Gisele MacKenzie

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the verses two and three of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            On my Christian’s Translations blog I published “Downtown Thrill”, my translation of “Dispatch box” by Serge Gainsbourg. Tomorrow I'll start learning the last song on the 1987 Gainsbourg song list, “Mon Légionnaire”, which is not written by Gainsbourg. It was written in 1936 and made famous later by Edith Piaf. I think to learn the song I might have to learn it from the Piaf recording because it’s hard to discern the melody from Gainsbourg’s cigarette induced talk-singing. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll start a four session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic guitar.

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I left home at 12:18 for Modern Literary Medievalisms class. There was no presentation scheduled but Professor Balot asked a couple who had done summaries to speak. 

            Gawain thought he was in a romance. 

            I say Gawain's greatest reputation is at Bertilak's castle. Everybody loves him there before he even arrives. 

            In the movie he's insecure.

            I say that Gawain seems angry that the Green Chapel is pagan and not a Christian structure. The Green Chapel is a barrow built into a hillside with a round opening. 

            Bertilak’s court is more grown up than the court of Arthur. The narrator favours Bertilak’s court.

            Hannah and Kenzo did their opening dialogue. Kenzo talked about the pentangle. 

            Gawain wearing the girdle is a gender switch. 

            In courtly love woman were in charge. Gawain is distracted because of fear of impending death. Bertilak gets his wife's kisses from Gawain. 

            In Thomas Malory’s Mort d’Arthur Gawain is a hothead. In the first adventure of Arthur’s court Gawain is placed on trial for accidentally beheading a woman and his sentence is that he has to serve all women. 

            Cosmopolitanism is worldliness. Romance is cosmopolitanism. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos at 16:00, which is the least I’ve weighed at that time since three Fridays ago. 

            I took a siesta until 18:00. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos at 18:00. That’s the lowest it’s been in the evening in two weeks. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:36. 

            I finished reading the essay “The Self Mourning Reflections on Pearl” by David Aers. He continued to draw conclusions about the motives of the narrator of Pearl based on the assumption that the speaker is male. 

            I started reading “The Mother at the Glen: The Relationship Between Mourning and Nostalgia” by Laura Impert and Margaret Rubin. The two authors are sisters who also happen to be psychotherapists. They lost their mother and did a study together of mourning. They say they are going against the grain by claiming that nostalgia can help the healing process. 

            I had a potato with gravy, a chicken spine and two wings while watching the first season finale of Burke’s Law. 

            One of the elevators in a fashion house crashes and when the door is forced open the car is full of mannequins and the body of Benjamin Glory the half owner of the company Glory Lee Frocks. The safety mechanism of the elevator was smashed with a hammer. The other half owner is Keekee Lee. They find in his pocket the colonel insignia of the US Army, a silver eagle. They go to question Lee and find her bullying the elderly Ophelia. They also see Anjanette Delacroix arguing with her daughter Sable. Lee now owns Glory Lee. She says everybody hated him. Anjanette says everybody loved him. Sable says he was a father to everyone. Much later Sable finds out he was her father. Lee and Anjanette fight a lot. Lee is focused on business while Anjanette is the designer and says Lee has no taste. Burke talks with Glory’s wife Carlene. She is planning a divorce when she learns her husband is dead. Tim talks with Sable and she is extremely flirtatious. She says Glory was her sugar daddy but that it was a platonic relationship. But Tim finds Glory’s clothes in her closet. She admits they might have had something between them. George the coroner finds he was wrong when he concluded that the elevator crash killed Glory. He was hit with a blunt and a sharp instrument before being stuffed into the elevator and there are traces of ironing starch. Burke thinks Ophelia’s iron might be the murder weapon. Someone has been stealing the company’s designs. A guy comes to take out the trash. Burke catches him and finds stolen designs in his pocket. He says he gives them to Mortimer Lovely, who is a Glory Lee competitor. Burke goes to see Lovely who is played by Buster Keaton. He has laryngitis and can only answer questions with charades. He confesses that Anjanette is his partner and she needed the money to pay off a gambling debt to Candy Sturdevant. After all that they find that he can talk. Anjanette claims to be Swiss but Tim finds she is French. Candy runs a moving crap game on the back of a tractor trailer. Burke goes under cover and gets in with the password. He thinks Candy is a man but finds out otherwise. When she gets annoyed with his questions she calls for her muscle but Burke beats the two thugs. When she finds out Burke is a cop she tells him about Anjanette needing the money to pay her daughter Sable’s debts. Burke says he’s not going to bust her because it’s not his department but suddenly the place is raided and Burke is arrested too. Sergeant Ames has to come down and vouch for his identity. Burke gets a report from the Paris police. Burke arrests Anjanette. She says she met Glory when she was in the French Resistance and he said he loved her but he never came back. She was pregnant with his daughter Sable. She came to the US with Sable but Glory didn’t even know who she was. She started working for him. Sable says, “He wanted to…” so it looks like she didn’t have sex with her father. Anjanette told Glory that Sable was his daughter but he laughed and accused her of lying. He hadn’t moved in with Sable yet so to save her he killed him. Anjanette is arrested. Burke and Tim show a lot of unjustified contempt for Sable and think she was bad even if he wasn’t her father. That seems rich considering Burke’s chronic womanizing. 

            Keekee Lee was played by Canadian superstar Gisele MacKenzie, who changed her name from LaFleche to Mackenzie because her birth name sounded too much like a stripper. She studied violin and voice at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. She was a multi-instrumentalist and was especially proficient on the violin. She hosted two radio shows for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She moved to LA in 1951 to become the singer for Bob Crosby’s Club Fifteen radio show. She joined the cast of Mario Lanza’s Coke Time. She performed a popular comedic violin duet with Jack Benny. She was the host of Your Hit Parade from 1953 to 1956. She hosted The Gisele Mackenzie TV variety show for one half season. She co-starred on the Sid Caesar Show during it’s one season in 1963. She had a hit in the UK in 1953 with Seven Lonely Days. Her biggest hit was Hard to Get. She later recorded a successful series of albums featuring children’s songs.