Old Paint
I dream I am in a dressing room in what appears to be the damp, stale bowels of a grotesquely decorated theatre. It is either the era of Vaudeville, or turn of the century Paris. It brings to mind both The Phantom of the Opera and Ed Wynn. Either way, the fact that my bathroom medicine cabinet is on the wall doesn’t ring any discordant bells. In fact, I am drawn to peruse the contents and there, secreted on the shelf above the deodorant and the eye drops, is a pack of Gitanes. I can smell the tobacco.
A pantomimic is mugging for the imaginary mob in his mirror. Try as he might to reflect the blue sky and sunshine that might calm the mob, he can’t disguise that he sees the world through brown eyes.
He is an unconvinced and unconvincing optimist. With every exaggerated expression the whitened wrinkles of his mask crinkle and crack, making a delicate rustling sound like tissue paper.
He is feeling profoundly, wearily troubled. Where will this situation go? Will his captive audience turn on him? And if they did, would they surge out of the mirror like vengeful Sergei Eisenstein Bolsheviks looking for the lisping Tsar? For the record, the Tsar looks like Donald O’Connor, who was in a movie on TVO last week (I don’t know how know this since he doesn’t have even a walk-on in this dream). The mob senses his sadness and smells blood. They can see he’s just another chalk-faced clown whistling past another flickering neon graveyard.
When the smoke clears (the smoke had drifted in while I was distracted studying the pantomimic’s face) I am left to wonder what it was for. I mean, it wasn’t smoky, and then it was, but it doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the narrative of the dream.
I want to continue the story but can’t stop dead-end speculation about the smoke. Or was it fog? Or was it an errant metaphor? This question is becoming really important. I am feeling uneasy, and I awaken.