Herb Wallerstein

            On Saturday morning my left arm was less achy, closer to the way it felt on Wednesday but not quite. 

            I worked on figuring out the proper text for “L'araignée du soir” (The Spider of Night) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the third verse of “Une Fille à la mer” (A Girl Out to Sea) by Serge Gainsbourg and revised my translation of the second and third verses. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice for the first of two sessions and it needed to be unlocked and tuned near the end. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since July 30. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where the grapes were all from the US and so I didn’t get any. They had five bags of Canadian cherries left but one bag’s contents were too soft so I got four. I also bought a Canadian watermelon, two packs of Mexican raspberries, some bananas, a boneless rib steak from New Zealand, a bag of spicy pepperoni, cinnamon-raisin bread, dental floss, a jug of iced tea, a jug of orange juice, two containers of skyr, and two bags of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos before lunch. July 18 was the last time I was that light in the early afternoon. I had whole wheat saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea. 

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

            The Parkdale Music Crawl was going on today. It’s a much cheaper version of the Parkdale Art Festival that I used to participate in. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 17:45. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:38. 

            I uploaded from my camera to my computer the video I shot yesterday. The file was 23 gigabytes in MP4. That’s too big and besides Movie Maker won’t work well with MP4 and so I converted it to AVI, which knocked it down to less than 3 gigs. The conversion process took a long time and while I was waiting I got a call from Cad who said he was downstairs. 

            I went down and chatted for quite a while with him and Goldie. They’d come for the Music Crawl. Then Cad needed to use the washroom and was considering using the one at Popeye’s when I invited them to come upstairs. I learned Goldie is a painter now and she’s also giving talks at community centres. We sat at the kitchen table for a good hour and then they headed out. But then Cad was attracted to the Shambala Tibetan restaurant. I recommended the shabta (beef chili). The place was very crowded and I didn’t think they’d find a seat but they went in and squeezed into a table. I’ll see Cad and Goldie again when he and Bruce March shoot the movie they want me to play a party in, supposedly in early September. 

            It was already 21:15, which is an hour later than I normally make supper. I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, pepperoni, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 18 of The Brady Bunch. 

            Tiger, the Bradys’ pet sheepdog goes missing. Alice says there has been a string of break-ins in the neighbourhood and suggests that the robbers lured Tiger away so they wouldn’t have a watch dog. Greg and Peter overhear this and go downstairs in the middle of the night to booby trap the doors with tin cans tied together and to the door knob. But Alice hears something downstairs and goes to investigate. Carol hears noises and encourages Mike to check. Alice gets caught in a booby trap. Mike puts an ad in the paper reporting a lost dog and all the kids chip in all of their allowances for a reward. They all search for Tiger and find him at Mrs. Stewart’s place. Her dog has just had puppies and Tiger is the father. 

            This episode was directed by Herb Wallerstein, who directed four episodes of the third season of Star Trek: "The Tholian Web", "Whom Gods Destroy", "That Which Survives", and the very last episode of the original Star Trek series, "Turnabout Intruder". He died at the age of 60 when he was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by his housekeeper who claimed he attacked her first. She and her boyfriend took his body two blocks away in her boyfriend’s car, which they set ablaze. It was found two days later. She was found not guilty.