A journal entry from April 23, 2003:Dream: I was walking down 7th street downtown, mostly nobody around, and entered a department store where I saw a familiar stranger shopping. I couldn't quite place him; he looked like somebody I knew, but he had a little white mustache and, if I ever had seen him, he was older than I had seen him before. I hovered, watching him shop in an area filled with little glass-domed clocks, hoping the name on the tip of my tongue would make itself known to me before he disappeared. Then he got a call on his cellphone, and once he started talking in his funny, boistrous, mock-industrious voice, I knew this fellow was Orson Bean.
He yammered into the phone: "I've written a hit song, I tell ya! It's got 'hit' written all over it. What's it called? Are you kidding? I'll tell ya what it's called, my good man! It's called 'My Name Is Love and I'm Gonna Break Down Your Door, But It's Not You I Want - I'm Gonna Grab That Hot Daughter of Yours and Carry Her Away!' What? Are you kidding? The title is not too long! The title is what's gonna sell it! Why, the kids'll eat it up like pancakes!"
He put his phone away, took a piece of paper from a nearby jewelry counter, patted himself down, then abruptly turned to me: "Hey, you! You got a pen?" Before I had a chance to answer, he reached out and pulled a pen from my breast pocket and started scribbling something down, like he was jotting down the lyrics of this crazy song before they slipped his mind. He seemed crazy with excitement at what he'd just hatched. Then he folded the paper, handed my pen back to me, seized both my hands and shook them warmly. "I couldn't have done it without 'cha, but don't let that go to your head," he said, releasing me and starting to move away.
I said, "Mr. Bean, before you go -- there's something I've been wanting to tell you since I was 18." He looked a bit bewildered and came back, saying, "Really? What's that?" "Well," I said, "I just wanted to say 'thank you for writing ME AND THE ORGONE.'" He threw his head back with his mouth in an big O shape, squeezed his eyes shut as if it was all too much to bear, then shook my hands vigorously, even bowing in mock theatrical fashion to kiss them. "Why, thank you, thank you, my boy!" he said, making too much of a fuss. All around this little scene, people in the store who had gathered to watch this meeting of two Americans stood beaming fondly at us and applauding.
Then I woke up. The first thing I thought was, "Shit, watch me get online now and find out that Orson Bean has died." Happily, this wasn't the case and I'm even happier to say that Orson Bean is still among the living and employed.
It was odd of me to have this dream, because it wasn't prompted by anything recent. I hadn't read ME AND THE ORGONE since I was 18 years old. It's an autobiographic account of the failure of Bean's first marriage, his adventures in Reichian therapy, and how he fell in love with and married his second wife, Carolyn. (I must interject here that one of the reasons I was prompted to read this book -- which was passed on to me by an acquaintence named Peter Umbenhauer who taught a course on Wilhelm Reich at the University of Cincinnati -- was that I had seen the Beans together numerous times on the 1970s "candid" game show TATTLE TALES, where I learned a lot about the two of them and came to think of them as possibly the coolest couple on the planet. I got to know more about their background by reading ME AND THE ORGONE, which was a "three E" book: engrossing, enlightening and entertaining. I think Joe Dante must have read it too, because he seemed to know the book when I mentioned it while telling him, years ago, how pleased I was to see Orson Bean pop up in INNERSPACE. But I digress; I digress like hell.
I haven't read ME AND THE ORGONE since I was 18, but the first thing I did after waking from this dream was to get online, confirm that Mr. Bean was alright and then look up his book in the usual search engines, to see if it was still available. It is, and if any of this interests you, you should read it. My researches also revealed that he had since written another volume of autobiography which I'd also like to read. He and Carolyn are no longer together, apparently; he has since remarried to Ally Mills (the mom from TV's THE WONDER YEARS) and I'm sure they're a neat couple, too.
I don't know how much feedback Orson Bean gets on his books, but I want to re-read the one I remember so fondly and maybe read the more recent one too, and satisfy this unrest in my subconscious by dropping him a line of appreciation. Whenever I have a vivid dream like this, some little devil seems to tell me that these familiar strangers -- people I've known all my life in a sense, but who are in fact strangers -- need to hear from me on some level, and it's always an emotional battle of sorts to deny the force of the dream and come to the more sensible conclusion that these people are probably getting along just fine without me.
I don't know why I decided to blog about this two-year-old dream today, except that maybe the seed was planted by the fact that Donna and I dined last night at a wonderful new Argentinian tapas restaurant called The Argentine Bean. And there was an even stranger coinky-dink that occurred as I was writing this, when the aforementioned Joe Dante e-mailed me with this little story about "The Wilhelm Scream," which he says shall be heard again (several times) in the December 2 installment of MASTERS OF HORROR, which he directed.
Now that I think about it, Kate Bush once wrote a wonderful song about Wilhelm Reich called "Cloudbusting" -- which I guess ties today's blog to yesterday's!
