Nancy Wilson

            On Friday morning I published “That’s the Be-Bop”, my translation of “C’est le be-bop” by Boris Vian on my Christian’s Translations blog. Tomorrow I might have time to post it on my Boris Vian Facebook page. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso and ran through singing and playing it in French. Tomorrow I’ll run through it in English and if there are no major translation adjustments that I need to do I’ll upload it to Christian’s Translations. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            I worked a bit on my Critical Summary before leaving for class at 12:15. When I got there I had to pee really bad but there was yellow tape over the washroom on the third floor. I went down to the second floor but the toilet there was occupied. I felt like I was going to explode. Finally the cute little student came out and smiled sweetly as she passed. I went in and relieved myself. When I got back to the third floor there was still no one waiting but Marianne showed up shortly after as usual. Then Andrew came and we discussed the novel Pearl. I said it’s the best writing in any novel of the course but I’s choppy. I said it’s like what George Orwell said about Henry Miller, and I paraphrased that he’d said Miller is not a great writer but he’s written some of the greatest writing of the 20th Century. The same is true of Hughes. Her work is patchy but there are brilliant moments. 

     

            In the novel Pearl Marianne collects artifacts of childhood laying claim to the value of memories. There is no continuity in her life which is reflected in the time jumping style of the narrative.

            A wake can be a track made by a person or thing especially in water, an aftermath, to wake up from sleep, a vigil when mourners stay awake with the deceased body. Pinch me wake me up.

            It feels like a mistake to lose one’s mother.

            I said rhymes help to find new words and connections. When we write without rhyming we reach for familiar words. But if we search for a rhyme we need to find new meaning. 

            Mothers experience useful madness after giving birth and maintain it until the baby realizes it's a separate person. An artist takes from outside, uses, then puts out again. This relates to the separation process. 

            Marianna, Alissa and James did their dialogue. 

            The narrator in Pearl the novel is mocking the Christian imagery in “Pearl” the poem. 

            Eczema expresses stress. Joe has eczema. 

            John Berryman wrote The Dream Songs. 

            Marianne transforms with Emily. She is at first submissive until Emily enters her realm of the country and then Marianne becomes the mother. 

            It’s ironic that the epigraph for each chapter is a skipping rhyme because the rhymes are very social and Marianne wasn’t. She never had anyone to skip with. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 16:00, which is the lightest I’ve been at that time in 49 days. 

            I took a siesta from 16:30 to 18:24. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos at 18:30. That’s the least I’ve squeezed out of the scale in 34 days. 

            I was caught up on my journal just before dinner. I had the usual tomato, avocado, cucumber, scallion, and lemon juice salad with a glass of Garden Cocktail while watching season 2, episode 20 of Burke’s Law. 

            Tennis star Wimbledon Hastings is giving a public show of pinpoint serving when one of the balls explodes and kills him. Forest Shea the ball boy loaded the bucket of balls and left it in the equipment room for Hastings. He also made a list of who else was in the equipment room before the demo from which he’s eliminated anyone without a motive. He says “We’ve got enough work without going on any wild goose chases”. “Les asks, “We?” Forrest asks, “Where would Dick be without Sam?” He means Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchum. Burke says they don’t need his help. Forrest says, “All right if you want to let Clayton get away”. Tim tells Burke that Forrest idolized Hastings and disliked Clayton because he was trying to replace him as the number one player. Clayton is being interviewed by two reporters while imitating Marlon Brando. He attacks one of the reporters and Burke pulls him off. He tells Burke he’s smart enough not to turn pro until he has crowd sympathy (It’s very odd that the number two tennis player in the world would not be a pro). He says he sometimes deliberately lost to Hastings to approach his goal. He says the only way to make money in tennis is to put on an act. He shows Burke some of the other characters he’s tried by imitating Cary Grant and then James Cagney. But he’s found himself by being Brando. Clayton says he and Hastings were friends and played poker every two weeks. Burke and his team search Hastings’s place. There’s an extra closet filled with women’s clothes with the initials HH. That’s Hastings’s girlfriend Helen Harper. Les finds a red dress and red wig in Hastings’s closet. Hastings’s ex-wife Ramona Specks was in a court battle for custody of their son. She was at today’s match but had trouble getting through the gate because she was wearing too little. Burke goes to see her and she is wearing a dress that’s been shortened to a mini by being torn rather than cut. Her living room is like the jungle set from a Tarzan film and she even has a campfire burning on the floor. She’s knitting a tube for her pet boa constrictor’s expected hatchling. She says she doesn’t like tennis but came to the demo to later go to dinner with Hastings to discuss an out of court settlement. She says Hastings said that he’d drop the suit if she arranged for a tutor for their son Genesis. She says her son will be the founder of a new race. Hastings chose to drop the lawsuit when he decided not to marry Helen. Tim finds that two more of the tennis balls were loaded with tetra glycerine. Helen hit Hastings over the head with a racket two days ago. Helen lives on a boat called The Garden of Eden. Burke goes to Helen’s boat at night and sees her swimming off the dock. She tells him to go away because she’s drowning. Burke observes that she’s not doing a good job but she says it’s harder when you know how to swim. She says she wants to drown because she’s bored but she says she can go drowning anytime so she’ll talk to him now. She says she and Hastings had a scene every two days about anything. She claims Hastings didn’t cancel their engagement. She says her sister Nonnie is a better suspect because she was hopelessly in love with Hastings. Tim gets a call from a singer named Choo Choo. She says she knew Hastings like the back of her racket. She invites him to meet her at a nightclub called The Drunk Tank. We see and hear her do an amazing performance of “What Kind of Fool Am I?” by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newlie from the musical Stop the World I Want to Get Off. It won the song of the year Grammy in 1963 and was the first song by British composers to do so. Choo Choo tells Tim that she and Hastings were just friends but everybody else he was close to like Clayton, Ramona, Helen, and Nonnie hated him. She says Nonnie was constantly trying break up Hastings and Helen’s marriage. Les talks with Hastings’s manager Clyde Olsen. He says he was in the equipment room before the demo to get out of the sun. He was hired by Hastings’s father to keep an eye on him so he wouldn’t be influenced by his delinquent older brother. Hastings was trying to get out of his contract now that his father was dead. Forrest accosts Burke again and asks to be allowed to participate in the investigation. He says when Hastings died it was almost as bad as the day L’il Abner got married. Burke somehow knows it was March 1952. Burke asks, “Shouldn’t you be in school?” Forrest says who needs school when they have comics. He says I bet you don’t know how comics got started. Burke knows it was a newspaper war. Forrest keeps trying to stump Burke and asks, “Who’s Knobby?” Burke says it’s Joe Palooka’s manager. “What’s the name of the cartoonists award?” “The Rubin”. Forrest declares that he was born the same year as Superman. Burke goes to see Nonnie and she insists on putting him in the chair to probe his teeth. She is disappointed that she can’t find any cavities. She says Hastings’s teeth were beautiful on the outside but rotten on the inside. She says she liked him as a tennis player but his diet ruled him out. He was like a son to her. Tim learns that a woman in a red wig and red dress stole some explosives from a chemical company three days ago. They find Nonnie was lecturing at the time of the murder and Ramona was at a party. Burke begins to think the wig and the dress were worn by a man. Burke gets Les to put on the wig and dress they found and when he does he looks like Little Orphan Annie. Burke thinks of another orphan who likes comic strips. Burke finds Forrest at the tennis club. He tells him that he remembered that Hastings had an older foster brother and realized that brother was Forrest when he remembered that Superman was created in 1938. Forrest grabs three explosive tennis balls and threatens Burke and his team with them as he backs away. In school Hastings stole a car and asked Forrest to take the blame and he’d take care of him. Forrest was disinherited because of it. He runs and they go after him as he occasionally throws an exploding ball to keep them back. He’s down to his last ball when he stumbles down a stairs and it explodes and kills him. 

            Choo Choo was played by the great Nancy Wilson, who knew she wanted to be a singer from the age of four. She trained by singing in church choirs. She won a TV talent contest when she was 15. In high school she was a regular on the TV show Skyline Melodies. She recorded her first record with Rusty Bryant’s Carolyn Club Big Band in 1956 and toured with the band for two years. She moved to New York in 1959 and got a job singing at the Blue Morocco Night Club. She signed a contract with Capitol in 1960 and released her first single, “Guess Who I Saw Today”. She had five successful records in two years. Collaborating with Cannonball Adderley she had a hit with “Tell Me the Truth” in 1963. The next year she had a gig at the Coconut Grove, the top nightclub in the US and she became a star. Her 1964 song “You Don’t Know how Glad I Am” reached number eleven. She had eleven songs in the hot 100 and four chart topping albums. She won a Grammy for her album How Glad I Am in 1964 and the same year she won the best new artist award. She won two more over her long career. On TV her Nancy Wilson Show won an Emmy.