I posted “I Love You. So Do I”, my translation of “Je t’aime. Moi aussi” by Serge Gainsbourg on Facebook and then looked for the next Serge Gainsbourg song that I’ve yet to translate. The last song listed in my 1972 Gainsbourg document is “Une chanson de cour” but it was just written for a TV show skit and doesn’t seem to exist online. I looked in the 1973 Gainsbourg file and found only one unfinished translation. That’s “Shylock” and it was written for a TV show called Top a, starring Petula Clark in that episode. She and Gainsbourg do the song as a comical duet. There’s a video of it on YouTube so I downloaded it and looked for an app to transcribe it because my free minutes on Sonix have been used up. I tried Turbo Scribe and it claimed to have transcribed the audio but I couldn’t find the text. The same thing happened with Quickwerx and Whisper. I finally got it done with an app called Eleven Labs. I copied the text and I’ll have a look tomorrow, then edit it and compare it to the audio.
I weighed 90.8 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since June 15.
I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune until after I sat down and played part of a song while sitting in front of my computer. For some reason that end or level of the room causes all my guitars to go out of tune.
I weighed 92.25 kilos before lunch. I think that’s the most I’ve ever weighed since I’ve been weighing myself regularly.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 91.6 kilos at 18:10. February 20 was the last evening when I was so cruel to the scale.
For the 12th day in a row I was a day behind in my journal and was still behind at suppertime.
I had a potato with gravy and a reheated T-bone steak while watching season 11, episode 6 of The Carol Burnett Show.
In the Tudball-Wiggins sketch, Mr. Tudball is preparing his offices for painting. Mrs. Wiggins arrives three hours late and says it’s because it took a long time to get into her overalls. She takes off her leopard print coat and is wearing a very tight pair of coveralls with high heels. She asks the time and he says noon so she starts walking out the door to go for lunch but he makes her come back because there’s no lunch today. She suggests he take off his watch before they get started and he does. She takes it from him but then drops it into the paint bucket. He gets her to paint the wall to the right of where he’s painting and she starts painting his right hand where he’s leaning. She climbs the ladder in her tight coveralls and stilettos and needs Tudball’s help getting up there. He says “From the back you look like Dolly Parton from the front”. He holds the tray for her while she dips the roller but as she swings her arm up and over to reach the wall she rolls it over his face. He shouts that she’s wasting paint when they have all of these walls to do. She swings up her arm in surprise, knocking Tudball and the paint bucket across the room and now all the paint is gone.
Carol and Dick introduce Ken Berry. He does a song and dance number that might be called “Girls” with the male dancers. They are portraying miners waiting for women to arrive and when the girls come they all do a dance. One girl is not dancing as she holds a suitcase with her name “Emily”. Ken comes and dances with her as a recording of his voice sings “Emily” by Johnny Mandel and Johnny Mercer from the 1964 film The Americanization of Emily.
Dick plays a once famous piano player who is now out of work and Carol plays his dedicated wife. It’s winter and they are burning all of their things in the fireplace to keep warm. He’s burning all the newspaper clippings that Carol saved of his concerts when they come across a $50,000 insurance policy on his hands. He decides to injure his hands to collect. He asks her to bring the hot poker from the fireplace down on his hand. She turns away and swings around to say she can’t do it but in doing so ends up poking him in the ribs. He next asks her to drop his bowling ball on his hand. She pulls it down from a high shelf but it’s heavy and her arms swing with it to hit him in the left knee. He asks her to try again but she can’t do it and throws the ball down but it hits his right foot. Next he puts his hand in the door jamb and tells her to slam the door on it. But before doing it she says, “Honey?” and he brings his head forward to ask “What?” then she slams the door on his head. Then they get a call from his agent saying they want him in Vegas at double Liberace’s salary. With all of his injuries he goes to sit at the piano to start to play badly, so Carol slams the keyboard cover on his hands and calls the insurance company.
They do a movie spoof called Stolen Serenade but I don’t know what movie they are actually parodying but it’s maybe the 1939 musical Broadway Serenade because it’s directed by Busby Berkeley and Tim plays a parody of that director named Buzzy Berkeley. Vicki, Ken, and Dick play an act called Winnie, Werner, and Woe. They sing a song that warns not to grab a rose by the thorn. Buzzy tells Winnie he’s going to make her a star but the star of the show Lily du Lane (played by Carol) arrives. She tells them they can’t be in Buzzy’s show but she wants their song for her own act. She says she’ll make it the biggest hit on Broadway. Woe is all for it but Werner argues they wrote the song for Winnie and if she can’t sing it no one can. Lily kisses Woe and brings him over to her side. Werner angrily tears the song music in half and gives half to Woe then he and Winnie leave. Woe regrets losing his friends but Lily introduces him to two new partners: her and a bottle of champagne. Six months later he’s a slave to the bottle and Lily as he serves as her piano player. She finds him disgusting and is tired of singing his rose song. Opens for Lily and does a song while drunk. She makes her entrance and wants him to lift her onto the piano but it’s a real struggle for him to get her up there. She sings the rose song while Woe accompanies her but he keeps seeing tiny versions of Winnie and Warner dancing on the piano and singing the song. Five years later Winnie and Werner are ragged beggars singing on the street in the winter in front of the theatre where Lily is doing her show. They sing the rose song and rich passersby condescend to throw them a coin. As they are trying to pick it up before it freezes to the sidewalk Lily and Woe come walking along and Woe trips over Winnie. The three embrace in a happy reunion. Lily gives Woe an ultimatum and suddenly he becomes sober. He hands Lily his bottle and says, “Who wants to live in luxury and comfort when he can starve with his friends?” Lily takes a drink and leaves them to go inside. Woe and Werner haven’t written a song since they split up but now that they are back together they are inspired. They write a dance song about shivering and shaking in the cold called “The Slush”. Buzzy happens to be passing by and thinks it’s sensational so he immediately puts them in a show. Lily comes out on stage drunk but Buzzy carries her off. Winnie, Werner, and Woe are now Broadway stars and they do a charity benefit at a hospital for the poor where they sing for terminally ill patients so they can die happy. There they find among the patients Lily. As Lily lies there coughing Winnie and Werner laugh at her but Woe says they should be compassionate, but then he grabs some snow from the window and rubs it in her face while they all laugh. Lily says, “My pulse just stopped, call the doctor!” The trio thinks that line is a great idea for a song entitled “Call the Doctor I’m IN Love” and so they start to sing and dance to it. At the end of the song Lily dies and her bed begins rising up and floating above the room and Lily sits up in her room and flaps her angel wings.
Carol sings her theme song from the floating bed while coughing. Then the cast crawl into bed with her.
During the 1920s Busby Berkeley worked as a dance director on Broadway. His earliest films were Eddie Cantor musicals and he was less concerned with choreography than with having his dancers form kaleidoscopic patterns. He was not the first to do that but elevated it to a high art. He directed dance routines for Florenz Ziegfeld’s shows A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Whoopie. Then he did the choreography for the film version. His short dance segments often cost more than the films in which they appeared. His fame skyrocketed during the depression with the film adaptations of five musicals: 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Golddiggers of 1933, Dames, and Fashions of 1934. When musicals lost their appeal he turned to directing dramas like They Made Me a Criminal and Forty Little Mothers. He directed the “I Got Rhythm” segment of Girl Crazy. In the 1940s he designed the finales for Esther Williams movies.
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