Marcia Wallace

            On Monday morning I had what felt like cold symptoms but I was hoping it was only a reaction to pollen. 

            I worked out the chords for the intro and most of the first verse of “Amours des feintes” (Feinting Romance) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the third of four sessions. 

            I weighed 87.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I stuffed my laundry into my bike trailer and rode to the Speedy Queen laundry. My trailer malfunctioned while crossing Lansdowne because I didn’t put the clamp on tight enough and it started grinding against the wheel. I made it across and then adjusted it. Speedy is only about a block and a third west of the Himalayan Laundry. It cost me $9 to wash and dry. The Tibetan place is cheaper but I’m mad at them for refusing to reimburse me for my soap when one machine broke down and then when the power went off in the middle of washing them in the second machine last month. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos at 14:45. 

            After I woke up from a siesta it was too late to take a bike ride downtown. 

            At 17:15 I weighed 87.95, 87.05, and then 87.75 twice, so I guess I’ll go with the latter. That’s the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since August 18. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:20. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “The Next State of Grace” I’d left off with the line “that’s built from the sweat”. Last time I’d inserted a clip of that line from the recent video of me singing the song on the street. This time I synchronized that with the studio audio. Then I synchronized the old concert video with the studio audio for the line “of my tarpaper third world heart” (Nowadays my line is “of my tarpaper shack dwelling heart” but I can’t change that for this video). Then I cut out a little bit of the concert video to line it up with the studio audio for the beginning of the chorus “Oh when oh when will I ever learn”. But then they fall apart for “I’ll freeze here on Earth with a heart that can’t burn”, so I’ll have to harvest another clip from my street video. I’ll work on that next time. 

            I had planned to make gravy tonight but on Saturday I forgot to buy flour. So for dinner I had a potato with margarine and slice of roast beef. I ate while watching the last two episodes of the seventh season of Bewitched. 

            In the first story Endora says Darrin has no sense of humour and so she casts a spell to make him tell jokes all the time. He starts by telling wife jokes to his secretary. A wife is called the better half because when they ask for money you’d better have it. After a couple more he realizes he’s under a spell and wants to go home but his boss Larry insists that he meet with their client Mr. Jameson. Jameson is a very serious man in the serious business of insurance. Darrin starts off telling jokes about drinking: He knows a guy who comes to work so loaded they make him use the freight elevator. When there’s a nip in the air he tries to drink it. The meeting is a disaster and Darrin comes home mad. Samantha gets her mother to remove the spell. But Darrin never learns to shut up and threatens to call an exterminator to get rid of Endora. So she casts another spell to cause him to laugh at anything serious. He’s about to head back to work when Gladys Kravitz tells him her sister is going for an operation. When he hears himself laughing at this he realizes he’s under another spell and goes back in the house. Samantha tells Larry Darrin can’t come to work because he’s sick. Larry wants Jameson to see Darrin’s layouts before he leaves town. On the way to the airport he brings Mr. and Mrs. Jameson by Darrin’s house. The first thing Darrin laughs at is Mrs. Jameson’s migraine. But Samantha covers for him by laughing as well and says they are laughing at something she said earlier about their nosey neighbour: She has a keen sense of rumour. This causes Mrs. Jameson to laugh. Samantha says Darrin’s laughter is staged to drive home a point. Then Darrin opens up the portfolio containing the layouts for Jameson’s campaign and tears them up. He says because insurance is such a serious business the approach to advertizing it should be funny as a form of release. Samantha says the slogan is, “Put a little laughter in your disaster”. Mrs. Jameson thinks it’s hilarious. Then Darrin says, “Keep your mother in law at home where most accidents happen”. Mrs. Jameson loves that one too. Larry says he knew a boss once who before he would fire you he’d give you a raise so you’d be losing a better job. Even Mr. Jameson is laughing now and his bursitis is gone. 

            Darrin’s secretary Betty was played by multiple actors throughout the series. This time she was played by Marcia Wallace who majored in English and Theatre in college. In 1968 she was one of the founding members of the improv group The Fourth Wall and studied acting with Uta Hagen. Her first TV appearances were as a regular on the Merv Griffin Show and that led to her being cast as the Carol Kester, the receptionist on the first Bob Newhart Show. She had a substantial career doing commercials for various products. She was a panelist for several game shows such as Match Game, Password, The $10,000 Pyramid, and Hollywood Squares. She was best known as the voice of Bart’s teacher Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons, for which she won an Emmy Award. Her memoir was entitled Don’t Look Back, We’re Not Going That Way. 

            The second story steals some of its plot from an earlier episode. Darrin’s mother Phyllis brings Tabitha an antique doll that she got from her grandmother. Samantha makes her let her brother Adam play with it but Tabitha levitates it back to her arms right in front of Phyllis. In order to explain this to Phyllis, Samantha convinces her that she has latent powers. Phyllis tries to levitate the doll consciously and Samantha causes it to come to her. Samantha tells her supernatural powers come and go but mostly go and so it will probably never happen again. Phyllis refuses to accept that and says people said her grandmother had powers. Phyllis goes to the library and borrows a lot of books on supernatural phenomena. She tries to demonstrate her powers to her husband Frank but nothing happens. Phyllis goes back to Darrin and Samantha’s house and says that her powers only work there because she has a familiar there. Now she has to figure out what object serves as her familiar. Then Tabitha once again levitates the doll and Phyllis says the doll is her familiar. She tells Tabitha she’ll get her a new doll but needs to take this one. Samantha decides she needs to scare Phyllis out of this obsession so when she calls Frank a stubborn mule she turns him into a mule and makes Phyllis think that she did it. But it doesn’t have the desired effect and Phyllis only concludes that she’ll have to be careful with her power from now on. Samantha suggests she have a séance to contact her grandmother and get some advice on how to use her powers to turn Frank back. During the séance Samantha conjures a human shaped light and has it speak to Phyllis in an Irish accent. Grandma says it’s a family curse and tells Phyllis she must promise never to use her powers again. Phyllis promises. Her “grandmother” tells her the magic words for turning Frank back are “I love you”. In this episode they were back to the original actor who played Frank.