Elaine Joyce

            On Thursday morning I was feeling kind of out of it, maybe I’m depressed about starting school again. 

            I listened to “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian a couple of times and then memorized the first verse.

            I worked out the chords to the first verse of “Shotgun: by Serge Gainsbourg. I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the final session of four. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished touching up all the black squares in the checkerboard pattern I made on the section of the kitchen floor in front of the counter. That’s the end of my home improvement projects until April. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I rode down to College and St George where I bought The Mere Wife and The Hobbit at the U of T Book Store. They didn’t have The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro or Pearl by Siân Hughes. I have a digital version of the former but I might have to order Pearl on Amazon. On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of grapes, a pack of blackberries, a pack of blueberries, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a jug of lemonade, a box of spoon size shredded wheat, Full City Dark coffee, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos at 18:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:49. 

            I spent an hour reading The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley for my Modern Literary Medievalism course. I almost made it to page 50 before dinner. The narrator was a soldier from a mountain area near an inland sea (mere or moor) in the US. She went to Afghanistan and was captured and raped and got pregnant. She names the baby Gren and returns to her home but everything is gone. It’s now a gated community and she is forced to raise her child in a cave in the mountain. At page 34 I realized that Gren is Grendel from Beowulf. Just down the mountain is a family of three. Willa is the mother and her husband is Roger. At page 42 I realized that Roger is King Hrothgar from Beowulf. Gren has been raised eating whatever his mother can trap, whether it’s squirrels or cats that have wandered too far from below. She tells Gren never to make contact with anyone in the community but he goes down to play with Willa and Roger’s son Dylan, although Dylan’s parents think Gren is an imaginary friend. 

            I had a small potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching the series finale of Green Acres. As with the penultimate episode, this was another backdoor pilot for a spinoff. It looks like the producers knew the show would be canceled and decided to sneak in two pilots so their production team and writers could survive the rural purge that killed Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, the Andy Griffith Show and many other country based sitcoms. 

            The story begins with Oliver getting in touch with his former legal secretary Carol Rush. His watch has broken and he remembers that she had taken it to be fixed at a watchmakers in New York and he wants to find out the name of the shop. Carol now lives with her sister and brother in law in LA and she works for Mr. Oglethorpe. Carol is a stereotypical ditsy blond to the extreme and is always on the verge of getting fired. A Mr. David comes to see Oglethorpe and Carol thinks he looks familiar. David tells Oglethrope about a $50 million real estate deal he’s making and Oglethorpe wants in. David says he’d have to invest $50,000. Oglethorp says he’ll sell some property and get $40,000 then gives him a cheque for all of his savings of $10,000. Meanwhile a young lawyer named Mark Allen rents an office from Oglethorpe and Carol negotiates a low monthly rent for him. After the cheque has been handed over and her boss leaves, Carol remembers that David is a conman that Oliver Douglas prosecuted in New York. Her brother in law Harry has a plan to help her get the cheque back. She gets into David’s hotel room and tries to distract him while she searches for the cheque as Harry is waiting outside. But Harry is a gambler and learns of a card game across the hall. At first David is trying to make it with Carol but then realizes that she was Oliver’s secretary and is going to kill her. She starts screaming but Harry can’t leave the game because he’s won too much money. But the cops come to bust the game and hear Carol screaming. David is arrested. 

            The spinoff would have been titled The Blonde or Carol, starring Elaine Joyce. She made her film debut as an extra in West Side Story. Her first television appearance was on Route 66 in 1962. She starred in Sugar the Broadway musical version of Some Like It Hot and won the 1972 Theatre World Award for her performance. She made several uncredited appearances in films until she was finally named in the credits of How To Frame A Figg. She was a dancer on The Danny Kaye Show, made guest appearances on many TV shows and was a regular panelist on several game shows in the 60s. In the short lived series City of Angels she played the secretary of a private eye/pimp played by Wayne Rogers. She hosted the first season of The All New Dating Game. She played a sorceress in the series Mr. Merlin. She was married to Bobby Van, then John Levoff and finally Neil Simon. She was the lover of J.D. Salinger for a few years.