Betty Garde

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the third verse of “Flashback” by Serge Gainsbourg. That’s half the song. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it went out of tune quite a bit but not as badly as the Gibson. 

            I weighed 89.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I applied a second coat of primer to the underside of my bathroom lazy Susan. I’ll probably only need one more coat for the top and bottom. 

            I weighed 89.4 kilos before lunch, which is the highest my weight has been in the early afternoon in a long time. 

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

            I weighed 88.5 kilos at 18:15.

            I took a couple of pictures of issue 2 of Orgasmagazine in the fading light. I struggled with finding a good position of the tripod to shoot from above but finally settled on mounting the magazine vertically. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:05. 

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Insisting On Angels”. The old video I’m synching with the audio was behind all the way through the second verse and into the final chorus, so I had to keep deleting bits of the video to keep them lined up. That will continue for the rest of the chorus but for the finale with the “da da dahs” the video will be jumping ahead of the studio audio so I’ll have to add something to push it back, like some more of my Parkdale video. 

            I compared the song practice video of my performance of “Je t’aime Moi non plus” on September 19 with that of September 13. September 13 is a better looking video with a slightly better sound. I compared September 23 to September 13 and September 13 is the better looking video. I compared September 29 to September 13 and September 13 looks better. There are two left to compare.

            I had a potato with gravy and my last chicken leg while watching episode 34 of Checkmate. 

            Joe Martinez is a stuntman and invites Don and Hyatt to watch him work. In a fight scene he’s supposed to fall from a balcony onto some mattresses but someone has moved the mattresses and Joe barely escapes injury. Joe is angry with the prop man and starts hitting him. The director Shep Stryker fires Joe because this isn’t the first time he’s flown off the handle. He can’t get any work for a month and finally he goes back to Stryker and begs. Shep’s brother Mal Stryker offers Joe a job, but as a location scout. It’s not what Joe wants but he’s desperate. Meanwhile Don finds the moving of the mattresses suspicious and begins to investigate. Joe says that Mal might have it in for him because of there having been some flirtation with Mal’s wife Tina. Joe and Mal go to a small run down town where Mal wants to shoot a movie. The locals are not very welcoming and almost seem like they are about to murder and eat everybody. The one who runs the diner is Sara and she is expressionless. Her son Zimmie tells them they can’t make a movie. Stoney is a mentally impaired man with a knife who claims he’s married to Sara and she confirms it but she just might be humouring him. They want to shoot in front of the house that’s next door to the diner and Joe pays Zimmie $100. Then Joe discovers that Stoney has used his knife to cut all the upholstery in his car. Joe goes home and finds Tina in his bed but he makes her leave. Then Mal says they want to shoot inside the house and when Sara is told she doesn’t like that at all. Zimmie grabs Don and Stoney comes at him with his knife but Don flips Zimmie and punches Stoney. Later Stoney cuts Joe’s pantleg with his knife. Joe takes the knife away from him and throws it away. Joe quits but Don tells him he's discovered that Mal Stryker paid the prop man $5000 to sabotage his stunt. He also shows him some police evidence about the people of the town. Joe goes back to talk with Sara on a different level and tells her it’s time to bury him. Apparently her husband died inside the house years ago and she still hasn’t put him to rest. The others there are her sons and she seems to have adopted Stoney. She agrees that it’s time to bury him and she says she’ll let them use the house for the movie. Mal doesn’t care and reminds Joe he quit. But Shep has heard about what Mal did and wants Joe back. 

            Sara was played by Betty Garde, who won a playwriting competition in high school and was starring with the Broadway Players of Philadelphia at 15. She made her Broadway debut at 20 in Easy Come Easy Go. Her first credited film appearance was in The Lady Lies in 1929. During the 1930s and 1940s she did a lot of work on radio. She did all the female voices for the Eddie Cantor Show. She played Aunt Eller in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma. She co-starred in the movie Caged. 

            My landlord called while I was watching the show. I didn’t answer but listened to his voicemail later, which said the new neighbour upstairs is complaining about the volume of my TV. I assume he meant the TV show I was watching on the computer but it seems to me calling the landlord in Burlington is a convoluted way to communicate with one’s neighbour who is sitting a few meters away from you. All Jacob had to do was contact me while the show was playing and I would have turned it down. If the landlord calls I have no idea what is too loud and when. I know the landlord doesn’t want his tenants to communicate with each other because then they might get in the habit of doing so, then organize and compel him to behave like a proper landlord. There’s also the possibility that if Jacob complained about a loud TV under his place he might have been talking about King’s unit where he plays the TV quite loud.