Maureen Stapleton

            On Sunday morning I continued editing “Au revoir mon enfance” (Goodbye My Childhood) by Boris Vian in my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication. 

            I continued to collect images for a photo video of the song “Le rent' dedans” (The Pick-Up) by Serge Gainsbourg to upload to YouTube. I just need one good image of a woman in a tree to finish. 

            I weighed 88.95 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my old Epi acoustic during song practice for the third of four sessions. It didn’t go out of tune at all. 

            I finally started painting my bathroom walls. Although the wall paint I’m using is a shade of purple it’s called “Pink Parade” and when poured into the tray it really did look pink. At first I thought it was a mistake and that I’d gotten the wrong paint. It even looked a bit pink when I started painting but soon it started showing as a shade of purple. I had hoped to get the first coat on all the walls today but it took an hour to almost do all the parts that I need the step ladder to reach. There’s a section in the southwest corner where the edges didn’t get as much paint. On Tuesday I should have time to finish the first coat. But then Wednesday I need to do laundry and Thursday I need to get a haircut. On Friday I should be able to begin the second coat. Then Saturday I go grocery shopping, Sunday I’m acting in a movie, and Monday I’m going to try to buy a new computer. Sometime soon I need to clean my humidifier. I might have all the painting done by the time I go for my colonoscopy on December 16. It’s amazing how dark the bathroom seems now that it’s half coloured. Forever it was a faded and ragged beige and so it was pretty light. Then I sanded it, drywall-compounded it and primed it and for at least a year it was relatively bright. 

            I weighed 89.45 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with peanut butter, five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea. 

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

            I weighed 88.75 kilos at 18:10. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:24. 

            I reviewed my digitization of the cassette recording of several Christian and the Lions performances at Fat Alberts. There was some skipping in different places on every copy. The player plays the tapes without glitches but there is something wrong with the tech behind the conversion process. If I order a different convertor from Amazon there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again. I have a Sony double cassette Dolby recorder-player that I haven’t used for decades because I’ve been afraid of not being able to connect it to my amp and my computer. I know it worked before so I should try to get it working again for at least until all my cassettes are digitized. 

            In my 2024-09-09 Song Practice Movie Maker project I synchronized the audio with the video. Tomorrow I’ll work on isolating the song “Laisses-en un peu pour les autres”. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, a chopped slice of ham, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore while watching season 1, episode 9 of Car 54 Where Are You? 

            A man reports that he went to a Romani fortune teller and left without his wallet and so car 54 is sent to investigate. The captain tells Muldoon to have Toody wait in the car or else he’ll leave the store with pierced ear and a down payment on an earring. The portrayal of Romani people is pretty racist as we see the fortune teller asking her kids why they’re inside on a day like today when they could be sneaking into a movie and stealing popcorn. When Muldoon walks in with the theft victim the Romani woman named Anna Lupesco says, “Good work officer! I see you caught him! He opened our front door and threw in his wallet!” Muldoon accuses her of stealing but she says she’s just a simple soul who doesn’t understand these things but if she did she’d say that he needs a corroborating witness. Muldoon accuses her of living in the store but she says she’s selling diesel locomotives on order. Muldoon goes back to the captain who says to have someone come in with marked bills and catch Anna when she takes them. Since she never saw Toody, Muldoon suggests sending him in civilian clothes so he doesn’t look like a cop. The captain says Toody doesn’t look like a cop in a uniform. Toody goes in and Anna steals his wallet, then Muldoon catches her and she has 24 hours to vacate the store. She curses Toody that he’ll break out in hives on his back and his wife will leave him. Toody believes it and gets hives out of nervousness and also argues with Lucille in his fear, causing her to go and stay with her sister. Toody is miserable without her and so Muldoon tries to track down Anna to get her to lift the curse. He finds her and takes Toody there. When he tells her that her curses came true she is shocked. She implies it’s against her Romani culture to tell the truth and so if her curses came true she’s a failure. She tells her husband and he is also in a panic. She confesses that her father once got a job for two weeks and never got over it. She says they don’t deserve to be called Romani. They are all in the back when a customer walks in and it’s Lucille. Muldoon tells Anna she’s got to get Lucille back with Toody and so she does.

            Anna was played by Maureen Stapleton, who moved to New York to study acting at the age of 18 at the Actors Studio and worked as a model. She made her Broadway debut in Playboy of the Western World in 1946. She won a Tony for her performance in The Rose Tattoo and another for The Gingerbread Lady (which Neil Simon wrote for her), plus four other nominations. She made her film debut in Lonelyhearts in 1958 and was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. She was nominated again for her role in Airport and again for Interiors. She won the Academy award for her performance in Reds. She co-starred in Plaza Suite, The Runner Stumbles, The Fan, The Cosmic Eye, The Last Good Time, Trading Mom, Cocoon, and Cocoon: the Return. She won an Emmy for her performance in Among the Paths to Eden. She was nominated for a Grammy for her recording of To Kill a Mockingbird. She hosted Saturday Night Live in 1979. She was afraid of planes an elevators. When she travelled across the country she took a train and when she crossed the ocean she did so by boat. She was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She said it would be more exciting to be acknowledges as the greatest lay in the world than the greatest actor.