Donald Curtis

            On Monday morning I blog published "Disrupting Colour", my translation of "Charlotte Forever" by Serge Gainsbourg. On Tuesday I'll start learning his song, "Ouvertures éclair" (Wounds That Zip Open). 

            I had my first full song practice while playing my Kramer electric guitar and didn't break a string. It was a good session and I'm enjoying becoming familiar with the electric guitar. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I scrubbed and scraped more of the glue from the space where the fifth floor tile had been in front of the kitchen counter. I got most of it off and it shouldn't take more than half an hour to get the rest. I'll do that on Tuesday and get a start of the glue from where the sixth tile was. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos at 17:00, which is the lightest I've been in the evening in ten days. 

            I spent another half an hour chiseling green fossils out of slate. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:05. 

            I reviewed the videos of me performing "Megaphor" from June 5 to June 7 of this year. On June 5 I played the acoustic and the last take at 5:30 was the best so far on the Martin. On June 6 and 7 I played the electric and on June 6 the last take at 13:00 was pretty good as was the final take at 7:30 on June 7. 

            I followed a tutorial on how to mute parts of tracks in Audacity. It said one has to press the "Mute" button before highlighting the section, then highlight it and press the "Mute" button again. I tried it at a certain point at the beginning of the instrumental where there is an odd drum beat. It might have muted part of the beat but I'm not sure. I'll try it again tomorrow. 

            I had a small potato with gravy and a chicken breast while watching season 3, episodes 10 and 11 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Betty Joe goes for a week in New York with Lisa Douglas. But she comes back changed after hobnobbing with ambassadors at the finest parties, living in five star hotels, eating in the finest restaurants, and shopping at the highest fashion dress shops. Her home seems so small and her family so plebian now and nothing is good enough for her anymore. In short Betty comes back a snoot. Her family finds her impossible. Then a young man she met in New York named Gregory Tremaine comes to visit, but he walks in acting even more snobbish than Betty. At dinner he turns up his nose at the fact that Betty's mother is not only the head of the house but cooks and cleans like a servant. Suddenly Betty has had enough and she tells Gregory he's a phony. He storms away and then Betty realizes she's been acting the same way and she's apologetic to her family. 

            In the second story Homer Bedloe returns but says he's been fired and his pension has been taken away. He's been replaced by a nice man named Goodfellow. Bedloe begs for the worst room Kate has. Then Goodfellow arrives and assures Kate that he's going to take good care of the Cannonball and Floyd and Charlie. He gets Floyd and Charlie new uniforms and says he's sending the Cannonball for a refit. Meanwhile Bedloe is eating the bones the dog is finished with and whenever Goodfellow sees him he warns him to keep in line. But late at night when no one is looking we see Bedloe come to Goodfellow's room and we see that Bedloe is still the boss. The refitting of the Cannonball is part of Bedloe's evil scheme, as once the Cannonball has been taken away, he plans to have it melted to scrap. Meanwhile business at the hotel is good and Kate can afford to go to the movies in Pixley. The next night after dinner she has a surprise for everyone and says she has some old movies of the Cannonball. But it turns out to be the movies she saw the night before and the actor in both features is Goodfellow. It comes to light now that Goodfellow is not the new vice president but an actor hired by Bedloe. Bedloe tells him to leave and confronts Kate that she knew all along. She threatens to send the movies to the president of the railroad and Bedloe slinks away. 

            Goodfellow was played by Donald Curtis, who was a student of world religions. He studied with yogis, Buddhist monks and Tibetan lamas. Before he began acting he taught at several universities. He studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and then worked on Broadway. In 1950 he co-starred in the sitcom Detective's Wife. In 1954 he became minister of the First Church of Religious Science in Santa Barbara. In 1955 he co-starred in "It Came from Beneath the Sea". In 1957 he became minister of the Los Angeles branch of the First Church of Religious Science. He published the magazine The Golden Bridge. He lectured and wrote several books, including Helping Heaven Happen, Your Thoughts Can Change Your Life, Human Problems and How to Solve Them, Daily Power for Youthful Living, The Golden Bridge, and New Age Understanding.