Jo de Winter

            On Thursday morning I finished revising my translation of “L'amour en cage” (Love in a Cage) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it. 

            I worked out the chords for the chorus of “Turlututu Capot Pointu” (You Kill With Your Pointy Hood) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I weighed 86.15 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since May 31. 

            Around midday I cleaned the bathroom sink. 

            I weighed 86.75 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco. I bought five bags of green grapes, a pack of blueberries (because there were no non-USA raspberries or strawberries), some bananas, a box of spoon sized shredded wheat, a pack of Full City Dark Coffee, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. I did a price match for the grapes with the Food Basics price of $8.77 a kilo. I’d searched for grapes on the Real Canadian Superstore flyer but there didn’t seem to be any even though I thought I saw them yesterday. 

            I weighed 86.45 kilos at 18:45. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 20:07. 

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. I deleted some of the concert video to synchronize it with the studio audio of the opening “Doot doot doot doo doot doot doo doo doo doot”. I think they go out of line after that but I’ll check tomorrow and figure out what to do. 

            The heat wave has broken and so for the first time in a few days I was able to use the stove to cook dinner. I made a new batch of gravy with chicken drippings and had some with a potato, two wings and a spine while watching episode 5 of The Bold Ones: The Lawyers. 

            The campaign office for gubernatorial candidate Stephen Patterson receives a phone call asking for campaign worker Ellen Sherman. The caller has loud bossa nova music playing while he talks to the receptionist but turns it off when he talks to Ellen. She recognizes Barry Goram’s voice as he tells her Stephen wants her to come to a meeting at his apartment because he is giving Barry his job back. She goes there but when she arrives Stephen isn’t there yet. Barry gives her a drink and tells her to sit down and relax. After she does so he stabs her to death, then cleans the knife and leaves. When Stephen arrives and discovers her body he panics. He carries Ellen’s body to his car and disposes of it near her apartment. The next day he goes to Walter Nicholls for help. Later a young actor named Paul Mitchell goes to District Attorney Braddock and tells him he witnessed Patterson carry the body to his car. At the trial Stephen’s wife comes to support him. Stephen’s campaign receptionist is put on the stand and she mentions she recognized the music playing in the background as Brazil My Way by Alberto Montes (It may be a made up artist because I can’t find a record of the name). The album was taken from Stephen’s apartment in a search and so that places the call as having come from Stephen’s apartment. Stephen recognizes Barry Goram in the court room. Neil Darrell has observed that Barry has been there every day. Stephen tells his lawyers that he’d asked Barry to resign from his campaign because he'd been informed that he was a homosexual. Paul Mitchell is put on the witness stand and testifies that he didn’t report seeing Patterson with the body until he’d hard about the murder. On the night he saw them he assumed Stephen was just carrying someone who was drunk. Brian Darrell requests that Paul be kept to return to the stand later and that upsets Paul because he thought that he was finished. Neil somehow learns that Paul is also homosexual but I wonder how. Were there police files on gays in 1969? Brian calls Barry Goram to the witness stand. I don’t think he could do that. Barry would need to be subpoenaed before appearing as a witness. The judge states that that since it’s a formal request of the court that Barry take the stand, no subpoena is required, but I don’t buy it. Barry says at the time of the murder he was in Cinema 16 watching an underground film called The Glass Apple. Paul is returned to the stand and Neil challenges his claim that he saw Patterson place the body in the front seat. He says that Stephen said he placed the body in his trunk. Paul then says he thinks he was mistaken and that it was the trunk after all. Neil then asks why he had assumed a woman being placed in the trunk of a car was inebriated. Finally Paul admits that he didn’t witness Stephen carry the body but someone else had seen it who couldn’t testify because he’d be considered a prejudiced witness. He points out Barry Goram. The judge dismisses the murder charge against Stephen. 

            Beth Patterson showed a lot of expression but had no speaking part in this story. She was played by Jo de Winter, who studied acting under Ben Bard. She was the original Nurse Ratched in a San Francisco production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Her film debut was in Dirty Harry. She had a recurring role on The Name of the Game for three years. She co-starred in the short lived “All In the Family” spin-off “Gloria” (I’d had no idea that Sally Struthers’s character of Archie Bunker’s daughter Gloria had gotten a show of her own. Apparently Rob Reiner’s “Meat Head” character was written out by having left her to live in a nudist colony with one of his students. That in itself would have been a funny spin-off).