Sol Saks

            On Saturday morning I memorized the third verse of “Allons z'enfants” (Join the Ranks Kids) by Boris Vian. There are eleven verses left to nail down. 

            I worked out the chords for the first verse of “L’Amour à deux” (Passion for Two) by Serge Gainsbourg and part of the second. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I hooked up my bike trailer and rode to No Frills. I bought five bags of green grapes, a pack of raspberries, bananas, a loaf of multigrain sandwich bread, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, three bags of skim milk, a jug of orange juice, a jug of low sugar iced tea, two containers of skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s kettle chips. 

            I had lunch about half an hour later than usual. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry iced tea. 

            I took a late siesta and slept a little longer than expected so there was not time to take a bike ride all the way downtown. I rode out for fifteen minutes, which was to Bloor and Dovercourt and then home. 

            I weighed 86.45 kilos at 17:45, which is the least I’ve weighed in the evening since August 22. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:49. 

            I started a new Movie Maker project, this one to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Me and Gravity”. I looked through all the old videos of my band Christian and the Lions and was surprised to find that there is no footage of Brian and I performing that song. It was standard in most of our shows but I guess by chance Aldo Erdic wasn’t shooting us during that song. The only video I have of “Me and Gravity” is from a concert by the original Christian and the Lions members (before I started playing guitar) from 1994 at the El Mocambo. I imported that video and the studio audio into Movie Maker. It’s going to be awkward trying to synchronize these two because my later arrangement that Brian played on is extremely different from the bluesy version that Steve Lowe and Tom Smarda backed me up on. Right off the bat I’ll need to find some outside video to insert at the beginning because the 1994 video by Phil Anderson has me singing right away whereas the studio audio has a short intro. I’ll work on that tomorrow. 

            I’m four days behind reviewing the videos of my daily song practice. I looked at a few minutes of September 4, covering my takes of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”. The song as I’m doing it now sounds pretty good and I only failed miserably on the final D chord. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 8, episodes 23 and 24 of Bewitched. 

            In the first story Tabitha is about to leave for school where she will take a test to determine if she should be advanced to Grade 2. She tells her grandmother that she doesn’t know if she’s smart enough. Endora says, “Of course you’re smart enough!” But then she shows she has no confidence in Tabitha’s intelligence by casting a spell to cause her to know everything. So at school it takes Tabitha 30 seconds to complete the 20 minute test with a perfect score. Samantha knows right away that her mother has been tampering again but Tabitha’s teacher Mrs. Peabody thinks that Tabitha is a genius. She gives her some more advanced math to do on the blackboard and she answers it correctly right away. Peabody takes Tabitha to Principal Roland and demonstrates her ability with math. When Samantha gets home she angrily summons her mother and tells her to remove the spell, which she does. But then Peabody shows up at her door and says she’s writing an article about Tabitha for the Scholastic Monthly. Samantha emphatically tells her no and shows her to the door. But Peabody sneaks around to the back yard where Tabitha is playing with her brother Adam. Over the fence she witnesses Tabitha using magic to make a model castle out of some linking blocks and she comes in to question her. Peabody asks where the castle came from. Tabitha says she made it up. Peabody asks how but Tabitha says she’s not allowed to tell. Peabody asks “Tell what?” Adam says, “That she’s a witch”. Peabody says “There’s no such thing as witches”. Tabitha says “Okay”. Then Samantha finds Peabody trespassing and confronts her. Peabody asks, “What are you people? From what planet?” She says she thinks Samantha and her daughter are from outer space. Samantha confesses that she’s a witch. Peabody insists she’s from outer space and so Samantha transports her up into a tree. After a couple more demonstrations she agrees Samantha is a witch. Samantha tells her that if she tells anyone about this they will think she’s lost her mind. Peabody goes to Roland and tells him what happened. He tells her he thinks she’s ready for a year’s sabbatical or maybe even a permanent one. She persuades him to come with her to prove that what she’s saying is true. Samantha invites them in and while they are sitting on the couch conjures a large old trunk behind them. She then repeats the claim that she’s a witch and proceeds to perform several tricks that could be performed by a stage magician. Samantha implies that she, Darrin and Tabitha are magicians and the act is that she plays a witch and Darrin plays her mortal husband. In the trunk are several tricks of her trade. She says she convinced Mrs. Peabody she was a witch as punishment for invading their privacy. The next day at school Tabitha has a new teacher because Peabody has been given a long sabbatical. 

            This story was credited to Sol Saks, who worked as a radio actor when he was a child. He started writing as a cub reporter, studied journalism and then worked for newspapers. He became a writer for radio and published short stories. He became a writer for the top radio series of its day, Duffy’s Tavern. He then wrote for The Baby Snooks Show. He transitioned Ozzie and Harriet Nelson’s radio show from a variety show to a story show. His first TV credit was an episode of My Favourite Husband. He developed the sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve. He co-wrote the film Walk Don’t Run. He was also the creator of the series Bewitched and the writer of the pilot. He became a millionaire just from writing the pilot and his name was credited as a co-writer for all the other episodes even though he didn’t write a word of them. He wrote a book entitled The Craft of Comedy Writing. He said “the worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn’t write”. 

            The second story is an almost total rip off from an episode that aired very early in the series. Maybe the writers knew the show was ending and just decided to phone it in. Darrin is struggling with some ideas to sell Benson mattresses. One of the layouts is “You’ll stop counting sheep on a Benson mattress”. Samantha sits down and expands on the ideas and for the counting sheep idea she says, “One sheep is all you’ll have time to count on a Benson mattress”. Darrin thinks these are better ideas but then he doesn’t think Samatha could have come up with them without using magic. She insists she didn’t but he thinks she’s lying so Samantha is insulted about not being trusted. She makes herself invisible and forces him to sleep on the couch. Darrin refuses to show Samantha’s ideas to Benson but he doesn’t like Darrin’s. When Darrin comes to work he finds Larry in his office looking at the other layouts and says they are great. They fight over showing them to Benson but Larry wins. However, Benson doesn’t like Samantha’s ideas either. Suddenly Darrin realizes they aren’t enchanted to compel him to like them and he goes home to apologize to Samantha. That’s fucked up, since if Benson had liked them Darrin would have continued to think Samantha was lying.