Dream Waltz of the Weirdos

Last night after some bad comedy (Jeanine Garofilo is smart, funny & pretty but the format was lame, at least for Sue Ellen and I, trapped in the front row. She and 2 smart funny guys (one of them was pretty too) riffed about upcoming summer movies for an hour. 15 bucks?!), I came home and looked more closely at my junior-high pal on FB. She hasn't blocked her photos so I got to see her as a bride, a young mom with 2 little boys, a film maker, actor, and still an animal lover with a whole album of pet pics. (For my 14th birthday she gave me a certificate for a free guinea pig. Rest in Peace, Thistle.) There was even, unbelievable, several scanned pages of a hilarious photo album titled, "This is your life, David Cassidy." She must have made this shortly after I broke it off with her in search of normalcy. While I was seriously crushing on David, occasionally daring to admit it might be hopeless, she and her pals were making fun of the whole scene. I'm afraid she was having a better time.

And then... I dreamed of her! I'm in a junior high class room with the desks pushed together to make rows and I see her in the second row. I go right up to her and say, "Hi Leslie."  And then I ask her to dance. We do a slow sort of sweaty galumphing waltz around the room- the same way I danced at the first junior high dance, when we asked Kevin Roberts' older sister for a lesson beforehand and she taught us the box step. She must have been messing with us, right? At the dance, the others quickly abandoned the box step when they saw what was really going on- kids swaying back and forth or gyrating rhythmically, but I hung on desperately to the four steps, terrified, in the equally scared arms of Larry Kosenko. In this dream waltz with Leslie, both of us silver-haired 50-somethings, I apologize. "I was wrong," I say, and go on to explain how I now understand that the weirdos turned out to be artists. I can't tell if she's hearing me but that might be because sound systems in dreams are notoriously unreliable.