I woke up early this morning — five-ish — in the middle of a bad dream.  I'm not generally plagued by them.  I am a very sound sleeper. This one just annoyed me.  It was one of those dreams I thought I'd stopped having twenty years ago. My mother and I were in the kitchen,having it out, I don't know over what.  It could have been about anything.  It was one of those teenager-to-parent/parent-to-teenager brawls where anything goes. It's like All In the Family MMA.

This kind of knock-down, drag-out fight very rarely, if ever, happened in real life.  Of course I went through the I-hate-my-parents stage, and my parents had their own I-hate-my-child stage, too (fair's fair), but I feel like my mother and I are OK, so it's annoying my subconscious is still battling it out with her evil dreamland counterpart.  I want to take my Id aside and say, look, get over it.  Or maybe I just need to lay off the curry and stop watching emotionally charged family dramas before bed.

Because I'm convinced one reason for the dream is that I'd watched the very emotionally charged Brothers— the American version with Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire.  I almost didn't watch it, to tell you the truth.  Some very fine performances but the premise is flawed almost from the get-go (I have trouble believing the Marine Corps would declare two men dead rather than MIA without recovering the bodies, given the fact that there are still Korean- and Vietnam-era soldiers who are officially MIA, as their remains have never been found).

In fact, if it had not been for this scene as the opening credits rolled...


...I probably would not have stuck it out. 

As it happens more of this movie happens in a kitchen than a motel bathroom.  Which is probably fortunate for me, since I can't imagine what my mother and I would be doing having it out in a motel bathroom. That would have been very confusing, on top of being annoying.

As it was it was easy enough to interpret my little nightmare.  It's always about love, isn't it?  When you're fighting with your mother, I mean. Especially in a dream.  But in a dream it's not about your mother's love, it's about the world's love.  Why did the world all the sudden withdraw its enormous teet?  That's what your subconscious wants to know.

Maybe this is also coming partly from my venturing deeper into the demimonde of fundraising, at school and with the Garden Society, which is a501(c)3.  If I end up on the 2011 board of the latter, I'll be looking to double our events budget, to fund programming throughout the year. And that means finding some teets to suckle.  Not Pam Andersons, but not Debra Messings, either. (Probably something between a 36B and a 32C,not counting the endowment.)

I've been brainstorming with all sorts of people about the possibilities of community events and programming on our seven acres, and will meet with our Parks representative Monday to discuss some of the logistics.  I've been working on this so intensively the past few weeks, and there are so many elements to it, and so many layers and players involved, I sometimes get ahead — or behind — myself.

As was the case yesterday.  I had a very energizing meeting with a couple willing to donate a hundred hours for our website relaunch and for event marketing— an incredibly generous offer.  I came home all fired up, and had a project waiting for me: I had seen a series of workshops, "Conversations on Curating", offered by the Boston Center for the Arts. They asked for an exhibition outline to apply.

Because I'm looking for as many ways as possible to generate buzz for my organization and to bring more arts programming to the park, I thought this would be a great program for me.  Not only that — I'm extremely interested in curating anyway, in both traditional and nontraditional settings (my friend Patrick Short is a big inspiration).

So, clickity-clack, I threw something together...

“Found and Lost” Exhibition Outline

The Fenway Victory Gardens represent an intersection of mysterious energies, an amalgam of underground and outlying urban cultures with their own histories and languages, whose claims on the seven-acre plot overlap in ways that confound space and time.  Appropriating that space as a gallery presents visitors with opportunities to explore wider issues of use of urban spaces while connecting them to the specific wonder of their immediate surroundings.

This group exhibition focuses on artifacts, found objects, imagined objects,curiosities, and enigmas that represent and explore mysteries and memories, signs and signals of the fixed and fleeting cultures of the Fens.  

Objects no larger than 5” X 5” (some full-scale, some miniature, some photographic) embedded in clear plastic resin are affixed, like roadsigns to the Twilight Zone,to fence posts and permanent structures over the seven acres of the Victory Gardens.

Visitors to the park are already rewarded for close attention, the exhibition further rewards them with vexations caught in amber, from an ancient key with a dainty robbin’s egg blue ribbon tied to it, to a miniature pair of old-school gym shorts, from a faded Polaroid of a fleeting erotic encounter to a tiny love note in a hurried hand on yellowed paper.

Each object presents the visitor with a tiny detail from a larger tale at the heart of which is a vast mystery...*

Just as I was getting ready to start on a narrative CV, I looked at the application again, and suddenly realized that the deadline was February... of 2010. 

Now, when I'd printed it out I had even highlighted the deadline, and still it just didn't sink in until I was halfway through the application that we're two months from 2011.  Where did 2010 go? No, really.  It's not a rhetorical question.  Where did it go?  I want it back.

Speaking of.

Back at the website meeting, we were discussing social networking, as you do.  We are looking, of course, to integrate social networking — I have a blog in the works, a flickr group, and we're looking to resuscitate a facebook page that a long-ago and very short-lived VP of Communication set up and summarily abandoned.  OK, no biggie.  I mean, at the time we didn't have anyone else who really wanted to take it on.  It just kinda slipped into a coma. And there it remains.

When we jump-started website talks last winter, I sought out the creator of the page, who obviously created it as a board member of our organization.  I shot him an email asking nicely for the administrative password.  Never heard back from him.  This morning, since it was on my mind, I shot him another one.  We'll see what happens.

But what if nothing does?

OK,so it's not the end of the world.  This kind of thing happens.  But,honestly, I've never understood it.  First of all, if I volunteer for a job, I see it through.  If for some reason I can't, I leave town.  You know, disappear, go underground.  This asshole works right down the street, for a rental agency no less.   

So, teets and ass.  That's my life right now.  I guess I shouldn't complain.  But I'm definitely gonna lay off the curry.
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*I know, it's a little cynical — the language — but I do sincerely like the idea of the exhibition — the theme could be fleshed out a bit more, but I only had 250 words to work with.