River dance

I dream that I am in my childhood back yard. The sun is setting and there are storm clouds and all the cracks in the universe are visible. There are lots of aliens but that's typical for the time of day. I see Brian Dennehy wearing a black cloak and that's not typical. When I get closer I see he is really Father Time, or Death (gender is very important in this dream you'll see). I laugh and Death laughs he almost had me fooled. 

Now we are in a restaurant and I am siting with all the feminine figures in my life. All of them. They are all upset with me, which is typical. (I'm sorry this is so binary, my dream writers are modernists with a smudge of post colonial & post structuralism). I am moving from table to table and trying to tell them my death story and no one wants to hear it and finally the one who looks like my ex wife says: "we are tired of your stories, you don't need to keep performing your life for us through these ridiculous stories."  As you can imagine this is very upsetting so I go under the table and sulk. (There is more How I Met Your Mother in this dream than I would like to admit). 

Next we are outside and it is night and we are walking around the hills that are on the edge of the sea. Elli is with me and she is particularly restless and reminds me of me on stormy nights in summer when I was a teenager. I have not changed that much. Soon she runs ahead of me and then she trips and starts to roll down. My first thought is that if she is going to fall off a cliff then I'm going too because I don't want to live without my daughter and besides the other world might be interesting. So I roll after her and she is close to water but it's a river not the ocean and she falls and submerges. I go in after her but right away I understand what is happening. She has turned herself into a fish, this is what she wanted for a long time and I can't follow her because I will never be that. I can go under the water, and I do, but I can't live there. She can though because this is where she is home. I understand this is what happens between all fathers and daughters. 

Last I am on the banks of the river, but another part. I am fishing with two men I know. They are older, I guess you could say post menopausal if we had such designations for men but we don't because we missed an important turn 40,000 years ago. It's not too late. Anyway we are fishing and don't worry about me catching Elli because we are using old bait, old eggs that do not have any more spark in them. We are throwing lines and crowds come and go and get in our way and I catch something enormous. I reel in part of a big pile of rope. I see it goes from the bottom of the lake to the middle of the sky. This is just part of the net that's been here since the beginning, the one that unites the below with the above. I am sad because of all that happened and I am not at home here with these men (but we are certainly related) and I'm not at home in the river with the fish (but we are certainly relayed) and I might not be home anywhere here but it sure feels close to home. 

O&E new

(Now ORPHEUS opens a lemonade stand and is charging nothing but it'll cost you your heart but hearts are cheap is what he is thinking. He is talking to his BRO.)

BRO: A lemonade stand is a tricky venture how will you suss it out. 

ORPHEUS: Wow, bra, ever since you went to England your speech is so sophisticated. 

BRO: They don't call it England over there they call it United EnKland. 

ORPHEUS: Oh wow that's cool. 

BRO: Yah. 

ORPHEUS: I don't think that's true but it's cool. 

(A beat. The kind of comfortable silence that happens between friends who are not all that smart, it's familiar and easy and dim.)

BRO: Why lemonade, Orpheus. 

ORPHEUS: Because did you hear that album. 

BRO: No but I watched the video until I got to the Pippilotti Rist part. 

ORPHEUS: Yeah that was cool. 

BRO: But derivative. 

ORPHEUS: I don't know calculus so who knows about that but I know myself when I see myself on screen, or like in songs, in whatever you would call a screen for songs. 

BRO: Oh my gosh you see yourself in the music are you going to wear a yellow dress or like what now. 

ORPHEUS: Oh I'm not her. I'm the window. I'm the hammer. I'm the glass breaking. I'm the moment of shattering. 

BRO: Oh. 

ORPHEUS: You want to buy some lemonade. 

BRO: In London we call it mad citric vitality mate.

ORPHEUS: I don't think that's true. 

BRO: I'm on a new regimen where I don't drink anything. 

ORPHEUS: Cool. 

BRO: You should be all like the first one is free but after that it might cost you all your strength because my heart is heavy as gold baby. 

(BRO kisses his own fingers and really looks like he thinks this might be a good song and he's wondering how people wrote things down when they think of them because this hasn't happened to him before.) 

(ORPHEUS is thinking of how he should move through the world carrying so much weight but it's really not all that much but we will keep that quiet for now.). 

(Now she's walking and she sees that place where she lost him, the x she visits now and again /not often /not seldom /often enough, and she sees pages of books he was reading when they were awake /before they fell asleep, and as she reads it is such a guilty feeling and it is warm too like her chest is being rubbed from the inside, it calms the nervous bird in her throat but it also reminds her there is a nervous bird in her throat, and she is so absorbed she doesn't see the bones /she doesn't recognize the bones, they are not his they are hers, the arms she had when she used to hold him, and even though it is cliche and she knows it she can't help it that she knows that it's not just he who is gone but this part of her is gone too.)

r u mad ophelia

This is March 5, 2016, 8pm.
You are invited to hear a slightly staged reading of this new work by Howl Theatre project. This is the final performance text in the Monsters of the Sea cycle. We're going to be putting this through a development process following this event, so we are requesting your delightful presence. We promise to be present to you. There might be cake, but to be sure, if you really want cake, then you should bring cake. You can also bring beverages of your choosing. You can drink during this. You can't smoke during it, though. But we have an ashtray outside and you are more than welcome. Also, there is a dog in the house. She doesn't smoke, and so far she does not drink, so please do not turn her on to liquor. The people involved have these names: Christopher Danowski, Heather Lee Harper, Jamie Haas Hendricks, Steve Wilcox, Ashley Kerin Martinez, Barry Moon, Stephen Kass, Shannon Phelps, Michael Frioli, Portia Beacham, and Boyd Branch. Oh, please note that this is a private event, and seating is extremely limited (and you might have to sit on the floor even, but there are pillows). This is super duper secret. But our love for you, that's no secret, we want to shout it from the rooftops.
Oh, you're going to need to rsvp for sure to get a space. Send a text to me, and that means you know me already and have my number, haha, I'm not going to just give it out to anybody are you mad? haha.