~that naughty waltz~

October 5th, 2006

Dream Oct 5th 06 am:

I am pregnant. Not with a child, but the book.
I am heading to the hospital to deliver, it’s kind of an airport/hospital/movie theater.
I am meeting my mom here. Wandering down the busy corridor
I realize I am about to go through labor, one of the most painful things a person can do voluntarily. Somehow I had overlooked this.

I stop in my tracks and let the notion of this sink in.
There is nothing to be done about it now but go forward.
A nurse comes and kisses the tip of my nose, she’s seen that face before I gather.

I see my mom and we go sit in a booth in a waiting room/café.
1930s sheet music hangs on the wall and graces the backs of the menus as well.
(At the Strand Book Store two days ago I saw some sheet music, including one I used to have on my bedroom wall for a song called That Naughty Waltz, with 20ish cartoon characters swirling around the dance floor among the paper lanterns).

At the booth across from us there are three women, teachers of mine from grade school. They are discussing their life philosophies and I am trying to listen-in. One of them is Mrs. Kennedy, my choir teacher at performing arts school, the one who told me my voice was wonderful because I could sing alto or soprano and cast me as Louise aka ‘Gypsy Rose Lee’–the burlesque dancer who was famous for bantering wittily as she stripped—in our mini-production of Gypsy. I was eleven years old. There is a picture of me standing on stage in my yellow nightgown and ballet slippers, mouth and arms wide and earnest with musical theater.

Natalie Wood played the part in the 1962 movie. I always got the Wood jokes–knock on wood, would she or wouldn’t she–but the worst was when she drowned and everyone laughted at “What kind of Wood doesn’t float?” and somehow I was implicated, sharing the dead woman’s name. I always related more to Ed Wood and Beatrice Wood too, the “Mama of Dada.”
It was based on a play that was based on the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee that described her awful relationship with her overbearing stage mother, who ran a lesbian boarding house on West End Avenue in New York in the 40s and 50s, and shot and killed her own lover when she supposedly made a pass at Gypsy.

The song was “If Momma was Married,” in which the daughters fantasize about a life without their mother, if only she could lose her fear of commitment (or not be gay?).

So what’s it all about? Performance? Exhibitionism?
She didn’t really strip, she “put the tease back in strip-tease”, a nice way of saying she talked. A lot. Then she’d peel off one glove.

I have a couple of 8mm film rolls of her in a large collection of burlesque films I found at the NY flea market, one of the only good deals I ever made there, what with all the dealers telling you “That’s very old.” and me replying “So am I!” But this one was sold by the wife of the collector, right under his nose. She gave me a fair price, especially considering among the amatuers, who are my favorites, there are reels of Tempest Storm, Lili St. Cyr, and Sally Rand, who danced with giant ostrich feather fans.

Maybe the dream is about the artful balance of concealing and revealing.
Maybe it’s about starting a blog, writing a memoir, that sort of thing.

People paid Gypsy Rose Lee to say what was on her mind, like:
“Praying is like a rocking chair – it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.”
“She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to.”

“I have everything now I had 20 years ago-except now it’s all lower.”
She was also a writer, of detective stories. The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body.
Perhaps it’s about language, speaking ones truth, birthing yourself.
And having a sense of humor about it.
“I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.”

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