I weighed 88.25 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Martin acoustic during song practice and it went out of tune during most songs, except for “The Deserter” and a few at the end.
Around midday I rode to Freshco because yesterday I’d forgotten to buy high acid vinegar at No Frills. When I came back I used some of it to clean the warm mist humidifier that’s been running all week.
I weighed 88.75 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 88.45 kilos at 18:35.
I was caught up in my journal at 19:36.
Once again I tried to record from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity my rehearsal of “Me and Gravity” and “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” with Brian Haddon and Arjan. The result was just as distorted as before despite my turning off “inst” and “air” on my Scarlett 2i2 audio interface and having downloaded and installed the driver for the Scarlett. I’ve always had the 48v button on because I didn’t know what it does. Apparently it provides a power boost for microphones and it’s unnecessary for what I’m doing and could cause distortion. So tomorrow I’ll try again with that turned off and hopefully that will solve the problem but it hasn’t been a problem for previous digitizations of tapes. I don’t know what else to do.
I had a tomato, cucumber, and avocado salad with lime juice while watching the first episode of The Carol Burnett Show.
The show begins with Carol herself warming up the audience. Normally a standup comedian or a professional MC would be hired for that kind of job but Carol got the idea from The Gary Moore Show to do it herself. She introduces the show’s announcer Lyle Waggoner and pretends to be enamored with him. When he does a sample of his announcing she says, “Did you hear those shoulders?”
In the first sketch Carol plays former child star Shirley Dimple, who even though she’s married with two children, still dresses and talks like a little girl and lives with her fairy godmother.
The first guest who became the traditional first guest of every season of the show, was Jim Nabors. He sang “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” in both English and Italian (“Io che non vivo”) by Pino Donnagio and Vito Pallavicini in Italian with English lyrics by Vicki Wickham and Simon Napier-Bell.
The second sketch involves Carol and Jim as two people forced into inactivity at a ski lodge because Carol’s arm is in a cast and Jim’s leg is in a cast. They are both very clumsy and keep hitting each other with their casts until they give up and crawl away in separate directions.
Next Carol and Jim do a song and dance skit that’s also a sample of Broadway songs.
The third sketch was based on Carol’s own life. She raised her younger sister Christine from the age of 12 until she was 20. It became difficult when she was 16 because Carol got married. In the sketch Harvey Korman plays Carol’s husband and it’s about how annoyed he is over living with a teenager.
The 18 year old Vickie Lawrence plays Christine. Harvey complains she’s always at home and wonders why she doesn’t go out and protest. Carol says, “Not so loud. She’s very sensitive about being sixteen and never having been arrested”. Carol has invited the neighbour Willie Kessler to take Christine for a walk. Christine asks, “What am I? A dog?” Carol had to pay Willie a dollar. Christine is taller than Willie so Carol tells her to slump. Christine says, “First you ruin my evening and now my posture”. After they leave Carol and Harvey start to worry about Christine but she comes home after dropping Willie in a mud puddle.
Next Carol’s character The Charwoman is mopping a very hip discotheque called The Angry Hand after closing time. She turns on the various lighting effects until she starts fantasizing that the place is crowded with young mod dancers and she are dancing to rock and roll with psychedelic camera effects. She finishes by sitting on her bucket and singing “Georgy Girl” by Tom Springfield and Jim Dale.
Vicki Lawrence started singing and dancing at an early age. She was a cheerleader and was voted “Most likely to succeed” by her class in high school. She sang with The Young Americans from 1965 to 1967 and appeared in the Academy Award winning documentary of the same name. She sent Carol Burnett a newspaper clipping showing their two pictures side by side to show how much she resembled Carol. She asked Carol for advise on how to win the Miss Fireball Contest she had entered. Carol had been looking for a teenager to play her sister in the “Carol and Sis” sketches for her upcoming variety show and so she attended the contest, which Vicki won, and after several auditions by others, she was hired. She was nominated for six Emmy Awards and won one for her performances on the Carol Burnett Show. In 1973 she had a hit record with “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia”. She also had lesser hits with “He Did it With Me” and “Ships in the Night”. She put out a disco album called Newborn Woman in 1979 and had a minor hit with “Don’t Stop the Music”. After her 11 years on The Carol Burnett Show she starred in Mama’s Family from 1983 to 1990. She then hosted Win Lose or Draw and became the first successful female game show host. She was a celebrity contestant 90 times on The New $25,000 Pyramid, 44 times on Super Password, 45 times on Hollywood Squares, and 49 times on Password Plus. She appeared on five episodes of Laverne and Shirley and five episodes of Hannah Montana. Her talk show Vicki! ran from 1992 to 1994, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. Her husband Bobby Russell wrote “Little Green Apples”, “Honey” and “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”. She says that performing on The Carol Burnett Show was The Harvard School of Comedy for her, with Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman serving as her mentors. The character of “Mama” was written for Carol but she wanted to play Eunice and for Vickie to play Mama. In 2001 she started a one woman show called “Vicki and Mama: a Two Woman Show”. In 2019 she co-starred in the sitcom The Cool Kids.
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