Virginia Mayo

            On Sunday morning I forgot about the time change and didn’t reset my alarm but I thought I heard it go off anyway a little bit after the earlier 5:00. I did my ablutions, got dressed, turned on the radio and started doing my yoga but it felt wrong. On top of that Radio Canada was playing jazz because they’d forgotten about the time change as well. Jazz is a little too upbeat for yoga. I decided that since it was Sunday and I had no appointments to honour I would choose today not to conform to the time change. I went back to bed for another hour even though I didn’t really sleep, and got up when the alarm sounded the old 5:00. It still felt weird because it was so cloudy that there was no light on the horizon as there would normally be at that time this year. I guess I’ll reset the clock sometime today. 

            I finished posting “That’s the Be-Bop”, my translation of “C’est le be-bop” by Boris Vian. There are a few of his songs from 1949 next on my chronological list that I haven’t been able to find French lyrics for. I’ll recheck tomorrow but probably the next Vian song I learn will one of his many anti-war songs “Les frères” (The Brothers). 

            I ran through singing and playing my translation of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso and then uploaded it to my Christian’s Translations blog. I started preparing it for publication and I may have it done tomorrow. 

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

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I changed my clock. 

            I worked on translating some sections of “Pearl”. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I was back in my long underwear for the first time in several days. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos at 17:45, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in 51 days. 

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

            I worked on translating more sections of “Pearl”. 

            I had the usual tomato, avocado, cucumber and scallion salad with a glass of Garden Cocktail while watching season 2, episode 22 of Burke’s Law. 

            Clayton Steele, cowboy movie star, part owner and grand marshal of a rodeo rides out into the ring only to fall dead from his horse. George from the lab says somebody twisted and broke his neck. The people who had access to the stall before Steele rode out were: Kelly Mars, who is a world champion cowboy and part owner of the rodeo and Ragnar Windsor, former stuntman, turned rodeo clown who also owns part of the rodeo. Burke goes to see Ragnar and finds him wearing a fez and smoking a hookah. He says Steele was afraid of horses and he did his riding and swimming for him in every one of his films. Clayton was a coward. They all go to Clayton’s funeral where they play one of his movies as part of the service. Burke notices a woman crying and Ragnar tells him it’s Vanessa Barrett the best female bronc buster in the business. Balakirov, the actor who played the First Nations character who interacted with Clayton in the film is also at the funeral. Ragnar says they never liked each other. Burke goes to see Kelly whose real name is a long one in Spanish. He says he could have killed Clayton but he was already in the ring when he rode out. He admits they didn’t like each other. Kelly was Clayton’s Achilles heel. Burke meets with Vanessa in her trailer at the rodeo. She says she’s engaged to Kelly. She couldn’t stand Clayton, especially because he was trying to kill Kelly. He had men all over looking for a killer horse for Kelly. He really hated him after Kelly took Terry Foster the veterinarian away from him. She says Kelly could have killed Clayton with one hand. Terry is going to inherit stocks and bonds from Clayton. Terry was in the offshoot corral when Clayton was killed. They were all in the arena at least fifteen minutes before Clayton’s entrance. Tim and Les go see Balakirov who appears to be putting on a Shakespeare recitation for the servants in his house, then tells them to get back to work. He tells Tim and Les that since he was a child he studied with the great acting teachers. Then when he was 20 he was playing a First Nations character with a vocabulary of two words. He never got offered parts from the great playwrights. The day Clayton was killed he was having lunch with him in his trailer. They were business partners. Les asks him who would want to kill Clayton and he answers “Me!” Burke goes to Terry’s home and the first thing he sees is a kangaroo, then a rattlesnake. He’s about to shoot the rattlesnake when a monkey jumps on him and the gun shoots wild. Terry enters upset at what Burke is doing. She says Artie has been defanged. She gets Burke to drive her to the rodeo while he’s interviewing her. While she’s treating a horse, Silver Crown the horse that Clayton rode is in the next stall. Silver Crown is restless and Burke asks why. Terry says because he hears to the music from the arena and wants to ride out there. Burke looks at Clayton’s x-rays and concludes that whoever killed Clayton exerted pressure with their left hand and so they must have been left handed. He says the killer could have murdered Clayton, placed him on his horse, tied him, unlocked the stall, returned to the arena, then when the music played Silver Crown would have just walked out of his stall and into the arena with the dead Clayton on his back. Burke goes on a date with Terry serving her champagne in his car. He notices that Terry is ambidextrous while all of the other suspects are right handed. Terry invites him to her house for dinner. She leaves him in the living room and goes into the kitchen where Kelly is waiting for her. She suggests they go out the back and run away but Kelly says that’s incriminating. He says the only thing to do is the same thing she did to Clayton. He convinces her. She goes back out to Burke and stands behind him, massaging his neck. Then she puts him in a lock to break his neck but he flips her. Kelly comes out and they fight until he is knocked out by Burke. 

            Terry was played by Virginia Mayo, who got her last name when she was performing on vaudeville with the Mayo Brothers. Her great great great grandfather founded the city of East St Louis. She was interested in performing from an early age and studied acting and dance at her aunt’s studio. She joined the St Louis Opera after high school and was spotted by a talent scout from MGM. Her first film was a small part in Jack London in 1943. She co-starred in Seven Days Ashore, The Princess and the Pirate, Wonder Man, The Kid From Brooklyn, The Best Years of Our Lives, Out of the Blue, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, White Heat, Backfire, South Sea Woman, Fort Dobbs, The Flame and the Arrow, Westbound, Evil Spirits, Flaxy Martin, Colorado Territory, The Girl From Jones Beach, Redlight, Always Leave Them Laughing, The West Point Story, Captain Horatio Hornblower, Along the Great Divide, Painting the Clouds With Sunshine, The Iron Mystery, King Richard and the Crusaders, The Proud Ones, The Big Land, The Tall Stranger, Jet Over the Atlantic, Young Fury, Castle of Evil, Fort Utah, and Haunted. She starred in She’s Working Her Way Through College, The Silver Chalice, Smart Girls Don’t Talk, Backfire, She’s Back on Broadway, Devil’s Canyon, Pearl of the South Pacific, Great Day in the Morning, Congo Crossing, and Revolt of the Mercenaries. At the end of the 50s her career began to slow down. She said that the Hollywood blacklist was too heavy handed but that there really was and still is a Communist threat in the Hollywood film industry. She co-starred and danced in a lot of musicals but her singing voice was always dubbed.