“Celebrity” Jitters
April 5, 2019 /
I woke up from one of the funniest/weirdest “celebrity” dreams I’ve ever had this morning.
I think it may have occurred because I just signed 40 copies of my book ahead of the Forks convention so I only need to personalize them as people buy them.
(If there’s a long line of De fans, I want to be efficient while signing and invite the ones who want to stay and talk to return afterward so people waiting in line won’t get frustrated. (I remember wishing I had done this in Sacramento in 2006; the line waiting for me to sign was about 20 people long at first and didn’t shrink for quite a while.)
In the dream, I was in some kind of classroom sitting with (I think!) Karl Urban (or was it Hugh Jackman? I don’t remember now, but I went to sleep listening the the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman, so it might have been Jackman) at his student desk because someone else had my usual desk. We were the only two people at the same desk near the front of this classroom.
After a time, I noticed that my desk (at the back of the classroom) was empty and said to my seatmate, “I’ll go back to my desk now….”
As I headed back, a woman’s voice to my right and just past where I’d walked called out, “Kris!”
I stopped and headed in the direction of the voice, which put me outside the classroom and in front a kind of carnival-like or festival-like booth you’d find at a country fair. (It’s a dream; these weird segues happen a lot in dreams!)
I said, “Yes?”
She said, “Oh my gosh, I never do anything like this. But may I have your autograph?”
I was embarrassed by this out-of-nowhere, unexpected recognition and request, but I recovered and said, “Sure! Thank you for asking!”
Then she placed in front of me this weird little contraption that looked like a four-inch strip of saran wrap on a plastic device with a saran wrap cutter at the top front end of it, and she handed me a square-tipped Sharpie to sign with!
I asked her, “What’s your name?”
She said, “Cynthia.”
I asked, “Spelled the usual way?”
“Yes.” So I spelled her name and she nodded.
I tried writing “With love…” and then realized I wouldn’t be able to write even two words with that horse-leg square-tipped Sharpie before I’d run out of room, and that there was no way I’d be able to write her seven-letter name on one line.
So, I hesitated, wondering if this was some kind of got’cha from a prankster, but Cynthia (who had receded to the middle of her booth) continued to look star-struck and enamored, so I pondered some more… perhaps she’s developmentally challenged. (“Don’t get flustered, Kris. Deal with this. Do the best you can…”)
At that moment, when I looked back down at this saran wrap contraption I noticed that what looked like at least a half spoonful of peanut butter had dropped onto the saran writing area and that it was dangerously close to getting pulled into the part of the mechanism that cut off the saran wrap, which would be a huge mess…
And so I said to Cynthia, “Uh, I don’t know how it happened, but there’s peanut butter on this…”
Cynthia came over and tried to run the glob past the cutter and as she did so, the glob of peanut butter not only spread throughout the mechanism but more than doubled in size!
I was sweating by now. I said to her sort of jokingly, to bring some levity to the situation, “Cynthia, I hope this isn’t one of your prized possessions…”
She lit up like a Christmas tree and laughed like crazy. I could see she was totally with it, not disabled at all. All of a sudden we were best buds, sharing a common challenge.
She and I took the now-messy contraption to the sink in her booth and started to wash the peanut butter off it. More people from her booth joined in the effort. Water was splashing everywhere, raining on eight or more four-inch-square pieces of chocolate cake that were sitting on the draining board next to the sink.
The situation was completely out of hand and we were all having a ball!
Everyone was having a whee of a time. I was in my element–no longer Cynthia’s “celebrity”. We were just a group of people laughing ourselves silly over something silly.
That’s when I woke up.
This dream was instructive to me. It reminds me of another dream I had that instructed me:
When I was at Warner taking Disaster Recovery Training and First Aid, I remember having dreams where I was having to rescue people in various forms of peril: I always managed to bring about a happy ending in those dreams. Three weeks after finishing the course, I was instrumental in saving my nephew’s life when he went into anaphylactic shock after being stung by a bee. I knew what to do and I rolled with the punches because I had “dreamed” my way out of life-threatening situations before.
I think last night’s dream was something like that.
I feel entirely inadequate as a bona fide “celebrity” but will be put in that position at the convention as the A-lister there, so I’m feeling like I can’t measure up to the Urbans/Jackmans/Kelleys of celebrity-dom, so I’m working through the issue beforehand.
The dream made me realize that all I have to do is be my quirky, quick-witted self and not allow another person’s opinion of my “celebrity status” to throw me for a loop. I just have to bring everything as much down-to-earth as I can as quickly as I can.
That’s what De did. He quickly established that his fans and he were equals and there was no reason for them to feel overwhelmed, star-struck or inadequate. We all put our pants on one leg at a time!
It was a FUN lesson! I woke up laughing!😂
But I know that if I meet a Cynthia at the Forks convention, I will have to take considerable pains to keep from cracking up totally!!! And if I do crack up, I will have to tell her about this dream to redeem myself in her eyes for laughing so hard!
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