On Sunday, Julia, my friend Page, and four other people watched Oklahoma! with me on the big screen at our local theater. As part of a “Flashback cinema” promotion, classic movies are returning to the big screen. (See the website here for more information. Casablanca is next week with To Kill a Mockingbird the week after that!) I knew the movie version of the show and have also been a part of several community theater productions, so I felt I knew the show very well.
I was surprised by the dream sequence. I had forgotten the 15 minute ballet that closes the first act. I’m not a fan of huge dance numbers in musicals and this one was no exception. I just couldn’t figure why Rodgers and Hammerstein included it in their adaptation of Green Grow the Lilacs, Lynn Riggs’ 1931 play. Hammerstein had originally conceived of it as a circus themed light ballet. It was the choreographer Agnes de Mille, in her first Broadway collaboration, who suggested the dark ballet the actors called “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.”
After enduring the movie’s forever dream ballet, I started thinking about my own dreams. Although I don’t think they are quite as wild and crazy as Laurey’s in Oklahoma!, they are bizarre and disjointed. Many are repetitive: the final class in college when I forget to turn in my last project, forget to go to class, or the remodel of our first home in Macon while continuing to live in Clarkesville. I am so glad to wake from most of my dreams.
Mom lives in that twilight dream world many mornings. She fusses at young girls for dragging their clothes on the floor. She asks about the baby; she worries no one is watching him/her. She laughs at jokes only she understands. Her feet dance to music unheard by her caregivers. Sometimes her eyes are open, yet she cannot see us – she’s looking through or beyond us.
I’ve written about Mom’s dreams before, but they still fascinate me. She speaks to brothers, sisters, and friends long absent. Sometimes she says a particular date – November 7 was the one tonight – and I’ll wonder about the significance. It’s not a birthday or anniversary that I know. Maybe it was a sibling’s special date?
Mom has one sister still alive, my Aunt Daught. She lives in Fayetteville NC with my cousin, Alexander, and his wife, Vera. Vera is very good about keeping in touch with us and occasionally the two sisters will have a chance to talk over the phone. Daught is 93 and still very sharp mentally and doing well physically, too. I hate that she lives so far from Mom because I have questions about things in Mom’s dreams and utterances almost daily! She might have the answers.
Even now, as Mom dozes beside me, I wonder who she sees in her mind’s eye. She’s peaceful so perhaps she’s just gazing into heaven. I would love to dream and go to that same peaceful place!
