Jacqueline Scott

            On Friday morning I memorized the seventh verse of “Au revoir mon enfance” (Goodbye My Childhood) by Boris Vian. There are two verses left to nail down. 

            I worked out all but the last three chords of the chorus of “À poil ou à plumes” (Naked or in Feathers) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 87.55 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson electric during song practice and it went out of tune a lot. Tomorrow I’ll play the Kramer. 

            Around midday I applied more primer to the white tiles in the checkerboard pattern on the floor in front of my kitchen counter and stove. The paint can seems bottomless. For more than a week I’ve used it thinking I was going to finish it but there always seems to be some left. Maybe I’ll finish it on Sunday. 

            I weighed 88.25 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back because yesterday when I was there I forgot to buy Sponge Towels. 

            I weighed 88.7 kilos at 18:10. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:01.

            I listened to the digitized copy of my Howl interview and there’s a lot of skipping. This happens on every tape so I assume the problem is the tape player on the converter. I wanted to get a better copy of my song “Sugar” and so I kept rewinding the tape to the point of the song and re-digitized it a few times to try to get a cleaner copy. 

            In my “2024-10-09 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I got the interface audio within a split second of being synchronized. It was still a little behind before supper. 

            I made a new batch of gravy from roast beef drippings and had some with a small potato and two slices of roast beef while watching episode 9 of Cain’s Hundred. 

            The dock workers are getting leached by the Organization while Tommy Jackson is trying to organize them to stand up to their overlords. But Tommy gets beaten by the thugs of the trucking company owner Dave Braddock and then staggers in front of truck that hits and kills him. That truck was going pretty slow so I doubt it would’ve done him that much damage. With Tommy gone, Hank Conrad steps in to try to organize the workers. Hank’s best friend Wilt Farrell used to be a dock worker but now he’s a runner. Hank wants the men to join the cargo handlers union because the cargo handlers are getting paid a decent wage. The cargo handlers unload the boats and the dock loaders load the trucks. The boss loaders are on the take. Braddock calls for Wilt to get him to persuade Hank to back off and gives him some money for incentive. Hank and his fiancé Helen go for dinner at the home of Wilt and his wife Irma. Wilt asks Hank as a favour to not have the meeting. Hank says he’ll do anything for him personally but he’s not going to sell out his co-workers as a favour to a friend. Wilt tells him to get out. Then Wilt gets a call from Braddock to meet with him in his car. Wilt gives him his money back and says it didn’t work. Braddock says they’ll try it another way and sends Wilt to go after Hank with two of Braddock’s men. Wilt sits in the car while Braddock’s men beat Hank until Wilt stops them. The next day Hank is still out to get the dock loaders a fair shake and still wants to organize a meeting. Cain offers Hank protection but he refuses. He says he can’t lead the men while walking around with a bodyguard. Later Wilt hears that Hank has been shot. He’ll live but he’s out of commission for a while. The men still want a meeting but they don’t have a leader to motivate them. Cain tells Wilt that Hank will try again but maybe next time Wilt will pull the trigger. Wilt goes and takes the money from the safe in the Cargo Loaders office and takes it to the dock loaders to be their organizing fund. 

            Helen was played by Jacqueline Scott, who won a tap dancing contest at the age of three but says she was the worst child tap dancer. She began acting professionally at 17 in a small St. Louis theatre. She studied under Uta Hagen in New York. She made her Broadway debut in The Wooden Dish. She made her film debut in Macabre in 1958 on the set of which she met Gene Lesser who became her husband for 62 years. She played Richard Kimble’s sister in The Fugitive. She co-starred in Stephen Spielberg’s first film Duel.