Maudie Prickett

            On Friday morning I looked for the chords for "Calypso Blues" by Boris Vian but no one has posted them and so tomorrow I’ll start working them out myself. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Ciel de plomb" (The Sky is Leaden) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through the song in French and English and then uploaded it to Christian's Translations to prepare it for blog publication. I’ll probably have it posted on Saturday morning. 

            I weighed 89.6 kilos at breakfast. 

            In the late morning I cleaned and scrubbed the front and sides of my stove. The outside looks nice for the first time in years but next I have to clean the oven and that’s going to take at least a week of work. 

            While working I listened to Jeff Buckley’s only studio album “Grace”. I don’t quite get what all the fuss over Jeff Buckley is about and why David Bowie listed “Grace” as being one of the ten albums he would take to a desert island. There are no songs that stick in one’s head and his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is not as good as the original or even better than K.D. Lang’s version. Jeff Buckley had a very good voice but it wasn’t as good as his father’s in the sense that Tim Buckley really experimented with his voice whereas Jeff just sang gratuitously high every now and then to give the illusion of melody. I’d say “Grace” is a good album but it’s not a “Holy fuck that’s good!” album like some of the ones Arcade Fire has put out. For a first effort it’s pretty good and chances are if he’d lived he might have created something outstanding by his third album. 

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before lunch. I had chips, salsa and yogourt and for dessert I had the juice from a can of peaches with coconut milk and honey. 

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor in the afternoon. On my way home along Queen I followed a bus that had an ad on the back for a law firm called Avanessy Giordano. There were separate pictures of the two lawyers and the guy was assuming that kind of awkward pose that cheap lawyers often have for their portraits in which he’s twisted slightly and leaning toward the camera with one shoulder forward. I guess the message is supposed to be, “I’m leaning toward you because I’m interested in your case.” The weirdest thing though was their slogan, which sounded like it was created by someone who either flunked grammar or couldn’t speak English in the first place: “Fighting for better”. They could at least finish the sentence and show they have an education. 

            As I passed Trinity-Bellwoods I saw the park was full of people and no one seemed to be wearing a mask. There was a gathering of people around a guy shouting “Freedom!” With 2000 new covid cases in the city a day the shout should more honestly be “Covid forever!” 

            Benji and Sankara were standing outside my building when I pulled up and so I chatted with them for about an hour. I weighed 88 kilos at 18:45. 

            I did some research on the odour of bedbugs for my poem series “My Blood in a Bug”. It’s funny that of the fifteen things people say bedbugs smell like, none of them match how I think they smell like rancid animal fat. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos before dinner. I had french fries and chicken tenders with gravy while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

            In the first story Aunt Bee is lamenting the fact that their relatives never visit and so Andy says she can invite her sister and her family for a weekend. Her overbearing sister Nora arrives with her obnoxious husband Ollie and their two bratty boys. Nora takes over in the kitchen, Ollie takes off with the squad car and the siren blaring and Opie has to sleep with the nasty boys in the same bed. It’s only supposed to be for the weekend but when Bee politely says she wishes they could stay longer, Ollie decides to take his sick leave so they can stay for a week. When the news on the radio says that a couple of dangerous convicts have escaped from a nearby prison, Andy is not worried because they usually head for the coast. Ollie brags that if they came to Mayberry he and Andy would take care of them. After Andy learns they’ve been captured he gets an idea and tells Ollie that the escapees are heading this way and that he’s going to help Andy capture them. Ollie packs up the car and his family and leaves. 

            Nora was played by Maudie Prickett, who performed in over 300 productions in over four decades. She co-starred on “Hazel”, played Jack Benny’s secretary on “The Jack Benny Program” and Tabitha’s teacher on “Bewitched”. Jonathan Winters named his drag character “Maude Frickert” after her. 

            In the second story Ernest T Bass returns. He says he asked his girl Rowena to marry him and she refused because he has no education. He tells Andy if he doesn’t help him get educated in a week he’ll break every window in Mayberry. It doesn’t do any good to put Ernest in jail for his mischief since he has the mysterious ability to escape, so Andy agrees top help him. Andy gets Helen to let Ernest take her fifth grade class but he is very disruptive. Helen does something she’s never done with any child and raps Ernest on the knuckles with a ruler. Suddenly Ernest is in love with Helen. Barney concludes that Helen is a mother figure for Ernest, since his mother used to use corporal punishment too. It looks like Ernest is not going to learn anything in time and so Andy works with him to memorize a few basics and they give him a diploma, not for passing but for learning. He proudly takes it to Rowena. 

            There’s a goof in the claim that Ernest can't read or write since from the start he's been throwing through windows rocks tied with messages he’s written.