Allyn Joslyn

            On Saturday morning I dreamed of meeting Pablo Picasso but he was in his twenties with long reddish brown hair and he was deliberately homeless in Toronto. As I was strolling on the sidewalk past St Joseph's Health Centre he was on the lawn of the hospital a little higher up than me as I passed. He was squatting and wearing a simple monk's robe with a hood and he addressed me as “Sir.” He asked if I had any extra robes because he had put out a call for people to donate robes to him in different colours like red and blue. 

            I don't know if I should say that this was the twelfth day of my cold or not. In some ways it feels like its over but I still have a lot of phlegm and during song practice there are still points where I get hoarse.

            I finished revising my translation of “Jet Society” by Serge Gainsbourg and did a search for the chords. No one has posted them and so tomorrow I'll start working them out. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where I bought seven bags of red grapes, a pack of chicken drumsticks, maple syrup, honey, skyr, and a bag of kettle chips. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before lunch. I had Ritz crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. I was waiting for the light to change at Dufferin when I saw bubbles floating past me. In the car on my left the driver was blowing bubbles out of his window. On the Bloor bike lane, in the places where it isn't white from snow it's often white from all the salt they've put down. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos at 17:00. 

            I finished my second reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He was certainly a good writer. Sometimes it's hard to discern who's saying what since although Marlow is telling most of the story the actual narrator is a shipmate on a boat returning to England. Marlow is actually telling the story to the narrator and his shipmates. Then within the story the narrator is quoting Marlow quoting other people. In that and in a few other ways it's similar to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Kurtz is certainly a monster similar to Victor Frankenstein and both have created something out of modernity that they cannot control. Frankenstein could have just as easily have been given the last words, “The horror, the horror!” 

            I had been thawing a pack of ground beef in the fridge since midday but it was still solid when I got back from my bike ride so I put it out in the sink. It still didn't unfreeze fast enough. I put it in a bowl and added oil, mustard, salad dressing, barbecue sauce, miso, salt, pepper, hot sauce, and several other ingredients. I had to really work at chopping up the frozen meat so it could be made into four patties. But since there had still been frozen pieces inside, the patties didn't hold as firm as I would have liked. I couldn't flip them without having them break up and so I had to settle for them staying on one side. It worked okay and I had one between two halves of a toasted slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with ketchup, mustard, cucumber and pickles. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of the Addams Family. 

            In this story Wednesday and Pugsley get in trouble at school for playing with dynamite caps. Morticia and Gomez decide that if public school was going to stifle their children's creativity they would enroll them in a private school. They learn that Mr Hilliard, the truant officer they met in the very first episode, is now running a private school called Mockridge. Hilliard still has bad memories of his earlier encounters with the Addams family and he really doesn't want Wednesday and Pugsley in his school. But when Gomez hands him thousands of dollars in cash he can't refuse. But the very next day after the Wednesday brings her Gila monster and Pugsley brings his octopus to school, they are permanently expelled. Gomez decides to buy the school and change it to Addams Hall, with Fester teaching demolitions and Cousin Itt in charge of speech therapy. Hilliard quits but all of the parents sign a petition for the return of Hilliard or they will withdraw their children. Gomez puts Hilliard back in charge on the condition that Fester remains as one of the faculty. But Fester won't come to teach for several years because he is working on explosive experiments. Hilliard agrees. 

            Hilliard's secretary was played by Carol Byron, who appeared in commercials for the 1966 Ford Mustang. 

            Hilliard was played by Allyn Joslyn, who was performing on Broadway in his late teens. He was the first to play the part of Mortimer Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace. He went to Hollywood. He acted in more than 3000 radio shows. He co-starred in My Sister Eileen, Heaven Can Wait, Dangerous Blondes, I Love Melvyn. He starred in Strange Affair, It Shouldn't Happen To A Dog. He co-starred on the sitcom Where's Raymond, The Eve Arden Show, and McKeever and the Colonel.