Gloria DeHaven

            On Friday morning I didn’t get to bed until around 13:15 so I didn’t get much sleep. I was out of it during yoga and song practice. 

            I was running through singing and playing my translation of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian when I realized that I’d overlooked translating one verse. Tomorrow I’ll have to do that before I can continue running through the song. 

            I finished working out the chords for the first verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. 

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

            I weighed 89.2 kilos before breakfast which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a long time. It’s about five kilos heavier than this time last year. 

            At around 10:30 I went back to bed for an hour so I’d have a better stance of staying awake in class. 

            I left for Modern Literary Medievalism class at around 12:20. A lot of the class was already waiting in the hall when I got there. 

            Everything can be taken to be about the mother. 

            Essay proposal: A working hypothesis to delineate a field of study and initial point of view. Your thesis will be different when you’re done. Quote some particular passages that are relevant. Use between 4 and 8 sources. 

            I told her I hated Aers’s article and the way he focuses on gender. She says his teacher Spiering was less gendered. 

            The Medieval Christian-Pagan connection: grace in all things. The wife of Bath can be tied in. 

            I said the events in “Pearl” are not a divine revelation but rather a dream. God is conjured as a way of dealing with the grief of mourning. 

            In Pearl the novel Marianne needs to create a story so she can move on.

            “Pearl” the poem is almost perfect but maybe deliberately flawed. 

            I mentioned Bernard de Clairvaux saying that every soul is a bride of Christ. The professor said that Clairvaux had visions of kissing Jesus on the mouth. 

            In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Bertilak says to Gawain “As pearls are to green pees so you are” and tells him “I forgive you”. 

            She said the French word for “pearl” is “Marguerite”. It’s not really. It does mean “pearl” in Latin and Greek and Persian but the French don’t use “Marguerite” instead of “perle”. There is also a flower called “marguerite”. Margarite is the name of the mother in the novel. Pearl the poem is pastoral.

            I weighed 86.9 kilos at 15:45. That’s the least I’ve tipped the scales at that time since last Friday.

            I took a siesta from 16:30 to 18:00. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos at 18:24 and it hasn’t been that high for at least seven months. It’s three kilos heavier than this time last year. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:45. 

            I found an essay proposal from two years ago to use as a template for the one that’s due on Monday at midnight. I copied and pasted it into a new document named “Pearl Proposal” and saved it in my Modern Literary Medievalisms folder. Tomorrow I’ll do some stream of consciousness writing with mourning in “Pearl” and Pearl in mind then see what I come up with. 

            I had a tomato and avocado salad with lemon juice while watching season 2, episode 14 of Burke’s Law.

            Construction magnate Alex Dukette is throwing a party and all the guests are there having a good time but the host has not arrived. The butler goes to the walk-in fridge to get more champagne and discovers Dukette hanging with a side of beef. After Burke’s team arrives Les finds a dinner guest list for the party Dukette was planning next week. Amos Burke is on the list. Dukette was dead before the guests arrived and so they are not suspects. The servants had the afternoon off and Dukette was alone all day. The killer could have been anyone because the meat hooks are lowered and raised electronically. Burke goes to see Dukette’s ex-wife Connie French. She plays piano in a lounge. She didn’t know he was dead. She said when they were married there were times she wanted to kill him but she hasn’t even seen him in three years. The next day the body of a psychiatrist named Lindel is pulled from the lake. He was shot in the head. There was a list of six dinner guests in his pocket that includes Burke’s name. Two of the people have been killed. They can’t find a connection between Lindell and Dukette. Burke wonders why he hasn’t been mailed a list and then he gets one. Another name on the list is Frank Cross and so Burke goes to see him where he trains professional wrestlers. Cross complains that his wrestlers have no expression. Burke suggests he send them to acting school. Cross says, “They’re bad enough now! What do I need with a Method wrestler?” Tim goes to interview Sharon McCauley who has one of the world’s top publicity agencies. She received a list but threw it away. She says she worked for Alex Dukette seven years ago but he made too many passes. Burke takes a golf lesson from Gil Knox who claims he didn’t receive a list. That night someone sneaks into Burke’s bedroom and tries to strangle him with a rope. Burke flips him and they fight in the dark. The man runs out the window and escapes when Henry enters the room. Burke has Cross brought in and accuses him of sending one of his wrestlers. He swears he didn’t but admits that he does have a connection with Dukette because years ago Cross’s brother was partners with Dukette in a small construction company that failed. His brother’s now doing time. Burke goes to see Connie in her home and her large and muscular butler Jason lets him in. Connie says Jason was working for Dukette when she married him. He’s also a former sailor. Burke points out to Connie that she had a motive because she was Dukette’s only heir. She informs him that she’s an oil heiress and has lots more money than Dukette would have left her. Burke has Les investigate Jason. Tim goes back to Sharon and confronts her with the fact that she didn’t just work for Dukette but was a partner. She says she was only a partner because he paid her in stock rather than money. The company failed and she got nothing. But she was also his lover right up until he died. Burke returns to Knox and finds him nearly unconscious in the locker room of the club. He says a big man beat him up. Knox still claims there is no connection between him and Dukette and so Burke says he’s going to put him in a cell for protective custody. I doubt that’s a thing. Anyway the threat works and Knox admits he received a list. He says his father was a construction inspector for the city but the department was about to bring him up on charges of bribery for overlooking faulty construction on a job for which Dukette was the contractor and so he committed suicide. The construction site was a mine and someone was crushed to death. It was Jason’s son. Burke goes to Jason’s house and knocks but no one answers. When he comes back to the car he finds Henry is just coming to from being knocked out. Jason is there with a gun and he makes Burke get into the driver’s seat but when he does so he deliberately knocks his car phone off the hook. He has Burke drive him to the mine and tells Burke that his son was inadvertently murdered by everyone on the list. Meanwhile the operator picks up the call and connects it to the police. While talking with Jason, Burke mentions their destination and so Tim and Les head there. Jason makes Burke go into the mine. Burke is on his list because he was a police lieutenant at the time and he went into the mine to save the workers. Burke tells Jason his son was already dead when he found him. Jason tries to push Burke down the shaft but he catches a rope and kicks Jason. They fight until finally Burke gets the gun and subdues him just before Tim and Les get there. 

            Connie was played by Gloria DeHaven, whose parents were Vaudeville stars and helped her to get into show business. Her first film appearance was at the age of eleven in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Her first credited role was at fifteen in Susan and God. She sang for Bob Crosby’s big band and developed her own nightclub act. She started being cast in movie musicals and in Step Lively gave Frank Sinatra his first screen kiss. She co-starred in Two Girls and a Sailor, I’ll Get By, So This Is Paris, and Scene of the Crime. In Three Little Words she played her own mother Flora DeHaven. She was a popular pin-up model during WWII. She made her Broadway debut in Seventh Heaven in 1955. She continued to sing but her film career waned as musicals went out of style. She made TV appearances and had a recurring roll on Mary Hartman.