While working on the Music Man arc of Pinta Parade I
have a dream. I am in a vernal park with electric green hills and I am Charlie
the Anvil Salesman only I am the current age I am now and I am with the cast
and co. of CCT music man and we are holding a giant drape about the size of a football
field or a giant American flag and we are trying to pitch a tent in this
bucolic utopia so that we can have one final encore performance at the end of
time. I am surrounded by Tommy Dijalis and Mayor Shinn who I will learn years
later via social media is now a pastor. Anthony is next to me and he is
flapping the drape so that it creates cosmic ripples in the center of the tarp.
We are trying to erect a theatre for our final production. I see Eulalie Shinn
and she is talking about her irksome bunion and while blathering on about
Balzac. There is Zaneeta who is Ye Gadsing out of control and there is Couri
and Jenny and men I have never seen before wearing diapers and wings flanking
them on both sides and there is Stacia, refulgent, dressed all in white and
glowing like a keyhole to heaven. All of
us have our assigned positions around the gargantuan contours of the tarp and all
of us lift the fabric at exactly the same time only when we do we fail to erect
a tent which Anthony refers to as a temple of light. The fabric falls down flaccid. Rather than
offering encouragement everyone is yelling and bickering and
pickalittle-talk-alittle at everyone else. Anthony is attired in his Harold
Hill conductor uniform which is really a Manual high school drum major outfit
and says lets try this again and everyone flaps the sheath of fabric in a
billowing snap and lifts only again it falls short. We try it one more time. I
am looking around the geometric configuration for people I have lost and while
there is no sight of Andrea or Dawn I notice next to me is Little Betsy. She is
wearing knickerbockers and the derby cap she wore in the show only there is
something different about her I can’t quite put the proverbial finger on just
yet. We all inhale as a collective
integer and lift the tarp one more time, this time higher than ever. The tarp
forms the shape of either a light bulb or a balloon. It hovers above us. Below
us it is now visible that the ground the tarp was concealing there are phallic
shaped pillars and acropolis like formations and its pretty clear that this is
the stage we are to be performing our encore performance on. The tarp overhead is hovering and it begins
to glow and turn white, the color of Stacia’s unblemished attire. I look at
little Betsy and smile and when I go to lift her up notice that she harbors a
heart shaped package below her waist and an Adam’s apple in the center of her
neck and, if I look, I can see that she looks exactly like I did 22 years
earlier and then I discern rather cathartically that it is me and that I am
near sighted cause I have my glasses doffed, cause I want people to notice me,
cause I want to be accepted and loved and just as I walk towards myself dressed in little Betsy attire I let
go of the hem of the tarp and the entire fabric falls dead like a picnic
blanket over the city of Pompeii and all of my fellow actors and actresses are
bitching, they are screaming at me. They are calling me a fuck-up. They are
asking why, even all these years later, I can’t do anything right. They are
saying that I almost had it, the temple of light erected in which we were to
perform our faretheewells and then I
hear Pam screaming at me, ripping into me, calling me Charlie, asking me why I
ruined it for everybody.
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