April 30, 2003

Dreamed of the movie Five Easy Pieces with Jeff Bridges in the Jack Nicholson role, as an outlaw who hijacks airplanes for ransom, and gets into a car chase; travelling in a TTC streetcar with the doors still open(?), standing next to the doors and feeling the rain outside; taking a class in a big high school and being in the washroom while a fire drill was called; seeing a display on ancient Gaul.

Got up at 9:44.

Another dance lesson.

Read an article in The New Yorker about how Lew Wasserman became a Hollywood giant.  Pretty depressing.

Dinner was spaghetti.

At the drama class, I was the only one who had all his lines memorized. (Rob and Tijuana surely would have, but they were filming a short this weekend!) Everyone was impressed, since it was a hard role to learn.  In the early part of the scene I had some awkward pauses remembering my lines, but they thought it was appropriate to the character!

We improvised scenes imagining how our characters first met.  We also read our monologues.  Tijuana is doing one on Lizzie Borden!  Before that we did an exercise of trying to hold a piece of paper on a wall.  (I couldn't do it.)

April 29, 2003

Dreamed of reading a film festival program and finding a screening of the 1961 Walt Disney movie of Victor Herbert's musical Babes in Toyland. [When I was little we had the soundtrack album.]

Got up at 9:34.

Went shopping.  We got some more cut-rate chocolate.

Dinner was salmon (which I marinated and fried).

Had the last class in the copy editing course.  Afterward Shelley took us out for a drink.  I was the only boy in the group and at times there was girl talk. (One of the other students actually resembled Miranda on Sex & the City.) [And now Cynthia Nixon is running for New York Governor!]

April 28, 2003

Got up at 9:09.

Dreamed of a hostage situation arising from a confrontation over a studio movie production, ending peacefully with the release of revealing documents; a lighter-than-air bus hovering in the sky  in a ca. 1900 setting.

It was very warm today, but I didn't get around to starting the garden.

Another dance lesson.

The parents returned home with Moira.

Dinner was KFC.

April 27, 2003

Got up at 8:11.

The parents went to Kingston for the day, so I'm home alone.

Rented a video of Sex & the City.  Kind of depressing. (Maybe it's just a girl's show.)

Dinner was McDonald's. (Imaginative, huh?)

Rented the DVD of Brian de Palma's Femme Fatale, a bizarre thriller that plays like a de Palma parody. (Antonio Banderas seems to know he's in a comedy.) Just when you think things can't get any more ludicrous they spend the last 15 minutes showing what would have happened if the other girl had taken the plane in the prologue. [At least I think that's it...]

Saw the Sopranos episode where Carmela went to a new psychiatrist, who advised her to leave Tony.  Unfortunately this shrink was male, and it seemed to me that this is the sort of advice only a woman could give her.

April 26, 2003

Got up at 10:32.

Dreamed of showering in a motel; seeing stills from a movie titled Trench Warfare; learning that Joan Crawford ate popcorn moderately; the comedy show Mad TV.

Finished memorizing my acting lines.

John and Rae came over for dinner, which was pork chops (which I fried) and macaroni.

Rae and I ran through my scene.  I only made a few mistakes.

Went to see Chicago at the Music Hall (where I'm told parts of the movie were filmed, though I didn't notice which). It's an extremely cynical musical, well made but rather unpleasant, not unlike the stage production. [I'd seen it on Broadway the previous September.]

April 25, 2003

Got up at 10:27.

Dreamed of using computer software to trace and blow up a drawing; trying out the Beatles song "Yesterday" for karaoke; driving through Oakville.

Sent a letter to Yvonne Ho, a Hong Kong lawyer I know from my days at Goodenough College in London.  Her husband is a medical systems analyst, so he must have his hands full with SARS!

Visited the Gardiner Ceramics Museum, because today admission was free fro ROM members.  They had an exhibit of teapots.

Dinner was spaghetti.

A new teacher, Elena, gave a rumba lesson.  The dance party was pretty sparse, because so many people (including Cynthia) were at the Dance-o-Rama.

April 24, 2003

"What did Lincoln say at Gettysburg?" "How should I know?  I wasn't there"--Ruggles of Red Gap

Got up at 9:42.

Dreamed of boarding a train; driving into Ottawa and passing by the entrance to a huge star-shaped Jewish cemetery; a movie using special effects to recreate the old Quebec City waterfront; entering a store in a mall without my shoes; finding them on the sidewalk with the laces still tied.

Another headache.

Went to the library and picked up my hold for The People's Almanac Book of Lists.  There shoud be some nice junk reading there!  Then I stopped off at the drugstore and bought a chocolate bunny (or something) at post-Easter reduced prices. (My parents like that.)

Dinner was roast chicken.

Saw Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap, a funny screwball comedy.  A deadpan Charles Laughton gives a stirring recitation of the Gettysburg Address.  Roland Young is exactly like a British lord.

Wasn't sure whether to go to the mambo class.  It was at the intermediate level, and I'm still a beginner with that dance (like samba).  On the other hand, I wanted to make up for missing Wednesday's group lesson and dance party, and I won't be able to go next Thursday.  

In the afternoon, my headache seemed to tip the balance against going, but I took my dancing shoes to the movie anyway, since it had eased.  In the end, the movie was a bit longer than I expected, so I skipped it. (I would have been at least 15 minutes late.)

April 23, 2003

Dreamed of being charged with kidnapping (and being guilty); of visiting an Arctic town (in the summer) at 80 degrees latitude.

Got up at 9:03.

Went shopping.

Started memorizing my lines from the Enchanted scene.

At today's dance lesson, Cynthia introduced me to mambo points in cha cha.  The cream she was wearing made her smell like maple syrup!  I think I got the smell on myself too. (I don't mind.)

Dinner was a roast pork casserole.

My crossword puzzle software CD arrived.

In the drama course we did a skit where I gave a ring to a Mafia mistress instead of the widow.  Then, we did a fairy tale with people passing around a golden apple of immortality. (In the end it was baked in a pie.) Then we played the characters we were studying waiting for a bus and in an ATM lineup.  

Danielle and I performed our scene in front of the others.  We also saw a scene from Neil Simon's California Suite with a divorced couple. (The movie version, with Alan Alda and Jane Fonda, was boring.) We'll soon be doing monologues, and I chose one from the play Bethune, describing a crowd of refugees attacked by fascist bombers.

April 22, 2003

Got up at 7:26.

Dreamed of Brooke Shields movies. [I've never seen any.]

Saw George Roy Hill's The World of Henry Orient, about two schoolgirls following second-rate pianist Peter Sellers around.  Parts of it were cute. (One of the girls reminded me of my niece Merle.)

John and the girls came over for dinner, but I had to go early, so I had KFC nuggets.

Shelley gave a general-knowledge quiz in the proofreading class.

April 21, 2003

"What do they know of heaven and hell, Cathy, who know nothing of life?"--Wuthering Heights 

Got up at 10:48.

Dreamed of our New Brunswick cottage; visiting Hampstead in London; visiting a spa in Mexico and meeting Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo; the Cole Porter song "You Do Something to Me" (Evil Under the Sun had a Cole Porter soundtrack); walking outdoors at night and starting to sing the song, attracting people's attention (there were a lot of other people out walking at night.

Saw the 1934 movie of Anne of Green Gables, starring Anne Shirley (who changed her name to match her character here!). It was pretty Hollywood:  the second half didn't have much to do with the book.

Printed out my matchmaker.com essay questions to show Dr. Hassan.

Dinner was steak.

Saw William Wyler's Wuthering Heights.  A triumph of Hollywood craft (though Merle Oberon is on the insipid side, not in Laurence Olivier's league), but for sheer passion I prefer Luis Bunuel's looser Mexican remake.  The feel-good ending is pretty cheesy.

Saw the famous "College" episode of The Sopranos.  Really, I find the episode barely watchable.  Tracey's life is bad, then it gets worse, then it's over.

April 20, 2003

Diana Rigg (to her surly teenage stepdaughter): "Well, if you want to have fun, go play with the jellyfish!"--Evil Under the Sun

Dreamed of going to Halifax for another year of college.

Saw the Agatha Christie mystery Evil Under the Sun.  On the pedestrian side.  Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot was a bit too cute.  Too bad Diana Rigg was the character who got killed off; her diva was the most fun. [There was a clever bit where one character always had a pipe but no smoke came out of it, and it turned out in the end that he had a stolen gem hidden in it!  Even the viewers who noticed the lack of smoke--I didn't--must have assumed the pipe was just a cheesy prop.]

Baked cheese bread.

Donald, John and Rae come over for dinner, which was turkey and lasagna.  Unfortunately, something happened to the stove and we had to put the turkey and potatoes into the microwave oven.  The spuds were still so undercooked that I couldn't eat them.

April 19, 2003

"There's only one woman in the world who says 'Ouch!' like that!"--Rally Round the Flag, Boys

Dreamed of delaying the start of a long journey from Sackville in order to shower; being on a ship; reading a People magazine article arguing that The Breakfast Club was a classic movie [some people would agree]; looking at a swimming pool on a ship that I'd fallen into earlier; writing a letter to a newspaper editor arguing that a columnist kept repeating his point with the same handful of anecdotes and statistics. [We know some of them, right?]

Got up at 9:57.

Moira went off to Kingston.

The warm weather's back.

Went to The Golden Fortress.  Unlike the other Satyajit Ray movies, I've seen, it's a lightweight comic adventure.  But it was overlong and I ended up with a sore back as well as a headache.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw Leo McCarey's Rally Round the Flag, Boys at the Cinematheque series.  It's a wide-ranging 1950s satire with a lot of funny stuff, though the farce involving Joan Collins as a home-wrecker was kind of weary.  Afterward Robin Wood talked about the movie, pointing out that McCarey launched Laurel and Hardy and that Jack Carson's military boor was similar to Hardy.  I asked if Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, married in the movie, had already married in real life. (They had.)

April 18, 2003

Dreamed of people in gorilla suits; an email to gorilla suit-wearers promoting a Valentine's Day festival in Hungary; seeing a charging bear in the back yard of our Sackville house and waving something to make it charge along the other side of a hedge; seeing a version of the Rip Kirby comic strip starring Fred Flintstone; the name Joey.

Got up at 10:03.

Saw Lost in La Mancha at the Varsity VIP lounge (a pretty ordinary place). It's a documentary about Terry Gilliam's doomed Don Quixote movie, in which everything seemed to go wrong from the start.  Perversely fascinating. [I've never cared for Gilliam's movies myself.]

Dinner was pork roast.

Saw the DVD of William Wyler's western The Big Country, for the second time but (importantly) for the first time in full wide-screen.  It's a real classic, intelligently made and entertaining.  Did Gregory Peck end up with Jean Simmons? (Moira predicted it!)

I'm now translating [into Chinese and Japanese] a passage from The Whiteoak Brothers set in a stable.

April 17, 2003

Got up at 10:55.

Father and I went to the Hollywood Canteen to rent some old movies for the Easter weekend.  They have a great deal there:  you can rent six for a whole week for less than $25!  But they were in the middle of moving, so finding what we'd ordered took a while.

Afterward I bought new shoes at Zeller's.

Saw James Whale's The Old Dark House.  A lot of laughs for a horror movie!

Tony was teaching a samba class.  It was a bit too tough for me.

Dinner was angel-hair pasta with a chicken sauce.

April 16, 2003

Dreamed of passing through Amherst, N.S., on a bus; trying to find my slippers from a group of identical ones; an arrangement I remember of the 23rd Psalm with Scottish music; a class beginning in a reform school.

Got up at 10:34.

Finished My Losing Season.

Went shopping.

Finished translating the second chapter of Wandering Youth!

Dinner was halibut.

Cold again today.  I went to the library to borrow a new book  but didn't feel like getting anything.  So I started the medieval section of Christopher Hibbert's The English:  A Social History 1066-1945.

While my computer's booting [the good old days!] I pass the time by rereading the children's book The Case of the Marble Monster (also known as Ooka the Wise) about a legendary eccentric magistrate in old Tokyo, and glancing through Nancy Drew mysteries. [I read those stories as a kid, and saw the word "shogun" in one of them, so when I saw the James Clavell title Shogun on the best-seller lists I knew it was about Japan!]

In the drama course we did skits set in a grocery store, with a scientist character, a fork, and the line "I'm looking for Mr. Right." We also did skits with a driver and hitchhikers.  Danielle and I worked on a scene from Jean Giraudoux' Enchanted, where I play a civil servant vying for her hand with a ghost.  Another pair did a scene from Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged.  I can't get into Simon Gray. (I'm one of the only people who didn't care for Quartermaine's Terms.)

April 15, 2003

Dreamed of going to someone's house and hearing someone sing "Candy Man" (from the Willy Wonka movie) with an extra verse rhyming "zin-ga" with "cinema"; going to a phys-ed class on a Saturday afternoon, still wearing a scarf despite the warm weather; hearing the Irish song "The Mountains of Morne," and thinking that I love music.

Got up at 9:08.

It got really warm today!  But it's supposed to be colder tomorrow.

Another dance lesson.  We're going to do a swing routine next month.

Dinner was pork chops.

There was no copy editing class this week so I went to the Fossil and Haggis karaoke.  Jim was there too.  I sang "The Wild Rover" and "A Groovy Kind of Love." There were four Pink Floyd songs. ("Money" made me feel like I was back in college!) A guy called Crazy Joe brought a video of Jim and his friends doing Jackass-type stunts.

April 14, 2003

Dreamed of the TV western Death Valley Days (which I've never seen); seeing Jay Leno on a Michigan ferry; driving up to Moncton to make an airplane reservation but not getting around to it.

Got up at 9:01.

The warm weather really arrived today.  Almost 20 degrees!

Another dance lesson. Saturday's showcase makes you appreciate a dance floor with room to dance.

Dinner was lasagna.  We also finished John's birthday cake.

Saw The Two Towers at the Paradise.  Never a dull moment, though I found the talking trees silly (both here and in the book).  My favorite part of this book, the climax with the big spider, was delayed till the third movie.

April 13, 2003

Got up at 9:41.

Saw Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder for the second time.  Powerful. [It's about the Bengal famine that killed millions during World War II, which Ray made in response to the refugee crisis that accompanied Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence.]

Donald, John, John's daughters and Johns' girlfriend Kathrine [she's still with him fifteen years later!] came over for dinner, which was Indian take-out food.

60 Minutes had a lame report on Iran, not once mentioning US support for the last Shah. "Clinton vs. Dole" is also lame, though accurately reflecting the official heterodoxy.

April 12, 2003

Got up at 9:03.

Saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at a Cinematheque matinee, for the fourth time.  It gets creepier and creepier with successive viewing.  Pretty impressive.

Went to the dance showcase at the Marriot hotel near the Pearson airport.  I didn't compete, but just came for the dinner and the evening dancing.  The floor was pretty crowded.  Cynthia was really pleased that I came.

April 11, 2003

Got up at 10:01.

Dreamed of reading about the Wandering Jew (from seeing Nowhere in Africa, no doubt); going to an Oliver Stone movie about Jesus Christ which ended with the Los Angeles police burning someone alive in a trailer (from the Iraq war?); hating it [I've never much cared for Stone]; taking a long time to get my things together after the end of the movie, and hearing it start again before I left; finding several copies of my Tasmanian Devil bookmark on the cinema floor.

The warm weather is back!

John and Rae came over for dinner, so we had macaroni as well as pork chops.

Sergei did a group lesson in West Coast Swing.  I'd never done it before (it's sort of like progressive cha cha and that merengue step you do just before the parallel walk) but I caught on pretty quick.  I got a picture that was taken of Cynthia and me doing the tango routine at the January spotlight.  She looks nice enough, but I look like a caveman with glasses!

April 10, 2003

Got up at 8:56.

Dreamed of visiting Seattle; taking a ferry to an island; finishing a mostly-completed crossword puzzle; being in the Sackville house on the last day before it was sold. [I actually was in it on that day, back in 1996.]

Read an Atlantic Monthly article about how rotten the Saudi Arabian regime is. (Doesn't bode well for the future.) It pointed out that if the country had a truly free election, the hands-down winner would be Osama bin Landen, simply because he's taken on the House of Saud.  The paradox of Washington hoping for a new wave of freedom in Arab nations is that its first result would be a rejection of pro-American alliances.

Saw Nowhere in Africa at the Cumberland. [It's about a German-Jewish refugee couple in Kenya during World War II.] It was pretty good in a colourful, somewhat predictable way.

Afterward my parents and I had dinner at the Swiss Chalet. (I always order the grilled chicken breast with rice, and side orders of cole slaw and corn.)

Ordered crossword-pule software over the internet. [I had an unrealized notion of becoming a writer of crossword puzzles.]

The new dance instructor Donnie (who resembles Edward Norton) taught a cha-cha class with the cross-body lead and a challenging variation.

April 9, 2003

Dreamed of going downtown to the Sackville cinema to see a movie; trying to record a TV show on the internet; lying on a sofa covered by cushions; the Chuck Norris movie Missing in Action (which I haven't seen).

Got up at 9:28.

Dinner was halibut.

The intermediate drama course is being taught by Liz Gallagher.  They managed to get seven or eight people on the first night.  We played games like "Fortunately/ Unfortunately" and "Zip, Zap, Zoom." We improvised a scene with characters who had a fast, slow and (in my group's case) medium rhythm.  Donna played a talk-show host (medium) whose guests were me as a manic Jerry Lewis-Jim Carrey type stand-up comedian (fast) and Tijuana as a legendary movie star suffering from jet lag (slow). I got to tell some Las Vegas jokes. ["Your honor, why am I here in this court?" "For drinking." "Good, give me a scotch and soda for starters!"]

In the second half we did readings from real plays!  My group did a scene from Barefoot in the Park, but my role as the husband was pretty small, and I mostly read the numerous stage directions instead. (Neil Simon's big on stage directions.) The other group did a dialogue from Oliver Hailey's Father's Day.

For the last part we improvised scenes, with three rules:  they had to be set in a laundromat, have an Olympic athlete as a character, and use a newspaper as a prop.  Improvising is tough!  Sometimes nobody's light bulb goes on.

April 8, 2003

Dreamed of riding an unfriendly horse bareback in a narrow corral and having it roll over me; an exiled Louis Riel in a South African colony antagonizing the other settlers; the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.

Got up at 7:29.

A miracle!  The intermediate drama course is on after all.

Went shopping.

Dinner was toad in the hole.

At the copy editing class Shelley went over some more usage points.

Saw the Sopranos episode where the old captain came out of retirement for one last hit.

April 7, 2003

Dreamed of travelling on a jet plane; seeing some rocky outcrops near the seashore and narrowly missing them; an extra scene in Catch Me if You Can where Leo meets Shirley Maclaine at the Los Angeles airport.

Got up at 10:28.

Another dance lesson.

Snowing again today!

Dinner was roast chicken.

Printed out one of my matchmaker.com letters to show to Dr. Hassan tomorrow.

Only four pages are left in my translation of this section of Wandering Youth.  But it slowed down after the text changed from dialogue to a long description of the heroine's mansion.

A severe sore throat.  I hope it doesn't turn into a cold.

April 6, 2003

Got up at 9:47.

Dreamed of Detroit's Ambassador Bridge; of "waking up"; seeing 2001:  A Space Odyssey in a big cinema (as I did on my 16th birthday).

Saw Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris 1871) at the Cinematheque.  It's about a TV crew covering the Paris Commune. (Seriously.) It's almost six hours long, but the first three was enough for me.

Donald, John and his daughters came over for dinner (which was spaghetti).

April 5, 2003

Dreamed of tuning in a NYC station on the TV set; of the TV set being in a new setting, next to wax grapes and other fruit; of trying to carry firewood and kindling up a ladder.

Got up at 10:25.

Saw The World of Apu, the last of Satyajit Ray's superb Apu trilogy.

Dinner was McDonald's.  I had to eat quickly because I had only half an hour between movies.

Also saw Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (for the second time) at the Cinematheque.  It's a really classic film noir.  And that ending...

Went to the Mensa games night.  I only arrived about 9:00, and you have to get there early to get games going.  But I did have a game of Scrabble.  It was really close, with less than 10 points between first and last place.  Afterward I listened to some conversations.

The streetcar was late, so I didn't get home until 12:30.

April 4, 2003

Dreamed of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata and Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony.

Got up at 9:21.

Saw Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away at Canada Square.  It's everything they say.  This movie is like nothing I've ever seen before, including Miyazaki's other anime.  Breathtakingly imaginative.

Dinner was roast beef.

Saw The Music Room. (I missed dancing for it.) A real masterpiece.  It's hard to say why I like Satyajit Ray's movies so much, like explaining the Motown sound.

There's a thick layer of icy snow!  There were a lot of traffic accidents today, including a streetcar accident that forced me to take a different route to see Spirited Away.  I barely got there in time.

The snow on the streets is like brown sugar.

April 3, 2003

Got up at 10:46.

Dreamed of taking a small handcar with my family along a railway line between Mississauga and Oakville (surrounded by forest!); seeing a documentary on an ethnic family and guessing they were Italian, with a name like Trevini; missing today's dance lesson; doing research in Britain; trying to remember an email address; remembering the (actual) line TV critic David Handler wrote about Pierce Brosnan 20 years ago: "Compared to this guy, Leonard Nimoy's jaunty."

Another dance lesson.

Dinner was chicken curry and rice.

Saw two more wonderful Satyajit Ray movies, Devi and Mahanagar.

It was so icy today that I almost slipped on the front steps.  Now there's a thick layer of sleet.

April 2, 2003

https://www.thenation.com/article/inland-empire/

Got up at 9:22.

Dreamed of being in a TV show about a new mayor (William Conrad) in an office like a music store, playing an assistant; an episode where previous mayor George Carlin visited the office while Conrad was away; seeing Cynthia among the group in the office; mentioning some gossip I'd heard from Genny about someone who'd been at the dance studio; learning of a 1948 Warner Brothers cartoon that almost added a big pair of eyeglasses to the Democratic Party's donkey symbol; comparing it to Orwell's "Big Brother is watching you" posters.

Went shopping.

Brought Dr. Hassan my February entries.

Dinner was salmon (which I fried).

Cynthia taught a group class in foxtrot, including grapevine turns (inside and outside). Sergei led a new Greek line dance.

The Nation had an interesting article on the new suburbs outside greater Los Angeles.

April 1, 2003

Got up at 8:16.

Dreamed of a supermarket checkout; the grandmother on The Waltons (Ellen Corby) being unwilling to deal with a friend's death; having to walk out and talk about the United Nations (as an exercise in the drama course); Australian singer Rolf Harris. [He was later convicted of pedophilia.]

Had another dance lesson, for the first time in five days. (I'ts been a while since I was away that long.) The only part I don't like is when I take my first step and Cynthia stops everything and says, "That step was too big." At those times I wonder if it's worth the trouble.

Dinner was lasagna.

At the copy editing course Shelley had some more ethical questions.

My Losing Season is a terrific book.

Baked whole wheat bread overnight.