Beverly Adams

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the second verse of “Hey Mister Zippo” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second of four sessions but I had to shorten my rehearsal because at 8:00 I needed to start getting ready to leave for The Graduate School of Periodontics for my root plaining procedure. 

            I left at 8:30 and got there with about ten minutes to spare. I had to pay $277 up front. The person who called me seemed like a dental hygienist in manner but I don’t know if that’s her official title. She was middle aged and so was the assistant from last time and so I think some people there are not residents but rather seasoned professionals. I didn’t know what to expect from the procedure but I assumed from the phrase “root plaining” that she was going to actually perform surgery on my gums. That’s actually the next stage if this deep cleaning procedure doesn’t stimulate the healing of the pockets. What she did was actually very much like a cleaning except much more uncomfortable and quite a bit more painful. Before she started she swished some freezing gel around my gums and then a very gentle guy came in and gave me about ten freezing needles, most of which I couldn’t feel at all. They were discussing music because she was playing Chopin and he used to play it. He noticed that the player in the recording made a wrong note. Even after the freezing the cleaning hurt in places. It took about an hour. She told me I’ve been doing a very good job of cleaning my teeth. That was surprising but good news. She gave me a new toothbrush and some toothpaste for my gums. She told me not to eat until the freezing went down. 

            Since that didn’t feel like it would happen for a few hours I took advantage of being downtown and went looking for Aden Camera. It used to be right on Yonge and the address is 382 Yonge but it’s hidden now. I walked around downstairs at that address through a maze of shops, then I walked through all three floors of Ikea. I asked a security guard but he said he wasn’t from here. Finally I asked at the Bank of Montreal which is directly under the 382 Yonge address and an elderly security guard guided me up the street and pointed to the side of the building. At Aden camera I asked about upgrading both my picture and video cameras into one camera that is better than both but he told me that my price range of $1000 couldn’t achieve that goal. He said that the Nikon Z50 takes only marginally better videos than the Coolpix that I already have and a marginal upgrade isn’t worth paying $1500. He also said that with the lens it comes with the Nikon Z50 is inferior at taking pictures to the Coolpix. If I wanted to take the Nikon Z50 far beyond the Coolpix as either a shooting or video camera or both I would need to spend an additional $2000 for a better lens, and so that’s at least $3,500. There are three more places to check but this store at least had some solid information unlike what one would get from Worst Buy. 

            I weighed 86 kilos at 12:21, which is the lightest I’ve been at midday since March 29. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 17:18. 

            In the Movie Maker project for the song “Joanna Dancing (Electric)” I tried to isolate that song from the other September 3 songs. But every time I cut off the beginning of both the video and audio timelines at the exact same time they would go out of synch. As long as they are cut in the same place they should stay lined up but I remembered that the September 3 Song Practice project was problematic because the audio format is MP3, which Movie Maker is less compatible with. If I cut them in the same place the audio would jump to an earlier position than the video. Then I remembered that what I did last time was to get the video at the exact place I wanted it to begin and then work on cutting the audio timeline until they are synced. Hopefully I’ll have them lined up tomorrow. 

            I downloaded the 1926 silent Greta Garbo film Torrent and then tried to convert it to WMV with Total Video Convertor but it wouldn’t work with this movie. I had to convert it on Cloud Convert instead. Then I imported it into my “Angeline” Movie Maker project and copied Torrent to the end of the timeline. I started watching it and editing it as the story unfolded. I’m only keeping the parts where Garbo is pretending to sing.

            I finished scanning the fourth to last box of slides. They were a combination of early baby pictures of my daughter, some pictures of buildings, and a photo shoot I did of my daughter’s Aunt Susan. I scanned the first 11 slides from the third to the last box. 

            I had a small potato with gravy and the last two porkchops while watching season 1, episodes 29 and 30 of Bewitched. 

            In the first story Darrin accidentally leaves the front door wide open on his way to work. Gladys Kravitz walks in just as Samantha is levitating some pictures to place on the wall. Gladys faints and when she comes to Samantha convinces her that it was her that levitated the pictures and that she has telekinetic powers and esp. But this creates a monster out of Gladys because she becomes obsessed with using the powers she now thinks she has. She tries to turn on the sprinklers with the power of her mind and then when it suddenly starts to rain she believes she caused it. Abner waits all morning for his breakfast because Gladys is trying to turn on the stove with her mind. Samantha tries to convince her that those kinds of powers may be temporary but she doesn’t listen . Finally Samantha arranges for a séance to scare Gladys into giving up the supernatural. Samantha makes a zombie appear but Gladys thinks it’s her Uncle Harold. When Abner complains, Gladys tells him to dry up. Samantha takes that opportunity to turn Abner into a pile of dust. Gladys swears she’ll give up her powers if Abner comes back, so Samantha changes Abner back to normal. 

            In the second story Darrin gets up earlier than Samantha on a Sunday and goes out to get the paper. Outside he meets his next door neighbour Pleasure O’Reilly’s little sister Danger. Danger is house sitting for Pleasure while she is on her honeymoon, I assume with Thor Swenson who threatened to kill her. Just then the wind blows Darrin’s front door shut and he didn’t bring his keys. Danger tells Darrin he should let Samantha sleep and just come over to her place for blueberry pancakes. When Samantha gets up she is looking for Darrin, then she looks out of her kitchen window to see Darrin sitting in Danger’s kitchen and eating breakfast. She calls Darrin and he says he’ll be right home but suddenly Danger’s dishwasher starts to flood the kitchen. He feels duty bound to help Danger even though he and Samantha had planned a Sunday outing. Samantha spends the day playing solitaire and her mother Endora tries to save her. She goes to see Samantha’s old boyfriend George the warlock and convinces him that Samantha needs rescuing. He comes to her in his raven form and then changes to himself. Samantha tells him he’s wasting his time. She scares him away with her wedding ring. Then back in his raven form he meets Danger. She says hello to the bird and then “Bye bye birdie”. The inside joke is that her house is the same one they used to shoot the movie musical “Bye Bye Birdie”. George then flies to where Darrin is working on a campaign for the Feather Touch typewriter. When Darrin and Larry see the bird they suddenly realize it’s the perfect model for their campaign. Darrin brings George home in a cage and Samantha has to reveal to Darrin that it’s her ex-boyfriend. Then Danger knocks on the door to ask for help because her oven door is broken. George volunteers to help and convinces Danger that he majored in oven doors at Oxford then goes over there. He fixes the oven when Danger isn’t looking. He tells her he’s a warlock and she thinks at first that “Warlock” is a religion. He performs some magic but she thinks they are just tricks. They hit it off and then decide to celebrate their relationship by taking champagne over to Samantha and Darrin. 

            Danger was played by Canadian actor Beverly Adams, who was born in Edmonton but her family moved to California when she was a child. She won the Miss Photogenic pageant in Burbank at the age of 17. She became a legal secretary for a while and had a weekend job at a dress shop. One time when they had a fashion show she modeled some of the clothes and was spotted by an advertizing man who invited her to do a commercial on a local station. While she was there she was spotted by Ozzie Nelson who cast her for a guest appearance on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. She played Lovey Kravezit in three Matt Helm movies. She played Cassandra in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. In 1967 she co-starred in The Torture Garden during the filming of which she met the hair stylist Vidal Sassoon. They married and had four children. She became a spokesperson for Vidal Sassoon Inc. She and Vidal wrote books together such as A Year of Beauty and Health. She gave up acting to raise their children but they divorced after 14 years. She changed her last name to Sassoon when she married Vidal and kept it after their divorce even during her subsequent marriages. She has a business called The Beverly Sassoon Pet Care System.