February 28, 2003

Got up at 8:07.

Dreamed of toy soldiers; a KFC close to the Sackville house; a marathon race starting at a bridge near there; visiting a non-existent fort in western Newfoundland where they filmed part of the Civil War movie Glory; climbing to the top of a pile of corpses, near there the pile becoming a garbage pile; deep-frying two pigs in a big pit in the fort; John warning me about sanitation in the frying; looking at a Newfoundland map and finding no paved road links all the way to the northwestern corner; Sterling Hayden playing a veteran soldier in Glory (he didn't).

Went to the library and read a Rolling Stone article listing 20 ways rock stars get screwed financially. (I don't usually read that magazine.)

I'm now doing situps twice a day, for a total of 40. (Cynthia will be proud of me.)

Dinner was ham and scalloped potatoes.  I burnt my mouth a bit.

Sergei taught a swing class with variations on the promenade and a step like in hustle, along with one where the girl does something like a Viennese waltz.  In the dance party's last dance, Cynthia introduced me to the pasa doble. Afterward I showed them how I came to life as Frankenstein.

Finished The Whiteoak Brothers. 

February 27, 2003

Got up at 9:33.

Dreamed of finding a bathroom scale under my bed. (Because I've been getting thinner?)

Since I'd baked white bread, I had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch.

I'll soon be a third of the way through the second chapter of Wandering Youth (whose title I recently figured out the translation for).

Yesterday was my brother Donald's birthday, so we went to the nearby Thai restaurant with him, John and John's daughter Merle. Unfortunately, the main courses weren't ready for an hour and I couldn't stay because of my dance class.  I should have known that would happen!

But I had a great time at the dance class, well worth missing dinner for.  Arman was teaching Claudia and me several variations on the progressive and chase.  One was the flick, in which the woman simply imitates what the man did.  He says "chase" is misleading because it's about imitation rather than pursuit.  So I suggested the name "Monkey See, Monkey Do." (I'm glad Claudia wasn't offended.) I later suggested calling it "the Echo." The only part we couldn't master was the mambo points.

Afterward I had a late dinner at KFC.

February 26, 2003

Got up at 8:48.

Dreamed of walking in downtown Sackville in my robe and pajamas.

At the studio Cynthia and I started preparing for my eventual Bronze II exam. (We've been distracted by these routines for quite a while.) Afterward I told he that I couldn't afford any more lessons, which she took pretty well. (I still have thirty left.) I also said she was a good friend, which pleased her.

Now that they're cancelling Phil Donahue's show, we're going to get rid of the MSNBC package and go back to the one with BBC Canada and IFC. [MSNBC cancelled Donahue because he kept warning against invading Iraq!]

Dinner was halibut (which I fried).

In the drama class we mirrored each other's movements then posed each other as sculptures.  Then we made plays out of "You're late." "I know, I couldn't help it." "I understand." "I knew you would." "I have something for you." "Really?" "Yes.  This."

Sean and I played it as gangsters in the drug rackets.  Then we did the same exchange as movie scenes.  My group did it as The River Wild; the others as The Godfather and a war movie.  

Then we made plays out of a banal exchange, with lines like "What did you do last night?" "Nothing." Tijuana and I did it as Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter. (What an evil spin I put on  "Nothing"!)

Baked some white bread.

February 25, 2003

Got up at 7:56.

Dreamed of the scene in Huckleberry Finn where the King fleeces a congregation with the hymn "Gather at the River"; and the anime series Sailor Moon.

There's another cold snap, and Father drove me to Dr. Hassan.

I still haven't found out if that George Brown workshop exists.  I thought I had a printout with the course number on it somewhere, but it looks like I don't after all.

Dinner was pork chops (which I fried).

Read over 50 pages of The Whiteoak Brothers.

No copy editing class, so I went to sink karaoke at the Fossil & Haggis. I sang If I Were a Rich Man and Dancing in the Street. (In the former song, the lyric screen went awry midway through the song and I had to sing it from memory to the extent I could. (Johnnie Blue, the host, said it was the Hebrew lyrics!) Genny's husband Jim was there and sang "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogy Woogy Flu," which I vaguely recall hearing in my youth, and "The Times, They Are A-Changin'." In this cold weather, I was glad to have a lift to the subway from Jim. [The Fossil & Haggis was near Eglinton & Ellesmere.]

February 24, 2003

Got up at 8:57.

Dreamed of Richard Thomas (John-Boy Walton) telling his son "We are not going to tell other people about this"; getting up in the Sackville house and being unable to figure out what time it was due to conflicting clocks.

Saw Gods and Generals, which was long, pedestrian and often sentimental.  Its evasive treatment of the slavery issue was often disingenuous:  Stonewall Jackson's conversation with a black cook (a volunteer!) was as funny as C. Thomas Howell's mutton chops.  The bit about Jackson's friendship with a little girl was particularly shameless.  At least Robert Duvall's Robert E. Lee (a smaller role than Jackson) was better-cast than Martin Sheen in Gettysburg, and they didn't have him raising his voice this time. [The "Bonny Blue Flag" musical number was really dorky!]

Dinner was roast ham.

Dawn taught a rumba class.  It included crossover and second-position breaks, both of which are in my routine. (The latter is a good Cuban-motion exercise.)

February 23, 2003

Got up at 9:15.

Dreamed of wearing white gloves for the dance studio's horse show(?); being on a cruise and leaving a couple of books on the beach, including The Golden Treasury of Poetry; seeing a low-flying helicopter near our Sackville home.

Saw Sue's play at an afternoon matinee. (It was "pay what you can," but I paid $25 and contributed $10 to restoring a stained-glass window there.) Orchidelirium was a pretty good play, though the ending was a bit symbolic for my taste.  The set decoration reminded me of Etheria in the seventh King's Quest computer game.  

Dinner was the rest of the lasagna.

Saw the last part of Lonesome Dove.

February 22, 2003

Got up at 10:31.

Dreamed of my Sackville house caught in a windstorm and rotating on its foundation; playing Scrabble with myself to dawn; the Marseillaise; the word "contraction."

Brother John and his daughters came over for lunch (pizza).

The Hours felt like years.  Was the real Virginia Woolf this much of a pill? (Mother says Nicole Kidman wasn't as aristocratic as the real VW.) [I saw Gina McKee--Iris in the Forsyte Saga remake-- as more like her.] It didn't help that I haven't read Mrs. Dalloway, let alone the novel The Hours. [Still haven't read either.]

Dinner at the Swiss Chalet. Mine was delayed quite a bit because the waitress got my order wrong.

The weather today was slushy!  Some phone lines were down and I couldn't go online.

February 21, 2003

Got up at 9:30.

Dreamed of being part of a circle around a swimming pool, across from a Russian girlfriend, about to perform a group stunt.

Puitak, Gordon and I were going to see Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity, but it closed after yesterday. [Don't think I ever saw it.] I was thinking of seeing The Quiet American instead, but it turned out that Pui had to work after all. (I like it when these things come in twos.) Gordon and I still had lunch at a Thai restaurant.  Mother had finished the Laura Ingalls Wilder bio, so I lent it to Pui.

Dinner was lasagna.

Dawn taught a samba class with something called policia.  There was an opeh house with a reporter from The Guardian.  The line dance was that silly Cuban dance again.  I've never felt like such a WASP as when trying to dance it!

Moira is in Kingston again.  

February 20, 2003

Got up at 9:48.

Dreamed of noticing in the movie Excalibur a shot of multiple shadows on the snow (the movie has no such scene that I recall) and inquiring who the cinematographer was; thinking it was Sven Nykvist. (It was actually Alex Thomson, the best thing in the movie.)

The Toronto schools are getting rid of their continuing education (cheapskates!) so I'll have to take the intermediate drama course in the spring instead of the fall.  Still a few days before I can register. [It survived after all.]

I'm pretty sure that George Brown College is having a weekend workshop in copy editing in late April, but I haven't yet found enough info to register.

Dinner was roast chicken.

The mild weather is finally here!  It was above freezing and I walked much of the way to George Brown College (in an unsuccessful search for info on the workshop).

Sergei taught a foxtrot class, including the right turn.  My pensive expression made Rita laugh. (I wish someone had taken a picture.) Cynthia tried to persuade me to have an extra lesson this week to review our routines.  At moments like that I wish I were rich.  Genny was also there:  it was the first time I'd met her since December.

February 19, 2003

Got up at 9:51.

Dreamed of a non-existent garden at our N.B. cottage, overrun with weeds.

Cynthia and I went over our rumba and salsa routines.

Got a haircut this morning. (They noticed it at the dance studio.)

Dinner was toad in the hole.

Sue was previewing her play [she was directing Orchidelirium] so her husband taught the acting class. (He reminds me of John Goodman.) The early games included something from Whose Line Is It Anyway? in which we had to make a conversation entirely with questions.  I was pretty good at it.  We also did "Yes, and..." in which we kept saying "Yes, and let's..." 

Then we did exercises on story structure.  The first was making a play from the dialogue "Oh," "Oh," "Oh," Oh well," "Well!" and Oh!" Andrei and I couldn't really figure out what to do.  Then we did "Well," "What," "How," "So," and "Well." This time Donna and I did a skit where I danced with her and she tripped.

February 18, 2003

Got up at 9:31.

Dreamed of driving through Moncton, NB; looking for my clothes in a big chest of drawers; the song "The Minstrel of Cranberry Lane."

Went shopping.

Lola Volair taught Cynthia and me a salsa routine.  She was impressed by how quickly I learn.

Went to the library and borrowed Mazo de la Roche's The Whiteoak Brothers (from the Jalna series) and returned the Freddy the Pig book.

Dinner was salmon (which I fried). The potatoes were undercooked because they were in the wrong size pot for the broccoli steamer.

Went to the last copy editing class before Spring Break.

Finished the Laura Ingalls Wilder bio, and started The Whiteoak Brothers on the way back from the editing class.

February 17, 2003

Got up at 9:48.

Dreamed of being part of a group captured by terrorists and ordered to choose one out of four for execution; books like Noddy Meets Raquel Welch and Noddy Meets Tiny Tim; playing Mensa games until dawn, such as a Spanish version of Monopoly in which the jail took up a large part of the board. (My dreams are telling insensitive ethnic jokes!)

Getting some of the snow from the US storm.

Finally got around to the latest copy editing assignment.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Cynthia taught a cha-cha group class.  We didn't have time to talk about the Montreal competition.

Baked multigrain bread, but the multigrain flour ran out so I combined it with whole wheat.

February 16, 2003

"Childhood is a congenital illness for which education is the cure"--James Mason at a PTA meeting, the best scene in Bigger Than Life

Dreamed of being at a resort boardwalk where the waves where so huge I hung onto a pole (like in Iron Monkey) then rode the wave; the Sound of Music song "Climb Every Mountain."

Got up at 9:08.

Saw another Nicholas Ray movie, Bigger Than Life, about what happens when you take too much cortisone.  Brilliant '50s melodrama, with James Mason at his best. ("God was wrong!") Ray managed to make good use of Cinemascope. [It's worth seeing in a cinema.]

Saw a magazine headline: "Kate Hudson:  What She's Really  Like." Yeah, right.

The others came back from Kingston.

Still really cold.  After getting home, Father and Moira sat around in their overcoats!

Dinner was Harvey's.

Sent a message to Blue Ocean at matchmaker.com

Saw more of Lonesome Dove.

February 15, 2003

Got up at 10:01.

Dreamed of walking along a stone road in Iran.

Saw James Whale's The Invisible Man at a Cinematheque matinee.  It had pretty good special effects for the '30s.

Dinner at McDonald's.

Saw Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, quite a good police drama.  Robert Ryan was a fine actor. [I must see this one again:  I've completely forgotten it!]

The Wilder bio is good.  I'll have to show it to Mother, as well as Puitak.

Rented the DVD of Iron Monkey.  It's great fun!  Lots of "How did they do that?" chopsocky.  And where did they find that kid? [Was I once capable of watching three movies in one day?!]

February 14, 2003

Got up at 8:03.

The parents and Moira went to Kingston, so I'll be on my own for a couple of days. (They left one of their suitcases behind.)

Went to the library to take out a William Anderson biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  It's written for a child's reading level, so Puitak should like it.  I also glanced at the latest issue of Premiere.

Afterward I went to the video store to see if I could find something I wouldn't rent when there are others around, but I couldn't.

Davis taught a rumba class. There were few people so they had one class, together instead of the usual three.  There were only about a dozen people at the dance party, including teachers.  Natalia was back for the first time since Christmas.  She was vacationing in the United Arab Emirates!

Finished Freddy Goes to Florida.  Walter R. Brooks was quite a clever writer.

My translation of the Chinese novel is speeding ahead.  The Communist Party is out to recruit the student heroine, and using the whole Qinghua University student body to that end. (Seems like a paranoia fantasy.)

February 13, 2003

Got up at 9:39.

Dreamed of being on a train just starting and unable to find a seat.

Moira and I went to see The Bay of Love and Sorrows at the Carleton.  I was mainly interested in the setting:  New Brunswick in the early '70s--the time and place of my youth--but it was a pretty effective drama on its own. [They showed the film on the CBC too.  I want to read David Adams Richards' novel someday!]

Afterward we had Thai fast food at a place in College Park.

Davis taught another salsa class.  Half the studio has gone to Montreal for the big competition there.  Rita and I were the only students for this class. (Rita's OK, but she's a bit hard to lead.) Afterward I told Dawn Moira had said that while most of us dancers look like we've learned their steps, she looks like she's just doing them.  She said, "She's so sweet!" When Davis speeded up the salsa, I said "Ramming speed!" [A reference to the galley sequence in Ben-Hur.] Davis actually got it!

Read over 80 pages of Freddy Goes to Florida.

February 12, 2003

"Bang, bang-bingle BOOM! went the thunder"--Freddy Goes to Florida

Got up at 9:13.

Dreamed of a longer version of Brideshead Revisited (like the original wasn't already pretty long); the place where our New Brunswick cottage was [near the eastern end of the border with Nova Scotia] now being a city with paved streets; wanting to leave that town, but my clothes were missing; staying at the Casinorama hotel and seeing Montreal Canadiens and Lionel Richie in the elevators; early Warner Brothers cartoons in colour [this was before they really introduced colour] about an orchestra, in the Disney Silly Symphonies style.

Went shopping.  There were out of Cheerios again.

Another headache.

Dinner was pork chops (which I fried).

In the acting class we did sketches using gibberish. (I did one as coach of a losing team at halftime). Then I played Frankenstein's monster coming to life, being rejected by the Bride and wailing.  I was also in groups doing Italian opera (I did a duet with one woman, dumped her for another, and got stabbed in the back), a WWII submarine movie, and a western. (I was born once and died twice.)

Another group did a soap opera in which a man makes love to three women in turn, who fight, then make love to each other. Our teacher said it was like Italian porn!  And some people did a skit of astronauts exploring space, and I thought they were hippies getting stoned!

February 11, 2003

Dreamed of the south side of the quarry [we lived near one when I was growing up in Sackville, N.B.] (And got a  stiff right shoulder.)

Got up at 7:34.

Finished The Ill Made Knight on the way back from Dr. Hassan.  It's a surprisingly funny work.  I was hopting to borrow a juvenile biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I couldn't find it.  Instead I borrowed Freddy Goes to Florida, the first book in Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Pig series.

Dinner was stew.

After the copy editing class, I mentioned to Shelley two things that bugged me in The New York Times.  One was the Chile correspondent dismissing pre-Pinochet Chile as "a backward banana republic." Besides being ignorant, "banana republic" was an offensive cliche, "backward" was redundant (all banana republics are backward) and the whole phrase was rhetorical journalism better suited to The Toronto Sun or The New York Post.

The other thing was a report that parenthetically referred to Mumia abu-Jamal as "a Philadelphia activist who killed a policeman" instead of "convicted of killing." [That may be the normal procedure, but the article itself was about people challenging his conviction!] Shelley said, "You'll make a good copy editor, James."

Catherine Zeta Jones: "This is not about money.  This is absolutely not about money!" (Methinks thou dost protest too much.)

Dawn was very well dressed in a black & grey combination.

February 10, 2003

Dreamed of being outside the McDonald's restaurant in Amherst, N.S.

Got up at 8:59.

Cynthia and I went over the rumba routine Pat taught us.  I volunteered for the next formation.

Dinner was roast chicken.  For dessert we had the strawberries Puitak brought over Friday night.

In the evening Davis taught a salsa class.  Not much happening today, is there?

February 9, 2003

Got up at 10:38.

Went to the Royal to see Frida, but it turned out that the schedule had contained a mistake and it was another movie.

Still a headache.  Father suggested it's from the high pressure system.

We had dinner at the Ethiopian restaurant The Queen of Sheba with Donald, John and his daughters.  Nice and spicy.

Saw the second part of Lonesome Dove.

February 8, 2003

Got up at 10:22.

John and Rae come over for lunch.  We had spaghetti.

Fierce headache.  I had to have a bath.

Dinner was risotto with jumbo scallops, which Moira cooked. I didn't come close to finishing it.  I've just never liked risotto.

We rented the DVD of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life.  It was unintentionally funny.  The first scene already had me imagining the Carol Burnett version.  Notice that in '50s movies a woman had to choose between work and marriage, and couldn't have both. (This is one of the movies that Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven was a reworking of.)

Spent hours online looking up the comic books Swing With Scooter and The Two-Gun Kid.

February 7, 2003

Got up at 10:01.

Dreamed of being one of a group of actors about to appear before a school assembly playing eccentric superheroes like the Mystery Men; of stopping at a park in coastal Maine on the Fourth of July.

We got a laugh from the headline list from the copy editing class: "Kids make delicious snacks"; "Juvenile court tries shooting defendant"; "British left waffles on Falkland Islands."

Dinner was spaghetti.

Puitak came over and looked at old pictures of our family, then went to the spotlight with Moira and me. (They had to leave early, before the end of the sequences.)

They all say my tango sequence was good.  Strangely, as I was doing it, it seemed short.  They had a birthday cake for people like me born in February.  My gingerbread was a hit, of course.

On the way back there were a lot of young men in the Ossington station. (I'm glad they had some police there.) They must have been returning from a Raptors game.

Is the space program like the quest for the Holy Grail? [Reading The Once and Future King at the time of the Columbia space shuttle disaster got me thinking about that...]

February 6, 2003

"The French have no word for 'entrepreneur'"--Dubya (priceless!)

Got up at 9:37.

Dreamed of meeting Shelley Winters; of seeing a big painting showing French parents in WWI receiving a letter saying that their son, who they thought had survived a big battle, had actually been killed.

Went shopping.  The bottom kept falling out of one of the boxes.

Baked gingerbread for tomorrow's spotlight.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw No Regrets for Our Youth at the Cinematheque.  It's an early Kurosawa, and Japan's first postwar movie to reflect the new antiwar orthodoxy.  Much of it was unsubtle:  the visual and verbal flashbacks were hackneyed and the peasant scenes reminded me of Soviet cinema.  But overall it was powerful, timely and very sad.  What would we do if our country were heading inexorably to war? (Wait, it is.)

February 5, 2003

Dreamed of being introduced to a journalism course; woke up; dreamed of being in a motel on a trip to Cape Breton; of looking through old comic books; of being about to do the tango routine, with pre-fanfare drum rolls, but Cynthia waasn't there (neither were my guests) and Chris Matthews wanted to do it with me; of considering appropriate fanfare music for a special occasion and thinking of movie music like Richard Adinsell's Beau Brummel theme (which I don't remember); of "waking up" and telling the family about my dream.

Got out of bed at 10:04.

Well, I'm 41 today.  Father's giving me $1500.

I couldn't upload my photo yet because I need a ZIP-CD scanner. (Ours is only PC.)

They remembered my birthday at the dance studio.  Cynthia, Dawn and even Lisa gave me hugs.  Cynthia says our tango sequence is ready!

Dinner was Chinese food.  My fortune said I love sports, horses and gambling(?), but not to excess.

In the drama class, we did story development: introduction, development, climax, falling action and resolution.  We were doing skits where our characters wanted to communicate but couldn't talk.

A girl and I played a priest and a nun in processions, where I wanted us to run away but she lost her nerve.  Then we did one where I was supervising an archive and one of the two guests there wanted to rip out and steal an important document and ended up eating it.  

Then we enacted five-stage tableaus of Little Miss Muffet with me as the spider.  Then we tried to improvise a five-stage pantomime, but we disagreed and one of us walked out.  We were lucky to come up with anything. (Chinese Sean and Russian Alexei didn't know our nursery rhyme!)

Looks like I managed to upload my photo after all.

Baked whole wheat bread overnight.

February 4, 2003

Dreamed of being in junior high school in Mississauga [I really was for one year]; of seeing that season finale of The Sopranos, in which the dead included Anthony Jr. and the Meathead from All in the Family, and part of the new season premiere in which one character was a transvestite; of reading a book about cinema (like John Naughton's Cinema:  A Crash Course, which Moira just bought), including a '50s British musical in the Powell & Pressburger style [like their The Tales of Hoffmann], set in the colonial Orient, with a rehearsal scene showing dancers in their shorts.

Chapter 13 of The Ill-Made Knight is beautifully written. [It talks about Guinevere getting older.]

Cynthia and I went over the tango routine again.  I hope it's ready by Friday!

Dinner was pork chops.

The copy editing course was about writing headlines.

Started reading a Harper's article about the actual end of the world.

Picked up the picture scan I'm going to post at matchmaker.com.  The parents liked the picture. (Father said I look pensive in it.) [You can see it at the upper right.]

February 3, 2003

Dreamed about walking home from some function with Brendan Fraser.

Didn't get up until 11:30, same as yesterday.

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Davis taught a swing class.

There was freezing rain so the sidewalks were slippery.

I'm back to wearing my brown overcoat. [The winter was getting milder.]

February 2, 2003

Dreamed of trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle with fairly big pieces, except that another puzzle with smaller pieces had been mixed in.

We drove down to Sunnyside Park for the first time since fall.

Baked some cheese bread.

Dinner was steak (which I fried) and leftover lasagna.

60 Minutes had a big report about how bad things are in North Korea, but didn't say anything about what to do about it. (Typical.)

Saw the first part of Lonesome Dove for the third time.  It's still stirring.

February 1, 2003

Dreamed of being in a big dance show, with some routine related to the spelling bee documentary Spellbound, but I couldn't remember the steps (it involved a diamond-shaped box-like cha cha), and I wandered off into the nearby streets, taking a secret staircase down to a theatre class, but I couldn't find my pen; passing in front of some royal steps after the death of some big bug (in business) and avoiding the Household Cavalry as it stepped out.

Returned Lolita.

Moira came back from Kingston.

Saw a Civil War movie titled Shenandoah.  It was rather pedestrian.