You would think your subconscious dreaming might look like an art film, but this one clearly was running in my sleeping head as a Movie of the Week, featuring Jennifer Warnes, in her fifties, as the love interest. Might have come into mind when I downloaded The Well, her last album from iTunes the previous evening.
I, or someone like me, was dating again, and through the mercy of my dreams, as a younger man in my fifties. I was in a small American mid-western town just big enough to have an am radio station, a high school, post office, grocery, a coffee shop, a hotel with a bar and a restaurant with a lounge, and a small local paper. {A lot like Boissevain MB or Eastend SK}
J, let’s call her, and V, the man over fifty. We first see the couple early in their relationship, as V reaches across the table to take J’s hand in the lounge before they go in for dinner. J is a recently hired biology teacher. As the school year progresses J becomes the focus of severe small town harassment because of her views on contraception, abortion, evolution and climate change.
Initially she is ostracized and vilified, but that’s not enough for some of the townsfolk. She becomes the focus of letters to the editor and the call in radio program whose callers try to get her fired. V leaves town to check out work opportunities in the city a few hours away.
J, let’s call her, is kidnapped as part of the local community’s charity funding campaign people paying to release the captive. After her capture J is dressed like a regional beauty queen chained on a rotating pedestal in the lounge. A recently widowed area rancher frees her.
V returns, and finds J talking to the rancher earnestly in the lounge as he goes to get himself a drink. The bar tender tells him about J’s captivity and that J has thrown him over for her rescuer. He takes his drink, walks over to where J and the rancher are sitting and throws it into the rancher’s face.
The End
But wait, after waking and a trip to the bathroom, and returning to my dream there is more. It’s as if the MOW had been market tested by a focus group that didn’t like the unhappy sad ending.
After dousing the rancher, V looks imploringly at J who bursts out laughing, as do the rest of the lounge patrons. Though the harassment was real, the captivity has all been an elaborate set-up. A practical joke, which makes J hesitate and quiver, having been made a fool before, until J slides out from behind the table, takes his hand and pulls him into her arms. I imagine she might say something like; “C’mon here, you big lug! Let’s go.”