March 4, 1994: I started my water fast

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday I started my water fast. I worked at the Ontario College of Art until 16:00.

Sheree North

            On Saturday morning I had a dream about teaching a yoga class to a tall guy who left when he found out that yoga is not Jewish. 

            I translated the verse I’d missed when I first translated “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords for about half of the second verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions.

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went to Freedom Mobile and paid for my March phone plan. Then I went to No Frills where I bought seven bags of red grapes, a pack of strawberries, a pack of blueberries, seven loose avocadoes, two bags of Imperfect avocadoes, three mangoes, two jugs of orange juice, and a jug of Garden Cocktail. As I often do at No Frills I forgot to buy vine tomatoes because they display them in an area where I’m not used to looking. 

            I weighed 87.7 kilos before lunch. I had the usual tomato, avocado and lemon juice salad with a glass of Garden Cocktail. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:45. 

            Because I’d gone to bed at 23:00 yesterday I didn’t get caught up on my journal this evening until supper. I had the same thing as lunch but with an extra tomato and avocado while watching season 2, episode 15 of Burke’s Law. 

            A ship is scheduled to set sail and Davidian Jonas the owner of the line is supposed to be taken ashore but they can’t find him. The captain decides to haul anchor and when it comes up Jonas’s dead body is tied to it. Tim tries to question the captain but he seems to only speak Russian. Burke arrives and says to book the captain on suspicion of murder and suddenly he can speak English. There was a party last night and everyone left for shore. Burke examines Jonas’s cabin and finds a gold earring as well as a note reading “Hangar 17, International Airport, 9:30.” He discovers a crewmember that everyone else somehow overlooked, a beautiful Swedish radio operator named Ulla Swenson. She has the guest list for the party. The permanent guests are staying in a hotel. They are Milhew Court, Harvey Haight, Putzi Voltran, and the Maharani of Kooshipoo. Burke finds that all the guests from the boat have checked out of the hotel. They find Harvey at the airport trying to leave for Marseilles. Burke finds Putzi at another hotel. He was Jonas’s personal photographer. Jonas had a brother named Gregorio who came to the party uninvited. Burke meets Harvey in the police psychiatrist’s office where he is alone making ink blots in books. He says he was Jonas’s public relations man. It was his job to make people believe he was where he was not. He asks Burke to lead him through a free association test. The word “murder” comes up a lot. Tim and Les find Court racing model boats with children in the park. He says once he had a line of sixteen ships but because of Jonas he is now down to seven. He tried to make a deal with him last night but he was occupied in an argument with Gregorio. Burk goes to the Taj Mahal Club to talk with the Maharani. There is an amazing dance performance being done by Tanya Lemani. The Maharani is a white woman in Indian garb but also wearing a veil while selling cigarettes. She met Jonas in Rangoon and hitched a ride back to the US. But it took two years because every time they touched port Jonas fixed it so she couldn’t go ashore. She says Jonas and Gregorian hated each other. Burke visits a stereotypical Romani camp where people dance and fight and party. It turns out that Gregorian is the king of the Romani and the sole heir of Jonas. Jonas was ashamed of his heritage. Jonas sent for him last night but not as a guest. He was planning a merger and Gregorian was his broker. He tells Burke he has a seat on the exchange and wears a three button suit and a homburg. An old woman with a crystal ball has made him a fortune by predicting what stocks to buy or sell. As Burke is leaving Gregorian throws a knife at him, deliberately missing to show he’s not a killer. Burke throws the knife back and comes even closer. Burke picks up Ulla and takes her to the Jonas yacht. At the dock Burke gets a call and the lab reports that Jonas was knocked unconscious in his room before he was drowned and there was zero alcohol in his blood. He hears a scream and finds Ulla unconscious. Burke goes on the yacht and finds Putzi. He suggests he hit Jonas with his camera. Putzi was only pretending to be drunk last night and holding up the unconscious Jonas. He says Putzi was being paid to stop the merger. Putzi attacks Burke and they fight. Putzi attacks with a fire axe and Burke cools him off by spraying the fire extinguisher at him. 

            The Maharani was played by Sheree North, who started as a ballet dancer. She lied her age during WWII to dance in USO shows. She made her film debut uncredited in Excuse My Dust. She danced in nightclubs and made her Broadway debut in 1953 in the musical Hazel Flagg for which she won a Theatre World Award. This led to her being cast in the movie Living It Up. She was picked as a possible replacement for Marilyn Monroe by 20th Century Fox in 1955 when the two women had the exact same weight and measurements. She later played Marilyn’s mother in a TV movie. She had her first co-starring role in How To Be Very Very Popular. She co-starred in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, No Down Payment, Destination Inner Space, and The Way To The Gold. On TV she co-starred in the short lived sitcoms Big Eddie and I’m a Big Girl Now. She played Lou Grant’s girlfriend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Blanche’s sister Virginia on The Golden Girls, and Kramer’s mother on Seinfeld. She’s the one who first spoke Kramer’s first name of “Cosmo”. She earned Emmy nominations for appearances on Marcus Welby and Archie Bunker’s Place.

March 3, 1994: I posed for the Ontario College of Art

Thirty years ago today

            On Thursday I posed at the Ontario College of Art until 16:00.

Gloria DeHaven

            On Friday morning I didn’t get to bed until around 13:15 so I didn’t get much sleep. I was out of it during yoga and song practice. 

            I was running through singing and playing my translation of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian when I realized that I’d overlooked translating one verse. Tomorrow I’ll have to do that before I can continue running through the song. 

            I finished working out the chords for the first verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos before breakfast which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a long time. It’s about five kilos heavier than this time last year. 

            At around 10:30 I went back to bed for an hour so I’d have a better stance of staying awake in class. 

            I left for Modern Literary Medievalism class at around 12:20. A lot of the class was already waiting in the hall when I got there. 

            Everything can be taken to be about the mother. 

            Essay proposal: A working hypothesis to delineate a field of study and initial point of view. Your thesis will be different when you’re done. Quote some particular passages that are relevant. Use between 4 and 8 sources. 

            I told her I hated Aers’s article and the way he focuses on gender. She says his teacher Spiering was less gendered. 

            The Medieval Christian-Pagan connection: grace in all things. The wife of Bath can be tied in. 

            I said the events in “Pearl” are not a divine revelation but rather a dream. God is conjured as a way of dealing with the grief of mourning. 

            In Pearl the novel Marianne needs to create a story so she can move on.

            “Pearl” the poem is almost perfect but maybe deliberately flawed. 

            I mentioned Bernard de Clairvaux saying that every soul is a bride of Christ. The professor said that Clairvaux had visions of kissing Jesus on the mouth. 

            In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Bertilak says to Gawain “As pearls are to green pees so you are” and tells him “I forgive you”. 

            She said the French word for “pearl” is “Marguerite”. It’s not really. It does mean “pearl” in Latin and Greek and Persian but the French don’t use “Marguerite” instead of “perle”. There is also a flower called “marguerite”. Margarite is the name of the mother in the novel. Pearl the poem is pastoral.

            I weighed 86.9 kilos at 15:45. That’s the least I’ve tipped the scales at that time since last Friday.

            I took a siesta from 16:30 to 18:00. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos at 18:24 and it hasn’t been that high for at least seven months. It’s three kilos heavier than this time last year. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:45. 

            I found an essay proposal from two years ago to use as a template for the one that’s due on Monday at midnight. I copied and pasted it into a new document named “Pearl Proposal” and saved it in my Modern Literary Medievalisms folder. Tomorrow I’ll do some stream of consciousness writing with mourning in “Pearl” and Pearl in mind then see what I come up with. 

            I had a tomato and avocado salad with lemon juice while watching season 2, episode 14 of Burke’s Law.

            Construction magnate Alex Dukette is throwing a party and all the guests are there having a good time but the host has not arrived. The butler goes to the walk-in fridge to get more champagne and discovers Dukette hanging with a side of beef. After Burke’s team arrives Les finds a dinner guest list for the party Dukette was planning next week. Amos Burke is on the list. Dukette was dead before the guests arrived and so they are not suspects. The servants had the afternoon off and Dukette was alone all day. The killer could have been anyone because the meat hooks are lowered and raised electronically. Burke goes to see Dukette’s ex-wife Connie French. She plays piano in a lounge. She didn’t know he was dead. She said when they were married there were times she wanted to kill him but she hasn’t even seen him in three years. The next day the body of a psychiatrist named Lindel is pulled from the lake. He was shot in the head. There was a list of six dinner guests in his pocket that includes Burke’s name. Two of the people have been killed. They can’t find a connection between Lindell and Dukette. Burke wonders why he hasn’t been mailed a list and then he gets one. Another name on the list is Frank Cross and so Burke goes to see him where he trains professional wrestlers. Cross complains that his wrestlers have no expression. Burke suggests he send them to acting school. Cross says, “They’re bad enough now! What do I need with a Method wrestler?” Tim goes to interview Sharon McCauley who has one of the world’s top publicity agencies. She received a list but threw it away. She says she worked for Alex Dukette seven years ago but he made too many passes. Burke takes a golf lesson from Gil Knox who claims he didn’t receive a list. That night someone sneaks into Burke’s bedroom and tries to strangle him with a rope. Burke flips him and they fight in the dark. The man runs out the window and escapes when Henry enters the room. Burke has Cross brought in and accuses him of sending one of his wrestlers. He swears he didn’t but admits that he does have a connection with Dukette because years ago Cross’s brother was partners with Dukette in a small construction company that failed. His brother’s now doing time. Burke goes to see Connie in her home and her large and muscular butler Jason lets him in. Connie says Jason was working for Dukette when she married him. He’s also a former sailor. Burke points out to Connie that she had a motive because she was Dukette’s only heir. She informs him that she’s an oil heiress and has lots more money than Dukette would have left her. Burke has Les investigate Jason. Tim goes back to Sharon and confronts her with the fact that she didn’t just work for Dukette but was a partner. She says she was only a partner because he paid her in stock rather than money. The company failed and she got nothing. But she was also his lover right up until he died. Burke returns to Knox and finds him nearly unconscious in the locker room of the club. He says a big man beat him up. Knox still claims there is no connection between him and Dukette and so Burke says he’s going to put him in a cell for protective custody. I doubt that’s a thing. Anyway the threat works and Knox admits he received a list. He says his father was a construction inspector for the city but the department was about to bring him up on charges of bribery for overlooking faulty construction on a job for which Dukette was the contractor and so he committed suicide. The construction site was a mine and someone was crushed to death. It was Jason’s son. Burke goes to Jason’s house and knocks but no one answers. When he comes back to the car he finds Henry is just coming to from being knocked out. Jason is there with a gun and he makes Burke get into the driver’s seat but when he does so he deliberately knocks his car phone off the hook. He has Burke drive him to the mine and tells Burke that his son was inadvertently murdered by everyone on the list. Meanwhile the operator picks up the call and connects it to the police. While talking with Jason, Burke mentions their destination and so Tim and Les head there. Jason makes Burke go into the mine. Burke is on his list because he was a police lieutenant at the time and he went into the mine to save the workers. Burke tells Jason his son was already dead when he found him. Jason tries to push Burke down the shaft but he catches a rope and kicks Jason. They fight until finally Burke gets the gun and subdues him just before Tim and Les get there. 

            Connie was played by Gloria DeHaven, whose parents were Vaudeville stars and helped her to get into show business. Her first film appearance was at the age of eleven in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Her first credited role was at fifteen in Susan and God. She sang for Bob Crosby’s big band and developed her own nightclub act. She started being cast in movie musicals and in Step Lively gave Frank Sinatra his first screen kiss. She co-starred in Two Girls and a Sailor, I’ll Get By, So This Is Paris, and Scene of the Crime. In Three Little Words she played her own mother Flora DeHaven. She was a popular pin-up model during WWII. She made her Broadway debut in Seventh Heaven in 1955. She continued to sing but her film career waned as musicals went out of style. She made TV appearances and had a recurring roll on Mary Hartman.

March 2, 1994: Steve Lowe backed me up on guitar at Fat Albert's

Thirty years ago today

            

On Wednesday evening I performed on the Fat Albert’s open stage with Steve Lowe backing me up on guitar.

Carl Reiner

            On Thursday morning I finished revising my translation of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it before uploading it to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the first verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished transcribing my hand written notes for my Critical Summary but it took me a long time because I kept dozing off. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in ten days. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and even though it was only minus four the cold was clawing through my gloves with its gloves off on the way back. I stopped at Freshco where I bought seven bags of green grapes, a pack of blackberries, a pack of blueberries, some bananas, seven loose avocadoes, three bags of small avocadoes, a bag of lemons, fifteen vine ripened tomatoes, and two jugs of garden Cocktail. The grapes were so expensive that Priscilla the cashier looked on her phone for a price match for me and saved me $20. That was very nice of her. 

            I weighed 87 kilos at 18:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:30. 

            I worked on my Critical Summary but only completed a paragraph before dinner: 

            In Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger’s essay “Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor” she argues that it is through metaphor that “mysticism” manifests itself in language. The Medieval poem “Pearl” is then a mystical work of art because of its heavy use of metaphor. She goes on to say that dreams are also a form of metaphor. That would imply that dreaming itself is a mystical experience. As “Pearl” takes place almost entirely in a dream it suggests that this would render it as an even more deeply mystical poem, but also accessibly so because anyone could potentially dream such an experience as the poet describes. 

            I had the rest of my potato soup with the rest of my plantain chips and the remainder of my soymilk while watching season 2, episode 13 of Burke’s Law. 

            This was a silly story full of a lot of stereotypical characters deliberately played in an over the top manner. At a convention of the world’s greatest detectives, Chief Gaynor, the keynote speaker is in another room finishing his speech. Meanwhile in the conference room Commissar Ilyna Buda of the Hungarian Peoples Police drinks to the other attendees. They are Chief Inspector House of Scotland Yard, Bascule Doirot from the French Sûreté, Toto from the Metropolitan Police of Tokyo, the famous US private eye Caligula Fox, and their absent comrade Captain Amos Burke. Suddenly the lights go out. While Tim and Les are struggling to light a candelabra Toto comes out and says somebody stole his Star of Fujiyama. They open the door to Gaynor’s office to find he’s been shot dead. They call Burke and when he arrives Tim and Les are in trouble for allowing this to happen under their watch. Les says the only suspects are the detectives because no one else could have gotten in. The lights weren’t out in the hall and so if anyone had come in from there they would have seen them. While Tim was watching the door and Les was calling Burke they couldn’t stop the world’s greatest detectives from tramping all over the murder scene. Burke enters the conference room where Fox is having his dinner. Burke tells Fox he hopes he is the murderer since he’s the only non police detective there. If he didn’t do it then that means a cop has become a cop killer. Burke says one of them might be an impostor. Burke observes that there was a mechanism in the table setting that allowed the killer to cause the lights to go off. Burke realizes that all the detectives left the room without being checked to see if they are carrying the Star of Fujiyama. Tim, Les and Ames do an experiment to see if the suspect could have gotten past them in the dark. Ames is blindfolded and tries to make it across the room but after several tries they find it would have been impossible. Burke goes to see House who is an over the top parody of Sherlock Holmes. House makes wild deductions based on faulty observations and he is always wrong. He concludes that Burke is a former sailor because he sees from his thumbs that he’s tied many nautical knots. He can tell from the hereditary slope of Burke’s shoulders that his father was a hog carrier. Burke says a House is not a Holmes. House plays the violin badly to help himself think. House plays the Hungarian Suicide Song. House says that he observed during dinner that Gaynor was on dope. Burke gets the lab report that Gaynor was on dope. Burke goes to see Toto who is played horribly by a white actor. Burke thinks someone slipped Gaynor a mickey. Burke goes to see Ilyna and finds her preaching against capitalism in a working class bar. Tim finds Doirot on the beach where he hides the star of Fujiyama. Tim pretends that he’s an aspiring detective novelist and outlines the plot of the real crime that has taken place. Doirot reveals that he has the star and that he knows Tim is a cop. He says the star was slipped into his pocket by Fox. Now Burke has the star and he interviews Fox who says it was slipped in his pocket by House. House says it was dropped into his pocket by Ilyna. She says it was passed to her by Doirot. Burke says he knows who the murderer is but needs to prove it. He invites all the suspects to dinner in his home. He invites Toto there an hour early and says he needs his help to capture the killer. He says he wants him to hide with Henry and he calls for Henry but there’s no answer. Toto says he saw Henry go into the study. Burke finds Henry leaned over a table, investigates and says he’s dead. He tells Toto to call the police and he leaves the room. Then Burke fires a gun. Burke steps out and tells Toto that’s the way he did it. He killed Gaynor while Tim and Les were reporting the murder that hadn’t happened yet. Toto pulls a gun on Burke but Tim and Les enter the room suddenly and distract him long enough for Burke to disarm him. 

            House was played by Carl Reiner, who at the age of 16 attended a dramatic workshop and it set the direction of his life. His first screen appearance was in the 1948 TV sitcom Fashion Story. The next year he was a regular on the 54th Street Revue. He made his Broadway debut that year in the hit musical Inside USA. In 1950 he joined the cast of Your Show of Shows and became a crucial part of the sketch show, winning an Emmy for his work. When Your Show of Shows ended he continued working with Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour. He was nominated for three more Emmys for the show and won two. On Caesar’s Hour he was also a writer. Around that time he wrote his novel Enter Laughing. It became a play and then a movie. In 1959 he wrote the pilot for a show called Man of the House but it wasn’t picked up because the lead character was too Jewish. He developed a routine with Mel Brooks called “The 2000 Year Old Man” which they performed on the Steve Allen Show. It became a hit album that won a Grammy. They did five more albums together and an animated version of the original skit. Reiner’s Man of the House pilot was picked up as The Dick Van Dyke Show with Reiner playing the dictatorial Alan Brady based on Sid Caesar. For it Reiner won five more Emmys, three for writing and two as the producer. Years later he played Alan Brady on Mad About You and won another Emmy. His directorial debut was the film adaptation of his play Enter Laughing. He directed The Comic, Where’s Poppa, Oh God, The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains, All of Me, and That Old Feeling. He co-starred in The Russians Are Coming. He was a regular on Hot in Cleveland and was the voice of Carl Reineroceros in Toy Story 4. He worked right up until his death at 98.

March 1, 1994: Mary Milne and I met to plan finding a new venue for our writers opens stage

Thirty years ago today

            On Tuesday I met with Mary Milne to plan our strategy on finding a new venue for our Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage. Then we went to the open stage at The Black Rooster. After that Mary gave both myself and John Margerm rides home. John freaked out and had a scary manic episode in the car while threatening violence.