Claudine Longet

            On Wednesday morning my left arm was very sore from the second Shingles vaccine shot I received yesterday. Some of my yoga poses were difficult because of that. 

            I worked on revising my translation of “L'amour en cage” (Love in a Cage) by Boris Vian. I might have that done tomorrow. 

            I finished memorizing “Turlututu Capot Pointu” (You Kill With Your Pointy Hood) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords but no one has posted them so worked them out for almost half of the chorus. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar during song practice and it stayed in tune for the whole 90 minute session. But my amplifier was picking up radio signals when I used distortion. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished washing the drywall compound dust from my bathroom walls. Maybe on Friday I’ll clean the sink, the toilet, the bathtub and the floor. 

            I weighed 86.6 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 stopped at Freshco on the way back. I bought five bags of red grapes, a jug of orange juice, and a loaf of multigrain sandwich bread. I tried to do a price match with the Food Basics price of $8.77 a kilo but my cashier Priscilla intervened and found a cheaper match at The Real Canadian Superstore for $4.14 a kilo. She said they are usually cheaper, especially for grapes. It’s weird that Freshco price matches them because the nearest store seems to be in Weston. I’d always thought price matching was determined by proximity. I think Real Canadian is owned by Loblaws. 

            I weighed 85.85 kilos at 18:08. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 19:30. 

            I started a new Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. For the main video there’s a solo performance that I did at the Riot Gallery back in 1998. I got the concert video lined with the studio audio for the first “doot” but with the second it already sounds out of sync. I’ll work on it tomorrow. 

            In my “Leave the Naïve Alone (Gibson Les Paul electric) Movie Maker project I isolated and then published the song. I made a screenshot to use as a thumbnail and on Thursday I’ll probably upload the video to YouTube. 

            It was again too hot to use the stove. Earlier today I thawed out the other burger that I’d grilled on Sunday. For supper I sliced it and had it on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with five-year-old cheddar, chili sauce, Dijon, and a sliced gherkin pickle. I had it with a beer while watching episode 4 of The Bold Ones: The Lawyers. 

            A bum named Henry Rockford has killed another derelict over a bottle of wine. He admits he did it and says he would do it again. The lawyer Walter Nicholls offers to defend him for free in exchange for the truth about a murder that happened a few years before that. Henry tells him he will only give him the answer if he gets him off. We now flash back to the night of the original murder. Henry’s wife Suzanne calls the police from the apartment of Henry’s mistress Carol Peterson and tells them she has just killed her. Nicholls, Darrell and Darrell take on her case. After a few days Henry approaches them and confesses that he killed Carol and that Suzanne had only been covering for him. They warn him that Suzanne would only get four years for her crime but that if he really did it he would be facing the death penalty. With Henry’s testimony Walter gets Suzanne off. Within minutes of Suzanne’s “not guilty” verdict Henry is arrested for the murder of Carol Peterson. But now that his wife has been acquitted he is safe to admit that his testimony was a lie. Other than his prior confession there is no evidence that he killed Carol and so he cannot be charged with her murder. He is however charged and found guilty of perjury for which he serves four years. Suzanne doesn’t visit him until three years have passed and she does so to tell him that she’s fallen in love with someone else. He spends his last year in prison in a dark state of mind and leaves as a broken man. He winds up as a wino on skid row and that’s where he murdered the other bum. At his trial Walter gets him off with insanity and he is sentenced to a mental institution. Walter thinks he fulfilled his part of the bargain and asks Henry for the answer but Henry says he has to get him out of the mental institution in order to win the answer. After Henry is taken away, Suzanne approaches Walter to give him his answer. She says that it was Henry that killed Carol after all. But Walter is still not sure. 

            Suzanne was played by Claudine Longet, who in 1960 was the lead dancer of the Follies Bergere Revue in Las Vegas. She made her acting debut on McHale’s Navy. She co-starred in The Party. She released five albums of cover songs in the late 60s. Four of the songs made it into the top 100. Her album Claudine peaked at number 11 and The Look of Love peaked at number 33. In the 70s she recorded three more albums but the last one wasn’t released until the 90s. In 1961 she married Andy Williams with whom she had three children. She appeared several times on The Andy Williams Show. Her breakthrough happened in 1966 when she performed a French-English rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Meditation” on the TV series Run for Your Life. She and Williams divorced in 1975. On March 21, 1976 she shot and killed her boyfriend, Olympic skier Spider Sabich after he told her to move out because she and her three children were cramping his lifestyle. She only served thirty days in prison and afterwards she married her attorney. The Rolling Stones recorded a song about her called “Claudine”. Her records continue to be popular in Japan.