My vote for the most beautiful member of my high school class (Madison High, Vienna, VA, Class of 1992) was a girl named Claire. Her background was Irish-Japanese, and the genetic combination resulted in her being fetching like you wouldn't believe. Reminds me of how Peter David once called someone fetching, meaning "she could get guys to fetch, sit up, beg, play dead, whatever she wanted them to do*..."
Claire was -- presumably is, still -- a quietly sly, funny, bold person, too, and I saw plenty of evidence of this as we were both on the high school paper the Hawk Talk and in the same Senior Year Spanish class**. Which is why I found it odd that in my dreams last night, she showed up as a worker at a car parts yard, and was both strangely demure -- the Claire I'd known was not demure -- and refusing to speak in anything other than Japanese. I'm there recognizing her, and trying to engage her in a "Hey! Great to see you! How've you been?" talk, and no, she just deflects and occasionally giggles, never quite looking me in the eye. Never quite heading off to find the particular car we need to get a part from, either.
Trust me, I liked being around as gorgeous a woman as her, but the personality disconnect made me think This isn't the Claire I knew.***
In other dream details from last night, I was in downtown New York, in one place overhearing designers and builders talking about the plans for a rather different Freedom Tower than the one that is actually (slowly) being built -- without getting into details, I'll just say that the design I dreamed would NOT be a soothing memorial to what happened there -- and another office that was either bustling or completely deserted (based on which way you entered it) where I once again did call center work. And the one phone call I got was the wrong kind of call, one I wasn't set up to handle, so I had to scramble to get the caller to the correct person. I haven't done call center work since 2004. It crops up in my dream-world only occasionally.
This has been a dream post. I'll never run out of material for them.
* PAD said that about the actress who played Daisy Mae in a community theater production he was in of Li'l Abner. David played Marryin' Sam.
** We were part of a deranged sketch version of Cinderella; she was one of the stepsisters, I was the Fairy Godfather. As in "I could make the prince an offer he can't refuse" Godfather. I wore a sport coat and carried a guitar case with -- and I think I got approval for this prop -- a fake gun tucked inside it. Today I am now rather surprised I got away with playing the character that way, but I took the part because we had more guys in the group than male roles. I still remember my slight annoyance when, as I was preparing to play the Fairy Godfather that way, the comic strip Non Sequitur did the same gag.
I now hereby apologize to any Italians annoyed at me for playing the character that way.
*** Fuller disclosure: My appreciation of Claire's beauty never quite developed into an actual crush, which is probably good because she had a boyfriend the whole time I knew her. My crushes senior year were, at different times, on two other members of the high school newspaper staff, Kathryn -- maybe my earliest exposure to the type who is now known as the Perky Goth, with a fashion style I eventually summed up as "sexy Emily Dickinson" -- and Carmen, one of our sports writers and a lacrosse player. If you read
popfiend, and you should, you could picture Carmen like a teenage version of popfiend's wife Lisa and you wouldn't be too far off from what Carmen was like. Last I heard, which was several years ago, Carmen was working for her dad at a medical supplies company that worked in Ghana.