/Ribbit/ 11.19.03

Somehow all my “bad” dreams (they’re not so bad, there are no cold sweats, no twitching, no music by Journey and Europe tribute bands, and I wake up, without marks on my body) seem to occur in a school, a large school with lots of corridors. It’s not always the same school. But it’s always attached to a mall. It’s always the afternoon. Someone is always unseen that I’m chasing, or perhaps they’re chasing me, or I’m late—

Last night is no different. This time I am late for a play performance, for about ten people in an auditorium (high school plays in my school certainly sold out better than that), with a cast of 8 or so. The only problem is of course I don’t know my lines, nor do I have an appropriate outfit. I am running through the mall. But this has nothing to do with the outfit, of course. I am running through the hallways and no one is there.

My co-star is Shev. I think. She’s a little more severe, less sweet than the MC Shiv B I know. But I am ready to simply perform in shorts—or underpants in this case. It’s a dream, I barely know what I’m thinking, so I drop my pants—

And I’m wearing tighty-whiteys. Not the classy green boxers (which are real, in my drawer right now) I intended but a pair of faded, ill-fitting, junk-revealing, cotton-pulled-taut-over-buttocks draws. Surprisingly, I am not that embarrassed, it’s part of the day. I get some pants on—

But it’s not like I know my lines. I don’t know why. Apparently I have had lots of time. We’re backstage and we can’t find a copy of the play so I can quickly memorize or bring it onstage with me as a prop. We step outside and we decide to improvise our scene, Shev and I. She’s a little frustrated, and for some reason, there is, in the distance, what looks like real people climbing up the sides of a New Orleans style plantation mansion to reach some woman who is on a difficult to reach verandah. I like to spell verandah with an “h.” I also like Kate Chopin but that’s neither here nor there. It's in that link.

I am watching these people do their thing and Shev is trying to feed me lines; we end up changing the scene. It’s a phone call where we pretend to be on one couch but in two different places; at the end of it we’re supposed to reach out to the other, the imaginary line being the middle of the couch as it might be on television, and almost touch each other, as if we can break this imaginary wall, but of course we can’t. That would disrupt the theatrical physics.

This dream has no significance but I wanted to drop in some content—I know Gully is bored. And also for Erica and Baby Sam, because I haven’t mentioned their names in a while. We have any new readers out there? Any old readers? Anyone?

I feel like the Looney Tunes conductor raising his arm and hearing… just the frog.