Gloria Foster

            On Wednesday morning I ran through singing and playing “Slavic Soul”, my translation of “L'âme slave” by Boris Vian and revised some of my translation as I went along. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to start preparing it for publication. 

            I finished working out the chords for “La plus jolie fille du monde” (The Prettiest Girl in the World) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through singing and playing it in French and then worked on revising my translation. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice. The volume pedal stopped working and I thought it had died but then I realized I had the cord that runs from the pedal to the amp plugged into the wrong hole in the pedal. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before breakfast.

            Around midday I removed again the things from my lower bathroom shelf and sanded the drywall compound from the underside of the shelf above it that runs parallel to the north wall. I had hoped to do the north wall that is between the top and bottom shelf so I could put everything back on the lower shelf. But sanding upside down, especially around the brackets is very time consuming. I should have time to finish that area on Friday and after that I’ll just have the underside of and the wall under the lower shelf to do, and then the rest of the southern wall and the bathroom door and door frame. Maybe I’ll have the first coat of compound sanded by mid-July. The second coat will be a lot less, with less sanding and so I hope to have the bathroom painted with at least the primer by the end of summer. 

            I weighed 86.75 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back had planned on stopping at Freshco to buy some grapes, but I forgot. I remembered before I was passing Queen Fresh Market and so I stopped there and bought one bag of red organic grapes. 

            I weighed 86.25 kilos at 17:45. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 18:40. 

            I searched for more animations of the lungs in motion and found a couple. I downloaded them and tomorrow I’ll convert them to AVI and upload them to Movie Maker to insert one of them into my “Ballad of My Chest Cavity” project. 

            I compared the song practice videos of my Martin acoustic performances of “Leave the Naïve Alone” on September 4 and 6. September 4 is a better looking video but I look kind of mean at the end. I think September 6 is the best so far. I compared September 10 to September 6 and I still think September 6 is on top. I compared September 16 to September 6 and September 6 continues to be ahead. I compared September 22 to September 6 and I think September 22 just wins by a hair. I compared September 26 to September 22 and we have a new leader in September 26. I compared September 28 to September 26 and September 26 looks slightly better. I compared October 2 to September 26 and I think October 2 is better. I compared October 8 to October 2 and found October 2 looks a little better. I compared October 14 to October 2 and the winner is October 2. That’s the one I’ll probably upload to YouTube. It’s interesting that with “Laisse tomber les filles” the earlier take beat all the later ones, whereas with my translation a lot of the later takes get progressively better. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, basil pesto, Genoa salami, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episode 10 of The Bill Cosby Show. 

            Los Angeles is in the middle of a torrential downpour and the streets are flooded. The phones are out and so is the power most of the time. A neighbour boy named Harold Winters knocks on Chet’s door and tells him his mother wants him with her because she’s going to have a baby. Her husband is out and busy working on repairing the phone lines. Chet goes over there and finds Dolores in the bedroom doing some work because the contractions have given her a burst of adrenaline. It’s better to be up and around during the first stages of labour. She’s very calm and knows how to breathe and ride through the contractions. She wants Chet to take her to the hospital but he tells her the roads are not workable in the flood. She calmly accepts that and resigns herself to having the baby at home. Her first two children came by natural childbirth and that’s what she wants this time. Chet goes out in the rain and gets a reluctant neighbour to go looking for a cop. When Chet gets back Dolores and her kids Harold and Carolyn are having cookies and chocolate milk. Dolores explains that the contractions have stopped because the baby is taking a rest. The kids are put to bed and then the contractions return. Dolores acts like she’s in ecstasy. When she’s resting Chet decides to go back to his place to see if his first aid manual has anything about childbirth but it doesn’t. He’s heading back to the Winters’ house at the end of Part 1. 

            Dolores is played by Gloria Foster, who studied at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. She moved to New York in the early 60s where her first stage role was also her Broadway debut in A Raisin in the Sun. Her next play was In White America for which she won an Obie. She won another for Having Our Say in 1995. Her film debut was in The Cool World in 1963. It’s there she met Clarence Williams (who would later co-star in The Mod Squad). They married in 1967 but divorced in 1984. Her TV debut was on I Spy. She co-starred in Man and Boy. She played The Oracle in the first two Matrix movies.