Kathy McKee

            On Friday morning it was 14 degrees when I got up but it wasn’t too cold even with the window open a crack. 

            I memorized the fifth verse of “L'amour en cage” (Love in a Cage) by Boris Vian. There is just one verse left to nail down. 

            I finished editing “Rêves et caravelles” (Dreams and Caravelles) by Serge Gainsbourg, and which I call “Vehicles Like Love”, on my Christian’s Translations blog and published it. I posted my translation on Facebook. I looked for the next Gainsbourg song that I haven’t completed and found still in the 1969 file “La Robe de Papier” (The Paper Dress). I must have tried to transcribe it from the audio because I’ve got the lyrics wrong. I see the proper ones are posted now and so I’ll transcribe them tomorrow. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. The action sounds like it’s dropped again so I think I’ll take it up to Alex Wood to be adjusted again when he lets me know he’s ready to repair my Epi acoustic guitar. 

            I weighed 87 kilos before breakfast. Around midday I finished sanding the drywall compound that I applied to the walls under the lower bathroom shelf. All that’s left is the lower part of the northern wall above the sink, the door frame and the door. 

            I weighed 86.85 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I’ve been in the early afternoon since last Friday. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 86 kilos at 17:30. June 24 was the last evening when I was that light. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 18:30. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the Christian and the Lions studio recording of Brian Haddon’s song “The Ballad of My Chest Cavity” I checked and saw that the concert video is ahead of the studio audio. It’s in front by almost 15 seconds at the beginning of the third verse when Brian sings, “At night my liver goes to the beach…” I needed something to push it back so I looked for a video of the liver and found one with no watermark. I downloaded it with ClipGrab, converted it to AVI with WinX, then imported it into Movie Maker. I copied it to the end of the timeline and started editing it. Tomorrow I will probably have the clips I want and will insert them into the main timeline. 

            In my 2024-09-2 Movie Maker project I finished deleting all the clips preceding “Leave the Naïve Alone”, then I started a “Leave the Naïve Alone” Movie Maker” project. On that day last year I nailed the song in one take and so it was easy to isolate it. I published it and made a photo from a screenshot of the end because that’s when I’m sort of smiling. I uploaded the video to YouTube. 

            I started a new Movie Maker project for the video of my September 19, 2024 song practice during which I played my Gibson electric guitar. 

            I roasted a Canadian beef sirloin tip and had a slice with a potato and gravy. It was delicious and I ate while watching season 2, episode 19 of The Bill Cosby Show. 

            Chet’s mother is going to visit her sister and while she’s away she wants to have the apartment painted and for Chet’s father to stay in a hotel. Chet offers to have his dad stay with him so they can bond. Chet cooks a stew and accidentally puts in too much salt, but Chet’s father thinks it needs more. He’s one of those people (including me) who puts salt on their food before tasting it. He says the stew needs onions. Chet passes him a big onion from the stew and he puts salt on it before eating it. They talk about a whipping he once gave Chet and his father says, “It hurt me more than it hurt you” (I think my father used that line at least once). Shiela calls Chet about a party he is invited to but he says he’s with his father. Then Shiela says he should bring his dad along. A young woman named Eloise drags Chet’s father on the dance floor and he just stands there while she’s dancing and he calls for Chester to save him. Chet meets a girl named Margo and they dance. Chet has a very weird style of dancing where he makes sudden movements to the beat and then suddenly stops, then moves again before freezing again. She gives him her phone number and says to call her later that night. Chet and his father are supposed to get up at 5:00 to go fishing, but after calling Margo he sleeps in and so Chet’s dad goes fishing without him. Chet arrives at the fishing spot but his dad has already caught a bunch of fish and leaves. They go to a carnival game place where they throw balls, shoot guns and play miniature golf, and Chet’s dad always wins. They go see a movie that Chet’s dad doesn’t like because he thought it was going to be about cowboys. Chet says it won two Academy Awards so it couldn’t have been Midnight Cowboy, which won seven. Back at home they try to talk but it’s not very deep. Then Chet’s mother calls and says she’s home and so Chet’s dad immediately packs and leaves. Later when Chet is over for dinner Chet and his dad tell her what a great time they had together. 

            Margo was played by Kathy McKee, who started as a Las Vegas showgirl. She worked with and was engaged to Richard Pryor. During the 70s she was Sammy Davis Jr.’s mistress. She was a morning talk show host. She became a casting director. In 2014 she disclosed that in Detroit in 1974 when she was touring with Sammy Davis Jr. (who was a friend of Bill Cosby’s as was Kathy, who had dined with Cosby and his wife). Cosby asked her to pick him up at his hotel room as they were all going to a boat party. But when she arrived he immediately raped her. She didn’t want to say anything at the time, perhaps partly because she was secretly Sammy Davis Jr.’s mistress and that might have hurt Sammy and his marriage. Cosby responded that she was lying and so she sued him for defamation of character and took it to the Supreme Court. Her suit was dismissed because she made herself a public figure by talking to the press about the rape rather than going only through the courts.