Diana Dors

            On Saturday morning I memorized the fifth verse of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg and continued to work on revising my translation. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. It stays in tune better than the acoustic these days. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where I bought five bags of little red grapes, a pack of strawberries, a pint of blueberries, a whole chicken, a pack of ground chicken, a bag of naan, dental floss, a jug of orange juice, a jug of lemonade and a container of skyr. A Tibetan woman in the baking section asked me about baking paper sheets and I tried to help her. The only thing with the word “paper” was wax paper and it didn’t say on the box one could cook with it in a conventional oven. I couldn’t help her. She thanked me anyway. When I look it up now it’s called baking parchment and they must have been out. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade with cranberry juice. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I was listening for music and as I left I heard the muffled sound of winter trapped bass in a car. There was no patterned music to be heard until I got near Bay Street where the steel drum player is always busking on the north side. At Yonge and Dundas there was a booth with a sign about Turkey. There was Turkish music playing and some people were dancing arm in arm. Yonge Street was closed from Shuter to Queen so I walked my bike to Queen through the mall. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            I started re-reading the rest of Beowulf after the killing of Grendel’s mother. I decided to re-read again her battle with Beowulf but this time to use the Broadview Anthology rather than the Norton. The Norton tends to shave down the details, like for instance the idea that Grendel wore a glove is entirely ignored in the Norton. I got up to Beowulf’s return to Geatland before dinner. 

            I made two chicken burgers and had one between two mini naan with chili sauce, Ted’s Tingly sauce, Dijon, horseradish and two slices of dill pickle. I ate dinner with a beer while watching season 1, episode 6 of Burke’s Law. 

            A Hugh Hefner type playboy entrepreneur named Alex Debbs is murdered with an ice pick in one of his clubs. His body is found in one of the cages that descend from the ceiling to release the tight tiger costumed hostesses to entertain the guests. Burke is spending intimate time with his girlfriend in his home when he gets the call. He wakes his chauffeur Henry and tells him to drive his girlfriend home. Henry complains, “I never had aggravation like this when I worked for Green Hornet!” When Burke gets to the club Les tells him that Debbs was not killed in the cage but rather dragged there from the liquor room. Burke goes to interview the tiger girls. They are almost all loyal to Debbs except for one named Angela Patterson. He asks her to take him on a tour of the club. She says Debbs was a monster and that he was an exploiter of women. They go to Debbs’s house where Tim notices that the bar has a very rare brand of champagne that could only have been acquired from Princess Kortzoff the former movie star. Burke goes to see Devora Cato who financed Debbs’s magazine when he first started it. She says she would have liked to kill him but didn’t. She tells him to find Debbs’s ex-wife. Sammy Davis Junior arrives at the police station as Cordwainer Bird, joke editor for Debonaire Magazine. This story was written by Harlan Ellison who sometimes used the pseudonym of Cordwainer Bird. Davis is the over the top highlight of the episode. He claims to have killed Alex Debbs and reads a long list of silly reasons. Burke has him thrown out. Tim follows Angela to the zoo where he sees her walk up to the tiger cage, pick up a metal rod and start teasing the beast. He tries to stop her when someone hits him over the head from behind. Burke talks with Orin Lashwell the manager of the club and he says he was with Angela at the time of the murder. Burke goes to see Sidney Wilde, the cartoonist for the magazine. He says Debbs took Angela away from him. Burke goes to Debbs’s office looking for a safe. He hears someone coming and hides. A blonde with a guitar on her back walks in and goes directly to the safe. He turns the lights on and asks who she is. She’s Maxine Borman and works in shoppers service for Debonaire. She seems surprised to hear that Debbs is dead. Burke asks where she was at the time of the murder and she says she was performing at a folk club and also hanging with her friend Angela Patterson. He gets her to open the safe and takes the strong box that’s inside. Inside are nude pictures of the princess. Burke uses them as leverage to get the princess to talk with him despite her diplomatic immunity. She says Debbs was blackmailing her with negatives. Sidney calls Burke and asks him to come over because the killer is sitting across from him, then there’s a click. By the time Burke gets there Sidney is dead by another ice pick. Burke goes to see Cato and Lashwell is there. She says Lashwell was with her at the time of the murder. They also reveal that Maxine is Debbs’s ex-wife. Burke goes back to Sidney’s studio because he remembers that Sidney sketched everyone that was in the room and then burned the drawings he didn’t like. He recovers the ashes and takes it back to the lab where, from the pieces of the drawing that didn’t burn, the technician is able to assemble a picture of Angela. Burke goes to see Angela and says he’s arresting her for murder. She says Sidney always drew her picture. He says he got a signed confession from Maxine that she helped her move Debbs’s body to the cage. Angela says Maxine killed Debbs and then Maxine comes running in screaming and attacks Angela. They have an old fashioned cat fight until Burke and Tim break them up and lock them in separate cages. 

            Maxine was played by British actor Diana Dors, who wanted to be a movie actor from the age of 3. At 14 she enrolled in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and she was the youngest in her class. She lied her age at 16 and started playing adult roles. Her first part was in The Shop at Sly Corner. She played Charlotte in Oliver Twist. She co-starred in A Kid for Two Farthings, Miss Tulip Stays the Night, An Alligator Named Daisy, Value for Money, Penny and the Pownall Case, Diamond City, Dance Hall, Worm’s Eye View, The Great Game, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary?, It’s a Grand Life, The Weak and the Wicked, and Yield to the Night. In 1953 she started doing a cabaret act and returned to versions of it throughout her career. Her first television role was as the lead in the BBC film, Face to Face. She hosted sex parties at her London home and filmed them. The archbishop of Canterbury called her a wayward hussy. She became the British Marilyn Monroe and then tried to conquer Hollywood. She was a better singer than Monroe and a better actress, but Marilyn had a certain look, combined with seductive vulnerability that was hard to match. Dors became quite successful from her television appearances. Her first Hollywood film was I Married a Woman. She co-starred in The Unholy Wife, The Long Haul, The Love Specialist, Tread Softly Stranger, Passport to Shame, Berserk, Hammerhead, Baby Love, Craze, The Amorous Milkman, Nothing But the Night, The Big Bankroll, and Steaming. She starred in Swedish Wildcats. Back in Britain she starred in The Diana Dors Show from 1959 to 1961. She starred in the British sitcoms Queenie’s Castle, and All Our Saturdays. She was a regular on The Two Ronnies, and on several British game shows. She co-starred in Mrs. Gibbons’ Boys, West 11, The Counterfeit Constable, The Pied Piper, Mr. Blunden, Bedtime With Rosie, What the Swedish Butler Saw, Keep it Up Downstairs, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, and The Sandwich Man. She played the fairy godmother in the Adam and the Ants video for “Prince Charming”. She told her son that she had left him 2 million pounds in various banks throughout the world, but said he would have to find the secret code to finding the money in a piece of paper that she gave him. Her husband apparently knew the code but after she died he committed suicide and the money was never found. She is one of the people shown on the cover of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album.