I had a weird dream last night
It was a weird movie

Michael J. Fox played a young man with thick hair who had somehow ended up with a magical elevator. It could go straight up as high as you wanted, with, as your companion throughout the ride, a built-in circus sideshow type hologram or puppet (the puppet in the booth in Tom Hank’s “Big” meets the Wizard of Oz’s floating face and booming voice in Frank L. Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz”) with spinning psychedelic eyes and a wooden-looking pinocchio nose and wooden-looking doll hands projecting out on either side of a red satin cloth.

Michael J. Fox invited a three young people (two women and a man; I think the man and one of the women were a couple) into the elevator disguised as an enclosed balcony set with a small table bearing a delicious spaghetti meal. Soon it turns out that one of the women (I see dark brown hair in forward-sweeping bob cuts on all my ladies) would’ve only charged like $10,000 for whatever the couple had charged $30,000 for. And the elevator rockets up and everyone panics until the couple agrees to come down to a fair price. Something to do with contracting? Construction?

But Michael J. Fox just leaves the elevator on the ground outside of his apartment building, and a couple teenage boys that the dream seems to think are the same people who were in the elevator, even though they clearly aren’t, find the elevator there on the grass between the bushes and they take it for a joy ride, and the crazy puppet with the crazy spinning eyes and the wooden-looking mouth with teeth painted in white warns them in increasingly desperate tones that they are moving into air they cannot breath, completely losing it with even eye-spinning that protrudes beyond and obscures his face and with wooden mouth opened wide to reveal dark hollow. Finally the two young idiots relent and dial the elevator back down, but in their panic they dial it down too fast and it crashes on the ground and they walk away shaking their heads from the broken elevator which now looks like a giant smashed-up and rumpled Cookie Monster outfit or puppet or something big and lying across the lawn next to the base of a nondescript cement (at the base), shiny dark-yellow plastic siding, and regular windows in black metal frames apartment building.

And the dream morphs into a narrator lamenting how we lost the movie before we found out how the Michael J. Fox character reacts to the demise of his magical elevator. But not lamenting much, since, after all, in this genre of easy-drinking 80s movie, the magical tool would of course have to be lost, leaving our hero with no choice but to find his happy ending without it, and losing a magic elevator that only goes straight up is not much of a loss, when compared to the typical wonders of magic. And then the narrator is wondering at the fact that Michael J. Fox, though an extremely short man, was a favorite lead in Hollywood films for the better part of a decade many decades after Hollywood had changed its mind that short men were better proportioned for the screen.

And then we see Humphrey Bogart in his typical all-grays gangster suit and upturned-collar trench coat (looking exactly like Albert Camus in that famous picture with him in a trench coat, cigarette on his lips, and determined eyes screwed thoughtfully forward) walking in a trench so he can be taller than some leading lady in a flapper’s silver sequin dress, or maybe in a nice white flowing dress.

And there’s a little talk of how it’s kind of a shame that now short men have no particular professional niche. Sure, they can be jockeys, but for that they have to be both very short and incredibly slight, and the world can only support a few jockeys at any one time in history.

Author: Amble Whistletown, with Bartleby Willard
Editor: Bartleby Willard, with Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson, with Andy Mac Son O’ Watt.