Gordon Jump

            On Friday morning I ran through singing and playing “You’re Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg in French. Then I worked on revising my translation but struggled with some of the rhymes. Hopefully I’ll have it done on Saturday. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second day of two. The B string went out of tune quite a bit. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I painted the first coat of “berry patch” onto the main areas of my kitchen counter. I still have to do a first coat on the edges of the drawers and then at least second coat on the whole counter front. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 85 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:45. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my September 3 song practice performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” the app was still glitchy. As I continued to remove parts of the audio timeline in order for it to catch up to the video I was only able to split and remove a section before Movie Maker froze. Then I needed to shut down Movie Maker and reopen it to move the remaining section to the beginning, then cut and remove some more before it froze again. I repeated this process for almost two hours before I finally got the audio synchronized with the video. Then I cut off the end so just that song was left. Tomorrow I’ll check the audio balance, add a fade to black effect and then try out some other effects and settle on one before publishing the movie. I might have it uploaded to YouTube on Sunday. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song "Megaphor" I finished editing the clip from the movie Ziegfeld Girl. Then I watched the first sixteen and a half minutes of the 1945 Ziegfeld Follies movie. It begins with Ziegfeld in heaven where every moment is perfect but he still reminisces about his Follies. 

            I cut and sleeved the previous set of colour negatives that I’d scanned. There was no time to clean and scan the next strip. I might have time for a couple of them on Saturday. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching season 3, episodes 10 and 11 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver and Lisa continue to recount one of the stories about how they met. This is the story of Oliver’s plane conking out over Hungary and meeting Lisa who is with the resistance. After Lisa has cut Oliver’s parachute free from a tree she shelters him in a barn. Two Nazis come looking for him and Oliver hides under the hay. Lisa has to poke the hay with a pitchfork to prove to the German soldier that there’s no one underneath. When Oliver gets back to his squadron he has to fly standing up for six weeks. They meet again by accident in Paris a week after the war when he goes into a restaurant where Lisa is playing cello badly and barely at all in the Budapest Chamber Trio. The management expects her to mingle with the customers and so she sits with Oliver, although not recognizing him. But when his pitchfork wound acts up they remember. They begin kissing but Oliver has to pay thirty five cents a kiss so he decides marrying her would be cheaper. He goes to Lisa’s father to ask for her hand but her father gives him a note saying he can’t marry her because he is too poor. Oliver asks her to marry him anyway but she says she can’t go against her father, so he leaves her. He goes back to the States and is sitting in a bar when he hears Lisa on the radio playing cello with Buddy Atkinson’s all girl band and dedicating a song to Oliver. He tracks her down through a talent agent to Buddy Atkinson’s apartment. He has a very fake looking fist fight with Buddy then he hugs Lisa and crushed her cello. But Oliver says that’s not what happened. Her father simply changed his mind and they got married. 

            The talent agent was played by Gordon Jump, who is most famous for his role as Arthur Clarkson on WKRP in Cincinnati. He got the part because Roddy McDowell was unavailable. Coincidentally he started his career working in production and as an announcer in Ohio radio stations. He moved to California in 1963 and got involved in theatre, which he always preferred to screen work. Under the influence his theatre mentors, Nathan and Ruth Hale, he became a Mormon and acted in several Mormon films. He played Chief Tinkler on the sitcom Soap. Starting in 1989 he replaced Jesse White as the lonely Maytag repairman in the TV commercials. 

            In the second story Arnold the pig is watching TV when the announcer tells all the children about the Pixley Orpheum Theatre’s annual masquerade party being held that morning. There will be free movies, free ice cream, and free balloons. One just has to show up in a funny costume wearing a pair of Teddy Bear sneakers. Arnold leaves wearing a party hat and carrying huis sneakers in his mouth. But then Fred says Arnold has gone missing. The whole valley is searched but Arnold isn’t found. Then Mr. Haney says he saw Arnold on the Pixley Road near the slaughterhouse. Oliver and Lisa go to the slaughterhouse. The manager of the slaughterhouse shows Lisa the pen full of pigs but she can’t see Arnold and he doesn’t respond. When the manager isn’t looking she opens the pen and lets all the pigs out. An hour and a half later Arnold comes home with several friends. Then the slaughterhouse manager shows up and Oliver has to pay for 200 pigs. Lisa says you can’t put a price on freedom.