Melody Patterson

            On Saturday morning I almost memorized the first verse of “Malaise en Malaisie” (Malaise In Malaysia) by Serge Gainsbourg. I would get the lyrics in my head, then I'd go back to sing the chorus but when I returned to the verse I would forget the melody. The tunes for verses and choruses are often fairly similar but in this case, the melodies are distinctly different and it throws me off. I'll probably get it tomorrow. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I went down to No Frills where I bought eight bags of red grapes, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, some pork ribs, Sunlight dish detergent, shampoo-conditioner, marinara sauce, hot salsa, kettle chips, and three bags of milk. 

            There was a very long lineup for cashiers 2 and 3. Cashier 1 was helping a guy in a turban put his stuff through cash 2. I wondered if he was her husband since he was about the right age and they were both from South Asia. 

            I rode along King and turned left on Dunn Avenue. There seem to be suddenly a large number of potholes since I rode on Dunn last week. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before lunch. I had a croissant toasted with five-year-old cheddar melted on top and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Ossington. The Bloor bike lane was mostly clear but where it wasn't there was a narrow cow path to follow that had been laid out by previous cyclists.

            I weighed 86.8 kilos at 17:00.

            I finished cutting quotes from “Modernism and the Primitive” by David Richards. I find his own arguments less valuable than those of the people he is quoting in his essay. His assessment of Picasso's “Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon” seems somewhat bigoted against sex trade workers. He mentions that the subjects in the painting are “prostitutes” several times when the most obvious thing about them is that they are women posing in the nude. He also asserts that their nudity is “sexually aggressive” when all they are doing is standing there with no clothes on. If they were five naked lawyers I doubt he would have called them “lawyers” each time he referenced them. 

            I made pizza on naan with sweet basil marinara sauce, a cut-up burger, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            In this story, Malloy and Reed are trying to catch a colour TV thief while on their regular patrol, but other situations keep occurring to keep them from finding the person. 

            First, a neighbour in an apartment building calls the cops because a mother has left her kids home alone and one of them sounds sick. Malloy busts down the door and they find that the boys have gotten into some of their mother's stash of pills. Both boys are unconscious and the drugs are in a bag on the floor. The mother comes home and claims the boys are just sleeping. They arrest the mother and Reed, who is about to be a father, asks, “What kind of mother are you.” Later Malloy gives him hell for losing his cool. 

            The mother was played by the great Cloris Leachman.

            Next they see a Volkswagen make an illegal left turn and they stop the pretty driver. She immediately claims harassment and declares that she will fight the ticket in court. 

            Then they see a car parked in an alley and they go to investigate. In the back is a coloured TV. Then a man in a repairman's uniform with tools steps out of a nearby building sees the cops and runs. They go after him on foot through a few back yards until the man jumps a fence and winds up in a pool. Reed goes in to bring him out. Back at the station he denies stealing TVs and it turns out that the car with the TV in the back actually belongs to another policeman. But they run the man's fingerprints and find that he's a jewel thief who poses as a gas repairman. They didn't catch the TV thief. 

            The woman in the Volkswagen was played by Melody Patterson, who had not yet turned 16 when she auditioned for F-Troop. She didn't tell the producers her real age until they told her she'd won the part of Wrangler Jane. She later wrote a column for Wild Westerns Magazine called Wrapping With Wrangler.” She co-starred in The Cycle Savages and Blood and Lace. She had a short movie and TV career but worked in theater as an actor and director for most of her life. She was married to James McCarthur who played Danno on Hawaii 50. 

            I timed myself as I started reading the initial text for my presentation on Primitivism in Art. I found that it took me ten minutes to read two pages of text. My presentation has to be about ten minutes long and I have ten and a half pages of text. That means I have to edit away eight and a half pages of information. I'll work on that tomorrow.