Marie Windsor

            On Wednesday morning I finished memorizing “La vague à lames” (The Bladed Wave) by Serge Gainsbourg but it took me an extra fifteen minutes of straining my brain. Tomorrow I’ll look for the chords. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar during song practice and it was the first time I’d performed without recording the session in audio and video in a month and a half. It was very relaxing to not worry about getting a perfect take and less time consuming to be free of all the extra cables. I had fun. 

            I weighed 84.4 kilos before breakfast. Since I changed the batteries in my scale it’s registered lower weight for me. But it still shows the proper weight for my 4.5 kilos dumbbell so it either showed my weight too high before or else I’ve lost weight, but I don’t feel like I have. 

            I had a little time to return to my bathroom project and sanded a bit more of the door frame. 

            I weighed 84 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. These days most of the bikes downtown are electric and being driven by people talking in South Asian languages. Most of them work in long sleeves and pants even in the summer heat and I even saw one wearing a winter coat. They gather and discuss their trade often just south of Bloor on Yonge and west of Spadina on Queen. They will often block other cyclists behind them after a light has turned green while they take the time to study their GPS. The Karaoke Preacher was back at the preachers’ corner of Yonge and Dundas. He has a shitty sound system for his voice as he sings along to the music of classic rock songs but with his Christianized lyrics that are obsessed with the Devil. He usually sounds pretty bad with a voice ravaged by a past of smoke and cheap booze but today he was singing to a basic blues melody which makes toneless voices irrelevant so he didn’t sound half bad. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 18:00, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since March 22. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:08. 

            I opened in Paint the first of the rainbow images I saved a couple of days ago. I made the range of the image taller and wider, then I copied the rainbow, flipped it, then lined up the left end of the flipped rainbow so the reversed rainbow looks like it’s flowing out of the other one. I did this again connecting the first image with the second to end up with a rainbow wave. Then I cut and pasted pieces of the blue sky around it and opened the whole thing in Photos because Paint will only rotate images in 90 degree turns whereas in Photos one can pick any angle one wants. The rainbow wave that I made in Paint travelled upward at about a forty degree angle but I needed it to be horizontal. I was able to level it off in Photos but one always loses some of the image when one does that. However I ended up with a wave image that I can turn into more waves. Once I cut them into parts and paste those onto the video timeline of my “Seven Shades of Blues” Movie Maker project, I should end up with an animated Rainbow wave for the song intro. 

            I reviewed the song practice video of “Comme un Boomerang” from September 1 of this year. I deleted part A because there as no full version of the song there. I played the Gibson, made a lot of mistakes and didn’t try to start over. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, a cut up slice of Black Forest ham and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episodes 13 and 14 of Branded. 

            In the first story McCord arrives in Canaan only to see that it’s a ghost town. Then he hears the church bell ring and goes inside. There he finds Joshua Murdock ranting like a madman and giving a sermon to an empty room. He greets McCord by name because Murdock is the one who contacted McCord about an engineering job in Canaan to lay the infrastructure of a city. McCord tries to reason with him that the town is dead but Murdock begins to rant again. McCord starts to leave but Murdock’s sons Micah and Malachi are armed and guarding the exit. Murdoch tells McCord he will be in Canaan for the rest of his life. McCord begins to fight his way out but the brothers overwhelm him and he is knocked out. When he wakes up he finds Murdock and his sons in the empty saloon. Murdock reveals that his son Obadiah died in the Bitter Creek massacre under McCord’s command. Almost every story refers to a person who died at Bitter Creek but it was made clear early on that there were only 31 people in the company. They’ll probably reference more than that before the series is over. Murdock says that tomorrow at daybreak they will re-enact the battle of Bitter Creek. Murdock takes McCord to the jail to show that he has imprisoned Grey Eagle, one of the Apache chiefs who signed the treaty with General Reed. Murdoch has captured Grey Eagle to hold as a guarantee that his sons Red Arm and Blue Hawk will do their best to kill him in the re-enactment. Micah and Malachi will make sure they don’t join forces. The next day Blue Hawk sneaks up on McCord but doesn’t want to kill him. They make a plan to free Grey Eagle but Malachi shoots Blue Hawk in the back for cheating. McCord goes to the jail and knocks out Micah. He retrieves his gun and frees Grey Eagle, then he kills Malachi. McCord saddles his horse while Murdock rants. Micah is about to shoot McCord when Red Arm kills him, causing Micah’s shot to go wild and kill Murdock. McCord asks Red Arm if he knows how he got away at Bitter Creek but he doesn’t. 

            In the second story McCord is trying to solve the mystery of how to drain the water from a silver mine so the company can mine it but it keeps re-flooding. Meanwhile at West Point Cadet Richard Bain is in trouble because he has written a thesis that declares that Jason McCord was not a coward at Bitter Creek. He is given thirty days sabbatical to reconsider his position and apologize. If he doesn’t he will be court martialed and kicked out of school. He travels to the mine where McCord is employed and asks the owner Carrie Milligan for a job as an assistant engineer. Both McCord and Carrie agree to hire him. Richard suggests that the river is draining into an old shaft next to the one they are trying to mine. Richard agrees to be dangled into the mine to find out for sure as long as McCord holds the rope. But Richard disappears inside and the rope returns cut. McCord swims in after him and discovers that Richard deliberately cut it to test McCord to prove his thesis that he’s not a coward. McCord is very angry but they find the break, blow it up and drain the mine, thus finding a large vein of silver. Richard is about to leave but begs to know what happened at Bitter Creek. McCord tells him the whole story about General Reed’s dementia and how he can’t reveal it officially without endangering the Apache treaties that Reed negotiated when he was competent. Richard agrees to return to West Point and to lie that he was wrong and to tell his teachers that McCord really was a coward. 

            Carrie was played by film noire star, Marie Windsor, who trained for the stage under Maria Ouspenskaya. She started out writing jokes and sending them to Jack Benny. When he met her he was stunned by her beauty and immediately got her signed with Warner Brothers. She became so notorious as a “bad woman” in her film roles that people used to mail her Bibles to help save her soul. She was known as Queen of the Bs because of all the B movies she starred in. She said a femme fatale gets the hero into bed and then into trouble. She said people tend to forget nice girls so she’d rather play a bad woman. She co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 noire “The Killing”. She co-starred in The Narrow Margin, Hellfire, Force of Evil, The Sniper, City That Never Sleeps, Cat Women of the Moon, and The Bounty Hunter. She was so tall she had to bend her knees while standing beside many of her leading men. She was director of the Screen Actors Guild for 25 years. When she retired from film acting she became a painter and sculptor but continued to work on stage. I suspect that the character of Mia Wallace as played by Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction was based on the appearance of some of Marie Windsor’s femme fatale characters.