Anne Helm

            On Thursday morning I tried to memorize the second verse of “Laide jolie laide” (Ugly, Pretty Ugly) by Serge Gainsbourg. But I needed to listen to the recording on YouTube while scrolling through the text and the text wouldn’t move at first. There was just the cursor turned into a spinning wheel indicating it was working on it. Then when I got the text in control there was a delay switching back to YouTube. I finally got them both working together but the delay made it so I only learned about half the second verse. Also, sometimes when I save documents, they go totally white as if the print has been erased but I can see the word count at the bottom and so I know it’s all still there. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I spent an hour reading “The Triumph of Modernism” and re-reading Untouchable. 

            I weighed 87.7 before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Montrose. I rode south to College, west to Dovercourt and then south to Queen. I stopped at Freshco where I bought eight bags of grapes, two pints of strawberries, a can of peaches, a jar of apple sauce, a jug each of orange juice and raspberry lemonade, a bag of kettle chips, and a pack of toilet paper. 

            I weighed 87.7 kilos at 17:40. 

            I read some more of “Triumph of Modernism”. There is a section on the two most prominent female Indian painters of the Modernist era. One was a privileged housewife who didn’t start painting until she was thirty. The other was a professional artist, half Sikh and half Hungarian who was educated in Paris and behaved like an independent European woman with many sexual affairs. She died at the age of 28. I have eight pages left in my re-read of Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand.

            I had a potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            This story is focused almost entirely on Malloy. Suddenly we learn that he’s a part-time university student, studying psychology. He sure didn’t show much psychological education in the way he dealt with the attempted suicide in the previous episode. He’s struck up a friendship with the young Professor Peg Tomkins and when he’s sitting with her in the cafeteria some students come up to invite her to a meeting. They also invite Malloy until they find out he’s a cop and then they uninvite him. Later when he’s on duty he is called with several other officers to the campus to deal with students who are protesting the fact that they are too young to vote but old enough to be sent to fight wars. They stage a sit-in which is considered disruptive and so they are arrested, with Malloy as the chief arresting officer. Peg debates with him whether the police action was justified. He says something about a line having to be drawn before the school is burned down. The next day at school Malloy discovers his Mustang has been vandalized. One professor suggests Malloy should drop out because he is creating tension. The dean tells Malloy that a timing device has been stolen. A student named Maria confesses to stealing it and that she gave it to the student leader Paul Banner. Paul has used it to make a time bomb which is scheduled to go off at 17:30. Malloy forces him to show him where it is. Paul has set the bomb in a fire extinguisher, but he has made sure he’s cleared the area so that only property will be destroyed and no people will be hurt. Malloy diffuses the bomb. With Paul under arrest, the other students now begin to include Malloy and suggest that he could learn something from them. 

            Peg was played by Canadian actor Anne Helm, who at 12 studied at the National Ballet Guild of Canada. She moved with her mother at 14 from Toronto to New York where she began studying at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and also began modeling. At 16 she was a showgirl at the Copacabana. After starring in a TV production of Sleeping Beauty she moved to Hollywood. For a while, she was Elvis’s girlfriend after co-starring in “Follow That Dream.” She co-starred in “Iron Maiden”, the British comedy The Interns, “The Unkissed Bride”, and “Nightmare in Wax”. She played Molly Pierce on “Run for Your Life” and Nurse Mary Briggs on General Hospital. After her acting career ended in 1986, she started writing children’s books.