Juliet Prowse

            On Monday morning I adjusted my translation of verses five to seven of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I finished transcribing two sets of chords for the Edith Piaf version of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. I started copying one more set. I’ll finish that tomorrow and then I’ll find out if any of the chords I’ve transcribed fit with how I hear the song. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second of four sessions. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished reading “The Pleasures of Rhyme: A Psychoanalytic Note” by M. Faber. Rhyme separates while at the same time connecting. Rhyme draws together things that one would not normally connect, thereby deepening the meaning. 

            I started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”. He did not like visual representations of fantasy and thought that it should always exist in the imagination through literature. He would have hated all of the film adaptations. But he was a bit of a fuddy duddy and wrote like one. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos before lunch. I had the rest of my chili with plantain chips and a glass of orange juice. 

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

            I weighed 87 kilos at 17:30. I was caught up on my journal at 18:12. 

            I finished reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”. 

            I read Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger’s essay “Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor”. It gives a pretty detailed analysis of Pearl, its repetition of puns and how the poem comes full circle like a pearl. 

            I downloaded D. W Winnicott’s “The Location of Cultural Experience.” There’s a link to it on the course website but it’s a dead end and so I had to find it somewhere else. I didn’t read it yet. 

            I had three potatoes with gravy while watching season 2, episode 10 of Burke’s Law. 

            In this story the De Armand Sisters, the biggest sister act in the world are performing when the lead singer Alicia collapses dead of strychnine poisoning on stage. Lou Manzini the manager and part owner of the act says that Alicia was the core of the group, so there’s no way the two remaining sisters could continue as a duo. Don Kyles the club owner says Alicia and Manzini had been arguing. Burke goes to see Lana De Armand who tells him that part of her always wished Alicia dead. Most of the people that Burke interviews throughout this series admit that they wished the victim dead. No one would really tell the cops that if they were in their right mind. Lana says that eight years ago she was the lead singer but the act was going nowhere. She says she doesn’t have enough talent to not need Alicia so she had no motive to kill her. Tim says a man named Yeats Dudley phoned Alicia the day of the murder and then Alicia left home in a cab. Dudley is a real estate salesman at Rolling Acres. Tim and Les go to talk with him. Yeats is also an actor and worked on a movie with the sisters three years ago. He says he called her yesterday to get her to invest in a business deal but she wasn’t interested. Burke goes back to the club where the sisters are trying out a replacement for Alicia but she isn’t working out. Kyles says he’ll have to cancel. Meanwhile Manzini is being beaten up by a thug in the dressing room. When Burke knocks on the door the guy escapes through the window. In the hospital Manzini admits that he has gambling debts. He owed $40,000 and paid it off with his part of the act, but with Alicia dead the act is worthless and so now they want the $40,000 again. Burke goes to see Renee and finds her arguing with her father. When he sees Burke he storms out and Renee immediately kisses Burke. She says her relationship with Yeats is platonic. She hated Alicia. Renee is constantly coming on to Burke throughout the interview. She says Alicia made her see a psychiatrist to have her nymphomania treated but she became lovers with the doctor as well. The next day Burke goes back to Renee and she admits that she and Yeats were lovers. Three years ago they were going to get married but Alicia paid Yeats to leave her. Tim goes to pick up Yeats but Yeats knocks him down gets in his car and tries to run him over before escaping. Burke goes to see Phil Ross the former arranger of the act. He says he became a big success because of the sisters but started hitting the bottle and fell from grace. Burke goes to see the sisters’ father who looks like Agostino my late bike mechanic. He says he’s only their step father and if he’d been the real father he wouldn’t have let it happen. He would have killed his wife, the sisters’ mother. She was obsessed with them becoming stars and robbed them of their childhoods. Four years ago the mother died but then Alicia became just like her. The cops find Yeats in the trunk of a car, beaten to death with a 2X4. Burke is waiting for Renee at her beach house when Lana walks in. She tells him Phil was crazy about Alicia but she drove him to drink and he ended up in a sanitarium. Burke thinks Yeats knew who the killer was and tried to blackmail them. Les says they found the address of a sanitarium in Dudley’s pocket. Burke goes to see Phil and tells him he knows he went back to the sanitarium to steal strychnine. Phil starts to go willingly but then tries to get away. Burke stops him. He says Alicia came to him for arrangements because she wanted to go solo and throw her sisters under the bus so he killed her. 

            Renee was played by Juliet Prowse, who studied dance from the age of 4. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dance but by the time she was 14 she was too tall to be a ballerina. She started dancing in European nightclubs. In 1960 while she was working on the movie Can Can Nikita Khrushchev was invited to a rehearsal. He told the press that Juliet’s French dance sequence was immoral. This led to his statement and her picture being together all over the news and because of that she became an instant celebrity. She was considered to have the best legs since Betty Grable. She became romantically involved with Frank Sinatra and they were engaged for six months. She co-starred with Elvis in GI Blues and they had an affair. In 1965 she starred in the short-lived sitcom Mona McCluskey. She co-starred in The Fiercest Heart, and Who Killed Teddy Bear? In 1967 she starred in the West End production of Sweet Charity and won Entertainer of the Year. She was a guest star on the very first Muppet Show episode. She did a series of commercials for Leggs Hosiery.

February 27, 1994: I got the bad news that Mudds Cabaret had been shut down

Thirty years ago today

            On Sunday I don’t know if I took my daughter back to her mother or kept her for another night. I got a call from Mary Milne informing me that Mudds Cabaret had been busted and shut down. That was bad news for our Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage. We arranged to meet on Tuesday to figure out where we were going to find another venue.

Pilar Seurat

            On Sunday morning I revised my translation of the first four verses of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I finished transcribing the chords for the Serge Gainsbourg version of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. I found another set of the Edith Piaf version and transcribed half of those. 

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

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. I worked on my Critical Summary of “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl” by David Aers and knocked off another half a page. I just have another half page to lose and then I’ll have the required size. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before lunch. I had red lentil snaps with spicy hummus and a glass of orange juice. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. Yesterday it was below zero and I needed long underwear. Today it was above and didn’t. Before going home I stopped at Lucky Supermarket to buy some plantain chips. But they no longer sell the good kind that they had for years and now only have the same brand one can buy at No Frills. I got two bags. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in nine days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:15. 

            I finished writing this Friday’s Critical Summary: 

                                                  Mourning Transcends Gender in Pearl 

            David Aers in his essay “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl” writes that death is a “challenge to human identity, the disclosure of an utter powerlessness framing our will to control others”. He says, “we mourn, inevitably, for our selves”. These are good theses and there may be evidence in the poem Pearl to validate them. But Aers proceeds to screw his argument into gender specific examples that distance it from proving his original point. 

            Aers claims that the male gender of the mourning parent who narrates Pearl makes him more possessive and that his addressing his child as “my pearl” is an example of male possessiveness (242). He accuses him of being “the controlling jeweler, the man whose identity is bound up with appraising and setting gems”. But mothers also address their children with pet names that begin with the possessive pronoun “my” followed by the names of valued objects such as jewels. A parent of any gender could see her child as her jewel and herself as the jeweller who made it. 

            Aers maintains that the speaker’s emotional responses to his daughter are negotiations with an adult woman. It is true that his child appears before him as a comely maiden after having been instantly advanced to marriage age to become a bride of Christ. But there is nothing in the speaker’s dialogue with his suddenly eloquent child that shows that he is longing for connection with her as a young adult. He does not remember his child as a woman because she had “lived not two years” (489-490). Therefore the root of his bliss is a child and not an adult. Also his manner of speaking to his child would not be out of place if she were male or any other gender. 

            When the speaker asks, “Are you my pearl for whom I cried / For whom I grieved alone at night?” (242-248), Aers states that his “strategy” is to draw his daughter into their past parent-child relationship so that he can resume control in a “masculine role that combines rhetoric of worship with the practice of controlling female identity to fit the idealizations and demands of male language”. But the narrator’s question, “Are you my Pearl?” is merely an attempt to understand if she is who he thinks she is. He is reacting not only to suddenly seeing his child alive again but also to seeing her in a holy form. To ask her to identify herself and to tell her that he missed and grieved for her is not an attempt to control her identity. He is trying to understand how her past identity relates to her current persona as a Bride of Christ. There is no “male language” being spoken here, as his lines could be uttered by a female mourner. 

            Aers believes that the speaker is using the language of courtly love to manipulate his daughter as if she were the sought after object of courtly love poems (745-56). He states that the narrator is playing a dominant male role in that tradition in order to make his child feel the guilt of a “failing female” because she refuses to “play the part of the love object” (325-36). But in courtly love the lover and the object have yet to be united whereas in this case the parent and child have already bonded before their current encounter. Aers may be right that the language is that of courtly love but the dynamics are far from being the same. The speaker wants to bond again with his lost child who he recognizes in her transformed state. There is nothing in these lines that show him “trying to make her see herself as a failing female”. The child being mourned could be any gender and still be the source of his joy, distress, and grief. 

            There is also nothing gender specific about the possessiveness expressed by the mourning parent in Pearl. Possessiveness by a parent is drawn from a sense that the child is part of who they are. When the child dies there is a loss of the self that existed because of that child. This sense of loss is gender neutral. The natural process of mourning may not be possible without a sense of possession. 

            I read about half of “The Pleasures of Rhyme: A Psychoanalytic Note” by M. Faber. He talks about how rhyme serves as an early replacement for the mother. 

            I had a bowl of chili with plantain chips and a glass of orange juice while watching season 2, episode 9 of Burke’s Law. 

            Nicholas Amenor the richest man in the world is in town to close a big deal and is staying and working in the Biltmore Hotel. In the high rise being constructed across the street is a man with a rifle. In the window that he’s watching through his scope there are Amenor’s secretary Dana Prentiss and two men. The older man steps in front of the window and is shot and killed. Burke’s team is there when he arrives. The victim’s name is Kurt Stulman and he was Amenor’s bookkeeper. Burke and Tim meet with Amenor who says he is negotiating an oil lease with three possible buyers, all of whom hate him because of past encounters. Amenor introduces Sakito his bodyguard. Tim scoffs at his bodyguard being a woman. Amenor signals for her to demonstrate. Sakito reaches for Tim’s gun, he grabs her hand and she flips him onto his back before handing him back his gun. Tim goes to see Clint Perry and is accompanied by Dana who says she likes younger men. They arrive at a party that has been going on for three days. Two attractive and scantily clad women escort Tim to Clint’s office. Clint greets him with a Texas accent but after a couple of questions Tim tells Clint he knows he’s no Texan. Now without the accent Clint admits it but says it’s easier to get people to deal oil with a Texan than an MIT geologist. Tim condiscates Clint’s rifle to take to the lab and see if it’s the murder weapon. Sakito makes out with Burke in the Rolls on the way to see the Rafer brothers (played by the Smothers Brothers). Luke and Ghys Rafer are the richest brothers in the US and seem to be the original Dumb and Dumber. They are absurdly eccentric. They decorate their home from the Salvation Army and their clothes are from Goodwill. Ghys is played by Tommy and Luke is played by Dick. Burke asks if they’ve seen todays paper. They say they don’t buy papers. They wait until the next day when the paper is free. Later Amenor has just gotten out of his car when it blows up. Burke goes to see Elaine Truscott. Her home is full of big game trophies that she killed. She talks very tough and takes masculine poses. She says if she’d wanted to kill Amenor he’d be dead. Burke starts insulting her and telling her she’s both a fake as a hunter and as a woman. She points her rifle at him but then stops. He says he was just testing her to see if she was the killer. All the guns from Perry, the Rafes, and Truscott are clean. Tim and Les go back to Clint. He’s paid Amenor a down payment of $9 million on the oil deal and says he’d lose it if he killed him. Sakito comes to Burke and tells him the murderer called to say he’s coming to the hotel. As they get out of the car at the hotel a gunman starts shooting at Burke from the construction site. Burke and the sniper have a long gun battle as Burke makes his way into the construction site and as they climb the stairs and fire at each other. Finally Burke tackles him and it’s Amenor’s press secretary Lesage. They fight. Lesage tries to get away and trips, falling from the building and dying. Burke thinks Sakito is part of the plot to kill Amenor and she is taken into custody. Now Burke says that all the suspects had to be in on Amenor’s assassination. Burke says Amenor is already dead and he was killed by Nicholas Amenor. Burke goes to Amenor and asks for Lasage. Amenor doesn’t know where he is. Burke tells Amenor that the real Amenor was killed two days ago. Amenor wanted to remain invisible and so he hired someone to pretend to be him in public. Burke says the real Amenor was much shorter than the fake one. They fight and then the imposter runs but is blocked by Tim and Les. 

            Sakito was played by Pilar Seurat, who moved from the Philippines to LA as a child. Her first professional performances work was as a member of Ken Murray’s Blackouts dance troupe. She only appeared in three major films: The Young Savages, The Battle at Bloody Beach, and Seven Women From Hell. She made guest appearances on several dramatic series. She played Sybo in the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold”. Apparently when she appeared in Hawaiian Eye and kissed Troy Donahue it was US TV’s first interracial kiss. Her son Dean Devlin produced the film Eight Legged Freaks.

February 26, 1994: I posed for an art class at Seneca College

February 26, 1994 

            On Saturday I posed for an art class at Seneca College and then I went to pick up my daughter.

Dean Stockwell

            On Saturday morning I ran through singing “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian in French. Tomorrow I’ll start adjusting my translation. 

            I finished memorizing “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso and looked for the chords. I immediately found a set based on the version by Serge Gainsbourg and started transcribing it. It looks like there is at least one set based on Edith Piaf’s version and so I’ll copy those too and any others I can find. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. It was minus 13 outside but very hot in my apartment and so I played with both living room windows open. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Kramer electric guitar. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning in ten days.

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where I bought seven bags of green grapes, a pack of toilet paper, a big pack of roasted seaweed and a jug of orange juice. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos before lunch. I had red lentil Harvest Snaps with spicy hummus and a glass of orange juice. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I was back to wearing my long underwear again. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:39. 

            I worked on my critical summary. I saved the four pages I’d written in case I need it for my essay. Then I copied it to another document and began editing it down so it will fit the two page requirement of the Critical Summary. I knocked off a page.

            I had a bowl of chili with plantain chips and a glass of orange juice while watching season 2, episode 8 of Burke’s Law. 

            The wealthy Lenore Wingfield has been found murdered in a boat in her pool with a twelve gauge shotgun. As usual Tim and Les are there first and then Burke. Her body was found by her friend Garnet who came from the mission downtown. Although she got her money from divorcing four rich husbands she preferred hanging out with the poor. Garnet grew up with Lenore in Tennessee. Burke finds a plastic ring by the pool. Lenore drew her calendar to cover the bathroom wall with the whole year. Her notes for that day were “Call Minnie Poo Undercover Affairs. Call lawyer – New will. Pick up wig. Tell Stinky where to go.” Garnet says Minnie Poo is Lenore’s sister and her real name is Meniletha Calhoun. Lenore’s last husband was Charles Wingfield and part of her divorce settlement was 25% of his plastics company. Tim and Les go to see Charles who they find photographing women who are modelling various plastic products. He says he divorced Lenore for his own health because she was too energetic for him. Charles broke a ten year engagement with Meniletha to marry Lenore and now he is engaged to Meniletha again. Burke goes to see Meniletha who runs a school for girls. She takes Burke to her room but all the young ladies come out of their rooms to look at Burke on the way. She says Undercover Affairs was a book Lenore was getting for her. Stinky is former governor Jim Clover. Lenore left almost everything to their nephew Jay Boy. Lenore brought Jay up from the south to pay for his education but he invested his college tuition in raising minks. Before Burke leaves she wants to show him her mission to keep the US mentally clean. She takes him to another room with a library of unfit books that she is dedicated to having banned. She reads him some passages from a book that she considers obscene. She says she wants his help to stamp out sex. He tells her he has a slight conflict of interest. Burke goes to see Jay Boy. He and Lenore had an argument about college the day before she died. Jay was with his girlfriend Lola when Lenor was killed. His ex-girlfriend Effie May is staying with him temporarily but she doesn’t know she’s his ex. She came there from back home to convince him to return. Effie comes home from shopping. She thinks Lenore wanted her to marry Jay. She says she never met Lenore but they corresponded. In the news there’s a report that Jim Clover’s construction company is merging with Lenore Wingfield’s real estate company. Also Clover’s daughter Rebecca is going to marry Jay Boy Calhoun. Burke goes to see Clover and pretends he’s a southerner so he’ll be more cooperative. Burke points out that Lenore had changed her mind about the merger before she was killed. Les finds that Wingfield was in Reno the night of the murder. The murder weapon has been found on the beach near Jay’s house. Burke goes there and finds a note that Effie has a new address. He also finds some plastic rings like the one at the murder scene. He goes to see Effie. She says Jay must have left the ring at Lenore’s. The rings are for tagging the legs of Effie’s chickens. She says Jay killed Lenore. Effie knows Jay plans to marry Rebecca and she’s angry. She says she went to see Lenore who laughed at her plastic wedding band so she shot her. 

            Jay Boy was played by a young Dean Stockwell, whose parents were both Broadway actors. At the age of seven Dean made his theatrical debut in The Innocent Voyage. His ten year old brother Guy was also in the show which ran for nine months. After the show Dean was signed to MGM and became a child star. At the age of 11 he won a Golden Globe for his role in Gentleman’s Agreement. He starred in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, The Careless Years, and The Boy With Green Hair. He co-starred in The Mighty McGurk and The Arnelo Affair. As an adult he co-starred in Compulsion, Rapture, Tracks, She Came to the Valley, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. In the 60s he became a Hippy and friends with Neil Young and Dennis Hopper. He said it gave him the childhood he’d missed as a child star. He co-starred in Psych-Out, and Paris Texas. He starred in Police Trap, The Loners, The Legend of Billie Jean, Gardens of Stone, The Time Guardian, Banzai Runner, The Long Haul, Buying Up, and The Werewolf of Washington. He was nominated for a Best Supporting actor Academy Award for Married to the Mob. On 80s TV he co-starred in Quantum Leap and won a Golden Globe. He played the villain Colonel Grat on Star Trek Enterprise and the Cylon Cavil on Battlestar Galactica. He was also a collage artist and a sculptor. He designed the album cover for Neil Young’s American Stars and Bars. He co-directed the movie Human Highway with Neil Young.

February 25, 1994: This was the night that Mudds Cabaret was busted

Thirty years ago today 

            On Friday it was my lunar birthday and so I just relaxed until 15:00, then I went downtown to pick up my paycheques. This was the night that Mudds Cabaret was busted and shut down forever, but I didn’t find out until a couple of days later. Apparently some drunks got into a fight and when the police came and discovered that Mudds was a booze can, that was the end.

Nanette Fabray

            On Friday morning I dreamed I said to a couple of young women, “How are you guys doing?” and one of them was offended that I would refer to her as a guy. But then we all had a conversation and I explained that it wasn’t a gender reference. She admitted that she says “You guys” to her girlfriends. The other young woman was wearing a wire retainer that looked almost like a cage around her head. 

            I finished working out the chords for “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing the whole song in French. Then I might have to adjust my translation before running through it in English. 

            I wasn’t quite able to finish memorizing “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso but I should have it nailed down on Saturday. 

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

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            I left at around 10:30 for my appointment with the dental hygienist at the Parkdale Community Health Centre. It’s nice that we don’t have to wear masks there anymore. The cleaning was a painful process because my gums are in such bad shape. My mouth felt like a carwash while she was working and it’s always hard to get a chance to swallow before I start feeling like I’m going to choke. I was exhausted at the end. Most of my teeth are whiter now but she seems to have ground off some of the fillings that Dr. Lake put on my two front teeth. They were white ten days ago but now they are discoloured and don’t look very good. Later I saw that my front teeth became whiter and so there must have been a temporary discolouration from the fluoride treatment. She gave me a new toothbrush, sulka brush, and some floss. I can’t get another cleaning appointment for six months. Dr. Lake called the U of T Graduate Periodontics Clinic to give me a referral and told me to call too. She also called two years ago but I never got a call back from them. I called them and left a message today. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I’ve been since last Friday. 

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

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I worked on my Critical Summary. Here are some of the paragraphs I worked on: 

            Aers frequently states that the speaker in Pearl is responding to a woman. But he does not remember her as a woman. She was a toddler when she died as is shown when the speaker says to her, “You lived not two years in our land” (489-490). Therefore the “root of his bliss” is a child and not an adult. But when the narrator’s daughter appears before him again she is described as a comely maiden and a bride of Christ. As the speaker indicates she only died the day before this meeting and so she has been instantly advanced to marriage age, which could have been as young as twelve years in Medieval times. But there is nothing in the speaker’s dialogue with his suddenly eloquent child that shows that he is responding to her gender as a young adult. His same choices of language would not be out of place if the child being addressed happened to be male. 

            The speaker says, “Are you my pearl for whom I cried / For whom I grieved alone at night? / Much longing I for you have sighed / Since into grass you left my sight / Sorrow and grief with me reside / While you remain in true delight / In Paradise, in peace to abide (242-248). Aers claims that the speaker’s “strategy” here is to draw his daughter “into acknowledging the reality of this memory. Once she does so, the fantasy of the past can frame the present relationship in a way that will allow him to continue the familiar masculine role that combines rhetoric of worship with the practice of controlling female identity to fit the idealizations and demands of male language”. But there is no strategy. The narrator is reacting to not only suddenly seeing his dead daughter again but also to seeing her in a holy form. Clearly his question, “Are you my Pearl” is an attempt to understand if she is who he thinks she is. He is telling her that he missed her and suffered in her absence as any parent would. He is not trying to control her identity but rather trying to understand the two identities he is faced with, the one in his memory and the current reality. There is no “male” language being spoken here. These are lines that could just as easily be uttered by a female mourner. 

            Aers claims that the speaker is assuming a dominant male position from which to negate his daughter’s subjectivity, and that in doing so he is following “the courtly and romance traditions of love”. He writes that the speaker “tries to induce a sense of guilt in her, trying to make her see herself as a failing female, one whose refusal to fill the received role of female love object causes him great pain... he insists that he will fulfill his fantasy of reunion with the lost female” (325-36). But when the speaker says, “It is not meet that you, my pearl, make me repine;” he is not trying to make her feel guilty. His words are more a plea for mercy because he craves to be reunited with his lost child as any parent would. There is nothing in these lines that show him “trying to make her see herself as a failing female”. The fact that she is female is not the issue. The lost child being mourned could be of any gender and still would have been the source of his joy when she was happy, of his distress in she was suffering, and of his grief in her death. 

            Aers sees the City of God presented in Pearl as a model Christian Socialist community and claims the speaker rejects this world that is without social and political elites (409-92). But the narrator makes it clear before he speaks in those lines that he may be mistaken and he acknowledges his daughter as having the authority to correct him. He is confused by the fact that a toddler would die and immediately be not only suddenly transformed into a young adult but also become royalty in heaven.

            Aers believes that the speaker is using the language of courtly love to manipulate his daughter as if she were the unavailable love object of courtly love poems (745-56). But the narrator is simply marvelling at how his child has been transformed. What he is missing is his lost child and not her current older form. 

            I had two large potatoes with gravy while watching season 2, episode 7 of Burke’s Law. 

            We see the hands of someone wiring the handrails of a swimming pool stairs. Then we see Cornelius Gilbert taking a late night swim. As he climbs out the murderer flips a switch and Gilbert is electrocuted. Burke’s team investigates and then Burke arrives. Tim finds a torn piece of plaid. Les finds a gold St. Christopher medal in a footprint by the bathhouse. Burke finds Rowena Coolidge on the dock of the private lake giving a speech to an imaginary audience. Although she is not related to Calvin Coolidge she still plans on running for president. She says she is Gilbert’s guest and one of the passengers on the round the world flight that he makes every year. He asks if she has a gold St. Christopher medal and she does. Gilbert gave it to her as a souvenir of the trip. She plans to visit countries that the US has granted aid and exchange her homemade preserves for a return of the aid money. The travel agency is owned by Linda Murray on La Cienega. Burke goes to see Linda. She says she’s not surprised Gilbert was murdered. She used to work for him and dated him a few times. Burke gets the passenger list from her. Every passenger was given a St. Christopher medal. Burke figures the one without a medal is the murderer. That night Linda is working at her agency when someone bangs on her window. She closes the curtains and they try the door. She tries to leave through the back door and a man is standing there. She faints and wakes up with Burke. He tells her he is grounding the plane. He goes to see Milton Yeager who tells him he is too busy to murder anybody. He shows Burke his medal. Burke goes to see Horton Galbraith who immediately confesses to robbing the bank where he used to work of $1 million. When he realizes Burke was there on another matter it is too late. He refuses to tell Burke where the money is but when Burke arrests him he insists on taking with him his two potted geraniums. He drops one, breaking the pot and Burke sees the money is inside. But Horton has a medal so he is cleared of the murder. Burke takes Linda out to dinner. That night Tim is late reporting in. An officer calls to tell Burke that Tim’s car has been found with blood on the back of the driver’s seat. We see that Tim is being held hostage by a big bald headed giant played by Tor Johnson of Plan Nine from Outer Space and many other films but uncredited here. Tim wakes up with a headache and tries to attack his captor but he is easily subdued. Burke figures there must be a sixth passenger for the flight and he forces Linda to tell him who it is. Linda says she didn’t tell him because Adrienne Shelton wasn’t officially on the passenger list according to Gilbert’s instructions. Burke asks to see Linda’s medal and she shows it. Burke goes to see Adrienne. She didn’t know Gilbert was dead. She’s known him for seven years. They were involved years ago and she left him but he recently blackmailed her into taking the trip. Burke asks for her medal. She looks but can’t find it. She realizes she will be incriminated if she doesn’t have it and so she panics, tearing everything apart. She breaks down in tears when she can’t find it but Burke finds it on the floor where it fell after she smashed a vase. Burke gets a call from a man who warns him that either the plane leaves at midnight or Tim will be killed. Burke hears clicking and knows the voice is a tape recording. At half an hour before midnight the man holding Tim makes another call and connects the phone to the tape recording. Burkes team is trying to trace the call but after giving the message the man hangs up. Tim is tied to a chair in another room but manages to throw a pillow at the other phone to knock it off the hook. The bald man doesn’t notice until its too late that the phone line is still open. Burke has the address and goes there. He has a big fight with the giant, who it turns out is deaf and dumb. Burke beats him with some karate chops. Burke goes back to Milton Yeager and tells him he knows by the way he unconsciously uses sign language with his hands when he talks that he’s the murderer. Tim finds a plaid coat that has had a piece torn out. Yeager confesses. He says he had to kill Gilbert because Adrienne went back to him. Burke goes to Linda and kisses her. 

            Rowena was played by Nanette Fabray, who was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She was singing and tap dancing on the vaudeville stage as “Baby Nanette” at the age of four and then sang on the radio. She won a scholarship to the Max Reinhardt School of Theatre. She co-starred on Broadway in High Button Shoes. She won two Donaldson Awards for theatre and a Tony in the 1940s for Love Life. Her first film appearance was a supporting role in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. She won three Emmy Awards for her work on Caesar’s Hour. She then starred in the sitcom Westinghouse Playhouse. She played Grandma Romano on One Day at a Time. She was a panelist on 274 episodes of Hollywood Squares. She co-starred in The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County and Harper Valley PTA. She was hearing impaired for many years until four operations restored it. She became an activist and one of the forces behind bringing sign language and captioning to television. She once sang Over the Rainbow while signing it on live TV after being told not to. She is Shelly Fabares’s aunt and her own birth name was also Fabres but she changed it after Ed Sullivan mispronounced her name on national television. Mary Tyler Moore said she learned to cry on camera by watching how Nanette Fabray did it.