Don's Writing Reboot

During my senior year of high school, our school band filled a school bus and headed to Grand Junction, in western Colorado, for a band tournament. Professional judges graded us based on a piece of music we had rehearsed, then gave us a musical score that was unknown to us, and we had to play it sight unseen. Basalt High School was a very small school. Although they had been consolidated with Carbondale, the two schools had just separated. In my senior class, seven students had started together in kindergarten. One student joined in first grade, and I joined in my junior year while the school was consolidated. By the time we got to the band tournament, there were a grand total of 51 students in grades nine through 12. Of those 51, two of us had any musical training … me on the clarinet, and my freshman brother on tuba, French horn, and sometimes trumpet. There were perhaps fifteen of us in the school band. Our prepared piece was probably out of tune and pretty elementary. Whatever it...

Comics and classics alike portray somnambulists (sleep walkers, for the uninitiated) doing all sorts of bizarre things. Lady Macbeth walks the castle parapets washing blood off her hands and manifesting daggers. Stage hypnotists make volunteers walk like a duck and quack like a duck. Orpheus travels through the underworld searching for his lost love Euridice and almost coaxes her back to the sunlight before he succumbs to curiosity, to the need to know that Euridice is still there, and turns to take a forbidden look before she evaporates like a dream that can no longer be grasped once the eyes are opened. Each of these examples shares something … they tantalize with the possibility that reality can cross the boundary between the physical world and the subconscious. There is something else in common with these references. Each of them occurs in a safe environment. When you watch Macbeth or Orpheus, you are either sitting in a live theater, watching on TV, or at a movie theater. The ac...