It stands to reason, I suppose, that in my dreams I'm as dyslexic reading music as I am reading English. I've been having a lot of music score dreams lately, probably because I've been trying to orchestrate old songs I've arranged. As happens when I'm handed something to read and see a jumble of letters, I can't figure out what I'm supposed to see when I look at a score. And the dreams go on and on. Thanks, Dream Center.
I plead, after a major part of the night is spent looking at these scores, to dream of something else. Last night, Dream Center put me with the Perellas. The Perellas were twins I went to junior and senior high school with; they were also the guys responsible for getting me to Camp Daddy Allen and who'd instigated The Music Man sing-alongs mentioned in the blog, "Well, Yuh Got Trouble."
We are in Lancaster along with another high school friend. We're in a national chain video store. I look for the rental section and can't find it...it's all DVD sales and equipment. John looks, too, and is equally frustrated. Tom, the older of the twins, joins us as we look for the manager. The manager becomes instantly defensive when we complain. We're obviously not the first to bitch about the lack of rental DVDs. He tells us to contact the national office because dropping the rentals wasn't his idea. We agree and leave. We're joined by the Mrs.s Perellas on the street. One of them tells me that I'll have to join Tom and John and Bruce to sing at the Fulton. This doesn't panic me, even though I haven't sung in the act before. I figure I can harmonize bass, which is pretty easy for me to do. Former neighbor Linda comes running out of the store proudly carrying a candle glass covering with a painting on it. We look at each other and try to be happy for Linda, but the painting strikes all of us as a really hackneyed Kincaid knock-off...a bad copy of an uninspired painting. We look at it. She asks all of us which is our favorite part. I see lights in windows and point to two of them. Proudly, she takes it away. I ask what time we're supposed to start the show. At 8...and it's 7:45 now. I was kind of hoping we'd have time for a sound check, which would give me an idea what we'd be singing. We're not far from the theater, so we won't be late for curtain, but there won't be time for anything before we start. We're on Water Street. We take an aluminum-and-glass stairway up to Prince Street. People are buying tickets and going into the theater. Tom and John hail some of the people. I try to push them along so we can at least be on time. Inside, a man takes Tom and his wife ahead of us. I try to follow them but can't. We're on the backstage extension of the balcony. They suddenly disappear and I can't see how to get down to the stage level. John and I look around rather frantically. I lift a heavy red curtain. This reveals a balcony aisle with an exit in the center. We decide to take that...at worst, we can walk through the house and take the stage stairs onto the stage.
In case you're interested, the first time I remember a dyslexic dream was ages ago when I'd started as an announcer. I was on-air and was handed a news bulletin to read right now. I looked at it and all I could see were shapes like the postal bar codes you see under addresses on envelopes. Eventually, as my illustrious announcing career continued, the shapes became letters and looked like words, but they never made sense.
Perhaps I'll tell you about my exercise in orchestration sometime.
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