High School Was Too High For Me

After the Mortified show, which was a total blast, I dream of wandering the streets of my adolescence. I stop by the church we started going to after Dad's accident. But I don't go in. I come to a school and walk down the empty redolent hallway with its dark wood and musty paper smells, and then to an empty classroom. I walk out the back door to an empty space with a tall sculpture, which I climb and then become terrified of the height. The ladder down is unreliable and I realize the danger is not as much in falling, as in becoming paralyzed with fear. Somehow I find another way. Girls stream into the space and I know I'm not supposed to be there, so leave. Looking back, I marvel at how the scary rigid sculpture has become flexible for them- it bends and brings them safely back to ground.

I come to a hospital where a client wants me to sneak her a glass of wine. She's making something out of fabric and I dig through my bag of scarves for her. I show them all an old clock I bought at a secondhand (ha, get it?) shop for $15. It's a wooden box that opens, with a sculpture on top like Michael de Meng would make. An art clock box. Someone asks who made it and I look on the bottom to see the word, "CAVEWOMAN." Visiting hours are over, it's time to go. A former client hugs me, crying, says, "You didn't spend very much time with me." With a pang, I realize she's right and I cry too. Another former client, who'd been anorexic, spontaneously exclaims, "I'm hungry!" and we both open our eyes wide in surprised gladness.

I visited all the institutions: A church, a school, a secondhand shop and a hospital. High school was too high for me, and this morning I cry with missing my clients. Life is really something, I tell ya.

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.