Fourposter

I had one of those waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night moments, round about 1 a.m., when it was so clear that a marvelous thing had occurred.  In fact, the realization was so stunning that it required sitting up, dropping my legs over the edge of the bed and pondering.  I was recalling this moment when I had seen "Little Me," a musical comedy from the 1960s, and I had gone onstage.  Thing is, Sid Caesar, the show's star, had asked me to take his place.  I had wandered up on the stage and, essentially, taken over his role.  I had gotten in the fourposter bed that dominated one particular scene with the show's heroine, Belle, a Hollywood star whose faux memoir the musical depicted in song and dance.  What a pleasant feeling.  I'd completely forgotten this moment.  

Naturally, I had forgotten it, because it never happened.  It was first confusing, then sad, to let this narrative with its feeling of absolute reality and total conviction, drain into the night, seeping right into the carpet, dribbling down the walls and assuming the general importance of my latest New Yorker...fun, but ephemeral.

How do I interpret this dream?  First, there are events and associations around it.  Yes, I saw "Little Me."  During my childhood I had seen a slim handful of touring Broadway companies when they came to Los Angeles.  Each performance was a major event, with years in between.  The drive into LA took two hours from the small town where I was born.  The shows played in a huge barn of a place, Philharmonic Auditorium which, incredibly, doubled as a home for the local orchestra.  I always sat upstairs in the balcony, a gallery, some seat closer to the sky than the stage.

Things were changing in 1964.  They were coming to an end, it seemed.  High school.  Living with my father.  "Little Me" beckoned.  I probably saw the ad in the Los Angeles Times.  And I worked it all out.  I was leaving for the summer.  First stop, Los Angeles and a few days with my friend Joe and his family.  Living in Riverside then, it was possible to go to a local department store and purchase tickets for events in Los Angeles.  The store made a phone call, for which it charged, and the customer got a receipt for a ticket, redeemable at the Philharmonic Auditorium box office.  As I recall, the "Little Me" ticket cost $4.25.  It was a lot of money, but being a Wednesday matinee, extravagant but within the bounds of the possible.

When I told my father, he sneered.  You certainly find ways to amuse yourself, he told me.  I was a rebellious adolescent by then, and the only odd thing in this exchange is that his words sank in.  In fact, they evoked a considerable amount of guilt.  Imagine, amusing myself.  Frittering away life, and only 17 years old.  This guilt, I believe, existed on a somatic Jewish level.  Guilt, its generation and cell-to-cell transfer, occurs on the level of molecular biology and is deeply Semitic.  I leave the rest up to researchers.

So there I was, heavy with guilt, yet walking proud and amazed through the orchestra level lobby of Philharmonic Auditorium.  Down here, there were attractive pictures on the walls.  Upstairs, it was all bare stucco.  Astonished, I took my place in the fourth row.  I was so close that during the show I could hear the orchestra laughing in the pit as Sid Caesar ad-libbed on the stage.

As for the fourposter bed, this turned up in a scene that even as a boy I understood to represent some sort of archetype or cliché.  The brass bed somehow symbolized the memoir heroine's fall, her descent into sin that, we understood, was not sin.  Just as some strong and alive part of me knew that my father's guilt-inducing judgment had to be resisted.  I was on the right track.  My poor father, in retrospect, loved Sid Caesar.  He must have been very jealous of me that Wednesday.  

And out of my misbegotten family background where love and pleasure were scant, somehow I've arrived here.  With Marlou, and if not in a fourposter brass bed, something better.  A fully automated bed that splits into, one half going up while the other goes down, that vibrates, that raises the foot on my side, then lowers it while Marlou, if she desires, can raise the foot of her bed.  Which has nothing to do with anything, except that there's something joyous in all these possibilities.  Above all, the bed is something we share.  And of this too, I imagine that my bitter and isolated father would be jealous.