Janice Rule

            On Wednesday morning I finished working out the chords for “L'araignée du soir” (The Spider of Night) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it in French and then I’ll have to revise my translation. 

            I worked on memorizing the final verse of “Paris d’papa” (Papa’s Paris) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have it in my head tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice and it went out of tune a few times but not to an annoying degree. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I started getting my laundry ready and then took it to the laundromat. I also washed my shower curtain, which had gotten soiled from all the sanding I’d done over the last few months. 

            I weighed 86.25 kilos at 15:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the early afternoon since August 29. 

            I took a siesta from 16:00 until 17:30 when it was definitely too late for a bike ride. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos at 17:45.

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:37. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia” I continued replacing the partitioned sections of the concert video with parts of the exact same duration from my August 22 video. It’s a tedious process going back and forth to replace segments that are sometimes only a fraction of a second in length. I managed to advance another twenty seconds into the song. There are about 4 minutes left of the August 22 video. 

            In my “2024-10-05 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I delete everything on the timeline before “Élisa” and then saved the project as “Élisa (Kramer)”. I published the video and made some screen shots. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to YouTube. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, basil pesto, a sliced cheddar sausage, and five year old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 11 of Checkmate. 

            Elena Nardos is the daughter of a Greek diplomat and she has a tendency to drive fast. When she hits and kills a Chinese boy and is exempt from prosecution because of diplomatic immunity, the Chinese community and especially the boy’s large family are angry. She begins to receive death threats and so Checkmate is hired to protect her. She attends the burial of the boy and when everybody is following the tradition of dropping handfuls of dirt in the grave, one young man drops his handful on Elena’s shoes. After her university classes the next day she is supposed to connect with Don so he can watch over her but instead she goes to see her boyfriend Paul where he is leading a dance rehearsal for a play. He demands that she make a decision about their marriage plans but since he’s being pushy she breaks it off. She immediately hooks up with Bill, the leading man in the play. After he drops her off at her car there are two masked men waiting inside who take her to the graveyard where Tommy is buried and drag her to the grave but she escapes. Don drives to Chinatown with Elena and Dr. Hyatt. While Don goes to talk with Tommy’s grandmother, someone throws a live firecracker in the car. Mrs. Tsong tells Don that the youth of the community no longer listen to her and they are being led by the angrier voice of George Harris. Don, Elena and her father agree that the people who took her to the graveyard only meant to scare her. But the next night she is attacked again and this person really wants to kill her. She screams and her new boyfriend Bill finds her unconscious. Later Elena goes with Don to apologize to George and he accepts her apology. A police officer is found who, with the help of some makeup can double for Elena and set a trap for the killer. Don needs to get Elena and her roommate Marilyn out of town for a while. Marilyn offers her place in the mountains. But when Marilyn goes to buy provisions she meets with the killer and we see that she’s paying him to kill Elena for stealing her boyfriend from her. She tells him how to get to her cabin. Once they are there Marilyn secretly cuts the phone line so Don has to go to the gas station to make a call. George assures Hyatt that no one from his family is involved in the plot to murder Elena. Marilyn tells Elena why she’s angry at her and then goes for a walk. The killer enters, hears the shower, enters the bathroom and fires at the silhouette but it’s just a dress hanging on a coat rack. Don jumps the killer and knocks him out. Hyatt arrives and removes the killer’s makeup to show he isn’t Chinese. Marilyn tries to kill herself with a razor but Don stops her. Later Elena waives her diplomatic immunity so she can face trial for killing Tommy. 

            Elena was played by Janice Rule, who studied ballet as a child. She started dancing in a chorus line at a Chicago nightclub at the age of 15. She danced in the 1949 Broadway production of Miss Liberty. She made her film debut in Goodbye My Fancy in 1951. She married Ben Gazzarra in 1961 and they were together for 18 years. She co-starred in A Woman’s Devotion, Gun For a Coward, The Swimmer, The Ambushers, Welcome to Hard Times, 3 Women, and American Flyers. In 1973 she started studying Psychology and continued acting while attending classes. She earned a doctorate in 1983 and gave up acting to become a successful psychotherapist.