Dina Merrill

            On Saturday morning I memorized the third verse of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Shotgun” by Serge Gainsbourg and then I worked on revising my translation. I still have more of that to do. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second day of two. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where they had no more firm grapes but I got one bag of relatively firm green ones. I’ll stop at Freshco in a day or so to get some more of the firm ones. I bought two packs of raspberries, a pack of chicken legs, a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread, two packs of mini naan, mouthwash, a jug of orange juice, and a container of skyr. While I was lined up for the cashier, the customer service cashier had to call a customer back after he’d taken a sack of rice from the cart where people put their donations for the food bank. Apparently he’d thought that the cart was a mini-foodbank and that needy people could just take what was in it. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade with a little pure cranberry juice. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. It was snowing a bit when I started out but it stopped about halfway downtown. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in three weeks. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:25. 

            I read about seventy more pages of The Mere Wife. Dana, Gren and Dylan are under the mountain together while B. Wolfe plans to dive into the mere and under the mountain after them. Gangrene has set in to Dana’s wounded arm and she gets Gren to cut it off. Gren abandons Dylan and takes his mother deeper into the mountain. Wolfe arrives in the cave and Dylan attacks and bites him. He tells Dylan that he killed Dana and Gren and then when he emerges from the mountain with Dylan that’s what he tells everyone. He is hailed as a hero and he marries Dylan’s mother Willa who has inherited Herot Hall and is essentially its queen. Dylan is the ring bearer and swallows the ring and so they have to quickly find a replacement. Years pass and even though she’s missing an arm, Dana is healthier than before and combat ready. Gren is a teenager and sneaks out to provide for both of them. Dana ventures out to the library in sunglasses and nobody knows her because she is now officially dead with a marked grave. She remembers the war and being in a lost city and that she married someone there, suggesting that was the father of Gren. The person would have to be another species of human. Gren tells his mother he’s going to look for Dylan. There are about eighty pages left. 

            I made pizza on two mini-naan with Basilica sauce, a chopped beef burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the 1965 Bob Hope Presents The Chrysler Theatre third season premiere featuring a story called “The Game”. 

            In the story Quincey Park is a tractor technician from the US on his way home to Kansas City after working on a job in Africa. He stops at a casino but wanders into a private game room where very wealthy people play chemin de fer (also known as baccarat). The host Abelard likes Quincey’s face and invites him to the bar. Quincey is curious about the game and so Abelard shows him how to play. Quincey has the $2000 lower limit for sitting in for this game and so he does so. He ends up winning $200,000, which is far more than he’s ever had. There is a beautiful woman there named Maralise who always attaches herself to the winner. He tells her that he loves his wife and she finds that both charming and seductive. Quincey collapses and comes to in a private room adjacent to the casino. They talk and she asks him to leave with her and they are walking out when the Maharaja arrives with a young woman and her grandmother. When he walks in he says he doesn’t like his date’s name and so he is changing it to Eloise. She obeys his every command, He comes over to Maralise and Quincey and Quincey asks, “What’s wrong with you?” He tells Quincey that the wealthy are different from him and not just because they have more money. He challenges him to the game and Quincey wants to break him. Quincey wins $6.5 million from him and then the man gets up and indifferently leaves with his date. Quincey begins to behave something like the Maharaja. He talks about how his family is set for life. He remembers getting a penny from his mother to buy a lollypop and then wanting a catcher’s mitt for a dollar, then he dies of a heart attack. 

            Maralise was played by Dina Merrill, who was born into high society and brought up in Mara Lago, which now belongs to Donald Trump. Her mother was heir to Post cereals. Merrill brought her trained elegance from childhood into her acting roles. She dropped out of college and enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts to study under Uta Hagen. She debuted on Broadway in The Mermaids Singing in 1945. Over the next twelve years she married and had three children, then made her film debut in 1957 in Desk Set. She co-starred in The Young Savages in 1961, A Nice Little Bank that Should be Robbed, Don’t Give Up the Ship, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and Caddyshack II. In 1966 she married Cliff Robertson who played Quincey in this story. They both guest starred as the villains Calamity Jan and Shame on an episode of Batman. They starred in the TV movie The Sunshine Patriot. They divorced in 1989. She married Ted Hartley and they bought RKO studios, renaming it RKO Pavilion for which she was vice chairman and creative director. They produced the movies Milk and Honey and Mighty Joe Young. She was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar. She was a pro-choice Republican. She was at the front of several philanthropical organizations like the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. She was still acting in theatre at the age of 89. When she died in 2017 she was the richest actress in the world.