Gloria Grahame

            On Sunday morning I memorized the third verse of “Les frères” by Boris Vian. There are twelve verses to go. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the instrumental intro of “Amour puissance six” (Love to the Power of Six) by Serge Gainsbourg. I think it’s the same melody as the first verse. 

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

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since December 13. 

            I read chapter 4 of Bored of the Rings. Frito and his companions make it to Riv’n’dell where they meet his Uncle Dildo and Goodgulf . Nobody wants responsibility for the ring and so Frito has to continue on. 

            I read most of chapter 5 of The Hobbit. Bilbo’s companions were captured by Goblins but in the tussle Bilbo stumbled and hit his head in a corner of the cave where the goblins didn’t notice him. He wakes up alone in the dark and descends. On the way he finds a ring that he puts in his pocket. He finds an underground lake where lives a lonely creature named Gollum who has lost his mind. Gollum talks to himself and calls himself “precious”. While deciding if he wants to eat Bilbo, Gollum challenges him to a riddle contest. If Bilbo loses he becomes dinner and if Gollum loses he leads Bilbo out of the caves. I guessed most of the riddles but I was stumped by “A box without hinges, key or lid / yet golden treasure inside is hid”. I wouldn’t think of an egg as a box. In the end Bilbo stumps Gollum by asking him, “What have I got in my pocket”. It’s not a riddle so it’s kind of cheating but Bilbo thinks he won. Gollum says he has to get something from home first and he rows his boat to an island in the middle of the lake but he can’t find what he’s looking for. It turns out it’s the ring that Bilbo found. Gollum comes after Bilbo but Bilbo absent mindedly slips the ring onto his finger and Gollum goes past him without seeing him. The ring has made Bilbo invisible so he follows Gollum in case he leads him out of the caves. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before lunch. I had a lettuce, tomato and avocado salad with sundried tomato dressing. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back and had to stop to pee at the McDonald’s on Yonge again. This happens every year this time when I’m eating a lot of salads. I guess the extra liquid makes me need to urinate more. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos at 17:45. 

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

            I finished chapter 5 of The Hobbit. Bilbo steals the ring from Gollum and gets away. Then while invisible he sneaks past the goblins and makes it out into the open. 

            I read chapter 5 of Bored of the Rings. Frito and his companions escape a monster called a Thesaurus that roars words and then roars their synonyms. They make it into a cave. They are sheltered by some elves and then attacked by narcs. Frito and Spam escape. 

            I went online and found the Exeter Riddles, then I copied and pasted them into a document because that’s what I’ll start reading tomorrow. 

            I had a lettuce, cucumber, scallion, mushroom, tomato, avocado, and roasted seaweed salad with sundried tomato dressing and a glass of Clamato juice while watching season two, episode 29 of Burke’s Law. 

            Some paper boys enter the house of Dr. Holt on collection day because he leaves the key under the mat and their money on his desk. But they also find Dr. Holt dead. He was shot by three bullets at close range. There’s money lying around and drugs in the cabinet and so that rules out robbery or drug addicts. There are no signs of forced entry. Holt’s wife Gina is missing and she’s the prime suspect. Captain Donahue asks Burke to come in. He tells him that a man named Dick called him a few years ago about a woman who just walked away during an argument and never came back. The woman was Gina Landers. The captain says there are a thousand reasons why people run but the real causes come from deep in the past. Tim interviews the neighbours and one of them four houses away has a telescope. He observed that lots of men were visiting when the doctor was away. Les finds that Gina spent a lot of the doctor’s money. Also a lot of cheques were written to Art Sanders who owns a casino in Las Vegas. Ames finds a pawnshop where a piece of jewellery belonging to Gina was pawned. Burke goes there and the broker says the pawner looked like a big wino. Burke checks out Cody’s bar across the street where the bartender tells Burke that the pawner is a mean drunk named Maddocks. He tells him which flophouse to check and Burke goes there. Maddocks punches Burke and they fight until Burke karate chops him into submission and takes him to the station. Maddocks finally admits he mugged Gina when he saw her stumbling and weaving but not drunk. She just stared at him when he took her purse. He threw the purse in a garbage can on Main. Burke goes to see Sanders who says Gina did the gambling. She was not an emotional gambler but rather bet like a robot and then walk away like she was in a trance. Les finds Gina’s purse and inside is a little phonebook with a few names. Burke finds Gina’s sister Doris working at an amusement park. Doris says Gina could never kill. She never even hit back at their abusive father and Gina got away. Burke goes to see Leonardo Krull the hypnotist. Burke has a criminal file on his other scams. He says he hasn’t seen Gina in three or four years. Gina came to him about headaches and they became lovers, He ended up hiring her as an assistant but dropped her when he began handling mostly female clients in Beverly Hills. If someone raised their voice to her she would just walk away and disappear for a few days. Then she would come back and act like nothing happened. If he asked her where she’d been she’d become hysterical. Somebody spots Gina at the amusement park but she’s gone by the time Burke gets there. Tim goes to see a ship’s cook named Bullock. He says he met Gina when he found her face down in the water and she got mad when he saved her. They became lovers for a few months until she disappeared with his life savings. Dr. Holt had the number of a lonely hearts club. Burke talks with the proprietor Clara Lovelace and seems to have a lot of contempt for her line of work. She says Dr. Holt was never a member. She refuses to let Burke look at her files. Burke goes to see Kew Dixon who hasn’t seen Gina for three or four years. They grew up together and he’s been in love with her from the age of eleven. He says she was like mercury, up in the clouds and then scared to death. She met Holt at the Cupid Society friendship club. Burk goes back to Lovelace and threatens her with arrest for withholding information. She admits Holt was a member but not Gina. She lets Burke look at her files. Burke consults a psychiatrist about Gina. The father is the key and the men and the stealing are a reaction to the father. She goes into disassociative states, reverting to childhood. Burke, Tim and Les stake out the amusement park and see Gina enter the House of Horrors where they find her in the mirror room looking at herself and talking to her dead father. Then they see Bullock walk in with a knife. Tim jumps him and disarms him. He says he didn’t kill Holt. He received a note telling him where he could find Gina. Burke finds it’s in Doris’s handwriting. Doris sees Burke leaving the house of mirrors with Gina and she runs. Burke chases her and catches up on the beach. She says she was jealous of Gina. She was always taking men away from her, including Holt, who Doris met at the Cupid Society. Doris was engaged to Holt until Gina stepped in. Doris killed Holt to incriminate Gina. 

            Doris was played by Gloria Grahame, who was descended from King Henry III of England. She studied acting with her mother. She started acting professionally while still in high school. Louis B. Mayer saw her on Broadway and signed her. Her debut was in Blonde Fever. She co-starred in In a Lonely Place, Oklahoma, Sudden Fear, Odds Against Tomorrow, The Big Heat, Roughshod, Human Desire, and Not As A Stranger. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Crossfire and won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful. Her second husband claimed to have caught her in bed with his thirteen year old son, who she later married. They were together for 14 years and had two children. She had a nervous breakdown and went for shock therapy.