Rick Jason

            On Sunday morning I ran through singing and playing “Where Did All the Millionaires Go?” my translation of “Les Millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I started collecting images of Zizi Jeanmaire for a photo-video of the song. 

            I weighed 89.25 kilos before breakfast.

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it went out of tune most of the time.

            Around midday I started up the clean warm mist humidifier and then cleaned the one that’s been going all week. 

            I weighed 90.5 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of iced tea.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride but only as far as Dufferin and Bloor. They’d ploughed the bike lane again but it was still somewhat slippery so I turned around and headed west on the eastbound bike lane since there was no one coming east anywhere in the distance. A lone cyclist who was heading west on the north side of Bloor where the bike lane has not been cleared at all shouted that I was going the wrong way. 

            I weighed 89.8 kilos at 17:55. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:44. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and then extracted to my hard drive side 2 of tape 1 of the recording of my third Slamnation poetry slam. For some unknown reason I stopped playing guitar after the first set. Did people not like it or did I decide to concentrate on judging? There were a lot of poets with affected US accents.

            I created a sub-folder for photos of Eva Vortex in my SSD and deleted a lot of her pictures from my hard drive. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, oven french fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore while watching season 1, episode 14 of Combat. 

            K Company is ambushed by a tank. Vince D’Amato and Fred Wharton are some distance away from the others. D’Amato decides to try to take out the tank. As Wharton protests but follows D’Amato as he crawls along a trench until he’s flanking the tank. D'Amato kills the gunner with his rifle, runs up and drops a grenade down into the tank, then takes over the gun. He uses it to kill about twelve Germans. One German officer manages to shoot him and then the Germans retreat as K Company advances. 

            Wharton runs from cover to Vince’s body and is so upset that he runs to the tank and starts shooting the bodies of the dead German soldiers. Seeing Wharton on the tank the others from K Company think he’s the one that saved them. He at first dismisses his role. Lieutenant Haney says he’s going to recommend Wharton for a Silver Star. At that moment Wharton and the others have to move out. 

            Later Wharton gets a Dear John letter and feels like a nobody so he decides to let Haney write the letter about the Silver Star. Haney asks Wharton for details and he puts himself in the part that D’Amato really played. But later they capture one of the German soldiers who was there. He pretends to acknowledge that Wharton was the one who commandeered the tank gun and killed his comrades. Later however when they are alone the German tells Wharton he knows he was not the one and offers silence in exchange for letting him escape. Saunders walks in on the conversation and now knows Wharton was not the hero. The German tries to run and Wharton shoots him. 

            Later when they are under fire just the two of them in a town, Saunders gets hit by a falling sign and knocked into some barbed wire. Wharton jumps in and shoots at the Germans while unclipping Saunders. A German throws a grenade. Wharton grabs it and tries to throw it back but it explodes and injures his arm. He shoots the rest of the Germans with his good arm and gets Saunders back to the post.

            The doctor says he won’t be able to use his right arm again but before they carry him to the ambulance he confesses that the Silver Star should be sent to D’Amato’s widow. 

            Wharton was played by Frank Gorshin, who would later star as The Riddler on the Batman TV series. 

            Lieutenant Hanley was played by Rick Jason, who was born rich. He got expelled from eight prep schools but finally graduated from the ninth. His father bought him a seat on the New York Stock Exchange but he sold it and joined the army during WWII. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and was spotted in a play in 1950 by Canadian actor, director, and writer Hume Cronyn who cast him in his play Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. For Jason’s role in it he earned a Theatre World Award and a Columbia contract. After a year he still hadn’t done a film and so he got released and was cast in Sombrero by MGM. He co-starred in The Sarecen Blade, This is My Love, Sierra Baron, Colour Me Dead, and The Witch Who Came from the Sea. He starred in Rx Murder. He played the lead in The Fountain of Youth: a TV pilot by Orson Welles that was never picked up as a series but aired in 1958 on Colgate Theatre. He starred in the 1960 detective series The Case of the Dangerous Robin (in which he was the first actor to use karate on television). The show was canceled after he injured the sciatic nerve in his back. After that he was cast in Combat. He was a regular on The Young and the Restless when the soap premiered. After retirement he ran The Wine Locker. He spoke French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. He shot himself to death at the age of 77. His autobiography Scrapbooks of my Mind was published after his death.