Thursday, October 20, 2011

Carolina Chocolate Drops and Christmas Cheer

Last night I had a dream that the Carolina Chocolate Drops had set up some sort of arts house in some merge between L.A., San Fransisco, and New York City.  There was an old Victorian era house with art pouring off all the walls.  There were sculptures and paintings, and there was food that was cooked by the kids everywhere.  When I first entered, there was a golf and crayon stained-glass window/alter-esque depiction of the Virgin Mary propped up near a table.  The members of the band were teaching students about art, about cooking, and about Jesus.

The whole place was full of active color and active children, eagerly making art pieces, learning about everything under the sun, and running around like mad.  I saw pictures from previous days where girls had removed paintings and sculptures from the walls and had somehow managed to climb onto the walls and pose as if they themselves were the art.  They had edited the images to flatten themselves into the architecture.

One of the lectures/labs incorporated many historical objects that kept emerging from behind a screen.  This included candelabra as well as random wooden objects that had become fused together.  Later in the kitchen, there was an overwhelming amount of food, and people about my age that were helping were serving the food to the various kids from the neighborhood.  Later, at a workshop, we were given all sorts of candies, fruits, and marshmallows and had to mix them together with our hands until the stickiness of the marshmallows brought everything together.  I was a bit to vigorous, unleashing blackberries onto the walls.  Somehow my mixture was becoming a large tower, and I realized the band member had given me more material to work with than anyone else.  When I went to remove it from it's bowl, suddenly it became clay or sandstone, and as I set it out to dry, I began to remold different parts.  Instead of it being a tower, it suddenly looked like a maiden sitting with her legs outstretched with a leg becoming an abstract form and bits of the hand becoming like feathers.

People stood watching me put the final touches, and my father told me that I would overwork it and ruin the sculpture.  As the various fine arts activities continued, such as putting up photos and sculptures all the way up the wall (salon style), I was snapping away photos.  For some reason, I couldn't upload them to a computer and had to pay to have them put onto a disc or something.  Apparently I had taken so many, though, that I was charged an exorbitant amount of money, which was really rather consistent with the whole dream.

There was something baroque or rococo about the atmosphere.  Everyone was spilling over with life and creativity.  The house overflowed with sound, color, and delicious food.  At one point I was talking with my old friend Jenn H. and I asked her if she was ready for lunch.  I myself was quite full from the wonderful breakfast.  She said she was trying to establish some rhythm to her eating and didn't want to take lunch till one or two.

In the mean time, I went with one girl (who was Czech) to the city center.  We linked arms and sang "Joy to the World" in two part harmony while crossing the street.  It was still October in my dream as well, and we felt that maybe it was a bit out of place, especially since we were suddenly in the Czech Republic again.  But the song seemed so fitting because the house we'd been in was so filled with life and hope and something like Christmas cheer.

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