Patricia Donahue

            On Thursday morning I worked on trying to memorize the fourth verses of “Les Araignées” (The Arachnids) by Boris Vian and “Flashback” by Serge Gainsbourg. I think I’ll have them both nailed down tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune a few times but not enough to make me cry. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my electric guitars. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since September 7. 

            Around midday I sanded a section where the paint had globbed on the edge of the round mirror that I started priming last Sunday. I’ll apply the second coat tomorrow and might also prime my lazy Susan that I keep on the top bathroom shelf. 

            I used the rest of my drywall compound to fill cracks in the bedroom where bedbugs might go but there wasn’t much left. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch. That’s the lowest since September 16. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. I was passing some teenagers hanging out at Bathurst and Bloor when one of the little pricks lunged at me just for fun. On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of green grapes, a pack of raspberries, a bag of Argentinian shrimp, a Black Forest ham, two packs of Full City Dark coffee, and a pack of Sponge Towels. I did a price match on the grapes with the No Frills price of $5.38 a kilo. 

            I weighed 86.95 kilos at 18:30. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:03. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Divorce the Weather” I synchronized the concert video with the studio audio by sometimes applying the Slow Down by Half effect at least three times to small sections of the video because it was slightly ahead of the audio. That worked for the most part. The app will only allow about five slow-downs and then at five one is freezing it. I also did the ending differently in the concert video and didn’t repeat the chorus an extra time but only the final phrase. That meant I had to use several slow-downs on the video so the audio could catch up. The slow-downs appear as a few seconds of freeze frames. One of those just shows Peter Fruchter frozen with his recorder while I’m singing until the video and audio are in sync again. I finished the song but I’ll have to either make the freeze frames look better or replace them with some outside video. 

            I compared the video of my song practice performance of “Je t’aime. Moi non plus” on September 15, 2024 with that of September 9 and found that September 15 is more expressive and played better. I compared September 21 to September 15 and it’s clear that September 15 is more expressive and looks better. 

            I had a potato with gravy and some parts of the leg of lamb while watching episode 26 of Checkmate. 

            Lee Tabor is an old friend of Dr. Hyatt’s. He’s also wealthy, eccentric, claustrophobic, and a big game hunter. He has had his Scottish castle taken apart and reassembled in the jungle of Malaya. He tells Hyatt that someone is trying to kill him. He has a handful of suspects, including his soon to be ex wife Kay, his future wife Marylu’s father Walter Keyes, George Parker who serves as a hunting ranger. Lee invites them all to his castle so he can choose his own battleground. Hyatt and Jed come along to stop the killer. Lee ruined Walter in a corporate battle and now his fiancé’s father works for him. Lee goes hunting on track 4 even though Parker has warned him it’s too dangerous so Hyatt goes with him. Lee falls in a concealed pool of quicksand and Hyatt can’t pull him out. He gives him a reed to breathe through and goes to get help. Jed ties a rope around himself with the other end on the jeep. Jed jumps in and finds Lee below the surface, then pulls him out (This trope about quicksand sucking one down is apparently false. He could have leaned back with his arms spread to float on his back and then slowly moved his legs in circles until they were free, then simply swam to solid ground). Lee is in shock and bedridden after that. Jed thinks that since Parker warned him about track 4 he’s no longer a suspect. But Hyatt says the best way to get Lee to do something is to tell him not to do it. Lee is now frightened for the first time of dying. Marylu still refers to Lee as “Mr. Tabor” and although she is going to marry him she doesn’t show any affection. In fact she kisses Jed. She says she hates Malaya and would rather be in Switzerland. The shortwave radio is not working and there are no telephones in the jungle. They want to fly Lee to medical assistance but the pilot says the plane has been sabotaged. Adams is sent in the jeep to get replacement parts. Lee shoots at someone on the edge of the jungle from his bedroom. He says Parker is in love with Kay and if Lee dies before the divorce then Kay will be rich. Lee says Adams is wanted for gun smuggling. He tells Jed where he can get tubes for the radio. Jed contacts the government station but they can’t send help until the next day. Lee decides to go out into the jungle and expose himself to the killer. He takes several guns with him. Jed and Hyatt follow and then Kay gets a gun and follows them. In the jungle she catches up to them, points her gun at Hyatt and Jed and forces them to drop their rifles. She says Lee needs to face this by himself. They see Parker stalking Lee but she can’t bring herself to fire. Jed picks up his gun and kills Parker just before he can shoot Lee. Lee says none of this means anything to him anymore and asks Kay how she feels. She says it never meant anything to her and so they come back together. Marylu and Jed are free to pursue each other. 

            Kay was played by Patricia Donahue, who worked as a model while studying acting in New York. Her first co-starring role was in the Bowery Boys comedy In the Money in 1957. She co-starred in the Michael Shayne TV series.