I worked out some chords for all but the last line of the first verse of “Venez donc voir” (“Come Then See”) by Boris Vian. I might have the song finished tomorrow.
I finished working out the chords for “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through singing and playing it in French. On Tuesday I’ll run through singing and playing my translation before uploading it to my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication.
I weighed 91.75 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since September 4.
I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions and it continues to go out of tune all the time.
I weighed 92.75 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 92 kilos at 18:10.
I was caught up in my journal at 19:52.
I tried to digitize a cassette recording of a Christian and the Lions concert at The El Mocambo but there was no left track. I turned up the left gain on my audio interface to see if it could pick up a left track but I just got a hiss. So I’ll have to re-record it on Tuesday with the left gain off. I was worried that my stereo had gone back to its old tricks and lost the left channel again but other tapes have two tracks and so it seems to have just been recorded with one track.
I had a small potato with gravy, my last chicken leg, and some Montreal smoked meat while watching a sketch from season 4, episode 23 and all the comedy bits from season 3, episode 36 of The Garry Moore Show.
The season 4 sketch is a mock TV show called Supergirl starring Carol Burnett. Supergirl was already a character in DC comics but this doesn’t seem to be based on her. She’s more of a gender reversed parody of Superman. Her secret identity is Clara Kleen who works as a reporter for The Daily Tabloid. She has a crush on Scoop Scanlan, ace reporter and he knows it but she’s nothing to him. Scoop gets a tip that enemy agents are planning on kidnapping the Queen of Morovia in three minutes and blame it on the US State Department. Since Morovia is far away they can’t be stopped in time. Scoop leaves to talk to the city editor and Clara changes to Supergirl (and Carol does her Tarzan yell on TV for the first time). She jumps out the window and fifteen seconds later returns to type up a report at super speed, then changes back to Clara. Scoop comes in and reads the report that Supergirl has saved the Queen of Morovia. Then Scoop gets a call from Killer Godowsky who tells him he’s sending two of his gorillas to work him over. Scoop is frightened and hides under his desk. Clara goes to change to Supergirl then the thugs arrive. They first open the door where Clara has gone and find her half changed into Supergirl. She gives one of them a hard slap and says, “Do you mind?” then closes the door again. The crooks find Scoop but Supergirl emerges and beats them up. Scoop says he’ll do anything to repay her. So she asks him to take Clara out to dinner and smooch with her but he refuses. So she punches him through a wall, goes to the window, does her Tarzan yell and flies out over the city.
At the beginning of the season 3 episode, Marian Lorne comes out to show Garry her passport photo because this is the last show of the season and she’s planning on travelling to Europe. Garry observes that her passport photo is a picture of Marilyn Monroe. She says she thought it would be more fun that way.
Garry introduces the country’s authority on suburbia, Alan King.
Alan says he read a book that reports of a small town in New Jersey that is notorious for its carryings-on, drinking and its wild parties. Alan has lived in the suburbs for 14 years and it’s the dullest place you ever saw. He wrote the author a letter to ask for the name of the town so he could move in for a couple of weeks.
Alan says every doctor is a specialist now and a general practitioner is just a medical director who sends you out to all the specialists. In the future if you wanna get your nose fixed you’ll need one specialist for the right nostril and another for your left. He says his mother is the witch doctor of Odessa and her cure for everything is chicken soup even if you fall from a building. Alan says just today a guy was lying face down on the street and people gathered around to fix him, turning him this way and that. They asked him if he was better and he told them he was just there to run an electrical line.
He says women want to lead two lives: theirs and their husbands’. At home he’s starring in a new series, “Father Knows Nothing”.
He says his brother in law goes to look at a car and starts kicking the tires. These cars are tested by the world’s greatest automotive engineers but he’s kicking the tires.
There’s a skit done by Carol and Durward that they repeated on her show a few years later when Durward and Garry guest starred. Durward heads the Safety Committee office and Carol is his secretary. He dictates a letter to Carol on his plan to eliminate accidents and proceeds to injure every part of Carol’s body with absent minded movements such as putting out his cigarette on one of her hands, hanging up the phone on her other hand, stepping on her foot, and so on. Eventually he accidentally knocks her out the window. Garry congratulates them on a brilliant performance and Durward says the most praise should go to Carol and as he sweeps his hand out he hits her in the face.
In another sketch Durward is an executive talking with three attractive women about them modelling his new line of nighties and pajamas. He has them sit down and then Carol comes in looking very nerdy in glasses to answer an ad for a bookkeeper. Durward tells her to sit down until he finishes with the other girls. Then each girl takes turns taking off their coats and modelling negligees. Of course Carol is shocked because she thinks these girls are also there for the bookkeeping job. When Carol is finally alone with him she just wants to get away because she thinks he wants her to take her clothes off. He closes the door and tells her she would need to work a lot of overtime at night. She asks if she can call her mother and when he shows her the phone she calls the police.
Garry says this has been his most fun year in show business so instead of just letting the credits roll he goes through all of the names personally. Executive producer Bob Banner; Producer Joe Hamilton; Director Dave Geisel (in his first year); head writer Vincent Bogert; Arnie Rosen, Coleman Jacoby, Norman Barasch, Carroll Moore, Sidney Reznick, and Doc (Neil) Simon; musical numbers staged by Ernie Flatt; Musical Director Irwin Kostal; Associate Producer Robert Wright; Settings designer Charles (Nutsy) Lisanby (who runs them over budget every week); Special Musical material by Ken Welch; Choral Director George Becker; That Wonderful Year was created by Arnold Peyser; Associate Director Mack Bing; Technical Director Carl Schutzman; Lighting Director Hal Anderson; Costumes by Robert Mackintosh; Set Direction Bill Harp; Graphic Artist Elinor Bunin; Hairstylist Ernie Adler.
Neil Simon used to get thrown out of cinemas for laughing too loud. He spent three days a week at the library reading homourists such as Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and S. J. Perelman. He started writing professionally as a sports editor in the mid 1940s while still in the Army Air Force Reserve. He was making $50 a week when he started writing for radio and television. His first radio job was for The Robert Q. Lewis Show. This led to Your Show of Shows on television. When he wrote for The Garry Moore Show, Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, Caesar’s Hour, The Phil Silvers Show, Red Buttons, and Jackie Gleason he was making $1,600 a week. He says Your Show of Shows had the most talented group of writers that at the time had ever been assembled together. He said it was the most enjoyable time he’d ever had writing with other people. He wrote about it in Laughter on the 23rd Floor. He made his Broadway debut as a writer with Catch a Star in 1956 and his first hit was Come Blow Your Horn in 1961. This was followed by Barefoot in the Park, which later became a hit movie. In 1966 he had four shows on Broadway at the same time: Barefoot in the Park, Sweet Charity, The Odd Couple (for which he won a Tony), and Star Spangled Girl. He wrote more than thirty plays and almost all of them were made into films, including The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity, The Sunshine Boys, I Ought to Be in Pictures, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Jake’s Women, The Goodbye Girl, California Suite, The Out of Towners, Plaza Suite, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, The Heartbreak Kid, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Cheap Detective, Seems Like Old Times, Only When I Laugh, Max Dugan Returns, The Slugger’s Wife, The Marrying Man, The Odd Couple II, and Murder By Death. He also wrote a gender reversed version of The Odd Couple. He wrote the film Chapter Two in 1979. He won a Tony Award for Biloxi Blues in 1985 and for Lost in Yonkers in 1991 (which also won a Pulitzer Prize). He’s been nominated for more Tony Awards and Oscars than any other writer. He became so successful that he could afford to produce his own plays. He was the most financially successful Broadway writer of all rime. In 1983 he became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theatre named after him. He says Herbert Ross has been the best director for his films, The others don’t understand his material as well. He said, “When it’s 38 in New York it’s 22 in Los Angeles; when it’s minus 5 in New York it’s 22 in Los Angeles, but there are 6 million interesting people in New York and 22 in Los Angeles.” He said playwriting is the perfect occupation. To sit in a room for ten hours a day with characters you created is heaven. When writing he thinks of sad situations and tries to write about them in a funny way. His style has been called “painful comedy”.
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