Jean Gillespie

            On Friday morning my elbow was considerably improved. 

            I turned on 90.3 FM Radio Canada as usual before yoga and it was dead. After about half an hour I found it online and so I had to shorten how long I held the fish pose down to a tenth. That put me only five minutes behind.

            I ran through singing and playing “If Our Tears Made Rainfall”, my translation of “S'il pleauvait des larmes” by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through it in French. 

            I ran through singing and playing “Asphalte” by Serge Gainsbourg in French and English. I uploaded it to my Christian’s Translations blog and started preparing it for publication. I should have it posted tomorrow. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the early afternoon I cleaned my bathroom sink and toilet. After that I didn’t feel there was time to start sanding one of the upper walls in the bathroom. I would probably need to take a shower after sanding like I did after each session of sanding the ceiling, so I’ll aim for Sunday to give it a shot.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. Bloor street is lately blocked off at Spadina so one has to take the lane behind the Jewish Community Centre down to the next street in order to get to Spadina and detour south. At Spadina and College someone called out my name and it was Tom Fischer, also on a bike. We rode together along College and chatted until Yonge Street. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos at 17:15. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:00. 

            I took my camera and tripod out to look for people to put on video for my project. I walked to Sorauren on the north side of Queen and then east on the south side. At around Elm Grove a guy named Minh asked me for change and I offered to give him $10 to be in a video. It went fine but the very top of his head was cut off. I would have preferred that the frame cleared his head. I walked to Sorauren again and then back to Elm Grove before going home. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my electric performance of “La jambe de bois” I established the end and then cut out everything after. I added a fade to black and then the poster and sharpen effects, which created some interesting colours. Tomorrow I’ll probably upload it to YouTube. 

            I finished listening to another cassette tape. This one is probably from the late 90s and the entire tape is made up of takes of “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” at Mike’s Place recording studio with me on guitar and Mike on drums. Next I’ll digitize it for my archives. 

            I made a new batch of gravy and had some with a big potato, two chicken wings and a chicken spine while watching season 5, episodes 11 and 12 of Bewitched. 

            In the first story Darrin’s mother Phyllis has taken the liberty of enrolling Tabitha in the Delightful Day Nursery School without consulting Darrin and Samantha. They are reluctant to put her in a school setting until she learns to control her powers but they give in. Samantha and Phyllis take Tabitha for her first day. They meet the school instructor (and perhaps owner) Mrs. Burch. Samantha wants to stay to look after Tabitha but it’s against the rules. Phyllis takes Samantha shopping. When Burch is alone with the children she is much more stern than she is around the parents and in the games she tells them that the most important thing is to win. They play a game in which Burch is Mother Nature and she assigns various species for each of the children to be. Tabitha is a bunny, Robert is a butterfly, and Amy is a toad. But Amy wants to be the butterfly. Burch says she can’t because she spilled her juice at lunchtime. Amy leaves the circle to cry and Tabitha goes to comfort her. Amy repeats that she wants to be the butterfly and so Tabitha turns her into one that flies out the window. Meanwhile Samantha is in a dress shop and asks for ten frocks to try on in the change room but that is so she can disappear and check on Tabitha. When Samantha arrives at the window of the school Tabitha tells her that Amy flew out the window and that Amy’s mother is yelling at Mrs. Burch for losing her daughter. Samantha follows Amy up a tree and then to the top of a skyscraper under construction where she surprises the workers during lunch. Samantha catches Amy in a net and brings her back so Tabitha can reverse the spell. Amy is very happy that she got to be a butterfly. Tabitha doesn’t have to go back to nursery school because the school is closing. Burch is taking a vacation to avoid a nervous breakdown. 

            The dress shop salesperson was played by Jean Gillespie, who started working on stage in her teens. By her early 20s she had steady work as a radio actor. She played Alan Young’s girlfriend for two years on his radio show. She became a regular cast member of The Phil Silvers Show and Cavalcade of America. She made her Broadway debut in 1944. She started appearing on television anthology shows in 1949. 

            In the second story we learn that there is a weeping willow in the front yard that Darrin planted for Samantha the day she gave birth to Tabitha. But the tree is dying and the neighbours have signed a petition to have it cut down. Samantha refuses to let that happen. Darrin starts to leave for work when his attractive new neighbour Elaine Hanson asks him for a lift into town. Samantha summons Dr. Bombay to treat her tree. He casts a spell, “Weeping willow black with blight I command with all my might that your sap run free and bright and with every wayward breeze which within your branches leap you will weep and weep and weep”. He leaves but then a breeze blows on Samantha and she begins to cry. This happens throughout the day and she knows that she was caught in the wake of Bombay’s spell but she can’t get him to come back. Nosy neighbour Gladys Kravitz saw Elaine get in Darrin’s car and she thinks that’s why Samantha is weeping. When Darrin drops Elaine off she is so grateful that she gives him a kiss on the mouth, which Larry sees on his way in to work and also thinks Darrin is having an affair. His fears are confirmed when Darrin talks to Samantha on the phone and Larry can hear her crying. Samantha is finally able to summon Bombay and he casts a spell to replace her weeping with laughter but that’s just as bad, as whenever a breeze blows now she begins laughing. Larry comes to see her and thinks that she’s using laughter to cover up her heartbreak. Then he begins laughing too and Darrin comes home out of concern and begins laughing as well. Bombay returns and this time both takes away the spell on Samantha and cures the tree just before a city worker is about to cut it down.