Last night I dreamed I was working in a New York City Off-Broadway theatre, something I've done a lot of in waking life. Many New York actors make ends meet, when they're not acting, by taking tickets and ushering, and so forth, in theatres. Besides the pay it's also a chance to see a show for free, and tickets can be sort of expensive.
In my dream it was my first time working in this particular theatre, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was one of a dozen or so people who were given receipt pads. We were supposed to help out when the line at the box office got too long. We were all wearing the standard usher outfit: black shoes, black pants and a white shirt provided by us, with a black vest and clip-on bow tie provided by the theatre,
I started flirting with an actress who was standing around holding a pad like the one I had. Pretty soon we were snuggling and kissing. She was wonderful. Beautiful and intelligent and witty. Just made me sigh to be around her, let alone having her permission to touch her. She reminded me of a wonderful actress I knew once in real life in NYC, who, amazingly, seemed to like me a lot, and it seemed as if she and I were beginning a romance, but I managed to screw it up.
One man came in, got a ticket and went into the theatre, and then another one did, and then the show started. None of us seemed interested in watching the show, so there were only two spectators this evening, each prominent New York theatre people themselves.
None of us standing around with our receipt pads had had to do a thing. But each of us still got paid a $20 bill. Judging from this evening, it did not seem that the show was a huge commercial hit. But I didn't know anything about it. For all I knew it might have been playing for years in that theatre already, might have made a fortune before winding down.
We were discussing what we were going to do with our newfound 20 bucks when the house manager, a beautiful young woman, looked like an actress, approached with a clipboard holding a form she was filling out, and asked each of us in turn what our major non-theatre job was, and what our biggest weakness was at that job.
I replied that I test drove EV's for the manufacturer (in real life I haven't yet had been employed by an EV maker), and that my biggest weakness was not concentrating on what I was supposed to do. "Asleep at the wheel?" the manager asked me, and some people laughed. "No," I replied, "I haven't actually caused any accidents yet. Not that absent-minded. What I mean is that I'm supposed to be talking into a tape recorder the whole time about the vehicle's performance, comfort, user interface and so on, and a lot of the time I just forget to do that, and drive, and think about show business instead."
Some of the others decided to blow their earnings on dinner. I and the actress whom I had been hugging and kissing went for a walk, holding hands. It was a pleasant evening, brisk but not unpleasantly cold. We told each other our life stories, window-shopped, people-watched. A nice stereotypical beginning to an NYC showbiz romance. Then I woke up.
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