A first act of Pullulating Remembrance

Last night (or rather this morning) I had another dream: This one was one of those 'I'm so close to waking up in the morning I'm nearly conscious therefore almost lucid' dreams. You know the kind. In it, I was acting a solo part for the entirety of Act 1 of a 2 Act play. During the act I didn’t move much, staying mostly to stage right, and I had a weird leather mask as a costume, a leather mask that was the semblance of one of PeGo's abstract clay sculptures -- the wiry, 'candleholder' kind that seems like a two-dimensional coral just realized it was, in fact, a 3D pufferfish. I went backstage for the entire second act, in which two people were on stage, while I talked to one of the backstage people (strangely, there was only one I could see or experience) about something or other, the usual just-off-stage exultations that actors share when they are not rushing to get ready for another part of the play.

After curtain call, (which didn't seem to actually be part of the dream, instead the play just seemed to end) I went out to the audience, to talk to them, to mingle. My usual fear of sociality contrasting with a desire to be among the peoples overtook me, and I noticed an old mentor among the audience. JeTr -- who ran the theatre, and was the only paid employee of the entire company -- is (and probably always will be) a person I revere and admire, and thus I went down to talk to him. After waiting patiently for a minute or two for him to get done with a conversation with a person sitting next to him, he turned to me, and I asked him what he thought of the play. He clearly did not recognize me, despite a couple of years of working together (not strongly, but intermittently, and he had always taken an interest in my well being, it had seemed) and said "I really didn't know what it was about!" to which I responded, abashed, "I'm not certain; I don't write the stuff, I just perform it."

I walked away, feeling sorry for myself that my theatrical role model did not have a clue who I was even after all of these years, and then realized I was still wearing the mask. How would he have been able to recognize me? So I tore it off, but it was too late. He was nowhere to be found.