Irene the Bean: The Musical

Yesterday was my day off, and I ended up sleeping quite a bit on the couch. I got out of the house to run a couple of errands, but spent most of my time napping.

Maybe I'm coming down with something, maybe I'm catching up on my sleep, whatever. But when I woke up in the early afternoon, before Patrick had gotten home from work, I had had the funniest dream...

City Garage decided to take these blog entries and turn all of my writing into a musical. Frederique and Charles (he's a real writer: his play, "Patriot Act," won a pretty big award, and was produced in New York earlier this summer) were going to adapt, somehow, my rambling entries and create a play. About me. So the dream goes, and Charles comes up with a script, based on this blog, and then they get into casting the thing. They audition all the City Garage members: all beautiful, young girls with perfect bodies (and at City Garage productions, you get to see those bodies!)... and it turns out that none of those women works in the title role.

So, Frederique approaches me, and asks if I want to do it myself.

Of course, here's the silly part: I am not an actor. I've been on stage, yeah, but usually I'm terrified, and usually I'm just hoping no one will notice. For the two shows I was in, I hoped that I might get at least one lesson in acting, but it never happens: my presence on stage didn't really require it, so I let it go. In this silly dream, I get the full-on "A Star is Born" treatment (remember? That's always my favorite sequence in movies: remember Neely O'Hara in "Valley of the Dolls"? Or Judy Garland in "Summer Stock"? Or Betty Hutton in "Annie Get Your Gun"?). Since my play is a musical, I get singing and dancing lessons as well as acting lessons. This actually sounds fun, no? It's totally ridiculous, because City Garage doesn't do musicals, doesn't have room for an orchestra, would never ever put me on stage in the title role of anything, but for a dream, it was pretty fun.

Anyway, I don't really know how many more details were in my dream that I've now forgotten. I do know that I woke up while we were rehearsing the show's opening moments, with the overture. Yes. "Irene the Bean: The Musical" had an overture.

Silly.