​This is totally off-topic. I mean totally and completely. I had an amazing bowl of bean soup at MomAlone in Clear Lake on Sunday, but that’s about the only thread that connects this post to the regularly scheduled ramblings of this blog. This last weekend I went home.

According to my very academic, very scientific research on the subject (asking a couple of people I know), many people have the classic stress dream on occasion. You know the one-- the one where you show up for your final exam and you realize that you haven’t attended a single class during the semester and panic ensues? Well, maybe because this was a pretty common occurrence for me during those four amazing booze-soaked years in college, I have a completely different stress dream altogether.

In my stress dream I am at the 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas and I step out onto a darkened stage only to be illuminated by a single spotlight right at the moment I remember that I’m supposed to be dancing my solo and I haven’t bothered to learn the dance. It’s seriously the most terrifying thing I can imagine apart from the side-eye my mom gave me as a kid when I did something truly offensive like say the word “bitchin’” or wear my hair slicked back like a Robert Palmer girl while wearing a gray flannel suit (the latter of which prompted her to ask me if I was feeling confused about my sexuality). My particular stress dream is probably scary and anxiety-provoking for me because it was my actuality as a kid; I took dance lessons for fourteen years, performed on that very stage time and again and I never did learn my solo until minutes before performing it to a house of almost a thousand people.