A LEAD ROLE

I dreamt I was cast in the lead role in a play. It was scheduled to be performed on Saturday and it was already Thursday and I had not even begun to learn my lines, there had been no rehearsals, and the crew responsible for the set were hanging around with no idea what to do. I had arrived in good time that morning, as requested, but the director had not yet bothered to show up. There was another actor in a lead role, but he seemed unconcerned.

When the director finally arrived he proved to be an Oliver Stone type--or at least the type I imagine Oliver Stone to be: tall, hefty, self-possessed, but a bit disconnected from what was happening around him. I was delighted, though, that he brought with him a copy of "Bob Went Home"--a large-scale, clumsy book/poem/sculpture that I assembled with the artist Gary Lloyd many years ago, as a young man. He had opened it up to reveal its extensive, and some dangling parts, and gave me to understand that he set great store by. Which encouraged me to think that he was a man who had a good grasp of contemporary culture.

He seemed curiously disinterested in getting to work, however. Everyone was just hanging around, waiting for something to happen. I worried a lot about not knowing my lines, with only a bit of Thursday and Friday left before the performance. I was also more than a little annoyed to think that we'd probably be staying up very late that night.