Stage Fright

Background: Once, I was in a film class in high school. We split into groups to make films. It was meant to be like real filmmaking, i.e. the person who wrote the script wouldn't even have to talk to the rest of the group again.

How many of you ever worked in a group in high school?

Right. So Annna ended up writing the movie, rewriting it when the stars dropped out of the class, Xeroxing it, figuring out special effects, raiding her own closet for costumes, cleaning up the stage area, wrangling extras, manning one of the cameras and directing too, as the director decided she wanted to act. The director wasn't completely flaky, though, it was just that out of 15 people in the group, only four actually worked on the movie the whole way through. Out of the six who even worked on it at all.

The director was a crazy straight edge punky girl named Deirdre. She was cool, particularly in the eyes of a pathetic nerd like myself. She dodged a lot of the work (which ended up in my lap, natch) until the last week of production, when she holed up in the AV room and edited like a crazy monkey.

The movie was about two dumb guys girls who were in a bad band. They went around the country and dug up dead rock and roll stars to make an unholy frontman.

You can walk around pretty much any cemetery in the greater Medford area, dressed like punks and carrying shovels, no questions asked. I did not know this. It was broad daylight, though, so I guess that helped.

"The Blair Witch Project" brought back filmmaking memories. That part of the mockumentary was certainly accurate: making a movie is nothing but head-hurting badness and people yelling at each other. Being killed by Evil is also very likely, even though that didn't happen to us.

The Dream:

I am a big rock star, or maybe just on the edge of stardom. Anyway, I am in a band and we have a show in a few minutes. Oddly enough, the show is in my house. Everything looks different -- the upstairs is dressing rooms and old sets, the downstairs is full of a stage and moshing area -- but the room configuration is the same. We are all getting dressed and tuning up upstairs.

I'm fit and thin. Also, I think I'm a man. I have on clean blue jeans and a loose, short-sleeved purple shirt. It's kind of iridescent. It looks really neat. I also have terminal '80s hair, sort of an afro accented with a blue headband. Not terribly sure what instrument I play, though. I think I'm that moustache guy from Hall and Oates, actually. All my clothes feel nice and clean, and breathe well. That'll be helpful on stage.

I start looking for the rest of the band. Room to room, I cannot find anyone. I do find, propped up against the wall, my keyboard. It's one of the kind that has a little thing at the end so you can hold it like a guitar.

"Oh, great," I think, "I can't play keyboard very well. If I had a guitar, I couldn't play it either, but I could at least mess with the settings so it just sounded like fuzzy sound."

"Hey," I also think, "What do our songs sound like?"

I'm kind of worried now.

Back when I was a lot younger and Quantum Leap was on regular TV, I had an irrational fear that that body-jumping moron might be me for a day and completely screw things up. I knew it was irrational, but I still worried about it before I went to bed. For a while I was thinking about writing up a wallet card that said where I lived and my likes and dislikes, but I never did.

Of course, now that I'm older and haven't seen that show for ages, I don't worry about silly things like that any longer. Now that I've read The Shadow Out Of Time I worry about what would happen if one of the body-hopping Great Race of Yith were to take over my body, forget how to use spoons and research the occult for a few years. That, too, would suck.

So anyway, I'm due to go on in a couple of minutes and I can't find the rest of the band, I don't know how to play anything, and I don't remember any of our songs. What do I do?

Well, I wander around a bit more, and then I decide that there's only one thing to do. I've got to have a drug overdose and use the time in rehab to learn how to play something. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find any drugs or anything. I guess it's good to be a clean band, but I'm still screwed. Can't climb out the windows, because we're on the second story. Can't sneak out through the club; I'm too famous.

If I could find the rest of the band, I could confess that I have no memory of how I got there or how to do music things, but they're all missing. Well, maybe that means we're not going on. I walk down the hall and run into Deirdre. I know that she's the singer, so no help with instruments there. I ask her if she knows where the rest of the band is. Nope. She figures we're playing alone until they show up.

I go downstairs to check on the crowd. The place is packed. It's odd to see my house filled with music fans, but it is. The joint is jumping. I attempt to sneak out the door, but a couple of fans recognize me and point and scream. My hopes of escape are dashed. A hush falls over the crowd as I make my way towards the stage. Deirdre is already up there, microphone in hand.

I think about now I realize I'm dreaming, or at least that I'm in an odd state. Up on stage, instrument in hand, surrounded by a crowd that could turn violent at any moment, I feel oddly calm. I realize that this situation is like those times when you say one word over and over again, until it has no meaning, or think too hard about the difference between your mind and your brain until you misplace your sense of self. That is, I hope other people have had that experience. Anyway, in the dream I realize that I just have to think about something else and trick myself into remembering how to play my songs. So I count, slowly and deliberately in my head, visualizing blank whiteness.

And everything is okay.