Jeanne Crain

            On Sunday morning, having gone to bed with my clothes on at 21:30 the night before I woke up at 0:15. I did the dishes, brushed my teeth and got properly ready for bed, then I worked on my journal until 1:30 and went back to bed. 

            I dreamed I was sitting in a café with my ex-girlfriend Brenda when a couple of black women walked by and Brenda knew the younger one. The other one might be considered elderly but she was in very good shape. She was wearing a lot of makeup and dressed in red leather pants. Suddenly the older woman said she recognized me from when she painted me in an art class somewhere in the east end. In real life I’ve had about a hundred strangers approach me and say they remember drawing me. A lot of people have seen me naked. 

            I finished running through singing and playing “That’s the Be-Bop”, my translation of “C’est le Be-Bop” by Boris Vian. Next I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to start preparing it for posting. 

            I worked out the chords for all but the last line of the second verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. It’s a complicated song. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the last of two sessions. Tomorrow I begin a four session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic guitar. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            At around midday I got caught up on yesterday’s journal. 

            I weighed 87 kilos before lunch. I had the usual tomato and avocado salad with lemon and a glass of Garden Cocktail. This is the third day of my fast. 

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

            I weighed 86.1 kilos at 17:45, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in two months. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            My upstairs neighbour David knocked on my door. He came back from his trip to Africa after midnight on Friday. He’d given me his key to check his place and water his aloe vera. I watered it three times while he was gone. He thinks it grew several shoots under my care but I didn’t notice. I gave him back his key. He says he’s fasting too for Passover. 

            I wrote three stream of consciousness pages with the poem “Pearl” and the novel Pearl in mind in relation to mourning. I transcribed them before dinner but they are too much of a jumble to share right now. I have until Monday at midnight to turn them into an essay proposal. 

            I had the same thing for dinner that I had for lunch but with an extra tomato and avocado while watching season 1, episode 16 of Burke’s Law. 

            At a pro wrestling match the Strangler is fighting the Count. The Strangler is winning when he suddenly collapses dead. Burke’s team arrives. George from the lab says the Strangler was killed with a poisonous dart shot from one of the five gold seats at the front. The match was filmed and they watch it back at police headquarters. The five suspects from the gold seats are Ralph Hirt the sports writer, Anna Nijinsky the Strangler’s sister, Mrs. Thomas Barrett, Rocky Mountain the wrestler, and Lorraine Turner the socialite. Sergeant Ames says she knows Anna from ballet class. She works as a go-go dancer to pay for her lessons. Barrett is a wealthy woman who goes to all the matches. She hates the villains and loves the good guys. She’s been arrested twice for stabbing villains with her hat pin. Rocky Mountain is a hillbilly and his trademark is four beautiful valets who he calls his cousins. He is a contender for the championship against the Strangler. Burke goes to visit Lorraine and it turns out she’s one of his old girlfriends. He finds her throwing darts at a picture of the Strangler. She says she dated the Strangler and was surprised that she really cared about him. Tim and Les go to see Mrs. Barrett. At first she thinks the Strangler threw the fight by dying. She says if she’d killed him she’d have boiled him in oil. Burke goes to see Anna at her ballet class. She says she loathed her brother Alex. She hates working at the Go-Go Club. Alex made over $200,000 a year and could have paid for her classes so she wouldn’t need to work there. Since they can’t find a blowgun Burke thinks the killer rolled up their program and used the tube to blow the dart. Burke goes to Ralph Hirt’s office. He says he’s a Method sportswriter and so he acts out every sport before writing about it. He writes negative reviews of the Strangler and the Strangler came in and threatened him in front of the whole office. Anna is the Strangler’s sole beneficiary. Burke goes to see Rocky. He tells Burke that he was going to beat the Strangler anyway because the papers were signed and it was all arranged. He says they were good friends. The whole team goes to the Go-Go where Anna dances. She has a different personality there and is no longer demure. She immediately kisses Burke. She says she hates ballet. She says if she’d known about the inheritance she might have killed Alex. Burke goes back to watch the film footage of the fight again. Then they go back to Rocky’s office to arrest him for murder. Burke says he saw Rocky put his glasses on in the film of the fight. He’d said earlier that he didn’t want his public to know that he wears glasses. But he put them on to aim when he blew the poison dart. Burke tells Rocky he found his lip prints on the rolled up program. There are no such things as lip prints but Rocky doesn’t know that. Rocky admits he killed the Strangler because the contract said Strangler got to be champion for five more years and he couldn’t wait that long. Rocky knocks Tim out with a moonshine jug and then attacks Burke. Burke beats him with his fists but Rocky says that’s against the rules. Rocky is arrested.

            Lorraine was played by Jeanne Crain, who while studying drama at UCLA won a part in the film The Gang’s All Here. She co-starred in Home in Indiana, Man Without a Star, The Joker is Wild, Guns of the Timberland, Hot Rods to Hell, Cheaper By the Dozen, Winged Victory, Leave Her to Heaven, You Were Meant for Me, Take Care of My Little Girl, The Model and the Marriage Broker, Belles on their Toes, Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, The Second Greatest Sex, The Fastest Gun Alive, The Tattered Dress, The Joker is Wild, and Duel in the Jungle. She starred in In the Meantime Darling, A Letter to Three Wives, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Pinky (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award), Vicki, Centennial Summer, Margie, Apartment for Peggy, Dangerous Crossing, City of Bad Men, The Night God Screamed, and State Fair. Her son Christopher Brinkman was the first lead guitarist for Jane’s Addiction.