotch bonnet pepper salad with raspberry vinaigrette while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Aunt Bee is feeling poorly because an acquaintance her own age passed away and now she is worried about her health. Andy suggests she see the doctor but Bee finds the local physician depressing because he always tells her that she is healthy for her age. On the way home she comes across a smooth talking salesman who calls himself Colonel Harvey selling his Indian Elixir, which he claims is a cure all. Bee is so impressed with the man’s eloquence that she buys two bottles and invites him home to dinner. Later when Andy and Barney come across Harvey they find that his papers are in order so there’s nothing they can do about him. They go back to Andy’s place and find Bee at the piano for the first time in years and singing "Toot Toot Tootsie". When she stands up and staggers around to make dinner they realize that she’s drunk. Barney looks in the closet and finds one and a half bottles of Harvey’s Elixir. Andy tells Barney to have the stuff analyzed. Harvey arrives, the family has dinner with him and he is a charming guest. Bee invites him to speak at the meeting of her Ladies Aid Church Committee and he agrees. The next day the results of the test come in and it is 85% alcohol. Since Mayberry is in a dry county that is grounds for Harvey’s arrest but Bee would never forgive him. So Andy decides to crash the next day’s meeting where he finds the committee all tipsy and singing “Chinatown My Chinatown”. Andy arrests Bee and her friends and after sobering them up with coffee in jail he explains the contents of Harvey’s elixir. Then Harvey is arrested. 

            Colonel Harvey was played by John Dehner, who started out his professional life as an animator for Walt Disney, a DJ, a pianist and a Peabody Award winning radio news reporter. His father was a world travelling artist and so he attended school in France and Norway, learning four languages in his childhood. He served as an army public relations officer during WWII. He played Paladin in the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel but turned down the role of Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. He played Pat Garret in The Left Handed Gun. He played one of the reporters in the two season series “The Roaring Twenties.” 

            One of the committee members was played by Noreen Gammill who played Martha Conklin on the Our Miss Brooks radio sitcom. She did the voice of the elephant Catty in the movie Dumbo.