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:
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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