Dream: 'Scarce a Grizzled Hair'

Dream 20020730, 4:10 AM:

‘Scarce a Grizzled Hair’

I’m in someone’s garage. The house reminds me of the Kaminsky’s house, across the street from Mom and Dad’s, but the family that lives there is nobody I know. I think that I’m staying over. I close up the garage, using switches set into the wall that lower the automatic garage doors. As I close one of them, I see a bottle of red dye, the same kind of apothecary jar that I use for my soap dyes – I pick it up, and carry it away from the door. As I’m nearly done closing up, a girl walks in through a chain-link gate that opens into a side of the garage. I ask how come she has no gun, and she tells me that she’s not afraid, she just bangs the gate and comes in. We go upstairs.

I’m staying in a little narrow room above the garage, or above the space adjoining the garage to the house. It seems like there are two bunk beds attached to the wall, and there is another man staying here too. He is painting two murals on the wall opposite wall, I think it may be above his bed, but opposite mine. It seems like the murals are scenes from Shakespeare, or possibly a Shakespearean interpretation from Greek myth. One of them is very small, and seems already finished; the other one is fairly large, and still all pencil sketch. The finished picture is above and to the right of the unfinished one, and he is standing working at the opposite end of the other one. He is working on the sketching, posing his own arms to draw from. The part of the sketched mural that I can see so far has a man in a Renaissance shirt and doublet making a dramatic pointing gesture. Then, the artist is trying to drink out of a spiral conch shell, so that he can figure out how it ought to look in the picture. He tries it in a couple of different angles before he finds one he is pleased with. He is very animated as he paints.

The girl is directing a play. Her father is playing the judge, and all the family are involved in some way. I get the feeling that the father has acted a lot. The girl is majoring in opera at school – she repeatedly talks about how much she loves music. At one point, I look at her homework folder, and she has written on it, “Music is my treat.” She and I and someone else, perhaps the other artist, are sprawled on a bed, talking

Later, sitting over breakfast, the girl (Jennifer?) is discussing the casting of the play with her mother. The whole family are in parts of costume and working on bits of scenery, romping around where we are sitting. The father keeps getting more and more of his costume complete: he has a natural-looking curly gray wig and beard, and robes of gray-green. Either Jennifer or her mother says something about Betty can play the part; I don’t know what part they’re talking about. The Dad says something about how Jenny has cut the score – everyone is surprised, because they didn’t expect her to cut any of the music. Everyone asks her, ‘You cut the score?” She explains that she had to shorten it, and to cut any lines would have harmed the play more than cutting some of the music. Her father smiles, like she’s learned an important lesson.

Now, we are in the garage again, eating buttered biscuits. I watch someone passing them out, they are in a big glass jar, and already dripping with butter. They are really good. I take one, and as I’m eating it, drip some butter on the laundry that I’m standing next to. I realize that I’m not dressed, and I grab a robe and wrap up in it.

The father keeps rehearsing his lines. Throughout the course of the dream, they shift, and sound more acted and less read. The phrase that he keeps repeating is, “Scarce a grizzled hair, but better a score of years on these young men.”