Anachronistic Austen-esque
28 December 2007 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3rdragonI had a dream last night. This isn't too surprising; I had two dreams the night before, and at least one the night before that - I believe that this is a function of getting nine or ten hours of sleep a night and lazing when I wake up, rather than becoming awake at seven and getting up more-or-less immediately (more immediately if it's a day when I think I'm in danger of falling right back asleep again). I tend to do a lot of dreaming when I regularly sleep in a bit-but-not-lots.
So.
I was at a fancy ball sometime during the nineteenth century. There was an enormously complicated system of dance parters and courting going on: the Three Post-It Note System. You haven't heard of the Three Post-It Note System? Honestly! Simply everyone who is anyone uses the Three Post-It Note System. You really haven't heard of it? Well, I suppose I could explain it to you.
All the eligible bachelors at the party have a different color of post-it notes (what do they do if there are more men than colors of post-it notes? I don't know. Perhaps this only works for small parties, or maybe they use patterned post-it notes). Whenever a man asks a lady to dance with him, he sticks half of one of his post-it notes onto her dress. After he has danced with her three times, he can offer her the other half of one of his post-it notes. If she accepts, he moves up in the courting hierarchy - an accepted suitor, if you will. This isn't a pre-engagement stage, or even the equivalent of serious dating; I think it's more just a signal from the man that he's really courting the lady, and a signal from the lady that she's seriously considering his suit. (By the by, it's permitted, although not really approved, for a lady to have more than one serious suitor, but a man can only seriously court one lady at a time.) So that was the system at this ball. Mind you, this wasn't explained in the dream, it was just The Way Things Were and implied.
So I was at this party, and had been courted by one gentleman for most of the evening, and then it turned out that he was in some way unsuitable (I don't remember how. If you want an explanation, pick any Jane Austen novel and find an unsuitable suitor - it'll probably work). I wasn't really disheartened by this, despite the fact that he was more-or-less my only prospect because he'd been monopolizing me the entire night and I hadn't really gotten a chance to dance with anyone else. I guess that it was early in the Season, and that there would be other parties. So, late in the night though it was, I did by best to catch up on dancing with other people. In the process I happened to get a good glance at mydressgown, which was a dark blue plaid (silk?) with puffy sleeves and a large skirt.
The next bit of the dream is a bit fuzzy, except for one clear memory of twenty-first century me trying to do the appropriate sort of dances (goodness knows how I got through several hours of dancing earlier, if that was all the skill at dancing this dream was going to give me. Let's just say it was a good thing that the skirt was long and pouffy).
And did I mention that this dream took place in my father's house? It did. Well, sort-of. I mean, when I was dancing and happened to be in the corners of the room, the corners were recognizably those of my father's kitchen, only stretched big enough to fit a large number of people, half of whom had puffy sleeves and even bigger skirts. It should be mentioned that my father's kitchen is small, can feel crowded with two people in it, and is completely unworkable with three.
The ball ended, and I went outside, which happened to be my dad's dining room. As I was about to go back to my mother's cottage (goodness knows why I was unescorted), I ran into a brother and sister - the brother was one of the young men I'd danced with towards the end of the party. They were carrying four or five pizza boxes (I did mention that this dream was anacronistic, didn't I? Good.) and discussing how their house/flat/abode was going to be foreclosed on within the next two hours if they didn't pay some debt or other. They didn't seem unduly concerned by this, despite being very frank about the fact that they were completely penniless. Seeing me, the sister asked me to hold the box with the whole cheese pizza while the brother held the box with the remnants of the stromboli and she consolidated two or three kinds of pizza into one box. I must confess that at this point I departed from the path of good Austen heroines. An Austen heroine would have, if not cut the connection directly, at least put sufficient frost into her voice to let the young man know that he was no longer being considered a possible suitor (due to lack of money and a certain tendency to accumulate debts he couldn't pay). I just held the pizza box.
The brother suddenly interupted a musing about whether the stromboli would fit in the same box with the pizza to turn to me and demand to know if I had a viper channel on my person. I was understandably confused, and his enthusiastic hand motions did nothing to help clarify the situation. After a few minutes I realized that the sister had set the pizza boxes down on the bureau when my dad keeps plates (which was also a hedge, in the odd way of dreams) and had been bitten by a snake. And the young man wanted a knife so that he could slice the bit to get the venom out. So I walked over to dad's kitchen and got a knife, wondering if it would be forward and more familiar than I wished to be to invite the two of them to my mother's house while the sister recovered. And then I began to wake up a bit, and began wondering if snakebitten limbs are supposed to be kept above the heart, or below the heart, and I couldn't remember.
Wow, I'm tired. And I'm willing to bet that a third of those sentences are odd in terms of grammar (if not outright wrong) or completely unintelligible in terms of content, but it's getting late. I'll probably edit it in the morning. And I'll tell you about the puppet theater, too.
Edit: So. Dream. While I've had weirder dreams, I don't recall ever having invented anything quite like the Three Post-It Note System before. Unless you want to count the mountain-climbing Rescue Nuns. Which were just as weird, but not nearly as complex, so I'm not going to count them.
And the theater. Last night Mom, Isaac and I went to see A Christmas Carol at the Mum Puppet Theater. I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy it, but was playing the part of the thrilled, cultured daughter because Isaac was doing The Teenager Thing where he wasn't interested in anything and had to be bribed by the offer of dinner at a restaurant of his choice (he picked Mama's - home of the unhealthiest cheese steaks in the Greater Philadelphia Area. The sandwiches are huge, and greasy (by which I mean considerably more greasy than most cheese steaks), and absolutely delicious. It was lovely having a cheese steak with the meat done properly and actual cheese and the real kind of bread - even if the Mama's cheese steaks are smaller than the ones I remember when I was a child. Isaac's memories concur, but I'm still not sure if this is a function of the changing size of the cheese steaks or a function of growing up). Have I mentioned that Isaac is really, truly a teenager now? He acquired the Teenager Attitude years ago - actually, it's a family joke that I turned 13 and he became a teenager - so he would have been eight or nine, but now he looks the part, too. His sweatshirts have been getting baggier and baggier over the past several years, and I was surprised to notice that he now has the Hooded Teenager Slouch as well. Ever since he claimed the mp3 player mom got me for Christmas (I'm not going to go into the story of my mother being lied to by salespeople, but suffice it to say that I wanted an mp3 recorder, and despite blithe assurances that all mp3 players record, this one doesn't.) he's even had earbuds glued to his ears. And his voice changed over this past fall.
Anyway. The puppet theater. The show was performed with two actors, one of whom played scrooge and the other of whom acted some characters and manipulated puppets or props for the others. It was really well done. The theater was necessarily small, so it was very intimate, and when they were making it scary prior to the ghost's arrival, it was quite scary. Isaac said that it wasn't scary, and mom said that she didn't feel the arrival of the ghost made it any less scary, but I find the idea of being alone in an old house with noises that you can't identify and that aren't there when you go and look to be much scarier than a well-done papier-mache mask (particularly if the mask's hair is made with a scraggly ostrich feather). The candle blowing out was a nice touch, but I anticipated it (it occurred to me that it would be good for the candle to go out right about now, and I was just wondering how that could be arranged when it did). The Ghost of Christmas Past was excellent - it was essentially a lighted head on a stick with long flowing gauze, which was manipulated by the second actor. He could stick his free hand through the layers of gauze of the spirit needed to be more material, or waft the head around the room if it needed to be more ethereal, and the lighting was just right so that it was mostly impossible to see the actor doing it. The lighting was really good for the whole show, actually.
I quite recommend it if any of you happen to be in Philadelphia over Christmas.
So.
I was at a fancy ball sometime during the nineteenth century. There was an enormously complicated system of dance parters and courting going on: the Three Post-It Note System. You haven't heard of the Three Post-It Note System? Honestly! Simply everyone who is anyone uses the Three Post-It Note System. You really haven't heard of it? Well, I suppose I could explain it to you.
All the eligible bachelors at the party have a different color of post-it notes (what do they do if there are more men than colors of post-it notes? I don't know. Perhaps this only works for small parties, or maybe they use patterned post-it notes). Whenever a man asks a lady to dance with him, he sticks half of one of his post-it notes onto her dress. After he has danced with her three times, he can offer her the other half of one of his post-it notes. If she accepts, he moves up in the courting hierarchy - an accepted suitor, if you will. This isn't a pre-engagement stage, or even the equivalent of serious dating; I think it's more just a signal from the man that he's really courting the lady, and a signal from the lady that she's seriously considering his suit. (By the by, it's permitted, although not really approved, for a lady to have more than one serious suitor, but a man can only seriously court one lady at a time.) So that was the system at this ball. Mind you, this wasn't explained in the dream, it was just The Way Things Were and implied.
So I was at this party, and had been courted by one gentleman for most of the evening, and then it turned out that he was in some way unsuitable (I don't remember how. If you want an explanation, pick any Jane Austen novel and find an unsuitable suitor - it'll probably work). I wasn't really disheartened by this, despite the fact that he was more-or-less my only prospect because he'd been monopolizing me the entire night and I hadn't really gotten a chance to dance with anyone else. I guess that it was early in the Season, and that there would be other parties. So, late in the night though it was, I did by best to catch up on dancing with other people. In the process I happened to get a good glance at my
The next bit of the dream is a bit fuzzy, except for one clear memory of twenty-first century me trying to do the appropriate sort of dances (goodness knows how I got through several hours of dancing earlier, if that was all the skill at dancing this dream was going to give me. Let's just say it was a good thing that the skirt was long and pouffy).
And did I mention that this dream took place in my father's house? It did. Well, sort-of. I mean, when I was dancing and happened to be in the corners of the room, the corners were recognizably those of my father's kitchen, only stretched big enough to fit a large number of people, half of whom had puffy sleeves and even bigger skirts. It should be mentioned that my father's kitchen is small, can feel crowded with two people in it, and is completely unworkable with three.
The ball ended, and I went outside, which happened to be my dad's dining room. As I was about to go back to my mother's cottage (goodness knows why I was unescorted), I ran into a brother and sister - the brother was one of the young men I'd danced with towards the end of the party. They were carrying four or five pizza boxes (I did mention that this dream was anacronistic, didn't I? Good.) and discussing how their house/flat/abode was going to be foreclosed on within the next two hours if they didn't pay some debt or other. They didn't seem unduly concerned by this, despite being very frank about the fact that they were completely penniless. Seeing me, the sister asked me to hold the box with the whole cheese pizza while the brother held the box with the remnants of the stromboli and she consolidated two or three kinds of pizza into one box. I must confess that at this point I departed from the path of good Austen heroines. An Austen heroine would have, if not cut the connection directly, at least put sufficient frost into her voice to let the young man know that he was no longer being considered a possible suitor (due to lack of money and a certain tendency to accumulate debts he couldn't pay). I just held the pizza box.
The brother suddenly interupted a musing about whether the stromboli would fit in the same box with the pizza to turn to me and demand to know if I had a viper channel on my person. I was understandably confused, and his enthusiastic hand motions did nothing to help clarify the situation. After a few minutes I realized that the sister had set the pizza boxes down on the bureau when my dad keeps plates (which was also a hedge, in the odd way of dreams) and had been bitten by a snake. And the young man wanted a knife so that he could slice the bit to get the venom out. So I walked over to dad's kitchen and got a knife, wondering if it would be forward and more familiar than I wished to be to invite the two of them to my mother's house while the sister recovered. And then I began to wake up a bit, and began wondering if snakebitten limbs are supposed to be kept above the heart, or below the heart, and I couldn't remember.
Wow, I'm tired. And I'm willing to bet that a third of those sentences are odd in terms of grammar (if not outright wrong) or completely unintelligible in terms of content, but it's getting late. I'll probably edit it in the morning. And I'll tell you about the puppet theater, too.
Edit: So. Dream. While I've had weirder dreams, I don't recall ever having invented anything quite like the Three Post-It Note System before. Unless you want to count the mountain-climbing Rescue Nuns. Which were just as weird, but not nearly as complex, so I'm not going to count them.
And the theater. Last night Mom, Isaac and I went to see A Christmas Carol at the Mum Puppet Theater. I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy it, but was playing the part of the thrilled, cultured daughter because Isaac was doing The Teenager Thing where he wasn't interested in anything and had to be bribed by the offer of dinner at a restaurant of his choice (he picked Mama's - home of the unhealthiest cheese steaks in the Greater Philadelphia Area. The sandwiches are huge, and greasy (by which I mean considerably more greasy than most cheese steaks), and absolutely delicious. It was lovely having a cheese steak with the meat done properly and actual cheese and the real kind of bread - even if the Mama's cheese steaks are smaller than the ones I remember when I was a child. Isaac's memories concur, but I'm still not sure if this is a function of the changing size of the cheese steaks or a function of growing up). Have I mentioned that Isaac is really, truly a teenager now? He acquired the Teenager Attitude years ago - actually, it's a family joke that I turned 13 and he became a teenager - so he would have been eight or nine, but now he looks the part, too. His sweatshirts have been getting baggier and baggier over the past several years, and I was surprised to notice that he now has the Hooded Teenager Slouch as well. Ever since he claimed the mp3 player mom got me for Christmas (I'm not going to go into the story of my mother being lied to by salespeople, but suffice it to say that I wanted an mp3 recorder, and despite blithe assurances that all mp3 players record, this one doesn't.) he's even had earbuds glued to his ears. And his voice changed over this past fall.
Anyway. The puppet theater. The show was performed with two actors, one of whom played scrooge and the other of whom acted some characters and manipulated puppets or props for the others. It was really well done. The theater was necessarily small, so it was very intimate, and when they were making it scary prior to the ghost's arrival, it was quite scary. Isaac said that it wasn't scary, and mom said that she didn't feel the arrival of the ghost made it any less scary, but I find the idea of being alone in an old house with noises that you can't identify and that aren't there when you go and look to be much scarier than a well-done papier-mache mask (particularly if the mask's hair is made with a scraggly ostrich feather). The candle blowing out was a nice touch, but I anticipated it (it occurred to me that it would be good for the candle to go out right about now, and I was just wondering how that could be arranged when it did). The Ghost of Christmas Past was excellent - it was essentially a lighted head on a stick with long flowing gauze, which was manipulated by the second actor. He could stick his free hand through the layers of gauze of the spirit needed to be more material, or waft the head around the room if it needed to be more ethereal, and the lighting was just right so that it was mostly impossible to see the actor doing it. The lighting was really good for the whole show, actually.
I quite recommend it if any of you happen to be in Philadelphia over Christmas.
