Archives for August 22, 2012

I don’t often have work-related anxiety dreams, but I had a doozy of one after staggering home last night from a twelve-hour-long tech rehearsal for Satchmo at the Waldorf.
I dreamed that a second production of the show was opening next week in Syracuse, and that everyone at Shakespeare & Company, myself included, had been so busy getting ready for our opening night in Massachusetts that we’d completely forgotten to send the latest version of the script to New York so that the other actor who was playing the double role of Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser could learn all his new lines. The funny part of the dream is that the “actor” in question was–wait for it–Little Walter. (I also dreamed that a woman was playing Armstrong and Glaser in a third production of the show, but I can’t remember any details of that part of the dream.)
The dream was so vivid that I woke up dead certain that I needed to get up at once, throw on my clothes, drive to the company office in Lenox, print out the revised script, and ship it off to Syracuse via Federal Express. Then I looked at the clock on the nightstand and saw that it was three-thirty in the morning. I laughed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
I’m still wondering who the woman in the other production was, though….
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Little Walter plays “Little Walter’s Jump” live in 1967:

In honor of the first preview performance of Shakespeare & Company’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, I’d like to share with you a little tune from my childhood that I always post on such occasions:

See you tonight!

Louis Armstrong and Dean Martin perform a medley of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “Sleepy Time Down South,” “Mississippi Mud,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Swanee,” “Bill Bailey,” “Gotta Travel On,” “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” on The Dean Martin Show in 1966, accompanied by Les Brown and His Band of Renown:

“I like to think of them out there in the dark, watching us. Sometimes we’ll do something and they’ll laugh. Sometimes we’ll do something and they’ll cry. And maybe, one day we’ll do something so magnificent, the whole universe will get goosebumps.”
Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe