Nancy Kovack

            On Monday morning I worked out the chords for the fifth verse of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the chorus of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. That’s about half the song. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the third of four sessions. 

            I weighed 88.5 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a long time. No wonder my chin-ups seemed especially difficult this morning. It’s about three kilos heavier than last year at this time. 

            Around midday I did my laundry and was done at 13:30. I washed my fluffy bathroom mat and ended up with little synthetic hairs all over everything. 

            I came up with a new melody and hummed it into a computer file to fit with some lyrics later on. 

            I weighed 88.5 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 87.3 kilos at 17:30. That’s the most it’s been in the evening in more than half a year and about three kilos heavier than this time last year. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:45. 

            I finished re-reading the 14th Century poem Pearl. I then re-read half of “The Self Mourning Reflections on Pearl” by David Aers and cut out relevant parts, pasting them into a document. The essay argues that the maleness of the narrator of the poem is a crucial factor in possessive mourning. I say everything the speaker does or says in the poem could have been done or said just as easily by a mourning mother. There is also the argument that the poem uses the style of courtly love when the father addresses the dead daughter but that also doesn’t mean that a mother could not feel courtly love for a daughter any less than a father could. There is at least one medieval courtly love poem from a woman to a woman. According to Wikipedia: A single courtly love poem exists, written by one Beatrice de Romans and addressed to another woman named Mary, which several scholars have argued is in fact expressing homosexual female love… and using the same register of affectionate language common in everyday society at the time… praising her character… the very fact Beatrice chose to use a poetic format so traditionally used to express romantic love means she must have known it would be understood as expressing a romantic context. 

            I had three potatoes with gravy while watching season 2, episode 3 of Burke’s Law. 

            Wealthy Cassandra Cass is in bed with a mud pack on her face while giving instructions to Hooper her butler to draw her bath. While he is in the bathroom someone opens the bedroom door and shoots Cassandra. Burke’s team arrives and then Burke. Les always thinks the butler did it and he is always wrong. Hooper is now drunk but reveals that he would have no motive to kill his employer since she has willed her entire estate to charity. Cassie’s secretary Athelstone Scone arrives in a bikini under a leopard coat and asks, “What’s black and white with fuzz inside?” The answer is a police car. She says Cassie has had it coming for years. She shows them a book with the names of four people Cassie had been blackmailing: Harrison Weems, King Dmitri, Eve Chapin, and Jason Flonder. Hooper says all four of them are expected for dinner any minute because it is St. Dismas night. St. Dismas being the patron saint of thieves. Burke tells Hooper to receive the guests anyway and to tell them Cassie is indisposed. The theme of the party is “come as your opposite” and so the king arrives in the costume of a chained peasant. Burke tells him Cassie’s been croaked and Dmitri immediately confesses. The king is arrested but Burke doesn’t buy it. He questions the king’s sanity. Tim and Les go to see Weems, who acts surprised that Cassie is dead even though the headline is right there in a newspaper in his office. Les tells Weems he was seen the night before arriving at Cassie’s home but driving off upon seeing the police cars. First he gives them the alibi that he was walking on the beach and then he changes his mind and says that he was in a conference at his bank. Burke goes to see Eve Chapin who is having a party with three other ladies. When Burke calls to her she hallucinates that he and Tim are very tiny people. Burke smells what they are drinking and says it’s katuga, one of the strongest hallucinogenics. I can’t find a match for any spelling of what Burke is pronouncing so it might be made up for the story. Burke also says there’s a law against brewing the drug. Eve says she dreamed she killed Cassie and she describes killing her exactly as it happened. Tim finds gloves burning in Eve’s fireplace. Eve says at the time of the murder she was on Jupiter and that Bessie Mopes saw her take off. Bessie Mopes is a famous walker. Burke finds her on the road walking to Kansas City. He asks her to get in but she refuses and says cars are homicide. She says he looks pale and tries to feed him some alfalfa. Alfalfa must have been a thing in the 60s. It was mentioned in another episode as well. She says if he wants to talk he’ll have to get out and walk with her, so he does. She says she doesn’t believe in time and so she doesn’t know where she was at the time of the murder. Burke goes to see Jason Flonder at his studio of psychodrama. They find him acting out Cassie’s murder with a dummy on a bed. Burke says he now knows who killed Cassie. Burke gets Henry to bring him newspapers, paper, envelopes, scissors and glue. Shortly thereafter each suspect receives a ransom note style letter with the message, “I know you killed Cassandra Cass. I will expect you at exactly 4:15 at her home. It will be in your best interest to be there. Weems arrives at Cassie’s house with a gun and climbs a ladder to a bedroom where he is grabbed by Tim and handcuffed. Dmitri enters the wine cellar with a gun and is handcuffed by Les. Flonder is disarmed by Tim and handcuffed to a bathroom sink. Eve walks in aiming a gun at Burke and his team, saying she’s come to murder. Burk plays a tape recording of Cassie saying what we heard at the beginning. Burke says all four of the suspects shot at a dummy on the bed. Cassie was already dead. Burke says Hooper did it and planned to blackmail each of them for Cassie’s murder. Hooper tries to escape but the other suspects chase him to the cops. 

            Athelstone was played by Nancy Kovack, who became a college freshman at fifteen, a radio DJ at 16, and graduated at nineteen. She won eight beauty contests by the time she was twenty. She started out on television as one of Jackie Gleason's Glee Girls and worked on episodic TV shows quite a bit. She was nominated for an Emmy for her performance on an episode of Mannix. She played Sheila Summers on Bewitched. She played Nona in the Star Trek episode A Private Little War. She co-starred in the film Jason and the Argonauts as Medea, and in Diary of a Madman, She married conductor Zubin Mehta.