Ken Howard

            On Saturday I went to bed a little after 2:00 and didn’t notice any bedbugs on me during the times I was awake. After yoga I checked and saw a few babies crawling on the old exit door and most of those were dark inside with no fresh blood. A couple did have blood and so I assume that they’d made it across the sticky carpet tape to feed on me while I was sleeping. I noticed one baby actually moving on the tape while some had gotten stuck. 

            I finished translating “L’epoque légendaire” (The Legendary Era) by Boris Vian so tomorrow I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            I continued editing “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication. I should have it posted tomorrow. 

            I weighed 91.25 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the third of four sessions and as usual it was chronically out of tune. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where I bought five bags of Canadian cherries, a basket of Canadian peaches, two packs of Mexican raspberries, some bananas, a sack of Canadian potatoes. a salmon fillet from Chile, cinnamon-raisin bread, mouthwash, a jar of tomato pesto, a jug of lemonade, a jug of orange juice, two containers of skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 92.5 kilos at 14:25. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            I took a siesta and for the first time in several Saturdays woke up in time to take a bike ride downtown. On the way back, since I’d forgotten to buy five-year-old cheddar at No Frills I thought I’d stop at Loblaws at Portland and Queen because since it’s the No Frills parent company I figured they’d have the same things. I hadn’t been in that store since the early days of Covid. They have a Starbucks in the store now. I looked for cheese and found they have cheese in five different sections. They have the processed cheese in one part, the shredded cheese in another and then three cheese locations in the deli section. It would be so much more convenient if they put all the cheese in once place. I finally found five-year-old cheddar in a fancy wooden fridge cabinet with sliding doors. They didn’t have the kind that No Frills sells but rather Agropur so I got two packs. It’s not as good as Balderson's five-year-old cheddar but it’ll do. 

            I weighed 91.95 kilos at 18:25. 

            I was still four days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, potato wedges, and five-year-old cheddar with a glass of Creemore lager while watching an interview with Carol Burnett by Screen Actor’s Guild and American Federation of Radio and Television Artists President Ken Howard. 

            He says Carol is their 52nd Life Achievement Honoree. 

            He says he knows where the bodies are buried and wants Carol to talk about Tamiment. She says it was a resort area in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They hired actors and writers to come for the whole summer. Each performer would get room and board plus $1000 for the whole season. They would write and perform an original musical comedy every week. People would come in on buses and spend a week there. They were usually single people looking to hook up. The shows were free and so they had to be good to capture the attentions of these guests who were really there to pick someone up and take a ride in a canoe. When Carol was there in 1957 Artie Johnson was there and so were the creators of Once Upon a Mattress. They had to learn things and put them together very quickly and it was a great training ground. Once Upon a Mattress was created at Tamiment in 1958. They kind of wrote it for the brilliant Nancy Walker and she said she’d love to do it. But then they got George Abbott to direct it and he said he’d like to have a brand new face star in the show. 

            When she was a small child she saw Jimmy Stewart on the screen and declared that he was her friend. Sure enough years later they became friends. When Carol was in her 20s she was a guest on a Dinah Shore summer replacement show and Mervin LeRoy the director called and invited her to lunch at the studio. She wore her only pair of high heels and took a bus to the studio. He was shooting The FBI Story and invited her to watch a scene before lunch. She was surprised to see James Stewart in the scene they were shooting. Mervin asked her if she wanted to meet him. When he spoke to her she couldn’t hear it because her heart was beating so loud. All she could think of to say was, “I guess we’d better put on the old feedbag” then she turned around to step off he stage but stepped directly into a bucket of whitewash with her right high heel. She was too embarrassed to let on that it was a mistake so she pretended that she’d done it on purpose and walked off the set dragging the bucket with her foot. Years later she went for dinner with George Kennedy and his wife and he’d also invited James Stewart and his wife so that’s how they became friends. Carol invited James and his wife Gloria to a party once and Gloria apologized in advance because they would be leaving early so they could get to bed. Among the guests were Jo Stafford, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and Mel Tormé. After dinner they all got around the piano to sing. James loved to sing and so he didn’t leave until 1:00. 

            The Mama’s Family sketch was written by Dick Clare and Jenna McMann. They were writing about their own dysfunctional families back in Chicago. At the reading Carol decided to do Eunice with a southwestern US accent and so Harvey and Vicki did the same. Dick and Jenna were horrified. They said you can’t do it that way because you’ll alienate the entire south. They tried it once without the accents and got no laughs but then when they brought back the accents the same sketch was funny.

            When her show went into syndication they did half hour shows with the musical numbers cut out. Steve Lawrence was a frequent guest and in addition to being a singer he was a brilliant sketch comic. He told the story of being approached by teenagers at an airport who only knew him as a comedian and had no idea he was a singer. 

            Carol has just finished writing her fourth book. This one is called In Such Good Company.

            One week on The Garry Moore Show the guest was Ed Wynn. He told them the difference between a comic and a comedic actor. A comic like Bob Hope says funny things while a comedic actor like Jack Benny says things funny. 

            Ken Howard studied at the Yale School of Drama and made his Broadway debut in 1968 in Promises Promises. He made his TV debut in 1969 on NYPD. He originated the role of Thomas Jefferson in the musical 1776. He won a Tony for his performance in Child’s Play. He made his film debut in Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon in 1970. In films he co-starred in 1776, A Numbers Game, Such Good Friends, The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie, Second Thoughts, and Better Living Through Chemistry. He co-created and starred in the TV series The White Shadow (based on his own experience as a basketball star in school). He starred in the series Adam’s Rib and The Manhunter. His first Emmy was for Facts For Boys. He won an Emmy Award for his performance in Grey Gardens in 2009. He taught master classes at the American Repertory Theatre Institute and Harvard University. He wrote Act Natural in 2003. His second wife was the daughter of Ann Landers. August 9 – On Sunday morning before getting up I felt and smelled some bedbugs. When I checked, some babies were stuck on the tape and a few more than yesterday were on the old exit door at the head of my bed. Some of them had my blood inside and some didn’t. I’ll put some more tape down today and some more diatomaceous earth under the baseboards. There are certainly fewer bedbugs now than there were a couple of weeks ago so maybe I can diminish them further. I uploaded “L’epoque légendaire” (The Legendary Era) by Boris to my Christian’s Translations blog and since there are no chords to place, it will be published tomorrow. I published “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg and my translation “Pirate” on my Christian’s Translations blog, then I posted my translation on Facebook. I searched in my 1974 Gainsbourg document for the next song that I didn’t translate before because I didn’t have the audio. The first two songs are “Lili t’a pas d’sosie” and “Y’a Bon” as sung by Lisette Malidor but there is no audio. Next after those is “Docteur Faust” and there is audio for that and I did a few years ago try to transcribe the lyrics but probably got it wrong. I found another transcript and copied it, so tomorrow I’ll start learning “Docteur Faust”. I weighed 91.3 kilos before breakfast. I weighed 93.15 kilos before lunch, which is a record high in the early afternoon of any time since I’ve been weighing myself. I weighed 92.25 kilos at 17:50.