Seamstress for the Band

This song never made me happy before I had a dream in which I attended my own funeral. I didn’t have the best seat and was under the impression that I was in a theater to see a Cirque du Soleil performance. Then this song came on and the lights went up instead of down. A parade of carnival characters came out from the stage entrances. It took four clowns to carry my casket which was covered in a white sheet. They lifted it over their heads and back to their shoulders like it was a tuba. Women with painted faces carried trays of food as they walked up the aisles. People reached over each other, mostly preferring the fruit. I took a slice of cantaloupe. It tasted like nothing. Initially, I thought it was tacky that they were serving fruit that is not ripe or in season. Then realized it was I who was no longer in season.

By the end of the parade, the whole crowd was standing and singing along until the body had left the room.  And all these years I’ve spent worrying that I am going to die were gone when I woke up. All the pressure to have done something important, all the determination to get over things that have caused me suffering seemed amusing–like when a child’s ice cream cone gets licked right off the cone and rainbow sprinkles swim in a puddle of pink bubblegum on concrete. Grown-ups exchange smiles over the child who cries over this. They know the secret knowledge: things get so much worse. This will seem like nothing. Also, there is more ice cream.

Well, that’s how my funeral felt after my life was over. It was a spectacle responding to spectacle. After everyone had  followed the song out of the theater, I went backstage (is that where you go? I didn’t know.) A man wearing a red and white striped suit was sweeping up flower petals and confetti with a janitor’s broom. He tipped his top hat  and smiled under his mustache when I passed him, and then I found a counter where a man was spinning pizzas on a series of turntables. He showed me how different albums sound if they are all played at the same time and on top of each other, how all the notes will mesh and then clash. I understood.  I took a number, pulled up a chair, and waited to order my remix.

MP3: Obla Di Obla Da

posted by holly.