Monday, April 21, 2008

"Listen, if you and Nimoy want to stay up and party all night long, that's FINE BY ME."

...line spoken to me and Leonard Nimoy by a very angry Bill Shatner in a very vivid dream I had last night.

My response, to Nimoy, after Shatner had stormed off: "Were you planning on staying up all night long and partying?"

Nimoy: "I don't know what the hell Bill is talking about."

Shatner's angry retort came as a response to me asking him about a saying or aphorism I'd seen taped up in his dressing room earlier in the day. Without going into TOO much boring detail about the dream -- who gives a shit about other people's stupid dreams, really?? -- I was just being polite and trying to strike up conversation with the guy.

Me, to Nimoy: "Do you know what that saying was in his dressing room?"

Nimoy: "Knowing Shatner, it was probably just a picture of two people fucking."

ANALYZE. I vote Nimoy and Shatner represent my Ego and Superego. Open to other theories.



(One of the byproducts of quitting smoking is that the nicotine patch causes EXTREMELY vivid dreams. This used to freak me out, but now I kind of love it. Normally, I don't remember ANYTHING I dream about, so its actually kind of neat. Plus, I sleep like a baby. That rules. I wish I could stay on the patch forever and ever, but every time I forget to put it on -- and those who know me well know that forgetfulness is perhaps my very worst fault -- I smoke. So that doesn't work, alas. Sigh.)

8 comments:

kelly said...

sometimes people telling you about their dreams is boring. true. but i read those dream quotes of yours out loud to my co-workers and we were laughing our asses off. you are too goddman funny.

maxsparber said...

Nimoy: "Knowing Shatner, it was probably just a picture of two people fucking."

That's hilarious. In my dreams, I'm always Finnegan, and Kirk is joyously beating me to death. Man, he hated the Irish.

MissTrixi said...

Yet again, you give my office mate fodder to think I'm crazy. Even after hearing about that dream this morning, reading your blog has caused snorts and fits of laughter here in cyberspace.

No, how about an artists rendition of the picture up in Shatners room?

xoxo
Trix

Coco said...

I totally love this. I have crazy, crazy dreams all the time. I have nothing to blame it on but my crazy mind. My friend, Matt, says they all boil down to boobs.
So, I figure, Shatner and Nimoy represent the duality of boobs . . .and the people fucking speaks for itself.
I myself had a dream about driving a big rig and taking a test on Shakespeare last night. Amazingly, he was able to draw parallels to boobs with that.
It's a talent.

lap said...

If you take melatonin to help you sleep it also makes your dreams odd and lucid. I have not experienced this first hand however. You've seen Free Enterprise, haven't you?

belsum said...

Sure, other people's dreams usually are boring as shit. But then again, they normally do not feature Shatner and Nimoy spatting!!

Anonymous said...

I have amazingly vivid dreams when I forget to take my anti-depressant, but the after effect is not pleasant (think Claire Danes in Shopgirl).

Greatest non-drug induced celeb dream I've ever had was about 20 years ago: Sleeping with Valleri Bertinelli (back in her impossibly gorgeous lattter day period of "One Day At A Time"). After a nice night (tsk, tsk), she heads to the shower while I'm basking in the afterglow silently...until I hear a car pull up to the driveway...and a front door opening

"Oh, shit", I panic."Eddie's back"! -- Scared me so much I woke up.

What would have been the icing on the cake? If some incidental music in the form of an Eddie Van Halen guitar riff a'la "Bill and Ted" played as I started to make a break for it.

Anonymous said...

This reminded me of my friend Bryan Thomas' dream write up on his blog at http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&FriendID=113096639&blogMonth=8&blogDay=22&blogYear=2007

your Trekky fantasy was awesome; this one is very vivid too:

Some of you who know me in the non-MySpace world may already know that I have really, really vivid dreams, and although I wrote one up as a blog post, a few months back, about one of my recurring vivid dreams -- the one I have every month or so, the one I call "the Plague Dream" -- I really don't often share my dreams, even with my closest friends. I mean, c'mon, they're dreams.

Most people don't really seem to care about the dreams anyone else has, unless it has some kind of relationship to something the two of you share, a common thread or theme. When I do happen to share my dreams with my friends, I can see that, content-wise, they're often so confusing and pointless to the other person that they'll often get a look on their face that my friend Rick G. perfectly described as "the same look that dogs get when you show them a card trick."

That is, unless the dreams have a lot of funny scenes or characters, which people don't seem to mind as much, because it's like you're telling a funny little story and not just a typically semi-boring dream, and so, just this morning, probably no more than a hour ago as I write this, I had a funny little dream which I'm going to share part of with you here in this blog.

So, okay, in this dream (part of it), I'm standing in a bar, chatting up a couple of cute girls (something I suppose is a favorite pastime of mine), and I mention to them that I happened to be hungry and asked if there was a place nearby to get something to eat, and one of the girls, a really foxy-looking brunette in a silky green dress (I think I know who this is, by the way -- she works in the HR dept. at work at has this knockout green dress she wears from time to time), and she says "right here in the hotel."

And it's at this point that I realize I'm standing in a hotel bar, which is at one point in the dream referred to as "The Lurk," and another time it's referred to as "McArthur's" or something like that (it's like a Bennigans, I think, if you have one of those in your city).

And not much longer after that I'm suddenly walking through this giant hotel lobby in a really ginormous hotel in (probably) a big city that I'm guessing is actually just my hometown of L.A. I see this restaurant across the lobby, with a Mexican theme (I eat lunch quite a bit, almost every day in fact, in Mexican restaurants of one type or another), and the restaurant has neon lights spelling out the name of the place (which I actually don't remember now!).

As I get closer, I see that there's a band playing music and it's crowded and people are sitting at tables and some are standing in the aisles, and waiters and waitresses are squeezing around everyone, bringing plates of food and drinks to the tables and it's kind of a rockin' place, very lively, lots of action goin' on.

As I get closer, I see the band are some kind of old school '80s funk-style band, with three or four guys wearing matching purple or deep blue velvet type suits, with big padded shoulders. They are a mixed race band, black (African-American) and white, and most of the guys have those squared-off haircuts like the guys in Cameo used to have. They've got a saxophonist honking and squawking along, and the bass player is bobbing up and down, and the crowd are doing some sort of dance that looks like a mix between the Robot and the Funky Chicken.

I am now leaning against some kind of railing, trying to see if there are any available tables inside, and I suddenly see that there's a velvet rope separating the restaurant from the rest of the hotel lobby, where people are standing merely inches away from the tables, watching the band.

Then I suddenly notice nearly everyone in the restaurant is much, much older, all these grey and blue-haired ladies and gents, everyone dressed up like they've just been to church, men in suits and ties, women in nice dresses. I would guess that most people were in either their seventies or eighties, and the music just doesn't seem to fit what this Lawrence Welk-lovin' crowd would probably be listening to.

Then I see, literally inches away from me, Vice President Dick Cheney.

My mood sours, and I can feel a smile slipping from my face. I can't believe it's him (and I'll pause here to note that I didn't really dream that he was surrounded by secret service agents, either; he was sitting at a table with other white-haired men in suits, as I recall now, munching on chips and salsa).

I lean over and shout, above the music, "Hey, it's the VEEP!" and he looks over and nods, half-smiles and turns back to the band. And I continue: "Dick Fucking Cheney, what the hell are YOU doing here?" and he turns back and he's surprisingly nice, and he starts talking to me, but what it really sounds like is the Penguin on the old '60s "Batman" TV show (played by Burgess Meredith). He's basically squawking and nodding and I finally catch a little bit of what he's saying....."and tonight the band are playing a couple of songs I wrote."

I shake my head, and say, "What?" and he looks back over to the band, who I now notice are playing their instruments and looking directly at us, as if waiting for a cue. Cheney holds up his fist in the air, which is a really ridiculous move for an old cat like him, a "fight the power" sort of air-pumping fist-action move.

Then, he flattens his fist out and takes his palm and runs it over his throat, meaning "cut it." One of the Cameo-looking guys kills the song mid-point, and waves the rest of the band off. The music stops. The crowd of blue hairs stop doing their Funky Chicken Robot dance.

Cheney squawks something at them, in that Penguin type voice of his (I believe I've seen Jon Stewart immitate Cheney this way), which sounds to me like "Play the new one again, fellas."

The band start jamming out this tune which I realize is really not at all like a song you'd expect Dick Cheney to sit down and write...and it's kind of ...spacey....and I realize they're playing a kind of reggae-beat...and so I say to Cheney, "it's kind of a space-reggae thing, right?" and Cheney, apparently not hearing what I've just said over the loud crowd and music, says to me, "This one's called 'Space Reggae.'"

I then realize who I'm talking to, and I suddenly start berating Cheney for all of the horrible things he's been doing as Vice President, and even though I'm shouting and laying it all out for the guy, telling him what I REALLY think of him, what an assclown he really is, but he doesn't really hear me. He just keeps bopping that fat head of his, up and down to the music, squawking like the Penguin, talking up a storm.

I end up saying something that comes out like "...you horrible Halliburton pork-fed fuck" and the band look over and they see I'm berating the Veep, so they start hamming it up onstage, trying to draw attention away from the spectacle I'm causing or about to cause. They start laughing and pulling faces and Cheney really starts squawking and laughing (the guy really needed a cigarette holder dangling out of his mouth and a monocle and a top hat too, at that point).

At some point a guy who works at the restaurant comes over and says I need a membership card or a pass or something if I'm going to hang out in the "A&R section." And I shake my head and say, "What??," and he explains that everyone on *this* side of the rope is in the music business, and I realize that this must have been the crowd you would have found at the old Brown Derby when it was located in Hollywood, near Vine St.

And I tell this restaurant manager guy that I'M in the music business, and he says, "Let me see your card" (my friend Kelly asked if I had a business card last night -- I don't have them, don't carry any sort of "card" that shows where I work, actually).

I then realize that nearly everyone in the place is an old-school Warner Bros. label exec, or they've had something to do with the music business from forty years ago. I see people in the flesh (in the dream) that I've only seen photos of, people I've never met that I recognize immediately, and one of those people is Bob Eubanks.

Eubanks, in case you don't know, used to be deejay here in L.A. and also ran a club in the sixties, called the Cinnamon Cinder, but some of you may know him best as a TV game show host (probably best known for hosting "The Newlywed Show") and I see he's sitting by himself, watching the band, and wolfing down a very lettuce-filled taco.

I detach myself from the Veep, and the guy from the restaurant and wander over to Eubanks' table. It's at this point I see that Eubanks has had some kind of surgery on his neck, which, despite the high collar of his shirt (a very '60s-looking Italian collared shirt, I think), and I make a face expressing pain and point to my own throat, and say "Sorry," and he croaks out (his voice is totally raspy in the dream), "It's alright, kid, throat cancer got me." I can see scar tissue on his neck.

He motions to me to sit down, and I see there's a velvet rope separating his table from where I'm standing and he just reaches over and lifts the rope up and I walk into the restaurant. I sit down at his table, and he starts telling me jokes, and they are HILARIOUS, but the only one I can remember now is something he said that Phil Spector told him recently. Eubanks says: "Phil Spector told me, if I hadn't started playing his songs in the sixties, he would have had to start killing people a lot sooner!"

Then Eubanks starts laughing and doubling over at his own memory of the joke, and we talk a little more, and I remember saying something about the Cinnamon Cinder and he launches into this raspy memory of it, and suddenly, I look up, and one of the girls I'd been talking to in the bar is standing on the (now) other side of the rope, and she's looking at me with this unhappy little look on her face, and she says, "We thought you were coming right back..." and she pouts...damn she's cute.

Then I look over at Eubanks, and I see that he really seems to be enjoying my company and actually, I'd love to chat with the guy about old stories about the music biz, and it's at that same point that I also happen to see Cheney, sitting at a now empty table, and now he's SMILING at me, and he's waving me over to his table, frantically waving to get my attention, and pointing at the empty seat across from him with his fat little hand. He wants me to come back and chat again.

Now I have something of a dilemma, because on one hand I'd love to stay and chat with Eubanks, but I'd also love to have a (ahem) "discussion" with Cheney, which is something I don't know if I'd ever get the chance to do...and yet there's this hot chick in a green dress asking me to come back to the bar with her, and....even though this was just a crazy dream of mine....

I'll leave it up to you to decide what I did....