Marion Lorne

           On Friday morning I wasn’t quite able to finish memorizing “Entre l'âme et l'amour” (Between Love and Spirit) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’m confident that I’ll have it done tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. On Saturday I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Kramer electric guitar. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            From about 9:00 to noon the wifi was down at the Shambala restaurant below me. I finished making notes on the novel Pearl and fortunately didn’t need to research anything online. I cried a bit during the first reading of the book but the second time I bawled my head off. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a siesta but only slept for about an hour and not the usual ninety minutes. I took an early bike ride but because of the rain I didn’t go all the way downtown. I turned south at Bloor and Shaw. When I came back my neighbour Benji informed me that our upstairs neighbour Caesar died about five days ago. I was thinking that he might have died or gone into the hospital because I hadn’t heard any noise above me for several days. Caesar was here through three landlords. His first landlord here was the father of Henry Pomer, who took over when his dad died and rented my place to me in 1997. With Caesar gone I’m now the longest standing tenant in the building. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 16:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since last Friday. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:20. 

            I started making notes on the 14th Century poem "Pearl" for my final paper: 

            While the "Pearl" mourner’s first descriptions of this dream environment are of scenes splendid and glorious beyond compare they do not describe the unknown but rather the enhanced familiar. However when the tree trunks are blue and the leaves are silver he has ventured into the world of the fantastic. The story becomes fantasy from that point on as Tolkien would say. 

            I had a potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching season 1, episode 7 of Bewitched.

            Samantha is having her friends Bertha and Mary for tea. Her third guest is her Aunt Clara who is late because she is old and her powers don’t work the way they used to. She had meant to appear in Samantha’s living room but materialized instead in the middle of the freeway. Halloween is approaching and they discuss the horrible way that witches are portrayed in masks and in artwork as ugly old crones with green faces, long noses, large warts and missing teeth. Samantha has the idea to ask Darrin for ideas on how to improve the image of witches. 

            But at that very moment Darrin is at work hearing Mr. Brinkman, the owner of the Brinkman candy company, telling him that he wants ads with ugly witches to advertize his candy. Later when Samantha sees Darrin’s drawings of ugly witches, she is upset. She tells him it is bigotry against a minority. He gets her point and tears up his drawings. 

            But the next day when Darrin shows Brinkman pictures of beautiful witches, Brinkman says it’s not what he wants. He especially thinks Darrin is weird when he suggests that there might really be witches. When Darrin refuses to do what the client wants he is fired. 

            That night Samantha leaves Darrin in bed and summons Bertha, Mary, and Clara. They decide to stage a witches’ protest in Brinkman’s bedroom. He tries to call the police but Samantha turns his phone into a snake. Then he thinks he’s dreaming because of French cuisine so Samantha puts him in front of a French Foreign Legion firing squad. When they fire he says he believes in witches. Then they give him a green face, a long nose, warts and blackened teeth. They change him back after he has promised to change his ad campaign. 

            This whole time Clara has been more interested in his doorknobs, because she is an obsessive collector of doorknobs. After the witches leave, all his doorknobs are gone. The next day Brinkman agrees to Darrin’s campaign of using beautiful witches. Then he says he has to go to the police because someone stole 105 doorknobs from his house. 

            Later we learn that it’s fathers who buy Halloween candy and so the gorgeous witch on the billboard has increased Brinkman’s sales by 27%. 

            Clara was played by Marion Lorne, who graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1904. Most of her career was spent in theatre, in particular, on Broadway beginning in 1905 and on the London stage. She owned her own theatre in London called The Whitehall where she starred in plays written by her husband, Walter C Hackett, and none of them ran for less than 125 nights. She was sixty-eight when she made her film debut in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. She only appeared in four movies in her acting career. She co-starred in the sitcom Sally. She made 147 appearances in comedy sketches on the Garry Moore Show. She won an Emmy in 1968 for her role as Aunt Clara but she died before the ceremony. Elizabeth Montgomery accepted the award on her behalf and gave a moving tribute. The writers made Aunt Clara a collector of doorknobs because so was Marion Lorne and she often used samples from her own collection on the show.