Riza Royce

            On Sunday morning I memorized the second verse of “Les Araignées” (The Arachnids) by Boris Vian. There are three verses left to learn. 

            I posted on Facebook “Leaving Your Parents’ Paris”, my translation of “Paris d’papa” by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the next Gainsbourg song that I hadn’t previously been able to translate because of the lack of a French transcript and found that there are a lot of them in my 1972 Gainsbourg file. The first one is “Flashback” as recorded by Petula Clark. Most people don’t realize that Petula Clark had a parallel career as a singer of French pop tunes. When I searched for the song I found that it doesn’t seem to be available by itself but only as part of her album “Comme une priere” (Like a Prayer) on YouTube. So I downloaded the entire album with Clip Grab, converted it to AVI, imported it to Movie Maker, isolated Flashback, and published it as a movie. Then I uploaded it to the Sonix transcription app and got a transcript, which I copied into my 1972 Gainsbourg file. Tomorrow I’ll start memorizing the song. There is another whole album of Gainsbourg songs from 1972 by Zizi Jeanmaire, which I’m pretty sure is also on YouTube, so I think I’ll have to do the same thing and download and isolate the songs from that as well. It looks like I’ll be spending the next few months on 1972 Gainsbourg songs. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the second of two sessions and it went out of tune quite a bit but not to a frustrating degree. Tomorrow I’ll begin a two session stretch of playing my electric guitars. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I taped paper over the glass of my bathroom mirror and applied the first coat of primer to the frame. It’s definitely going to need at least one more coat but it looks a lot better already. It originally had a repellently ornate design with silver paint around the rim, gold paint for the roses and kind of a brown marble main part. On Friday I’ll probably have time to paint the second coat. 

            I weighed 88.05 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the early afternoon since last Sunday. 

            I took a siesta and dreamed I was painting the interior of a big house at the top of a stairs. I posted a poetic joke about the process of painting the house. It turned out Donald Trump was supplying the paint but when I asked him about getting more paint he said, “Not since you wrote that insulting note”. I tried to explain it to him but couldn’t get through. 

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

            I weighed 87.35 kilos at 18:00. September 11 was the last evening when I tipped the scales that far. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:52. 

            I wanted to start a new Movie Maker project. I thought that I had two more studio recordings of songs that are also on that concert video from September 1998. “Divorce the Weather” is one of the songs and I thought the other was “Tropic of Ulcer” but I couldn’t find it as a studio recording. The other studio recording I have is “Insisting On Angels” but it doesn’t seem to be in the concert video. I was about to start a project for “Divorce the Weather” but I realized I’d already started one a few weeks ago. I discovered that “Divorce the Weather” is split over two video files and that I’d yet to convert the second part to AVI. So I did that and imported the converted file to Movie Maker. That’s all I got done this time. 

            I reviewed the video of my Martin acoustic song practice performance of “I Love You. Neither Do I” on September 28 and the take at 42:15 was not bad. I reviewed my September 29 Gibson Les Paul Studio performance of “Je t’aime. Moi non plus” and the take at 54:15 was okay. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, basil pesto, oven fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 22 of Checkmate. 

            Dr. Hyatt sees Bess Sironde sitting by herself in a bar and approaches her because they’d met at a party once. She tells him to go away and then she gets up to leave. He follows her outside just in time to pull her back from walking in front of a car. She tells him that her husband Barry killed her best friend and now wants to kill her. He takes her to Checkmate and she repeats that story to Don. Her friend was Jim Mead and her husband told her he killed him. He misunderstood their relationship as being more than a friendship. Don plots with Bess for him to pose as her cousin, Don Crescent, who Barry has never met and to come to stay with them. The Sirondes are wealthy with a large estate. Hyatt investigates Jim Mead’s apartment and finds out that his landlady had received a postcard from him informing her that he would be away for a while. Barry tells Don that Bess has a desperate need for friends and shouts for him to stop it then runs to her bedroom. The next day Don walks in the woods of the estate to look for any trace of Mead when someone starts shooting at him. He’s already seen that Barry is a crack shot with a rifle but when he digs one of the bullets out of a tree he discovers they came from a small handgun like one that is registered to Bess. Hyatt interviews a former boyfriend of Bess who says she tried to stab him with a knife once and then told a psychiatrist that he’d tried to kill her. Don confronts Bess about her state of mind and asks about her gun. She says she hasn’t seen the gun for months. Just then Bess receives a letter from Jim Mead saying he’s in Florida. Now she begins to doubt everything she thought that Barry had said and thinks that she has been under delusions. But she adds that they don’t seem like delusions. Hyatt analyzes the letter and finds that it’s a forgery. That night after dinner Bess, Barry and Don are in the living room when Don picks up a cufflink and asks if it’s Barry’s. It has the initials JM. On the record player is Jim’s favourite record and Bess freaks out. On the table is Jim’s favourite book, Moby Dick. Bess says maybe Jim came back from Florida. The next day Barry goes into town to look for Jim. Don knows it was Barry who forged the letter from Mead and so the cufflink, the record, and the book incidents were all staged by Don and Bess to set Barry off. Barry talks with Mead’s landlady and she says she’s heard Mead in his place and he left a note for her. Barry calls his office and his secretary says someone named Jim Mead called for him. Barry goes home and his Butler tells him Mead called three times and says Barry knows where to meet him. Barry heads for the woods and Don tells Bess to call the cops while he follows Barry to the place where he buried Mead.

            Mead’s landlady was played by Riza Royce who was married to director Joseph Von Sternberg from 1926 until 1930. They divorced over his relationship with Marlene Dietrich when he was directing her in The Blue Angel. She sued Dietrich for comments she made about their marriage and for seducing her husband. She appeared in the 1959 film The Bat.